The issue of More than a paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line. Contents include:
- A report back from the “Conscience and Taxes in a Culture of War” forum in Pennsylvania earlier this month featuring Shane Claiborne, Pat Hostetter Martin, Jack Payden-Travers, and Kelly Denton-Borhaug
- Counseling notes including information on the availability of low-income legal clinics to tax resisters, new estimates of the size of the underground economy and of the number of non-income-tax-paying households, and the IRS’s use of “ghost returns” when they battle non-filers.
- International news from the Conscience Canada group of war tax resisters.
- Ideas & Actions including a radio show sponsorship by a local war tax resistance group, an anti-census action in Britain, and Elizabeth Boardman’s evocation of John Woolman.
- A profile of Carol Dotterer and Ruth Kirk
In other war tax resistance news:
- Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, was at Mount Holyoke college recently to address the more recent Wikileaks action and the government retaliation against accused whistleblower Bradley Manning. According to one account:
While in the area, Ellsberg said he planned to visit with Randy Kehler, an old friend and tax resister whose refusal to pay taxes led to a much-publicized confrontation with federal authorities that forced Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, from their Colrain home.
Ellsberg said he first heard Kehler speak at an anti-war, draft resisters event in when Kehler talked about being willing to go prison rather than go to war.
“He made a very strong impression on me,” Ellsberg said. So strong, he said, that he got up and left. “I went by myself to a men’s room at the back of the auditorium, just by myself, and sat there on the floor and cried.”
It was that moment, Ellsberg said, that he realized he would have to act on his own already strong feelings about the waste and folly of Vietnam.
Without Kehler’s example, he said, “I wouldn’t have copied the Pentagon Papers.”
- War tax resisters Jack Herbert and S. Brian Willson appeared recently on the Veterans For Peace Forum:
