At a certain moment during last night’s Rolling Jubilee, MC David Rees announced to the cheering crowd that the group had raised enough money to purchase and abolish $5 million of medical debt owed by ordinary Americans. As the folks standing behind him tossed sparkling confetti out over the crowd, I realize that I was watching something I hadn’t seen before.

It’s been said that David Graeber’s book Debt: the First 5,000 Years was required reading for participants in Occupy Wall Street. But now we’re seeing the consequences of having a mobilized political movement that actually understands how the complex economics of Wall Street work. By raising $292,000 and turning it into $5.9 million dollars through the banker’s craft (as of the time of this writing, updated numbers are available at www.rollingjubilee.org), Strike Debt has captured the basic unfairness of the economy and made it work against itself. Bankers, beware.

The plan was simple. Use OWS’s impressive communication skills to promote a “People’s Bailout.” Then encourage everybody to give just a little money, telling them that Strike Debt would make it worth 20 times more to some stranger being pursued by a collection agency for medical debts. People donated more than a quarter million dollars, aided by a telethon featuring left-leaning celebrities like Jeneane Garofalo and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. The plan is to send the randomly selected recipients of the bailout a note telling them that Strike Debt has abolished their debt, along with a copy of the Debt Resistors’ Operation Manual.

It sounds somehow shady, or least like “civil disobedience,” as Graeber himself said when speaking from the stage early in the Rolling Jubilee telethon. But people in various parts of the economy buy debt all the time and get rich doing it. After a hospital or a university or other business gets tired of trying to get you to pay for something, they sell your debt to collection agencies for “pennies on the dollar.” The debt is cheap because there’s no certainty that the collectors will get their money.

In transactions like this, the economy has a kind of relativity to it. Money is worth more in certain places than it is elsewhere. Your debt might be worth $100 to you (plus collection fees, of course), but someone can buy it for $25.

This system creates a lot of inequality because there is a kind of fence between the place where your money is worth a lot and the place where it is worth a little. Most of the time, bankers, hedge funders, insurance executives, and other kinds of Wall Street finance workers can get the money where it’s cheap; ordinary workers and students cannot. They look on in despair as their money keeps flying over to the other side of the fence.

With the Rolling Jubilee, we crossed that fence. And we did it through solidarity between Strike Debt followers and unfortunate Americans who were being hounded by collection agencies for their medical bills.

There were times during Occupy when I wondered if “the 99 percent” really meant anything. Was there any real solidarity in the 99 percent, any chance that we would actual help one another out? If Strike Debt is any example, then the answer is yes.

James Trimarco wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. James is web editor at YES! and volunteered in Occupy's shipping, inventory, and storage working group during the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Follow him on Twitter at @jamestrimarco.

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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.

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Less than two weeks ago, the Green Bay Packers—the only fan-owned, non-profit franchise in major American sports—won the Super Bowl, bringing the Lombardi trophy back to Wisconsin. But now, past and present members of the “People’s Team” are girding up for one more fight and this time, it’s against their own governor, Scott Walker.

Walker, after the Super Bowl victory, bathed himself sensuously in the team’s triumph, declaring at a public ceremony that February was now Packers Month. He oozed praise for the franchise named in honor of the state's packing workers. But just days later, the governor offered cutbacks, contempt, and even the threat of violence for actual state workers.

Walker has unveiled plans to strip all public workers of collective bargaining rights and dramatically slash the wages and health benefits of every nurse, teacher, and state employee. Then, Walker proclaimed that resistance to these moves would be met with a response from the Wisconsin National Guard. Seriously.

Yes, in advance of any debate over his proposal, Governor Walker put the National Guard on alert by saying that the guard is "prepared" for "whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for.” Considering that the state of Wisconsin hasn’t called in the National Guard since 1886, these bizarre threats did more than raise eyebrows. They provoked rage.

Robin Eckstein, a former Wisconsin National Guard member, told the Huffington Post, "Maybe the new governor doesn't understand yet—but the National Guard is not his own personal intimidation force to be mobilized to quash political dissent. The Guard is to be used in case of true emergencies and disasters, to help the people of Wisconsin, not to bully political opponents."

