Just before 3:00 a.m. yesterday, while helping myself from a massive pile of donated groceries in the Wisconsin state capitol, I met Taylor Tengwall. He is a junior at UW-Superior with no previous ties to the labor movement—or any movement, for that matter. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” he told me.

He first showed up in Madison over a week ago with some friends, expecting to leave two days later. But Tengwall says he was so moved by what he saw, he told his friends to go home without him.

“It’s been the most moving, paradigm-altering experience in my life,” he says, appearing totally energized despite the late hour. “I came here so outraged and angry. So many people did. And they’ve formed something so peaceful and so meaningful.” He’s realized, he says, that “we have power.”

From Firefighters to Faith Leaders: A Movement of Solidarity

Public sector workers and union members stand to lose the most from the passage of the Budget Repair Bill, the proposed Wisconsin law that would essentially strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. And union members and leadership were certainly key to the early organization of the protests. But it doesn’t take more than a few hours in Madison talking to protesters and listening to Wisconsinites’ testimony to realize that this is a movement that’s gone far beyond union members.

An amazing, organic array of students, white-collar workers, religious leaders, unionized workers not covered by the bill, and average citizens have all amassed together in Madison. And they’ve inspired rallies around the country, as non-union supporters have joined with union workers to stand in solidarity with Wisconsin or to stand up against similar proposals in their own states.

Most media has focused on the massive crowds packing the capitol’s rotunda and the streets outside. With tens of thousands of people taking part, those scenes have been impressive to witness in person. But on the third floor of the capitol, a much quieter, more reserved scene has unfolded. Democratic lawmakers have held round-the-clock hearings on the bill, hearing from state residents, one by one, about how the bill would affect them. The majority are not union members, but rather Wisconsinites of all stripes.

Many of them are students. Jessica Weber, an undergraduate student studying education at UW-Platteville, sat down at the microphone in front of a packed room. She has wanted to be a teacher since she was a child, she explained. But the Walker bill has made her “scared.”

“It’s like a slap in my face,” Weber said. “Wisconsin has never made me feel this way before; I'm sad that there are people who have the power to do this."

Analyse Dickinson, a UW-Madison student originally from Michigan, took the mic next. She was worried about the bill's potential to create a phenomenon her home state experiences: "brain drain," the loss of educated people to states with better jobs and working conditions. More importantly, she said, the bill would reorient the state's priorities away from average people and towards the rich.

"It will show Wisconsin to be a state where corporations are more important than workers," she said. Her opposition "is about respecting the rights of those who can't afford to buy power."

That opposition is shared by religious leaders throughout the state and country. Madison-area rabbis released a joint statement Wednesday condemning the bill, saying, "As rabbis this an affront to our values—the Jewish mandate to protect workers, as well as the poor and needy among us. It is an affront to our deep value for education, for supporting women's rights, and for creating sustainable communities. And it is an affront to our belief that these issues should be debated openly and fairly under public scrutiny."

Progressive faith leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., have come out against the bill, of course, but so have other local faith leaders not known for backing labor causes. Religious leaders in Wisconsin and Illinois even offered safe haven for the 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state to prevent the bill’s passage. Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, changed the old protest chant to say, “Tell me what religion looks like. / This is what religion looks like.”

We Are Wisconsin
Video: Meet the people making history in Wisconsin.

Unionized workers whose rights aren’t on the line have been some of the most vocal participants. Some of the only public workers who will not lose collective bargaining rights with the bill are police officers and firefighters. (Both unions endorsed Walker for governor). So the prominent participation of firefighters and police throughout the protests has been somewhat surprising.

It shouldn’t be, they say. "We just couldn't stand by and let this happen to our brothers and sisters," Mahlon Mitchell, State President of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin told the Huffington Post. "We are firefighters, we respond to emergencies... We are responding to an emergency of the middle class."

In the large rotunda rallies, no other group draws such raucous cheers as the firefighters.

“It’s powerful,” says Alex Hanna, a sociology grad student at UW-Madison and the president of the Teachers Assistants Association. “Everyone knows they’re here to show solidarity. It really says a lot about the sense of camaraderie this whole movement has produced.”

We’re Not in Wisconsin Anymore

Over the last week, solidarity rallies have spread rapidly far beyond Wisconsin. In large cities like New York and Chicago, as well as small ones like Juneau, Ala., and Helena, Mon., citizens have demonstrated or are planning demonstrations to show their support for the workers of Wisconsin. On Saturday, MoveOn.org is helping to coordinate similar demonstrations in the capitols of all 50 states. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose attacks on collective bargaining such as the one in the Wisconsin bill.

But not all of the demonstrations are about simply supporting Wisconsin; in many states, workers are defending themselves from similar attacks on their benefits or bargaining rights. The Washington Post cites hotspots in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and California. In Trenton, New Jersey, AFLCIO president told demonstrators, “What happens in Wisconsin affects every man, woman, and child in America. Nothing less than the fate of our middle class is at stake.”

Wisconsin: The First Stop in an American Uprising?

In Columbus, Ohio, where thousands protested an anti-union bill, state troopers locked the citizens out of the state’s capitol for fear of a Madison-style occupation. Indiana state senators have taken a page from Wisconsin senators and have fled their state in protest of an anti-union bill there (the state senate leader has declared the Right to Work provision of the bill “dead”).

On Saturday, students and union supporters will rally in Topeka, Kansas—unlike Madison, a city not known for a long history of labor fights and solidarity. Ben Jefferies, an economics student at Kansas University, is one of the Wisconsin supporters organizing the protest.

“A strong union movement was and still is essential to the creation of that middle class,” Jefferies said. “It is truly cultural amnesia that people have forgotten that fact.” He’s particularly concerned about the Wisconsin bill because he’s seen the effect of similar legislation passed in his home state.

“Kansas, as a right to work state, has already lost much of the legal framework which allowed unions of public or private sector workers to become strong,” he said. “The fundamental issue with this bill is that it strips workers of the legal standing to collectively bargain, eroding a key component of workplace democracy. If we let that happen in one place, it will likely spread to others. It's important to show strong support for workers rights now before those that oppose workers rights gain any more momentum.”

Micah Uetricht wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Micah is a staff writer for CampusProgress.org and GapersBlock.com, and a frequent contributor to In These Times. He lives in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter for updates from Wisconsin this weekend.

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On Sunday, after two weeks of round-the-clock presence in the Wisconsin state capitol, it was announced that the pro-workers' rights protesters who have taken up residence there would have to leave the building. Inside the capitol, protesters debated what to do. Many decided they weren't willing to leave. This video shows what happened.

Video by MadisonTAA

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Glenn Beck has made a startling discovery. People are working together to make change!

Beck used my recent article, “Wisconsin: First Step in an American Uprising?” as a backdrop during his Wednesday show on Fox News, where he talked in dark, hushed tones about the spread of the UK Uncut movement to the United States. “A coincidence?” he asked. Is it a coincidence that citizens of both countries are holding protests in multiple locations on February 26?

Hardly! Organizers of US Uncut have made no secret of the fact that they were inspired by the British upstart group. UK Uncut started when 12 people meeting at a London pub decided they were fed up waiting for “someone to do something” about the fact that, in response to budget shortfalls caused by the financial crisis, the government was planning drastic cuts to public services while big businesses were raking in record profits. “Why don’t we just start?” they wondered. “If we do it, maybe everybody will stop asking why it isn’t happening and join in.”

