Some recent links of note:
- Extinction Rebellion is launching a “Climate Emergency Council Tax Strike”
The campaign is asking local groups in the U.K. to demand that their local councils declare a climate emergency and suspend projects that are ecologically irresponsible.Our movement has only scratched the surface of what non-violent civil disobedience can achieve. While they deceive and seek to oppress us further, we can take a stand against their ecocidal leadership — by simply withholding council tax then telling the world why we’ve done it.
- Conscience U.K. held an on-line seminar exploring the history of conscientious objection to military taxation featuring Karen Robinson, Robin Brookes, Mary Lou Leavitt, and Monica Frisch.
- Another detail of the Biden administration’s plan to beef up IRS tax enforcement has come out. They hope to force banks to report information about everyone’s bank accounts: how much came into and out of each account over the year. This would help them identify income sources that people and businesses fail to report on their tax returns. But it would also put more bank accounts on the agency’s radar. Currently, they only seem to be very aware of interest-earning bank accounts, via the reporting of this interest on annual 1099 filings. This has allowed some tax resisters to have bank accounts that are relatively invisible to the IRS (and thereby less-vulnerable to seizure) by having non-interest-bearing accounts. The proposed reporting changes might remove this protection.
Catalan separatists have amplified their tax resistance campaign. For some time now the Catalan National Assembly has been promoting a campaign in which individuals, businesses, and (an increasing number of) municipalities would redirect their national taxes from Spain to the Catalan regional government. That government would forward those taxes along to Spain, so the effect of this (and its risk) was minor, but in theory if the Catalan regional government decided to pull the trigger on political independence, this would establish the groundwork for fiscal independence as well.
But now, the separatist “Council for the Republic” is trying to push things further: asking resisters to redirect €300 of their taxes from the government to the Republican Fund for Solidarity Action. That money will not be forwarded to Madrid, and so this is a more confrontational act of civil disobedience.
The group has launched the campaign with the #Proumonarquia site (“Build the Catalan Republic with your taxes”) and two videos: a how-to narrated by actor Toni Albà and an overview of tax resistance by long-time war tax resister Josep Manel Fontdevila.
- Attorney Peter Goldberger will discuss the prospects for people who might try to assert that people have a legal right of conscientious objection to military taxation in U.S. courts. The discussion will be held online, on Zoom .
- In South Kivu, the government is striking back at the three-month-old tax strike, announcing that it will call in police to enforce the tax law. Strikers are protesting the lack of road maintenance in the region, and the spokesperson for the strike says it will continue until the main road is repaired.
- Chrissy Kirchhoefer, over at NWTRCC’s blog, recaps some of the Tax Day actions war tax resisters have engaged in this extended tax season.
- War tax resisters in Spain, organized under the Tortuga Antimilitarist Group, have sent letters to various political figures. The letters, accompanied by dried flowers, encourage the recipients to “stop collaborating with their respective institutions or roles in the service of violence and injustice and to join the 2021 war tax resistance campaign.” The flower-bearing messages were meant as a peaceful contrast to letters with death threats and accompanying bullets that were sent to the same figures last month by parties unknown.
- There has been yet more grassroots destruction and disabling of speed cameras in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Australia.
