new USUncut.org chapter locally-- demo @ Bank of America Saturday!...

Make spirit of Madison come ALIVE in Poughkeepsie Sat.-- rally in front of Bank of America!...

[note-- Rich Flaherty of Northern/Southern Dutchess News confirmed with us earlier today-- he'll definitely be comin' out to cover our rally this Saturday 10:30 am to 12:30 pm in front of the Bank of America at 11 Raymond Ave. in Poughkeepsie-- so check out http://www.USUncut.org ; join us Sat.!]

[...unless you truly relish notion of ever-more corporate welfare for banksters while rest of us starve...]

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Fact: Bank of America got $45 billion from the federal bailout-- while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens-- while we in the middle class and the poor pay for it all with property tax hikes and less funding for crucial services like LIHEAP (see: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/19 ).

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[there just might be TV coverage for us on this again too; Cablevision came out last night to cover our rally vs. federal budget cuts proposed to LIHEAP with Dutchess Outreach's Brian Riddell, Community Voices Heard's Edgar Gómez, Pat Diaz, Jenny Loeb, et. al., Holy Light Pentecostal Church's Ann Perry, and long-time community activist Barbara Lindsey-- note, too-- Brian Riddell impressed upon us how important it is for us grass-roots activists to take issue of LIHEAP 50% cuts seriously; wants us to gather weekly for an hour of picketing on this in Poughkeepsie in front of DSS building at 60 Market St. (at corner of 44/55 eastbound arterial and Market St.)-- so let's do this, folks!]

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[again-- come to this picket in front of Bank of America in Poughkeepsie this Sat. ONLY if you can't make it down to NYC for huge Rally for Women's Health Care with Planned Parenthood, NOW, NARAL, WFP:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=189460984407552 -- rally for choice is clear priority here!]

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Check out these three brand-new ones just posted yesterday online on Saturday's 50 USUncut.org rallies(!):

"Vermont House Votes To Support Wisconsin Workers" [Associated Press 2/24/11 11:24 am]
http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/2011/02/vt-house-votes-support-wisconsin-workers#
"US Uncut Spreads Madison Spirit: 50 Protests Sat. Over Cuts, Corporate Tax Dodgers" by Art Levine
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6998/us_uncut_spreads_the_spirit_of_madison_protests_saturday_over_budget_c/

"US Uncut: A Progressive Response to Economic Shock Therapy" by Sharon Delgado
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/24-3

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Three facts from "'US Uncut' Calls Out Corporate Tax Deadbeats" by Allison Kilkenny [posted Tuesday]
http://www.truth-out.org/us-uncut-calls-out-corporate-tax-deadbeats67941

1. "Nearly two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes at all, and the great vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, which received $10 billion dollars in taxpayer money during the bailout, negotiated their tax rate down to one percent. The entire tax haven scam costs taxpayers as much as $100 billion per year."

2. "Some of the worst corporate offenders are Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, Chevron, Ford, ExxonMobil and Bank of America. The biggest dodger is General Electric (GE), which, during a time of national economic crisis, actually made money on their tax filing in 2010. Though the company generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, it recorded $1.1 billion in tax benefits."

3. "Conservatives frequently cite the fact that America's corporate tax rate is 35 percent, which is higher than the average of other industrial countries, but that doesn't take into account these kinds of tax evading practices. In fact, 115 companies on the S&P 500 pay less than 20 percent in taxes, and that doesn't take into account the 37 companies, such as Citigroup and American International Group (AIG), that receive more in credits than they ultimately pay out (companies that pay less than five percent in taxes include Boeing and Amazon)."

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ENOUGH!...(what-- are we chopped liver here in U.S.?...see below-- what U.K. has done on this issue!).

Stand with the Real Majority Project this Sat. (Feb. 26th) from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm with signs-- in front of Bank of America at 11 Raymond Ave. in Poughkeepsie (12603)...(let us know if you can come!)...

[thx to Earl Brown, Wesley Lee, others who have agreed on Facebook to come out for this; join us, folks]

[thx also to Community Voices Heard's Edgar Gómez for helping to mobilize folks for this; P. Diaz too!]

Sign on to attend: Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=103907416356080 ...

Recall seminal Feb. 3rd piece on this in The Nation from Johann Hari (see Chris Hedges on this too!):

"How To Build a Progressive Tea Party" [our gathering this Saturday is first step to building local Uncut]
http://www.thenation.com/article/158282/how-build-progressive-tea-party .

[see below-- thx to http://www.USUncut.org , fifty rallies are taking place in front of Banks of America all across U.S. this Saturday-- we're launching local Uncut.org chapter here in our region-- join us!]

Can't make it?...call Congress-- toll-free: (866) 338-1015!...(unless you love corporate welfare)...

[recall http://www.MoveYourMoney.info -- get YOUR $ out of BoA-- as in Philly, L.A., Portland-- models!]

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!...

[ain't no power like the power of the people 'cause the power of the people don't stop-- say wha?]

Pass it on!...

Joel
444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net

p.s. From Sarah van Gelder's "Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?"

[see: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/19 ; http://www.YesMagazine.org/ ]

"Now, a US Uncut group has formed and announced a February 26 Day of Action here to coincide with UK Uncut's planned protests on the same day. Already, a dozen local events are planned. Some groups are keeping quiet about their targets, but several are targeting Bank of America. The goal, according to a statement on the US Uncut website, is 'to draw attention to the fact that Bank of America received $45 billion in government bailout funds while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens [...] And to highlight the fact that the poor and middle class are now paying for this largess through drastic government cuts'..."

p.p.s. Words of wisdom from mi ol' amigo Mr. Pell here in Clinton (edpell@optonline.net)...

Subject: Celente of Rhinebeck and Kingston

Date: Feb 24, 2011 8:08 PM

"But it is not hunger for democracy that drives them. Democracy, autocracy, theocracy, monarchy ? right, center, left ? it is mostly a gut issue, an empty gut issue. When the money stops flowing down to the man in the street, the blood starts flowing in the streets. It's a simple equation. A few at the top have too much, and too many others have too little."

p.p.p.s. Reason here to send a letter to all 25 of us-- at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!...