They sat down in front of a retail outlet of a major cell phone company that was $6 billion behind in its taxes. If that company paid up, they argued, all those cuts—to libraries, schools, health benefits, pensions—wouldn’t be needed. The protests spread, eventually shutting down retail stores and banks across the country.

Unlike the Tea Party movement that Beck likes so well, they didn’t have billionaire money behind them. The oil tycoon Koch brothers didn’t bankroll a front group to train and fund them and give them talking points. No, UK Uncut is made up of ordinary people, using social media to coordinate their actions, getting their voice heard in spite of being off the message that the Murdoch media would like us to hear. When news of their success spread to the U.S.—primarily via an article in The Nation by British columnist Johann Hari (reposted here)—Americans with the same concerns were quick to take up the idea, and dozens of decentralized US Uncut groups quickly formed.

Now, MoveOn.org and Van Jones are teaming up in a call for rallies on the same day to protect the American Dream. And the United States Student Association and Jobs with Justice are collaborating (there's that word again!) on a call to defend public benefits.

These sorts of collaborations are not new, and they're not secret. If Beck had been reading YES! Magazine, for example, he would have seen hundreds of examples of groups that form from the bottom up, that work for the benefit of ordinary people, and that collaborate in lots of creative ways. 

Which we think is a good thing. That collaboration is urgently needed at a time when the power balance in the United States is leaning dangerously toward large corporations and Wall Street banks. Because these institutions are formed to increase the wealth of those who already have it, any other goal we might have for our communities, our families, and our future easily gets pushed aside.

Video still from Fox News' Glenn Beck Show

It’s very clear what happens when corporate power and the fixation on short-term profits get too strong. Taxes on corporations and the wealthy get cut, and so money for infrastructure goes away, and our roads, bridges, schools, and universities decline. The pay and benefits of ordinary workers get cut, and they can no longer afford homes, education for their children, or health care. Environmental protection is put on the back burner or simply gutted, and our mountaintops are blown apart (including sites that could be ideal for wind farms that could supply energy for centuries to come). The climate crisis disrupts agriculture, causes floods and droughts, and brings extreme weather events, yet corporations prevent action. Our local economies are sapped of their strength, and regulation that could prevent some of the worst abuses goes away. That leaves us vulnerable to the sort of global economic meltdown that happened in 2008, and that continues to undermine economies everywhere. And the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is just the latest in a cascading series of events that adds still more power to the corporate side of the scale.

This lopsided power makes the events in Wisconsin (and now Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and many other states) all the more important. Ordinary people still have power, but only when we talk together and work together.

We Are Wisconsin
Video: Meet the people making history in Wisconsin.

Beck would like to shift the conversation to one of conspiracies and fear—frankly, I’m not not sure what he’s so afraid of, but it seems to be a rotating list that includes communists, the United Nations, and Muslims. Oh, and our president.

But in Wisconsin, firefighters, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, and students are rediscovering courage. Look at their faces, and you see fatigue, but also joy. No longer isolated and afraid, standing up for what they believe in, and, yes, collaborating, these people know they have power. And so do the rest of us.

How to get involved:

US Uncut actions targeting Bank of America and others will happen in more than 50 American cities on February 26. Here's where you can find the one near to you, or organize a new action.

Van Jones and MoveOn.org are organizing a February 26 “Rally to Save the American Dream” at noon at state capitals and major cities around the country. Wear Wisconsin colors, red and white.

Student Labor Action Project, a collaboration of United States Student Association and Jobs with Justice, is calling for a national day of action to defend the public sector on March 2nd.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

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• The First Stop in an American Uprising?
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When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced his Budget Repair Bill on February 11, Lieutenant Mahlon Mitchell had been president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin for just short of a month. The bill, which eliminates collective bargaining rights (as well as many other rights and benefits) for nearly all of the state’s public employees, specifically excluded the firefighers’ union.

But Mitchell and the firefighters he represents say they feel just as involved as if their own rights had been on the chopping block. Firefighters have been a visible presence throughout the historic protests happening in Madison over the past three weeks; a fellow protester reports that, “in the large rotunda rallies, no other group draws such raucous cheers as the firefighters.” Firefighters and law enforcement (also excluded from the bill) have offered to share in the bill’s pay reductions (already agreed to by other union) in order to retain collective bargaining rights for all public employees and to prevent the lay-offs that Governor Walker has threatened.

Mitchell—the youngest and first African American president of the PFFW—represents 57 local departments and nearly 3,000 firefighters across the state. I spoke to him about why he and his fellow firefighters think Wisconsin's fight for workers' rights is their fight, too.

Robert Mellinger: How did you get involved in the firefighters’ union?

Mahlon Mitchell: I got hired here in the Madison fire department when I was nineteen years old. I've always wanted to be a fire fighter, even as a young kid. My older brother is a firefighter in Rockford, Illinois; my younger brother is a firefighter in St. Paul, Minnesota. So it's kind of in our blood, you could say. I've been here in the Madison fire department for fourteen years now.

I'd only been president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin about a month or so, and suddenly all this stuff goes on [laughs]. So I am definitely getting baptism by fire, as they say.

Robert Mellinger: Firefighters weren’t included in the unions targeted by the Budget Repair Bill. So why did you get involved?

Mahlon Mitchell: We could have just sat on our hands and done nothing; the police officers could have, too—they weren’t included in the bill, either. But, personally, I truly believe personally in solidarity—I always have. I know a lot of people just pay it lip service and a lot of people think it’s a cliché, but I truly believe that "an injury to one is an injury to all."

Being involved in the community is what I love about being in the fire department. It's helping people everyday. People who call you, who call 9-1-1, it's usually on the worst day of their life. But we're there to help ease the pain and give some type of helping hand to people in need.

And the union does the same. A union basically speaks up for the voiceless and the people who can't speak up for themselves. That's what unions do. A lot of people say that unions have passed their time, but I think they’re still important so that there’s somebody to speak up for the middle class.

Robert Mellinger: Why do you say that these protests are about the middle class, instead of just unions?

Mahlon Mitchell: This is also about the rights of all workers. Especially in these times, I think that we in the middle class need to stick together and look after each other’s rights. The last thing we want is a decline in what’s available to people in the middle class. That’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the economy, it’s not good for jobs.

We Are Wisconsin


In this beautiful video, filmmakers Finn Ryan and David Nevala introduce you to the people making history in Wisconsin.

The ability to sit down at the table with your employer and talk about hours, wages, and working conditions is not a fiscal matter. All these workers want is a seat at the table—to be able to talk to their employer about their working conditions and hours. It just makes sense.

Look at union salaries—we’re solidly middle class. And Wisconsin is a hardworking, blue-collar state. You don't become a fire fighter or a teacher or a police officer to be rich. You don't do it because you want to be wealthy. You do it because it's a job that helps you take care of your family, helps you to have a better life for yourself, and also to give back to your community.

Robert Mellinger: What’s it been like to be in the crowds of protesters in Madison over the last few weeks? What’s the atmosphere been like?

