Peoples’ Assembly Organizing Committee

Organizing Agenda

Moving beyond the “Wall Street model of human liberty.”

The ever expanding burdens thrown onto the backs of working people are not only unreasonable, oppressive and unfair, these burdens have grown too big for working people to shoulder. In response, Occupy Portland's Labor Outreach Committee has launched a Peoples’ Assembly Organizing Committee tasked with organizing, planning and facilitating the democratic development of a peoples’ budget centered on democratically addressing the primary economic interests of ordinary working people.

Upcoming Events

Community Assembly to Create a People's Budget

• Date: Saturday, May 5, 2012
• Time: 1:00pm until 6:00pm
• Location: First Unitarian Church of Portland Oregon - 1211 SW Main Street, Portland, OR 97205
• Jump to this event's wiki page, edit it, discuss it or return to the events page.

Purpose

Occupy Portland’s Labor Solidarity Committee invites all people to join us in a Community Assembly to create a people’s budget that works for all of us. Our intention is to launch a campaign and action plan to achieve a city budget and spending proposal that addresses the primary concerns we all share, such as jobs, no cuts to services, housing, transportation, health care, education, etc. We plan to outreach to labor unions, community groups, Occupy, and the broader 99% to join us in a fightback against the planned city cuts to essential services, while putting forth a budget for the 99%.

Other details
Why do some observers compare the collapse of neoliberal capitalism to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.”

Contact Us

Main Info Page

• Community Assembly to Create a People’s Budget

• Group Homepage: http://groups.google.com/group/peoples-assembly
• Group Email: peoples-assembly@googlegroups.com

Facebook Pages

• RSVP: Community Assembly to Create a People's Budget
• The Continuations Committee to implement a People's budget
• Occupy Portland Labor Solidarity Committee

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Downloadable Flyers

• Whose Budget? The People's Budget!
• Jobs! not Layoffs! No cuts to city services!
• Save Our Community Centers!

See Also

• Peoples’ Assembly Organizing Committee
• Occupy Portland Labor Outreach Committee
  
  more information

References

Links to Documents

• A Budget for the Rest of Us
• Resolution in Support of a Community Assembly to Create a “People’s Budget”

(Short version.)

• Resolution in Support of a Community Assembly to Create a “People’s Budget”

(Long version -- draft.)

• CA Outreach Update - Time Sensitive

(Shorter, updated list.)

• CA outreach lists

(Fuller list.)

• Peoples’ Assembly Organizing Committee - Combined Meeting Notes
• Proposal Ideas: Community Assembly for a People’s Budget

This document contains DRAFT proposals that began with suggestions and ideas that emerged during inaugural meeting to plan for a Community Assembly Meeting for a People’s Budget, which took place on Thursday, January 26, 2012 in Portland, Oregon.

Contact Us

Group Homepage: http://groups.google.com/group/peoples-assembly
Group Email: peoples-assembly -AT- googlegroups -DOT- com

Attend Our Meetups!

Join our discussion list -- http://groups.google.com/group/peoples-assembly

We generally schedule meetings on Wednesday evenings from 5:30 - 7:00. Please connect with us through our mailing list to receive all time/date/location updates.

Past Events / Meetings

A Budget for the Rest of Us

Who: Occupy Portland’s Labor Solidarity Committee

What: Strategy Session

When: Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Where: Oregon Fair Trade Campaign Office

Address: 310 SW 4th Ave., Suite 436, Downtown Portland

In addition to our group discussion list, a number of our wiki pages use the possessive of peoples, as in indigenous peoples. It's likely, however, that the possessive of people, as in We the People, will appear more often in the discussions we have and in the documents we craft.

See Also

• Occupy Portland Labor Outreach Committee
• Represent The People
• Make Revolution Not War
• Organized Power

Further Reading & Research

• March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
• Statement by Dr., Martin Luther King Jr., President, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Announcing The Poor People's Campaign. Atlanta, Georgia, December 4, 1967.
• The Poor People’s Campaign 43 years later through the lens of Occupy Wall Street

Scroll down to the "The Poor People’s Campaign — 1968 The “Occupy” Movement — 2011" (compared) section.

• How To Destroy The Occupy Movement And How To Prevent It From Failing
• A Constituent Power Greater Than its Parts: Occupy and Workers from the Port Shutdown to the Primaries
• Book review: Hessel & Morin — The Road to Hope

See the sections "What are the problems?" and "What are the solutions?" for useful ideas.

• The Ninety-Five Theses on the Ills of Europe
• King Versus the Tea Party: From the Poor People's Campaign to Occupy
• The Freedom Budget at 45: Functional Finance and Full Employment - ABSTRACT:

Forty-five years ago, the A. Philip Randolph Institute issued “The Freedom Budget,” in which a program for economic transformation was proposed that included a job guarantee for everyone ready and willing to work, a guaranteed income for those unable to work or those who should not be working, and a living wage to lift the working poor out of poverty. Such policies were supported by a host of scholars, civic leaders, and institutions, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; indeed, they provided the cornerstones for King’s “Poor Peoples’ Campaign” and “economic bill of rights.”

This paper proposes a “New Freedom Budget” for full employment based on the principles of functional finance. To counter a major obstacle to such a policy program, the paper includes a “primer” on three paradigms for understanding government budget deficits and the national debt: the deficit hawk, deficit dove, and functional finance perspectives. Finally, some of the benefits of the job guarantee are outlined, including the ways in which the program may serve as a vehicle for a variety of social policies.

• Unions and the movement - Howard Zinn on class in America Pt4: A reinvigorated labor movement needed for a great social upheaval

"90 percent of the workforce is unorganized. They're organizable. This 90 percent of the workforce are not people who are rich. They're people who need unions. They need to raise their wages. They need to be able to face their employers with some strength rather than the weakness of an individual facing a corporation. So there's a reservoir of possibility there for organizing."

External Links

• Peoples Assemblies Network

Includes Peoples Assemblies News and Peoples Assemblies Groups.

• Federated General Assembly - Introduction
• Federated General Assembly - Description

The Federated General Assembly (FGA) project is building a new web platform that combines community organizing techniques and ideas, lessons and patterns from social networks, web standards and best practices, all together with the very real ecosystem of Occupy itself: occupations & their working groups, the values and principles, and all the coordination & communication challenges.

Grammatical Confusion?

“Peoples’” or “People’s”?

Either way works for this group!