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| 31 March 2010 | …y in 1927, with Vivien as president. “I started with one man and vast ignorance,” she recalls. By the time the Kellems sold the company to Harvey Hubbell Inc. in 1962, it was a flourishing enterprise with 135 employees. Since the company was not public, the amount received was not disclosed. “I loved the cable grip business,” Ms. Kellems says. “Men always try to hide th… | |
| 29 October 2010 | …Samoa. The mandatory power was going to the limit of its patience before resorting to stronger measures. The commission will further examine the report to-morrow. Western Samoa finally gained its independence in 1962, after a campaign of nonviolent resistance in which tax resistance played a role. Is there an “Eastern” Samoa? Yep. It’s called “American Samoa” and it’s not independent — it’s a “possession” of the Un… | |
| 21 January 2007 | …21 January 2007 Thoreau’s journals, almost all of them, were finally published in a 14-volume set in 1906. The 1962 version I’m working with compresses this into two books by printing on each page, four pages from the 1906 set. The first of these books was checked out fifteen times… | |
| 17 May 2011 | …uspension. The Ohio Synod will meet June 13–16 at Muskingum College. If it reviews and upholds the presbytery’s judgment, Mr. McCrackin can appeal to the general assembly of the church in Denver, in May, 1962. Mr. McCrackin came to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in 1945 when it was merged with West Cincinnati Presbyterian Church. He… | |
| 16 May 2012 | …from the Niagara Falls Gazette from fifty years ago today (the accompanying article comes from… | |
| 16 June 2011 | …y on Monday night voted unanimously to restore the Rev. Maurice McCrackin, an 81-year-old Cincinnati pastor, to the ministry. McCrackin was defrocked in 1962 by the then-United Presbyterian Church (USA) because of his repeated refusal to pay federal income taxes that support the military.… | |
| 9 April 2010 | …U.S. government budget going to pay interest on the money borrowed to finance our deficit spending. A more immediate implication of these twin deficits will likely mean far fewer dollars available to spend on defense. In 1962 defense spending accounted for some 49% of total government expenditures, but by 2008 had dropped to 20% of total government spending. Following current trend lines, by… | |
| 7 April 2004 | …CIO Magazine goes into more detail about their upgrade trauma: The Internal Revenue Service’s Master File.… still runs code from 1962, written in an archaic programming language almost no one alive understands. Every year, programmers, some who have worked at the IRS for decade… | |
| 6 March 2013 | …New York City 10012 (212) 477‒2970.” The sticker also depicts a hand on the receiver of a phone. Kiger tried a First Amendment defense, but the court wasn’t buying it — it found him guilty and fined him $10. In 1962, Kiger had refused to be conscripted into the military, and had also refused to be drafted into an alternative civilian service position for conscientious objectors, and he was sentenced to two years in prison for his r… | |
| 6 August 2005 | …f. As described by former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry in his book War Scare, it was “a clerical error” that brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since October 1962. And while Americans don’t wring their hands in public about nuclear weapons like they used to in the days of Dr.… | |
| 3 May 2010 | …We Won’t Pay: A Tax Resistance Reader). A few more data points: From the 25 October 1962 Sumter Daily Item (excerpt): Since 1954, when farmers were included in the Social Security system… | |
| 27 February 2006 | …ness enthusiasm for the war sprang from military developments in Vietnam, but was also spurred by war-related economic doldrums (which have resonance today). As Small explains, “For many economists, the last truly good years for the economy were 1962–65 with almost full employment, very low inflation and a favorable balance of trade.” As the war escalated, “an increasingly unfavorable balance of trade, related in part to spending for the war abroad, contribu… | |
| 31 October 2006 | …ing system. Gigantic cost overruns and seemingly unstoppable schedule drift have been the norm for years now. As one recent summary puts it: “The IRS relies heavily on an early-1960s magnetic tape system encoded with an obsolete computer language to process tax returns.” Modern Mechanix recently scanned in and posted… | |
| 12 April 2011 | …imes trials, they did not want to contribute voluntarily to a government policy which they feel is immoral. E. Russell Stabler, a special associate professor of mathematics at Hofstra University who has not paid the balance due on his income tax since 1962, said: “I feel we are bound by a higher law. We canot abide by the U.S. income tax law and at the same time avoid responsibility for criminal acts… | |
| 3 May 2010 | …From the 25 October 1962 Sumter Daily Item (excerpt): Since 1954, when farmers were included in the Social Security system, the Amish and the government have battled over the Amish farmers’ refusal to pay Social Security premiums. Internal Revenue agents moved to collec… | |
| 26 November 2005 | …ue figure is as much as 50 per cent, according to ten years of research by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona. …Adam Weissman, a freegan activist and sometime security guard in New Jersey, says freeganism grew out of the radical 1960s “yippie” movement but also has affinities with the hobos of the Great Depression who travelled around the country by stealing rides on the railways. “I have pity for people who have not figured out thi… | |
