How to Build a Progressive Tea Party. 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. We Recommend Gather some friends, pick a tax dodger and get on the street! US Uncut - it has arrived! Fascinating development.
Or at least it looks like it - we don't have any good information yet as to who the organisers are. But this looks promising. And their first action follows Johann Hari's excellent article in The Nation, and this earlier piece of ours. Already on twitter there are US Uncut groups springing up - @nycuncut, @brooklynuncut, etc. Let's hope it grows real legs. We also notice, hat tip to Jamie Stern-Weiner, that the Daily Kos has shown that such a campaign, or a campaign on tax havens, might well have legs. Here's the interview on Daily Kos (about Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands.)The thing to note about it, apart from the positive reception in the comments, is that it was both 'Rescued' and featured on the 'Recommended list'.
Time for a USA Uncut? Time for a USA Uncut?
A few weeks ago ten activists, mostly in their twenties, met in the Nag’s Head pub in North London and started to discuss protesting against severe austerity measures being implemented by Britain’s coalition govermnent. Instead of protesting simply against cuts, they thought it would be more interesting to launch a strike against tax-dodging multinational corporations. Building on analyses of the UK’s so-called Tax Gap, a subject where the Tax Justice Network’s Senior Adviser Richard Murphy has been especially influential, the young activists could see this was a clear and coherent alternative to the government’s austerity programme. The group called itself UK Uncut – and their idea began to spread like a virus, especially on Facebook and Twitter (#ukuncut, for the Twitterati). By December 4th the group had triggered a co-ordinated day of almost spontaneous protests across Britain, with nuclei sprouting unexpectedly and automomously in the most unexpected places.
IRS Would Add 5,000 Employees to Pursue Tax Cheats Under Obama Budget Plan. President Barack Obama proposed increasing the budget for the Internal Revenue Service by 9.4 percent to hire more than 5,000 new employees, most of whom would pursue tax cheats.
CNNmoney: Majority of corporations avoid federal income taxes - study - Aug. 12, 2008. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes, according to a congressional report released Tuesday.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005. In that time period, an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes - despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue. The study showed that 28% of foreign companies and 25% of U.S. corporations with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in sales paid no federal income taxes in 2005. Those companies totaled a combined $372 billion in sales for the largest foreign companies and $1.1 trillion in revenue for the biggest U.S. companies. But many of the companies the report found had paid no tax were likely small businesses that pay other taxes.
What The Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes - Forbes.com. Pay Up, Corporate Tax Dodgers - OtherWords. Instead of cutting state and federal budgets, the United States should crack down on the corporate tax dodgers thumbing their noses at us.
Across the nation, states are making deep cuts that will wreck the quality of life for everyone to close budget gaps that total more than $100 billion. But there’s a more sensible option. Overseas tax havens enable companies to pretend their profits are earned in other countries like the Cayman Islands. Simply making that ruse illegal would bring home an estimated $100 billion a year. The next time you read a story about some politician bemoaning that “there’s no money” and “we have to make cuts,” just point to artful tax dodgers in our midst.
They include some of the banks that trashed the economy but gladly took our tax dollars to stay alive after the economic meltdown. See that FedEx delivery van go by on the roads you paid for? These corporations are heavy users of our taxpayer funded public infrastructure and property rights protection systems. With Corporate Tax Reform Under Consideration, a Look at Businesses’ Treasured Loopholes. Corporate Tax Code Is Resistant to Change.