Occupy Fort Lauderdale followed a very simple format: In order to have people meet and socialize, they were asked to come up front and tell their story.

One meeting coordinator said, “You have grievances with the system right now; we want to hear from as many people as possible so we can make a decision on how to move forward.” Then he read the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.”

“The big thing that we can focus on are issues of economic class,” Evan Rowe, another meeting coordinator, said. “We have to consider the fact that we need to expand. We have the majority on our side in theory, but we need to make sure we have the majority. We need to make people … want to join us, the working class. We have to think about who is our base, how can we expand?”

“We can build slowly. We have time on our side,” Rowe concluded.

Speaker after speaker addressed personal grievances and social ills — denouncing unemployment, reverse mortgages, the military complex and the ongoing wars, the prison industry, the lack of adequate funding for education, corporate greed, and the indifference of members of both major political parties.

A women who spoke of her experience working on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch said she lost her job, has seen her income drop 50 percent, can’t pay her daughter’s student loans, and now that banks are asking for more, she told the crowd to put their money in local banks or credit unions that will not charge more fees.

One speaker called Occupy a campaign of peace, honesty and compassion.

Tim Ross — of Communications Workers of America Local 3104 — told participants they want $25-an-hour jobs with benefits for all, and called for people to support unions and fight for issues like the right to collective bargaining.

Speakers also called on:

• the audience to think about local politics and the need to develop a process to recall elected officials in Florida;
• elected officials to take pay cuts;
• and Occupy participants to make 50 percent of their shopping at local businesses and put 50 percent of their money into local banks.

One speaker asked, “Why are institutions vital to our well being destroyed while greedy corporations get bonuses?”

Check out photos from the event:

More on the Florida Independent website.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.

The biggest offender? Not Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers, but Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America.

Just before the financial crisis and credit crunch, it originated 31 collateralized debt obligation deals and ended up purchasing parts of 13 of them, for instance.

Quitner explains why targeted LGBT banking and financial planning programs are so important.

“It boils down to marriage rights,” says Jennifer Hatch, president of Christopher Street Financial, one of the oldest financial advisories for gays and lesbians, based in New York. “The average straight couple gets a lot of their financial setup simply by saying ‘I do.’”

As LGBT rights advocates have often argued, marriage confers certain legal rights that makes everything easier — and it includes banking.

But some groups, like Christopher Street Financial, work specifically with same-sex couples and LGBT individuals to design financial plans in accordance with their sometimes unique needs and, in the last decade, has seen competitors finally pop up all over the country. Chicago’s Northern Trust, which deals exclusively with high net-worth individuals — a lucrative income stream for many retail banks — just launched its first practice aimed at high net-worth individuals with non-traditional family relationships. Boston’s Wainwright Bank started issuing affiliate credit cards in the 90s that gave a portion of the proceeds to LGBT rights groups — and it says that 10 percent of its employees are openly gay, including two senior executives and one member of the board.

Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, worked to reach out to the LGBT community for 20 years, though it only established a specific LGBT practice in 2005, and in 2009 it began a program to certify financial planners to work with same-sex couples. Bank of America’s wealth advisory practice through its Merrill Lynch affiliate — again, a personalized banking service aimed at high net-worth individuals — will nonetheless work with LGBT individuals or couples in any income bracket for financial planning fees ranging from $250 -$1,000.

Interestingly, Citibank today announced that it plans to double its private banking force over the next two years. It is not reportedly dedicating any of those new private banking resources to an LGBT-specific practice. Apparently, the money in the LGBT community that is attracting attention from its big competitors isn’t of enough interest to Citibank.

Since Thain oversaw a loss of $1.79 billion in his last quarter at Merrill, he can hardly do worse at a company that has already gone bankrupt.

In an amusing twist, Bank of America — which forced him out post-merger with Merrill after he finagled billions of dollars in bonuses ahead of the shotgun marriage — will be paying taxes to recoup the government’s losses on CIT and others if Obama’s big bank tax makes it through Congress. Better yet for Thain, the man that forced him into unemployment, former BofA Chairman Ken Lewis, is now unemployed himself.

Despite his high-flying corporate career, Thain is likely to be best remembered as the man who, in the midst of massive losses at Merrill Lynch in January 2008, spent $1.2 million of the company’s money to renovate his private offices. Some of those expenses included an $87,000 area rug, a $13,000 chandelier for his private dining room, and $35,000 for a “commode on legs.” While similar devices can be had for less than $200, one assumes Thain didn’t want to touch anything but the finest of craftsmanship.

The person with the, ahem, crap job of removing the commode from Thain’s office after his resignation probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference.