Mahlon Mitchell: I have never seen energy quite like this in anything I've done in my life. Even during one-day events, I haven’t seen it, and this event has been going on for weeks. The energy is unbelievable. And it's just not stopping. I thought it would wane, especially from my members since we're carved out of the bill, for now. But we still have guys coming. I just got a call from firefighters from Florida that want to come up and march with us. I’ve heard from guys in L.A. who want to come up and march with us, from New York and Chicago. It’s amazing how much enthusiasm there is and how many people want to come and lend a helping hand.

It’s harder now to get access to the capitol; they’ve sort of locked it down on us. But firefighters are still saying, "Well, we'll march around the capital." So the energy keeps going.

Of course, rallies are great, but when you're speaking at a rally, you're speaking to the people who generally agree with you. You also have to go out and speak with people who don't necessarily agree with you, to make sure the people hear what's actually going on.

Robert Mellinger: What do you think the lasting impact of these protests will be?

Mahlon Mitchell: The biggest impact for the unions will be the way this has brought us together. Years ago, you wouldn't see firefighters working right alongside police officers working right alongside the carpenters working right alongside the sheet metal workers and the plumbers and the SEIUs. It's really brought together the leaders of the unions, but also the members—the people that go to work everyday and just want to get a decent paycheck and take care of their families. They're out in droves now. If there is one good thing about this bill, it's that it has brought middle class workers together, made our unions stronger and our relationships closer.

Robby Mellinger interviewed Mahlon Mitchell for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Robert is a YES! Magazine editorial intern.

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GOP candidate Tim Pawlenty observed the 10th anniversary of the Bush-era tax cuts by proposing $2 trillion in additional tax cuts, primarily for millionaires and global corporations.

Have we learned nothing?

A decade since their passage, its clear that the Bush tax were a $2.5 trillion mistake that put us on the road to fiscal instability. 

At the time they were passed, Congressional budget analysts projected a $5.6 trillion surplus over these last ten years. But even after the rosy projections turned to red ink, the tax cut bonanza continued. As a result, Congress engaged in a “decade of magical tax cut thinking,” responding to the deep economic challenges of the last ten years with a one-point program: cut taxes for the wealthy and expand tax loopholes for global corporations.

In 2001, Bob McIntyre of the group Citizens for Tax Justice argued that the tax cuts were a bad idea—that they were overly tilted to benefit the rich—and would eventually lead to deficits. Last week, in the face of massive deficits and deep cuts to crucial programs, CTJ released a report projecting that another ten-year extension of the Bush tax cuts would cost $5.5 trillion.

“There are some in Congress who believe that the best way to deal with the struggling economy right now is to extend the tax cuts and see if they work the second time around,” said McIntyre. “They didn’t work the first time, and they aren’t going to work the second time.”

A report from the Economic Policy Institute points out that the Bush tax cuts cost over $2.5 trillion over the last decade. An estimated 38 percent of those tax cuts—almost $1 trillion—went to households in the richest 1 percent, those with incomes over $645,000. Tax cut beneficiaries include some of the highest paid CEOs in America.

Bleak Moment or Emerging Movement?

At first glance, the prospects for shifting this anti-tax environment appear bleak. GOP presidential candidates and Congressional leaders are beating the same drum: “We’re broke,” “Deficits Kill Jobs,” “Must Cut Taxes…”

Behind the headlines, however, public attitudes are shifting. A growing number of citizens are taking on the fundamental unfairness of the current tax system. They see how growing inequality is destroying the middle class and contributing to economic instability.

Historically, public attitudes about taxing the wealthy have been somewhat ambivalent. In the abstract, many U.S. voters are reflexively anti-government and anti-tax. But when it comes down to the concrete ways we use tax revenues, citizens want a responsive government that includes retirement security, environmental protection, healthy communities, and the wide range of public services that we enjoy.

As states and the federal government make deep budget cuts, the things people appreciate about government will start to deteriorate or go away: the bus will be late, the state park closed, the school art department gone, the police unavailable.

Though GOP congressional leaders talk austerity and imply that the only solution to budget deficits are spending cuts, a strong majority of people in the U.S. want to put raising taxes on the table.

Public opinion polls reveal that over 72 percent of the public favors increasing taxes on millionaires and closing tax loopholes before further budget cuts. And support for progressive taxes will only increase as the impact of budget cuts further degrades the quality of life, public services, and infrastructure in our localities.

Revelations that huge corporations and the wealthy are paying historically low tax rates are fueling this public attitude shift. Recent IRS data reveals that the richest 400 U.S. taxpayers have seen their effective tax rates fall to their lowest levels since prior to the 1930s Great Depression. The cover story in Business Week during April’s tax season was “The Billionaires Guide to Paying No Taxes.” And reports that General Electric pays no federal taxes—and that other companies including Verizon, Federal Express, Boeing and bail-out recipient Bank of America pay no or ridiculously low taxes—touch a deep nerve.

The grassroots US Uncut movement has emerged to draw attention to the powerful juxtaposition between budget cuts and corporate tax dodging. As a result, the public conversation is shifting. A year ago, the Tea Party narrative dominated April 2010 tax day. This year, however, the news on Tax Day focused on millionaire and corporate tax deadbeats. 

The 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts focused new attention on the irresponsibility of further tax cuts. Grassroots groups convened actions and press events around the country to dramatize the link between the tax cuts and local budget cuts that worsen unemployment.

Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?

Activists are coalescing around a number of revenue proposals that could raise trillions of dollars over the next ten years. One initiative is the Fairness in Taxation Act, introduced by Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Her legislation would add additional tax rates for millionaires, generating $74 billion a year. In an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Rep. Schakowsky writes, “Middle-class and low-income families didn't create these budget deficits or reap economic rewards over the last generation. So our nation's plan to get our fiscal house in order should not sacrifice the vitality of our middle class and our commitments to address poverty.”

An organized group of 200 millionaire business leaders added their voices to the debate. The Patriotic Millionaires, organized by the Agenda Project and Wealth for the Common Good, released a video message to Congressional leaders to increase taxes on millionaires. “It is self-defeating to pursue these tax policies, and it is inconsistent with our values as Americans,” said Dennis Mehiel, Chairman of US Corrugated at a press conference on the tenth anniversary. “We need to throw out the Bush tax cuts in a hurry and begin the process of restoring some fiscal sanity to the country’s budget.” 

Business leaders are also speaking up about troubling economic implications created when global corporations use offshore tax shelters to dodge taxes. Paul Egerman, founder of eScription, wrote in the Madison Capital Times, “it is myopic to require domestic enterprises to compete on an unlevel playing field against another company based not on product quality and services, but on accounting gymnastics.” A new business coalition is backing the Stop Tax Haven Abuse legislation that will be reintroduced later this June.

Opposition is also building against the idea, lobbied for by companies like Google, Apple, Pfizer, and Oracle, of a “tax holiday” for corporations that have shifted more than $1 trillion in profits to offshore tax havens—a move that would cost the U.S. Treasury $80 billion. Business for Shared Prosperity is circulating a business sign-on letter to Congress calling on them to “reject demands by U.S. multinationals for a tax holiday to “repatriate” the funds they shifted offshore to avoid paying taxes.” Last week, US Uncut began to challenge Apple Computer for its role in lobbying Congress for a “tax holiday” for corporations that have moved over $1 trillion in corporate profits to offshore tax havens.

The message of these emerging movements is getting louder: No more budget cuts until millionaires and corporate tax dodgers pay their fair share. 