[...why the heck can't at least Dem-led Assembly here in NYS pass this here?...call 877-255-9417...]

From http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/2011/02/vt-house-votes-support-wisconsin-workers# ...

Vt. House votes to support Wisconsin workers

By: The Associated Press 02/24/11 11:24 Am

The Vermont House has gone on record supporting collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

In a 95-44 vote Wednesday, lawmakers passed a resolution saying they believe labor unions have been a positive force in the country, and that all workers - including those in the public sector - should have a right to bargain through them for better wages and benefits.

The move comes as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pushes legislation there that would curtail sharply the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public-sector workers.

The Vermont resolution drew objections from Republicans who said Vermont lawmakers should stick to Vermont affairs and not meddle in Wisconsin's.

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US Uncut Spreads Spirit of Madison: 50 Protests Saturday Over Budget Cuts, Corporate Tax Dodgers
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6998/us_uncut_spreads_the_spirit_of_madison_protests_saturday_over_budget_c/

Thursday Feb 24, 2011 9:42 am By Art Levine

A little over two weeks ago, Carl Gibson, a 23-year-old former Mississippi Public Radio reporter fired over protesting a pro-BP cover-up, was inspired by the grassroots protests of poor and middle-class British citizens facing deep budget cuts.

The UK Uncut movement targets corporate tax dodgers and was spread largely by social media, as were the protests in Cairo and Tunisia. The template for bringing that model of grassroots direct action to the United States was described in an essay by the Nation's Johann Hari, "How to Build A Progressive Tea Party." Gibson's father sent the article to him as something he ought to look into himself.

"Dammit," he recalls saying, "if no else is going to do it, I will." Beginning with friends in Jackson and his home state of Kentucky, he started a Facebook page and Twitter stream, and borrowed some pointers and a web template from the British organizers for the debut of US Uncut. It's a loose network that doesn't depend on top-down leaders and invites activists to create their own protests timed to national days of action. This Saturday, nearly 50 protests are scheduled, targeting primarily the Bank of America, which has paid no income taxes while receiving $2.3 billion from the federal government in 2009, along with other corporate tax dodgers.

While there's no guarantee this onging effort will succeed-in an era marked by deficit hawks, timid Democrats and a GOP-controlled House of Representatives-this semi-employed young man working part-time as a bouncer at a gay bar has already drawn significant progressive press attention within a week or so of US Uncut being founded. And he's articulating a clear, fervent populist message that's been MIA from our national politics for far too long.

"We want to reframe the national debate about how to deal with this recession: Instead of saying 'what can we cut from the budget because we can't possibly raise taxes on anyone,' why don't we make the two-thirds of corporations that don't pay any income taxes pay their fair share? If we did, the U.S. Treasury would recoup $100 billion a year, a trillion dollars in a decade," he says.

As he explains, "I have one dollar in my wallet. That's more than the combined income tax liability of GE, Exxon Mobil, Citibank and the Bank of America. That means somebody's gaming the system."

For his state, the poorest in the country, enforcing existing tax law and actually closing loopholes could add $432 million in federal funds every year, he notes, while GOP Governor Haley Barbour is proposing $634 million in cuts.

"This budget crisis would be moot if corporations and corporate tax dodgers would just pay their fair share," he argues.

What would have happened to the congressional debate over tax cuts for the rich, Wall Street reform, and job creation programs if President Obama had used the bully pulpit to make such arguments with all the eloquence that has made him the greatest orator in a generation?

Yet similar points have been made before by national unions, among others, in such relatively well-funded campaigns as last spring's Make Wall Street Pay. That aimed to tax financial transactions for job creation programs to counteract the impact of the financial industry's looting of the economy-but it didn't make a dent in Congress, the press or in the White House. In fact, President Obama, Democratic leaders and Beltway pundits largely accepted the Republican framing of budget issues as a deficit crisis that also placed taxing the rich as off-limits.

Despite seemingly extensive organizing by national progressive groups and public rage at the bankers, the New York rally last year drew not much more than 10,000 people. The far more spontaneous Madison protests, fueled by grass-roots activism and union locals, quickly drew as many as 60,000 protesters in a single day. That's more than virtually any progressive local or national action since President Obama took office. (Some exceptions in 2010: a few local pro-immigration reform rallies and a last-ditch "One Nation" rally in Washington a few weeks before the GOP gave Democrats a "shellacking.")

The Wisconsin protests have also brought more national attention than any other labor-related issue in over a decade: whether it's the now-dead Employee Free Choice Act or fights over the minimum wage. In fact, mainstream progressive groups since Obama took office never really tried to organize major national rallies in Washington that could help ramp up public pressure on any reform goals, except for the defensive "One Nation" rally in October 2010, long after the Tea Party had hijacked media attention a year earlier and the GOP was streamrolling towards an election triumph in November.

It's still unclear why liberals demurred for so long, but it was likely due to their concern about potentially undermining the President they supported by going "off-message"-or their misplaced tactical view that they shouldn't risk derailing the insider legislative efforts for health reform, jobs programs or Wall Street reform. On top of that, Democratic Party leaders decided to muzzle the 14-million strong Organizing for America network of Obama supporters until the very end of the healthcare debate, when the bill was nearly headed to defeat and the public option had been long dropped.

At one point, Obama echoed FDR's message to liberal groups on reforms, "Make me do this," but they never really did, so Washington insiders and Blue Dog Democrats dominated the public discourse and legislative agenda.

As a result, progressives didn't draw much attention or spur effective activism to drive overdue reforms, lost control of the healthcare debate and couldn't counteract the Tea Party's ascent. They offered instead often tepid messages that didn't rally the Democratic Party's liberal base and allowed the centrist impulses of President Obama and his political advisers to hold sway.

Now this 23-year-old amateur organizer from Jackson, Miss., along with the organizers of the Madison and spreading labor protests elsewhere, are trying to reclaim the DIY populism that's been lost amid a decaying economy and indifferent Washington response. Their new prominence is a sign of the hunger to express outrage that national progressive groups never effectively harnessed since they all celebrated Obama's inauguration.