Already this week, as many as 100,000 people have marched at various protests around the state with signs that reflect the current moment like "If Egypt Can Have Democracy, Why Can't Wisconsin?” “We Want Governors Not Dictators," and the pithy “Hosni Walker."

But also intriguing is the intervention from past and present members of the Super Bowl Champs. Current players Brady Poppinga and Jason Spitz and former Packers Curtis Fuller, Chris Jacke, Charles Jordan, Bob Long and Steve Okoniewski issued the following statement:

We know that it is teamwork on and off the field that makes the Packers and Wisconsin great. As a publicly owned team we wouldn't have been able to win the Super Bowl without the support of our fans. It is the same dedication of our public workers every day that makes Wisconsin run. They are the teachers, nurses and child care workers who take care of us and our families. But now in an unprecedented political attack Governor Walker is trying to take away their right to have a voice and bargain at work. The right to negotiate wages and benefits is a fundamental underpinning of our middle class. When workers join together it serves as a check on corporate power and helps ALL workers by raising community standards. Wisconsin's longstanding tradition of allowing public sector workers to have a voice on the job has worked for the state since the 1930s. It has created greater consistency in the relationship between labor and management and a shared approach to public work. These public workers are Wisconsin's champions every single day and we urge the Governor and the State Legislature to not take away their rights.

The players who signed on don’t have quite as high a profile as Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers, but give it time. Rodgers is the Packers union representative in negotiations with the NFL, and on Tuesday the players' union issued their own statement in support of state workers, writing:

"The NFL Players Association will always support efforts protecting a worker's right to join a union and collectively bargain. Today, the NFLPA stands in solidarity with its organized labor brothers and sisters in Wisconsin."

The support of the Packers players hasn’t been lost on those marching in the streets. Aisha Robertson, a public school teacher from Madison, told me, “It’s great to see Packers join the fight against Walker. Their statement of support shows they stand with us. It gives us inspiration and courage to go and fight peacefully for our most basic rights.”

Walker no doubt envisioned conflict when he rolled out his plan to roll over the workers of Wisconsin. But I don’t think he foresaw having to go toe-to-toe with the Green Bay Packers. As we learned in Egypt, envisioning unforeseen consequences is never an autocrat's strong suit. As we’re learning in Wisconsin, fighting austerity is not an Egyptian issue or a Middle Eastern issue—it’s a political reality of the 21st century world. And as Scott Walker is learning, messing with cheeseheads can be hazardous to your political health.

Dave Zirin is the author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). He originally wrote this article for The Nation.

Copyright © 2011 The Nation — distributed by Agence Global

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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.

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After two weeks of protests in Wisconsin, we are now watching demonstrations spread across the country. Over the weekend, the online advocacy group MoveOn.org helped mobilize tens of thousands of people, who marched in all 50 state capitals in support of Wisconsin workers. Demonstrators are speaking out against attacks by Republican governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan and their own states.

It is entirely appropriate that protests should spread, because recent events in Wisconsin are only a window into what is happening in states scattered across the country. It is important that we understand the scope of this debate. This is a discussion that has impact on all Americans, not just union members. One point should be clear: This is not a story of public employees trying to feed at the trough. It is a story about whether or not governors can take away fundamental workers' rights.

Everyone in this country is entitled to their opinion about politics and public policy. Every governor is free to propose policies that he or she feels are in the public interest, even if others might disagree with those actions. But they must follow the rule of law.

In this case, newly elected Republican governors can certainly negotiate contracts with public employees. But there is a lawful process for such negotiation. It involves sitting down at a bargaining table, talking through disagreements, and coming to a mutual agreement. Instead of engaging in this process, governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker want to unilaterally take away people's rights, while claiming that they are doing something entirely different. He and others like him are using budget issues as a subterfuge for their power grab. That is not acceptable. And it is why they have stirred the passions of so many.

