'Uncut' Activists Claim Purge of Facebook Pages

Friday, April 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Protest groups claim Facebook has taken down dozens of pages in a purge of activists' accounts

by Shiv Malik - The Guardian

 

Activists are claiming that dozens of politically linked Facebook accounts have been removed or suspended by the company in the last 12 hours.
 
 The list of suspended pages include those for the anti cuts group UK Uncut, and pages that were created by students during last December's university occupations.

A list posted on the UCL occupation blog site says the Goldsmiths Fights Back, Slade Occupation, Open Brikbeck, and Tower Hamlet Greens pages as no longer functioning.
It is not yet known how many websites have been affected in total or why they are not working. Facebook is currently looking into the issue.

Guy Aitchison, 26, an administrator for one of the non-functioning pages said, "I woke up this morning to find that a lot of the groups we'd been using for anti-cuts activity had disappeared. The timing of it seems suspicious given a general political crackdown because of the royal wedding."

"It seems that dozens of other groups have also been affected, including some of the local UK Uncut groups."

Earlier, it was reported that the Metropolitan police had invoked special powers to deter anarchists in central London ahead of the royal wedding.

Police threw a section 60 cordon around the whole of the royal wedding zone on Friday morning to respond to anarchists masking up at a small gathering in Soho Square in central London.

The section 60 order allows police officers to stop and search anyone without discretion. The police also imposed section 60a, which gives them the power to remove masks and balaclavas from anyone within the area.

Scotland Yard said the decision was made after individuals were seen putting on masks in Soho Square where a group of anarchists had gathered.

The Guardian is awaiting a comment from Facebook.

• If your page is affected, please email the Guardian at newseditor@guardian.co.uk

This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Monday, April 4, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

Everyone Has a Stake in US Uncut's Fight

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by The Nation
by Allison Kilkenny

This weekend, US Uncut chapters in Georgia, New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and California staged actions (a much larger nationwide protest is planned for March 26. Thus far, thirty cities have signed up). I spoke with Kevin Shields, the founder of US Uncut Philadelphia about the protest and also his wish to close the divides between three groups: members of the lower classes, US Uncut’s predominately white movement and minority communities and also domestic efforts and the anti-austerity resistances in other countries.

A senior in high school, Shields decided to start his own US Uncut chapter simply because the need to protest is in his DNA. “For me, protesting and getting involved in activism is just something you do. If you don’t do it, you’re really missing out, and you’re participating in your own exploitation. So when I saw this, I thought, okay, I’ll do that.”

He tells me what happened at Saturday’s protest. It’s a familiar story for the newer branches of US Uncut: a small, peaceful protest during which the activists staged a “teach-in.”

“We explained [to customers] that if you take half of the money the IRS paid [Bank of America] in 2009 you’d be able to pay for every single cut Governor Corbett is proposing…. We just educated everyone there about what’s going on.”

For an example of a teach-in, here is a video from Uncut Boston:

As usual, the staff of the bank was not amused. “The security guy was kind of stressing out,’” says Shields. But then a funny thing happened. Security called the police, and when an officer arrived to the scene, he didn’t seem to know what to do. The protest was peaceful, and the activists clearly weren’t looking for a fight. Shields said the officer lingered in the bank for fifteen minutes before approaching him. “Finally, he walked up to me and was like, ‘They really want you to leave. I don’t want to tell you to leave, but they really want you to leave.’ It was really weird to have a cop at a protest be so polite to me,” he says.

I witnessed similar behavior at New York’s day of action. Protesters spoke with police officers and explained they were engaging in civil disobedience on their behalf. Under Mayor Bloomberg’s leadership, firefighting staff will fall to its lowest ranks since 1980, and the police force will be slashed to its 1992 level, according to an Independent Budget Office’s report. Bloomberg also intends to fire 5,000 teachers. The cops seemed sympathetic with the protesters, who after all, were outside shivering and clinging to cardboard signs partly to save their jobs.

