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Is Someone at the Board of Trade Now Dropping Spam Email on Occupy Chicago?

2011_10__leaflet_spam.jpg

This photo has been bouncing about as proof of another message to Occupy Chicago from whomever is using office supplies at the Board of Trade to antagonize the protesters. The photo leading off this post at Raw Story sure makes it seem as though it happened. (The bollards in the photo resemble those outside CBOT.)

The professional leftists over at Daily Kos asked, "Perhaps the next one will be email spam?"

That's kind of what happened. As Eric Zorn notes, the text comes from an email written in April 2010.

What we'd like to know: who occupies the eighth floor offices of the Board of Trade where these incidents keep happening? Anyone who has a clue should feel free to point us in the right direction. In the meantime, here's the full text of the screed.

"We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?"

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Comments [rss]

  • Guest

    I like how this self-described "more vicious than a dinosaur" thing didn't even have the balls to write out ASSES and substituted asterisks for letters.

  • MrBlifil

    Mamet wrote that right? Not even kidding.

  • Peak 6?   I need to ask if they are on the 8th floor.  

  • Tafter

    And, BTW, there are suites that are only on the 8th floor and suites that are only on the 7th floor  (all on the atrium side of the building, IIRC).  But there are some that span both floors, for instance the space that used to be the O'Conner trading floor.  It has since housed several trading firms and companies.  My point being:  it might be hard to pin down exactly which firm this is coming from.

    In any case, I'm not sure what good would come from knowing who is posting this.  They are as free to have their opinions as the OWS people.  I doubt very much that Navin, for instance, would love it if someone tracked down his real identity and tried to pin all of the crap that he posts here (and probably does at the OWS site) to a real person.

    Don't like what he's saying?  Fine.  But attack the message, not the messenger.  Flushing out their identity would serve only as an opportunity to try to embarrass and intimidate this person.  Not exactly playing fair and reasonably, IMO.

    Edit: this wasn't directed at the parent poster. Just in general.

  • Tafter

    No, they are in suite 500.  I know the two firms that used to occupy 7 and 8 in the CBOT, but both have moved out and I'm not sure who is there now.

  • Yeah ... so many of those guys who lost their jobs a couple of years ago are doing landscaping now. That's really worked out well for them so far.

    And the bit about never taking a break? Who smokes all those cigarette butts filling the sidewalk cracks on the north side of the Board of Trade?

  • Tafter

    They definitely got a lot wrong in this.  The average trader will not be taking a landscaping job, that's for damn sure.  As the recent legislation in Alabama has shown, just getting rid of illegals doesn't solve any problems, it just creates a lot of job openings that Americans won't touch with a ten foot pole.

    But a lot of traders do work hard in a very stressful job.  They work long hours and take few breaks during trading hours.  When they do take breaks, they are covered by co-workers and are quite short.  Which is why you see clerks (in the funny jackets) running to starbucks and lunch places in the area to get the traders their meals and caffeine.

    And if you are going to crack wise about traders smoking (another sign of their stressful job, BTW), you may as well be accurate:  the vast majority of traders smoke between the CBOT and 111 W Jackson (AKA "smokers alley" in my office) or on Financial Pl between the CBOT and the Insurance Exchange building.

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