OneGoodCut.org works with UK Uncut on banking reform--should we import "Plan B"?

Here's a nice video from OneGoodCut.org explaining how the monetary system works to make a lot of money for the people who run the monetary system by keeping the rest of us either in debt, or poor, or both. The political solutions described focus on the situation in the UK, but a UK "plan B" to cut bank subsidies could be adapted for the US, just as a British version of the Tobin Tax is under consideration there, under the much more memorable name of "Robin Hood Tax."

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Tax Day for us, Tax Holiday for them... unless we say no way!

Another tax season closes and the media is once again full of stories about how major corporations and the few who profit the most from them are ducking their obligation to pay their fair share of taxes.

Between tax shelters and loopholes, creative accounting and squadrons of lawyers, the most wealthy and the corporate elite have made sure that the costs of sustaining "the richest nation in the world" will fall most heavily on the majority--middle and working class Americans, the working poor, and the unemployed.

And to keep us from going broke, despite all that wealth out there, its the poor, elders, the sick, and youth who'll give up the most in cuts to social programs, health care, support for students, and job creation programs.

It’s time for us to raise our voices and our signs. When we pay, and the corporations don’t, it shows how the elite 1% are steering economic and tax policy in a way that benefits private fortunes at the expense of our common wealth. How? By using personhood "rights" to corrupt our candidates and office-holders with big-money donations.

This tax day, have your say. Join an action--there are more than 80 nationwide--starting Friday, April 15 and continuing through the federal tax deadline on Monday April 18. Join with our allies in the Coffee Party in saying that "trickle-down" economics has got to stop. Join with US Uncut http://www.usuncut.org/ in calling for an end to cutbacks until the rich and "corporate persons" pay their fair share.

If you're participating in tax-day protests or actions, or you just want to help spread the word, print out some of these signs. The original pdfs can be copied on ledger size paper or reduced by 61% for letter size home printers.

• "Tax Day for the People, Tax Holiday for the Corporations
• "Tax Corporate Profits"
• "We Won't Pay for Crony Corporate Giveaways"

And check out these organizing materials, for more on the link between corporate personhood, political bribery and a dysfunctional and non-representative government.

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A note on .pdfs

Our downloadable .pdf signs print on ledger size paper (11 x 17). If you send the file to your local copy shop they should be able to run out a sign on this size paper, or larger. If you'd like to print out signs at home on letter-size paper, set your printer to reduce the original file by 61%.

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"Populist Dialogues" are available to air on your local community access cable station

"Being the media" is extremely important. Whether TV, print or radio, we don't get coverage in the major corporate media, so we need to do it ourselves. We need to present the analysis and the framing of the issues of the day so that people can understand issues from a populist, anti-corporate progressive perspective. That is why we created the Alliance for Democracy - Populist Dialogues. Now we need to share them with the rest of the nation and that is where you come in. You can "be the media" by helping to put our programing on your local public access TV station. It's easy!

Populist Dialogues – media for the populist future!

Bring it to your community. All Populist Dialogues episodes are available for any public access station nationwide to broadcast. And it is easy both for you and for them to do it.

What you need to do:
First, go to the Portland AfD Chapter website at www.afd-pdx.org and view the list of programs. You can view all the programs recorded to date. New shows will added at the rate of one a week.

Now, contact your local public access TV station and find out, by speaking with the programming manager how they schedule shows. Most stations have open time spots which they need to fill and will be interested to know that this is available. Learn from them if they are interested in just one or another episode, or topic, or maybe running Populist Dialogue Program with one show each week. How this works will be different for each station.

You can direct them to our web page so they can take a look. Direct them to the show you like for viewing and let them know there is a need for this type of programing to be on the air. Let them know that it is easy to use PegMedia to download the shows for broadcast and it does not cost them a penny.

Many stations have never heard of PegMedia. Let them know that this is a way for them to download content for their station at minimal or no cost to them and that you and others in the community are interested in watching "Alliance for Democracy – Populist Dialogues."

What they need to do:
1. Go to the PegMedia web site at www.pegmedia.org.
2. Establish a free account by clicking on: Create New Account
3. After establishing the new account, log in.
4. Now click on: Shows From Selected States
5. Select "Oregon"
6. Click on: Alliance for Democracy – Populist Dialogues
7. Now read the brief description of the series and scroll down to view list of currently available shows.

The station or program manager will find instructions on how to download the shows on the right hand link: Downloading Show Episodes.

Note that there is no cost to the downloader as we, the Portland Chapter of the Alliance for Democracy, pays the cost.

What do we have so far? See the Populist Dialogues page for the short list and more details!

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Congressional progressives propose "The People's Budget"

The Paul Ryan budget got the most attention, but the Congressional Progressive Caucus has developed "The People's Budget"--you can find out more online here. The CPC budget features a jobs program, protection for social safety net programs, ends the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and shoots for a budget surplus within ten years.

Jeffrey Sachs wrote this op-end endorsing the People's budget.

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Another Move to Amend endorsement...

...from the Central Labor Council of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, California. Would your labor council or union local like to endorse too? Check out Move to Amend's website for information on local resolutions.javascript:void(0)

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Anacortes WA water program features "virtual bottled water plant"

Last night, residents of Anacortes, Washington learned about the transportation impacts of a one-million-gallons-a-day water bottling plant, thanks to a presentation by local engineer Ralph Bennett and the group Defending Water in the Skagit River Basin. Bennett then extrapolated the impacts to the 5-million gallon-per-day plant that the Anacortes City Council agreed to allow bottler Tethys Enterprises to build.