It’s trickier to form the same bonds of solidarity in Philadelphia because of a shrewd maneuver by Governor Corbett. Shields launches into an explanation of Corbett’s tactic by telling me a story about former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“There was one part of the government that Maggie spent more money on, and that was police, and of course she needed them for the miner strike. Corbett is doing the exact same thing here. He’s actually increased funding on police by about $40 million.”

By heavily funding the police, Corbett is removing the possibility of a serious, unified backlash from unions in the wake of his other austerity measures (about $1 billion in cuts). He has successfully managed to squash solidarity.

However, Shields has some ideas for how to counteract the Corbett-style wedge. Now, this must be stressed (namely because he emphatically emphasized it): Shields is by no means calling the shots. Unlike an astroturfing campaign like FreedomWorks, US Uncut is a 100 percent genuine grassroots movement. As such, it’s completely democratic. The members decide where the agenda goes. That being said, Shields does have some good ideas he wanted to convey to me.

He wants to capitalize on the overwhelmingly positive response he’s gotten from the protests thus far. Tax dodging, unlike abortion or gay marriage, isn’t really a super-divisive issue. For the most part, people agree that rich corporations should pay their fair in taxes, namely because citizens have to pay taxes, so why should the lavishly wealthy get to avoid them?

“It’s amazing because we’re actually getting a positive reaction from everyone that walks by. The only people who don’t like it are the bank managers.”

Since the issue of corporate tax dodging is such an enormously unifying cause, he wants to seize upon that spirit of solidarity and extend a hand to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), an organization that oftentimes adopts conservative stances on issues. For example, the FOP opposed the Employee Free Choice Act.

“I want to explain and say I know they’re spending more money on you, and your comrades, but the teachers and firefighters are getting totally screwed over,” he says, adding that other innocents can be hurt, too, like when two children in Philadelphia died from rolling brownouts, a process of closing fire stations on a daily rotating basis in order to save the city money.

Shields stresses the link between firefighters and police officers. Since his father is a cop, he goes to a lot of parties at firehouses where he sees firefighters and cops mingling. “So we want to get that message through to them, and say, look, Corbett is trying to bribe you. He’s trying to make you feel like you’re separate from them, but you’re not. You’re all part of the same class. You all have to work together, or else you’re all going to be brought down.”

All of this talk of budgetary cuts reminds Shields of crime-ridden Camden, where nearly half the police force was just laid off. “My parents won’t let me go to Camden, and I don’t want to go,” he says. “It’s scary what happened there. It’s so weird, ever since that happened, there’s been this shock.”

But he wants to educate people that the austerity pirates won’t stop at Camden. They won’t stop until all the middle-class wealth is gone, and the poor have been stripped of their rights to collectively fight back. “If we use [Camden] as an example and say they’re coming for you eventually.”

I asked him about one of the major criticisms I’ve heard lobbed at US Uncut: it’s an overwhelmingly white movement, which is a problem for a group that is about economic exploitation. Who has been more victimized by class inequality and a regressive taxation system than poor minorities? I asked Shields if US Uncut plans to do any outreach in the inner-city.

“Oh yeah. Pretty huge outreach,” he quickly responds. He tells me about the Taxi Workers Alliance, a group he clearly admires. “They’re a really interesting and inspiring group. Eight-five percent of them are immigrants.”

Shields intends to invite the alliance to the next US Uncut day of action. ”You can’t get any more diverse than taxi drivers,” he says. “Their union meetings—they don’t have a hall or anything—they meet outside the airport, but it’s like the United Nations…. They all have to translate for each other.... We’re going to do outreach to them, and if they’re interested—and a lot of them are—it definitely won’t be a white movement in Philly.”

Finally, Shields says that he wants to bridge the US and UK Uncut movements. “I want to…have an international day of action where we go after Verizon and Vodafone, collectively.” (To see how Verizon uses Vodafone to dodge taxes, read my last blog post).

“I think it would sort of tie the whole thing together…. With all the austerity the world governments are making it would be really amazing if we could have international resistance to international austerity.”