| 24 October 2005 | …%26.9%11.5%17.2%2.5% 1960s42.0%20.4%18.4%14.9%… | |
| 24 October 2005 | …The share that corporate tax revenues comprise of total federal tax revenues also has collapsed, falling from an average of 28 percent of federal revenues in the 1950s and 21 percent in the 1960s to an average of about 10 percent since the 1980s. The effective corporate tax rate — that is, the percentag… | |
| 24 October 2005 | …of 25.3 percent of their profits in federal corporate income taxes, according to new Congressional Research Service estimates. By contrast, they paid more than 49 percent in the 1950s, 38 percent in the 1960s, and 33 percent in the 1970s A dubious source but perhaps a lead:… | |
| 24 March 2003 | …mmunications systems more reliable and even guides U.S. bombs to specific enemy targets. The journey of these two businessmen underscores the quandary faced by other veterans of the 1960s anti-war movement who later became Silicon Valley technologists and entrepreneurs and who found themselves having the U.S. military as a key cust… | |
| 24 March 2003 | …l paper today featured an article about the company I’m quitting. Some excerpts: Ethical quandry Ex-activists confront issues of tech and war As young men in the 1960s, D— and J— opposed the war in Vietnam and embraced their generation’s critical view of the U.S. military. But today, the technology they h… | |
| 22 January 2008 | …s many people believe it to be. This message wasn’t delivered in a particularly convincing way, and it used some dubious factoids. Evans said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that nobody gets put in jail anymore for war tax resistance like they did in the sixties because they’ve changed the laws since then. The radio host read another factoid from the campaign’s web site that reads “… | |
| 22 January 2008 | …ce the 1970s only one war tax resister has been prosecuted, and he was sentenced to 8 hours per week of community service.” Neither of those statements is accurate. In fact, there were very few war tax resistance prosecutions during the 1960s as far as I know, but there have been four people who have done time for tax resistance since the Iraq War began, and at least ten… | |
| 21 March 2008 | …ng-overdue: StealThisWiki.org. It’s modeled after Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — a sort of Boy Scout Handbook for the politically radical counterculture of 1960s America — but brought up-to-date and given the benefit of Wikipedia-like group authorship. Caleb Johnson has written a piece for the New Hampshire Free Pr… | |
| 15 January 2004 | …e radical individualism and focus on lifestyle change that allowed the group to stay focused during the conformist fifties scaled poorly to the sort of mass movement that coalesced around civil rights and Vietnam in the sixties). Among the budget proposal elements the Bush administration is expected to bring forward in 2004 is a plan to allow private c… | |
| 12 December 2003 | …es paid, and the amounts they still owe or are owed as refunds. The I.R.S. says it can still process returns and send out refunds on time, but its dependence on the 1960’s-era Assembler and CoBOL computer languages makes it difficult to investigate and resolve taxpayers’ problems. Finding a record using the existing system can take a week; the n… | |
| 9 February 2008 | …evasive about their motives. But part of the charm of Smith’s writing is how he shares his sometimes self-deprecating introspection into his own motives. If I had to guess from this, I’d say he’s not antisemitic, but mostly just ornery. In the 1960s, he ran a bookstore, and was arrested, jailed, and convicted for selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. This make… | |
| 7 July 2007 | …We’ve even gone into español: Con mi dinero no se paga la Guerra de Irak Parece que no sólo volvemos a los 60 con la conmemoración del Verano del Amor en San Francisco. Ahora parece que se vuelve a extender un movimiento de protesta contra la guerra que siguieron entre otros la canta… | |
| 5 April 2013 | …lide presentation entitled “More Than A Paycheck.” According to spokesmen, tax resistance in the United States has its roots in the Revolutionary War. During the Vietnam War as well tax resistance was popular. Prominent tax resisters in the 1960s included Joan Baez, Alan Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, and Pete Seeger, the presentation said. Ed Agro, one of two part-time staff people at… | |
| 20 May 2003 | …War Tax Revenue Act of 1914, then died again after World War Ⅰ. It came back again and climbed to a 25% charge on long distance and a 15% charge on local calls during World War Ⅱ and the Korean War. Between 1954 and 1965, the tax started to wither away, but then when the Vietnam War started to hit the budget, the phone tax came back with a vengeance. In 1990, Congress abandoned the ritu… | |
| 23 June 2012 | …thing I hope to write about the “one man revolution” theory as he and Thoreau sketched it out. Along the way, I noted the mention of a handful of war tax resisters from that first generation of the modern American war tax resistance movement (roughly 1948–1962) whom I haven’t otherwise had opportunity to mention at The Picket Line:… | |
