Despite efforts by the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR)--the lobbying organization for banking and financial industries--to keep the location of their spring meeting secret, a group of spirited protesters found them yesterday in Washington, D.C. at the luxury hotel Park Hyatt in Georgetown.
"How did they get in here?" That's what the woman staffing the FSR spring meeting wanted to know. She and meeting attendees like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf were clearly agitated and miffed when they realized that a group of outraged taxpayers entered the posh hotel where the meeting was being held.
Dressed in black with shirts that read "Bailout Watchdog Team" and name tags that read "Taxpayer," the spirited protesters marched into the hotel like they belonged there. And seeing how FSR members have taken more than $203 billion in bailout money as TARP recipients, it seems like the taxpayers who found the "secret" meeting place had every right to be there.
But that's not how FSR saw it. They freaked out when the crime scene tape went up and the giant eviction notice was delivered to the FSR lunch area, along with hundreds of pink slips for the bank executives who have gotten bailouts while taxpayers keep getting sold out. The protest caught the attention of financial executives.
Throughout the lobby, hallways and restaurant, you could hear guys in suits chattering about the "Bailout Watchdog Team" and crime scene tape. When last seen, CEO Stumpf was engaged in an animated discussion with the FSR staffer in charge of making sure that the security team showed the taxpayers to the door.
FSR had originally planned to hold its spring meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Beach Resort in Naples, FL, that includes three miles of white-sand beaches, a 51,000 square-foot spa, golf course, three pools, and six restaurants; where rooms start at $530 per night. What changed their minds into moving the meeting to an 'undisclosed location' in Washington, DC, you may be wondering. The answer: labor coalition Change to Win found out about the bank CEOs' plans to meet in Florida on the taxpayer's dime to continue to push their anti-worker agenda and wasted no time blowing the whistle on FSR's egregious misuse of U.S. taxpayer's bailout funds.
Change to Win chair and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger wrote a letter to FSR President and CEO Steve Bartlett, in which she outlined why the meeting was a bad idea and urged him to reconsider. Here's a quick excerpt:
Any private use of taxpayer funds to influence the political process, whether by individual TARP recipients or the industry association they fund, raises serious questions. But partisan political activity by the Roundtable and its members with respect to Employee Free Choice crosses the line and constitutes an indefensible abuse of taxpayer money. It violates the intent of Congress, conflicts with Obama Administration policies prohibiting government contractors from using federal funds to oppose union organizing and throws a body blow to the working men and women who are paying for the bailout and whose economic security has already been ravaged by the excesses of your members.
The Roundtable's decision to move their three-day meeting-whose invitees included Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., FDIC chair Sheila Bair, and SEC chair Mary Schapiro-made in response to Burger's letter was first reported in the Los Angeles Times.
