There is a ripple of rage spreading across America. It is clearer every day that the people of the United States have been colossally scammed. Everyone can see the bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on taxpayers' cash, and the only people the political class is hurrying to help are the super-rich fund who their campaigns. Yet the rage is being directed by a minority in a totally wrong direction - towards building a Tea Party that is dedicated to stripping away even the pathetically puny regulations on the banks and the rich introduced by Obama. Among most Americans, there is simply a flailing sense of impotence. You are furious, but you feel there you nothing we can do. There's a mood that you have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than you, and all you can do is sit back and be shafted.
This mood is wrong. It doesn't have to be this way - if enough of us act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small scandal, a small response - and a big lesson from history.
Here's an example of how a left-wing fightback has begun in Britain - a Coffee Party, rather than a Tea Party. For years now, the massive mobile phone company Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British government that are outstanding. The company - which has doubled its profits during this recession - engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, claiming much of its business takes place in ultra-low tax Luxemburg. They owed a sum the investigative magazine Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn ($9.5bn).
Then, suddenly, the Conservatives came to power and canceled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in the British IRS says is "an unbelievable cave-in." A few days after the decision, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government's Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Conservatives think it should be done. At the same time, the Conservatives have announced a cut of £6bn ($9.5bn) to the support given for poor people to be housed, which will drive 200,000 people of their homes in London alone. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn ($19bn) a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn ($190bn).
After I wrote about this in the British press, many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn't pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter - and a big crowd of enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. "Vodafone won't pay as they go," said one banner. "Make Vodafone pay, not the poor," said another. The reaction from members of the public - who were handed leaflets explaining the situation - was startling. Again and again, people said "I'm so glad somebody is doing this" and "there needs to be much more of this." Lots of them stopped to talk about how frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done.
Then the protests became a wave. Across Britain, ordinary citizens went to their local Vodafone store and shut it down. In 21 different places spanning the whole of Britain, the shops have been forcibly closed by protesters.
You might ask - so what? What has been changed? To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let's start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause - and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square in London was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up - and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.
Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: "Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters - and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks." It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.
If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can. But let's look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn't prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was "failing," it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson - a thug prone to threatening to "crush" entire elected governments - with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They "proved," using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would "save lives."
It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: "I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?" He knew that there would be a cost - in protest and democratic revolt - that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon - and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn't do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed - but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do - but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.
Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation and make the British people pick up the tab, he will know there is a price. People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, in Britain and the US, we can make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather than the poor and the middle - to name just one urgent cause that deserves protest.
And protest can have an invisible ripple effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House - and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.
Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren't I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand - and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.
You don't know what the amazing ripple effect of your protest will be - but wouldn't America be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of you are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it's an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defense. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic campaigner, said: "Never doubt that small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk
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