The NWTRCC newsletter is out.
It includes profiles of tax resisters Brian Willson and Russell Kanning, and an article about the difficulties that churches and nonprofits have when they try to comply with the government restrictions imposed on tax-exempt organizations (the IRS recently demanded copies of sermons and newsletters from a California church in response to an election-season anti-war sermon).
Jesse Walker of Reason magazine has an interesting article on the current generation of nonviolent revolution think-tanks, in the form of a review of the new book Nonviolent Struggle — 50 Crucial Points: A Strategic Approach to Everyday Tactics which has just been published by the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, and which is available from their site as a free PDF download.
The U.S. government is spending more on its military today, to support its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its global military presence, and its arsenal, than it spent (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the most expensive year of the Vietnam War.
And much of this spending is coming from “off-budget” borrowing. For instance, Congress has “borrowed” $177 billion from the Social Security trust fund this year to spend on war and pork, but you won’t see that $177 billion show up in the officially-reported budget deficit.
