More than 10,000 union members, community activists and progressives marched on Wall Street on Thursday, protesting the irresponsible behavior of big banks and demanding they stop getting rich at the expense of taxpayers.

“Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Wall Street CEOs should use the $1.4 million a day they are spending to kill Wall Street reform to help families keep their homes, expand lending to small businesses to create jobs, and help states and cities close the record budget gaps caused by Wall Street’s recklessness,” said SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger.

Watch CBS‘s coverage from the center of the march down Broadway through the Financial District:

“It’s an outrage that instead of giving something back, these banks are pushing back on desperately needed industry reforms,” said Kevin Doyle, Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 32BJ. “And banks like Bank of America even have the audacity to turn their backs on the very people who work in their buildings by allowing low wage workers to be laid off.”

Yesterday’s NYC march and rally on Wall Street to call for banking regulation followed actions on Tuesday and Wednesday at bank shareholder meetings across the country.

Sherwin Carroll, President of the SEIU Missouri/Kansas State Council, spoke out at the Big Bank Showdown outside of Bank of America in Kansas City:

The Kansas City rally, along with actions in San Francisco, Charlotte and NYC, kick off a month of actions across the country, as the debate over tough new rules to rein in Wall Street’s reckless practices rages on in the Senate. Added together, these protests brought together the largest number of people so far in the fight against the bankster greed that fobbed off the recession on taxpayers–while they reaped bailout money and took advantage of cash-strapped working families by offering them short-term, high-cost loans.

Check out more photos of the NYC Showdown on Wall Street on Flickr here.

The NYC march on Wall Street may have ended, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop calling for accountability and an end to predatory lending practices.

Will you call your Senator and tell them to support Wall Street reform? Click here to call: http://action.seiu.org/wallstreformcall

The “Other 98 Percent” March on Wall Street in NYC

originally appeared on

SEIU.org

on Friday, Apr 30, 2010.