As Gibson says, citing communications guru George Lakoff, "Liberal groups have failed in their messages so very, very much, because the messages are too complicated, and people can't relate to it. This is really, really simple: It's not about taxing the rich or a higher tax rate, it's just about making folks who avoid paying their fair share of taxes pay it."

One crystal-clear example, drawn from the US Uncut website, about Bank of America:

Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America has consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. In fact, in 2009, Bank of America actually received a net tax benefit. Yes, last year, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion.

That money alone could almost completely cover the proposed $2.5 billion cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills and affects 34 million households.

As Citizen Radio co-host Allison Kilkenny reported in Truthout about Gibson and his fledgling movement:

Now, Gibson is helping to coordinate movements in twenty states. UK Uncut helped him organize a unified day of protest against the banks. He's spoken with BBC World and The Guardian. Additionally, Gibson says certain US Uncut participants have reached out to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in order to bridge the divide between liberalism's two great abandoned resource pools: the poor and labor.

"I think this just indicates that people are so, so ready for a movement like this to come out," he said, "especially when you consider how the right-wing has stolen the mantle of populism in order to preach corporate propaganda and get people to protest against their own economic self-interest in the Tea Party movement."

As part of their efforts to nurture their fledgling counterpart, UK Uncut is helping Gibson locate those easy-to-recite tax dodging figures that captured the attention of Brits everywhere. The figures shouldn't be difficult to find.

The IRS estimates that individuals and corporations currently hold $5 trillion in tax haven countries. Nearly two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes at all, and the great vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, which received $10 billion dollars in taxpayer money during the bailout, negotiated their tax rate down to one percent. The entire tax haven scam costs taxpayers as much as $100 billion per year.

UPDATE: US Uncut or some of its members are linking up with separate protest actions on Saturday being organized by the Moveon.org Political Action team...

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From http://www.truth-out.org/us-uncut-calls-out-corporate-tax-deadbeats67941 ...

"US Uncut" Calls Out Corporate Tax Deadbeats
Tuesday 22 February 2011
by: Allison Kilkenny, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
A few weeks before he died, Howard Zinn had lunch at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Their topic of conversation was, of course, social justice.

"If there is going to be change, real change," Zinn told Herbert, "it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens."

A year later, the streets of London erupted with citizens who were engaging in Zinn's favorite pastime: active democracy. Students gathered in protest at Parliament Square, but there were also other protests in Oxford, Scotland, Glasgow, Cambridge, Birmingham and Leeds. Across the region, students displayed their frustration with a government that sought to triple tuition fees, effectively pricing young men and women out of their educations.

The UK government's message was clear: Sorry, there's not enough money for the little people. Yet, it soon became clear there should have been enough funds to cover the educations of Britain's youth, and to provide housing for every poor man, woman and child in the country. However, there were some entities - corporations - that were committing the equivalent of economic treason, and that is why the UK is currently experiencing a shortfall in tax revenue.

UK Uncut, a grassroots movement compromised of average citizens, organized in an effort to figure out where the money had gone. As The Nation reports, they made some startling discoveries:

All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes, are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone - Vodafone, one of Britain's leading cellphone firms - owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg. The last Labour government, for all its many flaws, had insisted it pay up.

But when the Conservatives came to power, David Hartnett, head of the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, apologized to rich people for being "too black and white about the law." Soon after, Vodafone's bill was reported to be largely canceled, with just over £1 billion paid in the end.

Once news of the theft reached the people, UK Uncut's ranks swelled. They staged peaceful sit-ins that shut down Vodafone's stores. Following the successful protests, the group shifted its attention to one of Prime Minister David Cameron's official advisers, Sir Philip Green.

As The Nation notes, Green, the ninth-richest man in the UK, is also a shameless tax dodger:

Although Green lives and works in Britain and his companies all operate on British streets, he avoids British taxes by claiming his income is "really" earned by his wife, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco. In 2005, the BBC calculated that he earned £1.2 billion and paid nothing in taxes - dodging more than £300 million in taxes.
UK Uncut pointed out that the school sports partnership, one of the programs axed under Cameron's recently implemented cuts, could have been saved if Green was made to pay his taxes.

These kinds of lucid examples of corporate theft spoke to the public. More protests and occupations broke out, inspiring journalist Johann Hari to declare in The Nation that this is how the United States might build a progressive Tea Party. Here were real people exercising the method Zinn advocated his whole adult life: average people, building from the bottom up.

Now, the UK Uncut movement has come to America. US Uncut just recently launched, but there are already chapters springing up across the country. The whole thing is moving faster than Carl Gibson, the director of US Uncut's founding chapter in Mississippi, could have ever hoped for.

"This is snowballing so quick," said Gibson. "I made the Twitter page and Facebook group and invited a few friends and said, 'Guys, we've got to do something about this,' and this is right after I read the article about UK Uncut in The Nation that had the ten steps to launching a US Uncut movement, and I got busy."

Now, Gibson is helping to coordinate movements in twenty states. UK Uncut helped him organize a unified day of protest against the banks. He's spoken with BBC World and The Guardian. Additionally, Gibson says certain US Uncut participants have reached out to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in order to bridge the divide between liberalism's two great abandoned resource pools: the poor and labor.

"I think this just indicates that people are so, so ready for a movement like this to come out," he said, "especially when you consider how the right-wing has stolen the mantle of populism in order to preach corporate propaganda and get people to protest against their own economic self-interest in the Tea Party movement."

As part of their efforts to nurture their fledgling counterpart, UK Uncut is helping Gibson locate those easy-to-recite tax dodging figures that captured the attention of Brits everywhere. The figures shouldn't be difficult to find.

The IRS estimates that individuals and corporations currently hold $5 trillion in tax haven countries. Nearly two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes at all, and the great vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, which received $10 billion dollars in taxpayer money during the bailout, negotiated their tax rate down to one percent. The entire tax haven scam costs taxpayers as much as $100 billion per year.