| 21 January 2011 | …1948. A Peacemaker committee promoted tax refusal and provided research, literature, action suggestions, and publicity for those in the tax resistance movement. Although many hundreds of people were refusing to pay income taxes during the 15 years following 1948, the government prosecuted and imprisoned only six: James Otsuka of Indiana, Maurice McCrackin of Ohio, Eroseanna Robinson of Illinois, Walter Gormly of Iowa, Arthur Evans of Colorado, and… | |
| 2 May 2013 | …the Internal Revenue Service exercises over citizens. He called on the members of the audience to follow his example and not give money to a government that used 60 per cent of its taxes for defense. “I haven’t paid any federal income tax since 1960,” said Meyer. “I don’t pay now and I don’t think I ever will.” Meyer does believe people have an obligation to contribute to society and said he does give his share, although not to the government… | |
| 2 May 2013 | …ncepts of non-exploitation of others to all phases of their lives, Meyer said to a group of about 30 persons at the Lutheran Student Center Wednesday night. Meyer has been involved with anti-war groups since 1959 and served nine months in the Cook County Jail for refusing to pay federal income taxes. “Non-violence begins with overcoming our fears of economic deprivations, death, and loss of social status… | |
| 28 August 2005 | …nd anarchist revolutionary thinking from Gandhi’s deputy Vinoba Bhave: SATISH KUMAR: For the last fifteen years you have been on the march. What are you aiming at? VINOBA BHAVE: At revolution. In other words, I am aiming at the liberation of people from all kinds of suppr… | |
| 22 April 2011 | …il 15 tax deadline passed last Friday, and for the 19th time the Rev. A.J. Muste’s tax return was among the missing. Since 1948, the Internal Revenue Service has received from Mr. Muste only a Bible, a copy of Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and a three-page typewritten outline of the principles that he feels prevent him from… | |
| 12 April 2011 | …inly to longtime pacifists and professionals. Pacifists have been protesting the use of tax money for armaments for years. The movement was popularized after World War Ⅱ by the late A.J. Muste, clergyman-philosopher, who refused to pay his taxes from 1948 to his death in 1967. Cakars’ War Resisters League, which is one of the organizations promoting tax resistance to its mailing list of 10,000, has been in business advocating peace policies since World War Ⅰ… | |
| 20 March 2010 | …on a course that harmonizes with the book as because the book doesn’t much move me) — any recommendations? Timewise, the books in my top ten have a couple of clusters: one around 1849–59 and another around 1957–78, with only one outlier, also the only book on the list from this century, Hochschild’s Bury the Chains. The president signed another law the other… | |
| 14 April 2012 | …IRS nine years after he began to resist. Since court trials of war tax resisters are expensive and may generate publicity favorable to the cause, they are few and far between. From 1948 to 1971 seven pacifist refusers were criminally prosecuted, from 1972 to 1978 none, and in 1979 there were two criminal convictions.… | |
| 11 December 2012 | …RS: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes since 1941, were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned. Then, in April, 1966… | |
| 16 June 2011 | …entatives of the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination… [met in t]he 199th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA)… ¶ …and reversed a 25-year-old decision defrocking a peace activist. Also Monday, the commissioners discussed “Presbyterians and Peacemaking: Are… | |
| 4 December 2008 | …Meyer, who says he has earned between $13,000 and $18,000 annually since 1975, claims the IRS has managed to collect only $168 from him since 1959. He has quit jobs and moved bank accounts to prevent further collections. Michael McGrail, an IRS tax specialist, could no… | |
| 3 June 2004 | …etc. and how this relates both to changing government policy and to the science of coercive interrogation and torture as it was developed by the CIA in the middle of the last century. The current U.S. government, Danner says, “made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and interrogation… [that]… | |
| 1 November 2012 | …atistics to justify the creation of their group: each year Congress and local governments continue to spend 10% more than the previous year, right now, the taxpayer is spending 44% of his working time just earning enough to pay all his taxes and since 1939 state and local taxes have risen 1700% (WOW!). The NTU hopes to mobilize enough support by the creation of local groups and cooperati… | |
| 21 January 2011 | …Peacemakers and eighty local groups. Nineteen eighty-three featured the largest show of war tax resistance actions in ten years, including Ralph Dull, an Ohio farmer and tax resister since 1951, who drove a truckload of grain to the IRS office as payment for his taxes. The… | |
| 5 January 2013 | …ile a tax return.” Catlett isn’t embarrassed to be going behind bars. “I have absolutely no regrets,” Catlett said last week. “I’m unregenerate, proud of what I’ve done.” Catlett sees his refusal to pay federal taxes since 1947 as a moral issue, not a legal one. “It’s immoral to pay someone to do what it would be immoral to do yourself,” he said. “War is immoral, and I can’t pay taxes that will buy war.”… | |
