Brothers and sisters, we're here today to bring the voices of Cara and Diane and Coretta and Debra to Wall Street, to tell their story to the nation—and to demand action on their behalf.

Theirs is a story of Enron and WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, where corporate greed cost 28,500 workers their jobs, and nearly $2 billion dollars in retirement savings.

But it is also a story of two million other workers who've been thrown out of work by failing companies and a struggling economy, a tale of $1.5 trillion dollars drained from worker retirement and savings funds since the collapse of Enron.

And it's an unbelievable story of corporate criminals wrecking the lives and retirement dreams of millions of working families and flaunting their ill-gotten gains in our faces.

As the pages of this story turn, we see Enron CEO Ken Lay paying himself and other executives bonuses of $100 million dollars, even as he cheats thousands of employees and stockholders out of their jobs and their savings.

We witness the sorry spectacle of Gary Winnick, the CEO of Global Crossing, selling off $734 million in stock while urging his employees to buy more, and then using the money to purchase a $92 million dollar mansion in Bel Air.

Our families watch as WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers pockets $400 million dollars in loans, and the company dumps 17,000 employees into the streets and dives into bankruptcy without paying their severance.

More than 1,000 companies are forced to admit they cooked their books.

Top name companies like Merrill-Lynch, First Boston, Johnson & Johnson and AOL Time-Warner fall under investigation.

The stock market loses $7 trillion dollars in value as the White House drags its feet and Congress refuses to rescind the $1.6 trillion dollar tax break they gave to the same CEOs who are now stealing us blind.

Brothers and sisters, this isn't the way we do business in America.

Working hard. Playing by the rules. Making new products. Lifting up families and communities. Finding new solutions instead of creating cheap illusions. That's the way we do business in America.

That's how we built the strongest and most competitive economy and the largest middle class in the history of the world.

That's how we made it possible for ordinary people to do extraordinary things—fly in an airplane, drive an automobile, read a book after dark, speed around the world with the push of a button or the click of a mouse.

Nearly 100 years ago, robber barons hijacked our country and our wealth by taking advantage of the legal and regulatory voids created by our change from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

It took years, but we reclaimed our nation by heeding the words of John Adams and generations of patriots and renewed our Republic as a government of laws and not of men.

Now we're faced with 21st century corporate pirates who took advantage of our transition from an industrial to an information economy to kidnap working families and take us back to the past.

They plundered our companies by replacing long-term prosperity with short-run insincerity.

They polluted our capital markets by pumping up prices instead of producing profits.

Then they perverted our government by purchasing every politician money could buy, creating legal black holes where they can enrich themselves out of public sight.

The most cruel irony of all is that today the corporate criminals not only break our laws, they make the laws.

CEOs like Ken Lay and Gary Winnick and Bernie Ebbers aren't businessmen, and they aren't even capitalists—they are thieves and they are stealing our hopes, stealing our dreams and stealing our future.

When corporate criminals invade our workplaces and our markets to steal our jobs and our savings, we must react every bit as decisively as when thieves enter our homes and try to bring harm to our loved ones.

And we must respond just as strongly when co-conspirators of those criminals occupy and take control of our government, our legislative bodies and our regulatory agencies.

The sad truth is that American consumers can shop with more assurance of quality and safety at their corner grocery store than American investors can shop for equities in our stock market.

And American workers can depend more on the lottery than on their employers for decency, fairness and security.

In the wake of our corporate crime wave, Congress passed a much-needed corporate accounting bill—but cooked books are just a part of the problem and accounting reform is just part of the solution.

We have to reshape our corporate priorities and put people first.

We have to hold CEOs accountable and put integrity back into the companies they lead.

We have to give shareholders a voice in the companies they own.

And we have to clean up corporate corruption of politics through public financing of congressional election campaigns.

We're not going to restore confidence in the stock market, or renew trust in American business, or bring equity to our economy unless we seize this historic opportunity.

And so we've come here today to announce five new action steps to put a stop to "business as usual."

First, we insist that the Securities and Exchange Commission and all three stock exchanges agree to a single higher standard for publicly-traded corporations.

That standard must require companies to expense and index stock options they give CEOs, or, better yet, ban them outright.

It must prohibit CEOs from selling their company stock while they are in office.

It must outlaw the use of offshore tax havens.

And that standard must give workers and their pension funds the real power to choose corporate directors so we can replace the yes-men and women and the rubber-stampers with genuinely independent directors.

This afternoon I am meeting with New York Stock Exchange President Dick Grasso and with Henry Paulson, the CEO of Goldman-Sachs, to discuss how we can bring business and labor together to demand and enact these changes.

 The New York Stock Exchange has taken positive steps already—but we have to insist on more.

Second, we're demanding that Congress write these standards into law. And we're also going to insist that Congress put workers in the front of the line in bankruptcy proceedings and make genuine pension reform—not just 401(k) protections—its first order of business when it returns from its summer recess.

These things shouldn't require an act of Congress, but they do and Congress should act.

But when it comes to the families victimized by the largest corporate bankruptcy in history, we can't wait for Congress.

And that's why, as our third action step, I'm announcing today that the AFL-CIO will go to court with a suit on behalf of the 17,000 laid-off WorldCom workers to get the severance they are owed—and we will win for them just as we won $34 million dollars for the Enron workers.

But we aren't going to leave corporate accountability and business reform up to the lawmakers and the regulators and the courts alone.

We have more than $6 trillion dollars in workers' pension funds invested in American corporations; it is our country's single largest source of investment dollars.

We intend to use that power to insist on higher standards of corporate behavior and change Abusiness as usual" on Wall Street.

Company by company, starting with the S&P 100, we will demand corporate accountability through shareholder action, cyber-action, suite action and street action.

Yesterday, I joined the Machinists union at Stanley Works in New Britain, Connecticut to protest that renegade corporation's plans to reincorporate in Bermuda.

 Now Bermuda may be a fine place to vacation—but we all know that it's a code word for corporate corruption and tax evasion—we should not tolerate that and we will not tolerate that.

Tomorrow, we will call on Fidelity Investments in Boston—the biggest mutual fund firm in our country—and make it clear that we will not support funds that prop up companies like Stanley Works that want to take from America, but not give back.

As investors, we will no longer tolerate the greed of short-term speculators or corrupt insiders, and we will not tolerate companies that overcompensate executives, cheat their employees, lie to their shareholders, or cook their books—no excuses, no exceptions.

Fifth and finally, we will demand political accountability by using the influence of 40 million people who live in union households in our country to change the way business is done in Washington.

Our campaign is already underway. During the month of August, the AFL-CIO will be publicly linking corporate criminals with their congressional co-conspirators while those members of Congress are home in their districts.

On Labor Day we will launch the most aggressive effort in our history to replace anti-worker members of Congress with men and women who reject insiders and special interests and put people first.

And then on October 19th, we will convene a "No More Business As Usual" National Day of Action to educate and energize workers and their families and to motivate them to go to the polls and vote on November 5th.

We undertake this campaign to protect workers and retirees, but also to help restore confidence to our markets, trust in our companies and faith in our employers.

Brothers and sisters, workers' retirement and savings funds own over 20 percent of all the stock in America.

As investors, as employees, as consumers and as stewards of our communities, we must demand standards of basic decency and morality from corporate America.

The same standards of decency that we insist on in our communities.

The same standards of morality we teach our children.

We ask nothing more, and nothing less, of American business.

Thank you and God bless you all and God bless America.