Bigger Than Unions,
Bigger Than Wisconsin
How Americans across professions, religions, and states are uniting in opposition to Wisconsin's anti-union bill—and cultivating a movement that reaches far beyond the state border.

Many people may not see collectively bargaining as relevant to problems in their own work lives. You might think, I don't need a union because I'm a professional. Even if this is the case, you are nevertheless affected by a growing imbalance of power in today's workplaces.

There was a time in America when employers couldn't unilaterally decide to take away health care or pensions. Workers had some say in deciding to accept less in wages in order to hold on to their families' health care coverage. Yet in recent decades, we've moved toward a situation where there are little or no counterbalances to the whims of employers. America's once-strong middle class has dwindled as a result.

Whether any of us happen to be union or non-union, we need to get back to the day when people had a say in negotiating the terms of their employment. In the past, public employees opted to prioritize their health care and retirement over other forms of compensation. They should still have a right to believe their employers will abide by the legitimate contracts they previously negotiated. They have the right, in other words, to be treated just as any of us would expect to be treated when we've come to an agreement with an employer regarding our livelihoods.

It is important to understand that this is not a question of tightening belts to cope with a moment of economic crisis. Public employees in Wisconsin and beyond have been very clear that they are willing to bear their share of common sacrifice in tough times. But they are not willing to give up the basic rights to associate, to belong to a union, or to organize collectively.

This is something that should matter for all Americans. Because if our rights related to association and collective bargaining can simply be denied, taken away as part of an executive initiative disguised as being about something else, then other rights are also at risk. We avoid restricting freedom of speech in our country because we recognize that encroachments on our freedoms create a slippery slope. One violation of basic rights leads to another. If we don't stand up now against abuses of power on the part of state executives, the safety of our dearest liberties could be called into question.

Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?

Our ability to freely associate and form organizations to advance whatever political and economic interests we might have is one of the things that makes this country great. It is something that Alexis de Tocqueville admired about American democracy when he wrote his renowned observations about our political system in the early nineteenth century.

We abandon this democratic tradition at our peril. A politics that condemns public employees for being greedy because they insist on maintaining their rights is profoundly dishonest and dangerous.

The fact that we have elections in this country is not enough to safeguard our democracy. If we allow rights to be restricted, under the auspices of a twisted interpretation of the rule of law, we follow a treacherous path that has historically led the way to tyranny.

Those outside of Wisconsin who have joined in solidarity protests, and those speaking out against assaults by their own governors on middle-class employees understand that this issue impacts us all. Our rights are too precious to be sacrificed without a fight.

Amy Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. She worked for nearly two decades in the labor movement and now works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations in progressive, labor, and faith communities. You can follow Amy on Twitter at @amybdean, or she can be reached via the Web site, www.amybdean.com. Amy wrote this article for The Huffington Post.

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Thousands of people gathered on the streets of St. Paul, Minnesota yesterday to take part in a "March for the Middle Class." As they made their way from the St. Paul Cathedral to the State Capitol, they carried signs defending the rights of working Americans and chanted, "We are one."

The march in Minnesota was just one of hundreds of events that took place around the country. The events marked the forty-third anniversary of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who, shortly before his death in 1968, had gone to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike by local sanitation workers. Carrying signs that read, "From Memphis 1968 to Madison 2011," thousands of workers, students, civil rights activists, and supporters gathered at rallies in all 50 states to continue Dr. King's fight and to show their support for workers who have been under attack by conservatives in recent months.

This tremendous outpouring was remarkable not only for the demonstration of nationwide support for working people and their collective bargaining rights, but also for the broad coalition of organizations that came together in this powerful moment of solidarity. But, unless we seize this opportunity to change the way that the labor movement works and the way in which it is perceived, that's all this will be—a moment.

Earning Public Support for Unions

Following months of assaults by Republican governors in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan, the labor movement is now in a unique position. Despite efforts by conservatives to portray the tens of thousands of pro-union protesters in Madison and elsewhere as violent or greedy, Americans by and large recognized in them the hard-working teachers and firefighters they know in their own communities. And polls now show strong public support for embattled unions in the states.

