Some Bits and Pieces from Here and There

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • If you haven’t seen it yet, treat yourself to this video of U.C. Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walking to her car down a path lined by silent sitting students, in the wake of yet another act of standard-procedure police brutality against protesting students on that campus.
  • Susan Miller has written up her impressions of the NWTRCC National in Kansas City earlier this month.
  • War tax resister, activist, and former Santa Cruz mayor Scott Kennedy died . Back in I noted the IRS seizing some of his paycheck (at the Resource Center for Nonviolence) for back taxes, and a Santa Cruz Sentinel article on war tax resisters in which he was featured.
  • Roy Prockter has taken his legal battle for conscientious objection to military taxation as far as it will go in the English court system, without success, and is now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
  • A group of residents of Andino, Argentina met and decided to suspend their payment of property taxes after rate increases they felt to be unreasonable. The government of Argentina has been taking drastic steps — including prosecuting economists who have the nerve to contradict optimistic government figures, and sharply restricting the legality of people and companies to hedge by keeping their assets in foreign currency — to wish away inflation and prop up the peso, while introducing its own version of an austerity plan.
  • The resistance movement targeting the new tax on electric bills in Greece continues. Some recent actions have included sit-down blockades of the utility company offices and YouTube videos showing how resisters can reconnect their own power if the utility shuts them off for non-payment.