To help illustrate the massive hole this con game leaves in the budget, consider that President Obama made the recent decision to end the year-round Pell Grant policy in order to save $3.4 billion in 2011 and $4.2 billion in 2012. Another example: The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are braced for more than $6 million in cuts, a shortfall that could easily be made up if the US recovers just .06 percent of the annual taxes owed to it by tax haven criminals.

Some of the worst corporate offenders are Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, Chevron, Ford, ExxonMobil and Bank of America. The biggest dodger is General Electric (GE), which, during a time of national economic crisis, actually made money on their tax filing in 2010. Though the company generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, it recorded $1.1 billion in tax benefits. Forbes calls this GE's "uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the US and make lots of money overseas, where tax rates are lower." Such activity is also known as tax dodging, but publications like Forbes prefer to avoid such shrill language.

Conservatives frequently cite the fact that America's corporate tax rate is 35 percent, which is higher than the average of other industrial countries, but that doesn't take into account these kinds of tax evading practices. In fact, 115 companies on the S&P 500 pay less than 20 percent in taxes, and that doesn't take into account the 37 companies, such as Citigroup and American International Group (AIG), that receive more in credits than they ultimately pay out (companies that pay less than five percent in taxes include Boeing and Amazon).

In 2010, if you made between $34,001 and $82,400, your marginal tax rate was 25 percent. That means you paid more in taxes than a company like Carnival Corporation - the entity behind the floating eyesores of Carnival cruises - which, over the last five years, has paid only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits, according to The New York Times. You even paid more if you were in either of the next two lowest income brackets.

For singles earning between $0 and $8,375, the marginal tax rate is 10 percent - a positively patriotic sum considering that income won't keep an individual above the poverty line, and yet would cause any Fortune 500 CEO to experience cardiac arrest.
Despite these glaring instances of stolen revenue, the right has been marvelously successful at using astroturfing campaigns to create its Tea Party, a movement that is more likely to focus on illegal immigration than foreign tax havens (unsurprisingly, given that large corporations like Koch Industries bankrolled such endeavors).

Gibson blames the propaganda from networks like Fox News for brainwashing the lower classes into fighting against their own interests, yet he's optimistic about the future. The US Uncut web site is up and growing, as are its Facebook group and Twitter page. "It's time for the people to speak up and do whatever we can," said Gibson.

When my Citizen Radio partner and I interviewed Zinn in his home a couple months before he died, we asked him why it's so important for students to have an intimate understanding of history.

"To me, understanding history is a matter of life and death," he said. "If you don't understand history, you're a victim." By that, he meant that if citizens didn't understand their own history of exploitation at the hands of robber barons and tycoons, who fought for deregulation at the expense of their employees in order to accumulate larger profits, they would be doomed to repeat those tragedies. Now here we are in 2011, and an entire movement branded as a populist uprising is screaming about illegal immigrants and Obama's birth certificate while corporations rob the country blind.

Luckily, it seems as though enough sane Americans are learning the correct history lessons from their brothers and sisters in struggle. Here's hoping US Uncut never forgets its history.

US Uncut's official website is http://www.usuncut.org/. They are also on Facebook and Twitter.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/24-3 ...

US Uncut: A Progressive Response to Economic Shock Therapy
Published on Thursday, February 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Sharon Delgado

Around the country, cutbacks are being proposed and pushed through with great speed, as a kind of shock therapy to the economy, as Naomi Klein describes in her book Shock Doctrine. But hold on-progressive groups, inspired by recent events in Cairo and Madison, are rising to the occasion and calling for a sane, reasoned, and equitable approach to the crisis at hand.

On Saturday, February 26, groups around the United States will engage in actions that demonstrate the will of the people to protect essential programs and services from cutbacks and to demand that such services be paid for by the banks and other mega-corporations that currently dodge taxes and dominate economic policy. A newly-emerging organization called US Uncut, modeled on UK Uncut, is planning autonomous but coordinated actions in over 30 locations nation-wide. (see http://www.usuncut.org/ )
These actions are in response to legislatures in Washington and in various states that are proposing "austerity measures" such as those imposed on developing nations by the IMF for decades. State and federal tax cuts threaten to shrink middle class benefits, dismantle social safety nets, and undo labor and environmental protections that we have taken for granted. These cuts constitute a massive transfer of our country's wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, pushed through by corporate power.

At the same time, tax cuts for the wealthy have been extended, profits and stocks of bailed out banks have been rising, and CEO bonuses are sky high. Bank of America and other banks continue to evade taxes in offshore accounts and off-balance sheet accounting. These financial institutions, which played fast and loose with our money, are helping to shape economic and social policies to prevent regulations that would limit their power.

Remember, it's not just out of the blue that we find ourselves in tight economic circumstances. The financial Ponzi scheme, with its layers and layers of highly leveraged, complex securities built upon subprime mortgages, collapsed in 2008, taking the global economy with it. This could only happen because the regulations that had safeguarded the financial system since the Great Depression were discarded under pressure from financial institutions that wanted freedom to engage in risky speculation as well as government insurance through the FDIC. The wanted both, and they got it. Government free-market ideologues helped this deregulation along at every stage, and are escalating their efforts today.

The poisonous eruption of "toxic assets" came to a head in 2008. Trillions of dollars of phantom wealth evaporated, along with much of society's real wealth, which is still being siphoned up to the top as foreclosures rise and services are cut. The $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout was a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of tax dollars spent by Treasury and the Federal Reserve in order to bail out the banks and save the financial system, though rescue efforts clearly did not extend to the people.

Ironically, the US government injected money into banks and bought those toxic assets at face value, to buoy up Wall Street, without placing conditions that would help people on Main Street. Now we and our grandchildren are on the hook for trillions of dollars in debt, and these financial monsters, rather than coming clean and paying their fair share of taxes, are pushing legislators to cut any programs that could empower the people or relieve their pain.