But we should not misinterpret this information. Americans have not suddenly decided that they love public sector unions. Instead, they have reacted against the overreach of Republican politicians who said they were going to create jobs and deal with real economic problems, but who instead used the economic crisis as an excuse to lash out against political foes.

It is a mistake to see Wisconsin and other state battles as marking a sea change in public opinion about unions. However, these fights have put the labor movement in the spotlight. And, in doing so, they have given us an opportunity to rebuild our relationships with the community. Instead of assuming that we have already won a public stamp of approval, we must use the moment to truly earn this support.

Polls show that Americans have rejected Republican characterizations of unions as the cause of the state budget crises. But this is not enough. If we want to build sustainable support among a majority of Americans, community members need to see us playing a proactive, productive role in solving these crises. That means doing more than changing our rhetoric. It means changing the way we do business.

3 Steps Toward A 21st Century Labor Movement

To go forward from here, we need to do three things: expand the range of issues we take on when we represent employees in the workplace, change the way we relate to the community, and begin to move away from outdated models for labor activism rooted in the era of the industrial economy.

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.

As a first step, with regard to representation in workplaces, we need to be making demands that highlight our role as problem solvers. If we only negotiate over things such as pay and benefits, the public will always see unions as special interests. Instead, we must be concerned with advancing service delivery and using collective bargaining to improve the departments in which we work.

This is especially true in the public sector, where unionized workers are often teachers, firefighters, social workers, and others working for the common good. When public unions began organizing in earnest several decades ago, they bargained over issues like the amount of time social workers would be allowed to spend on a given case: over-hurried employees stood up to management to insist that they get the time they needed to help families. Unions are still very much involved in these kinds of issues, but questions of service delivery have often been overshadowed by wage negotiations. We need to re-embrace demands that highlight unions' roles as public interest advocates, bringing a focus on service to the fore of our efforts.

Second, we must change our relationship to those outside the labor movement. The time to reach out to community allies and to develop deep relationships is not in the middle of an emergency campaign or a contract fight. Instead, community outreach should be a part of the ongoing organizing work of every union local. Locals should be developing training programs that teach people about the value that our organizations add to their communities. We should use these programs as a way to educate candidates about our work before they receive labor's endorsement, so that elected officials have a substantive commitment to supporting our efforts. And while we're teaching, we should also be learning, understanding the concerns of other community organizations and developing durable bonds based on mutual interest, not momentary convenience. That way, where there is an emergency, we have real community partnerships that we can turn to for help.

A third way we need to change how we do business is to move beyond outdated models of unionism developed in the age when America's economy was based on manufacturing. When public sector unions began to seriously organize, they looked to the dominant model of industrial unionism then in place. Organizations such as AFSCME brought in representatives from the United Auto Workers (UAW) to lead trainings for emerging union leaders. They formed labor operations based on then-dominant norms. These structures might still be relevant in some manufacturing environments. But most of America's economy has dramatically transformed in the past 40 years, and most union structures have not. As Jim Grossfeld points out in a forthcoming article in the American Prospect, even new auto workers' President Bob King has recognized the need to build a "21st-century UAW" to adapt to changing times.

The Moral Underground
All around you are everyday heroes who refuse to be complicit in the economic mistreatment of other people.

Today, we need to be more decentralized, recognizing that framing issues in national offices doesn't always work. We need to empower local unions to develop their own capacities to proactively engage their communities—allowing them to step forward with research, policy, and coalition-building proposals uniquely suited to their metropolitan regions. That means redirecting resources from the national level into the locals. National officials need to provide the leadership, funding, and support that will allow locals to enter their communities as problem solvers.

In order to move forward and harness the kind of support we saw in yesterday's demonstrations, we cannot merely tell our story differently. We must act differently, earning lasting support from the public by showing, in concrete and local fashion, how much the labor movement serves the public good.

