Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Greece →
in 2011–2019 →
electricity tax resistance
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Carl Watner, proprietor of Voluntaryist.com has put out an anthology of works critical of the practice of taxation: Render Not: The Case Against Taxation.
“Some goods and services are essential to human survival, but voluntaryists realize that they need not be provided by the government on a coercive basis.
What we oppose is the coercion involved in collecting taxes.
We oppose the means and take the position that the ends never justifies the means.”
Austerity for the citizens and tax payers, more money for the banks and tax farmers: that’s the message the European ruling class is giving the people of Greece, and the Greeks are experimenting with ways of saying “forget it,” or in Greek: “ΔΕΝ ΠΛΗΡΩΝΩ” (I won’t pay).
The Greek government intends to combat tax resistance and evasion by increasing fees, fines, and tolls, and by slapping a tax onto electric bills: so “sales of generators have shot up” and people are threatening to simply not pay the extras.
The government says it will shut off power to those who resist, but as one resister put it: “when 70% of Greek households don’t pay it, what are they going to do?
Cut off the whole lot?”
Greek resisters are also occupying toll booths and waving cars through, sabotaging public transit ticketing machines, and unionists at the power corporation have refused to print out and send bills that contain the new tax.
The IRS has finally taken notice of Cindy Sheehan’s tax resistance, and recently took the unusual step of issuing her a summons to bring all the details of her financial life to their office so they can decide how much of it to seize.
Her response?
“We will never pay, so stop harassing us.”
A while back, the U.S. government experimented with turning some of its naughty delinquent taxpayers over to private debt collection agencies.
This, they hoped, would result in increased tax revenue, a new source of corporate profit, and some nice campaign contribution kickbacks.
It was a bit of a boondoggle, was naturally opposed by the union representing IRS employees, and was scrapped in .
But then what happened to all those cases that had been given to the private debt collection companies and then reverted to the IRS?
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration took a look. In the sample of cases they investigated, on nearly half the IRS had taken no collection actions since the cases had been returned to them.
The «δεν πληρώνω» (“won’t pay”) movement in Greece is generating a lot of commentary in the press — but mostly in the Greek press, and so mostly in Greek.
But I’ve been able to extract a few tidbits from the news via Google Translate.
Some background: The Greek government, trying to get on a stronger financial footing and pay off international creditors, is raising taxes and cutting spending — in effect, giving Greeks that winning sales pitch: “you will get less from us and it will cost you more, all so we can give money to foreign banks.”
In Greece, tax evasion is notoriously something of a national sport, so raising taxes either means further goring the few bloody oxen who can’t run fast enough, or coming up with creative ways to tax the faster ones.
In this case, the government has decided to hike fees like highway tolls (or sell the rights to collect these fees to foreign companies) and tack new taxes on to utility bills.
The “won’t pay” movement is largely attacking these new taxes.
Members of union representing electrical power workers cut power to a federal government building on , protesting the hypocrisy of adding a new tax onto citizens’ electric bills while at the same time the government itself has been failing to pay its electric bills.
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.
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.
…the Greek government sent [Ioannis Chatzis, 86,] a new $372 real estate tax bill, incorporated into his electric statement.
Mr. Chatzis says he is being asked to choose between lights and paying for his wife’s medicines, since he cannot afford both on his $720-a-month pension.
“This is how we are treated,” he said recently, his face a mixture of fury and despair.
“I have nothing left to give.
I will not be paying it.”
Mr. Chatzis is far from alone in that vow, and it is not certain that the Greek government will do anything about the tax rebels.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
“LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government.”
It seems to be a cleverly-engineered, crowdsourced, ever-evolving database of the connections between politicians, lobbyists, business executives, organizations, bureaucrats, and the like.
“The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman” — Melman was the Winslow Wheeler of , keeping a watchful and critical eye on the military budget and both its inherent and extravagant waste.
This article looks in particular at the opportunity costs of military spending, and at the common fallacy that such spending stimulates the economy and enriches society.
Argentine congresswoman Griselda Baldata couldn’t help but notice that nobody was maintaining the road on Route 36, but the company in charge of maintenance was still collecting a toll.
So she stopped paying and urged her constituents to do likewise.
Martin Newell, from the London Catholic Worker community, broke into Northwood Headquarters with the hopes of disrupting the disreputable.
He was instead hauled into court and fined.
He refused to pay and was sentenced to 24 days in prison for his refusal.
First off, you may have heard some talk in the news about cuts to the Pentagon budget. You should be aware that it’s hooey. What the talk is really about is proposed reductions to the budget increases that the Pentagon had been hopefully anticipating. The Pentagon budget is still going up in both real and nominal dollars. This talk of “cuts” is like a sign in a store reading “25% Off our recently-doubled price!”
Richard Cebula and Edgar L. Feige have attempted to estimate the size of the underground economy in the United States. They estimate that 18–19% of legally-reportable income in the U.S. stays under-the-table, which translates to about half a trillion dollars in taxes each year that the IRS fails to collect. The IRS itself hasn’t attempted to measure this underground economy since .
The Greek “We Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting the stealth tax the Greek government imposed in the form of sharply hiked utility rates, has notched up a victory in court, winning an injunction preventing the utility company from shutting off power to resisters who have refused to pay the extra amount in their bills.
Jerry DePyper has beefed up his Pro-life Strike Manifesto — which advocates tax resistance in the service of anti-abortion activism — since I last visited his site. It has a good overview of the whys and hows of tax resistance, with many parallels to the war tax resistance movement.
Some bits and pieces from here and there.
A recent outrage-of-the-week was the Obama administration’s attempt to require employers to provide coverage of contraception-related treatment in employer-provided health insurance plans.
Some employers, you see, think contraception is immoral, and don’t think the government ought to be able to force them to violate their consciences by providing a benefit to an employee that an employee might use to do something they think is wrong.
