Protesters bash bailout bill

ST. PETERSBURG — Bailouts make for strange bedfellows.

President Bush and Congressional leaders, Democrat and Republican, came together in Washington D.C. Friday to support an $850 billion plan to rescue Wall Street.

And on a street corner in downtown St. Petersburg Saturday, political groups as disparate as the Uhurus and Ron Paul supporters came together to denounce it.

“Common cause,” said Lee Nash, a Ron Paul backer from Brandon. Bailout opponents are “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

Nash and about 40 other people gathered at Williams Park to protest the bailout, brought together by a shared view that the plan did too much for fat cats and not enough for common folk.

“We shouldn’t have to pay for their mistakes,” said Teah Michel, a social work student at the University of South Florida. She was toting a sign that told Congress and Wall Street to go do something that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

Saturday’s participants also included members of the Green Party, St. Pete for Peace and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. As they marched past the Bank of America Tower to the Saturday Market, they chanted: "They stole our money, who’s to blame?/Paulson and Bush, Obama and McCain.''

“When you have 12 million children going hungry in America every year . . . the money would be better spent on them,” said Joyce McCarty, 63, who said she retired after most recently working for Rax and Chick-fil-A.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted Sept. 27-29 found 45 percent of the American public thought the bailout was the right thing to do, while 38 percent did not. The poll also found 61 percent were angry about it, 50 percent were scared and 43 percent were confused.

“While some political fallout can be expected from supporting a plan that elicits mixed reactions from many and angry protests from some,” Pew President Andrew Kohut wrote Oct. 1, “the downside political risk in not doing something seems much greater.”

-- Ron Matus, Times Staff Writer