The Occupy Movement and a Call for Non-Violent Action Worldwide on November 17.

Occupy Portland has endorsed a call for decentralized-yet-coordinated nonviolent civil disobedience against big banks on Thursday Nov. 17. Let’s shut them down!

*Please send invites to everyone you know in the Portland-area for this event!*
http://www.n17pdx.org

… On Thursday November 17th the Occupy movement worldwide calls for a day of mass action to reject big banks direction of the economic system that divides us all. Let’s reclaim our democracy, stop the foreclosures, and recreate the society we want to see. Together, on Thursday November 17, let’s shut the banks down!

This is a call to form “affinity group” action teams, take on support roles, or join in a public march visiting action locations. An action “spokescouncil” for communication between and support of affinity group has been formed by the Occupy Portland Action Committee and seeks your participation.

Ways to engage:

1) Form an affinity group! A sit-in with half-a-dozen friends can shut down a corporate bank for hours, especially if utilizing u-locks or other basic “lock-down” devices. Affinity groups are coordinating through “spokescouncil” meetings to ensure actions don’t accidentally conflict, can get their action’s message out to media, have legal support, and more. Ideas for affinity groups at http://www.n17pdx.org/ag/

2) Support the direct actions! There are many ways to help support actions without risking arrest – police and media liaisons, legal observation, march planning, outreach, etc. Teams are forming for all of them, and are a great place to get trained – no experience necessary. Email join@n17pdx.org.

3) Get trained. Workshops for anyone wanting help planning actions and organizing new affinity groups are happening! Schedule @ https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=310129472346919. http://www.n17pdx.org/training or contact training@n17pdx.org.

4) Come to the Spokescouncil meeting – To coordinate with other actions or join support teams for them, come to the action Spokescounil planning meetings. Every other day at 6pm: Thursday 11/10, Saturday 11/12, Monday 11/14, and Wednesday 11/16. Contact join@n17pdx.org for location.

5) Join the march! The action starts @ 8am on the East Side of Steel Bridge with a labor action with We Are Oregon. Then join us for a 10am Rally at Waterfront Park @ SW Ankeny. At 11am we march to visit civil disobedience actions in progress!

6) Donate! This coordinated action – one of the largest days of action in Portland history – is running on a painful shoestring budget! Put your money where your values are now! We need your support asap, every bit helps: Funds are desperately needed for legal support, outreach material, sign making supplies, and civil disobedience blockade devices. Do you want to see the big banks shut down? Then please put your money where your visions are and visit n17pdx.org/donate today!!

7) Spread the word! RSVP on facebook and invite others, help with flyering, and check out n17pdx.org/outreach for more ideas.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to take bold action with a critical mass of activists willing and ready to confront corporate greed. Seize the moment. Plan to take the day off work (because banks are open 9-5pm). Spread the word. Gather your friends. Plan your action. Be Creative. Occupy the Banks.

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Elizabeth Warren Bashes Wall Street in First Campaign Ad

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren unveiled her first television advertisement on Sunday, in which the Harvard professor and progressive Democrat condemned the influence of Wall Street on the U.S. government.

Like her previous campaign video announcing that she would challenge Sen. Scott Brown (R) next November, the ad features Warren speaking to the camera.

“I’m Elizabeth Warren,” she says in the ad. “I’m running for the United States Senate and before you hear a bunch of ridiculous attack ads, I want to tell you who I am.”

Last week, the conservative group Crossroads GPS spent $560,000 on an attack ad blasting Warren for sympathizing with the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protests. When asked about the ad, Warren said that she had “been protesting Wall Street for years and years.”

In her latest ad, Warren touts her efforts to reform the nation’s financial industry and protect consumers.

“For years, I have worked to expose how Wall Street and big banks are crushing middle class families,” she says. “It just isn’t right. I stood up to the big banks and their army of Washington lobbyists. I worked to hold them accountable. I led the fight for a new agency to protect consumers, and we got it.”

Warren helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The Bureau was enacted by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to regulate mortgages, credit cards and other financial goods and services.

“But Washington is still rigged for the big guys, and that’s got to change,” the ad concludes.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by Warren’s campaign, below:

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Video of the Battle of the Parks Defended by Occupy Portland on Sunday Morning

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Congress is Getting Rich Off of Wall Street

In the Spring of 2010, a bespectacled, middle-aged policy wonk named Peter Schweizer fired up his laptop and began a months-long odyssey into a forbidding maze of public databases, hunting for the financial secrets of Washington’s most powerful politicians. Schweizer had been struck by the fact that members of Congress are free to buy and sell stocks in companies whose fate can be profoundly influenced, or even determined, by Washington policy, and he wondered, do these ultimate insiders act on what they know? Yes, Schweizer found, they certainly seem to. Schweizer’s research revealed that some of Congress’s most prominent members are in a position to routinely engage in what amounts to a legal form of insider trading, profiting from investment activity that, he says, “would send the rest of us to prison.”