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

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The influence of the new digital commons in democratic uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain has been chronicled at length in news reports from the Middle East, with Facebook, Twitter and other social media winning praise as dictator-busters.

But the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands. To celebrate their victory over the Mubarak regime, for example, protesters in Cairo jubilantly returned to Tahrir Square, where the revolution was born, to pick up trash.

It’s the same story all over the Middle East. In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, people express their aspirations and face bloody reprisals in Tripoli’s Green Square and Martyr’s Square. In Bahrain, they boldly march in Pearl Square in the capital city of Manama. In Yemen, protests have taken place in public spaces near the university in Sanaa, which students renamed Tahrir Square. Kept out of the central Revolution Square in Tehran by the repressive government, Iranian dissidents gather in Valiasr Square and Vanak Sqaure.

Last week in Tunisia, the name of the main square in Tunis was changed to honor Mohammad Bouazizi, an unlicensed street vendor whose suicide in December in response to government harassment sparked the revolution that toppled the regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

The course of recent history was rewritten by events happening in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as dissidents ousted an oppressive regime in December 1989. Those protests were inspired in part by events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that seized the world’s imagination earlier that year when democracy activists unsuccessfully challenged the power of China’s dictatorship.

The state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of workers now protest the governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represents another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was named by Project for Public Spaces as one of the great public spaces of the world. “This is truly the town square that early Americans imagined as the crux of democracy,” the PPS website explains.

The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capitol are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. (State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor—but those groundskeepers are also presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.)

Reclaim Your Streets: How to Create Safe and Social Pedestrian Plazas

This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park, or other public space that is open to all. An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate-run shopping malls replaced downtowns and main streets as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, which will almost certainly say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls. The result is that our ability to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens is limited.

Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the sites of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services, and other expressions of community.

The moment when I first became aware of the importance of public spaces was when the Minnesota Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987. I did not have tickets to the game, but gathered hopefully with thousands of others outside the stadium in Minneapolis to share in the joy of the victory. When the Twins won the game, thousands more poured out of the ballpark into the streets and we all marched to…where? Minneapolis has no downtown square or landmark gathering place so we milled around the streets for a while—an unsatisfying way to celebrate a World Series championship. If it had been the Red Sox, everyone would have headed for the Boston Common (site of protests and public gatherings for three centuries, from a 200-person protest of food shortages in 1713 to a 100,000-strong march against the Vietnam War in 1969). We weren’t so lucky.

I’ve often wondered if this lack of a central commons in Minneapolis and most other American communities somehow inhibits our civic expression. With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square.

Jay Walljasper adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jay is a contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces, and co-editor of OnTheCommons.org. Editor of Utne Reader magazine for 15 years, he is the author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons and The Great Neighborhood Book.

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• Wisconsin: First Stop in an American Uprising?
  It took a while, but protests in Wisconsin show that poor and middle class Americans are ready to push back against the policies and cuts that hurt them most. Madison may be only the beginning.
  

In one sense, the struggle over union rights in Wisconsin is over. It took some breathtaking, possibly even illegal, shenanigans (click here for details), but the union-busting “Budget Repair Bill” has been passed, signed, and celebrated. In other ways, though, the weeks of historic protests in and around Wisconsin’s capitol were just the first act of what may prove to be a far longer—and larger—struggle.

Around the country, state governments are targeting union rights, workplace protection, social services, and the ability of middle-class and working poor to have a voice. But, in large part thanks to the momentum of the Wisconsin protests, they’re finding it difficult to do so quietly. In state after state, the Americans whose rights and services are being cut are rising up against the decades-long shift of wealth and power to corporations and the very wealthy.

Wisconsin Moves on to “Phase Two”

The passage of Wisconsin's anti-union bill on March 10 came after weeks of protests, an extended occupation of the state capitol building, and the self-imposed exile of 14 Democratic senators, whose absence prevented a vote on the bill as it was originally drafted.

Following Thursday's passage of the Wisconsin bill, hundreds of students in Madison’s middle and high schools walked out to join those demonstrating at the capitol. Then, in the largest protest since the bill was proposed, an estimated 100,000 people filled the streets and squares around the state capitol on Saturday. The Family Farm Defenders and the Wisconsin Farmers Union joined the protests, bringing more than 50 tractors with them.

“This is the beginning of phase two,” Fred Risser, one of the 14 Democratic senators, told the crowd.

He was referring to a rapidly growing campaign to recall eight GOP senators who supported the bill; the Wisconsin Democratic Party reported yesterday that over 45 percent of the necessary signatures have already been collected. Because Wisconsin law only allows recalls of officials who have been in office at least a full year, Governor Scott Walker and other supporters of the bill are not yet eligible to be recalled—though opponents of the anti-union law are already laying the groundwork for a recall next year.

Other States Target Workers’ Rights

Though the weeks of demonstrations have focused national attention on Wisconsin, workers’ rights are on the line in dozens of states across the country, and workers are fighting back. Newly elected Republicans in state legislatures and in the U.S. Congress are pressing—and in some cases, passing—deeply unpopular measures that target workers’ rights to unionize and such basic protections as minimum wage laws.

The Ohio Senate has passed a bill that takes Wisconsin union-busting one step further, Reuters reports. The bill prohibits collective bargaining for nearly 62,000 workers and blocks 300,000 others (including firefighters, police, and public school teachers) from striking or negotiating about health care benefits. In Indiana, House Democrats, taking a cue from Wisconsin legislators, have left the state to prevent a vote on a bill that limits collective bargaining rights. Idaho has approved a measure to limit public school teachers’ right to bargain collectively. Michigan is on track to approve a law that would allow the state to break union contracts. And union dues or collective bargaining are also on the line in Iowa, New Hampshire, Kansas, Tennessee, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Washington, Alaska, and Arizona.

Nor are unions the only form of worker protection under attack. The Missouri House of Representatives has approved a bill that caps the state’s minimum wage, even if the Consumer Price Index rises, essentially revoking a law that was passed just five years ago and supported by 76 percent of voters. Seven other states are considering similar bills, according to the Progressive States Network.

Other proposed measures would cut deeply into education funding, public safety, health care, and infrastructure maintenance. These bills are presented as necessary in order to balance state budgets, but recent state and federal tax giveaways to the wealthy make that a questionable claim.

Undermining the Political Power of the Working Class

Instead, this may be an example of what Naomi Klein describes in her book, The Shock Doctrine: Wealthy elites often use times of crisis and chaos to impose unpopular policies that restructure economies and political systems to their further advantage.

And many of these policies are deeply unpopular with the American public. Recent polls show that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that public employees should have the right to bargain collectively; that states should not be able to renege on pension commitments to retirees; that the minimum wage should be raised; and that tax breaks for wealthy Americans are a bad move. According to a recent Bloomberg poll, one of the reasons that "Americans reject Republican efforts to curb bargaining rights" is that they widely believe that union power is "is dwarfed by corporations."

Of course, the proliferation of anti-union bills isn’t just an economic blow. Unions are a bulwark of political power on behalf of middle- and working-class Americans, a long-standing counterweight to the political influence of the wealthy. Not only do they give employees bargaining power within the workplace, they allow workers to join their voices to have some say in the political debate. 

