Chicago is the place to be October 25-27. Thousands of workers and community leaders will gather to show Wall Street and Congress we want real reforms that fix our financial system and make the economy work for all of us. If you are wavering about joining us, here are 10 reasons you should be there:

10. Wall Street is partying Like It’s 1999.
The financiers are living it up while the rest of us struggle to keep roofs over our heads and paychecks in our bank accounts. And the American Bankers Association is throwing their members a big party on the 25th in Chicago.

It's time to crash the party with strong financial reforms. Without real reforms and smart re-regulation, big investment banks will keep taking risks (and paying bonuses) with our money. Our economy should not be held hostage to mega-banks that care more about short-term profits for brokers than long-term prosperity for American workers, communities and small businesses. We’ve had enough of the ‘Heads, they win, tails, we lose’ approach to financial management.

9. “Too Big to Fail” is too big.
What have we learned, one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout of AIG? We should have learned that any institution so big that it can bring down an entire sector is too big to exist and should be broken up. Unfortunately, the no-strings-attached TARP program was administered in a way that encouraged more mergers, benefiting the behemoths that control trade, often at the expense of the smaller banks that make loans to families and small businesses.

We used to have public policies that prevented companies from getting too big. They were called ‘anti-trust’ laws. When the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was passed in 1906, many feared that corporations, which were supposed to serve the economy and by extension, the public, were fast becoming the people’s masters. We must relearn this lesson: It is not good for the economy (or for our democracy) when businesses and consumers must depend on a small number of large financial institutions.

8. Our regulatory system is broken.
Too many of the people in charge of regulatory agencies come from Wall Street. It is little wonder that they have acted as regulatory ‘doves.’ Emboldened by successive deregulation measures, lax regulators enabled Wall Street to engage in high-risk activities. They encouraged the reckless financial products and the mega-mergers that made banks ‘too big to fail,’ and ignored the fact that banks were under-capitalized. We need regulatory ‘hawks’ who are independent of Wall Street, who serve the American people’s interests by preventing meltdowns and ending the bubble-bust-bailout cycles.

7. “Trickle down” is a lie.
Bob Herbert says it best: “We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day. That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.”

Our nation’s economic policies have transferred wealth from working and poor people to the super-rich for over 30 years. The recent crisis and bailouts could have been an opportunity to reverse this trend. Instead, the no-strings-attached bailouts became the ultimate transfer of wealth, while the rest of us got a stimulus package that was woefully under-funded and not very well-targeted (We should note that it is too early to write off the benefits of the stimulus) To be clear: we are not anti-stimulus. We want stimulus funds to go where they are most needed.

6. Invest in the REAL economy, stupid!
The ‘real economy’ refers to manufacturing, services, agriculture and other productive sectors. The real economy provides us with goods and services, and the necessities of life. The purpose of the financial system, of banks and insurance companies and stock markets, is to promote and protect the productive economy, by recycling savings and investments back into production.

Left to their own devices, financial markets go after the short-term gain at the expense of long-term investments. They have short time horizons. Financial markets have to be tethered to production and its longer-term needs. Otherwise, they lose interest in the productive economy. What we get when the financial sector dominates our economy are cycles of boom, bubble, bust, and, eventually, bailouts.

Remember the arguments that were made in support of the bailouts for Wall Street? We were told buying up banks' toxic securities was the fastest way to get those banks loaning money again. This was supposed to be a necessary first step toward a broader economic recovery: in order to save Main Street, we had to save Wall Street. But, while some on Wall Street are doing very well for themselves post-bailout, Main Street is still waiting. We’ve waited long enough.

Bailing them out first and asking them to change their ways later was a predictably bad idea. Just like the previous Administration (which is the one that approved the TARP program), this Administration has been pretty soft on Wall Street, using the ‘go easy’ approach with the hope that they will mend their ways, get stronger and start investing in the real economy again. Well, that’s not happening.

Even Larry Summers is getting annoyed with Wall Street’s ingratitude: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” [quoted by Paul Krugman]. What is to be done? Let’s start with robust regulatory reforms.

5. Goldman Sachs is a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” I could not resist sharing this quote from Matt Taibbi. It speaks for itself.

4. The Right is wrong about regulation.
Even though we might find ourselves in agreement with many of the things that tea party activists say about the bailouts for Wall Street, we disagree about the solutions and the way forward. Here’s why:

The free-market Right says financial reform proposals will lead the country down a path toward higher taxes, bigger government and less freedom. To this we ask: should big banks and corporations be allowed to do whatever they want to our economy and environment? That’s what de-regulation leads to.   

Over the past 30 years, powerful Wall Street interests have managed to get leaders in both political parties to dismantle the regulatory framework that had helped us addressed the tension between the productive economy and the financial economy. Deregulation allowed the financial economy to become unmoored from real assets, real productive capacities, and the vast majority of the people. The role of government has been reduced to an instrument that bails out the financial sector whenever it spirals out of control. Financial markets have to be compelled to serve the real economy, and only the government can make this happen. It goes back to the founding days of our country, when the newly formed states recognized the need to hold banks and corporations to a public purpose, through charters and other means.

3. A jobless recovery is not a recovery at all
The combined un- and under-employment rate is near the 20 percent mark (according to official numbers; unofficially, it is much higher). Foreclosure rates are still high, despite recent relief efforts. Recession-strapped states are slashing basic services. We say, the recession isn’t over until workers, communities,  small businesses and states experience economic recovery.  It’s not over until unemployment goes down, foreclosures are slowed down, credit abuses are curbed, services are restored, neighborhoods wiped out by housing crisis are repaired, etc.

If Wall Street is unwilling to do its job (investing in the productive economy), then we demand that our representatives enact measures to redirect Wall Street’s energies. And, get some of our money back, so we can use it to create jobs.

2. Wall Street should not be setting the reform agenda.
It has been a year since the collapse of our financial system. We have a pretty good idea of what caused the collapse. And yet, those who were responsible --- the financiers of Wall Street and many of the regulators who did not do their jobs --- are lobbying heavily to block any of the reforms that could prevent another crisis.

We will be in Chicago to send a message to our elected representatives (and agency officials, like the Fed Chair): “you work for us, not the banks.”

And, reason #1 to be at the Showdown in Chicago October 25-27:
1. This Is our Progressive-Democratic-Populist Moment, and the start of something big. You don’t want to miss it!

--Sandra Hinson