Recent Tax Resistance Links of Note

Some tax resistance links from hither and yon:

• The Greenfield Recorder features an article about anti-war activist Randy Kehler. Excerpt:

  At age 77, the soft-spoken Kehler is still inspiring nonviolent anti-war activism. Locally, he and his wife of 45 years, Betsy Corner, are possibly most remembered for their stand against the Internal Revenue Service, as “war tax-resisters” whose rural Colrain home was seized for non-payment of taxes in 1991 and sold by the IRS for $5,400.

• The Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action’s newsletter includes an interview with war tax resister Kathy Kelly and an article about war tax resistance by Lincoln Rice and Glen Milner.
• Richard M. Schickel, a former IRS Revenue Officer, has put out a new book: Why The IRS Doesn’t Work Anymore: An Insider’s Guide to the Agency. It airs the dirty laundry at the IRS that the agency tries to distract you from with their rah-rah glossy reports.
• Bloomberg Businessweek has an article about IRS “customer” service and how awful it is.

  Its customer service workforce has shrunk more than 40% since 2010, according to the most recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor shortage — handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates at little more than fast-food wages.

  It’s so bad, that tax professionals can’t even reach the agency on the special back-channel line designed just for them. One person’s hopeless bureaucratic dysfunction is another person’s opportunity: A company has launched a $100/month service “that makes robocalls to the agency’s special practitioner line… waits on hold, and then, when it makes a connection, puts the client through to an IRS agent.”
• The human war on traffic ticket camera robots continues. In France and Italy, fire and spraypaint took out several cameras, while Santa Claus converted another one into a pose-with-Santa photo booth. Spraypaint was also the weapon of choice in several attacks in France and Germany in recent weeks.