He lists some countries experiencing austerity: Portugal, Spain, and Ireland, and adds, “It would be cool if we could…draw a line across the Atlantic where we show there’s a common enemy of the international working class…. It would be good to show solidarity. Being part of an international movement is really an exhilarating thing, and it would excite a lot of people.”

‘US Uncut’ crashes Bank of America ‘Tax Dodger Conference’

By David Edwards - RAW Story
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Several demonstrators crashed Bank or America's Investor Conference Tuesday to make the point that when corporations don't pay taxes, governments are forced to lay off public workers.

A blog posting by the anti-austerity group U.S. Uncut called for protesters to gather Tuesday morning at what they called Bank of America's "Tax Dodger Conference."

"Call your broker- if you have any shares in BofA, you're free to come inside to the conference and tell everyone you see about BofA's tax dodging," the statement said.

After the conference had gotten underway, demonstrators unfurled a banner reading "Tax Dodger."
"When corporations like Bank of America don't pay their fair share of taxes, we have to 'cut' teachers, firefighters, and public servants," one protester shouted. "Do you pay your taxes? So do we. Why don't corporations pay their fair share, just like everyone else?"

"Bank of America is Bad for America," the added. "Bank of America pockets billions in profits and bailouts, but $0 in American taxes - that's immoral and un-American."

Last month, the same group organized demonstrations at 40 different Bank of America branches.

U.S. Uncut credited an article in The Nation by John Hari called "How to Build a Progressive Tea Party" with calling the group to action.

"Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind," he wrote. "Instead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism."
The group takes their name from the British group U.K. Uncut, which seeks to use public protests to shame corporations into paying taxes.

A list compiled by Forbes showed that Bank of America paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in income in 2009.

USUncut Protest against Corporate Tax Dodgers First Day of Action Feb 26, this Sat.

First Day of Action Saturday, Feb 26, 2011

US Uncut is about taking action against unnecessary and unfair cuts to public services across the US. Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans.

Obama seeks to trim $1.1 trillion from the budget in the next ten years by cutting or eliminating over 200 federal programs, many dedicated to social services and education. For instance, it cuts in half funding to subsidize heating for low-income Americans; limits an expansion of the Pell grant program for students; and decreases Environmental Protection Agency funding by over 12%.

Meanwhile, Republicans are using their new House majority to slash spending even more brutally. The GOP has made it clear that they are bent on raiding funds for Social Security, Medicare, education; determined to kill health care reform; and gut needed investments in infrastructure, climate change and job creation, at a time when America needs it most.

These cuts will come on top of very painful austerity measures made at the state-level across our nation–-worth hundreds of billions--since the recession began.

In short, budget cuts demonstrate that Washington has abandoned ordinary Americans.

But there is an alternative: Make corporate tax avoiders pay.

Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy struggles from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America’s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.

If we pay our taxes, why don’t they? If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?
It’s time for ordinary Americans to fight back and demand an end to the corporate tax avoidance. Join US Uncut and together let's make corporate tax avoiders pay.


US Uncut is a horizontal movement. There are no centrally planned protests. If you want one in your town or city, you'll have to take it on yourself. Read our blog about what to do next. 

Feb. 26 Target: Bank of America 

Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America has consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. In fact, in 2009, Bank of America actually received a net tax benefit. Yes, last year, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion. That money alone could almost completely cover the proposed $2.5 billion cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills and affects 34 million households. Bank of America is the largest bank and 9th largest corporation in the country, holding over $2.2 trillion in assets, and yet it pays less in taxes than the average American household, which made between $35,400 and $52,100 and had an effective tax rate of 14.2%.

We pay our taxes, why don't they?

On February 26th, citizens across the country will be targeting Bank of America branches and peaceably but forcefully showing them that they can't get away with such egregious tax-cheating.

Nation's Eyes Turn to Wisconsin Amid Struggle over Collective Bargaining (3 articles)

(I feel the need to compare this struggle to the one taking place between the NFL owners and players. The Wisconsin events really minimize the NFL's petty bullshit. What really matters vs What doesn't matter at all, really. 

