Some links that have caught my eye recently:
- The Green Zone: How a Greening Culture Cannot Ignore the Military. The elephant in the room during the debate over the environment and climate change and what-have-you is U.S. militarism. If “the largest source of pollution in the world is the military, particularly the military at war” then maybe environmentalists have something better to do than encourage people to change their lightbulbs.
- Tax resistance by American fiscal conservatives against taxpayer-funded bailouts and deficit spending continues to be an idea that has yet to come, though a lot of folks are meekly hoping somebody else will get the ball rolling. The latest of these ideas goes by the name “Operation Dep 9” and encourages folks to re-file their W-4 forms, claiming 9 allowances so as to reduce or eliminate federal income tax withholding (this is the same technique that many war tax resisters use).
- The proprietor of FSK’s Guide to Reality has written up some back-of-the-envelope theorizing about “tax resister insurance.” For those of you not patient enough to wait for such theories to incorporate on earth, I encourage you to look in to the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which, despite its possible theoretical shortcomings, is actually in operation.
- I haven’t had a chance to look at this closely, but it sounds interesting: Protecting Trust Assets from the Federal Tax Lien.
- Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society writes about Barter Networks and the Counter-Economy.
- The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says that IRS agents are “not using collection tools, including tax liens, levies and property seizures, soon enough in many instances” and recommends that they clamp down sooner and more ruthlessly.
- Protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes”:
China’s official Xinhua news agency said the local government’s plan to more strictly enforce payment of taxes from the furniture makers and dealers has been suspended in the face of the opposition. China’s furniture industry has suffered in the global economic downturn from a decline in demand from export markets. Thousands of similar protests over taxes, land disputes or corruption are reported in China each year.