| 15 January 2004 | …Action: Radical Pacifism From the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven, which, coincidentally, I’ve just finished reading. The movement chronicled in this book includes many of the movers-and-shakers in the war tax resistance movement in the middle of the last century in the United States, which is part of what drew me to read it (war tax resistance only features in a small part of the book). The story in summary is about a small, dedicated core of acti… | |
| 30 January 2012 | …59 in fines and penalties and unpaid income tax for the tax years, 1966 through 1970. This was a very impressive bill, and we wondered what it would be if they started figuring out what they thought we owed them from the years 1933, when we began, up to 1966! The New York Times, in a story sign… | |
| 23 October 2003 | …its. There are actually two distinct payroll taxes: a 12.4% one to fund Social Security, and a 2.9% one to fund Medicare. While income tax rates have declined for most families in recent decades, payroll taxes have increased dramatically. From 1960 to 1995, the percentage of government revenue derived from payroll taxes went up from 12 to 33. In other words, Congress has quietly legislated a fundamental shift toward payroll taxes over… | |
| 23 November 2003 | …t’s much more difficult to evade than the income tax and I quoted an article that said “more than 79 percent of U.S. families now pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes” and “from 1960 to 1995, the percentage of government revenue derived from payroll taxes went up from 12 to 33.” All this presents a problem for a tax resister like myself. My goal is to stop paying for things like ne… | |
| 4 March 2010 | …Seattle (AP) — Irwin Hogenauer doesn’t fret or fume as tax deadline nears. The 70-year-old Quaker and war protester just keeps doing what he’s done since 1948 — refuse to pay. To protest spending taxes on the military, Hogenauer hasn’t filed a tax return for 35 years. “I’ve lived a life of principle and I’ll continue to stand by it,” he says.… | |
| 12 January 2012 | …IRS seizure is nearly complete, Harvey said his views on tax resistance haven’t changed and he has no plans to pay any money to the federal government. Harvey has not paid federal taxes since 1959, and Gravalos hasn’t paid since 1972. Supporter Jim Stockwell of Albion said, “I think (Harvey and Gravalos are) very proud of what they’re doing.” Stockwell pr… | |
| 12 January 2012 | …1996: War Tax Resistance and Blueberry Fields Forever Arthur Harvey has not filed a federal tax return or paid income tax since 1959. His partner, Elizabeth Gravalos hasn’t filed or paid since 1972. Until recently, the Internal Revenue Service gave them little trouble. “They visited us twice, o… | |
| 6 May 2012 | …ompost system for solid waste. “I just don’t think it’s realistic,” Gravalos said, referring to buyers who may be interested in purchasing the house. The couple call themselves tax resisters and Harvey hasn’t paid federal taxes since 1959 and Gravalos since 1972 as a way of protesting the government’s use of nuclear weapons and its policies on sending American troops and weapons overseas. The… | |
| 6 May 2012 | …k and informed the couple that the federal agency was seizing all of their property as payment for unpaid taxes and penalties. The visit was not entirely a surprise for the couple since Harvey hasn’t paid any federal income taxes since 1959, and Gravalos since 1972. The two are politically opposed to the government’s use of nuclear weapons and its policies of sending American troops and weapons overseas, they… | |
| 30 January 2012 | …n to being pacifists). When we first thought about Federal income taxes, most of which go for war or “defense,” we simplistically considered ourselves exempt because we had no income; no salaries are paid at the Catholic Worker, nor ever have been since we started in 1933. I myself have been questioned because of my writings, and lecture fees which were not really fees but offerings made to the work which covered all expenses of travelling and supported the wo… | |
| 27 September 2007 | …rces tied up in maintaining a warfare state that otherwise could be used for useful purposes. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce e… | |
| 6 December 2004 | …dividends paid by businesses. In 2002, the gap between these two figures reached $961.1 billion or 13.7 percent of the Commerce Department’s estimate of AGI. This is the largest gap since figures began to be collected in 1959. It suggests that the federal government is losing at least $100 billion per year just due to the non-reporting of taxable income on personal tax returns.… | |
| 27 January 2005 | …ear Total adjusted gross income was just over $6 trillion, 2.2% less than the previous year Taxable income dropped 4% to $4.1 trillion Total income tax fell 10.2% to $797.0 billion (“This was the largest percentage decrease since 1958.”) 103.5 million returns (80%!) came from taxpayers who had overpaid their taxes and were due a refund (meaning they gave the government a free loan during the year) From this last poin… | |
| 27 November 2004 | …n we can kill them, progressives opposed to warmaking simply can’t deny a moral imperative: don’t turn your productivity over to the warmakers.… Karl Meyer, a pacifist guide for numerous war tax refusers, a man who hasn’t paid his taxes since 1960, takes a harder line than I do, but without his perspective I never would have been drawn into allowing the IRS to become my spiritua… | |
