New National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Newsletter

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out. Contents include:

• Ruth Benn reports back from the Fall 2013 NWTRCC national gathering in New York City
• remembering the recently departed war tax resister Sallie Marx
• some notes on how war tax resisters are approaching the new legal landscape of Obamacare
• Conscience U.K. explains their campaign to allow conscientious objectors to contribute to nonviolent national security solutions
• notes on the recent New England gathering and on some other war tax resistance actions around the country
• a profile of resister Ruby Phillips

Here’s a bit more about the bonnets rouges, who held a big anti-tax demonstration across France yesterday:

• Philippe Euzen has a backgrounder at Le Monde — “Ces patrons à l’origine des ‘bonnets rouges’ ” (the bosses behind the bonnets rouges) — in which he describes how business and entrepreneurial groups with a deregulation/low-tax agenda united with leftish Breton nationalists and decentralization activists to gel this unusual movement.
• Another backgrounder at France Info looks at an odd variety of angry birds in the French political scene: activist coalitions with names like “Pigeons,” “Chicks,” “Turkeys,” “Dodos,” and “Storks” that are fighting for a variety of causes. Some are trying to crack open an over-regulated and cartelized economy and enable more small-scale entrepreneurialism by overturning laws banning innovations like Airbnb and Lyft — and this is causing the establishment unions, who are invested in the status quo, to turn their backs on the movement.
• According to a leaked government report based on reports from regional law enforcement officials, “France is on the verge of a ‘social explosion’ over ever-increasing taxes.”

  In the report, the prefects said that roadside cameras installed across France to monitor traffic for the new tax had become symbols of fiscal oppression, and demanded that they be “removed before they are all destroyed”.

• The government has tried to defuse the protest by “suspending” the new “ecotax” which was originally supposed to go into effect next month. It is now scheduled for 2015 at the earliest.