By Cora Currier, ProPublica, Sept. 26, 2012

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac did not keep homeowners trapped in high-interest loans in order to boost profits on billions of dollars' worth of complex financial bets it had made. That's the conclusion reached in a report released today by the inspector general that oversees the agency in charge of Freddie Mac.

Last January, ProPublica and NPR reported that Freddie had dramatically expanded its holdings of mortgage-backed securities that would profit if homeowners stayed in their existing high-interest-rate loans. At the same time, the company had taken steps that made it harder for homeowners to refinance at lower interest rates. Our report stated that there was no evidence of a coordinated attempt to bet against homeowners' ability to refinance. The inspector general's report concludes that there was none.

But the inspector general left a key stone unturned: It did not independently evaluate the firewall within Freddie Mac designed to keep Freddie's investment arm from profiting from insider information about the mortgage giant's plans to tighten or loosen homeowners' access to credit. Instead, the inspector general relied on the word of employees it interviewed and conducted no further investigation. It also reported that the agency that oversees Freddie has not tested the firewall's integrity.

Freddie Mac and its sister company Fannie Mae were bailed out by taxpayers after the financial crisis and are now controlled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie and Fannie guarantee most of the mortgages in the U.S., and they have a mission to make home loans more affordable. But Freddie also has a massive investment portfolio and has to protect against losses. Sometimes, those two goals can conflict.  

Beginning in 2010, Freddie Mac expanded its portfolio of a particular kind of mortgage-backed security known as an "inverse floater." The company offered investors a relatively safe bond with a floating interest rate. It then kept on its books what is called an "inverse floater," which pays out the highest returns if borrowers stay in their mortgages. When interest rates dropped (as they did during that period), Freddie Mac stood to profit on its inverse floaters, because the rates being paid by the pool of borrowers were higher than the prevailing market rates. Inverse floaters lose that advantage the more that homeowners in the pool refinance at the lower rates. 

The report says that Freddie's investment wing increased its holdings in inverse floaters merely because investors were demanding the floating rate bonds linked to them — not because of any strategy to exploit homeowners trapped in high-interest-rate mortgages.

Freddie Mac has an  "information wall" designed to separate the employees running Freddie Mac's investment strategy from those designing and carrying out its policies that impact the mortgage market, such as programs aimed at helping people refinance or making it more difficult for them to do so. The inspector general's report says that it found "no evidence" that the wall had been breached.

Yet, the inspector general noted that FHFA has not conducted any independent testing of Freddie's information wall. And the inspector general limited its own investigation of the wall to interviewing Freddie executives and FHFA officials and reviewing policy documents. The inspector general "did not independently evaluate the efficacy of Freddie Mac's information wall policy," the report states.

The report emphasizes that there are indeed "tensions between policies aimed at homeowners refinancing and Freddie Mac's retained investments." But it says that such tensions are not unique to inverse floaters but are "inherent throughout [Freddie and Fannie's] various business lines."

At the end of 2011, Freddie held about $5 billion worth of inverse floaters, according to the report, or less than one percent of its $653 billion investment portfolio.

The report also notes that the company hedges to balance its interest-rate risk, meaning that it places many different bets so that no matter whether interest rates rise or fall, its investments will be close to "net flat" — stay roughly the same, recording neither large profits nor large losses. Freddie does not try to balance the risk of each individual investment, but rather hedges "on its portfolio as a whole."   The report explains:

In the context of inverse floaters, although Freddie Mac may on the one hand benefit from a trend of low interest rates and reduced prepayments by homeowners, on the other hand, Freddie Mac's other investments may equally suffer from such a trend. Thus, the end result, if perfectly hedged on interest rates, is that Freddie Mac's overall position will remain the same regardless of prepayments.  

The inspector general did not independently evaluate Freddie's hedging strategies. When ProPublica and NPR first reported on these deals, it was unclear what kind of hedging, if any, Freddie Mac had performed.

