sign the Jobs with Justice petition to Bank of America here.

Done. I am convinced progressives should be supportive. If the powers that be don’t get this kind of pressure (sit ins) from regular people, regular workers, there’s nothing to pressure them from leaning rightwards toward big bizness. (I believe Howard Zinn said something like that in an interview as well ;)

A great name for this demonstration would be the Hugh L. McColl Jr. Memorial Strike. Bank of America, once the Bank of Italy set up to help working people, was completely revamped after a series of leveraged mergers by McColl’s tiny North Carolina National Bank that eventually swallowed BofA and changed its nature forever. McColl, who helped put the foundations of the current financial crisis in place, walked away early with a $60 million bonus package. In retrospect, much of his amazing career seems not be from genius, but good old-fashioned evasion of regulatory scrutiny, story-tellin’, and cooking the books. The BofA Corporate Center in Charlotte is referred to as the “Taj McColl” to this day.

A couple of years ago my father and I were watching Micheal Moore speak at the college in Flint and he started talking how the UAW was formed right here in this town and went on to talk about the sit down strike……. All of a sudden a light bulb went off for my Dad and memories flooded him to the point of bringing him to tears……. He was old enough to clearly be aware of what this strike meant and the risks that his family members took……

Dad spent quite a while telling me all about the strike, how our family participated and how so much better it was when it was over……