Organizer Bruce Hartford for A New Way Forward,
speaks to demonstrators outside the San Francisco Federal Reserve yesterday.
The protest was held to rally opposition to the Obama administration’s
bailout of failed banking institutions.
Photos by Luke Thomas

By Luke Thomas for NewSplink

April 12, 2009

As many as two hundred mostly mature and educated demonstrators yesterday flaunted witty, well-crafted signs of outrage against the Obama adminstration’s bailout of banks, calling for failed banking institutions to be broken up, nationalized and regulated.

Richard Tamm, 61, a retired former Federal Reserve computer programmer, said: “Some of these companies are bankrupt and they won’t admit it. We need to wake up to what actually is happening — to force Obama to do the right thing,” adding that trying to support the existing “failed financial oligarchies” is a move in the wrong direction.

“What we need to do is take over some of these large investment banks and break them up like we broke up Standard Oil and Ma Bell,” Tamm continued, “because they were too big to fail.”

Richard Tamm holds up a hand made placard
in front of the San Francisco Federal Reserve
that read in part: “Stop pouring $$ into mega bankrupt holes.”

Passing motorists honked their horns in support of the national day of action protest effort, organized by A New Way Forward. Bruce Hartford of the same organization said: “Abraham Lincoln told us that government should be of the people, by the people, for the people. But what we have today is government of the powerful, by the lobbyists, for the wealthy – and it’s our fault to a certain degree because we have let them get away with it. It’s time that ‘we the people’ started saying ‘we want to exercise people power in counter to the money power of the lobbyists.”

About 20 law enforcement officers were present but made no arrests.

“We are here to say loudly, as a nation, that we want to bail out the people, not the banks and the CEOs,” said Nancy Mancias, of CodePink Women for Peace. “There are lobbyist groups and corporations that are pulling the strings of our President and Congress.”

Nancy Mancias (right), CodePink Women for Peace.