And for anyone who thinks this uprising here is treason or a betrayal, understand this: this is not about overthrowing America, it is about removing corporate influence and corruption from the govt. The corporate sponsored Supreme Court legalized the purchase and ownership of congress, the White House, and federal courts. Every political position has a price tag, and corporate influence and corruption guides every political decision made in this country now, including the anti-labor moves of Wisconsin's state govt. 

The most important aspect to this uprising here is that it remains PEACEFUL, NON-VIOLENT, RESOLUTE and STRONG. If you are not committed to seeing this through to the end, it's OK if you'd rather watch it on the news. But history will look back on these days as the time when people all over the world said "Enough of this bullshit. Corporations aren't people, they shouldn't have influence over the govt" (which is technically fascism)"and when they break laws, they need to be punished the same way an individual who commits the same crime is punished, which means holding its executives and board responsible for crimes committed by the corporation. Corporate bottom lines do not come before the health, welfare and civil rights of the people. The people are what is most important about the United States--not it's govt, not its history, not even its security or economic standing. The people come first in America, and that has gotten way lost over the years leading up to this."

It remains to be seen how committed people will be, how the govt will respond (the Wisconsin governor has already threatened to call out the National Guard), and what changes as a result. But history is on our side. Ours is the side of what's right, what's fair and what's good for the people of this country, not the corporate bottom line. "The people...United...will never be divided!"--jef)

++++++

Saturday, February 19, 2011 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
Nation's Eyes Turn to Wisconsin Amid Struggle over Collective Bargaining
by Clay Barbour

MADISON, WI - The birthplace of Progressivism this week became the key battleground in a fight that has repercussions stretching from New York to California.

As protests against Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan to severely curb collective bargaining rights for public employees continued for a fifth day at the state Capitol Friday, demonstrators were joined by union supporters from Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as national union leaders and civil rights advocate the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The political fight has captured the nation's attention, landing on nearly every major network and spurring dialogue about its relevance for the rest of the country. To many, Wisconsin represents the line in the sand for public employee unions, who find themselves under siege in several states. Losing ground here, they fear, will cost them everywhere.

"This is a coordinated effort by the Republican Party to destroy the labor movement in this country," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, in town Friday for the largest day of rallies, estimated by Madison police at 35,000 to 40,000 people. "If Wisconsin passes this, there are at least another 12 to 15 states that will try it."

Republicans leaders who took office as part of the conservative wave the swept the nation in November are promising deep spending cuts and more fiscal discipline. Many are also fighting for major changes to labor relations.

Union membership decline

The efforts come as organized labor reels from a steady loss of members in the private sector. The public sector, with about 7.6 million members, now accounts for the majority of workers on union rolls, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Making matters worse for unions, most states are wrestling with major budget problems. It has gotten so bad that even Democratic governors — usually friendly with labor — are targeting public employees and unions as ripe for cutbacks.

Lawmakers in Tennessee, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Nevada and California are considering severe cuts to public employees, including layoffs, pay freezes and increased donations to employee pension and benefit plans. Collective bargaining in each of those states is in danger.

In Ohio, where lawmakers face an estimated $8 billion budget gap, the Legislature debated a bill this week that would limit collective bargaining for about 400,000 public employees. Protestors have rallied at the statehouse in Columbus, but on a far smaller scale than in Madison.

Pieter Wykoff, who works for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said public employee contracts have gotten out of hand.

"They are an albatross around government's neck," he said. "What you are seeing is state governments across the country making a stand. Taxpayers are tired of subsidizing benefits they never get."

In New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing a $10 billion budget gap. He has vowed to balance his budget without tax increases. One of the key parts of his plan is to cut about $550 million by freezing public employee salaries and requiring them to pay a bigger share of their pensions and benefits coverage. He has threatened unions with as many as 9,800 layoffs if they can't agree on a deal.

"We are all in the same boat when it comes to public employees," said Morris Peters, Cuomo's budget spokesman. "It's just math. You can't run from that."

Giving government tools it needs

Walker wants to remove nearly all collective bargaining rights for most of Wisconsin's 175,000 state and local government employees, allowing workers to negotiate only over salary. He has exempted most law enforcement, firefighters and Wisconsin State Patrol troopers from his proposal.

