National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Newsletter

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

• my tribute to Henry David Thoreau on the bicentennial of his birth
• brief notes about issues of interest to tax resisters, including: the private debt collection companies that the IRS has deputized to collect taxes, and how to do war tax resistance counseling in a “nondirective” way
• updates from the NWTRCC field organizer, and a note from new anti-Trump tax resister Andrew Newman
• upcoming webinars on using social media to promote war tax resistance
• a recap of the NWTRCC national gathering last month in St. Louis
• a profile of new war tax resister Sarah Mueller

Also, on the NWTRCC blog, Erica Weiland examines the first Trump budget proposal.

Next month is the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, and so he’s starting to “trend.” Here are some recent examples of note:

• A Radical for All Seasons: The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau by Jedediah Purdy, The Nation. Excerpt:

  On November 1, 1859, Thoreau defied the forces of law and order and the pleas of respectable friends by delivering a defense of John Brown to 2,500 people in Boston. “The reason why Frederick Douglass is not here,” he began, “is the reason why I am.” If every privilege check had that kind of snapping specificity and quiet moral thunder, they might be both more subversive and less disdained.

• Thoreau: American Resister (and Kitten Rescuer) by Holland Cotter, New York Times. Excerpt:

  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, securing the return of runaways, tipped him over the edge from outrage to activism, though his upbringing had primed him to make the move. His mother was a founder of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society; his older sister, Helen, was a friend of Frederick Douglass; the family home, where, aside from two years at Walden, he lived till he died, was a stop on the Underground Railroad to Canada. Given this context, his night in jail, in 1846, for refusing to pay taxes to a slavery-supporting government was a less sensational event than history has tried to make it.

Other links of interest:

• Another way the Greek government is trying to tax its tax-averse citizens to pay off international lenders is by adding a 20% tax on coffee imports. The Cafe Justicia/“Fair trade is not for sale” project plans to respond by smuggling fair trade coffee from Guatemala to Greece.
• Julie L. Holcomb, author of Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy was recently interviewed on the Ben Franklin’s World podcast.
• Ozy got Gloria Steinem to open up about her renewed interest in tax resistance. (Scroll down past the annoying video at the top.)
• Sometimes it’s the IRS that gets audited. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration looked at the IRS backlog of unpaid tax accounts and found hundreds in which penalties and interest had been incorrectly calculated by the agency.