Yesterday I helped a crew from Northern California War Tax Resistance put on a workshop in San Francisco.

With the anti-war movement in the doldrums and with many activists staring dumbly into the headlights of the presidential election, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that there’s a lot of fervent interest in war tax resistance.

Indeed, with Code Pink’s “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” campaign and the new “Pledge for Peace” from Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, the war tax resitance movement is playing catch-up. We’re no longer out in front trying to rally the troops: the troops have run on ahead of us.

Steev Hise was leading a small film crew at the workshop. He’s working on a war tax resistance documentary (you can see a promotional trailer for the work-in-progress on-line). Afterwards, his crew came by my place to interview me for the film.

Colorado Springs war tax resisters are in the news again, this time in The Gazette. Excerpts:

For the past three decades, retired social worker and lifelong peace activist Esther Kisamore has received threatening phone calls and letters from the Internal Revenue Service because she refuses to pay federal income taxes and federal excise taxes on her telephone bills.

Lawyer Bill Durland and his wife, Genie, have appeared in tax court numerous times since the 1970s and last year had their Social Security checks garnished by the IRS.

Psychologist Donna Johnson had two houses seized and eventually returned.

The Colorado Springs residents were aware of such possible consequences when they deliberately snubbed tax time — not to have extra money in their pockets and not because they don’t believe the government should tax citizens.

They don’t want their taxes used to fund military spending and war efforts.

“It is an individual act of moral conscience,” [Peter] Haney said. “In Colorado Springs close to 50 percent of our primary employment comes from military bases and defense contractors, so we’re so reliant on the federal dole, yet many of us have a frontier mentality to be independent and self-reliant.”

Before Johnson reduced her income to below the taxable rate, she paid half of what she owed in federal income taxes. Her first house was seized by the IRS for nonpayment of the phone excise tax, about $7. She eventually got the house and another one back, and the $200,000 she owed in taxes and liens on her property were released after a statute of limitations ran out.

“You just stand up and say ‘I’m not willing to pay even though you threaten me,’” Johnson said.

Some short bits of interest from around the web:

• People are more likely to behave unethically if you tell them that they don’t have free will. This according to two recent experiments conducted by psychologists Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia.
• “Hawala is a money-transfer system based primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, based on independent brokers who phone one another and say, ‘I’m holding so much money in such and such a currency, please transfer an equivalent sum in local funds to such and such a person.’ The settlements are based on the honor system, and by some accounts, the network has its origins in the Silk Road. The system functions even in places where the rule of law and other elements normally considered crucial to a a functional financial system have collapsed.”
• “The president moves about like Caesar Augustus, with a vast, graded court of civil and military aides, doctors, secretaries, valets, hairdressers, makeup artists, bodyguards, drivers, baggage handlers, cooks, food tasters, Praetorian guards, snipers, centurions, bulletproof limos, a portable hospital, and an armored rostrum. And that's when he travels in the United States.” 250 secret service agents, 150 national security advisors, 15 sniffer dog teams, 200 representatives from other bureaucracies, 50 political aides, a personal chef and his team of four cooks all travel in three jets accompanied by two helicopters to be met by two identical motorcades of 20 armored vehicles including limousine, whenever the president of the U.S. wants to have his picture taken in some important district or other.