In Wisconsin and Ohio, people are rising up against legislation that would take away the right of public employees to organize. This legislative push is part of an ongoing effort, paid for by the billionaire Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity and other wealthy free market libertarians who think that their day has come. They seem to agree with Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Taxpayer Reform, who said "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Shrinking government means cutting corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy. It means cutting back the benevolent role of government to protect the common good, but expanding the authoritarian role of government to enforce contracts and provide police, prison, and military power. It also means disempowering labor, which often votes Democratic, and which provides the primary countervailing power to absolute corporate rule.

This coming Saturday and in future days, we can resist the shock therapy of cutbacks and demand that banks pay their fair share. "Cut CEO bonuses, not Social Security." "Bail out the schools, not the banks." "Corporate tax dodgers, pay your fair share." If we join together nonviolently, as workers and unemployed, students and pensioners, immigrants and citizens, homeowners and homeless, rich and poor together, without scapegoats or enemies, we have power, not the power of domination but of cooperation and moral persuasion. As we rouse ourselves from apathy and take action together, for the children's sake and for the sake of the future, we are upheld and uphold each other through the power of community-people power. Another world is possible! The time is now.

Sharon Delgado is an ordained United Methodist minister, founder of Earth Justice Ministries, and author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization (Fortress Press, 2007). She will be in participating on Saturday, February 26, in the U.S. Uncut day of protest. You can reach her at revsher@earth-justice.org.

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Full article here-- from http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/19 ...

Published on Saturday, February 19, 2011 by YES! Magazine

"Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?"

by Sarah van Gelder

It took awhile, but Wisconsin shows that the poor and middle class of the U.S. may be ready to push back. Madison may be only the beginning.

The uprising that swept Tunisia, Egypt, and parts of Europe is showing signs of blossoming across the United States.

In Wisconsin, public employees and their supporters are drawing the line at Governor Scott Walker's plan to eliminate collective bargaining and unilaterally cut benefits. School teachers, university students, firefighters, and others descended on the capital in the tens of thousands, and even the Superbowl champion Green Bay Packers have weighed in against the bill. Protests against similar anti-union measures are ramping up in Ohio.

Meanwhile, another protest movement aimed at protecting the poor and middle class is in the works. Cities around the country are preparing for a February 26 Day of Action, "targeting corporate tax dodgers."

Learning from the UK

The strategy picks up on the UK Uncut campaign, begun when a group at a London pub-a firefighter, a nurse, a student, and others-came up with an idea that is part flash mob, part sit-in. In an article published in the Nation, reporter Johann Hari tells the story of the group's frustration about government cutbacks. If Vodafone, one corporation with a huge back-tax bill, paid up, the cutbacks wouldn't be needed. The group spread the word over social media, and held loud, impolite demonstrations. The idea quickly went viral, and flash mobs/sit-ins materialized at retail outlets across Britain, shutting many of them down.

Now, a US Uncut group has formed and announced a February 26 Day of Action here to coincide with UK Uncut's planned protests on the same day. Already, a dozen local events are planned. Some groups are keeping quiet about their targets, but several are targeting Bank of America. The goal, according to a statement on the US Uncut website, is "to draw attention to the fact that Bank of America received $45 billion in government bailout funds while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens [...] And to highlight the fact that the poor and middle class are now paying for this largess through drastic government cuts."

The Politics of Class Warfare

Across the country, the poor and middle class have suffered from the economic collapse: jobs disappeared, mortgages sank underneath debt, and opportunities for a college education evaporated. Much of the bailout that was supposed to fix the economy went to the very institutions that caused the collapse. Many of these institutions are now using tax loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes.

The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

It took some time for a political response to coalesce. The Tea Party movement was able to direct discontent away from the Wall Street titans who brought the economy to its knees. Funding from the Koch brothers' petro-fortune along with fawning attention from Fox News helped get the libertarian movement off the ground. But progressives remained fragmented and few built active, organized bases. Many waited for President Obama to act.

The tide may now be turning. Inspired by people-power movements around the world, people in the United States are beginning push back. The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

Politicians are scurrying to cut spending, but fewer than one in five Americans say the federal budget deficit is their chief worry about the economy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center; 44 percent say they're most worried about jobs. Polls show that Americans also want spending for education, investment in infrastructure, and environmental protection. Yet spending in all these areas is up for drastic cuts in state and federal budgets.

Likewise, on the tax side, 59 percent of Americans opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, according to a Bloomberg poll. Congress cut the taxes anyway, and the package will cost $800 billion over just two years.

Until now, polls have been one of the few places where anger at government policies that favor the rich while cutting service to the middle-class has been visible. But the crowds in Madison and the momentum of US Uncut tell us that may be about to change.

As a statement on the US Uncut website puts it: "We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize, we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!"

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From http://www.thenation.com/article/158282/how-build-progressive-tea-party ...

How to Build a Progressive Tea Party
Johann Hari
February 3, 2011 | This article appeared in the February 21, 2011 edition of The Nation.

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week-to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

As people see their fellow citizens acting in self-defense, these tax-the-rich protests spread to even the most conservative parts of the country. It becomes the most-discussed subject on Twitter. Even right-wing media outlets, sensing a startling effect on the public mood, begin to praise the uprising, and dig up damning facts on the tax dodgers.

Instead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.

This may sound like a fantasy-but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain. As recently as this past fall, people here were asking the same questions liberal Americans have been glumly contemplating: Why is everyone being so passive? Why are we letting ourselves be ripped off? Why are people staying in their homes watching their flat-screens while our politicians strip away services so they can fatten the superrich even more?

And then twelve ordinary citizens-a nurse, a firefighter, a student, a TV researcher and others-met in a pub in London one night and realized they were asking the wrong questions. "We had spent all this energy asking why it wasn't happening," says Tom Philips, a 23-year-old nurse who was there that night, "and then we suddenly said, That's what everybody else is saying too. Why don't we just do it? Why don't we just start? If we do it, maybe everybody will stop asking why it isn't happening and join in. It's a bit like that Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. We thought, If you build it, they will come."

