#takewallstreet

The face-off between protesters and police in Lower Manhattan has often crystallized into a standoff between opposing cameras, with each side relying on video accounts of their encounters to verify their version of contested events and, they hope, vindicate themselves.

(Crain's) — Several thousand protesters from dozens of community and labor groups marched through downtown Chicago late Monday afternoon, blocking streets and speaking out against the banks and corporations they say are responsible for driving the economy — and their communities — into the red.

The demonstration, the first of four scheduled this week, served as the kickoff for “Take Back Chicago,” a collaborative effort among the Chicago Teachers Union, Stand Up Chicago and other local organizations that seeks to “take back” the jobs, houses and schools that protesters say have been taken from them by corporate America. The weeklong campaign coincides with two banking conventions — the Futures and Options Expo and the Mortgage Bankers Assn. Convention and Expo — being held in Chicago this week.

Demonstrators began gathering around 4 p.m. Monday at five locations in and around the Loop, including the Hilton Chicago and Hyatt Regency Chicago, the hotels where the two financial expos are taking place. Two of the locations were designated for marches to reclaim jobs, another two for marches to reclaim schools, and the fifth for a march to reclaim homes.

Members of the Service Employees International Union gathered at Daley Plaza with signs that read "Give back our jobs" and "Give back our homes." They hoisted giant puppets wearing "corporate welfare" crowns, and drummers kept a beat on plastic buckets.

Alfonso Pulido, 51, was among the crowd that nearly filled the downtown plaza. He and his wife recently lost their jobs at Chicago-based BagcraftPapercon.

"We're here because we want to take back Chicago," Mr. Pulido said through a translator. "We're here to tell the bankers and the corporations that it's enough, that we're tired of them keeping us out. I want equality."

Members of Move On and Occupy Chicago chanted "How do you fix the deficit" and "Tax, tax, tax the rich" as they marched toward the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, where all the demonstrations were set to converge. The Futures Industry Assn. is holding a reception for its annual meeting at the Art Institute.

Oscar Varnadoe, 54, a security guard at Chicago Public Schools, said the Chicago protest was just the tip of the iceberg. Demonstrators have been camped out near New York's Wall Street for nearly a month.

"This is a boiling point; this is not just a one-day thing," Mr. Varnadoe said. "This is not just a U.S. thing. This is a global thing."

Gene Blake, 64, and his wife, Linda, 63, joined the protest because they wanted to do away with lobbyists and ensure that education doesn't become privatized. Sue Myers, 58, was upset that "Wall Street got bailed out and nobody was held accountable."

Stand Up Chicago, a coalition planning a protest against economic inequality, wants to levy a $1.4 billion tax on trading at the city's biggest financial exchanges to fund a jobs program.

Calling CME Group Inc. and CBOE Holdings Inc. "giant casinos" that fuel the kind of "excessive risk-taking" it says brought on the financial crisis, the group is seeking a 25-cent-per-contract tax on the two exchanges.

Such a tax would generate $1.4 billion in yearly revenue and help create 40,000 jobs for the unemployed in the city, the group said in its jobs plan blueprint.

The idea of a transaction tax on the derivatives industry has a long history, but exchanges have historically fought off such proposals by arguing that a tax would simply send trading elsewhere, resulting in a net loss of jobs and no added revenue.

CME and CBOE executives have already been considering pulling up their Chicago stakes and relocating to other states to avoid steep tax hikes imposed by Illinois earlier this year.

Rising tuition and shrinking academic programs were among the chief complaints for hundreds of students who walked out of classes and demonstrated on campuses and in city plazas across the nation on Wednesday. The rallies, some of which were coordinated through social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter, were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Lower Manhattan, as well as by the Arab Spring uprisings in the Mideast.

In all, students on nearly 100 campuses participated in the walkouts and rallies, organizers said. Some participants in the student rallies expressed solidarity with the Wall Street demonstrations against financial inequities, while others acknowledged that the goals of the Manhattan protests were not entirely clear to them. But the students did seem keenly aware of how financial pressures were affecting their campuses and their own futures.

