Walgreens' Tax Decision Proves Movement-Building Works

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

09 August 14

algreens’ backing away from their plans to use “inversion” as a tax dodge in the wake of massive public outcry is a major victory for a movement that’s been building for the past 3 years, and is a sign the economic narrative is shifting in a major way. This year’s state and congressional elections are likely to play out along a polar opposite set of talking points from the 2010 midterms, and could set the tone on conversations about taxes, budgets, and deficits for an entire generation.

The Birth of a Movement

Four years ago, corporate-funded, Tea Party-affiliated Congressional candidates took over the House of Representatives on a mantra of “stop the spending” (despite those candidates' dependency on such spending). The media was abuzz with stories about the deficit in the wake of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the narrow passage of the Affordable Care Act. Republican gubernatorial candidates took over the executive branches of their respective states, pledging to cut runaway spending. The American public, it seemed, was chiefly obsessed with cutting public services to the bone and balancing budgets. Nary a peep was heard about corporate tax accountability.

Then, in early 2011, a few activists from around the country and I teamed up to start an awareness effort called US Uncut after being inspired by UK Uncut’s direct action campaigns in Britain. In the UK, activists used direct action to tie unpaid corporate tax bills to public service cuts. The first such nationwide protest was against Vodaphone, Verizon’s overseas partner, who had dodged billions of pounds in British tax while the British government had slashed public housing by almost an identical amount. The protests spread like wildfire, and UK Uncut’s list of corporate targets expanded. As a result of UK Uncut’s public pressure, Starbucks agreed to voluntarily pay back 20 million pounds of tax that had been previously dodged.

Armed with data from groups like Citizens for Tax Justice, US Uncut activists staged “bail-ins” at storefront offices of corporations known for their nefarious tax dodging schemes like Bank of America, Verizon, BP, FedEx, and Apple. In over 100 cities during the Spring and Summer of 2011, we turned banks and other stores into schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, and other public assets whose funding had been cut as a result of corporate tax dodging.

On Tax Day 2011, we teamed up with The Yes Men to play a prank on General Electric and the rest of the mainstream media, making them believe GE was voluntarily donating its $3.2 billion tax refund to the U.S. Treasury. After GE’s stock dropped by almost that exact amount in just 30 minutes, the onus was on GE to make a public statement confirming that yes, indeed, the press release was a hoax and that they would continue dodging taxes.

Corporations Fight Back

Corporate tax dodgers hoped to drown us out with their lobbying clout in Washington, formed an Astroturf group called the Win America Campaign, and pushed for a “repatriation” tax holiday, in which they would bring home billions of dollars in overseas cash at a 5 percent rate (instead of the nominal 35 percent rate). A previous tax holiday was granted in 2005 under the auspices of “jobs creation,” although corporations who repatriated overseas cash simply fired thousands of workers, and used the surplus cash to buy up shares of their own stock to make options owned by executives more valuable. Apple led the 2011 Win America Campaign, which was joined by big pharma and tech companies like Pfizer, Cisco, and Oracle. US Uncut fought back by disrupting business in over a dozen Apple stores around the country on a national day of action.

US Uncut activists in San Francisco even donned skintight, fluorescent-colored bodysuits with QR code emblazoned on the front and danced in front of the 2011 Apple World Wide Developers Conference. The QR code took viewers to a YouTube video we made illustrating how Apple was pushing for a tax holiday that would deplete enough in tax revenue that could instead be used to hire 90,000 teachers. Even the biggest Apple fans were supportive of the cause. Eventually, the repatriation bill failed in Congress after President Obama pledged to veto it, and the Win America Campaign disbanded a few months later.

All of these actions were featured in the Sundance-selected documentary “We’re Not Broke,” about the movement to get corporations to pay their fair share in taxes. The documentary has been screened in nearly all 50 states, several countries, and reviewed tens of thousands of times on Netflix. While US Uncut organizers eventually transitioned into Occupy Wall Street and then dispersed into various other activist causes after Occupy’s camps were dispersed, we’ve found more creative ways to bring awareness of corporate tax dodging into the mainstream. In Tax Day 2013, US Uncut activists volunteered to develop a video game called Tax Evaders, which was a big hit. The US Uncut Facebook page has grown to over 465,000 likes in the last 3 years. 300,000 of those likes came in the last 6 months. And now, after 3 consistent years of spreading information on social media, anger over corporate tax dodgers is at a fever pitch.

Changing the Conversation

We’re coming up on another midterm Congressional election, and voters are overwhelmingly fed up with the “stop the spending” rhetoric coming from a Congress that has been honored as the least productive Congress in history. Voters polled in states as red as Kentucky and as blue as Maryland are in solid agreement that corporations and the rich aren’t paying enough in taxes. And a vast majority of Americans across both parties polled earlier this month disapprove of the practice of corporations using inversion to dodge taxes. That includes 86 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of Republicans, and 80 percent of Independents.

Four years ago, it seemed impossible that the national economic conversation would be centered on corporate tax accountability. It seemed just as unlikely that a major corporation like Walgreens would withdraw its plans to dodge billions in taxes. The major lesson to learn here is that movement-building works. It requires groups with facts and data, like Americans for Tax Fairness and Citizens for Tax Justice, elected officials like Elizabeth Warren proposing legislation, and grassroots movements like US Uncut and Occupy Wall Street to put pressure on corporations and governments to listen to the people.

Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

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