| 24 April 2004 | …an spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent — again, in real dollars — throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War. There is no nuclear arms race going on now. The world no longer offers many suitable nuclear targets. President Bush is trying to persuade other nations — especia… | |
| 12 January 2012 | …lueberry fields. It’s not that the 72-year-old organic farmer, inspector and book seller has filed early this year. Instead, Harvey, who lives with his family across from the town office on Main Street, has not paid federal income taxes since about 1959. He won’t pay because he is opposed to where his dollars would be spent. “My fundamental objection is to nuclear weapons,” he said Thursday while seated at a small table off his kitchen, sur… | |
| 23 February 2012 | …a graph that shows how the percentage of Americans has been rising who are neither federal income tax payers nor a dependent of someone who is.… | |
| 6 August 2005 | …the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent — again, in real dollars — throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War. U.S. policy & Osama’s creed… | |
| 14 June 2005 | …tax in protest against the American war on Mexico hardly stopped the war. But the resonance of that most unpunishing and briefest spell of imprisonment (famously, a single night in jail) has not ceased to inspire principled resistance to injustice through the second half of the twentieth century and into our new era. The movement in the late 1980s to shut down the Nevada Test Site, a key location for the nuclear arms race, fai… | |
| 4 February 2008 | …Ralph DiGia died last Friday at age 93. He was among the direct-action pacifists who forged the American anti-war movement in the last half of the twentieth century. Imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ (he didn’t qualify for conscientious objector status because he couldn’t provide a religious reason for his obje… | |
| 16 April 2013 | …ection for citizens who want their taxes to be diverted from the Pentagon maw. The legislation is not likely to pass in this or the next millennium. Its value may be for historians, ones who will ask how and why so many ordinary Americans in the late 20th century said or did nothing about their government squandering its wealth on militarism. In this current darkness, a few lights shine. Honorable dissent may be only flickering, bu… | |
| 16 April 2013 | …aming the world on trade missions to hustle more customers for the U.S. weapons industry. Client states include such habitual violators of human rights as Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Since 1945, uncountable dictators to whom the United States has supplied weapons turned them on their own people. From Sunday through Wednesday, the annual arms bazaar — the “Con… | |
| 16 April 2013 | …and Catholic” was “extensive and abject.” Religious leaders “were men of God second and Germans first.” They blessed state violence. As the main military force that defeated the Nazis, the United States has been able to position itself since 1945 on the moral high ground and, with furrowed brow, ponder in astonishment why so few Germans protested their government’s well-organized barbarity. If a cold eye is to be cast on Germany’s behavior… | |
| 23 October 2003 | …illegally) refuse to pay those taxes. Or you can be a member of a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to insurance (for instance because “god will provide”), that supports its dependent members, and that has existed continuously since 1950. The Amish are an example of such a religious group; I’m not sure which other ones qualify. There’s an interesting artic… | |
| 23 November 2003 | …d economy, or work as an independent contractor and simply (illegally) refuse to pay those taxes. Or you can be a member of a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to insurance (for instance because “god will provide”), that supports its dependent members, and that has existed continuously since 1950. The Amish are an example of such a religious group; I’m not sure which other ones qualify. Can you think of any other techniques?… | |
| 15 August 2004 | …15 August 2004 Today: a roundup of some things I’ve found on-line: Silence and Courage: Income Taxes, War and Mennonites 1940–1993: An interesting paper from the Mennonite Central Committee that gives a good overview of the history of the income tax and its close association with war. If it seems awful to you that f… | |
| 12 January 2005 | …ional programs. Others wept. ¶ This, alas, is roughly the situation of Western or at least American evangelicalism today.… If Christians do not live what they preach, the whole thing is a farce. “American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century,” Barna concludes, “because Jesus’ modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus.” This scandalous behavior mocks Christ, undermines evangelism, and destroys Christian credibili… | |
| 18 October 2005 | …in 2004, some 42.5 million Americans (one-third of all filers) filed a tax return but had no tax liability after taking advantage of their credits and deductions. Figure 1 shows the percentage of non-payers between 1950 and 2004. During that period, non-payers averaged 22 percent of all taxfilers. Today, however, non-payers account for 32 percent of all taxfilers, a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of non-payers… | |
| 18 October 2005 | …Percent of Tax Filers Who Owe Zero Federal Income Tax, 1950–2004 Tax Foundation economists estimate that in 2004, some 42.5 million Americans (one-third of all filers) filed a tax return but had no tax li… | |