To which many folks said: “Seriously? Of all the things the government forces us to bloody our hands with, you’re getting bent about this?”
For example:
“Pacifists’ ‘Conscience Objections’ to War Taxes Never Get Same Notoriety as Opposition to Funding Birth Control” by David Dayen, FireDogLake, who includes this depressing remark about the collapse of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends: “I went to a Quaker secondary school for a year, and I’m quite sure that many of the believers in the weekly meeting for worship sessions had strong religious objections to their money being used to kill other people, even in self-defense.
And yet I don’t remember a single controversy in my lifetime about ‘conscience protections’ for taxpayer funds and their use in war.
I don’t even remember any accounting accommodations made for that.”
“A modest proposal regarding religious liberty” by Mark Gordon, Vox Nova: “The principle being upheld is that as a matter of religious liberty no one ought to be forced to pay for something that violates their conscience.
If that is true of government-mandated private insurance policies, and I believe it is, then it is equally true of government-mandated taxes.”
“Obama’s Big Government Mandates: Why no one should be forced to act against his conscience” by Sheldon Richman, reason.com, who says “Americans have been forced, without their consultation — much less permission — to finance mass murder.
It’s called war, invasion, occupation, and special operations.
U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere have directly or indirectly killed over a million people who never threatened Americans at home.
Those missions have ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands more through injury and the destruction of their homes and societies.
The president of the United States refuses to take war with Iran off ‘the table’ … War against Iran would constitute mass murder.
The U.S. government should be stopped from engaging in such brutality.
But short of that, those with a conscientious objection should be free to opt out of financing these crimes.”
This is similar to the argument by the “won’t pay” movement in Greece, whose government is nickle-and-diming the citizens by raising rates on utility bills, road tolls, transit fees, and so forth, to try to raise money to pay off international lenders who are openly threatening to abolish representative government in Greece entirely and instead run the country as though it were a bankrupt corporation in receivership.
When the government electric power monopoly cut off power to a family of seven with a disabled child because they were unable to pay the hike, members of the “won’t pay” movement reconnected the power themselves in defiance.
The IRS is being swamped by identity theft cases in which fraudsters use someone else’s social security number to file a tax return that qualifies for a big refund, then cash the check before the victim knows about it.
The IRS then pursues the victim for having perpetrated tax fraud and tries to force them to pay back a refund they never saw.
The agency’s focus on trying to get more people to file their tax returns electronically has made it easier and faster for the identity thieves to process fake returns wholesale.
In Tampa, Florida, where the practice had become so widespread that local tax fraud entrepreneurs even taught classes in how to use the technique, the local news reported a few days back on “hundreds of frustrated people [who] were lined [up] at an IRS building…” waiting in long lines for hours only to find that the IRS personnel they talked to were unable to help them.
Here’s some video of folks from the “Δεν Πληρώνω”
(“Won’t Pay”) movement in Greece reconnecting the electricity at a home where
it had been shut off for failure to pay the new taxes grafted on to the
utility bills:
Some bits and pieces from faraway lands:
The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement continues to brag about its success in reconnecting the power, Archibald Tuttle-style, to people who have had it cut off for failure to pay the additional taxes added on to the rates.
Josep Maria Yago, a war tax resister who had been an antimilitarist activist in Spain since the years of the Franco dictatorship, died this month.
Tax resistance campaigns can increase their visibility by adopting particular
uniforms, badges, ribbons, or other emblems to identify resisters and those
working in concert with the campaign. Today I will summarize some examples of
this.
Gandhi’s satyagraha in India
An important part of the Indian independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi
was the wearing of khādī (homespun cloth). This had three
purposes:
To encourage the development of Indian self-reliance and industry as the
economic foundation of Indian independence.
To hurt the British government by boycotting and thereby reducing the
profits from exports of British fabric to India.
To serve as an emblem to identify and express the commitment of Indian
patriots.
Gandhi wrote:
[T]he most effective and visible cooperation which all [Indian National]
Congressmen and the mute millions can show is by not interfering with the
course civil disobedience may take and by themselves spinning and using
khādī to the exclusion of all other cloth. If it is allowed
that there is a meaning in people wearing primroses on
Primrose Day, surely
there is much more in a people using a particular kind of cloth and giving a
particular type of labour to the cause they hold dear. From their compliance
with the khādī test I shall infer that they have shed
untouchability, and that they have nothing but brotherly feeling towards all
without distinction of race, colour, or creed. Those who will do this are as
much Satyagrahis as those who will be singled out for
civil disobedience.
Gandhi wearing a “Gandhi cap”
Gandhi himself put in many hours at the spinning wheel, and demanded this of
his followers as well.
“Gandhi caps” made from
khādī became almost a uniform of the resistance. One news
dispatch from around the time of the Dharasana salt raid noted:
The correspondent said the growth of the Gandhi movement was shown by the
increased number of persons wearing the Gandhi caps. In the cities, he said,
a majority of the people wear them; they also are beginning to be worn in
villages in Punjab while even in aristocratic Simla one person in six of the
population in the bazaars have donned caps, which is the symbol of the
nationalist campaign.
Homespun cloth in the American revolution
But Gandhi’s campaign wasn’t the first blow against the British Empire that
was struck in part by homespun cloth and conspicuous consumption of
locally-manufactured goods. This was also an important part of the American
Revolution.
Here is an example reported in a
edition of the Massachusetts Gazette:
On Wednesday evening the honorable speaker and gentlemen of the House of
Burgesses gave a ball at the capitol… and it is with the greatest pleasure we
inform our readers… [of] the patriotic spirit… [that] was most agreeably
manifested in the dress of the ladies on that occasion, who, to the number of
near one hundred, appeared in homespun gowns; a lively and striking instance
of their acquiescence and concurrence in whatever may be the true and
essential interest of their country.
