By Anthony Burke Boylan – It’s likely to lack the vigor and creativity of the 1968 Democratic Convention, but attention will be cast on Chicago in October when the American Bankers Association annual convention comes to town. The protestors are planning to be there, too.

Scheduled for the event are featured speakers including Sheila Bair, Newt Gingrich and George Will. Seminars titled “Cost Cutting: Doing More with Less,’’ “Strategies for Acquiring Troubled Banks,’’ and “Unwinding Government Intervention,’’ will be offered.

And in their off hours bankers can enjoy the architectural river cruise, take an ethnic dining tour of Chicago, or visit the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio in Oak Park.

What is not on the ABA schedule is a wide-scale protest by activists who oppose the bailout, the foreclosure crisis and what they see as the general avarice of the financial industry. That’s right, bankers may yet again find themselves a convenient scapegoat for the disaffected.

And rounding it all out will be the involvement of documentarian and celebrity protestor Michael Moore, whose new film -- “Capitalism: A Love Story’’-- coincides nicely with the Oct. 25-28 event.

The city that saw Abbie Hoffman and the Youth International Party invade Lincoln Park amid clouds of tear gas will be home to many of the usual protest suspects – grass roots organizations calling for greater controls on CEO pay, corporate profit and greater protection of consumers.

But being a union town, organizers hope to buttress the events with real blue collar, rank-and-file members who do hard work for a living and don’t think they deserved to lose their home because someone sold them a loan they didn’t understand, or because indulgence caused the economy to disintegrate to the point where their companies collapsed.

These sympathetic figures, in their 40s or 50s, with displaced children, histories of solid employment and an ability to connect with average Americans, present a much bigger public relations problem for the banking industry than 20-something professional protestors in Che Guevara t-shirts.

And you can expect them in spades, bussed into the city from all around the country to be available for media opportunities, to heckle at meetings, to protest in the streets, and generally bring even more attention to what they believe was a raw deal.

If the conference were a month earlier, the banking industry might have looked to Mayor Daley to intervene. But the decision on whether or not Chicago will host the 2016 Olympics already will have been made and Daley won’t want to appear unsympathetic to unions and workers, a core part of his constituency.

This according to ChicagoUnionNews.com on Sept. 8:

"This demonstration is designed to force the nation's banking executives to confront the truth: They have used taxpayer bailouts to enrich themselves at the expense of working families and this must stop," according to a news release from the Service Employees International Union, one of the participants in the demonstrations. (http://www.chicagounionnews.com/2009/09/unions-to-protest-banker-convention-in.html.)

The story reports that the ABA had been unaware of the planned protests until they were contacted by a reporter. That seems unlikely, but then with an industry that sold balloon mortgages to people on fixed incomes and didn’t expect fallout, I guess you can’t be too sure.

Among the protestors’ points are the following:

·          American families lost $11 trillion in wealth in 2008, nearly 18% of their net worth.

·          Americans have lost $6.1 trillion in homeowner wealth since June 2006.
Banks have generally refused to modify mortgages to help prevent foreclosures because it is more profitable for them to collect fees as a family loses its home than it is to save the home.

·          More than 5.7 million Americans have lost their jobs since last October, and the national unemployment rate is at its highest in 26 years.

·          Personal bankruptcies are soaring while declining property values and personal income have taken a toll on government budgets, leading to cuts in essential services from public health to childhood education.

·          Between October 2007 and December 2008, the top 1,000 US pension funds lost $1.75 trillion, or 23.3% of their value, the worst losses in 30 years.

The ABA isn’t blowing this off, and offered a statement on the issue.

"The majority of people in Chicago [at the event] will be from smaller institutions . . . groups that make loans to small businesses in your community and give car loans to people," a spokesman said. "While we respect [the] right to protest, the people who will be there are primarily the people who are trying to solve the financial crisis and be the engine of recovery for the country."

Referring to the unions and community groups, he added: "We probably agree on some things," in the area of predatory lending, for instance.’’

While Hall’s point about the vast majority of banks in attendance is a good one, it’s likely to be overshadowed by the likes of Andrew Hall, a Citigroup trader who stands to make as much as $100 million in 2009 working for an institution that was among the biggest beneficiaries off the taxpayer bailout.

And the banking industry is wise to work to blunt the Chicago demonstrations by acknowledging some of the concerns and showing it’s working to make changes.

What these protestors have to offer is a lot more convincing than slogans such as “don’t trust anyone over 30’’ and “Let your freak flag fly,’’ and to some extent it’s bound to resonate with at least a portion of the public across America and around the world.

Anthony Burke Boylan is a financial journalist and PR and media consultant in Chicago. Write him at TonyBoylan@CapitalInsight.com