The new Conservative-led government in Britain is imposing the most extreme cuts to public spending the country has seen since the 1920s. The fees for going to university are set to triple. Children's hospitals like Great Ormond Street are facing 20 percent cuts in their budgets. In London alone, more than 200,000 people are being forced out of their homes and out of the city as the government takes away their housing subsidies.

Amid all these figures, this group of friends made some startling observations. Here's one. All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes, are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone-Vodafone, one of Britain's leading cellphone firms-owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg. The last Labour government, for all its many flaws, had insisted it pay up.

But when the Conservatives came to power, David Hartnett, head of the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, apologized to rich people for being "too black and white about the law." Soon after, Vodafone's bill was reported to be largely canceled, with just over £1 billion paid in the end. Days later George Osborne, the finance minister, was urging people to invest in Vodafone by taking representatives of the company with him on a taxpayer-funded trip to India-a country where that company is also being pursued for unpaid taxes. Vodafone and Hartnett deny this account, claiming it was simply a longstanding "dispute" over fees that ended with the company paying the correct amount. The government has been forced under pressure to order the independent National Audit Office to investigate the affair and to pore over every detail of the corporation's tax deal.

"It was clear to us that if this one company had been made to pay its taxes, almost all these people could have been kept from being forced out of their homes," says Sam Greene, another of the protesters. "We keep being told there's no alternative to cutting services. This just showed it was rubbish. So we decided we had to do something."

They resolved to set up an initial protest that would prick people's attention. They called themselves UK Uncut and asked several liberal-left journalists, on Twitter (full disclosure: I was one of them), to announce a time and place where people could meet "to take direct action protest against the cuts and show there's an alternative." People were urged to gather at 9:30 am on a Wednesday morning outside the Ritz hotel in central London and look for an orange umbrella. More than sixty people arrived, and they went to one of the busiest Vodafone stores-on Oxford Street, the city's biggest shopping area-and sat down in front of it so nobody could get in.

"What really struck me is that when we explained our reasons, ordinary people walking down Oxford Street were incredibly supportive," says Alex Miller, a 31-year-old nurse. "People would stop and tell us how they were terrified of losing their homes and their jobs-and when they heard that virtually none of it had to happen if only these massive companies paid their taxes, they were furious. Several people stopped what they were doing, sat down and joined us. I guess it's at that point that I realized this was going to really take off."

That first protest grabbed a little media attention-and then the next day, in a different city, three other Vodafone stores were shut down in the northern city of Leeds, by unconnected protests. UK Uncut realized this could be replicated across the country. So the group set up a Twitter account and a website, where members announced there would be a national day of protest the following Saturday. They urged anybody who wanted to organize a protest to e-mail them so it could be added to a Google map. Britain's most prominent tweeters, such as actor Stephen Fry, joined in.

That Saturday Vodafone's stores were shut down across the country by peaceful sit-ins. The crowds sang songs and announced they had come as volunteer tax collectors. Prime Minister David Cameron wants axed government services to be replaced by a "Big Society," in which volunteers do the jobs instead. So UK Uncut announced it was the Big Society Tax Collection Agency.

The mix of people who turned out was remarkable. There were 16-year-olds from the housing projects who had just had their £30-a-week subsidy for school taken away. There were 78-year-olds facing the closure of senior centers where they can meet their friends and socialize. A chuckling 64-year-old woman named Mary James said, "The scare stories will say this protest is being hijacked by anarchists. If anything, it's being hijacked by pensioners!" They stopped passers-by to explain why they were protesting by asking, "Sir, do you pay your taxes? So do I. Did you know that Vodafone doesn't?"

The police looked on, bemused. There wasn't much they could do: in a few places, they surrounded the Vodafone stores before the protesters arrived, stopping anyone from going in or out-in effect doing the protesters' job for them. One police officer asked me how this tax dodge had been allowed to happen, and when I explained, he said, "So you mean I'm likely to lose my job because these people won't pay up?"

* * *

UK Uncut organized entirely on Twitter, asking what it should do next and taking votes. There was an embarrassment of potential targets: the National Audit Office found in 2007 that a third of the country's top 700 corporations paid no tax at all. UK Uncut decided to expose and protest one of the most egregious alleged tax dodgers: Sir Philip Green. He is the ninth-richest man in the country, running some of the leading High Street chain stores, including Topshop, Miss Selfridge and British Home Stores. Although he lives and works in Britain, and his companies all operate on British streets, he avoids British taxes by claiming his income is "really" earned by his wife, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco. In 2005 the BBC calculated that he earned £1.2 billion and paid nothing in taxes-dodging more than £300 million in taxes.

Far from objecting, Cameron's government appointed Green as an official adviser, with special responsibility for "cutting waste." So UK Uncut drew a direct line from Green's tax exemption to the cuts in services for ordinary people. For example, Cameron had just announced the closure of the school sports partnership, which makes it possible for millions of schoolchildren to engage in healthy, competitive exercise. The protesters pointed out that if Green was made to pay taxes, the entire program could be saved, with more than £120 million left as small change. So they declared a day of action.

At the London protests against Green, everybody was asked to turn up at the largest branch of Topshop-again on Oxford Street-and mill around like ordinary shoppers. Once a whistle was blown, they were to start chanting, put on sports clothing to dramatize what was being taken away from schoolchildren and sit down by the counters to stop sales. It was the Saturday before Christmas. There was a strange frisson as everyone turned up and looked around. It was impossible to tell who was a shopper and who was a protester: they looked the same. The whistle blew-and they shut down one of the largest retail stores in Europe.

Across Britain, the same thing was happening. Even in Tunbridge Wells-a town synonymous with ultraconservatism-the Vodafone store was blockaded. Again, many people spontaneously joined in. The protests were all over that evening's TV news. It was the most-read story on the websites of the BBC and the country's most-read newspaper, the Daily Mail. The prime-time Channel 4 News reported, "A more eloquent and informed group of demonstrators would be hard to come across and one is struck by the wide appeal across ages and incomes, of what they had to say." The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have shown how social media can be used to conduct the unfocused rage of a scattered population and harden it into a weapon. UK Uncut shows the same tactics can be used in a democracy-and there is the same need. Unemployment in the United States is at the same level as in Egypt before the uprising: 9 percent.

