this morning, i’m coming east down jackson street, and i notice, blocks ahead, a white sign floating out over the street — looking like something that’d been tethered to a building, perhaps the building next to the CBOT building, but had broken loose of its bottom tethers. the wind is blowing it around pretty well, and all i can read of it is:
ORES
STRUCTI
so, naturally, i figure this is some sort of ad banner for some sort of new construction condo building downtown — of which there are countless numbers at this point in time — and so i resume looking around for the source of the emergency sirens i could hear behind us.
we get a little closer to the building and notice that it appears that two people dressed in black are scaling (or rappelling down) the front of the CBOT building, with the enormous white sign, which we can now read a little more of:
AINFOREST
ESTRUCTION
and i say, well, you know, these guys are pretty generous, it’s nice to be a philanthropist when you make stacks of cash, but i don’t know that the building would really be sponsoring a giant sign on the front of the building about saving rainforests, so that seems a little odd. meanwhile, there are sirens around us everywhere but still can’t find them.
then we’re at the front door and i run inside and think no further on this (other than idly wondering, inside, why the hell there are still so many sirens), until around 0900 when i run down the hall to fetch coffee and blair mentions something about the rainforest protest, and suddenly everything clicks.
Police this morning arrested two protesters on the Chicago Board of Trade building in the Loop and were trying to get two others off its roof.
The demonstrators, members of the Rainforest Action Network, climbed up the side of the CBOT building at Jackson and Wells Streets at the start of the day’s trading and unfurled a 50-foot banner protesting the expansion of U.S. agricultural businesses.
man, some days it really pays to pay a little more attention to details, you know? i totally could have moblogged that!