The company is also supposed to be reducing its investment portfolio as part of the terms of its government bailout. In a footnote, the inspector general's report mentions that Freddie Mac told the Securities and Exchange Commission that selling the floating rate securities was a way to reduce its balance sheet. But most Freddie and FHFA officials interviewed by the inspector general said that reducing its balance sheet was not the motivation for Freddie to create inverse floaters, even if that was the result.

Separately, the way Freddie structured the inverse floaters leaves Freddie with nearly all of the risk of the assets that no longer show up on its balance sheet. The reason: As the guarantor of the mortgages that back the securities, Freddie is already on the hook if the homeowner defaults. With inverse floaters, it also retains the risks that homeowners might refinance and that overall interest rates might rise. Indeed, independent analysts told ProPublica and NPR in January that Freddie may actually have increased its risk, because inverse floaters are illiquid and hard to sell.

In its written response to the inspector general's report, the FHFA did not address Freddie Mac's statements to the SEC. When contacted by ProPublica, an FHFA spokesperson declined to comment.

The report said that FHFA issued misleading statements to the public on when it ordered Freddie to stop creating inverse floaters. According to the report, in the spring of 2011, the FHFA began a review of Freddie Mac's mortgage securities operation, in large part to determine whether the company held too many complex and risky mortgage products, including inverse floaters.

But an executive at Freddie didn't suspend inverse floaters and certain other complex securities deals until January 6, and FHFA didn't explicitly order Freddie Mac to stop selling inverse floaters until January 30, 2012, after ProPublica's story was published. In fact, according to the report, that day marked "the first time that FHFA's senior leadership met to discuss the Agency's position with respect to inverse floaters."

By then, however, Freddie had long since stopped selling floating rate securities — not because of any order from FHFA but because the market for them dried up in spring 2011 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that interest rates would remain low for at least another year.

That's not how FHFA described what happened after our story broke. In a statement released in response to ProPublica and NPR's reports, the agency said that staff met with Freddie in December 2011 and came to an agreement then to suspend inverse floater trades. The inspector general's report concludes that statement was misleading: "prior to January 2012, neither Freddie Mac nor FHFA made a decision to halt Freddie Mac's creation and investment in inverse floaters; the market for reciprocal floating rate bonds simply disappeared. Had the market reappeared and Freddie Mac found the economics were again profitable, [Freddie] would have been free to structure floating-rate and inverse floating-rate investments."

In a response to the report, the FHFA disputed the inspector general's reading of the public statement, saying that it did not claim "that there was a specific, well-articulated FHFA policy and agreement" in December. The agency also emphasized that it did not take a position on inverse floaters only in reaction to media reports. While acknowledging that "the key stakeholders" had met together for the first time on January 30th, the day ProPublica and NPR released their original stories, the FHFA emphasizes that it had been in communication with Freddie on inverse floaters over the previous year.

The inspector general's report was requested by Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ, last January, after our story brought the issue to light.

Finders Weepers: Early Bain Disputes Cast New Light on Its Business

by Jesse Eisinger ProPublica, Sept. 11, 2012

It was one of the "quickest big hits in Wall Street history," as the Wall Street Journal put it at the time.

In 1996, an investment group including Bain Capital, the firm then run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, sold the consumer credit information business Experian to a British retailer, making a $500 million profit. Bain and the other investors who reaped that windfall had closed the acquisition a mere seven weeks earlier, stunning the investing world.

Another party was stunned by the deal, but for a different reason. James McCall Springer believed that he had brought the idea to buy Experian to Bain in the first place.

Springer sued to get what he contended was his rightful finder's fee, eventually settling. And he wasn't the only one. At least three other parties had similar legal disputes with Bain during the early 1990s, when Romney led the company, raising questions of how rough-and-tumble the company could be. The suits also shed light on how Bain actually operated, complicating one of the main narratives Bain, the Romney campaign, and many commentators have used to describe the private equity firm.

The Romney campaign declined to respond to a request for comment on the lawsuits. Bain did not respond to a request for comment. And, of course, disputes about finder's fees are not uncommon; large sums are at stake for little work, a situation ripe for claims of aggrandized roles.

