Tax Resistance News from Here and There

Some tabs that have arisen in my browser in recent days:

• Add Michael Bowman to that short list of Americans who have followed their anti-abortion convictions through to tax resisting conclusions. Bowman objects to his tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood, and has been resisting taxes since 1997. He was recently indicted for what the government insists is his “frivolous” objection. Bowman explains his stand in this video. In part he is trying to use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Hobby Lobby case to further his legal stand, a strategy American war tax resisters have also considered.
• Rampant corruption in South Africa’s government has caused many people to stop paying taxes in exasperation. The latest report from the South African Revenue Service reports a record tax revenue gap, with only 75% of the expected tax returns having been filed. “We have seen a slippage in compliance… we will be looking specifically at those people who have stopped paying because they are unhappy with government,” said the agency’s head of revenue research Randall Carolissen.
• PopularResistance.org covers CodePink’s new “Divest from the War Machine” campaign. It’s frustrating to read. The aim of the project is “to redirect U.S. tax dollars from the war economy and into the peace economy.” But rather than forthrightly redirecting their own tax payments at the source, the campaigners plan to try to lobby institutions to reduce their investments in the profits of military contractors in the hopes that this will have some effect somehow someday. Why take this winding, dusty back-road to your destination when there’s a paved expressway?

A news dispatch found in the Rochester Times-Union from this date in 1930:

Machine Guns of British to End Tax Riots

Rangoon, Burma (AP) — British soldiers with machine guns have been sent into the Tharawaddy district, 65 miles north of here, where more than a score have been killed in tax resistance rioting during the past two days.

Considerable feeling throughout Burma has been aroused by reports of the murder of H.V.M. Fields Clark, a forest ranger in the government service. He had returned from an inspection tour to his lonely bungalow in the village of Weya, the report said, when native rebels closed in and killed him.

Four police have been killed and several wounded in encounters with the rebels who thus far have eluded capture by taking advantage of the wild character of the country.

Wikipedia gives this context:

In December 1930, a local tax protest by Saya San in Tharrawaddy quickly grew into first a regional and then a national insurrection against the government. Lasting for two years, the Galon rebellion, named after the mythical bird Garuda — enemy of the Nagas, i.e. the British — emblazoned on the pennants the rebels carried, required thousands of British troops to suppress along with promises of further political reform. The eventual trial of Saya San, who was executed, allowed several future national leaders, including Dr Ba Maw and U Saw, who participated in his defence, to rise to prominence.

Further information on the Saya San page paints this as less “tax resistance rioting” than a nationalist insurrection aiming to replace the British colonial government with a traditionalist Burmese king.