IN A BIG LEAP for Occupy Wall Street, protesters all across the country are planning to do something they’ve never quite done before: Flood the streets all on the same day, and for the same reason, as part of a nationally coordinated series of marches, teach-ins, and stunts poking at corporate lobbying might.

The event—planned for Wednesday, February 29—is called “Shut Down the Corporations” (or F29, for short). It’s being hailed as a chance to reinvigorate and refocus the Occupy movement—and shape it into something more powerful—after a winter of soul searching and scattershot marches and protests. And the spark? Occupy Portland.

“This was a callout from Occupy Portland,” says Kari Koch, a media liaison with the Portland Action Lab, an Occupy subgroup. “We’re really looking to put together a national effort that will live beyond February 29. F29 is part of building that network.”

F29’s focal point is a little-seen lobbying outfit known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a nearly 40-year-old consortium whose members include big corporations but also hundreds of state legislators across the nation. Its chief aims include writing business-friendly legislation, and then having its members ram the laws through as many statehouses as possible.

Notorious examples of ALEC’s handiwork include Arizona’s anti-immigrant law and union-busting legislation in Wisconsin. In Oregon, ALEC’s “Legislator of the Year,” State Representative Gene Whisnant, has been pushing bank-friendly foreclosure bills.

“We want to take this opportunity to highlight ALEC and put it on notice,” Koch says. “We know who you are and we have decided to take this on.”

Portland’s slate of F29 events will look a lot like the November 17 Occupy the Banks protest, which also was planned by the action lab. A rally, along with teach-ins, is set for 11:30 am at the waterfront along SW Ankeny. From there, protesters will march through downtown (on a still-secret route) and file past sit-ins and other nonviolent protests targeting ALEC’s corporate members.

Koch says organizers are planning to send an open letter to Mayor Sam Adams’ office asking police not to get rough with protesters and promising that there won’t be any sanctioned property damage. And, in a bid to avoid the pepper spraying and chaos that marred the end of the N17 protest, she says organizers are also planning a “solid wrap-up at the end of the day.”

Occupy groups in big cities like New York and Los Angeles are planning similarly complex events. Smaller groups are plotting simpler events. Occupiers, echoing the tactics of mayors and police chiefs before November’s wave of camp evictions, have been holding regular national conference calls and training a team of national spokespeople.

The effort’s gone well enough that Britain’s Guardian newspaper took notice and posted an article on the protest on Monday, February 20.

“It’s been a really great coalition builder,” says Justin Kramer of Occupy Salt Lake City. “We’ve been able to delegate some individuals from the different groups into doing research on ALEC and connecting their issues to local issues and local corporations.”

Koch says keeping up that dialogue is a key goal: “We didn’t want to do one-off events. We thought that maybe we were at a point in our development where we could come up with an overarching message.”

UPDATE: Our February 29th live-blog of the protest is here!

Denis C. Theriault is the Portland Mercury's News Editor. He writes stories about City Hall and the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on issues like homelessness, police oversight, insider politics, and...

12 replies on “Great Leap Forward”

  1. Yes please, by all means children.
    Go attempt to “shut down the corporations.”
    Or open a history book about the last few times that’s been done.

  2. Well now, looks like they’ve found some direction.

    Some tips if they want to be taken seriously by the general public:
    1.) No masked anarchists. You look like a bunch of troublemakers when you do that, like you’re about to break something. Be completely open about who you are and conduct youselves in a civil manner.
    2.) Don’t break or vandalize anything. Don’t glue ATMs like a bunch of high school kids. This is self-defeating.
    3.) Lose the red Bolshevik flags. Usually there are a few of you carrying them as you march. Last I checked, that doesn’t play well in most of America, it gives most people one more reason to be dismissive.
    4.) If you really want to be taken seriously and even take a stab at irony, dress in business casual attire. Leave the hemp ponchos at home, comb your hair, wear khakis and a polo shirt. I’m not kidding. Not only will the likelihood of tear gas and arrests be reduced, but you will make more of a connection with the average citizen. All of those people who usually look at you in annoyance as they try to get to work might take a second to hear you out if you all look like them. Just sayin’.

    Hope it all goes down without incident.

  4. Well said, Average Citizen. It’s amazing how few dipshits in black bandanas it takes to discredit a much larger group of average Joes and Janes with legitimate grievances. Take his words to heart, folks. Yes Men tactics will get us a lot further than Black Bloc shenanigans…

  5. Hi, I just wanted to jump straight to the comments section to register my knee-jerk reaction to the headline. I would like to be as dismissive as possible while at the same time being neither clever nor insightful. If there’s any stock jokes about bongos and body odor, I’d like to include a few. I may or may not read the article later. Okay, thanks guys!

  6. Tommy – is it me that is supposed to be a ‘yes man’?
    Just because I have grown disallusioned by ‘occupy’ tactics and muddled themes, please don’t take that to mean I don’t share the core values of the beginning of this movement.
    I too, as a blue-collar worker, am pissed off about tax structure and what I see as unfair distribution of wealth.
    So, to me it is with great regret that I have to distance myself from this movement that claims to represent me.
    If it were only the black bandanas, drum circles, or other stupid shit that went with this ‘occupy’, then I would be more forgiving of the extremes of the whole.
    But it is so much more that I find disagreeable, and it pains me to see a ‘movement’ come about in my lifetime – one that I really want to embrace – do nothing more than play into the hands of power that be.

  8. “ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.”

  11. @10. I realize this. But an Occupy leader (if there is one) speaking in front of a camera at City Hall, with Sam Adams in the background, publicly denouncing this type of vandalism and asking for anarchist groups to cease and desist would go a long way towards getting the movement a little more cred in the eyes of the general public.

    It’s one thing to write an email saying you didn’t do it. It’s another to openly marginalize those who did, while you’re surrounded by community leaders such as the Mayor and Chief of Police. Surely Sam and company would go for it.

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