By ending state employees' ability to negotiate for their pensions and insurance rates, the governor will be able to increase employee pension contributions to 5.8 percent of salary and more than double their health insurance contributions.

Currently most state employees pay nothing toward their pensions and a modest amount for their insurance. Walker said those increases alone would save the state $30 million this fiscal year and 10 times that much in future budgets. He said that would help him overcome the $137 million hole in the current budget, and eventually help the state make up the $3.6 billion shortfall projected for the next biennial budget.

Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell and Wisconsin State Employees Union Executive Director Marty Beil have both said the state's unions are willing to consider the governor's changes to their pension and benefits plans. But the unions remain dead set against his bid to end most collective bargaining rights.

In his office Friday, a raucous crowd just outside his window, Walker stood firm on his goal.

"I know full well the negative impact collective bargaining has on a county, city, town and school district officials to balance their budget," Walker said. "We're going to give local governments the tools they've been asking for, for decades."

That promise is the stuff of nightmares for union leaders. Organized labor is expected to spend a lot of money on fights in Wisconsin, as well as the other states where lawmakers have targeted labor.

And if Walker's bill goes through, as expected, Trumka promised a massive labor uprising in the state.

"We will be in the streets," he said.

+++++

Saturday, February 19, 2011 by YES! Magazine
Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?
It took awhile, but Wisconsin shows that the poor and middle class of the U.S. may be ready to push back. Madison may be only the beginning.
by Sarah van Gelder

The uprising that swept Tunisia, Egypt, and parts of Europe is showing signs of blossoming across the United States.

In Wisconsin, public employees and their supporters are drawing the line at Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate collective bargaining and unilaterally cut benefits. School teachers, university students, firefighters, and others descended on the capital in the tens of thousands, and even the Superbowl champion Green Bay Packers have weighed in against the bill. Protests against similar anti-union measures are ramping up in Ohio.

Meanwhile, another protest movement aimed at protecting the poor and middle class is in the works. Cities around the country are preparing for a February 26 Day of Action, “targeting corporate tax dodgers.”

Learning from the UK

The strategy picks up on the UK Uncut campaign, begun when a group at a London pub—a firefighter, a nurse, a student, and others—came up with an idea that is part flash mob, part sit-in. In an article published in the Nation, reporter Johann Hari tells the story of the group’s frustration about government cutbacks. If Vodafone, one corporation with a huge back-tax bill, paid up, the cutbacks wouldn’t be needed. The group spread the word over social media, and held loud, impolite demonstrations. The idea quickly went viral, and flash mobs/sit-ins materialized at retail outlets across Britain, shutting many of them down.

Now, a US Uncut group has formed and announced a February 26 Day of Action here to coincide with UK Uncut's planned protests on the same day. Already, a dozen local events are planned. Some groups are keeping quiet about their targets, but several are targeting Bank of America. The goal, according to a statement on the US Uncut website, is “to draw attention to the fact that Bank of America received $45 billion in government bailout funds while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens [...] And to highlight the fact that the poor and middle class are now paying for this largess through drastic government cuts.”

The Politics of Class Warfare

Across the country, the poor and middle class have suffered from the economic collapse: jobs disappeared, mortgages sank underneath debt, and opportunities for a college education evaporated. Much of the bailout that was supposed to fix the economy went to the very institutions that caused the collapse. Many of these institutions are now using tax loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes.

The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

It took some time for a political response to coalesce. The Tea Party movement was able to direct discontent away from the Wall Street titans who brought the economy to its knees. Funding from the Koch brothers’ petro-fortune along with fawning attention from Fox News helped get the libertarian movement off the ground. But progressives remained fragmented and few built active, organized bases. Many waited for President Obama to act.

The tide may now be turning. Inspired by people-power movements around the world, people in the United States are beginning push back. The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.