“Spinning bees” at which patriotic Americans worked together to card, spin,
weave, and sew, so as to avoid having to import clothing from England, were
ways that everybody could demonstrate their revolutionary spirit and
participate in the resistance. Resisters also made a point of eschewing
imported tea in favor of locally-produced substitutes (such as dried raspberry
leaves).
One patriotic poem of the time advised “young ladies”:
Wear none but your own country linen;
Of economy boast, let your pride be the most
To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay
As brocades, yet be not in a passion,
For when once it is known this is much worn in town,
One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be
To such as will wear London factory,
But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose
As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear;
Love your country much better than fine things;
Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion
To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.
Massachusetts patriots vowed in :
…that we will not, at funerals, use any gloves except those made here, or
purchase any article of mourning on such occasion, but what shall be
absolutely necessary; and we consent to abandon the use, so far as may be,
not only of all the articles mentioned in the Boston resolves, but of all
foreign teas, which are clearly superfluous, our own fields abounding in
herbs more healthful, and which we doubt not, may, by use, be found agreeable…
Rebecca Riots
The Rebecca Riots in Wales in
were notorious for the distinctive garb donned by the
resistance groups who would gather to tear down tollgates.
The leader of the party was usually a man dressed up in women’s clothing and
a large bonnet, sometimes wearing a long horse-hair wig or carrying a parasol,
who was given the name “Rebecca.” Rebecca’s followers also were men wearing
women’s clothes, or at least white blouses over their clothes, and sometimes
bonnets or other high-crowned hats, occasionally with fern fronds, feathers,
or other decorations on them. They would paint their faces black or yellow,
and sometimes drape their horses in white sheets.
In this case, the reasoning behind the costuming was not so much to express
public pride than for other purposes. For instance:
To disguise the participants so that the government would be less able to
take reprisals against them.
To resonate with ancient folk forms of grassroots vigilantism and protest
that had a similar character (cross-dressing, face painting, a carnival
atmosphere).
To intimidate toll gate keepers with their strangeness and reputation.
To create a figurehead for the movement that could be adopted and then
set aside by multiple people, so as to make the movement’s leadership
harder to target for reprisals.
To make the resistance more festive and carnivalesque and thereby
encourage participation.
To make it easier to identify fellow-resisters in the confusion of
late-night raids on dark country roads.
Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League
The badge representing Holloway Prison that was awarded to women’s suffrage
activists who had been imprisoned.
Women’s suffrage activists in the United Kingdom awarded badges to resisters
who had been imprisoned for their resistance. Here is a description of one
such badge given to Kate Harvey:
The badge is cast in the form of a shield on which is depicted the entrance
to Holloway Prison. On the reverse is a card inscribed in a faint hand:
“Given to Mrs K Harvey By Women’s Suffrage After She Had Been In Prison For
Tax Resistance.”
These badges were the equivalent of medals for meritorious service. An
American woman who visited her counterparts across the waters observed:
It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young
women… and to know that they had actually been prisoners. It was not long
before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made
special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had
been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their
numbers mounted up to the hundreds.
Relics of the Glastonbury cows
Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied
women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s
property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute
the money to male patronage recipients. In response, the government
periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and
“Taxey”).
Emblems made from hairs of the cows’ tails, woven into the shape of flowers,
and tied with ribbons emblazoned with the slogan “Taxation Without
Representation,” became popular adornments for supporters of the Smiths’ tax
resistance.
“I refuse to fund this war” stickers
In , an American anti-war group held a
“Stop Funding the War in Iraq” rally near the offices of a Congressional
leader.
A war tax resistance group was there to hand out stickers for people to wear
that read “I refuse to fund this war!” I was there and noted:
I figured a few people would take them and wear them without thinking much
about it, a few people would refuse to take them without thinking much about
it, and the remainder would have to think about whether they should start
refusing if they hadn’t already.
As it turned out, just about everyone we offered the stickers to was eager to
wear one, though it’s hard to tell which of these will put their money where
their mouths are. Hopefully a few, anyway, had that light bulb go on, and
then looked around and wondered “have all these other people wearing these
stickers started resisting their taxes?”
French cockades and militia uniforms in the Fries Rebellion
The Fries Rebellion in the United States took place about a decade after the
enacting of the United States Constitution, and shortly after the successful
French Revolution.
The United States government was under the presidency of John Adams, who
represented the more authoritarian, aristocratic, pro-English faction; the
faction out of power was more populist, democratic, and pro-French.
Tax resisters who participated in the Fries Rebellion sometimes signaled
their loyalty (and frightened the Adams government) by wearing French
tricolor cockades in their hats to demonstrate their affinity with the
democratic revolutionaries across the pond, and/or by wearing their old
American revolutionary militia uniforms to show their belief that their
current rebellion was more in harmony with the spirit of the American
Revolution than were the policies of the federal government.
Masks at the Carnival of Viareggio
The Carnival of Viareggio is today a parade and bacchanal, but it began with
a tax protest in which “a number of local citizens, as a sign of protest…
decided to put on masks in order to show their refusal of high taxes they were
forced to pay.”
Australian miners wear a red ribbon
Australian miners, who in were resisting
a license tax, held a “monster meeting” at which they passed a number of
resolutions, including these:
[A]s it is necessary that the diggers should know their friends, every miner
agrees to wear as a pledge of good faith, and in support of the cause, a
piece of red ribbon on his hat, not to be removed until the license tax is
abolished.
