Calling out the tax cheats

PORTLAND, Ore.--More than 60 people gathered in freezing temperatures on the morning of February 26 to demand that Bank of America pay its fair share in corporate income taxes.

The protest was one of many actions held in dozens of cities across the U.S. as part of a national "kick-off" day of action for U.S. Uncut, a group inspired by the British group UK Uncut, which has been mobilizing against austerity measures in the UK.

U.S. Uncut is a loose coalition of grassroots activists involved in organizing demonstrations against austerity measures and for stopping budget cuts by closing corporate tax loopholes. Many of the actions targeted Bank of America branches and, in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., two branches were forced to close early as a result of the protests.

As the group's Web site states, budget 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."

In Portland, protesters rejected the idea that workers should pay for the economic crisis, pointing out that Bank of America paid nothing in income taxes in 2009 after receiving $45 billion in TARP funds and making $4.4 billion in profits. The energetic protest involved a picket of an open branch near downtown, and provided an opportunity to speak to many customers and passerby about the tax-dodging practices of the banks.

The organizer of the Portland demonstration, Jen Nichols, said she was inspired by the demonstrations in the UK and wanted to organize something locally. She noted that "we don't have a deficit problem in the United States, we have a revenue problem" because corporations aren't paying taxes.

Nichols and many others at the demonstration were new to activism. One woman at the protest had a stable job at a for-profit university, and said she came to understand the absurdity our current economic system when asking students to acquire student loan debt for a degree that won't help them get jobs in the current economy. Another protester had recently been foreclosed upon by a bank that received TARP funds. Chants included "B of A--make them pay" and "They got bailed out, we got sold out."

Demonstrators also brought a cake to the picket decorated with the words "Pay your taxes." A delegation brought the cake into the Bank of America branch as a "gift" to branch management. The managers declined the gift--and the message--and the demonstrators were left to eat the (delicious) cake ourselves.

Nichols said she hoped to hold similar demonstrations at least monthly to call out tax-dodging banks and build the national fight-back against budget cuts.