Politicians are scurrying to cut spending, but fewer than one in five Americans say the federal budget deficit is their chief worry about the economy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center; 44 percent say they're most worried about jobs. Polls show that Americans also want spending for education, investment in infrastructure, and environmental protection. Yet spending in all these areas is up for drastic cuts in state and federal budgets.

Likewise, on the tax side, 59 percent of Americans opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, according to a Bloomberg poll. Congress cut the taxes anyway, and the package will cost $800 billion over just two years.

Until now, polls have been one of the few places where anger at government policies that favor the rich while cutting service to the middle-class has been visible. But the crowds in Madison and the momentum of US Uncut tell us that may be about to change.

As a statement on the US Uncut website puts it: “We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize, we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”

Here's a "how-to" from UK Uncut:

++++++

Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin
By Joshua Holland | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at February 18, 2011

What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit."

Walker then used the deficit he'd created as the justification for assaulting his state's public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money." Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.

Walker's bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear -- before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state's employees' unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn't have that power).

But he's spinning the measure as something else -- a bitter pill state workers must swallow in order to save Wisconsin's government. So the first things you need to know are:

1. Wisconsin's public workers  have already "made sacrifices to help balance the budget, through 16 unpaid furlough days and no pay increases the past two years," according to the Associated Press. The unions know their members are going to have to make concessions on benefits, but they rightly see the assault on their fundamental right to negotiate as an act of war. 

2. There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore notes,  "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."  

3. This isn't just about public employees. What even a majority of the protesters don't know is that Walker's law would also place all of the state's Medicaid funding in the hands of the governor.  State senator Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton -- one of the Dem law-makers who fled the state to block a vote on the bill -- told local media that this amounted to "substantial Medicaid changes" that put "the governor, all of a sudden... in charge of Medicaid, which is SeniorCare, which is BadgerCare ...and he has never once said what he intends to do” with those programs. But the provision led journalist Suzie Madrak to conclude that "the end game for all this is to defund state Medicaid programs and make it impossible to serve as part of the new health care safety net."

4. Health-care costs, rather than workers' greed, are what has driven up the price of employees' benefits. But generally speaking, those public sector health-care costs have grown at a slower clip than in the private sector.

5. Public employees' pensions account for just 6 percent of state budgets.

This has nothing to do with the state's fiscal picture. Aside from potentially undermining Wisconsin's public health-care system, it's really about destroying the last bastion of unionism in the American economy: public employees. As Addie Stan wrote on AlterNet's front page:

Walker is carrying out the wishes of his corporate master, David Koch, who calls the tune these days for Wisconsin Republicans. Walker is just one among many Wisconsin Republicans supported by Koch Industries -- run by David Koch and his brother, Charles -- and Americans For Prosperity, the astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch. The Koch brothers are hell-bent on destroying the labor movement once and for all.

Consider these facts:

6. Last year, more working people belonged to a union in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private (7.4 million), despite the fact that corporate America employs five times the number of wage-earners.  37 percent of government workers belong to a union, compared with just 7 percent of private-sector employees. 

7. Whether in the public or private sector, union workers earn, on average, 20 percent more than their non-unionized counterparts. They also have richer retirement and health benefits -- the “union compensation premium” rises to almost 30 percent when you include those bennies.

That workers can still negotiate from a position of strength somewhere in the US is simply unacceptable to the right, and that's what this is about. As you might expect, the tool they're using in their campaign is a pack full of lies and distortions about public employees. Here are some answers to those falsehoods:

8. Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree). 

9. When you adjust for those factors, they make, on average, 4 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.

10. Like any group of workers with a high union density, they have better benefits, on average. But even including those benefits,   state and local employees still make less in total compensation than they would doing the same work in the private sector. 

11. In 2007, the average pension for a public sector worker was $22,000. Not exactly caviar dreams.

12. Many public employees are not eligible for Social Security -- those pensions, and whatever they can put away on their own, is all that they'll have in their golden years.

(Unless otherwise indicated, you can find links to the data for all of the above in my piece, "Right-Wingers Using Public Employees as 21st-Century Welfare Queens.")

The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: "How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?" It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: "What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?" At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin.