“It was fantastic! They had so many groups come together. It was great to see everyone come together for a common cause.” - Yvonne Smith, Causa Justa :: Just Cause member

On Tuesday, April 27th, more than 800 people, including nearly a hundred Causa Justa members and staff, rallied outside of Wells Fargo’s annual shareholder meeting. The action was part of a national effort to hold big banks accountable by holding mass protests from the Bay Area to Wall Street. Together community organizations, labor and faith groups are calling on big banks to take responsibility for the crisis that they created and to reinvest in neighborhoods and communities that have been hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

Since 2006, more than 13,000 homes in Oakland alone have received notices of default, yet in an entire year, only 372 Oakland households have received the permanent loan modifications they need to remain in their homes. The national average for permanent loan modifications is only a little over 3%. Bay Area working class communities have been suffering from disinvestment for decades, and this current crisis is our opportunity to demand that our communities get the resources that we deserve.

The march in San Francisco was the first of a series of major actions this spring to demand that big banks start putting the people’s economic recovery ahead of their oversized profits and bonuses. The action kicks off a national effort to divest $10 billion from Wells Fargo by the end of this year.

Wells Fargo Protest SF 4/27/10 (v.3) from Oriana Bolden on Vimeo.

Check out Causa Justa’s award winning bank accountability poster here!