How to build a left-wing Tea Party: A guide for Americans
Johann Hari, 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, there is a movement 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?…
…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.”…
…What should US 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.
(4 February 2011)
Life in the Water
Reverend Billy Talen, Alternet
We have a schizophrenic feeling about water. We grow up with the loving mysterious frame of the blue lakes, of fluffy clouds and sunsets over oceans. Our youthful baptism grows into swimming and then into honeymooning on a white sand beach. We love water near us – how it seems to hold life in it. But then at the same time we colonize water, demanding its presence to wash, to drink without thinking, to defecate into and dismiss into pipes. We have industrially fished the oceans to death, the rivers are dammed and diverted and poisoned.
And then, in a flash, this dominance of water changed: Our slave became our boss. Our sentimental friend got very serious. Now everyday the water rises up and floods the celebrities off the news. The blizzards, mudslides, tsunamis – everyday we are drowned. The horizon to horizon floods of Pakistan and Australia astonish us. Last week a storm paralyzed my neighborhood in New York. The storm reached to the Rockies, nearly two thousand miles across. The vapors and crystals and waves of water seemed to need to outsize the USA.
The leaders of nation-states, corporations, armies and big religions – they offer nothing but official comment on this apocalyptic turn of events. The continent-size storms are countered by a world-wide hush of public representatives. Despite that cataclysms of the weather have tripled since 1980, the news media considers each “natural disaster” a stand-alone event. Public officials face the accelerating apocalypse and insist that it has no meaning. Nature cannot originate meaning.
One day recently I watched a television in an airport. On CNN a helicopter hovered over a rooftop with the family waving from it, the wind of the copter blade fanning little waves on the flood’s surface around the house. The life-line was let down. The CNN host constructed the tabloidized story of heroism and victimhood. The flood was not a character in the story. And why not? Isn’t the rising water very much a living presence in this narrative; in fact, the hero? Didn’t the water make the heroes journey, from the month-long rain storm, culminating in this furious out-pouring? The hero in a traditional story guides the story line by taking the risk of ultimate change. We witness this raining for a month and flooding the land, and it becomes the lesson of climate change…
A student of the writers Charles Gaines and Kurt Vonnegut, Reverend Billy Talen moved to New York City in 1994 and joined the sidewalk preachers of Times Square, specializing in exorcisms of sweatshop companies such as Disney and Wal-Mart, and opposing the gentrification of neighborhoods. He has been jailed countless times in his quest to stop the Shopocalypse.
(9 February 2011)
Paradox: Linchpin Of The Long Emergency
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
When people ask me, “Will the Long Emergency happen quickly or slowly?” I answer, “Yes.” When they ask, “Will it be like rolling down a bumpy hill or falling off a cliff?” my answer is “Yes.” My response usually draws laughter or a knowing smile, and then I proceed to explain what I mean as I intend to do in this article. Answering “yes” to such questions underscores the paradox that is at the core of both the questions—and the answers, and without which it will be absolutely, unequivocally impossible to navigate the Long Emergency.
Obviously, the expression, “long emergency” is in itself paradoxical. The very word “emergency” implies a crisis that is sudden, immediate, short-lived, and abrupt. So when James Howard Kunstler entitled his book “The Long Emergency,” he captured the paradox that lies at the core of humanity’s current and future predicament.
The dictionary defines paradox as: a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. Psychologist James Hillman in a recent interview, when asked about a number of world events, responded with:
We have to realize that our minds are our enemy. The current debate has become very ideological, with certain fixed ideas dominating the discussion. This is a result of thinking in opposites; it goes back to Aristotle, and has to do with an either/or kind of logic: If something is this way, it cannot be that way.
But this isn’t how the world really is. For example, most people think that the opposite of white is black. But there are shades of black — from blackberries, to black coal or blackbirds — that have nothing to do with white. The point is to learn how to evaluate each issue on its own merits without having to bring up the opposition’s point of view. In therapy, when you have a dream of your mother, for example, you don’t necessarily have to talk about your father as a supposed opposite…
(4 February 2011)