| 12 December 2011 | …siness executives, organizations, bureaucrats, and the like. “The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman” — Melman was the Winslow Wheeler of his time, keeping a watchful and critical eye on the military budget and both its inherent and extravagant waste. This article looks in particular at the opportunity costs of military spending, and at the… | |
| 25 July 2006 | …I have this friend who’s made a sign — she goes to peace parades but she stands with that and says “don’t buy this war” — “I Haven’t Bought a Bomb Since 1971.” And I’m going to revise it and say I haven’t bought a bomb since 1948.… Chris Floyd made a similar point a couple of months back:… | |
| 5 July 2005 | …o, Inge Donato, and Kevin McKee join the tax resisters hall of fame as three of the only thirty-five or so conscientious tax resisters to be jailed for their resistance since World War Ⅱ. One of the lawyers on the case says that he believes these are “the first pacifis… | |
| 1 April 2011 | …in New York City. Then there are the criminal penalties. Tax evasion, “willful failure to pay,” and fraud can land a person in federal court, according to the IRS. In the past 60 years, 30 people have gone to jail, typically for one to three months, on resistance-related charges, Hedemann says. Some were convicted of fraud, usually claiming too many dependents. The bulk of convict… | |
| 2 August 2007 | …caught my eye: A profile of J. Tony Serra, the radical defense lawyer and long-time tax resister who is “one of two war tax resisters since World War Ⅱ to have been jailed for ‘willful failure to pay’ federal income taxes.” A report from Bill Ramsey on his a… | |
| 24 May 2007 | …ed out by a long history of war tax resisters. According to the War Resister’s League, tens of thousands of Americans — including Dorothy Day, Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky — have at some point resorted to civil disobedience by not paying their taxes since World War Ⅱ. Some resisters have deliberately chosen to live below the poverty line to avoid paying taxes, while others simply do not pay part or all of what the government demands for its addiction… | |
| 7 June 2007 | …n’s budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War Ⅱ wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Sovie… | |
| 30 August 2012 | …and imprisonment reminiscent of their early struggles 300 years ago in England and America if they take to heart the guidelines they drew up at their annual sessions recently at Silver Bay. In what may well be the strongest message of the 20th century by a major body within the denomination, Quakers were urged “unequivocally and at all costs” to hold to their Peace Testimony first formulated in a “Declaration from the ha… | |
| 22 April 2013 | …ama’s local CBS news station. And take a gander at this photo of Juanita Nelson holding her “Haven’t Paid Taxes Since 1948” sign on tax day outside the downtown post office in Brattleboro, Vermont. Here’s a bit more about the tax resistance campaign that activists for Catalan independence are engaged… | |
| 31 January 2008 | …31 January 2008 I just recently learned that the newsletters of the Syracuse Peace Council from 1936 to the present day are available on-line. This makes for an interesting historical walk-through of the concerns of the anti-war movements. There are interesting bits of war tax resistance history to be found there. For instance,… | |
| 4 March 2010 | …From the 4 March 1978 Spokane Daily Chronicle: Irwin Hogenauer (1912–1984) Tax Protest Techniques Told Military expenditures take up 53 percent of the national budget, “a disproportionate amount,” but there are ways to protest… | |
| 26 May 2008 | …26 May 2008 (1935–2008) From time to time, individual Quakers or Quaker delegations would meet wi… | |
| 17 April 2013 | …“pay no taxes until June so the government cannot pay the bonuses and treat itself to a good time.” The American Enterprise Institute has issued a new edition of their useful compendium of poll results: Public Opinion on Taxes: 1937 to Today.… | |
| 9 January 2004 | …atants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in the 20th Century. An additional number of people, about a quarter as large a total, were killed in the course of warfare in that timespan. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that that comes to about two and a half million each year, about 6,500 per day, about one every 13 seconds. Even as a public health problem, tha… | |
| 9 January 2004 | …One estimate was that (as of 1987), governments had organized people in such a way as to murder about 170,000,000 noncombatants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in the 20th Century. An additional number of people, about a quarter as large a total, were killed in the course of warfare in that timespan. Some back-o… | |
| 9 January 2004 | …Telemarketers Maybe it’s a little phobic to worry so much about the possibility of your neighbors turning into cogs in a mass killing machine. Maybe not. One estimate was that (as of 1987), governments had organized people in such a way as to murder about 170,000,000 noncombatants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in the 20th… | |
| 15 November 2006 | …in the gunsights of the Fox News set and the Republican talking points generators. The JROTC has been doing its thing in San Francisco’s public schools for 90 years now. “It’s basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military,” said Board member Dan Kelly. Students get school credit for participating in the program, which is funded 50/50 by the school… | |
