“Hey, hey, B of A, how many taxes offshored today?”

“I pay, you pay, why doesn’t B of A?”

Just a couple of the chants you might hear this Saturday if you happen to be strolling by your local Bank of America branch.

US Uncut, a grass-roots political action group opposed to what it describes as “unnecessary and unfair cuts to public services across the U.S.,” is planning a national day of demonstrations against the bank, which it claims has “consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer” and “imperiled an entire nation with its greed” (quotes from the group’s website).

Perhaps “planning” is too strong a word — “loosely coordinating” might be a better description of US Uncut’s highly social-media-dependent strategy, which has a lot more in common with flash mob creation than it does with traditional top-down activism. The group’s website lists event locations and provides suggestions for “creative, nonviolent” demonstrations, including chants (see above) and signage.

OK, so this may not exactly be a Cairo-style Twitter uprising (and neither was Cairo, for that matter), but the strategy is proving effective. US Uncut’s first round of protests in late February scored some national media coverage (though rather more in the United Kingdom — this Guardian article, for example.)

The group models itself on British tax activist organization UK Uncut, which managed to shut down more than 30 retail outlets owned by mobile communications giant Vodafone in late 2010 (as I noted here). The idea for an American version of Uncut was explicitly laid out in Johann Hari’s February article in the Nation, titled “How to Build a Progressive Tea Party.”

Noxious as the “Tea Party” tag might be to US Uncut’s campaigners, they would probably prefer it to a term that’s been bandied about in the United Kingdom: “Tax Taliban.” This seems to have originated with Anthony Travers, recently retired chair of Cayman Finance, who used it, somewhat indiscriminately, to brand “socialist activist movements” (including the charity Oxfam!) in a speech in December reported by the Cayman News Service.