The UK Uncut message was simple: if you want to sell in our country, you pay our taxes. They are the membership fee for a civilized society. Most of the protesters I spoke with had never attended a demonstration before, but were driven to act by the rising unemployment, insecurity and austerity that are being outpaced only by rising rewards for the superrich. Ellie Mae O'Hagan, a 25-year-old office worker in Liverpool, one of the most economically depressed places in the country, said she was "absolutely outraged to discover that I was paying more than Philip Green in taxes." She added, "I could see what all the cuts were doing. My brother had been made redundant, loads of my friends were unemployed and I could see it all getting worse, while these bankers get even bigger bonuses. And I thought, Right, you've got to do something. So I e-mailed UK Uncut to ask if there was a protest happening in Liverpool. They said, Not yet, so you organize one. So I spent forty-eight hours arranging one. And a hundred people turned up-an amazing mixture of people, who I had never met, and who didn't know each other-and we shut down both Vodafone stores. Suddenly, it felt like we weren't passive anymore. We were standing up for ourselves."

At every protest, a clear and direct line was drawn from tax avoidance to real people's lives. If they pay their bill, you won't be forced out of your home. If they pay their bill, your grandmother won't lose her government support. If they pay their bill, our children's hospitals won't be slashed.

The protests began to influence the political debate. Public opinion had already been firmly for pursuing tax dodgers, with 77 percent telling YouGov pollsters there should be a crackdown. But by dramatizing and demonstrating this mood, the protesters forced it onto the agenda-and stripped away Cameron's claims that there was no alternative to his cuts.

Polly Toynbee is one of Britain's most influential columnists: imagine Maureen Dowd with principles instead of snark. Toynbee attended the London protests and was manhandled out of Topshop by security guards. She reported later that the protests were being watched very nervously on Downing Street. "It is no coincidence that the government immediately hurried out a 'clampdown' on tax avoidance, collecting £2 billion," she tells me, "or that [its coalition partners] the Liberal Democrats suddenly remembered this was one of their big commitments. Of course, that sum is only a drop in the ocean. But this really was a jolt to the political system. It was hugely important."

But perhaps the most striking response was from the right. One of Britain's most famous businessmen, Duncan Bannatyne, came out in support of the protests, declaring, "We need to rebel against tax dodgersŠas Government won't." The Financial Times conceded that "the protesters have a point" but then grumbled about them. Surprisingly, the Daily Mail, Britain's most right-wing newspaper, became one of the movement's most sympathetic allies. The editors could see that their Middle England readers were outraged to be paying more taxes than the superrich. So they ran their own exposé on Philip Green's tax affairs, along with straightforward and detailed reporting of the protests.

* * *

The only part of the media that attacked UK Uncut outright was, predictably, Rupert Murdoch's empire. This isn't surprising given that his company, News International, is one of the world's most egregious tax dodgers, contributing almost nothing to the US or UK treasuries. His tabloid the Sun accused UK Uncut of being a "group of up to 30,000 anarchists" scheming "to bring misery to millions of Christmas shoppers," with plans to "set off stink bombs, leave mouldy cheese in clothes and rack up huge sales at tills and then refuse to pay." After one of the people named in the article reported the Sun to the Press Complaints Commission, the newspaper was forced to retract the article by removing it from its website.

But these smear jobs were the best the right could muster. Conservatives ran into hiding, with almost nobody prepared to defend tax avoiders. Only a few stray voices emerged: ultraconservative blogger Tim Montgomerie, regarded as highly influential with Cameron; and Labour MP Tom Harris, our equivalent of a Blue Dog Democrat. They argued that tax avoidance is legal and therefore fine. The protesters responded that they were obviously arguing for a change in the law.

The tax-evasion defenders also tried to argue that a crackdown would "drive away" corporations, to the detriment of the nation. But the corporations are already, for all intents and purposes, "away." They pay nothing to Britain. They have relocated everything they can. They can't, however, physically relocate their British shops to Bangalore. It's impossible. That remnant can certainly be taxed. What are they going to do?

Besides, the right's claim that enforcing fair taxes drives away the rich was recently tested-and proved wrong. Toward the end of the last Labour government, officials increased the top tax rate to 50 percent. (This is still far short of the 90 percent levied on US taxpayers by President Eisenhower, during the biggest boom in American history.) Conservatives predicted disaster: London Mayor Boris Johnson said it would reduce the city to a ghost town as bankers fled to Switzerland. Yet after the taxes rose, the number of rich people applying for visas to leave Britain for Switzerland actually fell by 7 percent.

After the empirical argument collapsed, a few on the right tried to shift the argument to a moral one.

They said that Green "earns all his money on his own," so why should he have to pay any of it back to the rest of us? I responded on TV and in a blog post by suggesting a small experiment. Let's take one branch of Topshop, and for twelve months we'll deny any services funded by collective taxation to that store. When the rubbish piles up, we won't send garbage men to collect it. When the rat outbreak begins, we won't send pest control. When they catch a shoplifter, we won't send the police. When there's a fire, we won't send the fire brigade. When suppliers want to get their goods to the store, there may be a problem: we won't maintain the roads. When the employees get sick, we won't treat them in the publicly funded hospitals. Then let Philip Green come back and tell us he does it all himself.

The last argument of the defenders has been to say it's impossible to do anything about tax havens, so we'll just have to accept them. But this is false. After the 9/11 attacks, the world-under US pressure-passed virtually universal laws to freeze Al Qaeda-related accounts and so prevent them from stashing or accessing money from tax havens. Where there is political will, they can be brought to heel rapidly. In the early 1960s Monaco was refusing to hand over details of French tax dodgers to the French authorities. President Charles de Gaulle surrounded the country with tanks and cut off its water supply until it relented. On a more prosaic level, many countries have integrated into their law something called a General Anti-Avoidance Principle, which stipulates that any act contrary to the spirit of the nation's tax laws is illegal. It slams shut most loopholes overnight.

