Tax the Rich Animation

Watch Sean Hannity go nuts over the animation.

Sisters and brothers: It seems appropriate at this sorry moment in U.S. tax history to revisit how we got here. One way to review would be to read Sam Pizzigati’s The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press, 2012), an excellent and lively history of American tax policy that draws its analysis from the insights of labor history as well as tax policy proper.

A short cut would be to view (and share, and “like”) the animated cartoon I made for the California Federation of Teachers with Mike Konopacki and Ed Asner five years ago, “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale.” This little cartoon, which drew hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube, was the target of right wing media faux outrage, including on Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show. The invective focused on one scene, in which we depicted ‘trickle-down economics’ via a commonly used metaphor on the left, a rich guy peeing on the 99%. The resulting barrage of hate phone calls and emails from all over the country to our union’s offices caused the CFT’s executive board, fearing for the safety of our staff, to ask me to remove that image from the video. The version I reposted has a freeze frame where the trickle down image was. You can still hear the sounds of water falling in the background. The metaphor seems all too contemporary in light of what the Republicans are doing to us at the moment.

Solidarity, Fred Glass

(Ironically, the Sean Hannity version has the original “pee” scene, Mike Konopacki)