Students are worried, Allison Wade, a Spanish major at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne who organized a campus rally there, told a local news station. "I have amassed $20,000 so far in debt, and I feel that's unacceptable," she said. "Many students are not certain that they're going to get jobs, and that's why we're here."

Many of the largest student walkouts and rallies were in the Northeast, with a throng of students converging on the administration building of the State University of New York at Albany. About 230 of the students eventually were allowed inside to meet with the university's president, George M. Philip, to air their concerns over tuition and other issues, the Associated Press reported.

Jackie Hayes, a graduate student in Latin American studies at Albany, told the AP she was there to protest the effects of state budget cuts on higher education. "On our campus, the state budget cuts translated into the elimination of five departments — French, Russian, theater, Italian, and classics," she said. "We're concerned about how the next round of cuts will affect academic programs."

Scores of students also demonstrated at other SUNY campuses, with about 85 students walking out of classes at New Paltz, an organizer told the AP, and according to a participant's posting on the Occupy Colleges page on Facebook, more than 300 students walked out at Binghamton. "My main concern is the education system," Brad Gorfein, a sociology and psychology major at New Paltz, told the AP. "These people will be leading the country someday and I would like a well-educated populace voting," he said.

In New York City, student groups organized walkouts to coordinate with a larger demonstration in Foley Square, near City Hall, that planned a march to Wall Street. Student organizers included the advocacy group New York Students Rising, a "statewide network of students and campus organizations dedicated to defending public higher education" that was formed in response to budget cuts at SUNY and the City University of New York, as well as students from the New School and Columbia and New York Universities, The Village Voice reported.

In Boston, a group mostly made up of Northeastern University students briefly blocked a city street, The Boston Globe reported. After negotiations with the police, the group pulled back to Dewey Square, the gathering point for a larger protest involving students from other campuses, as well as registered nurses and other protesters.

Walking south down LaSalle Street from the Chicago River, there were few signs anything was happening outside the normal mechanics of an average Wednesday. Commuters carried their usual baggage towards their transit points home and the city lights slowly began to glow as the night crept into day. Even at LaSalle and Monroe, where the columns of the Federal Reserve began to show themselves, sights and sounds of the Occupy Chicago movement were faint, amounting to a handful of handbills I spotted roped to street poles much further north. Freshly printed signs reading “No Parking” lined both sides of the street, and when I arrived, I found only a fraction of the nearly 200 people I sat with on Saturday. Occupy Chicago has gone mobile. According to a press release, Occupy Chicago demonstrators cannot remain grounded on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve unless they're willing to face citation and possible arrest. Those I spoke with told me police said that they must keep moving. Now, demonstrators can no longer keep anything on the sidewalk that can't be stowed in a backpack or pushed away in a small cart. Micah Philbrook, a demonstrator who has spent the majority of his days and nights on Jackson and Lasalle, told me that while going mobile was slightly disheartening, he still felt the movement would grow. In fact, he felt it could be an opportunity to spread the message further and encourage others to join in.

“I've been telling a lot of people - this movement is bigger than any one of us...for any reason somebody has to leave, someone will step up. We're not a leaderless movement, we're a movement of leaders.”

Though the crowd may have amounted to two dozen or so activists the moment I arrived, that soon changed. A stream of marchers poured onto the corner, returning from passing through the Loop spreading their message. Plenty of new faces were among them, but Sarah, a 26-year-old legal secretary, has been there, like Micah, since the beginning. She too, felt that the movement has made strides in the past two weeks and seemed undeterred by the changes.

“I work 45 hours a week so I can't be here all the time. What I originally wanted was for Americans to come out and speak to each other about these issues and engage each other. Everybody's having conversations, they're talking to each other, I think it's great. I would like to see more people out here. But what we have from what we started, I think it's amazing.”