| 15 April 2005 | …th anniversary of Gandhi’s salt march: …The baseline fact is that the various Nation-States of this small and lonely planet have murdered around 200 million people in wars and internal conflicts during these [last 90] years. They have indirectly destroyed many millions more lives through Corporate-State institutionalized economic exploitation and ecological destruction. From these facts arise the questions… | |
| 15 April 2005 | …on is the expropriation of private property under threat of violence. What is this if not theft? What is theft if not violence? Is this what Gandhi taught?… From whence comes the finance for Nation-States to murder 200 million people in the past 90 years? It comes from taxes mostly. Who paid the taxes? Was it not us as citizens? So, who financed the murder and who is responsible?… Peace is, at minimum, the absence of violence or threat of v… | |
| 21 October 2010 | …the former). Perhaps the most fundamental tenet of all international norms is that a sovereign refrain from use of or threat of force in its relations with other countries. This policy has been consistently expressed in various forms as early as 1899 to the present. In the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, J… | |
| 30 June 2011 | …of death travelled over the world today and visited each person, man woman and child, and killed with its breath every tenth person it visited, it would extinguish fewer lives than the governments of the world will murder off of the field of war in the next hundred years.” Someone muttered “anarchist” and turned on his heel and left with his family, and that’s when Leon became an anarchist. He shot and killed William McKinley, then president of the United… | |
| 30 December 2003 | …nding the holidays with family and old friends in the town where I grew up and I haven’t been on-line much. I’ve also been reading an interesting book — Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover. The book tries to examine some of the worst wars and atrocities of the last century with an ey… | |
| 30 December 2003 | …Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover. The book tries to examine some of the worst wars and atrocities of the last century with an eye toward finding some sort of strategy for making them less likely or not as awful in the next century. He explores these events from a number of angles — asking how the people who advocated t… | |
| 28 January 2004 | …creature, like “Zeus” or “Fate” or “the wheels of history.” It’s a piece of shorthand, a literary device, but not an actual agent in the world we live in. It’s also the “bad faith” excuse behind much of the worst parts of the 20th century. I’ve done a casual read-through of the literature about the theory of government, and about anarchism, and I’ve had a hard time finding anything that se… | |
| 27 June 2005 | …it is a profoundly dangerous situation for the American people. Mass murder of civilians is rarely the work of lonesome nuts operating totally outside of societal norms and beliefs. On the contrary, scratch the surface of most of the horrors of the twentieth century, and you will find a cold, cruel belief that the victims brought it upon themselves. Everyone shakes their head and loudly condemns the atrocity once the bodies are cold and deep under the earth… | |
| 24 October 2004 | …U.S. experience in democratic nation building is daunting. The low rate of success is a sobering reminder that these are among the most difficult foreign policy ventures for the United States. Of the sixteen such efforts during the past century, democracy was sustained in only four cases ten years after the departure of U.S. forces. Two of these followed the total defeat and surrender… | |
| 24 June 2007 | …h about a third of those who responded assumed that war tax resisters are likely to be imprisoned, in reality, you can almost count on your fingers the number of people who have done any time behind bars for war tax resistance in the United States in the last hundred years. Former war tax resisters, who might be expected to have more understanding of the consequences, listed jail as a likely consequence on only 6.4% of their surveys. Would they consider a o… | |
| 23 May 2007 | …ematic production of conditions which undermine whatever positive cultural containment is in place.” Propaganda is crucial to this deliberate and systematic production of the conditions for collective evildoing. “In all cases of genocide in the twentieth century, the action… typically assumes the character of self-defense.… If there is a mentality characteristic of genocidal perpetrators, it is that of self-righteousness.” In what Vetlesen calls… | |
| 19 March 2003 | …, no? I also believe that because I have free will, I’m responsible for the actions I choose — I cannot rent out my conscience to another person, army, government, corporation, majority or law-book. It’s not just unwise, given the history of the last century, but it is literally impossible. Each of my decisions is a decision I choose based on what I anticipate the consequences will be. I may take into account what the law says, or what the Bible sa… | |