Most accounts of Bain characterize the firm as full of hard-working young men who sought to find troubled companies, invest in them and turn them around. Romney's presidential campaign website says that "under his leadership, Bain Capital helped to launch or rebuild over one hundred companies." Romney campaigns have embraced his reputation as a turnaround artist, as he has run on his private equity record and his overhaul of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. He even titled his 2004 book "Turnaround," a memoir and account of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

But as the disputes illuminate, the reality of Bain's business in the early years is more complicated.

Often, Bain wasn't finding companies on its own. Finders and middlemen were more common in the early days of private equity than they are now. Smaller firms would seek out acquisition targets and bring them to the big buyout firms.

More significantly, Romney's firm wasn't always looking for startups or troubled companies that it could turn around.

Private equity companies conduct a variety of transactions other than buying startups with growth potential or troubled firms ripe for a turnaround. Some seek out family-run operations under the theory that those typically have a lot of fat to cut. Some like "roll-ups," buying up a bunch of small operations in one industry and combining them into a powerhouse with economies of scale. Firms buy divisions of large corporations that are trying to streamline their operations. Some acquisitions fit more than one of these descriptions. The constant is debt, and plenty of it. Private equity firms use such borrowed money to maximize their gains.

The Romney campaign says Bain did various types of deals. And it celebrates that Bain helped launch or rebuild some American corporate stalwarts, like Staples, Bright Horizons and Sports Authority.

Yet in addition, under Romney's tenure, Bain often sought out solid businesses that didn't need to be turned around. The reason: Such companies could operate under the burden of the enormous debt that Bain would layer on them.

Continue reading »

The Bailout: By The Actual Numbers

by Paul Kiel ProPublica

Quick, how many billions in the red are taxpayers on the bailout of GM? AIG? Fannie and Freddie? Is it true that the government has reaped a profit from bailing out the banks?

It should be easy to find answers to such questions. But while it's a snap to find rosy administration claims about the bailout, finding hard numbers is much more difficult. That's why, since the bailouts began in 2008, we've maintained a frequently updated site to provide them. Now we've retooled our database to make it even easier to find these sorts of answers.

So you can effortlessly discover that it's $27 billion for GM, $23 billion for AIG, $91 billion for Fannie, $51 billion for Freddie, and yes, the bank investments have so far returned a profit of $19 billion.

We also make it easy for you to see which investments have resulted in losses (39 so far in total) and to sort bailout recipients by how far in the red or black they are. As always, our scorecard page adds it all up and shows where both bailouts — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP ($55 billion in the red) and Fannie and Freddie (negative $142 billion) — stand right now.

Ultimately, the bailout of GM seems likely to result in the TARP's single biggest loss. But since the government still holds about a third of the company's stock (currently worth about $10 billion), we don't include it on our list of losers yet. It's possible the government will sell the stock for more than it's currently worth, recouping more of its investment.

For now, the reigning bust is the $2.3 billion investment in the bank CIT, which landed in bankruptcy less than a year after its bailout. Second on the list is Chrysler, which resulted in a $1.3 billion loss.

"The government's financial stability programs are expected to cost far less than many had once feared during the crisis, and we're continuing to make significant progress recovering taxpayer investments," said a Treasury spokesman.

Over time, that list of losing investments is likely to grow far beyond 39, because many of the smaller banks that have yet to repay the government are struggling. Although more than 300 banks have exited TARP (often repaying with money from another government bank program), nearly 400 remain. Of those, 162 are behind on their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. According to the GAO, the banks that are languishing in TARP tend to be weaker than those that have left, and at least 130 appear on a secret "problem bank" list kept by regulators.

The TARP's main bank program was supposed to be reserved for healthy banks, but among the losing investments are banks that were troubled even when they first received the money. Central Pacific Financial, a Hawaii bank, got its $135 million in early 2009 despite regulators having just ordered it to raise additional capital. As we reported then, the approval came two weeks after staff for Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, who had helped establish the bank and owned a large amount of the bank's stock, inquired about the bank's application for funds. Both regulators and Treasury denied that the inquiry affected their decision. Taxpayers ultimately lost $61 million from the investment.