When union members’ economic power is weakened, so is their political voice—a fact not lost on those leading the charge against them. As Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, a leading proponent of the state’s anti-union bill, noted in an interview with Fox News, “If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.”

A Sleeping Giant Wakes Up

“If there is one good thing about this bill, it's that it has brought middle class workers together, made our unions stronger and our relationships closer,” Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin, said in an interview with YES! Magazine.

Indeed, all over the country, the attack on union rights has awakened a dormant class-consciousness. “I think that what’s happening in Wisconsin is sort of Ground Zero for workers,” said Jane Cutter, a 47-year-old teacher who attended a Wisconsin solidarity rally in Seattle. “It’s going to drive down wages and living standards for all different kinds of workers.”

An American Uprising
In-depth coverage of grassroots responses to the consolidation of wealth and power.

In the weeks since Wisconsin teachers and firefighters began occupying their state capitol, thousands of others have been inspired to make their opposition more vocal. Protests many times the size of the Tea Party demonstrations are spreading across the nation. Some are being organized by unions and their supporters; others, by MoveOn.org and Van Jones to “Defend the American Dream.” Still others are part of US Uncut, which is organizing flash mobs to confront corporations that haven’t been paying taxes. From Indiana to Ohio and Tennessee to Texas, workers are demanding to know why corporations and the wealthy get bailouts and tax breaks while teachers and steel workers bear the burdens of budget crises they didn’t cause.

One of the farmers who rode through downtown Madison on his tractor summed it up on his handmade protest sign: “Walker woke a sleeping giant.”

Sarah van Gelder and Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Sarah is the co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine; Brooke is the web editor.

Additional reporting in Seattle by Oliver Lazenby and Robby Mellinger.

Interested?

• The Middle Class Needs to Stick Together: Interview with Mahlon Mitchell
  Left out of Wisconsin's anti-union bill, firefighters "could have just sat on our hands and done nothing." Why they didn't.
• US Uncut Debuts
  The latest from a growing international movement to make corporate tax dodgers pay ... so public services don't have to.
• Why Every American Should Care About Wisconsin
  The debate in Wisconsin doesn't just apply to union members and public workers—it applies to every American who cares about our fundamental rights as citizens.
  

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 [UPDATE: As of Feb 21, there are 30 local events listed on the US Uncut website]. 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.

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.

Signs of the Times

The best signs and slogans from the Wisconsin protests.

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!”

Here's a "how-to" from UK Uncut:

Sarah van Gelder is executive editor and co-founder of YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Interested?

• The UK's Progressive Tea Party
  by Johann Hari
  Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 inspired ordinary people to take on corporate tax evaders. The name of this parallel universe is Britain.
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  by Dave Zirin
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  interview by Jeff Biggers
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Click here to watch the US Uncut photo essay.

Inspired by the British movement against corporate tax dodgers, the new grassroots group US Uncut held protests around the country on February 26, most of them in front of Bank of America branches. Why? The bank paid no income taxes in 2009 and 2010. US Uncut is calling out large corporations that find loopholes or use offshore tax havens to evade paying taxes in the country where they do business. If corporations paid up, activists point out, many of the deep cuts in social services happening at the state and federal level wouldn't be necessary.

More and more people are noticing a correlation between multi-billion dollar budget deficits and multi-billion dollar tax evasions. On Saturday, US Uncut protests popped up in 50 cities across the United States, and some—like in Washington, D.C.—even shut branches down for the day. February 26 was the kickoff day of action for US Uncut, but more protests are already scheduled for the coming months. 

Visit the US Uncut website to find out more.

Photos by Merton Gaudette, Eliud Martinez, Xavier Gomez, Mary Henley, Todd Wade, Jonathan Cox, Brighton, Suzanne O'Keefe, Valarie Cooley, and Kevin Carroll.

Interested?

• "Do You Pay Your Taxes? Bank of America Doesn't." :: The latest from a growing international movement to make corporate tax dodgers pay ... so public services don't have to.
• The UK's Progressive Tea Party :: Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 inspired ordinary people to take on corporate tax evaders. The name of this parallel universe is Britain.
• Wisconsin: The First Stop in an American Uprising? :: protests in Wisconsin show that poor and middle class Americans are ready to push back against the policies and cuts that hurt them most. Madison may be only the beginning.

Click here to view the photo essay

On September 17th, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of New York’s financial district, calling for deep changes to unjust financial  and political systems. Referring to themselves at "the 99 percent"—as opposed to the top 1 percent of Americans who control a majority of the nation's wealth—the mostly young demonstrators held signs saying, "Too Big Has Failed," "Tax the Rich," and "Our Democracy Isn't for Sale."

Though their numbers have dwindled, many of the protesters are still camped in Zuccotti Park (renamed Liberty Square) nearly a week later. They meet in daily General Assemblies to discuss issues such as police relations and meeting their food and shelter needs (as during the workers' rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin, supporters from far and wide have sent thousands of dollars worth of free pizza). Indeed, some protesters say they were inspired by the way demonstrators "liberated" public spaces during the Madison protests, the Arab spring, and anti-austerity protests in Europe.

"We occupy Wall Street as a symbolic gesture of our discontent with the current economic and political climate and as an example of a better world to come," the demonstrators wrote in a recent dispatch on their website.

Photos by David Shankbone, Andrew Shiue, Collin David Anderson, Joann Jovinelly, and Carwill Bjork-James

Interested?

• How to Liberate America
  How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services? David Korten introduces a landmark new report, “How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule.”
  
• People, Power, and Public Spaces
  What the privatization of public spaces has to do with our likelihood of taking to the streets.
• An American Uprising
  While wealth and power concentrate in the hands of a few, the rights, jobs, and services that everyday Americans depend on are on the line. Across the country, people are rising up to defend them.
  

This interview and its transcript originally appeared on Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book'The Shock Doctrine, which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!

Naomi Klein: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.

Amy Goodman: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

Naomi Klein: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

Wisconsin Awakens a Sleeping Giant

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. As you know, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s health care, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.

Amy Goodman: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

Gov. John Kasich: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

Amy Goodman: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

Naomi Klein: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, "We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?" Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that.

In the '90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

Amy Goodman: And where does the Obama administration fit into this? We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you."

Why Every American Should Care About Wisconsin

Naomi Klein: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand with them.

And, you know, one of the things that’s so important for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here.

Amy Goodman: Well, let me ask you about Michigan. About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.

Naomi Klein: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify, or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

Amy Goodman: A municipal government.

Naomi Klein: A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools.

And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

Amy Goodman: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

Naomi Klein: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

Amy Goodman: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

Naomi Klein: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

Amy Goodman: Let me ask you a question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the Madison protest. Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] The Shock Doctrine to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps even rolling back the compromise contract?"

Naomi Klein: Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory after another. This started off with an attack, but people have been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.

Amy Goodman: I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s. And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.

Naomi Klein: Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean, what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage. He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.

Amy Goodman: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.

Naomi Klein: He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many, many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on to these tactics.

Bigger Than Unions, Bigger Than Wisconsin

And I do think—you know, just coming back to that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage, because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And that was a message that really resonated with voters.

One thing I wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why what’s happening in Wisconsin and what we need to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott Walker.

Amy Goodman: And the people that President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the presidential election?

Naomi Klein: There’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.

And that’s another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking, once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve got people in the streets, but you also have Democratic lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well, they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.