Amy Dean wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Amy is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. She worked for nearly two decades in the labor movement and now works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations in progressive, labor, and faith communities. You can follow Amy on Twitter at @amybdean, or she can be reached via the Web site, www.amybdean.com.

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• Why Every American Should Care About Wisconsin
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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.
  

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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• We Are Wisconsin
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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.

In the past 24 months, those of us who longed for positive change have gone from hope to heartbreak. But hope is returning to America—at last—thanks largely to the courageous stand of the heroes and heroines of Wisconsin.

Reinvigorated by the idealism and fighting spirit on display right now in America's heartland, the movement for "hope and change" has a rare, second chance. It can renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.

Over the next hours and days, all who love this country need to do everything possible to spread the "spirit of Madison" to all 50 states. This does not mean we need to occupy 50 state capitol buildings; things elsewhere are not yet that dire. But this weekend, the best of America should rally on the steps of every statehouse in the union.

Moveon.org and others have issued just this kind of call to action; everyone should prioritize responding and turning out in large numbers.

On Saturday, the powers-that-be (in both parties) should see a rainbow force coming together: organized workers, business leaders, veterans, students and youth, faith leaders, civil rights fighters, women's rights champions, immigrant rights defenders, LGBTQ stalwarts, environmentalists, academics, artists, celebrities, community activists, elected officials and more—all standing up for what's right.

Defending—and Defining—the American Dream

And we should announce that our renewed movement is more than just a mobilization to back unions or oppose illegitimate power grabs (as important as those agenda items are). Something more vital is at stake: our country needs a national movement to defend the American Dream itself. And the fight in Wisconsin creates the opportunity to build one.

After all, it is the American Dream that the GOP's "slash and burn" agenda is killing off. We need a movement dedicated to renewing the idea that hard work pays in our country; that you can make it if you try; that America remains a land committed to dignity, justice and opportunity for all. Right now, this very idea is on the GOP chopping block. And we must rescue it now—or risk losing it forever.

America will not make it through this crisis healthy and whole if—at the first sign of trouble—we are willing to throw away millions of our everyday heroes. Our teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses and others make our communities and country strong. Their daily work is essential to the smooth functioning and long-term success of our nation. An attack on them is an attack on the backbone of America.

Nobody objects to politicians cutting budgetary fat. But the GOP program everywhere is so reckless that it would actually cut muscle, bone, and marrow, too. This approach is both shortsighted and immoral. We should rise up against it—in our millions.

Both parties should be taking steps to solve the country's problems in a balanced, fair and rational way. If deficits are truly the issue, then raising taxes and cutting spending both should be on the table, as tools. But Wisconsin's governor recently handed out massive corporate tax breaks, reducing the state's revenues. That move greatly added to the problem he now wants to fix by attacking essential services with a meat axe. A slew of GOP governors in places like Ohio are gearing up to take similar approaches.

If a foreign power conspired to inflict this much damage on America's first responders and essential infrastructure, we would see it as an act of war.

And if a foreign dictator unilaterally announced that his nation's workers no longer had a seat at the bargaining table in their own country, the U.S. establishment would rightfully go bananas.

If Republicans would oppose that kind of thuggery abroad, how can they champion it here at home?

How can they accept for the American people what they would denounce for the people of any other nation on Earth?

GOP governors in multiple states are advancing schemes to erase the long-standing rights of American employees to choose a union and bargain collectively. We need to call these outrageous plots what they are: un-American and unacceptable. They are not just assaults on workers; they are assaults on the American Way itself.


This Is Our 'Tea Party' Moment

It is time to draw a line in the sand—nationally. Someone has to stand up for common sense and fairness. It is time to use all nonviolent means to defend the American people and our American principles from these abuses.

Wisconsin: The First Stop in an American Uprising?

If we take a bold and courageous stand, over time, we can win. Make no mistake about it: this is our "Tea Party" moment—in a positive sense.

In fact, we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right. Don't forget: even after the Republican's epic electoral defeat in 2008, a right-wing uprising was still able to smash public support for "new New Deal" economics. Along the way, it revived the political fortunes of the GOP.

