Some links from here and there:
- The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is holding a national conference and committee meeting in Oregon. This meeting will include a special focus on cooperation between the war tax resistance movement and climate/environmental activism.
- Nathan Goodman spoke on his research into how
U.S. military spending makes Americans poorer and less free.
He put in a kind word for war tax resisters: “If a cellphone, burger, or cup of coffee isn’t worth the price to me, I can choose not to buy it. Were you ever given an ‘unsubscribe’ option from American Empire? If I want to stop paying to subsidize the brutal Saudi war in Yemen for instance I have very few options. There is of course a noble tradition of war tax resistance in the United States, with Henry David Thoreau refusing to pay poll taxes that he believed funded the Mexican-American War and Noam Chomsky and others resisting taxes during the Vietnam War, but tax resisters face repression, they risk incarceration, they risk garnishing of their wages, they risk having their property seized, and even moving out of the United States isn’t enough to avoid paying for American Empire: When you criticize U.S. foreign policy you might get told ‘hey if you don’t like it you can leave’ — well even if you leave you still are seen as owing taxes to the U.S. government unless you go through a costly process of renouncing your citizenship. And that’s ignoring that there are also funds gained through inflation, through the printing of money, that’s a tax on everyone who holds U.S. dollars…” - I noticed a campaign calling itself “Tax Resistance” suddenly appear on-line. It has appropriated photos from the U.S. war tax resistance movement, but it seems to be directed at potential war tax resisters in the U.K. Its Twitter account was suspended before I could even take a look at it. Its Facebook page is spare and generic. There’s no indication who’s behind it. I’ve got a suspicious eyebrow raised, but will keep my eyes on it.
- Attacks by motorists on traffic ticket machines continue worldwide. Some recent examples:
- If the IRS files a formal tax lien against you, expect a lot of deceptive junkmail from outfits hoping to capitalize on your plight.
- Remember Ed & Elaine Brown? The “show me the law”-style tax protesters who became causes célèbres in constitutionalist/sovereign-citizen circles? They were arrested after a long siege of their New Hampshire home about a decade ago and given lengthy — essentially life — prison terms. But one of the major charges against them was based on a law that was declared to be unconstitutionally vague in an unrelated Supreme Court case, and so now the Browns will be resentenced and may soon be released as a result.
- The government of Ontario is protesting the Canadian federal government’s carbon taxes by mandating that gas stations put stickers on the pumps that point out how carbon taxes are rising and contributing to the price of gasoline. Ontario is also spending millions of dollars on legal battles opposing the tax.
