"There's literally billions of reasons to fire Ken Lewis," said SEIU's Stephen Lerner, slamming the controversial Bank of America CEO yesterday on CNBC's "Power Lunch." Just what are these billions of reasons? Well, there's over $5 billion Bank of America dished out in executive bonuses while receiving $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. There's the $10 billion Bank of America collected from raising overdraft and interest fees. Not to mention the hundreds of billions Bank of America caused shareholders to lose when its stock plunged after the Merrill Lynch acquisition. No wonder Lerner and the SEIU are leading the charge to Fire Ken Lewis.
Now that Rick Wagoner is out at GM, my money is on Lewis as the next corporate CEO on the chopping block. As David Sirota pointed out recently, it will be a tragic double standard if the White House doesn't call for Lewis's resignation at this point. Bank of America's bailout abuses, continued predatory lending, and other wasteful corporate practices have been so atrocious that the best defense Thad Woodard, CEO of the N.C. Bankers Association, could muster for Lewis to keep his job was, "I can tell you right now that Ken Lewis is not Satan." That bit of praise was by far the most amusing moment from yesterday's "Power Lunch," though a close second was when Woodard ganged up with the show's hosts to twist calls for Lewis's resignation into an attack on unions.
And since they brought it up, Bank of America has spent millions lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act. That, coupled with Bank of America's decision to lay off up to 35,000 employees in the coming years and its refusal to provide workers adequate wages or affordable healthcare (saving the company billions more and thus adding to Lerner's billions of reasons), means we're dealing with a company bent on hurting its own employees as much as it cripples the US economy.
The bottom line, as Lerner suggested, is the American people need to see some accountability and responsibility from our banks. That's right, "our banks," since tens of billions of our tax dollars went into saving Bank of America, thereby making the government (and us) a major shareholder. Check out SEIU's Fire Ken Lewis campaign, and stay tuned as populist outrage over corporate excess fuels a national day of demonstrations next week, calling on Bank of America to kick Lewis to the curb.
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