A popular outcry from the left could just as easily shatter the prevailing bipartisan consensus that America is suddenly a poor country that cannot possibly help its people meet our basic needs.

The truth is that we don't live Bangladesh or Malawi. America is not a poor country. The public has just been hypnotized into believing that the richest and most creative nation on Earth has only two choices in this crisis: massive austerity (as championed by the Tea Party/Republicans) or semi-massive austerity (as meekly offered by too many DC Democrats). It is ridiculous.

Fortunately, the people in Wisconsin know that. So they are fighting courageously. Their efforts could blossom into a compelling, national force for the good—offering a powerful alternative to those false choices.

And while our re-born movement needs to be as clear and bold as the Tea Parties, we must base our efforts on a deeper set of American values.

The Tea Party attached itself to only a single American principle. And it identifies itself with only one moment in our distant past: the Boston Tea Party, symbolizing "no taxation without representation."


"American Dream" Movement Rooted in a Deeper Patriotism

That is an important moment and concept. But the notion of "negative liberty" ("don't tread on me!") is only one principle among many that make our country great. Other equally vital American values and ideals (like justice, opportunity, fairness, and democracy) have gone largely undefended and unheralded, in this recent crisis. That ends—now. Our rising movement should stand for the full suite of American values and principles.

And the American ideal most in need of defense is our most essential one: the American Dream.
The steps needed to renew and redeem the American Dream are straightforward and simple:

• Increase revenue for America's government sensibly by making Wall Street and the super-rich pay their fair share.
• Reduce spending responsibly by cutting the real fat—like corporate welfare for military contractors, big agriculture, and big oil.
• Simultaneously protect the heart and soul of America—our teachers, nurses, and first responders.
• Guarantee the health, safety and success of our children and communities by leaving the muscle and bone of America's communities intact.
• Maintain the American Way by treating employees with dignity and respecting their right to a seat at the bargaining table.
• Rebuild the middle class—and pathways into it—by fighting for a "made in America" innovation and manufacturing agenda, including trade and currency policies that honor American workers and entrepreneurs.
• Stand for the idea that, in a crisis, Americans turn TO each other—and not ON each other.

A Return to the Moral Center

These are not radical notions. They are the common sense ideas that form the core of who we are as a nation. We can rally Americans, once again, to stand up for these values. We can make America, once again, a land where it is safe for everyday people to dream

We will prevail because—in truth—we are not in a right-wing period of American history, nor are we in a left-wing period. We are simply in a volatile period.

Signs of the Times

Some of the best signs and slogans from the Wisconsin protests.

And during times like these, we can take comfort in knowing that a great nation will ultimately pull its answers—not from its ideological extremes—but from its deep, moral center.

By standing up for dignity, equal opportunity and fair play, the Wisconsin workers have found their way to America's great moral center. They have shown us all, at last, the way back home. By standing with them, we reclaim what is best in our country.

April 15, 2009, marked the beginning of the national movement to remember the Tea Party and pull America to the ideological right.

Let Saturday, February 26, 2011, mark the beginning of the national movement to renew the American Dream and return us to the moral center—where everybody counts, and everybody matters.

Van Jones is a former contributing editor to YES! Magazine and the founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build a green economy and pull people out of poverty. This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

Interested?

• "This is A Peaceful Protest"
  Video: What's it like in the Wisconsin capitol?
• 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: Solidarity Among Workers ... And Football Players
  As Wisconsin's public workers fight to keep their wages and bargaining rights, they're joined by others involved in a labor struggle: their Super Bowl champion neighbors.

The world’s eyes are on the escalating struggle to defend the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public workers. Some people have even called the growing mobilization a transformational movement.

But transformational organizing takes more than growing numbers.

Revisiting the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott can help us understand what it takes.

