There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
- a report on the Fall 2014 NWTRCC national gathering from Ruth Benn
- some notes on practical issues of interest to war tax resisters including the possibility of reducing taxes through charitable giving, how to react to letters from the IRS, and the use of no-interest community investment loans to keep assets secure from collection
- a summary of Erica Weiland’s interview with Spanish activist Enric Duran
- a report from the New England war tax resister gathering and some notes about other events at which war tax resisters have done outreach recently
- some notes about internal NWTRCC business matters of concern to the membership
- Peg Morton profiles war tax resister John Lindsay-Poland
I’ve also seen some new interest in the tactic of tax resistance popping up here and there on-line. Twitter is full of people threatening to stop paying taxes with 140-character bravado over everything from police impunity to Obama’s immigration policy tweaks. That’s nothing to get too excited about, except that I haven’t seen so many people hit on tax resistance as a possible activist response to political issues all at once before.
Tax resister Gary Flomenhoft posted a couple of meditations recently at ClubOrlov:
- The Only Way to Stop the Empire
- “The only action that can possibly stop the empire in its tracks is cutting off its food supply — the tax money on which it lives. We have to starve the beast through divestment, capital expatriation, tax resistance, tax refusal and tax revolt. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig told us this flat out in the 1980s when, being confronted with huge protests over U.S. Central American policy, he said: ‘Let them protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes.’ Truer words were never uttered by a U.S. official. Is there any evidence to contradict his statement? Has any other measure had any impact on the war machine? The honest answer is no. Millions of people around the world protested before the invasion of Iraq. These protests were ignored. No amount of protest or other efforts can stop it, because it doesn’t cut off the empire’s food supply of money and fear. Only by cutting off its funds by not paying taxes can we stop the empire.”
- Tax Revolt Methods
- Describes some of the methods readers might adopt in order to reduce or nearly-eliminate their federal taxes.
Also, The Moon Magazine recently reprinted my meditations on the “one-man revolution” of Ammon Hennacy, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Robert Frost.
