"WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!
WHOSE CITY? OUR CITY!"

That is the battle cry you often hear at rallies because much of the power to create change in our communities has been stolen by and given away to corporations like CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange). While we face deep cuts to our state budget, CME makes record profits and pockets $1 billion in our tax dollars. It's time to stand up and demand that our tax dollars need to go toward job creation and public services and not corporate welfare!

Join Chicagoans and many others as we tell CME at their Shareholders meeting on May 23rd to stop pocketing our tax dollars.

Please visit the facebook event page for more information.

If you are interested in attending please call SOUL at 773.363.0199. We will provide buses from 6th Grace Presbyterian Church at 600 E 35th St, which will depart promptly at 3:45pm.

SOUL was a crucial part of a coalition which brought progressive amendments to the city's Vacant Property Ordinance. (This was a main piece of our 2011 MLK Day Public Meeting). As recently reported in the Tribune, these improvements to the Ordinance are now bearing fruit:

Chicago assessed $619,000 of fines against more than 150 financial institutions in the first three months of the year for not following the city's vacant building ordinance, according to figures released Wednesday.

In addition to the 2,500 violations issued, the city also said that the number of vacant properties registered with it since October, shortly before the retooled ordinance took effect, nearly doubled to 4,436.

Even so, the full power of the amendments to the Ordinance have yet to be brought to bear, and there still remains much work to be done to hold banks accountable for vacant properties, prevent blight, and increase incentives for banks to keep people in their homes.


In addition, the FHFA, the regulatory agency in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is suing the city over these amendments, "arguing that properties whose mortgages are backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are exempt because of the FHFA's role as the entities' sole regulator". This is a familiar pattern: in the years leading up to the crash in 2008, many municipalities and state legislatures which attempted to impose common-sense regulations on the subprime mortgage industry found their efforts crushed by federal regulatory agencies. 


And why would the regulatory agencies do such a thing? Because most of them have long since been bought off by Wall Street, and are "regulators" in name only.


The FHFA, for its part, is quite compromised in its status as a "regulator". Much of this has to do with the current head of the FHFA, Ed DeMarco, who is currently blocking Fannie and Freddie from writing down the principals of underwater mortgages. For more on DeMarco, and a campaign to push President Obama to fire him, see this page from our national partners at the New Bottom Line.

[cross-posted at IIRON]

by Will Tanzman, co-director of SOUL.

Yesterday, in St. Louis, Peabody Energy became the latest target in this spring’s national Confront Corporate Power campaign. Peabody is notorious for violating workers’ rights, destroying the environment, and demanding tax breaks that hurt the struggling St. Louis public school system.  Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), Occupy St. Louis, and other groups got people into Peabody’s shareholders meeting and disrupted the meeting, while a crowd supported them outside.

Across the country, people are coming together in similar actions to hold large corporations accountable at their annual shareholders meetings.  Last week, thousands of people (including a delegation from SOUL) disrupted General Electric’s shareholders meeting in Detroit.  In 2010, GE paid just 11% of its income in taxes, far below the national corporate tax rate of 35%.  Meanwhile, people in our communities are facing cuts to jobs programs, health care, and energy efficiency.  Thousands more people targeted Wells Fargo’s shareholders meeting in San Francisco to push the company to stop funding private prisons and to reduce homeowners’ mortgage debt to the actual value of their homes.

These large corporations are at the root of many of the problems affecting our communities, so we need to hold them accountable in order to win on our issues.  They are moving jobs to wherever they can pay workers the least, refusing to reduce home mortgage debt and stop foreclosures, lobbying for tax breaks while our communities suffer from budget cuts, and pushing for right-wing legislation like the “stand your ground” law that led to Trayvon Martin’s killing.  If we do not fight the increasing concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands, things are going to continue to get worse.

On May 23, Confront Corporate Power comes to Chicago with the shareholders meeting of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  The CME is one of the most profitable corporations in Illinois but successfully lobbied for $100 million in tax breaks at a time when the state is making cuts to health care and other vital services.  We will be meeting at 4:30 p.m. at Daley Plaza.  Join us on May 23 to confront corporate power and make Wall Street pay for the crisis they created in our communities!