In the 1950s, humanity was at a watershed. During World War II nearly 50 million people, more than half of them civilians, had been killed. To win the war, we had created and dropped an atom bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet Americans were celebrating our winning this “good war” and even proclaiming the American century because our factories were busy producing the goods that the war-devastated factories of Europe and Japan were unable to produce.

As Einstein put it, “the splitting of the atom has changed everything but the human mind, and thus we drift towards catastrophe.”

It was under these circumstances that the people of Montgomery, Alabama, launched their yearlong boycott to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to go to the back of the bus.

Responding not only to the indignities of segregated busing but to the brutal murder in September 1955 of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a people who had been treated as less than human began a struggle against their dehumanization not as angry victims or rebels but as forerunners of a new, more human society. Practicing methods of non-violence that transformed themselves and increased the good in the world, creating their own transportation system by walking or car pooling, always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating buses but creating the beloved community, they carried on a struggle that grew their own souls and inspired the civil rights movement and the other humanity-redefining movements of the 1960s.

How Resilient Are You?
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In 2011 we are again at a watershed that calls for growing our souls. The U.S. empire, which sustained the American Dream of upper mobility and middle class lives for all Americans but also included supporting the world’s Mubaraks, is dead.

That means we have to create a New American Dream. To do this we need to look in the mirror and begin making the radical revolution of values that Dr. King called for in his 1967 anti-Vietnam War “Break the Silence” speech. To make this revolution:

• We, the American people, must acknowledge that we have reached the end of
  the empire that has sustained the old American dream. We must not only struggle against the concentration of wealth at the top of American society. We must acknowledge that we have enjoyed many of our middle class comforts and conveniences at the expense of the Earth and of other people here and around the world. We must begin to live more simply and responsibly so that others can simply live.
• We need to ask ourselves new questions about how to provide for the general welfare and how to educate our children. We must create ways to meet these basic needs not mainly through a growing number of public workers but through caring for one another in beloved communities.
• We must begin reorganizing our local, state and federal budgets so that we spend public monies not for military domination and to support the Mubaraks of the world but for constructive human and domestic needs.

The struggle in Wisconsin and other states can become a transformational movement if those involved in the struggle recognize that our current crises are rooted in the decline of the empire which made possible the welfare state with its thousands of public employees to take care of tasks for which we the people must become increasingly responsible.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of Rights. We have entered the epoch of Responsibilities which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

In cities like Detroit and Milwaukee, abandoned by global corporations, community people are struggling to build more self-reliant, localized economies, growing our own food, restoring the neighbor to the ‘hood, and in the process also growing our souls.

The Wisconsin struggle can be deepened by connecting with these community struggles.

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change.

Interested?

• More blogs from Grace Lee Boggs.
  
• Wisconsin Awakens a Sleeping Giant
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• Envisioning MLK's Dream in Today's World
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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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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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Click here to view the photo essay.

In Madison, Wisconsin, public workers—and their supporters—have been protesting by the tens of thousands, night and day, at the state's capitol building. They're hoping to block a proposed bill that would curb workers' wages, benefits, and bargaining rights.

For days, teachers, students, firefighters, and many others offered uninterrupted testimony in the capitol, explaining why they want to protect the rights and livelihoods of Wisconsin's middle class.

But they may be equally eloquent in the homemade signs they're carrying:

"My teachers, my mom, and my granny r NOT public enemies," reads one girl's poster. "Union workers: When we get screwed, we multiply," says another.

Click here for a slideshow of signs and slogans from the Madison protests.

Photos by Matt Baran, Andy Peters, Rob Chandanais, Aaron Fruth, Felipe Gacharna, Paul Baker, Mark Riechers, Lynnebin, Thomas Coulton, Jessie Reeder, and Emily Mills.

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On Monday afternoon, the Capitol Police in Madison, Wisconsin refused to enforce an order to clear the Capitol building of hundreds of peaceful protesters who have been occupying the site to protest Governor Scott Walker's plan to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews State Rep. Kelda Helen Roys (D), who spent Sunday night in the Capitol building with other protesters. Roys describes what happened at four o'clock on Monday afternoon when the government gave the order to clear the protesters from the building:

And after several hours of the same sorts of scenes that we’ve been seeing all week—singing, chanting, drumming, speechifying—the Capitol police captain, Chief Tubbs, made an announcement, and he said that the protesters that had remained in the building, they were being orderly and responsible and peaceful and there was no reason to eject them from the Capitol.

