Guess what. Maybe it has started. The great gray horse may be rising to her feet at last. Maybe the sane middle class of America isn't dead in its tracks after all.
I have a column in this week's paper talking about a real Tea Party movement in the UK -- not a fake AstroTurf thing like the American Tea Party, bought and paid for by the Koch brothers to keep old white people addle-pated. The movement in Great Britain, called UK Uncut, is the real deal, a true grassroots movement aimed right at the throats of the fat-cat, tax-cheating, omnivore corporations that are responsible for the underfunding crisis in England. And here.
I said in my column, "We Americans are going to have to rise up from our La-Z-Boys and take to the cobblestones." A reader commenting on-line pointed out that the great La-Z-Boy evacuation may already be under way.
Two weeks ago a 23-year-old former public radio reporter in Kentucky named Carl Gibson formed US Uncut, based on the British model but aimed at some high-value American targets -- huge corporations that pay zero dollars in U.S. income tax -- a trillion dollars in dodged taxes.
Instead of shutting down the public school system, how about making these people pay their damned taxes?
I talked to Gibson at the end of last week, and I will write more about him and the US Uncut movement in my column in the newspaper March 17. He said the response so far has been staggering, leading him to conclude that "people have just been waiting for a chance" to do something.
It's all online, on Facebook, Twitter and the US Uncut web page. They raise no money. It's all do-it-yourself volunteer. And it really seems to be lighting up. Maybe it will be the American Tahrir Square.
Next week I will also be writing again about the calamity facing our public school systems, which have been deliberately and disastrously under-funded by the Rick Perry Republican regime in Austin. I said last week we needed to take to the cobblestones. Tell me. Is that shoe leather we're beginning to hear out there as we speak?
