Some tax resistance news from here and there:
- A multi-day business strike in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is protesting the government’s attempt to extend and hike a tax.
- It’s very rare for a major U.S. political party to call for tax refusal, but that’s what the Republican Party in Seattle has done after that city passed a questionably-legal municipal income tax. “This law is unconstitutional, illegal, and against the voter’s [sic] will expressed nine (9) times at the ballot box and it deserves nothing less than civil disobedience — that is, refusal to comply, file or pay,”
- Stephen Ruth discovered that Suffolk County officials had unsafely manipulated the timing of traffic lights to trick drivers into running red lights and increase the revenue from the ticket-issuing red-light cameras. He was so furious that he not only blew the whistle, but he cut the wires to the cameras to foil the scheme.
- Save Lagos Group has called for tax resistance against the government of that Nigerian state.
- American war tax resister Frances Crowe is 98 years old. That didn’t stop her from getting arrested in a civil disobedience action against a planned natural gas pipeline. She was convicted, and is now refusing to pay the fine.
- Welt wonders where Thoreau would find himself in today’s political landscape, and concludes: “He belongs to nobody; he cannot be monopolized by any party. ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume,’ said Thoreau, ‘is to do at any time what I think right.’ Ideologies, even progressive ones, bothered him.”
- The Den Plirono movement is still sending out its Harry Tuttle-like engineers to reconnect the power to families who have lost electricity for failure to keep up with the tax hikes the government has added to utility bills.
