Tax Resistance News from Around the World

Some links from here and there…

• Nicaraguan tax resistance leader Irlanda Jerez was released from prison as part of a government amnesty of political prisoners in the run up to negotiations with the opposition. Jerez says she was drugged, tortured, and sexually assaulted while in prison, and that her home was sacked and her family attacked by government-aligned paramilitary forces soon after her release. Her children are now refugees. Torture, arbitrary arrests, and repressive brutality are frequently relied upon by the Ortega regime, amounting to “crimes against humanity,” according to Amnesty International. She has renewed her call for mass civil disobedience. “We’re ready to pay any price necessary to free Nicaragua.”
• The 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns is scheduled for late this year in Edinburgh, Scotland.
• The international human revolt against the traffic-ticket robots continues, with new attacks in France and Australia in recent weeks.
• Residents of Faradje, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government to take action against the incursions of Wodaabe nomadic cattle-herders from neighboring South Sudan into the land they use for agriculture.
• In the United States, individual taxpayers paid $93 billion more in federal income taxes last year than the year before. “Interestingly, that number stands close to the tax break amount that corporations received from the TCJA in 2018. Last year, big businesses paid $91 billion less in taxes than they had in 2017, prior to the new law’s passage.”

In 1988, Bob Livingston was half-way through his career as a U.S. Congressman. A decade later he would get within a hair’s-breadth of the Speaker of the House position, but when news of an extramarital affair leaked out, he was passed over in favor of a Republican with moral character more suitable for the position (Dennis Hastert).

But on this date in 1988, Livingston had other things on his mind. He had gotten ahold of a copy of “Presbyterians and Peacemaking” by Dana W. Wilbanks and Ronald H. Stone, a paper that had been circulated by a Presbyterian Church U.S.A. advisory body in preparation for an upcoming general assembly.

Livingston took to the floor of the House to exclaim that the contents of Wilbanks’s and Stone’s paper were “shocking beyond belief, and could readily be construed to be manifests for revolution against the U.S. Government.” Most interesting to us here at The Picket Line, is this:

The second form of resistance the authors advise is tax resistance. That resisters are people who withhold part or all of their income tax from the IRS in order to prevent their money from being spent on the military, and to protect [sic] the government’s policies. Wilbanks and Stone urge that the General Assembly “extend its position on conscientious objectors to wars to the support of the conscience of tax resisters.” They envision two methods of resistance that the church could follow, “the Assembly could advocate massive civil disobedience through symbolic withholding of a certain amount; or hold corporately in escrow the money individuals withhold so that legal liability for such acts of disobedience would be the national church body.” To avoid the question of illegality the authors would like the Assembly to “seek the establishment of a World Peace Tax Fund which would provide a legally available channel for conscientiously motivated tax resisters to pay into an alternative fund the portion they would otherwise withhold.” The study recommends that the church should show its opposition to militarism and nuclear arms by encouraging its members to practice tax evasion.