AN ODE TO PROTEST
AN ODE TO PROTEST
Johann Hari gave a short “Ode to Protest” that young Americans need to put to heart and store there in order to fuel activism. This statement came at the end of a short interview last week on Democracy Now after 50,000 British students hit the streets last week to protest the government’s plans to reduce education- and other public spending by up to 80%. Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent and the Huffington Post.—KAS
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/11/over_50_000_students_protest_in
Hari made a direct statement to American audiences as he summarized as follows:
Well, one of the things that’s really inspiring about this is how big and how inventive the protest and fightback movement is. And I think this is really helpful for American viewers, where the only fightback that we’re seeing over here from you guys seems to be from this massive exercise in false consciousness, the Tea Party, where people claim to be standing up frontally and they’re in fact installed in office later, stooges for Wall Street and other vested interests. Here, there’s been a much more interesting fightback.
I’ll give you a good example. One of the biggest corporations in Britain is called Vodafone, a cell phone company. And for over six years now, they have been basically refusing to pay taxes on a massive part of their business. They’ve been claiming that it’s routed through Luxembourg, where they pay almost no tax. But it isn’t. And Private Eye, the investigative magazine, calculated they had racked up a bill of six billion pounds to the equivalent of the IRS here. That would be enough to cancel all the cuts in housing benefit that are going to force 200,000 people out of London alone this year. And there was, when this came—but what happened is when the Conservatives came to office, George Osborne, David Cameron’s finance minister, effectively canceled their outstanding tax bill. He reduced it to a sixth of what was legally due.
So, it’s a really striking illustration of the priorities: you know, give a massive tax cut to an exceptionally rich corporation and crack down on the poor. Now, when this was revealed by Private Eye and my column and a few other places, including the Financial Times, there was a spontaneous mass movement of real anger among young people. They organized on Twitter, and they did something really inventive: they went to the Vodafone stores all across Britain on a specified day and shut them down. They said, "If you want to operate on our streets, in our country, you pay our taxes." Twenty-one cities across London saw Vodafone stores being shut down. Now, that means that George Osborne, next time he wants to cut the tax due legally from a massive corporation, will know there’s going to be a big kickback and will know there’s going to be a cost to that.
Now, we know from history that bad leaders can be stopped from doing even more terrible things by public pressure.
You know, one of the examples I used is Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both presented with programs—with proposals by the Pentagon to launch a nuclear strike on Vietnam. And we know from the classified minutes that have now been released, they didn’t do it, not because they thought it was a bad idea, but because, as Lyndon Johnson said it, "Can you tell me how long it would take for the protesters to break over the White House wall and lynch their president if I did that?"
So we know very clearly from history, the more you protest, the more obstacles you put in the way of bad leaders doing terrible things. Now, I have no doubt all those Vietnam protesters who went out felt they had failed. And it’s true they couldn’t do enough to stop the killing of three million Vietnamese and 56,000 Americans. But those people who went home from that protest thinking they had failed had in fact prevented a nuclear war. I think that’s a really good example of how protest has effects that we may not realize at the time, but it has a huge ripple effect that can be very positive for years afterwards.
Johann Hari gave a short “Ode to Protest” that young Americans need to put to heart and store there in order to fuel activism. This statement came at the end of a short interview last week on Democracy Now after 50,000 British students hit the streets last week to protest the government’s plans to reduce education- and other public spending by up to 80%. Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent and the Huffington Post.—KAS
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/11/over_50_000_students_protest_in
Hari made a direct statement to American audiences as he summarized as follows:
Well, one of the things that’s really inspiring about this is how big and how inventive the protest and fightback movement is. And I think this is really helpful for American viewers, where the only fightback that we’re seeing over here from you guys seems to be from this massive exercise in false consciousness, the Tea Party, where people claim to be standing up frontally and they’re in fact installed in office later, stooges for Wall Street and other vested interests. Here, there’s been a much more interesting fightback.
I’ll give you a good example. One of the biggest corporations in Britain is called Vodafone, a cell phone company. And for over six years now, they have been basically refusing to pay taxes on a massive part of their business. They’ve been claiming that it’s routed through Luxembourg, where they pay almost no tax. But it isn’t. And Private Eye, the investigative magazine, calculated they had racked up a bill of six billion pounds to the equivalent of the IRS here. That would be enough to cancel all the cuts in housing benefit that are going to force 200,000 people out of London alone this year. And there was, when this came—but what happened is when the Conservatives came to office, George Osborne, David Cameron’s finance minister, effectively canceled their outstanding tax bill. He reduced it to a sixth of what was legally due.
So, it’s a really striking illustration of the priorities: you know, give a massive tax cut to an exceptionally rich corporation and crack down on the poor. Now, when this was revealed by Private Eye and my column and a few other places, including the Financial Times, there was a spontaneous mass movement of real anger among young people. They organized on Twitter, and they did something really inventive: they went to the Vodafone stores all across Britain on a specified day and shut them down. They said, "If you want to operate on our streets, in our country, you pay our taxes." Twenty-one cities across London saw Vodafone stores being shut down. Now, that means that George Osborne, next time he wants to cut the tax due legally from a massive corporation, will know there’s going to be a big kickback and will know there’s going to be a cost to that.
Now, we know from history that bad leaders can be stopped from doing even more terrible things by public pressure.
You know, one of the examples I used is Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both presented with programs—with proposals by the Pentagon to launch a nuclear strike on Vietnam. And we know from the classified minutes that have now been released, they didn’t do it, not because they thought it was a bad idea, but because, as Lyndon Johnson said it, "Can you tell me how long it would take for the protesters to break over the White House wall and lynch their president if I did that?"
So we know very clearly from history, the more you protest, the more obstacles you put in the way of bad leaders doing terrible things. Now, I have no doubt all those Vietnam protesters who went out felt they had failed. And it’s true they couldn’t do enough to stop the killing of three million Vietnamese and 56,000 Americans. But those people who went home from that protest thinking they had failed had in fact prevented a nuclear war. I think that’s a really good example of how protest has effects that we may not realize at the time, but it has a huge ripple effect that can be very positive for years afterwards.
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 5:00 AM
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