Using new
technology, everyone in America can join the Online Tax Revolt, and March for
America. There is no cost; it is
an old-fashioned protest march in the street with signs and the symbols of
protest and even "real" streets.
It ends in Washington on Tax Day April 15 where each participant’s
avatar and team will join in the live rally taking place in the Capitol that
day.
Today the
Online Tax Revolt makes its soft launch at the CPAC
meetings in Washington DC, on Neal Boortz’ Nationally syndicated Radio Talk
Show and with announcements here
in Fox and Hounds and selected other sites. On March 1 the hard launch starts with aggressive buys on
talk radio, emails, social networking sites, direct mail, banner ads and such.
We know
there are millions of Americans who sympathize with Tea Party activists. The Tea Party is currently more
popular than either major party.
But most people, for one reason or another, cannot or do not turn
out. Who among us is not now
picking up a mental pitch fork, at least from time to time? Who among us is not, to one extent or
another, cheering on the Tea Parties?
The Tea
Party movement began around kitchen tables, not with politicians or consultants. It is political activism created and
driven by frustration with a broken system that rewards the few and hinders the
very freedom and drive to succeed of the many. New technologies are providing the way for the still
employed, the homebound, those economically unable to leave their homes and
travel, or who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable raising their fists in
a crowd at the town square, and to do so and do so effectively from their
homes, offices…anywhere.
Participants
need only give their email address, zip code and name, select an avatar to
represent them, and they will be there as their avatar begins marching from
their neighborhood in route to Washington. The technology uses Google Earth to enable each protestor to
be with their avatar right where they are marching on any given day. Emails and text messages will urge
protestors to join their avatars as they march across our nation.
Each
protesting American will travel at different speeds depending on when they join
the Online Tax Revolt, and how far they have to travel. Each will be urged to
ask family and friends to join them in Marching for America…to start anywhere
in the country and meet on Constitution Avenue in Washington DC. Tens of
thousands will arrive in DC on the morning of April 15 and flood the streets as
they move to their positions right in the live rallies. All of it will be streamed live to
those Marching Online for America.
Teams will
be led my President Ronald Reagan’s eldest son Michael Reagan, Radio Hall of
Fame Talk Show Host Neal Boortz, Joe the Plumber, Ken Hoagland the National
Chairman of the FairTax Victory Campaign.
There are Tea Party Teams, Flat Tax Teams, and more being added daily.
Organizations, officeholders and candidates wanting to form teams may do
so. There are no sponsorship
fees. Those sponsoring teams will
be given the contact information for those selecting their teams as new
marchers join.
We believe
the Online Tax Revolt represents an opportunity for organizations,
officeholders and candidates to:
-
Activate
supporters — Get people to join their team using their websites, supporter
lists, Facebook, etc -
Build their team
– using peer-to-peer outreach to encourage friends and family to join a team -
Be Leaders in the
next Great American Tax Revolt – position their team as revolting against Wall
Street and the DC power elite, joining the people from Main Street in their
outrage -
Be a part of the Populist
movement in the age of new technologies.
And we
believe the Online Tax Revolt: March for America is a significant next step in
the process of utilizing new technologies to reenergize the American voter to
direct democratic action-something Joel Fox and I last saw in California in the
great populist tax revolt of 1978, driven then by new techniques in direct mail
and small donor funding raising
led by Howard Jarvis and culminating in the landslike passage of
Proposition 13 and the election of California’s Ronald Reagan as the nation’s 40th President.
The
generation of television based communications, which created a largely passive
voter population, is ending and the newest era of the American people taking
direct action for change-as they did last year in electing a President whose
campaign utilized and refined these new techniques-techniques which are now
being adopted and advanced by those being activated by reaction to this very
President and his administration’s policies.
We do not
mourn the passing of TV passivism.
The new activism will put politicians much more at risk of offending the
voters, and paying the consequences.
This, in turn, will force them to focus on the actual voter, rather than
focusing solely on the big donors who fund carpet bombing TV buys.
We were vastly
outspent in Prop 13 and won. It
was a populist uprising that led to transformational change for our entire
nation. Those kinds of victories
have been all too rare in the passive era, the 30 years from Prop 13 in 1978 to
the Presidential election of 2008, but they will become all the more common in
the era of online activism, the surface of which has just been scratched. Take a look at its most recent
iteration at OnlineTaxRevolt.com.
And it makes politics more interesting when everything is not determined
by the deepest pockets on the playing field.
None will
agree with all that results from the application of new technologies to
politics and political protests.
Progress will be erratic.
But it is a return to something that more closely resembles how our
country functioned in the time of our Founding Fathers-and that, on balance, is
a very good thing.
Bill Butcher is a partner in the firm
of Butcher and Butcher of Sacramento and Newport Beach. The firm are the lead consultants
to the Online Tax Revolt. Technology application management is headed by Chuck DeFeo,
CEO of Connell-Donatelli of Washington, D. C.