Click on the link below for the rest of the story.

Congress is Getting Rich off of Wall Street

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Why the economy is worse than we know–The government cooks the books by using deceptive statistics

Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering—the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

Click the link below and read the rest of the story.

Inflation: why the economy is worse than we know

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Economic Lies of the Republican: Tax Cuts for the Rich Don’t Create Jobs, They Destroy Jobs and Redistribute Income From Working People to the Rich: Here’s How

By John Hively

Republicans have long championed the idea that tax cuts for the rich create jobs. We know that’s a lie. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy created negative private sector job growth for the last ten years. They also helped to send us spiraling into the current slow motion 2nd Great Depression. Let it be stated unequivocally that there is not a shred of evidence that tax cuts for the rich has ever created a single job, but there is plenty of evidence they destroy jobs and redistribute income.

We’ll start this series with how the affluent use tax cuts to steal money out of the pockets of working people.

Say you’re a billionaire and you have a yearly income of a hundred million dollars. Perhaps you take home ninety million dollars after all the deductions you have. You’re only paying fifteen percent federal tax on your capital gains, which is how you derive your income, but those deductions add another five million to your checking account. What happens if the capital gains tax rate is slashed to ten percent? That means you take home ninety-five million dollars.

You might invest that extra five million with a hedge fund, which is a non-regulated investment company. The managers there might invest that money in the futures market for oil. Does that create any jobs? Hell no. But it does bid up the price of a barrel of oil. Say oil is trading at $100 a barrel before the tax cut. After the cut, there are lots of billionaires and millionaires investing in the futures markets with the cash from their new tax break, which bid up the price of lots of commodities; but let’s stick with black gold for simplicity. All these rich people bid up the price of oil to say $150 a barrel.

That means the price of gasoline is going to jump, maybe a dollar or two a gallon, more or less. That extra dollar or two you pay at the pump goes directly to the rich folks that bid up the price of oil. That means money goes from your pocket to the wallets of the rich because of their tax cut. In this way, tax cuts for the rich redistribute income from working people to the affluent.

Of course, it’s worse than this if you’re a working stiff because the wealthy are pushing up the price of goods all through the economy via their investments in the futures markets for farm produce, chickens, beef, steel, whatever. You name it. You’re paying more of your income to the rich for a ton of stuff.

That means you have less cash to spend at your local restaurant, or maybe to buy that iPod, television, Toyota Prius, or any number of things. And whatever company makes the items that citizen’s purchase is forced to reduce labor costs because the demand is less thanks to the redistribution magic of those tax cuts. So companies cut the wages and benefits of their employees, and or reduce their work force through lay-offs, or they offshore jobs. That local restaurant of yours might be forced to lay-off people, reduce employee hours, or even close, thereby eliminating more jobs.

So those tax cuts for rich fat cats are killing jobs, not creating them. And when they destroy jobs via their investments in the futures markets, they also weaken the tax base for schools, local government, libraries, police, roads and so many other things that make our lives better. That also means government employees see their jobs eliminated, their hours sliced, or their hourly compensation held static or pushed down. Those that keep their jobs wind up working more and earning less.

You can’t forget tuition at state colleges and universities are going to spike, so our kids are going to pay more for school because of the tax cuts, which are also smothering their future employment prospects as jobs are eliminated. When it comes to fleecing your pockets, our federal government helps the affluent a lot.

Sure, there might be a few patriotic warriors of the people in congress left, brave men and women of high moral standing like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon; but about 98 to 100 percent of the Republicans in Washington and somewhere between 66 and 80 percent of the Democrats are collaborators of the affluent; people like Ron Wyden, Wall Street’s Democratic senator from Oregon and Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer, another collaborator of Wall Street from Oregon. Those kind of people help change the rules in favor of the rich.

Take inflation for example. Using current methods, the government says inflation was 1.5 percent for all of 2010. Yet, according to Harper’s Magazine, inflation would have been over 10 percent last year if the government measured inflation the way it did thirty years ago. But it doesn’t. The government has changed the way it measures inflation twenty times since 1980. There might be a sinister reason for this.

Speculation in the futures markets drive prices up, which adds to the inflation rate. And this means that inflation can be used to help gauge how much of your income is being shoveled into the pockets of the wealthy thanks to those tax cuts. Government, you see, is a keen collaborator of the one percent as they financially pillage the middle class. Most of our politicians don’t want us to know what’s really going on. That’s why the government doesn’t include the price of food and energy in the way it determines the yearly amount of inflation, at least not anymore. There’s another way the rich benefit by bidding up the prices of commodities in the futures markets, but I’ll save that for part two of this series. The links below are for other similar articles.

Four Obstacles for Upward Mobility for Young People

Bill Moyers Explains How the Rich Have Waged War Against Democracy and Shared Prosperity

the Government is using deceptive statistics to fool us; they\'re cooking the books

Seven economic lies of the republicans

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