Some recent links of interest:
- War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:
Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death. But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.
- The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity. This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich. And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
- The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government. In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign. Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign. But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
- War tax resistance also continues in Spain, with offices of tax resistance opening in various cities to counsel potential resisters this tax season.
- The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robot cameras blinded with spray paint in France and Germany, pilfered in South Africa, stickers and graffiti reading “non-essential” blinding the cameras in France, along with other spraypaint and fire attacks, and more camera destruction in Italy and England.
- In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
- NWTRCC is collecting 2021 “Tax Day” protest and outreach actions around the United States.
- Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.