And that’s something really important to remember. So many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win." And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top priority. And they hear that.

This interview and its transcript originally appeared on Democracy Now!

Interested?

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  In a controversial move, Republicans maneuvered the passage of Wisconsin's assault on collective bargaining after three weeks of protests. How'd they do it, and what happens next?
• Time to Reclaim the American Dream
  Van Jones: Why Wisconsin gives the movement for “hope and change” a second chance—and what you can do about it.
  

At a time when federal and state lawmakers are grappling with huge budget deficits, the impact of corporate tax dodging is getting vigorous attention.

Public outrage is growing over reports that General Electric paid no taxes in 2010. Other global companies such as Boeing, Verizon, Bank of America also haven’t chipped in a dime to Uncle Sam.

At the center of the movement to change that is US Uncut, a 7-week-old grassroots effort with the message: “No Budget Cuts Until Tax Dodgers Pay Up.” Since February 26, US Uncut has organized over 170 local demonstrations at the storefronts and offices of notorious tax dodgers.

On April 13, US Uncut teamed up with the theatrical Yes Men to play a huge prank on General Electric. They issued a mock General Electric press release with the headline “GE Responds to Public Outcry—Will Donate Entire $3.2 Billion Tax Refund to Help Offset Cuts and Save American Jobs.” Associated Press and other news outlets ran the story before the hoax was revealed, and the value of GE stock dipped dramatically.

US Uncut activists are planning over 100 demonstrations over the tax day weekend, April 15-18th. Some of the more creative actions include a reenactment in Boston of the ride of Paul Revere—and a “guerilla book-signing” in Washington, DC with Nicholas Shaxson, the author of the new book, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens.

According to Shaxson, tax havens—or “secrecy jurisdictions”—are the mechanisms through which wealthy individuals and multinational corporations move money around the planet to avoid taxation and regulation. These same mechanisms facilitate criminal activity, from laundering drug money to financing terrorist networks.

An American Uprising
Wisconsin and beyond: While wealth and power concentrate in the hands of a few, the rights, jobs, and services that everyday Americans depend on are on the line. Across the country, people are rising up to defend them.

The cost of tax havens is estimated to be over $100 billion in lost revenue each year. And a coalition of more than 20 U.S. companies have launched a “WinAmerica” campaign to lobby for a “tax holiday” on $1.2 trillion in overseas profits they want to bring back to the United States. US Uncut is mounting a campaign to educate the public about this organized tax dodge.

A year ago, the Tea Party’s views about taxes dominated the news around Tax Day. But this year, media and public focus is on millionaire and corporate tax dodgers. Business Week’s cover story this week is “The Billionaire's Guide to Paying No Taxes.” Reporter Jessie Drucker, who wrote the article, summed up his findings: “the more you make, the less you pay.” For our nation’s millionaires and billionaires, “this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s.”

At a time when many governors and lawmakers are saying “we’re broke,” polls show that the public wants to hike taxes on millionaires and corporate tax dodgers before cutting budgets.

A new report that I co-authored, Unnecessary Austerity, demonstrates that budget cuts are unnecessary if we reverse fifty years of huge tax cuts for the wealthy and tax dodging corporations. If corporations and households with $1 million income paid at the same levels they did in 1961, the Treasury would collect an additional $716 billion a year—or $7 trillion over a decade. 

With Congress virtually captured by corporate interests, it will require a powerful social movement to turn the tide on budget and tax matters. 

The good news is efforts like US Uncut are touching a nerve as Americans think about unequal sacrifice in the face of budget cuts to schools, mental health services, infrastructure, and even home heating oil for low income elderly residents.

The creative spirit of local actions is flourishing as volunteer organizations use Facebook and Twitter to meet up and protest. The budget cuts will likely worsen over the coming year—but the seeds of a movement to build a more fair economy are starting to sprout.

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

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We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

What convinces tens of thousands of people—including those whose rights aren't directly on the line—to take to the streets and to occupy their state capitol around the clock? What's it like to be in such a gathering? In this beautiful video, filmmakers Finn Ryan and David Nevala introduce you to the people of Wisconsin.

• "I love my job, I want to be with my students, but I'm also here for the future of Wisconsin. I'm a single mom. If this bill passes, I will lose my house [...] It's a large percentage of my take-home pay. I started crying in the grocery store because I have the money now, but I won't very soon."
• "We're grateful that firefighters were exempt from this bill. however, we still collectively bargain and the basic principle of the union is that we stand together—and that's what we're here to do."
• "I've seen nothing but peace, I've seen nothing but people getting along—responsible adults, people that are friends, that are family. I hear people making this out to be something that's angry, violent. And I've seen none of that. As a police officer [on duty at the capitol] and as a citizen walking out here, I've seen none of that."
  

Finn Ryan and David Nevala are media producers based in Madison, Wisconsin.

© 2011 Finn Ryan and David Nevala

Interested?

• Wisconsin: First Stop in an American Uprising?
  It took a while, but protests in Wisconsin show that poor and middle class Americans are ready to push back against the policies and cuts that hurt them most. Madison may be only the beginning.
• People, Power, and Public Spaces
  What the privatization of public spaces has to do with our likelihood of taking to the streets.
  
• Signs of the Times
  The best signs and slogans of the Wisconsin protests.
  

This article originally appeared in 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, the movement is 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 a.m. 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.

Main Street Businesses Take on Corporate Tax Havens
Small businesses have decided they’re done picking up the slack when Wall Street dodges taxes.

“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 passersby 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 dodgers…as 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 U.S. 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 top U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

"Let Our Tax Cuts Go"
Why some wealthy Americans aren’t happy to see their tax cuts continued.

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 Hoovers…slashing 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 U.S. 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 lucky…. 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.

Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent in London and a contributing writer for Slate. He wrote this article for The Nation.

Copyright © 2011 The Nation — distributed by Agence Global

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All Images courtesy of Strike Debt Facebook Page

Sung in unison by 50 voices and accompanied by the melancholic twang of a banjo, these lines echoed throughout the otherwise vacant Deutsche Bank atrium at 60 Wall Street last Sunday:

Every day, several times a day, a thought comes over me.

I owe more debt than I can pay back, more money than I’ll ever see.

For Some Debtors, “Coming Out” Is First Step Toward Resistance
Chris Kasper hadn’t realized how much shame he felt for being in
debt until he stood up in public
and spoke about it.

The lines were taken from the Depression-era Woodie Guthrie song “The Debt I Owe,” and had been recomposed for collective song by Dave Backer, an organizer with Occupy University. It was the weekly assembly of Strike Debt, a movement of debt resisters that has emerged from Occupy Wall Street over the past six months. While haunting in their sense of despair and isolation, when we vocalized them together the lines created a sense of beloved community, temporarily transfiguring the grim postmodern atrium of a bailed-out bank into a kind of secular cathedral of debt resistance.

The participatory sing-along highlighted the importance of cultural work and aesthetic experience in the development of Strike Debt. It segued into a report-back from a small team working on the People’s Bailout. The People’s Bailout is a high-profile cultural event scheduled for November 15 at the West Village club Le Poisson Rouge. Details are being withheld in advance of a strategic media rollout, but here is what we know so far: appropriating the kitschy Americana format of the Telethon variety show—think Jerry Lewis—the People’s Bailout will be a hybrid multimedia spectacle combining music, comedy, performance, speed lectures, video projections, global live-streaming and more.

