Refuse to Fund Certain Voluntary, Non-Governmental Activities as Well

I’ve learned of a few campaigns that have threatened to withhold certain non-governmental, voluntary payments as well as taxes.

Example Women’s Freedom League

For example, the Women’s Freedom League resolved “that Suffragists refuse subscriptions to churches and organised charitable institutions till the vote is granted, with a view to women making their power felt and to show the difference their withdrawal from religious and social work would make.”

Example Campaign Contribution Strike

In 2001, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, announced that he and the heads of a hundred other large companies had pledged to withhold campaign contributions from political candidates “until a fair, bipartisan deal is reached that sets our nation on stronger long-term fiscal footing.”

Example Repledge

In 2012, another fellow came up with a clever plan to get money out of politics. Dubbed “Repledge,” it worked like this:

We connect individual contributors who agree to transform their political contributions into charitable donations if a supporter of the opposing political candidate matches the contribution.

This way, people could divert their political contributions to more useful purposes without feeling that they’re thereby empowering even worse politicians than the ones they had been intending to fund.

A more recent project along these lines, the Double Impact Project, accepts donations from American supporters of the Republican and Democratic parties.

You can pledge money to the party of your choice, but the twist is, if someone pledges money to the opposite party, both contributions “cancel out”, and we will send that money to charity that both parties agree to at the end of the month.

Only what’s left after this cancelling-out actually goes to fund the politicians.

Example Zuism

In Iceland, the government mediates religious tithing by requiring every citizen to declare their religion and then doling out tax money to the various churches in proportion to the number of citizens they have in their congregations. Thousands of citizens who were fed up with this government subsidy of religion flocked to a newly-revived ancient Sumerian religion, Zuism, whose officials promised to refund all of their government subsidy directly to church members.

Notes and Citations

“Women’s Freedom League Annual Conference” The Vote 3 April 1914, p. 379
Hartman, Rachel Rose “Starbucks CEO says 100+ businesses to withhold campaign donations over debt” Yahoo! News 25 August 2011

No such deal was reached—indeed, if anything Congress got even more histrionically dysfunctional with its “fiscal cliffs” and “sequesters” and other such games. In late 2012 I looked up a handful of the signers of this pledge at a website that tracks political contributions, to see if they’d held to their vow. What I found was not very encouraging. Whole Foods chief Walter Robb, for instance, donated $5,000 to the Democratic National Committee about ten months after signing the pledge. Tim Armstrong of AOL donated $30,000 to the Republican National Committee between May and September of 2012, along with additional contributions to a senatorial candidate and to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Mickey Drexler of J Crew donated to several Democratic Party organizations. Campaign organizer Howard Schultz himself couldn’t resist the temptation to drop $1,000 into Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s campaign bucket.
Sherwood, Harriet “Icelanders flock to religion revering Sumerian gods and tax rebates” The Guardian 8 December 2015