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Walgreens' Tax Decision Proves Movement-Building Works |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 August 2014 14:35 |
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Gibson writes: "Walgreens' 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."
Grassroots pressure kept Walgreens from avoiding taxes by relocating oversees. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Why Airstrikes in Iraq Are a Mistake |
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Saturday, 09 August 2014 14:23 |
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Van Buren writes: "As America goes back to war in Iraq with airstrikes, here's what to know and do instead."
A piece of political street art by the anonymous artist Banksy. (photo: Ben Leto/cc/Flickr)
Why Airstrikes in Iraq Are a Mistake
By Peter Van Buren, Common Dreams
09 August 14
 s America goes back to war in Iraq with airstrikes, here’s what to know and do instead:
– This is a slippery slope if those words have any meaning left. Airstrikes are in part to protect American advisors sent earlier to Erbil to support Kurds there because Iraqi central government won’t. The U.S. is assuming the role of the de facto Iraqi Air Force. What happens next week, next crisis, next “genocide?” Tell me how that ends.
– Understand how deep the U.S. is already in. It is highly likely that U.S. Special Forces are active on the ground, conducting reconnaissance missions and laser-designating targets for circling U.S. aircraft. If U.S. planes are overhead, U.S. search and rescue assets are not far away, perhaps in desert forward operating positions. This is how bigger wars begin. Go Google “Vietnam War,” say starting about 1963.
– The U.S. media is playing the meme that the U.S. is worried about Christian minority in Iraq, as a way to engorge the American people with blood. But the media fails to note that over half of Iraq’s Christians were killed or fled during the U.S. occupation.
– The only realistic hope to derail ISIS is to alienate them from Iraq Sunnis, who provide the on-the-ground support any insurgency must have to succeed. Mao called a sympathetic population “the water the fish swims in.” Separating the people from the insurgents is CounterInsurgency 101. Instead, via airstrikes, the U.S. has gone all-in on side of Iraqi Shias and Kurds. You cannot bomb away a political movement. You cannot kill an idea that motivates millions of people with a Hellfire missile.
– Sunnis are not confined by the borders of Iraq and this is not a chessboard. U.S. actions toward Sunnis in Iraq (or Syria, or wherever) resonate throughout the Sunni world. There is no better recruitment tool for Sunni extremists than showing their fight is actually against the Americans.
– Throughout the broader Islamic world, the takeaway is that again the U.S. unleashes war against Muslims. Nothing can inspire jihad like seeing the struggle in Iraq as one against the Crusaders.
– Precise, Surgical Strikes: Sure, just ask those wedding parties in Yemen and Afghanistan how that has worked out.
– ISIS’ connections to al Qaeda are tenuous at present. However, just like when Sunnis felt threatened during the U.S. occupation, fear and military needs will inevitably drive them closer to al Qaeda.
– Irony: Back to the Future: U.S. airstrikes on Iraq are being launched from an aircraft carrier named after George H.W. Bush, who first involved the U.S. in a shooting war against Iraq in 1991?s Desert Storm.
– Air strikes will not resolve anything significant. The short answer is through nine years of war and occupation U.S. air power in Iraq, employed on an unfettered scale, combined with the full-weight of the U.S. military on the ground plus billions of dollars in reconstruction funds, failed to resolve the issues now playing out in Iraq. Why would anyone think a lesser series of strikes would work any better? We also have a recent Iraqi example of the pointlessness of air strikes. The Maliki government employed them with great vigor against Sunnis in western Iraq, including in Fallujah, only six months ago, and here we are again, with an even more powerful Sunni force in the field.
– Oh, but what should we do?!?!? The U.S. lost the war in Iraq years ago, probably as early as 2003. It is time to accept that.
Step One: Stop digging the hole deeper (see above, Sunni-Shia-Kurd problem;
Step Two: 2: Demand the Iraqi government stop persecuting and alienating their own Sunni population, the root of these insurgent problems;
Step Three: Demand the Saudis and others stop funding ISIS in hopes of choking back their strength;
Step Four: Demand the Iraqi government launch airstrikes in support of the Kurds as a show of support;
Step Five: Deliver humanitarian aid only through the UN and the Red Crescent. In Vietnam, this mistake was colloquially expressed as “F*ck ‘em, then Feed ‘em.” So instead, divorce the good U.S. stuff from the bad U.S. stuff.
Those things will be a good start. Airstrikes are a terrible start that begs a tragic finish.
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Stop Calling Scalia a Scrotum |
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Saturday, 09 August 2014 14:15 |
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Sharpe writes: "In the days following the Supreme Court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, I repeatedly saw a word being used on social media by people who, like me, were outraged: 'Scrotus.' This is a play on the acronym SCOTUS - Supreme Court of the United States - a metaphor, if you will, in which the five (male) justices who joined in the majority opinion become a single scrotum."