The event has already received coverage from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Spin for featuring headliners such as Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Guy Piciotti of Fugazi, and Tunde Adimpe of TV on the Radio, alongside non-musical entertainers and artists such as Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, comedian Janeane Garofalo, and David Rees of the comic strip Get Your War On. Woven among these celebrity voices will be presentations and performances by groups allied with Strike Debt, such as Occupy Faith, Healthcare for the 99%, and the Yes Men.

This will not be the first time that an Occupy-related event has sought to deploy the social capital of high-profile figures, despite the movement’s emphasis on horizontal power over charismatic showmanship, its critical relationship to mainstream culture industries, and the risk of co-optation by ulterior agendas. While there have been notable successes—especially in the early media-intensive phases of OWS—the question has always been how to strike the right tone so that celebrity power is not treated as an end in itself. As Natasha Baghat Singh put it in the first issue of Tidal: Occupy Theory/Occupy Strategy:

We should use celebrity status as a resource that gets coupled with a strategic objective. … We do not want our movement mainstreamed in order to make activism cool for people to join. Our movement should radicalize people to act in a civil and disobedient manner.

Moving beyond the paradigm of the one-off solidarity rally—exemplified by the May Day concert—the People’s Bailout has an extremely precise strategic objective: to launch the “Rolling Jubilee.” According to a meme on the People’s Bailout Facebook page:

The Rolling Jubilee is a bailout of the people by the people. We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt—instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.

Although otherwise still cryptic, the page informs us that tickets will go on sale Friday, November 2, at 10 a.m. and provides the following breakdown for the prices:

• $25 (abolishes an estimated $500 worth of debt)
  
• $50 (abolishes an estimated $1000 worth of debt)
  
• $100 (abolishes an estimated $2000 worth of debt)
  
• $250 (abolishes an estimated $5000 worth of debt)

Rather than simply staging a charity or a fundraiser, however, Strike Debt is ushering in an entirely new tactical model for bringing together cultural capital, collective resource-mobilization and the principle of mutual aid.

A strategic trajectory

“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” is among the most enduring chants of Occupy Wall Street, and it speaks to the basic impetus for the movement that sprang up last fall in Zuccotti Park. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008, government policy was overwhelmingly oriented toward shoring up the financial institutions that had precipitated the meltdown rather than helping the majority of the population suffering from its effects—foreclosures, layoffs, service-cuts, fee-increases, and a deepening hole of personal debt for basic human needs like food, healthcare, education, shelter and transportation. The figure of “the 99 percent” emerged out of this chasm between received ideals of democratic governance and the sobering reality of a political system rigged to support the profits of banks over the lives of people—despite the promise of “change” made by Barack Obama.

Some appeals to the 99 percent over the past year have focused on repairing the actually existing system through campaigns targeting the corporate lobbying complex exemplified by the Citizens United decision, for instance.

However, many organizers in OWS have always seen the crisis as a window of opportunity to rethink political and economic life more deeply through a process of education, creativity, and experimentation with new forms of living. It is thus no coincidence that arts and education have played a crucial role in the evolution of Strike Debt. Exemplary in this regard is the work of Strike Debt organizer Thomas Gokey, whose isolated artistic experiments with debt purchasing laid the groundwork for what would be collectively transformed by Strike Debt assemblies into the Rolling Jubilee project.

The occupations last fall were a crack in the system, unleashing the political imagination. Strike Debt aims to deepen that crack, calling for us to imagine actively refusing compliance with the power of creditors over our lives. Significantly, the launch of the Rolling Jubilee falls on the one-year anniversary of the eviction of Zuccotti Park; while the work of Strike Debt has taken a very different form than physical occupation, since its start last summer it has channeled and refined the principles of direct action, mutual aid, and dual power that were at the heart of the original camp.

Throughout this period, Strike Debt has woven together days of action in the conventional sense—mass assemblies, marches, and physical interventions at sites of financial injustice—with a wider diversity of tactics. Two major dates in this regard have been the September 17 OWS Anniversary Convergence and the October 13 Global Day of Action Against Debt and Austerity. In both cases, Strike Debt kept its eyes on the prize of long-term movement-building by supplementing the negative call to “Strike Debt” with the affirmative principle of “ reclaiming the commons.”

Taking S17 in stride

A key date in the overall evolution of Strike Debt was the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, held in New York from September 15 to September 17—conventionally referred to as “S17.” From the beginning of the S17 planning process, Strike Debt was always averse to fixating on a single day of action—especially one that ran the risk of appearing too circular or self-referential relative to OWS. Instead, S17 was approached strategically as a nodal point in a widening network of organizing and escalation for the fall.

Strike Debt members planned their participation S17 as a nonlinear feedback loop in which the media visibility of the anniversary would both highlight past work and point forward. Strike Debt began its expanded fall sequence of “ Year II” activities with a speak-out and debt burning in Williamsburg a week prior to the S17 convergence.

Having people gather and burn their debt statements together has become a signature ritual for Strike Debt—a replicable action-logic that is amenable to scaling up, moving around, and being creatively transformed in new contexts in a manner similar to the occupation itself last fall. In recent weeks, debt burnings have taken place across the country, in cities including Portland and Minneapolis.

Stoked by the positive media coverage of the event and Strike Debt more generally—ranging from the New York Daily News to The Village Voice and The Nation—debt resisters took the OWS anniversary in stride. On Saturday, September 16, a large debt assembly was held at Washington Square Park as part of the Occupy Town Square, followed by a release of The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual (DROM) at Judson Memorial Church that evening. The latter was inaugurated by an 18th-century sermon against usury from Occupy Catholics, which was an important supplement to the DROM event insofar as it inaugurated future collaborations with the faith community around the political theology of a debt jubilee.

Intensive outreach continued on the following day in Foley Square, where Strike Debt set up an outreach table as part of the pop-up occupation supplementing the OWS anniversary concert. Onstage, folks from Strike Debt appeared in balaclavas as the Zapatista-inspired Invisible Army of Defaulters. Holding aloft copies of Tidal and the DROM, they read a short, choreographed communiqué:

We are the invisible army of defaulters. We are the millions of students in default, the millions of households in foreclosure, the millions who cannot and will not pay our medical charges and credit card bills to the banks. We are everywhere. The liars and thieves on Wall Street claim we owe them money. They humiliate us. They take our homes, our health, our dreams, our dignity. Out of fear and isolation, we have remained hidden. Now we know that we are not alone. We are not a loan. To occupy is to overcome shame. In Year II, we step out of the shadows.

As the Invisible Army peeled off their masks, they declared:

We say to the 1 percent: We owe you nothing. We say to our friends and families and communities: we owe you everything. We are debt resisters. We reject this system. On our birthday, we present to you our sharpest weapon: the debt resistors’ manual. Strike Debt, Occupy Wall Street, join the resistance!

With that, hundreds of copies of the DROM were disseminated to the audience, while those on stage proceeded to burn an oversize cardboard prop reading “Our Debt to the 1 Percent.”