That this meeting… desire to publicly express their esteem for the memory of
the brave men who have fallen in battle [during “the late out-break”], and
that to shew their respect every digger and their friends do wear tomorrow
(Sunday) a band of black crape on his hat…
Taking pride in resistance
Many of these are examples of resisters showing pride in their
resistance. This can be a way of short-circuiting a traditional government
gambit used against tax evaders: to publish their names as a way of calling
them out as bankrupts or deadbeats. If the government tries to shame tax
resisters as irresponsible tax evaders, but the resisters have already
willingly made their resistance public, this government tactic loses its
force.
When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to use this tactic
against Poll Tax resisters in the Thatcher years, the newspapers who published
the lists of “shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the
editor from resisters who were outraged that they had not made the
list — insisting that their names be included too!
Here are some similar examples of people taking pride in their resistance or
in things incident to resistance:
When the Women’s Freedom League (a British suffrage group which refused to
pay taxes on the salaries of its employees), was threatened with a legal
writ by the government, it decided to auction the writ as a
fundraiser.
Greek tax resisters in Penteli (near Athens), who have been refusing to
pay the new taxes attached to their utility bills during the recent “won’t
pay” movement, hung their urgent “past due” notices from a Christmas tree
in the town square as ornaments.
When somebody asked Quaker Nathaniel Morgan whether he and his father had
“got anything” in the course of their war tax resistance (by which he
meant, did his Quaker meeting reimburse them for their losses when their
goods were distrained and sold), Morgan replied: “Yes, peace of mind,
which was worth all.”
Mark Wilks was arrested and sent to Brixton Prison for failing to pay his wife’s income taxes.
The case became a cause célèbre in the British women’s suffrage movement and an embarrassment to the British government and its tax authorities.
This is a good example of how careful study of the law can help tax resisters find and exploit flaws that hold the tax system or its enforcement arm up to ridicule, make them unworkable, or make them vehicles for additional resistance or propaganda opportunities.
Ethel Ayres Purdie, resident tax law expert of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, discovered the vulnerability.
The Income Tax Act, she wrote, “is a most fearsome piece of composition.
Its language is archaic and tautological, it rises wholly superior to punctuation, and proceeds breathlessly through one hundred and ninety-four clauses.”
But one of those clauses held a fatal flaw.
The “Married Woman’s Property Act” of was a reform that allowed married women to maintain control of their property rather than relinquishing it to their husbands’ control upon marriage.
But the earlier () Income Tax Act still considered the husband to be solely liable for the income taxes of both the husband and wife.
At first, when Elizabeth Wilks began resisting her income tax, the government responded by seizing and selling her property, but when this quirk in the law was discovered, tax resisters like Wilks protested that the government could not legally seize her property since as a married woman her taxes were legally owed by the him in the marriage.
So the government went after Mark Wilks instead.
Mark Wilks, for his part, insisted that he could hardly fill out an income tax return since he had no legal right to demand information from his wife about her income!
Besides, his modest income and lack of property in his own name meant that he could not afford to pay the taxes on his wife’s considerably larger income (he did pay the tax on the portion of their joint income that was attributable to his own income, though his income was low enough that by itself it would not have been taxable).
“I am informed that I am liable for taxes levied on her income,” he wrote “while at the same time the law places all her property entirely beyond my control.”
Meanwhile, the Women’s Tax Resistance League trumpeted the arrest of Mark Wilks and his indefinite imprisonment — “for non-payment of taxes not his own and due on an income over which he has no control and whose amount he can only guess at” — as proving their contention that not only should women resist the income tax, but that married women were not even legally obligated to pay it and those who were paying it were operating under a legal delusion.
The imprisonment of Mark Wilks was a propaganda coup:
For what do the arrest and imprisonment of Mark Wilks mean?
We are perfectly certain that it will not last long.
Stupid and inept as it has been, the Government, we are certain, will not risk the odium which would justly fall upon it if this outrage on liberty went on.
A Government which has much at stake and which lives by the breath of popular opinion cannot afford to ignore such strong and healthy protest as is being poured out on all sides.
To us, who are in the midst of it, that which seems most remarkable is the growth of public feeling.
In the streets where processions are nightly held, we were met at first by banter and rowdyism.
“A man in prison for the sake of Suffragettes!”
To the boy-mind of the metropolis, on the outskirts of many an earnest crowd, that seemed irresistibly funny; but thoughtfulness is spreading; into even the boy-mind, the light of truth is creeping.
If it had done nothing else, the imprisonment of Mark Wilks has certainly done this — it has educated the public mind.
Wilks was released after less than a month in prison, without official explanation, and without paying the tax.
A tax resistance campaign is almost always one that butts up against the law, and it can be helpful to have campaigners who know a thing or two about legal matters.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it when she was considering a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in America,
One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of how legal study and the assistance of attorneys have made a difference in tax resistance campaigns.
Poll Tax rebels in Thatcher’s Britain
Understanding the law and the legal process was important in the poll tax rebellion — to give confidence to resisters, to support targets of government reprisals, and to make the process of tax enforcement costly and unmanageable.
Anti-poll tax volunteer Danny Burns writes:
In Bristol when the court cases started, each person with a summons, who rang into the office, was logged and sent an information pack.
The same personal attention was given to people with notices from the bailiffs.
At the peak of the campaign, the Bristol office was staffed morning and afternoon five days a week by different volunteers.
, it was receiving over 200 calls a week.
… [The volunteers included] at least five court support workers…
In every part of England and Wales local groups mobilised to provide support for non-payers in the courts.
Tens, if not hundreds of activists in each region attended legal briefing sessions.
These were run both by activists and sympathetic local lawyers.
People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings.
These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off.
People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them.
They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.
By , when most of the court cases had started, virtually every Anti-Poll Tax Union in the UK had trained at least two or three of its members to become conversant with the Poll Tax law.
Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
This is unique in the history of popular campaigning.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions hoped to use the legal precedent of McKenzie versus McKenzie (), which said that a person can “attend a trial as a friend of either party (to) take notes and quietly make suggestions and give advice to that party.”
This person would be known as a “McKenzie friend.” McKenzie friends had no right to address the court, but they could advise the non-payer what to say.
In this way everyone would be able to offer technical defences and thereby delay the proceedings.
The campaign needed lawyers only in the most technical cases.
Lawyers were often seen as a liability, because they represented an individual client, and it was in their interest to get through the procedure as quickly as possible.
It was in the campaign’s interest for everything to proceed as slowly as possible.
Nevertheless, legal knowledge and guidance was essential.
This arrived with the creation of the Poll Tax Legal Group… [which] researched legislation and case law.
It set up a network of lawyers throughout England and Wales who could support the legal challenges of Anti-Poll Tax groups and produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.
These underpinned the legal needs of the movement and helped ordinary people to get to grips with the law they needed to use.
Delaying tactics were mixed with serious legal technicalities.
Councils were challenged for sending notices to the wrong addresses.
Given the rate at which people moved houses, it was difficult for the councils to keep up, and as a result many cases were dropped because people hadn’t received proper notice.
Big legal challenges were also made over “correct procedures.”
These came in the first few weeks and resulted mostly from the inexperience of councils in dealing with this sort of process.
The first day of Medina Council’s cases (on the Isle of Wight) is probably the most famous example.
The reminder notices were sent out with second class stamps, they consequently arrived late, people didn’t receive the statutory notice which they were entitled to, and the court threw out all 1,900 cases.
The council had to start again.
When police attacked an anti-poll tax demonstration in London, many of the demonstrators fought back, and hundreds were arrested.
Elements of the campaign leadership distanced themselves from the defendants, embarrassed to have the campaign associated with violence.
So other activists helped to form and coordinate an independent group — the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign — with the following mandate:
The campaign will:
Unconditionally defend all of those arrested on .
Be controlled by and be accountable to the defendants
Be totally independent of any other organisation.
Seek support from the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement and all other sympathetic organisations.
Seek to co-ordinate the legal defence of all those arrested.
Seek to build a coherent picture of events of from the point of view of those arrested.
Publicise the points of view of defendants.
Raise money for a bust fund, controlled by the defendants to cover their legal and welfare costs.
Ensure that at all future Anti-Poll Tax events there will be proper legal cover and support for anyone arrested.
This will include an office and workers to visit places of detention and look after prisoners’ welfare.
Danny Burns again:
About a dozen people volunteered to carry out the court monitoring process.
They attended every hearing, systematically took notes of everything that was said, recorded the numbers of police officers and approached the defendants asking them to attend the now weekly TSDC meetings… By the summer, over 250 of the defendants had been contacted.
The TSDC ran advice sessions on prison, produced legal briefing notes and mailed out the minutes of the weekly meetings to every defendant every week.
A solicitors’ group was established with a core of three, but at the peak of early activity they managed to get over fifteen solicitors involved.
This proved important because the solicitors’ group managed to get hold of over 50 hours of police videos and handed them over to the campaign.
The police videos were crucial in getting a lot of people off, and a number of people in the campaign worked extremely hard editing videos and rejigging them for particular trials.
The solicitors’ group also got the Crown Prosecution Service to hand over a full list of all of the defendants and the names and addresses of their lawyers.
The lawyers were all contacted and, although many were initially reluctant to co-operate with the campaign, they soon realised that TSDC had a lot of information which their clients needed.
Every possible legal angle was pursued by the campaign’s legal team — down to legal definitions of what constituted a householder, making the councils prove that the person they had summonsed actually lived at the address, that they owned the property, etc., etc. We weren’t doing this because we had any illusions in the impartiality of the court system.
We knew that even though we were successful in finding various legal loopholes these would all be closed one by one and that the judges would be doing their best to facilitate the councils.
This was demonstrated most clearly when a judge in Swords invoked the Public Order Act to close several streets around the courthouse to prevent a protest outside it.
But by contesting every detail of every summons we could make the system unworkable.
There were tens of thousands of non-payers.
After several months the councils had only managed to get a couple of dozen cases through the courts.
Someone calculated that at the rate they were managing to proceed it would take them something like 220 years to process all the cases.
And it was costing them more in legal fees than they could ever hope to take back in charges — even if they managed to bully everyone into paying.
Any time the council did manage to get a court order, it was appealed — again the objective being to clog up the system.
George Cony’s aggressive lawyers
When Oliver Cromwell knocked the English king off his throne, he did so in part in the cause of Parliamentary democracy.
Upon assuming charge of the English government, however, he grew impatient with Parliament and decided to enact some taxes on his own.
One of Cromwell’s more radical supporters, George Cony, taking Cromwell at his word (Cromwell had said that “the subject who submits to an illegal impost is more an enemy of his country than the tyrant who imposes it”) decided to refuse to pay one of these arbitrary taxes.
Cony’s lawyers argued his case so successfully that Cony’s tax evasion case threatened to call the legal underpinnings of Cromwell’s regime into question.
The judges in the case seemed sympathetic, and Cromwell was so alarmed that he had all three lawyers imprisoned in the Tower of London until they repented, upon which the chief-justice who was hearing the case resigned.
Hugh Williams and the Rebecca rioters
Radical lawyer Hugh Williams was of great help to the Rebecca movement in Wales — some say he was more than a legal advisor, but one of the instigators of the movement, or even “Rebecca” herself!
One account says: “[Williams] did all the legal work for the rioters, also drafting various petitions for them.
He was a prominent member of the Chartist movement, acting as their solicitor, and he defended the prisoners at Welshpool Assizes in July, 1839, for taking part in the Chartist Riots.
He rendered similar services to the Rebecca prisoners gratuitously; but was eventually reported to the Lord Chancellor and struck off the Rolls.
