The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 both hit record highs on Thursday while the NASDAQ surged to its highest level in over 13 years. The year-end rally is expected to add a boost to the massive bonuses Wall Street is preparing to hand out this year. The largest Wall Street firms have reportedly set aside more than $91 billion for year-end bonuses. In response, an activist group called The Other 98% has launched a petition calling on employees of Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America to donate their bonuses to the 10 million Americans made homeless by the housing crisis. We are joined by Alexis Goldstein, a former computer programmer at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank who later got involved with Occupy Wall Street and is now communications director at the group, The Other 98%.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thursday was another record-setting day on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 both hit new highs while the NASDAQ surged to its highest level in over 13 years. The year-end rally is expected to add a boost to the massive bonuses Wall Street is preparing to hand out this year. The biggest Wall Street firms have reportedly set aside a whopping $91 billion for year-end bonuses.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a spinoff of Occupy Wall Street called The Other 98% has launched a petition calling on employees of Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America to donate their bonuses to the 10 million Americans made homeless by the housing crisis.
We’re joined now by Alexis Goldstein in Washington, D.C. For seven years, she worked on Wall Street as a computer programmer at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank. She later got involved with Occupy Wall Street, now is communications director at The Other 98%.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Alexis.
ALEXIS GOLDSTEIN: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about your recommendation for what these bankers should do with their bonuses.
ALEXIS GOLDSTEIN: Sure. So you had on Laura Gottesdiener, who’s the author of A Dream Foreclosed, earlier this year. And she has said that 10 million people were displaced during the foreclosure crisis, often due to predatory loans. These were mortgages that were sold that had rates that were bait-and-switch rates. And so our suggestion is quite simply that they should take this money and do something about the lack of affordable housing, which we think is a problem that they caused, because they have essentially thrown so many people wrongfully out of their homes.
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