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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Citizens across the country continue to protest over drastic budget cuts to basic social services.

Last Monday, a dozen demonstrators, including people who are homeless, arrived at the Olympia, Washington, Capitol after walking 50 miles over four days to protest budget cuts and corporate tax giveaways.
Gina Owens, a disabled grandmother and community activist who used to be homeless, said if the cuts continue, she could end up on the streets with her grandchildren. “Why should that happen when I pay taxes everyday? So that our big corporate heads and our banks can pay zero? Something is definitely wrong with our tax system. Help me to help people in my position,” she said.
The walk started in Auburn, Washington, home of Weyerhaeuser, an international timber company that paid no federal or state taxes in 2010.

According to the group We Are Washington, “Not one single tax exemption for corporations has been touched despite more than $12 billion in cuts to core services over the past three years. Last year, our state gave away $6.5 billion in business tax loopholes. It’s getting out of control and it needs to STOP.”

And it’s not just your “typical activists” who are fed up.

Representative Paul Ryan’s extreme plan to further slash the social safety net, permanently extend the Bush tax cuts, and phase out Medicare is also being criticized by his Republican constituents.

Remember when those rowdy Republicans stood up at town halls two years ago screaming about President Obama’s birth certificate? They also shouted down Democrats at town halls over the healthcare bill. The media couldn’t get enough. The shouting was played over and over again on the cable shows.

A lot has changed over the past two years.

Last week, a town hall audience in Milton, Wisconsin booed Representative Ryan when he defended giving even more tax breaks to the rich.

A constituent who described himself as a lifelong conservative told Ryan that the middle class is disappearing. He wanted to know why the congressman was “fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire.”

Ryan said, “We do tax the top.”

The audience wasn’t having it.

Another Wisconsin Representative, Sean Duffy, was caught off guard when a constituent pointed out that the statistics from Paul Ryan’s budget were from a flawed Heritage Foundation study. The constituent called the budget a “lie and a fraud.”

The Huffington Post reports that at a town hall in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, business owners and accountants told Republican Representative Robert Dold that chopping 10 percentage points off the highest corporate tax rate will not create jobs. As evidence, they pointed to companies like General Electric that pay almost no taxes despite billions in profits.

Audience members also said they oppose the Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

Representative Charlie Bass was also met with opposition in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. Almost every question of the night was about the Ryan budget plan.

As Think Progress points out, these outraged and fed up constituents represent the public as a whole. A recent Washington Post-ABC poll found that more than 72% of the country want Congress to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year.

But because these citizens aren’t yelling about birth certificates, they’re not getting covered. If it weren’t for alternative websites, we wouldn’t even know these town halls were taking place.

One of the corporate media’s favorite narratives about the United States being such a polarized country is quickly coming apart. The Republican Party has gone too far, even for their most loyal constituents. The question is, what’s the alternative?

Rose Aguilar for Uprising