He, however, continued to do a considerable amount of legal work, and whenever it became necessary for him to appear in court, he invariably employed [another attorney] to appear for him.”
His familiarity with the law and the legal process helped him help the Rebeccaites translate their grievances into formal petitions, which in turn helped the Rebeccaite “people power” movement effect change in government policy.
White supremacists in Reconstruction-era Louisiana
When white supremacists in New Orleans decided to actively withdraw their consent from the mixed-race Reconstruction government of “scalawags” and “carpet-baggers” there in , they formed “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” and declared a tax strike.
Fifty-eight New Orleans attorneys signed the following statement of support:
The undersigned attorneys at law, citizens of New Orleans, engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the “school-tax,” the “park-tax,” and the “metropolitan-police tax,” and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.
The Smith sisters of Glastonbury
Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute the money to male patronage recipients.
In response, the government periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and “Taxey”).
That failing to discourage the Smiths, the town decided to fight dirty, and the Smiths fought back legally in a way that brought further attention to their cause:
[A]n inconspicuous advertisement in the Hartford Courant announced the sale at public auction of fifteen acres of Smith pasture land on , a date contrived to fall just before the grass would be cut.
Though the sisters set out on that day with ample funds, the collector adroitly shifted the meeting place, and when the two women caught up with the auction, the gavel had just gone down transferring for $78.35 land worth nearly $2,000 to none other than a covetous neighbor who had tried for years to get possession of it.
Abby and Julia were daughters of a lawyer.
They brought suit against tax collector George C. Andrews on the grounds that he had violated a law which plainly stated that movable property must first be sold for unpaid taxes before real estate could be seized.
The case was tried in the home of Judge Hollister of Glastonbury, who gave a verdict in favor of the sisters and fined Andrews damages of $10. Threatening terrible consequences, Andrews appealed the case.
The new trial, which lasted three days in the Hartford Court of Common Pleas, had a farcical aspect.
There were misplaced records; there was distorted evidence.
The judge, in absentia, reversed the Glastonbury decision and decided in favor of collector Andrews.
At this point the Smiths’ lawyer backed out.
Abby and Julia, both now in their eighties, began the study of law with the intention of conducting their own case.
Happily a capable lawyer finally agreed to place a second appeal before the Court of Equity.
For two years a wide and sympathetic public followed this devious litigation.
Across the nation, even in England and France, editors and columnists lauded the Glastonbury cows in prose and poetry.
Reporters visited the town, drank tea in the elm-shaded farmhouse, admired the cows, polled public opinion in Glastonbury, and returned with highly flavored and often inaccurate stories.
With whatever condescension these reporters arrived, they seem, one and all, to have found the Smith sisters irresistible.
The hospitality, wit, and charm of the two elderly spinsters captivated the world beyond Glastonbury.
When the final verdict was made in their favor, in , women the country over rejoiced.
To be sure, Julia and Abby did not vote in Glastonbury, but from that time on their property was undisturbed.
The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement
The current Greek “Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting a number of stealth taxes the government has added to things like utility bills and road tolls, has also carried its struggle into court — at one point winning an injunction that forbade the state power company from cutting the power of people who were refusing to pay the new utility bill tax.
Newly-enfranchised Pennsylvania women
When women in Pennsylvania won the vote, many discovered to their chagrin that they had also become subject to taxes to which they had previously been immune.
Thousands of them, deciding the package was not worth it, decided to refuse to pay.
And they were able to take advantage of a quirk in an law that did not permit the authorities to send women to prison (though they could imprison men) for tax refusal:
Nothing herein contained shall authorize the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind.
It took a few years for the state legislature to pass a law allowing for the jailing of women who refused to pay their taxes.
Maurice McCrackin’s lawyers
Not all legal help is helpful.
When American war tax resister Maurice McCrackin was convicted of refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons, he was following a strategy of complete noncooperation that he kept following right into the courtroom — where he refused to stand for the judge, refused to plead to the charges, refused to answer questions, refused to consult with his court-appointed attorney, fasted while behind bars, and had to be wheeled into and out from his court appearances because he wouldn’t walk there under his own power.
For the same reason, upon his conviction, he emphatically said that he was not interested in pursuing an appeal: “I said I wanted to file no appeal, nor did I want steps taken to keep the door open, so an appeal could be perfected later.
I do not recognize any appeal on my behalf… My position is not changed.
This is a moral, not a legal, struggle.”
One of the lawyers who had been assigned to defend him, however, convinced that the judge had betrayed bias against McCracken in his statements from the bench, said that he intended to appeal anyway.
“Constitutionalist” tax protesters
And then there are the “Constitutionalist” “show me the law!”-style tax protesters.
For years they have been bedeviling the IRS with their baroque, ever-evolving, quasi-legal arguments and pleadings based on the real Constitution, or common law, or tortured interpretations of excerpts from a variety of cherry-picked statutes and court rulings.
While they typically know just enough about the law to get into trouble, without knowing enough to get out again, there’s no question that they cause headaches a-plenty for the powers that be.
Alas, this does not seem to actually be their objective.
Instead, they seem convinced that they’re not just whistling Dixie, but they’re right, and if they can just figure out how to pick the lock of the court system with the right argument, they’ll be able to walk out free into a new world where their Constitution holds sway and the perverters of the true law are vanquished.
Alas, most of what they have discovered is an enormous and inventive catalog of things that don’t work, so in spite of all of their creativity and effort, they have given the rest of us little to work with.
But if you ever have a “that’s so crazy it just might work!” idea about going up against the IRS, you might want to research these folks first — they may have already tried it.
And every once in a while they rack up a courtroom victory — not often one that amounts to much in real terms, but it fuels the movement.