| 19 March 2003 | …, but ultimately I’m the one making the choice. If I ignore my conscience, I’m committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — choking off the guardian of my free will and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who’s spent the last hundred years swerving from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox. Not for me. Then what of my choice whether or not to pay the federal income tax? The… | |
| 19 August 2007 | …ent”? The traditional alternative that has been offered to the prevailing economic model has been some form of state socialism. “But,” McKibben writes, “one real benefit of living in the twenty-first century is that the twentieth taught us an awful lot about what didn’t work.… It’s a great luxury for us to not even have to entertain the possibility that state socialism might be the way out of our troubles.” The something di… | |
| 13 May 2005 | …lent Arab movements often ignore Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ‘security barrier’: The uprisings aren’t aligned with U.S. interests.” For much of the twentieth century, the chief means of overthrowing a government were guerilla warfare and military coups. Nonviolent resistance existed — at times it thrived — but it was generally regarded as an odd aberration t… | |
| 11 November 2004 | …re) to declare our natural goodness and their natural badness is one thing, but that anyone believes there is an inherently moral distinction which can be defined geographically or racially means people just haven’t been paying attention to what the 20th century — of which the Milgram study was little more than a reiteration and foreshadowing — made hideously clear. Tell people to go to war, and mostly they will. Tell them to piss on… | |
| 7 August 2004 | …ps, the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one remains, he will be called the “supreme guard,” and that will be the ideal society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all twentieth-century governments, will be settled once and for all. Of course, this is but a prophecy and, although governments and police forces throughout the world are striving, with great good will, to achi… | |
| 7 April 2003 | …, and I will take all the blame if things go bad.” That’s snake oil. Can’t be done. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. And, crucially, it killed almost two hundred million people in the last century. Which is to say, people killed almost two hundred million other people in the last century, shooting them in the back of the head, starving them to death, stuffing the… | |
| 7 April 2003 | …And, crucially, it killed almost two hundred million people in the last century. Which is to say, people killed almost two hundred million other people in the last century, shooting them in the back of the head, starving them to death, stuffing them into gas chambers, etc. thinking all the while that it wasn’t th… | |
| 5 August 2007 | …d over our collective heads. This system of organizing a society of six billion human beings doesn’t work. Its institutionalized structural violence is destroying humanity and the earth. States have murdered more than 230 million human beings in the past 100 years. A system that places the power of planetary incineration into the hands of a few psychopathically aggressive tyrants is clearly insane. It is impossible to reform a system whose very foundation is… | |
| 29 August 2005 | …xation is the fuel of war” — a phrase found in the L. Neil Smith essay from which these excerpts are taken: Since the beginning of the 20th century, Western populations have gradually become accustomed to higher and higher rates of taxation. Americans are presently commanded to stand and deliver… | |
| 24 May 2005 | …a repeal of the tax but President Clinton vetoed it; new legislation is targeting it for repeal again. If Congress hasn’t been able to get rid of this “temporary” tax for 107 years, I won’t hold my breath. But I may not have to — the phone tax is starting to decay in the face of modern communication technology without much help from the politicians. The internet is part of this.… | |
| 29 August 2005 | …umes could — and have — been written about the economic and social damage this kind of taxation does to a culture. But what concerns me here is that taxation is the fuel of war. Warfare of the kind witnessed for the first time only in the 19th and 20th centuries, warfare that kills tens of millions in the space of only a few years, warfare that snuffs out whole cities in the blink of an eye, is… | |
| 30 May 2008 | …today’s and tomorrow’s entries, as I’ll be off the grid for a few days. In Lillian Schlissel’s Conscience in America: A documentary history of conscientious objection in America, 1757–1967 (1968) is an excerpt from a letter to the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1795 that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, and the author of which re… | |
| 12 November 2005 | …Bush took office (and he did take it), his government has borrowed $1.05 trillion. That is to say, over one thousand billion. Remember how many a billion is? $1.05 trillion is more than the total borrowed by every administration between 1776 and 2000 ($1.01 trillion). The mind implodes. Half of this nation’s debt in 224 years, the other half since Junior Bush got the top job. Remember how far away the sun is? We have spent enough d… | |
| 1 March 2013 | …to military tax payment on the part of CFS employees will be accepted as an appropriate stance, in keeping with the Friends Peace Testimony established and upheld by Quakers since its original expression in 1660.” At present, the letter is in the hands of the IRS. Regardless of the outcome, the school… |