Also notable among the failed investments is South Financial Group. The bank received a $347 million government investment in 2008 about a month after its former CEO, Mack Whittle, retired with a $18 million golden parachute. Taxpayers ultimately lost $200 million while the CEO kept his package. Contacted by ProPublica, Whittle said, "I founded [South Financial Group] in 1986 and take offense that anyone would imply that retirement benefits were not warranted." He added that the benefits had been negotiated long before he announced his retirement in the summer of 2008 and that he'd retired by the time the bank applied for TARP funds.

Of course, the government has already turned a profit on its bank investments overall, because the biggest bailouts — particularly Citigroup and Bank of America (each received $45 billion) — resulted in large profits. None of the banks remaining in TARP have net outstanding amounts over one billion dollars.

The Treasury wants to get rid of those remaining bank investments as soon as it can — even when that means selling stakes in apparently healthy banks for a discount, as ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger reported last month.

What defines a profit? So far, the Treasury has allowed many banks to exit TARP after receiving most, but not all, of the amount owed. But in cases where the Treasury received enough other revenue (e.g. through dividend payments) from the bank to result in a net gain, we label that investment as a profit. So far, that's been the case for 26 banks.

The final cost of the TARP, the Fannie, or the Freddie bailout isn't possible to know.

For the TARP, it depends on the biggest remaining investments: AIG and the remains of the auto bailout, GM and GMAC (now called Ally Financial). The net outstanding amount of those three companies together is about $61 billion. At this point, it seems likely that Treasury will ultimately recoup its bailout of AIG. The auto companies, on the other hand, seem likely to result in a loss approaching $20 billion, according to both Treasury Department and Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Another big factor is the TARP's housing programs, its mortgage modification program chief among them. Although Treasury set aside more than $40 billion for its various initiatives, less than $5 billion has been spent so far, a testament to the limited reach of the programs. Since those are subsidies, none of that money will be repaid, and any spending ups TARP's tab. Earlier this year, the CBO estimated that ultimately $16 billion would be spent.

Of course, all of these numbers benefit from being put in a broader context. The Obama administration argues that the TARP should be credited with blunting the force of the financial crisis and saving "more than one million American jobs." Critics like former TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky say the program may have stemmed the damage from the crisis, but it did so by largely preserving the broken too-big-to-fail system that caused the crisis. It's also worth mentioning that the Federal Reserve played an enormous role in supporting the biggest banks and allowing them to exit TARP.

The fate of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts is even harder to figure, although the Treasury recently announced that all of the companies' profits from now on will be handed over to Uncle Sam each quarter. Their tabs should decrease, but how quickly and for how long they'll be allowed to exist is unclear.

For now, our site provides a snapshot of the two bailouts as they actually stand. We've been at it since 2008, and we'll continue to update it frequently.

Matt Taibbi is f*&^ing brilliant. This is today's "Must Read."

Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone:

Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

...

"But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth."

"By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions - placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place..."

"If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House."

The lobbying firm Strategic Health Care is hosting a Capitol Hill event titled, "White Trash Reception." Here's a flyer for the um, "event":

"Hey y'all - get gussied up in your Sunday jorts, mullets, and fullets and come on down to the White Trash Reception," the invitation reads:

White Trash Reception
July 19, 2012 5:30 - 9:30 pm
230 2nd Street SE
Washington, DC 20003

Grab some suds and grub with Strategic Health Care! Please RSVP to info@shcare.net

Peggy Tighe, Beth Swickard, Jason Gromley, and Kyah Flickinger

Here's how the lobbying firm describes itself: "Strategic Health Care’s vision is to become the leading health care consulting firm focused all matters where government and health care meet. In order to achieve this (and distinguish ourselves from other firms), we will continue to capitalize on our knowledge of the health care system, our understanding of our clients’ businesses, our ability to anticipate and influence legislative and regulatory issues, and our dedication to efficient and cost-effective client service."