Holding the Capitol



Video: What happened inside the Wisconsin capitol when protesters were told they'd have to leave.

Police attempted to clear the building of protesters on Sunday night, but they relented when the protesters refused to leave, allowing them to stay another night. On Monday, the police decided not to eject protesters already inside, but no additional activists would be allowed in. The governor plans to deliver his budget address on Tuesday afternoon. Walker is expected to call for spending cuts that could exceed $1 billion dollars.

Gov. Walker has threatened mass public sector layoffs if the Democratic senators do not return from Illinois by March 1. However, the Uptake.com reports that one of the absent legislators, state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, claims Walker is not telling the truth. Erpenbach says the unions have already agreed to come up with the money the governor needs to balance the budget, and therefore, he has no need to lay anyone off to bridge the gap.

Wisconsin 101

Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive describes the epic scale of the Wisconsin protests:

This is the largest sustained rally for the rights of public sector workers that this country has seen in decades — perhaps ever.

The crowds at the state Capitol have swelled from 10,000-65,000 during the first week all the way up to 100,000 on Feb. 26. Hundreds of people occupied the Capitol building with a sit-in and sleep-in for days on end, and total strangers from around the world ordered pizzas for them.

In case you're still wondering what all of this means, Andy Kroll, Nick Baumann, and Siddhartha Mahanta of Mother Jones have joined forces to bring you this "Wisconsin 1o1" primer.

The Republicans in the Wisconsin House passed a bill that would take away collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, restrict their ability to collect dues, and force them to undergo yearly recertification votes. But the bill cannot become law until the state Senate also passes it. Currently, 14 Democratic state senators are hiding out in Illinois to deprive the Republican majority of the quorum they need to vote on the bill. However, as Kroll notes, if only one Democrat breaks faith and returns to Madison, the Republicans will be able to pass the bill.

Nationwide solidarity

Jamilah King of Colorlines.com brings us a photo essay on the solidarity rallies held around the country over the weekend in support of the Wisconsin protesters. From San Francisco to Salt Lake City to Atlanta to New York, people took to the streets in support of the right of workers to organize. Also at Colorlines.com, historian Michael Honey draws parallels between the situation in Wisconsin and Dr. Martin Luther King's last crusade. Shortly before his assassination, King stood with the sanitation workers of Memphis to demand collective bargaining rights and the power to collect union dues.

George Warner of Campus Progress profiles some young activists who took to the streets of Washington, D.C. to express their solidarity with the Wisconsin protesters. About 1,500 people came out to a rally in support of the protesters on Saturday.

Anonymous strikes again

In a bizarre twist, a loosely organized coalition of anarchic hackers known as "Anonymous" attacked websites linked to Koch Industries on Sunday, Jessica Pieklo reports for Care2.com. The Koch brothers are among Gov. Walker's most generous benefactors. The hackers launched a distributed denial of service attack on the website of the Koch-funded conservative group Americans for Prosperity.

In addition to generous contributions to Gov. Walker's campaign, the Koch brothers gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn paid for millions of dollars worth of ads against Walker's opponent in 2010. Walker is evidently very grateful to Koch. Last week, a writer for a Buffalo-based website got Walker on the phone by pretending to be David Koch.

Don't look now, but...

Meanwhile, in Indiana, the state assembly reconvened on Monday to find most of the 40 Democratic members had decamped for Illinois. The legislators are apparently taking a page from the Wisconsin playbook. Indiana's Republican governor is trying to pass legislation that would make permanent a ban on collective bargaining by public sector workers and the Democratic legislators are seeking to deny him the 2/3rds quorum required to vote on the bill.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets, of which YES! Magazine is a member.

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