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. (photo: AP)
Stop Calling Scalia a Scrotum
By Matthew Sharpe, Salon
09 August 14
Can't we disagree with each other without comparing people to genitals? Yes, we most certainly can!
 n the days following the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, I repeatedly saw a word being used on social media by people who, like me, were outraged: “Scrotus.” This is a play on the acronym SCOTUS—Supreme Court of the United States—a metaphor, if you will, in which the five (male) justices who joined in the majority opinion become a single scrotum.
My first response was to feel that the scrotum is more demeaned by the insult than the Supreme Court justices. My next response was and still is to lament the use of the term altogether. Of course it is misogynistic to use names for women’s genitals—pussy, twat, etc.—as insults, not only because there is nothing intrinsically cowardly or mean about a vagina, but because to refer to women’s reproductive organs demeaningly is to join a long history of the systematic oppression of women. Though not charged with the woeful power dynamics of misogyny, using the names of male reproductive parts—dick, schmuck, etc.—is hardly less problematic. Finding much to admire in genitals of all stripes, I’ve grown weary of the prevalence with which their names are invoked in antipathy.
I have also come to object to non-genital name-calling-as-insult. Asshat, bitch, fuckwit, garbage, idiot, moron, shithead, vile bag of worms: I’ve seen all of these insults used recently on the Internet by people whose politics I basically agree with—namely, progressives. My understanding of progressive politics is that they are based in compassion. And when we call someone an asshat or an idiot or a worm, we are asserting, metaphorically, that this person is in a different, lesser category than ours—either inhuman, or still human but lower in the hierarchy of being. And if you are a progressive—if you are anyone, for that matter—this is an unproductive, indeed, a destructive assertion to make.
I can imagine people saying, in response to the above: 1. What, you’ve never called someone an insulting name, even in your head?; 2. Lighten up, it’s just a joke; 3. Why are you going after fellow progressives for a minor offense like uttering an insult when the bigger offense is, for example, the Supreme Court decision you mentioned that restricts women’s access to reproductive health care?
1. Of course, we have all called people names. And I confess that despite my emphatic belief in the destructiveness of name-calling, I sometimes have difficulty refraining from it. But I try to, because words matter.
2. I happen to love jokes. They make life more bearable and they can be profound tools of political opposition (see below). However, the implication of dismissing an insult with “Lighten up, it’s just a joke” is that it doesn’t really mean anything. But if it doesn’t, why say it? The premise of both a Supreme Court opinion and an insult is that words have power.
3. I am taking on name-calling precisely because I believe it undermines the effectiveness of political action. If I call the perpetrator of an injustice an insulting name, I am probably doing so in righteous indignation. And while righteous indignation can be an efficacious response to injustice and a motivator of action, it is also not a fuel that will sustain action for very long on its own. More importantly, using an insulting name compromises the righteous part of righteous indignation, and then you’re left with just indignation, which after a while is corrosive to the soul, the proverbial poison that you drink to harm your enemy. This I know from personal experience.
As I’ve been meditating on the name-calling problem, I’ve also been thinking about and looking for examples of oppositional political speech that I admire and consider effective, and that do not entail name-calling. Thankfully, they are abundant.
Last week, for instance, I saw a clip of an MSNBC interview with two people in Detroit about the city’s having shut off water to thousands of people who can’t pay their water bills. One of the interviewees was Hank Winchester, a reporter for the local TV station WDIB; the other was Maureen Taylor, chair of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization. Winchester claimed that while some people were unable to pay for their water, there were others “who simply don’t want to pay the bill, who’d rather spend money on cable.”
Taylor replied, “Shame on Hank for putting that lie, that disinformation out on the air. Saying that people don’t want to pay for their water bill is scandalous. What is at stake here is that there are thousands of people who cannot pay rising water bill costs, and we’ve got people out here like this guy standing on the side of the people that have money.” She added that the city had not shut off the water to sports stadiums and golf courses whose water bills remain unpaid.
The MSNBC anchor asked Taylor, “What would you like to see happen, Maureen?”
She replied, “I don’t want to tell you what I would like to see happen because I don’t want to speak those words. But the next time you invite me here, let’s have some truth, and a fair exchange, instead of Hank who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about gobbling up all the time.”
The restraint of this woman who has spent more than 30 years advocating for the poor in one of America’s poorest cities was impressive, and her righteous indignation was relevant to a situation in which her interlocutor was peddling on national television the tired old story that poor people remain poor because they spend their money unwisely.
