Obituary for the Win America Campaign

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

01 May 12

nce upon a time, there was a deadly coalition of corporate lobbyists determined to use their bottomless war chests to sway lawmakers with a deluge of cash. Their agenda was twofold: Maximize their profits, and shift their tax burden to the shoulders of the disappearing middle class. Those middle class folks had enough of this corporate cabal and their greed, and decided to organize an effort to stop them in their tracks. It worked, and the coalition disbanded.

But I'm not talking about the anti-ALEC campaign of 2012 led by Color of Change, Occupy and other social justice organizations. I'm talking about the fight against the Win America Campaign (WAC) of 2011 led by US Uncut, Citizens for Tax Justice and other tax-fairness organizations. This week, the Win America Campaign, led by some of the world's most notorious corporate tax dodgers like Apple, Google, Cisco and Pfizer, finally disbanded after months of sustained grassroots pressure against their low-tax "repatriation" scam.

See, these big companies got a generous tax break in 2004, paying just a 5% federal tax rate (instead of the statutory 35% rate) on US profits they "repatriated" back to America from overseas bank accounts in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Ireland. And Bush, along with his Republican Congress, gave it to them under the auspices of "job creation."

Thing is, those profits were made in America, but these companies just exploited loopholes in the tax code (that their lobbyists helped write) that enabled them to make money here without paying taxes here.

And that big tax break they got for shifting American profits back to America didn't create jobs - Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer and others actually cut tens thousands of jobs in the year following their "repatriation" tax break, while paying multi-million-dollar salaries to their CEOs and buying back company stocks to artificially inflate their market value. Then they shifted even more profits overseas, hoping to cash in on the next repatriation scam.

It took efforts from a trifecta of dedicated activists to stop greedy corporate tax dodgers from scoring another wasteful tax break. Nonprofits like Citizens for Tax Justice, Jubilee USA, Institute for Policy Studies and Global Financial Integrity all contributed an onslaught of devastating studies and reports exposing the truth of the last repatriation scam, and wrote op-eds that ran in mainstream publications. Advocates like Nicole Tichon, Jack Blum and Chuck Collins all used these studies to lobby key lawmakers against the proposal.

Grassroots groups like US Uncut then took that information and turned it into creative direct action at Apple stores in over a dozen major cities, from Honolulu, Hawaii to DC. Chris Priest and US Uncut Boston wore shirts that disguised them as Apple employees before breaking out into spontaneous protest in an Apple store and getting carried out by police. Some of the activists who took part in the Wisconsin uprising of early 2011 protested at the Apple store in Madison. Leslie Dreyer of US Uncut San Francisco and several others wore pastel-colored skintight Zentai suits with QR code that linked to US Uncut's video calling on Apple to ditch the Win America Campaign, right outside of the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference. Jim Coleman and US Uncut Chicago demonstrated outside of the city's flagship Apple store at a high-traffic intersection for 12 weeks straight.

Even the corporate-owned media noticed our campaign - a columnist for both Fox Business and Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch talked to me about a piece called "Jobless Recovery Creates More Corporate Protesters." Independent media, tech reporters, mainstream papers, even the New York Times covered our campaign.

US Uncut activists even engaged the Win America Campaign online. WAC created a YouTube channel, with their first video featuring Rep. Paul Ryan on cable news talking about how he doesn't want repatriation every 7 years, but every day. Within an hour of posting the video on our Facebook page, Uncutters gave the video hundreds of "dislikes," and a comments thread filled with disparaging comments for Rep. Ryan and corporate tax-dodgers. WAC soon deleted the video, along with their YouTube channel. President Obama would threaten a veto of the repatriation bill, and the bill would die in Congress.

Win America finally disbanded. But we aren't going to let them slide that easy. If those companies want to create jobs, we challenge them to stick to the promise they made - dedicate 5% of their American profits stashed overseas to create new jobs in America, or use that money to give a raise to non-executive employees.

ALEC is an even more sinister corporate coalition than WAC, and will be much tougher to take down. But the Occupy Wall Street movement is already escalating tactics on corporate offenders, even threatening a day of general strike on May 1. The moral of the story? Organized people can and will prevail over organized greed.

Carl Gibson, 24, of Lexington, Kentucky, is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent, creative, direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. He graduated from Morehead State University in 2009 with a B.A. in Journalism before starting the first US Uncut group in Jackson, Mississippi, in February of 2011. Since then, over 20,000 US Uncut activists have carried out more than 300 actions in over 100 cities nationwide. You may contact Carl at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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.

Don't Look Now, Lefties Are Winning

By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

01 May 12

uick. What's the most important political trend of the past few months?

Bet you didn't say the resurgence of the Internet-empowered left.

The dogfight between Romney and Santorum got all the media oxygen, followed more recently by endless nonsense about whether Obama (who once ate dog meat) or Romney (who strapped his dog to the car-roof on a family trip) was the worse offender in the "war on dogs."

But step back and consider this impressive string of victories by progressives:

1) No SOPA for You!

The horrible "anti-piracy" bill that Republicans and corporate-friendly Democrats thought was a slam dunk was blocked at the rim by an ad hoc coalition of Big Tech and progressive-minded Internet users everywhere, nauseated by a law that would make everyday Internet activities illegal and punish illicit downloading with the kind of prison sentences usually reserved for manslaughter. The mass rebellion forced congress to turn tail and run.

2) Curing Komen's Cancerous Politics

The Susan G. Komen foundation, the previously non-partisan breast cancer-fighting pink-ribbon mega charity hired as its top lobbyist the Tea Partying former secretary of state of Georgia, who promptly pulled the plug on Komen's funding of Planned Parenthood, which provides, among other things, breast-cancer screening to low-income women. The Twittersphere ripped Komen to pink shreds, forcing the resignation of Komen's right-wing VP of Public Policy and Planned Parenthood's removal from the funding blacklist.

3) Busting Rush

After Rush Limbaugh called a pro-contraception law student a slut and demanded she provide pornographic video of herself in exchange for federally funded birth control, progressives mounted an Internet- and Twitter- shame campaign that prompted more than 20 advertisers to abandon the talk-show host, and even brought El Rushbo himself to apologize - twice!

4) Shaming ALEC

The same tactics that brought Rush to his knees have just this week forced ALEC - a corporate-backed bill mill that writes right-wing legislation for passage by Republican-led state legislatures - to abandon its efforts to influence social policy. In addition to advancing trickle-down economic policies, ALEC had been pivotal in the passage of Stand-Your-Ground gun laws across the country, like the one currently at the center of the Trayvon Martin court case. ALEC had also railroaded legislation in numerous states to restrict voting rights of the young people, poor people, and minorities. Pressure brought by the Internet Left forced Coca Cola, McDonalds, Kraft and others to withdraw from the group, and forced ALEC to stick to its economic knitting:

"We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues," the group announced in a press release, "and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy."

Each of these victories underscores the lost opportunity of the Obama presidency. The president never used his massive Internet-enabled activist base to seriously engage on his top legislative priorities. Obama's movement, likened at the end of the 2008 election as a many-million mouthed dog, was kept on leash.

That dog could have hunted; these unlikely lefty victories prove it. Progressive voices amplified through Internet activism can force congress to turn on a dime and prompt major corporations to abandon long and profitable relationships with the the most prominent and abusive figures and institutions on the right.

The president, if he's fortunate enough to gain reelection, should take note.