Kat Kanning Discusses Her I.R.S. Office Civil Disobedience

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• I’ve mentioned some of Kat Kanning’s civil disobedience actions at the Keene, New Hampshire IRS office before. On The Ridley Report, Kanning discusses her arrest and incarceration.
• The group “Conscience Canada” has created a “Peace Tax Return” that war tax resisters there can file instead of or as a supplement to their annual income tax return.
• Every time Noam Chomsky reminisces on his Vietnam-era war tax resistance, he seems to take a little more credit for the tax resistance movement of that era. In this example, he talks with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

  Chomsky: In 1966 — in 1965, I tried to organize — a friend of — an artist friend of mine, since died, tried to organize a national tax resistance. Well, we got somewhere, so that’s taking, you know, sort of a mild risk. But in 1966, there were the stirrings of an effort to organize more serious resistance.

  Goodman: Did you not pay your taxes?

  Chomsky: I didn’t pay my taxes for years. But what — you know, it’s — I mean, there is a — how the IRS reacted is kind of interesting. In my case, of course they can get the money, you know.

  Goodman: And did they just take it out of your salary?

  Chomsky: They just took it. I got a nasty letter from them from some computer. But in some cases, they randomly, as far as I could tell, you know, they took people’s houses. People went to jail, and so on. So there’s a kind of a risk associated with it.

Tax resistance was one of the tactics used by groups agitating for the Reform Act of 1832. Here’s how The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser covered it on 17 March 1832 (excerpts):

We have been informed that in several districts of the metropolis the tax-gatherers have been informed by the inhabitants on whom they have called, that the taxes which they have recently collected would be the last they would have to receive, unless the Reform Bill was carried. The districts to which we allude are not those in which a determination has been evinced, with reference to the taxes called rates imposed by self-elected bodies, to act upon the constitutional principles that taxation without representaton is illegal; namely Mary-le-bone, St. Pancras, and Islington parishes. We may mention as an instance of the quiet mode in which these determinations will be carried into effect, that the inhabitants of St. Martin’s parish, without calling any public meeting, or making any outward demonstration, have refused to pay their last poor-rates. The amount which it was expected to produce is, perhaps, £2,000; and of this amount probably not more than £100 has been collected, and that it is believed has been paid by those who had not been consulted, and who knew nothing of the determination of other inhabitants to refuse payment.