One observer of the movement reacted to a twist of this sort by saying: “This is going to encourage thousands more people who were on the fence, who were paying taxes only because they were afraid they would be criminally prosecuted.
If too many people do this, the tax system will collapse because it is based on people voluntarily complying.”
(I’m most familiar with the U.S. variety, but similar groups exist in Canada, the U.K., and probably elsewhere.
Earlier this year in England, for instance, hundreds of Constitutionalist tax protesters stormed a courtroom where one of their number was on trial, whereupon they attempted to put the judge under citizens arrest, and began making their own rulings from the bench!)
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
Another way people can assist and show solidarity with tax resisters is by coming to their assistance if their property is seized.
Here are some examples:
Practical support
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was established in .
It helps war tax resisters who have had penalties and interest added to their tax bills and seized by the IRS by reimbursing them for a large portion of these additional charges.
The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes.
The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight.
In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more.
In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
When the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner was seized for back taxes, supporters came from near and far to maintain a 24-hour occupation of the home:
[David] Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain [Massachusetts] house…
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December.
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction in , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.…
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Suffragist tax resister Dora Montefiore barricaded her home and kept the tax collector from seizing her property for several weeks in , in what came to be known as the “Siege of Montefiore.”
She noted:
The tradespeople of the neighbourhood were absolutely loyal to us besieged women, delivering their milk and bread, etc., over the rather high garden wall which divided the small front gardens of Upper Mall from the terraced roadway fronting the river.
The weekly wash arrived in the same way and the postman day by day delivered very encouraging budgets of correspondence, so that practically we suffered very little inconvenience…
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the [first] morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent.
Examples like this also proved to be vivid anecdotes that the press could use when describing the siege and the support from sympathizers.
When the U.S. government seized Amish tax resister Valentine Byler’s horses and their harnesses while he was in the field preparing for spring planting, sympathetic neighbors allowed him to borrow their horses so he could continue his work.
Other sympathizers throughout the country who heard about the case sent Byler money — more than enough to buy a new team.
An auctioneer who was dragooned into helping the government sell some of the livestock of a man who had been resisting taxes meant to pay for sectarian education in , donated the fee he had earned for conducting the auction to the resister.
During the water charge strike in Dublin, “local campaign groups successfully resisted attempts to disconnect water and in the couple of instances where water was cut off, campaigners re-connected it within hours.
The first round was won hands down by the campaign and it was back to the drawing board for the councils.”
Similar monkeywrenching is being practiced today in Greece, where activists promptly reconnect utilities of people who have been disconnected for failure to pay the increased taxes attached to their utility bills.
During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh, people sympathetic to the resisters would bid on and return furniture and other items that had been seized and sold by the tax collectors.
The Rebecca Rioters, on the other hand, were characteristically more direct in their resistance:
Warrants of distress were issued… and the constables proceeded to execute them…
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.…
At Maesgwenllian near Kidwelly, several bailiffs were put in possession for arrears of rent to the amount of £150, but about , Rebecca and a great number of her followers made their appearance on the premises, and after driving the bailiffs off, took away the whole of the goods distrained on.
As soon as daylight appeared, the bailiffs returned, but found no traces of Rebecca, nor of the goods which had been taken away.
A group in Olive Hill, Kentucky in followed the Rebecca model, to an extent, “in a raid… by a band of between 800 and 900 men, who forced Levi White, Collector of Taxes, to give up a stock of goods which had been seized.
The goods were then taken back to the store of Levi Oppenheimer, where the official had seized them.”
Last year in Oaxaca, the PRI said that the would “defend up to the point of injunctions those citizens who suffer from liens imposed as well as judgments in order to prevent the impounding of vehicles, considering it unconstitutional that the police will impound them to stop the driver and remove the unit if the striker does not pay the corresponding [vehicle] tax.”
The IRS auctioned off a portion of Ralph Shinaberry’s property in after he refused to pay a fine for growing more wheat on his farm than his government-assigned quota.
“I don’t believe the Government can tell me how much I can grow,” he said, explaining his resistance.
The winning bidder, Herbert Jessup, told a reporter:
“I have no intention of taking possession of the property.”
When war tax resister Cosmas Raimondi’s car was seized by the IRS in , a handful of families in his parish offered to permanently loan him their car so he could still get around, and many others loaned him their cars temporarily.
“I’ve not had to ask one person,” he said.
In Beit Sahour, when the Israeli occupation authorities seized furniture and appliances from resisters, relatives and others would loan them spares, or camping furniture to use as replacements.
“In Bedfordshire in community pressure persuaded a minister to return goods seized from a Quaker for non-payment of tithes.”
Moral support
When Dora Montefiore was first formulating her “siege” strategy with fellow-activists Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, they agreed to organize daily demonstrations outside of her home while she was defending it.
Montefiore remembered:
The feeling in the neighbourhood towards my act of passive resistance was so excellent and the publicity being given by the Press in the evening papers was so valuable that we decided to make the Hammersmith “Fort” for the time being the centre of the W.S.P.U. activities, and daily demonstrations were arranged for and eventually carried out. …
The roadway was… ideal for the holding of a meeting, as no blocking of traffic could take place, and day in, day out the principles for which suffragists were standing we expounded to many who before had never even heard of the words Woman Suffrage.
At the evening demonstrations rows of lamps were hung along the top of the wall and against the house, the members of the W.S.P.U. speaking from the steps of the house, while I spoke from one of the upstairs windows.
…shoals of letters came to me, a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging.
Some Lancashire lads who had heard me speaking in the Midlands wrote and said that if I wanted help they would come with their clogs but that was never the sort of support I needed, and though I thanked them, I declined the help as nicely as I could. …
The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house…
When the IRS seized and auctioned off the home and farm of Art Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos in , other war tax resisters and supporters were by their sides:
“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted.