The National Journal contacted Strategic Healthcare's director of government relations to find out if the invitation was legitimate, and the response? It is.

She said the party at the firm's Capitol Hill townhouse gathers lobbyists, Hill staffers and health industry types for some happy hour fun. The firm throws themed parties every couple of months, though past themes have included the decidedly less edgy pirate and cherry blossom varieties.

This reminds me of the foreclosure attorneys office staff that held a party where they dressed in mock "homeless" attire, and even created scenery to depict vacant, foreclosed homes.

If this invitation hadn't been become public knowledge, I imagine the lobbyists would have dressed as stereotypes of the people who won't ever be able to afford healthcare as their states are opting out of medicare expansion.

And as ThinkProgress notes the event particularly stings because health care lobbyists at Strategic Health Care profit from pharmaceutical companies that make their money on expensive drugs that low income Americans of all races frequently have to turn their pockets inside out to pay for.

[Via]

Can you imagine a more difficult challenge than to find a way to provide free health-care in a nation with the second-largest population in the world, where over 40 percent of the people live below the poverty level and there is no government-funded welfare system or safety net?

At India's Narayana Hrudayalaya, meaning "Temple of the Heart," one of the world's top cardiac surgeons, Dr. Devi Shetty, determined to make a difference, making a profit and offering free medical care go hand-in-hand.

"The essence of life is helping people," Shetty says. "We are in a profession where people come, [and] they are not coming to buy a car or a house or a new suit. They are coming here to save their life. And when they come and tell us that they have no money we know if we refuse they are going to die. So if a hospital is not able to help people who come to its doorstep, we believe they should not be doing that job."

How does he do it?

Al Jazeera:

"We decided to adopt all the business principles of Walmart or Henry Ford - the one thing in common is the economy of scale," Shetty explains.

At the Narayana, approximately 40 per cent of patients pay a reasonable price for their treatment, a small percentage - those who "want the frills of executive rooms" - pay a premium, a majority pays less than the market rate and 10 to 20 per cent pay virtually nothing. For the latter category, the hospital's charitable wing raises money to help compensate for the material costs of their treatment.

In any other hospital, those who could not afford to pay their medical bills would simply be sent away until they came up with the cash, but at the Narayana the hospital's charity wing helps them to find the money.

While the charismatic Shetty and his ideals are a draw card, it is the fact that he can offer the surgery cheaper than anyone else that is the main attraction.

In the first episode of Indian Hospital, we follow the story of Akbar and Qurr - a couple who have gone from one state hospital to another trying to save the life of their nine-month-old first-born child, Hatersham.

There will be five more episodes of "Indian Hospital" on Al Jazeera, see the schedule with dates and show times listed here.

Occupy Wall Street // Spring Training // April 13, 2012 from Mo Scarpelli on Vimeo.

Friday, April 20, 11am
Foreclosure Auction Blockade
Queens Civil Supreme Court, 88-11 Sutphin Blvd, Room 25
Protect the Queens communities most affected by the vulture profit-making inherent to foreclosure auctions.

Friday, April 20th, 2pm
Weekly Wall Street Marches
Liberty Square
Every Friday Occupy Wall Street converges in the streets for Spring Training marches from Liberty Square to Wall Street in preparation for May Day, followed by a community pot-luck dinner! Check out this Spring Training video for more on the fun we have every week.

Saturday, April 21, 2pm
Weekly Occupy Wall Street Orientations
The Gandhi statue in the southwest corner of Union Square
Learn more about how to get involved with Occupy. Can’t make it? Email Tascha and the rest of the crew at orientation@nycga.net for more information.

Sunday, April 22, 4pm
Occupy Earth Day
BP Gas Station at 300 Lafayette st.
Celebrate Earth Day Occupy-style and call for “System Change Not Climate Change!” The future we are fighting for will be won in the streets.

