Inspiration for Next Weekend's Days of Resistance

As I posted yesterday, April 15-18 will see demonstrations around the country against corporations who cheat to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Two weeks aga, March 26, was a USUncut Day of Action against those corporations, and Allison Kilkenny at The Nation has a roundup of links to photos and videos.

Video and photos from US Uncut’s forty nationwide protests are beginning to come in. Perhaps the liveliest chapter is US Uncut DC, whose 100+ members shut down a Bank of America branch on Saturday. Reportedly, the bank managers pulled a fire alarm as action began at the protest. This is not the first time the franchise has successfully shut down BoA’s operations.

Other states decided to target different corporate tax dodgers. In 2009 and 2010, Verizon reported $24.2 billion in pretax income, but the company hasn’t paid a penny in taxes on that revenue, so in Ohio members of the “Citizens’ Revenue Service” went to a local Verizon store in order to collect the taxes on behalf of the American people.

More videos and photos from Chicago (where a protester alleges BoA told her she could not close down her account ‘because she’s a protester’), Wisconsin, New Jersey and Michigan have also been posted on the US Uncut website, Youtube and Twitter.

Still, there are other protests that haven’t publicly posted photos or videos yet. In Boston, protesters performed street theater, including a sketch with music that was written about billionaires vs. citizens, of course with the citizens winning in the end. In Tennessee, activists gathered to ask why BoA pays less in taxes than an average American household, and I attended US Uncut NYC’s protest, where I witnessed a police officer shove a completely peaceful activist inside a Bank of America.

Several branches that held protests and haven’t had the opportunity to upload video and photos yet have contacted me, so I’ll be updating the blog throughout the week with those events.

More links, stories and a song here.

Remember: Next weekend, April 15 through April 18, your friends and neighbors will hold protests in communities all over the country to demand that the obscenely wealthy and the tax-avoiding corporations pay their fair share.

Click here to find an April 15-18 USUncut Corporate Tax Cheats Are Cheating America event near you.

Click here to find a Moveon Tax Day Make Them Pay event in your town.