The hearing, initially to be held Thursday, has not been rescheduled.

But yesterday the Obama administration was pulled more deeply into the scandal as well, after newly unveiled BoA documents suggested that both incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and incoming senior economic adviser Larry Summers had endorsed the merger as well. From The Washington Post:

Bank of America chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis told the company’s board that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told him “that Geithner and, in addition, Larry Summers, were both on board with the transaction,” according to Dec. 22 talking points prepared for a conference call.

Both the White House and the Treasury Department have denied that Geithner and Summers were influential in pushing the merger, even if they knew about it, the Post reported. But their involvement at any level might explain why the Obama administration’s Securities Exchange Commission was so light in penalizing BoA for a failure to tell its shareholders about $3.6 billion in bonuses Merrill was poised to pay its employees around the time of the merger. The $33 million SEC fine — which effectively charged company shareholders for the alleged crimes of company executives — was thrown out by a federal judge last month.  According to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, “The notion that Bank of America shareholders, having been lied to blatantly in connection with the multibillion-dollar purchase of a huge, nearly bankrupt company, need to lose another $33 million of their money . . . is absurd.” Rakoff has ordered a trial to be held in February.

The saga hasn’t been lost on some lawmakers. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has undertaken an extensive investigation into the details of the dubious merger — including those surrounding the decision to hide Merrill’s bonus payments from BoA shareholders. The committee will hold its fourth hearing on the episode this Thursday. Witnesses will include SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, and Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Lewis and BoA have been in hot water over their government-backed deal to acquire the failing Merrill Lynch in December. At the time of the deal, Merrill was set to pay $5.8 billion in employee bonuses — bonuses that BoA executives didn’t reveal to their shareholders, who approved the buyout.

The saga didn’t escape Democratic leaders on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, whose ongoing investigation of the deal has gained public prominence with several Capitol Hill hearings. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), who chairs the panel, issued a statement Wednesday warning Lewis’s that the probe will continue despite the changing of the guard.

Our investigation has uncovered troubling facts about Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, and Mr. Lewis was at the center of this controversy. We hope that Bank of America’s new leadership will quickly repay American taxpayers and help us finally resolve unanswered questioned about this merger.

Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch in December, even after then-BoA CEO Ken Lewis voiced reservations that the buyout would be a bad move for BoA shareholders due to the bad financial shape of Merrill.

Lewis later told New York’s attorney general that federal officials, notably Bernanke and Paulson, had pressured him to go through with the sale. To sweeten the pot, the White House eventually put up $20 billion of Wall Street bailout dollars to catalyze the deal.

Appearing before Towns’ panel last week, Bernanke defended his role in the saga. Paulson will have his chance  July 16.

The saga made headlines this spring when former BoA CEO Ken Lewis told New York’s attorney general that he was reluctant to go through with the deal because Merrill was in such tough shape financially, but federal officials, including Bernanke, had pressured him to keep quiet about Merrill’s troubles so the deal could proceed.

Today Bernanke conceded that (1) Lewis had expressed interest in backing out of the acquisition, and (2) he urged Lewis to complete the contract, citing the fragility of the economy at the time. But in his strongest defense yet of the Fed’s handling of that deal, Bernanke also said the Fed put no inappropriate pressure on BoA to finalize the deal.

Here’s the money quote from his prepared testimony:

Importantly, the decision to go forward with the merger rightly remained in the hands of Bank of America’s board and management, and they were obligated to make the choice they believed was in the best interest of their shareholders and company. I did not tell Bank of America’s management that the Federal Reserve would take action against the board or management if they decided [not] to proceed with the [acquisition]. Moreover, I did not instruct anyone to indicate to Bank of America that the Federal Reserve would take any particular action under those circumstances.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), who chairs the oversight panel, had subpoened the Fed earlier in the month to obtain documents related to the BoA-Merrill deal. His opening statement at today’s hearing set the appropriate tone.

“This was,” Towns said, “a most unusual transaction.”

It seems only one of those requests was honored.

On Tuesday, Towns and Kucinich — along with Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the senior Republican on the oversight panel — announced that they’ve subpoenaed the Fed for its share of the information.

It’s just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding the merger. In April, reports emerged that Lewis claimed he was pressured by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to keep silent about Merrill’s decline at the end of 2008 — as well as $4 billion in bonuses Merrill intended to pay its employees — lest the news spook BofA shareholders and kill the acquisition deal. That deal, originally billed as a private transaction, eventually required $20 billion in federal funds to complete.

The House lawmakers want to know to what extent Lewis’ claims are true.