Following the concert, hundreds of attendees made their way from Foley Square across the street to 1 Police Plaza, where a massive Affinity Group Spokescouncil was held in preparation for the “99 Revolutions” actions in the Financial District the following morning. Of the four zones mapped out by S17 planners, the debt zone was the largest, and it included the participation of intellectuals and artists such as Michael Hardt, George Caffentzis, Martha Rosler, and concert participant Michelle Shocked (who had earlier begun her musical set with “99 Ways to Loathe Your Lender”).

On the morning of September 17 itself, several hundred debt resisters gathered at 55 Water Street, attached to the global credit-rating agency Standard and Poor’s. Banners, birthday paraphernalia, and the People’s Debt Boulder were on hand. The first of several morning affinity groups set out for a nearby JPMorgan Chase lobby in “civilian” mode, a technique developed by the OWS Plus Brigades during Spring Training and the Summer Disobedience School. Accompanied by Michelle Shocked and a number of journalists, the group entered the lobby and tossed hails of red-square confetti while mic-checking a letter addressed to Chase CEO and notorious financial criminal Jamie Dimon written by a victim of the 2008 foreclosure crisis. As the group exited the building after its three-minute intervention in the lobby, we were tackled by a phalanx of NYPD officers in riot gear.

Kicking off the day with a bang, our non-deliberate arrests provided a moral boost to fellow Strike Debt participants. They proceeded to swirl throughout the Financial District for the rest of the day, shutting down intersections and creating joyful chaos for the NYPD through small creative actions. Looking forward, however, Strike Debt organizer Pam Brown suggests the need to develop:

large-scale action-logics that clearly communicate to a wide public the grievances we have concerning the predatory debt system and its relationship to economic and racial inequality. When folks put their bodies on the line and risk arrest for an action, that action should match the power of our analysis.

Tactical debates aside, moving through the criminal justice system was a lesson in personal privilege and the racial injustices baked into the system we are fighting. Imprisoned on charges ranging from petty theft to subway-fare evasion, the consequences of debt, poverty, and austerity were evident in the stories we heard from non-Occupy prisoners at Central Booking. As members of Strike Debt were greeted by lawyers and a jubilant OWS jail support team after 35 hours of imprisonment, most of our cellmates remained locked underground in “the tombs,” their fate uncertain.

From O13 to N15 and beyond

S17 brought new media opportunities for Strike Debt. For instance, I was invited to discuss the circumstances of my arrest on Al Jazeera, where I made sure to plug the DROM for an international television audience. On MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, Amin Husain and Alexis Goldstein elaborated on the intergenerational connections between historic social movements such as ACT UP, the trajectory of OWS, and the analysis being developed by Strike Debt—the website of which temporarily crashed due to an overload of visits. Meanwhile, a week’s worth of debt-related assemblies and teach-ins took place at the Free University at Madison Square Park, including discussions from Occupy University based on the DROM’s analysis of debt and race, municipal debt, and more. Free University provided a space for Strike Debt to decompress and to further cultivate relationships with allies in the student movement.

The month following S17 also saw the strengthening of relationships between Strike Debt and the art community, such as through the debt-themed exhibition To Have and to Owe at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.

Recalling the synergy between progressive artistic spaces and the work of ACT UP in the 1980s, exhibitions such as To Have and to Owe and related programming at Momenta Art by Occupy Museums have functioned as a platform for reading groups, meetings, teach-ins, and performances.

Strike Debt also had a strong presence at the annual Creative Time Summit. Tidal: Occupy Theory/Occupy Strategy was invited to present its work and distribute literature to nearly 1,000 participants from around the world. Internationally renowned artist Martha Rosler held aloft the DROM during her keynote address, and communist philosophical impresario Slavoj Zizek posed for a photograph with the Strike Debt red square flag.

Slavoj Zizek displays Strike Debt banner at Creative Time Summit, October 12, 2012.

A small-scale breakout discussion was also hosted by Tidal to address the evolution of OWS, the project of Strike Debt, and the ways in which the skills and resources of contemporary art might be tapped for growing the movement.

A key point to emerge from the discussion was the proliferation over the past decade of experiments with alternative economies by artists, ranging from skill-shares to gift-exchanges to time-banks to collectively managed spaces of all sorts. What might it look like to channel these energies and resources into affirmative spaces of debt resistance and mutual aid? As Vanya S. of Tidal put it, for many artists the advent of Occupy “has dissolved the boundaries between their practice and their experiments with new ways of living, alternative ways of inhabiting time and space.”

Participants in the Tidal assembly at Creative Time then made their way to Columbus Circle, the convergence point for the October 13 Global Day of Noise against debt and austerity called in solidarity with the Spanish Indignados, Yo Soy 123 in Mexico, and others. Hundreds were in attendance equipped with pots, pans, and other noisemakers. Then, moving in small, sauntering groups, the assembly converged on 61st Street at the home address of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs; the threshold of the courtyard was lined with police as the first few demonstrators arrived. A mic check addressed to Blankfein detailed his responsibility for the mortgage-backed securities crisis and the $12 billion TARP bailout ultimately received by Goldman Sachs.

Citing Blankfein’s cynical remark that the company was doing “God’s Work,” mic-checker Debra Thimmesch looked upwards to the penthouse and concluded, “Lloyd, you’re not a god. You’re a common criminal.”

The clamor of the banging pots and pans reverberated up the walls of the residential towers, bringing residents to their windows as so many 1-percenter silhouettes. The massive gates to the building were then closed shut with the help of NYPD officers. From there the march headed for Times Square, hitting targets including the Plaza Hotel, a Trump Tower, Fox News, and Rockefeller Center.

Marches, banner-drops, clamorous denunciations of the 1 percent—it all felt good, and proved the benefit of continuing to organize for concerted days of mass protest. But negatively highlighting debt as the vampiric engine of Wall Street profits is only one side of the Strike Debt coin. Strike Debt also opens a space for imagining and enacting alternative ways of living without relying on existing authorities—hence the importance of the Rolling Jubilee, in which the people bail out one another rather than waiting for the government to do it.

And the Rolling Jubilee is but one preliminary tactic in an overall dual-power strategy currently under development. Crucial next steps for Strike Debt will be developing relationships with groups that have long practiced forms of alternative economics, including arts collectives, community-based organizations, religious organizations, gardens, squats, strike committees, worker co-ops, credit unions, and more.

Large strategic questions include the problem of national and international scale, alliance-building within and outside OWS, the development of debtors’ clinics and debtors’ unions, the securing of spaces to house critical infrastructure and bring people together, the relationship between the debt economy and the climate crisis, the specter of “ communization,” and more.

As the People’s Bailout approaches, a happy but daunting concern looms: How will Strike Debt absorb growth as it gains more attention? What structures and processes will be optimal for sustaining it? What lessons does the ongoing history of OWS offer, and what can we learn from other social movement histories?

This sense of multiple histories was palpable last weekend during the performance of Woody Guthrie’s “The Debt I Owe” at 60 Wall—the sounds of the ’30s, the ’60s and the 21st century co-mingled in the air. The aesthetic legacy of a figure such as Guthrie is not the only strand of history to which we are, so to speak, indebted, as we move into Year II. From the banging of casseroles at Blankfein’s doorstep to the special guests joining us onstage at Le Poisson Rogue on November 15, Strike Debt will continue to bring the ruckus to the 1 percent while amplifying the beautiful noise of the people.

This article originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence. Yates McKee writes about art, politics, and ecology.

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