Americans could affectively cripple the teahadists, the Republicans and the banks if they did one thing. They don't have to take to the streets, not yet. They don't have to vote with their feet in November 2012, either. They don't have to do anything even remotely difficult.
They only need vote with their tongues or their fingertips--they only need not pay Federal taxes for one year. Don't lick that stamp, don't click that submit button. Do not allow withholding and do not send in a check. Do not pay your taxes. Just say NO.
Look, the politicians already get paid very handsomely for fouling the works in DC. The corporations pay them well to ignore their constituents, sit back on their asses while they refuse to support legislation that will keep the country running, and do everything they can to punish the electorate for voting in an African American man. The corporations virtually support Congress and the Senate already. I think they should just keep right on doing it. Let Monsanto pay their wages. Allow Kaiser Permanente to pick up the health care tab. Lunches, haircuts, drivers? Kraft Foods, SC-Johnson Wax, and BP. Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers can throw in some change for those fact-finding trips (I mean heck, they already do, right?), while KB and Xe can concentrate on securing the homeland from those scary Brown People. Diebold can keep the money safe. Exxon can fill the government tanks. The CEOs and big names in the banking industry, on Wall Street and in the SEC can keep the physical plant of the government running--the lights, heat, cooling--you know, the stuff that keeps our "representatives" comfortable.
We have paid and paid and watched as our treasury empties and the money disappears down the rathole that is corporate America. If you work for a living, you pay. If you steal money for a living, you get paid. Record profits seen by the Fortune 500 are a marker for the criminal enterprise we need not support.
What might you do with the money that you would ordinarily send off to the IRS? Pay the mortgage so you don't lose the house this month? Pay a medical bill for which your insurance company denied you coverage? Fill the pantry? Take a class at the college? Pay the mechanic to keep your old car running just a few more years? I know one thing--you will do more with it than the goverment will. Because instead of building a new school in rural Mississippi, the government will take that money and use it to kill our children in a foreign country. Instead of refurbishing or rebuilding the factories in our crumbling cities, the government will buy drones that fly into Afghani wedding parties and kill the bride and groom. And because the money we pay isn't enough, the United States government has created an unpresidented national debt by borrowing from a rogue nation that cares less about its own citizens than some of the countries we have bombed in the last decade. A country whose people are working while ours are not, making the things we used to make for ourselves, before the government allowed their handlers to send the jobs to China.
Until the government taxes all of us equally, we are not represented equally. Marching in the streets will only give us some capitulation, not the representation our money should be buying us. Since corporate money means more to the members of Congress and the Senate, to the Supreme Court and yes to Barack Obama than our taxes, I say let the corporations support the monster they have made. After a year with no money coming in to pay for the drones, spyplanes and oil and corn subsidies, the government might see the real workers of this country in a new light. Hey Congress! Give us what we want and nobody gets hurt! Ignore the will of the People at your own peril.