Wednesday, April 25th, 4pm
1T Day National Day of Action Against Student Debt
Meet at Union Square
On April 25 the total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. is due to top 1 trillion dollars, and we will march from Union Square to Wall Street to mark this historic day. Participants include Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, the Plus Brigades, Billionaires for Debt, and other OWS performers.

Wednesday, April 25, 11am
ACT UP and OCCUPY! 25th Anniversary Action
City Hall (Broadway and Murray St)
ACT UP is calling for a small tax (0.05%) on Wall Street transactions and speculative trades in order to raise the money needed to end the global AIDS epidemic and provide universal healthcare in the US. At 11am meet at City Hall for an important demonstration and march that ends on Wall St.

Tuesday, May 1
A Day Without the 99%: May Day 2012
On May 1st we will take the streets to reclaim our jobs, our communities, our lives. Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a General Strike, a Day Without the 99%, and more! There will be actions throughout the day, including a 4 p.m. rally at Union Square that culminates with a march to Wall Street at 5:30 p.m. Click here for the full May Day schedule. Text “@maydayaction” to 23559 for day-of text updates on ongoing events, and if you would like to be added to the announcement and / or discussion listserv, or have any questions in general, please contact mayday@nycga.net.

Anonymous has announced a joint action between the hacktivist group and the Occupy movement, "OUR POLLS," which seeks to Occupy the Vote 2012 with the aim of holding our elected officials accountable to the people.

The message:

Elected officials serve one purpose -- to represent their constituents, the people who voted them into office.
Last year, many of our elected officials let us down by giving in to deep-pocketed lobbyists and passing laws meant to boost corporate profits at the expense of individual liberty.
Our Senators and Representatives showed how little they cared about personal freedoms when they voted overwhelmingly to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA allows for the indefinite detention of individuals based merely on a suspicion or allegation of sympathizing with questionable groups or causes.

This act is a prominent threat to the inalienable due process rights of every US citizen as laid out in the Constitution. It allows the military to engage in civilian law enforcement, and to suspend due process, habeas corpus or other constitutional guarantees when desired.
Our congressmen passed one of the greatest threats to civil liberties in the history of the United States.

Will we hold them accountable on election day? Will we hold our elected officials accountable for supporting rigid Internet censorship laws such as SOPA, PIPA, HR 1981 and the ACTA treaty? The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) aimed to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting user access to websites that hosted or helped facilitate pirated content. SOPA and PIPA's ambiguous, broad wording would have cast a wide censorship net around most of the Internet, thus creating questions of due process, burden of proof, and privacy violations.

The proposed laws were lobbied and paid for by Hollywood, RIAA, MPAA and other massive media companies and would safeguard entertainment industry profits at the expense of essential freedoms, the Internet and constitutional civil liberties . Even if the goal was to merely regulate pirated content, the ambiguous wording demonstrates that the authors and supporters of SOPA and PIPA have little-to-no understanding of the Internet's architecture or the frightening implications of the legislation.

What can you do?
You are one person. You have one vote.
Use that vote on November 6 to hold your elected official accountable for supporting bills such as NDAA, SOPA and PIPA. We are calling on voters, activists and keyboard warriors under all banners to unite as a single force to unseat the elected representatives who threaten our essential freedoms and who were so quick to minimize our individual constitutional rights for a quick corporate profit.

Anonymous also lists all U.S. Senators up for re-election in 2012 who voted to support the NDAA and who still support PIPA, all U.S. Representatives up for re-election in 2012 who voted to support the NDAA and who still support SOPA, and notes that all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for re-election in November 2012.

On February 29th, Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent direct action challenge society's obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations.

We are rejecting a society that does not allow us control of our future. We will reclaim our ability to shape our world in a democratic, cooperative, just and sustainable direction.

We call on people to target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council which is a prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people. They used it to create the anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin and the racist bill SB 1070 in Arizona among so many others. They use ALEC to spread pro big business laws around the country.

For more information visit:

Portland Action Lab