* * *

There has been an obsessive hunt by the media to discover who UK Uncut "really are." They assume there must be secretive leaders pulling the strings somewhere. But the more I dug into the movement, the more I realized this is a misunderstanding. The old protest movements were modeled like businesses, with a CEO and a managing board. This protest movement, however, is shaped like a hive of bees, or like Twitter itself. There is no center. There is no leadership. There is just a shared determination not to be bilked, connected by tweets. Every decision made by UK Uncut is open and driven by the will of its participants. Alongside many people who had never protested, activists from across the spectrum have poured into the movement, from the students occupying their universities to protest the massive hike in fees, to antipoverty groups like War on Want, to trade unions. Indeed, even the trade union at Britain's IRS came out in support, with ordinary tax collectors rebelling against their bosses for letting the rich wriggle out of taxes.

Think of it as an open-source protest, or wikiprotest. It uses Twitter as the basic software, but anyone can then mold the protest. The Western left has been proud of its use of social media and blogging, but all too often this hasn't amounted to much more than clicktivism. By contrast, these protesters have tried at every turn to create a picture of George Osborne, Cameron's finance minister, sitting in his office, about to sign off on another big tax break for a rich person, paid for by cuts to the rest of us. Is a big Facebook group going to stop him? No. Is an angry buzz on the blogosphere going to stop him? No. But what these protesters have done-putting all the online energy into the streets and straight into the national conversation-just might. And by creating a media buzz, it draws in people from far beyond the tech-savvy Twitterverse, with older activist groups-from trade unions to charities-clamoring to join.

As one UK Uncut participant, Becky Anadeche, explains, "So many campaigns rely on the premise that the less you ask somebody to do, the more likely they are to do it. This campaign has proved the opposite. People who have never even been on a protest before have been organizing them."

British liberals and left-wingers have been holding marches and protests for years and been roundly ignored. So why did UK Uncut suddenly gain such traction? Alex Higgins, another protester, explains, "It's because we broke the frame that people expect protest to be confined to. Suddenly, protesters were somewhere they weren't supposed to be-they were not in the predictable place where they are tolerated and regarded as harmless by the authorities. If UK Uncut had just consisted of a march on Whitehall [where government departments are located], where we listened to a few speakers and went home, nobody would have heard of it. But this time we went somewhere unanticipated. We disrupted something they really value: trade." A wave of bankers' bonuses is due to be announced in February, and it would be surprising if UK Uncut did not respond with a similar program of direct action.

* * *

Can this model be transferred to the United States? Remember that a few months ago, Brits were as pessimistic about the possibility of a left-wing rival to the Tea Party as Americans are now. Of course, there are differences in political culture and tax law structure and enforcement, but there are also strong parallels. In the United States the same three crucial factors that created UK Uncut are in place. First, at the state level, Americans are facing severe budget cuts, causing the recession to worsen. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says state governors are acting like "50 Herbert HooversŠslashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation's economic future."

Second, most of these cuts could be prevented simply by requiring superrich individuals and corporations to pay their taxes. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) calculated in 2008 that eighty-three of the 100 biggest US corporations hide fortunes in tax havens. And even without these shelters, the rich have been virtually exempted from taxes across America. Billionaire Warren Buffet recently conducted a straw poll in his office and found he paid a lower proportion of his income in taxes than anybody else there-and considerably less than his secretary. Indeed, tax expert Nicholas Shaxson says that in many ways "America itself is a tax haven for many rich people." WikiLeaks is poised to release the details of a whole raft of corporations and banks using tax havens in the Cayman Islands, laying out the dodging for all to see.

And third, public opinion is firmly behind going after the rich and corporations. A poll in January for 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair asked Americans which policy they would choose to reduce the deficit. By far the most popular, chosen by 61 percent of respondents, was to increase taxes on the rich. The next most popular, chosen by 20 percent, was to cut military spending. Other polls bear this out.
So Americans are facing the same cuts as the Brits. They are being ripped off by corporations and rich people just like the Brits. And they are as angry as the Brits. "All it takes," says Tom Philips, "is for a few people to do what we did in that pub that night and light the touch paper."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to go after tax havens. He pointed out that one building in the Cayman Islands claims to house 12,000 corporations, and said: "That's either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record." He promised he would "pay for every dime" of his spending and tax cut proposals "by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens."

Yet in office he hasn't done this. In 2009 Congress passed the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act, which shuffled a few inches forward but still doesn't even require the automatic exchange of information from tax havens that EU law requires as a matter of right. So if a rich person opens a tax account in the Cayman Islands and hides his money there, the IRS isn't told and doesn't know. Yes, President Obama's deficit commission made a few passing noises about closing tax loopholes, but the bulk of its recommendations and energy focused on going after benefits for the poor and middle class, like Social Security.

What should US Uncut target? "It's important to go after brand names that exist in every city in America," says Tom Purley, a UK Uncut participant. "The key to our success was that it was so easily replicated. People could do it anywhere. It took something that seems like a remote issue and connected it to a place they see every day." Most of the companies that engage in the worst tax avoidance in the United States are Big Pharma and financial companies, which don't have stores. But the GAO also named a number of major brands that are exploiting tax havens. They include Apple, Bank of America, Best Buy, ExxonMobil, FedEx (whose president, Frederick Smith, was named by Obama as the businessman he most admires), Kraft Foods, McDonald's, Safeway and Target. That's a wealth of potential targets.

American citizens should ask themselves: I work hard and pay my taxes, so why don't the richest people and the corporations? Why should I pick up the entire tab for keeping the nation running? Why should the people who can afford the most pay the least? If you're happy with that situation, you can stay at home and leave the protesting to the Tea Party. For the rest, there's an alternative. For too long, progressive Americans have been lulled into inactivity by Obama's soaring promises, which come to little. As writer Rebecca Solnit says, "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling luckyŠ. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency." UK Uncut has just shown Americans how to express real hope-and build a left-wing Tea Party.