KGO ABC News San Francisco reports that a group of clergy members joined the 99 Percent Movement yesterday for a march to San Francisco’s financial district, including the office buildings for JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. The demonstrators hailed from different parts of the Bay Area and carried a golden calf, which “represented a young version of Wall Street’s golden bull.”
“The message of the march,” reports Heather Ishimaru and Amy Hollyfield, “was that there is too much money concentrated in the corporations and in their executives’ personal accounts.”
“We are creating our own version of a lobbyist for the poor and the middle class. We don’t have a lobbyist to send to our representatives, who often have expensive lobbyists coming to them and speaking their issue. So we are coming here, lifting our voices and getting their attention,” said Rev. Donna Allen of New Revelation Community Church to an ABC News reporter. Watch a video of the broadcast here:
The clergy is right to target both big banks and their lobbyists as equal parts of the problem. A ThinkProgress investigation found that California, a state suffering from one of the worst foreclosure crises in the nation, failed to enact mortgage mitigation policies after lawmakers close to the mortgage banker lobby killed a bill this year. State Sen. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) went to dinner with a Bank of America lobbyist after he voted against an effort to address the widespread robo-signing scandal. Experts believe robo-signing, or the mass forgery of mortgage documents by several bank-related companies, has led to thousands of fraudulent foreclosures.