As for the political use of jokes that I mentioned earlier: My new favorite example of speaking jokes to power comes from The Onion in a fake news video that begins, “George W. Bush may be retired from politics but he’s been keeping busy with his new hobby of painting. Today the Picasso in Chief tweeted his latest picture, a turkey sandwich and a glass of lemonade in front of the ghost of the Iraqi child who follows him everywhere.” The actresses in the Onion video give pitch-perfect deadpan performances as perky news reporters, while images flash on the screen of Bush’s increasingly bloody, ghoulish and surreal paintings. “He’s even started painting in his sleep,” one of the newscasters smilingly says as the video shows an image of Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch with a child’s enormous screaming mouth painted around the front door. I am consoled by the ferociousness of this joke that blends Bush’s nonfictional painting hobby with a fictional scenario in which he actually expresses responsibility for the killing and mayhem he unleashed in Iraq on false pretexts.
Finally, here is an uplifting response to a different SCOTUS decision that was itself uplifting, namely, Browder v. Gayle, wherein the court declared segregation on public buses to be unconstitutional. In a document entitled “Integrated Bus Suggestions,” dated Dec.19, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. and his co-author, W. J. Powell, write, “This [decision] places upon us all a tremendous responsibility of maintaining, in the face of what could be some unpleasantness, a calm and loving dignity…” “If cursed, do not curse back,” they say. And they offer this beautiful piece of advice: “According to your ability and personality, do not be afraid to experiment with new and creative techniques for achieving reconciliation and social change.”
Since I began writing this essay, the Israeli Defense Forces have been steadily bombing civilians in Gaza, and Hamas has been bombing civilians in Tel Aviv. This is an extreme test of my assertion that progressive politics are and should be the politics of compassion. How do we have compassion for Knesset member Ayelet Shaked, who notoriously posted an article on Facebook calling Palestinian boys who fight against Israel “little snakes,” and advocating for the death of their mothers and the destruction of their homes? One answer is that the alternative is to follow her example of dehumanizing her adversary—which name-calling does even without advocating for murder. Having compassion does not mean condoning unjust behavior, and it does not mean giving permission for the injustice to continue or be repeated, and it does not mean not opposing the injustice. It means not regarding the perpetrators as alien life-forms, and not using words that render them as such.
I believe that what I am advocating is important, but I recognize that it’s also difficult. I have uttered hundreds of insults in my life, and have thought many more than that. As with any skill, insulting people becomes easier the more you practice it. The same is true of not insulting people. And the same is true of thinking with compassion about someone whose behavior you strongly object to. A good first step might be not to call anyone an fuckwit on Facebook.
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FOCUS | Rand Paul Tests the Limits of Political Cowardice |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 August 2014 13:01 |
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Pierce writes: "America's brogressive love-puppet speaks the weaselspeak like a native, doesn't he? He doesn't want any contact with the berating scofflaws, but he wants them to have work permits, but not in-state tuition."
Rand Paul. (photo: Jeff Malet/maletphoto.com)
Rand Paul Tests the Limits of Political Cowardice
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
09 August 14
s always, 4:59:57...4:59:58...4:59:59...
In a Wednesday radio interview on WHO in Iowa, Paul said that he had "sympathy" for the "DREAM Act kids" and conceded that, "I'm actually a moderate on immigration." Paul, who was seen walking away after the DREAMers accosted King, said he "had time to stop and grab my beer" so he "wasn't in that much of a hurry" to get to his next interview. He said that a minute before the "kamikaze" DREAMers approached King, he told journalists that he needed to take a "couple more bites" of his burger before doing more interviews. "I'm not interested in being filmed and being berated by people who broke the law," Paul said. Paul, a potential 2016 GOP presidential contender, has said he favors giving work permits to all of the country's illegal immigrants and noted that he still supports a comprehensive immigration reform bill. He also criticized Texas Governor Rick Perry, a potential 2016 rival, for embracing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and luring illegal immigrant juveniles like President Barack Obama did with his temporary amnesty program for DREAMers.
America's brogressive love-puppet speaks the weaselspeak like a native, doesn't he? He doesn't want any contact with the berating scofflaws, but he wants them to have work permits, but not in-state tuition. In four or five days, he will likely reverse all three of these reversals of positions. He will feel very strongly all three ways and, also, free pot! All in all, I am disinclined to agree with my friend Bob Draper that we are living through the libertarian moment, at least as represented by Senator Aqua Buddha. This is because "the libertarian moment" is a scam.
Also, I do not seek political enlightenment from former MTV hosts, especially ones that used to crush on Dan Quayle in their former lives as S.E. Cupp's inner child. This is why I never discuss trade policy with Martha Quinn.
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