The audience learned that a million-gallon-a-day plant would produce 7.5 million half-liter bottles and ship 5,000 tons of freight per day. Those bottles would fill 200 heavy trucks or 100 rail cars per day. The proposed plant, working at full capacity, would double the number of tractor-trailers on nearby Route 20, or add 400 rail cars to a local spur line--nearly 16 times the present number.

AfD regional representative Rebecca Wolfe reported that the program was very well received, with lots of great questions from the audience. One city councillor was present, too.

Dr. Bennett is a retired researcher and director at the Idaho National Laboratory, where he explored issues related to the siting and permitting of large nuclear facilities. We hope to get his presentation up online soon!

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Bolivia set to pass rights of nature

From The Guardian:



"Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as 'blessings' and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry....

"Ecuador, which also has powerful indigenous groups, has changed its constitution to give nature 'the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution'. However, the abstract rights have not led to new laws or stopped oil companies from destroying some of the most biologically rich areas of the Amazon."

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Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin voters reject corporate personhood and "money as speech"

A resolution and ballot question establishing that corporations are not people and money isn't speech was approved by 84% of voters in Madison, Wisconsin, and 78% of voters in surrounding Dane County. South Central Wisconsin Move to Amend organized to get the resolution and question on the ballots and get it passed.

The Madison resolution states: "RESOLVED, the City of Madison, Wisconsin, calls for reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that: 1. Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and 2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political
contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech."

Dane County voted on a question asking: "Should the US Constitution be amended to establish that regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting freedom of speech, by stating that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights?"

Congratulations to South Central Wisconsin Move to Amend and their supporters at the ballot box.

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Chris Hedges: This is what resistance looks like

Join the protest, starting at 11 a.m, Friday April 15 in New York City's Union Square at the doors of Bank of America. Visit "It's Our Economy" online for more information on the protest and concert, on the web and on Facebook. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

by Chris Hedges. Posted on truthdig April 3

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.
“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

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Blue Hill, ME is the latest town to pass a local food and self-governance ordinance

Blue Hill, Maine, voted overwhelmingly to pass a Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance at their Saturday town meeting on April 2. Discussion of the ordinance, which allows communities to establish their own rules governing sale and production of farm products, was lively, according to AfD co-chair and Blue Hill resident Bonnie Preston. You can read a model of the ordinance here.

Local food activists will be meeting soon to discuss how best to move forward to get this ordinance passed in other towns around the state. Two more towns are going to be voting in June, and several more are interested in adding it to their warrants for next year. Brooksville, which voted the ordinance down after a committee recommended a no-vote, may take the ordinance up again in May.

Bonnie also reports that people from around the country are interested in what the ordinance does to protect local farming and farm-to-consumer sales--the
day the Local Food, Local Rules web site went up, there were 522 hits on the link to the sample ordinance. Everybody eats!

The Bangor Daily News covered the vote here.

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On April 4, Alliance for Democracy calls you to stand up for economic justice and workers rights

Why should "we the people" suffer cuts in services because of the Federal and state budget crisis we did not create? The people and corporations who created this crisis are not paying! Using tax breaks, tax dodges, tax write-offs, and off-shore tax havens pushed through state legislatures and Congress, the wealthy and corporations pay little or zero in state and federal taxes taxes. We must hold them accountable.

Resistance, popular movements and mobilization are growing fast. This past Saturday in London, 500,000 people marched to protest public spending cuts and corporate tax dodgers. In the U.S., there were protests in more than 40 cities to oppose tax cuts for the wealthy, while public services for the poor, the middle class, students, seniors, and the sick are cut.

Join in the movement for economic and social justice and peace
Monday, April 4: "A Time to Break Silence"
Join the "We Are One" Mobilization
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had come to stand with sanitation workers on strike for more than sixty days. These workers demanded collective bargaining rights, better pay, and an end to discriminatory and dangerous working conditions. 

Now, forty-three years later, workers across the country are fighting for the same rights, especially in states where GOP governors are carrying out drastic budget cuts. 


On April 4, 1967, King's speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” marked his movement from civil rights to a critique of capitalism.  Read “Beyond Capitalism: A Revolution of Values," in Justice Rising.

King called for a “revolution of values,” a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.

He envisioned “a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation."

He cautioned, “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” 



Across the country, beginning with worship services over the April 1 weekend, and continuing through the week of April 4, unions, people of faith, civil and human rights activists, students and other progressive allies will host community- and workplace-focused actions. 



Join or organize a local action--whether it's a march, teach-in, vigil, film screening – a day to be creative, but clear: We are one. Ideas for action are here.

Find a local event or add your own event to the growing list of activities here. Jobs with Justice has resources on their website.

Tuesday, April 5: National Teach-In on Debt, Austerity, Corporate Domination and How People Are Fighting Back
The Teach-in is organized by a coalition of groups and hosted by Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West and over 70 campuses are participating. Find one near you here. This Teach-In will hear from people on the ground fighting and building the movement to resist and roll-back the corporate domination by banks, energy companies and war profiteers.

Listen to the live web-cast Teach-In beginning at 2:00 EDT pm here.

For those in NYC, the event at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, is free and open to the public.

Download or request materials from our "Tools for Organizing" page. And tell us what you did, so that your actions can inspire other AfD members to get involved with the fight for economic justice and an end to corporate rule.

We call on our members to join these events. Add your voice to the millions calling for an end to business-funded attacks on workers' rights. Demand economic justice for the vast majority of Americans, an end to giveaways and subsidies for the corporate elite, and an end to austerity cuts to schools, job creation, public health, and other vital programs.

Thanks for all you do,
For Alliance for Democracy,
Nancy Price and David e. Delk, co-chairs

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