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100 Days to Fix What Wall Street Broke: Wells Fargo Shatters Retirement Dreams

Photo by OccupyFightsForeclosure/Flickr

Wall Street wrecked the economy and banks are still refusing to work with people who are trying to stay in their homes. The Campaign for a Fair Settlement, along with other partners, is calling on President Obama over the next 100 days to champion an agenda that would:

1. Hold bankers accountable for their crimes.

2. Keep people in their homes by resetting their mortgages.

Sign the petition here

Beverly Jones shared this story of how Wells Fargo hurt her family. Read more from 100 Stories of What Wall Street Broke:

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Working Families Rally Against Patriot Coal's Retiree Health Care Cuts

Photo courtesy of Cathy Sherwin.

Working families, retirees and their allies are rallying Tuesday at 10 a.m. in St. Louis to call on Patriot Coal to live up to its obligations to pay retiree health care costs. The company filed bankruptcy and is asking to abandon paying health care costs to retirees, most of whom worked for Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, which created Patriot. Mine Workers (UMWA) has charged that Patriot was designed to fail so that the former parent companies could avoid commitments they made to their former workers.

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JPMorgan's 'Risky Business' and the London Whale Fail

Photo of whale courtesy of John "K"'s Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkay/

JPMorgan Chase lost more than $6 billion on a bad bet known as the “London whale” trades and then tried to conceal its losses from regulators, investors and the public, according to a report released last night and hearings held today by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

When media reports surfaced in April of last year that a JPMorgan Chase trader had “amassed positions so large that he’s driving price moves in the $10 trillion market,” JPMorgan Chase executives quickly responded by holding a call with investors and analysts.

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Mine Workers Say Patriot Plan to Gut Contract Is Totally Unacceptable

Photo by Julie Hunter

As previously reported, the Mine Workers (UMWA) union has been saying that Patriot Coal was specifically designed to fail so that former parent company Peabody Energy Corp. could eliminate health care costs associated with former workers in their mines. Patriot was originally spun off of Peabody and was started with much of Peabody's obligations to its retired workers, but very little of Peabody's assets. UMWA argued that Patriot was using bankruptcy to get out of living up to those obligations. Now Patriot filed a motion with the bankruptcy court to create a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) to replace the existing retiree health care system. According to UMWA, the VEBA would cover only a fraction of the obligations owed to retired workers and their families.

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100 Days to Fix What Wall St. Broke: Don’t Evict Retirees Earl and Anne Favre

100 Days to Fix What Wall St. Broke: Don’t Evict Retirees Earl and Anne Favre

Earl and Anne Favre are working with Occupy Chattanooga to save their home from Freddie Mac, a corporation sponsored by you and me. You can support them by signing on to their petition here.

This concerns the end of my life as I know it. I was happy and fairly financially secure. Then Katrina happened on Aug. 29, 2005. I lost everything except the clothes on my back, the sandals on my feet and my three dogs, with whom I spent six hours on a roof waiting to be rescued.

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Peterson’s Puppet Populists

Photo from the PR Watch blog.

Fix the Debt is the most hypocritical corporate PR campaign in decades, an ambitious attempt to convince the country that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner and that urgent action is needed. Its strategy is pure Astroturf: assemble power players in business and government under an activist banner, then take the message outside the Beltway and give it the appearance of grassroots activism by manufacturing an emergency to infuse a sense of imminent crisis.

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Weight Watchers Employees Call for Fair Pay

Photo courtesy Yourtw

You can find commercials, products and meetings sponsored by Weight Watchers all across American popular culture and the program can inspire strong devotion from its participants and employees. Helping people lose weight and become more healthy is a laudable goal that many people dedicate their lives to. But Weight Watchers is the target of numerous complaints that it underpays its employees and fails to pay them for many of the hours they work.

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100 Days to Fix What Wall Street Broke

Wall Street wrecked the economy and banks are still refusing to work with people who are trying to stay in their homes. The Campaign for a Fair Settlement, along with other partners, is calling on President Obama over the next 100 days to champion an agenda that would:

1. Hold bankers accountable for their crimes.

2. Keep people in their homes by resetting their mortgages.

Sign the petition here

Read more and comment »

HR Policy Association Front Group Attacks SEC Commissioner for Speaking Out on Runaway CEO Pay

This week, the HR Policy Association’s so-called “Center on Executive Compensation” criticized a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for suggesting companies should consider voluntarily disclosing CEO-to-worker pay ratios. The HR Policy Association represents human resource executives of more than 325 of the largest U.S. corporations, and would prefer to keep secret the pay disparity between their bosses—the CEOs—and their employees.

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