More than 300,000 people have signed online petitions asking President Obama to “end the administration’s ‘too big to fail/jail’ policy,” or for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to step down if he refuses to prosecute big banks.
Activists from liberal organizations MoveOn, CREDO Action, and others plan to deliver the petitions to Department of Justice offices throughout the country on Tuesday, reports Huffington Post.
At a Senate hearing in March Holder said that he’s concerned that the size of some financial institutions makes it hard to prosecute them. And he said part of the problem is the concern that because the institutions are so big, criminal charges could have ‘‘a negative impact on the national economy.’’
Brian Kettenring, coordinator of the campaign for a Fair Settlement, who created one of the petitions, told the Mississippi Business Journal that activists are seeking accountability from the Obama administration.
“More than a quarter million Americans have come together to declare that no one should be above the law — and especially not the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy,” Kettenring said. “Activists across the country are demanding accountability from the nation’s largest financial institutions that were bailed out using trillions of taxpayer dollars.”
Kettenring said activists simply want “for the millions of homeowners harmed by the big banks’ criminal activities, and on Attorney General Holder to either do his job or step down.”
The MoveOn petition, which is hosted on SignOn.org calls on President Obama to end the administration’s “too big to fail/jail’ policy by taking immediate steps to break up the big banks and prosecute the criminals who used them to destroy our economy.”
A separate petition created by CREDO Action calls on Holder to resign if he won’t prosecute big banks. “Treating powerful individuals and institutions as ‘too big to jail’ is fundamentally wrong. It’s your job to prosecute criminals,” the petition states.
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.