American Icon Joe the Plumber to Appear on Warning Signs at OPEC Emergency Meeting Thursday in Vienna

Freedom Watch demonstrators will carry placards warning OPEC at its emergency meeting here Thursday that any vote to drain more billions of dollars from the U.S. economy at a time when it teeters on the edge of a deep recession, “risks enraging Joe the Plumber.”

The demonstration led by Freedom Watch Founder Larry Klayman will follow a news conference set for Wednesday at which the celebrated attorney will wave a gas pump nozzle in the air in front of OPEC headquarters, calling it a “smoking gun” that ties OPEC to the current economic crisis in America. See www.freedomwatchusa.org .

While not a primary cause of the financial crisis, OPEC’s steep run-up in oil prices earlier this year definitely weakened the U.S. economy, draining it of billions of dollars, thus setting the stage for the financial calamity that followed, he said. Klayman will then serve OPEC with a lawsuit filed in Southern District Florida charging the cartel is a criminal conspiracy of Arabs and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez who are using their oil as a “terrorist weapon” against the U.S. economy.

“There are those in OPEC who want to destroy our way of life and are using oil just as destructively as terrorists would fly airplanes into our buildings,” Klayman said.

The media event Wednesday is set for 10 AM in front of OPEC headquarters and the demonstration Thursday are both being organized for Freedom Watch by TransMedia Group, the international public relations firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, www.transmediagroup.com .

According to Tom Madden, TransMedia’s founder and a former Vice President of NBC, Freedom Watch demonstrators will carry other signs, including one urging OPEC to “Please Push America Into Alternative Energy. Go Ahead . . . Make Our Day!”

“What America needs right now is a further decline in oil prices, which will provide a form of stimulus to the economy as consumers pay less to fill up their tanks,” Madden said. As recently as July, oil was trading at a record of $145 a barrel, which was draining billions from our economy, he added. “That must not happen again,” he said.