But she was far from alone.
About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.
About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine.
Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
In , the IRS levied 78-year-old war tax resister Ruth McKay’s social security checks to recoup the taxes she had been refusing to pay over the previous 20 years.
To show their support of her stand, 40 activists from New Hampshire Peace Action joined her for a vigil at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire.
When war tax resister Maria Smith’s wages were garnisheed by the IRS in , fifty supporters held a special church service in her honor.
“One of the Valod Vanias,” whose land was seized by the government during the Bardoli satyagraha, “who thus lost all his valuable property, celebrated the event by inviting friends and soldiers of Satyagraha to a party.”
On the other hand, some campaigns have taken the position that sacrifices for the cause are their own reward — that martyrdom is a blessing and that it would be foolish for such resisters to seek or accept recompense.
Nathaniel Morgan was speaking with someone curious about the Quaker stand on war and war taxes, and had this to say:
I told him then that I and my father had refused to pay the income tax on account of war, and had refused it on its first coming out, and withstood it 16 years, except when peace was declared, and that our goods were sold by auction to pay it.
This seemed to excite his curiosity, and made a stand to hear further, on the steps above the engine, going down to the river; asking me if we got anything by that, meaning, was anything refunded by the Society for such suffering.
I immediately replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”
I mentioned boycotts of government-produced or -taxed goods and services as a variety of tax resistance or a tactic that has accompanied tax resistance campaigns.
Today I’m going to cover a related tactic: the manufacture and sale of untaxed alternatives to taxed goods.
This tactic was put to good use in the American Revolution.
Boycotts of British products like tea, paint, cloth, were supplemented by expansion of local industry to make alternative products:
Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens.
New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American.
Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.
In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.
Gatherings at which dozens of people would card and spin yarn, weave fabric, or sew clothing, were simultaneously acts of resistance and patriotic rallies.
Towns competed with each other over how many yards of cloth they could produce, with results breathlessly reported in the newspapers.
At society balls, a woman who turned up in anything but a homespun cloth dress would be shunned.
…at the first commencement exercises of Rhode Island College (later Brown University), the president proud-spiritedly wore wholly homespun clothing.
At Harvard, the faculty and students had all taken to homespun in support of their women spinners, of whom the Boston Chronicle had bragged “[T]hey exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience.”
American tea drinkers switched to “balsamic hyperion” — dried raspberry leaves — which could be produced domestically.
Homespun cloth, or khādī, was a signature part of the Indian independence movement (which also, famously, promoted the domestic production of salt to break Britain’s taxed monopoly).
Gandhi insisted that everyone in the resistance movement should participate in producing, and of course should exclusively wear, domestic cloth.
I’ve tried to promote home-brewing beer and cider as a way of avoiding the federal excise tax on those products.
Home distilling is another option, though it’s not legal in the United States.
When Britain increased the excise tax on distilled spirits in Ireland in , “the only effect was to increase illicit distillation.
The decrease in the duty was £7,361 4s. The number of persons in confinement for breach of the revenue laws had increased from 84 to 368.” A few people have started growing their own tobacco as a way of combating the increasingly prohibitive tobacco excise taxes.
Audrey Silk grew and cured enough tobacco at her Brooklyn home in to roll nine cartons worth of cigarettes, which would have cost more than $1,000 at taxed rates at the time.
The “Addiopizzo” movement in Italy founded a supermarket, the shelves of which were stocked exclusively with goods from producers who had vowed not to pay any more protection money to the mafia.
They also maintain a buycott list of such companies to help consumers make pizzo-free shopping choices.
When Greece tacked new taxes onto electric bills as a way of combating tax evasion, the sales of gas-powered electric generators shot up.
Francisco José Sarrión Torres reports on the activities of the Tax Resistance Group of Ciudad Real [Spain]:
“This year we wrapped up the war tax resistance campaign with no refunds
redirected to two-thirds of the tax resisters in Ciudad Real. It has been
reclaimed as though it were an error, but we have already stated publicly
and in writing that it was not, but was an exercise of conscientious
objection in the face of the misuse of our taxes by the government. We
have redirected €870 to organizations like Ecologists in Action of Ciudad
Real, the 0.7% Project of the Rural Christian Movement, the Anselmo
Lorenzo Foundation, or Doctors Without Borders, from believing that these
are some that actually contribute to progressing toward a peaceful
world.”
…there are reasons to protest, most of us understand that the national books have been cooked and since we are shackled with deep debt, the most workable, quick, and “EU-recommended” solution is budget cuts, to be prioritized in terms of their expendability — and it is here that most of us feel betrayed, by seeing how expendable the citizens are and how comparatively vital are the political class, who have barely changed their privileges.
Lopez has decided to become a “social rat” — reducing his consumption as
much as possible so as to avoid paying the value-added tax:
…I declare a consumer strike, and I will get the most out of every cent I earn; I subscribe to “lonchafinismo” (responsible consumption).
I’ll stretch out the time on my monthly contact lenses, I’ll cut my hair less, I’ll give up on going to the movies and watch films at home, I’ll stretch expiration dates, will drive more economically.
Certainly the shops are not to blame, and I’m sorry for them, but if the government comes to realize that it [the VAT increase] is a useless measure, perhaps they will rethink it.
He also recommends a few other methods of tax resistance. There were over
a hundred comments on the article last I looked, many of them off-topic
in the classic internet fashion, but giving some clue as to the reach of
the article.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Peter J. Reilly, who has a blog at the Forbes website, writes about how the IRS labels conscientious objectors to military taxation “frivolous” as a way of discouraging dissent, and how war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman is challenging this in court.
Some developments in the “won’t pay” movement in Greece:
I wish I could read Greek or that mechanical translation were more sophisticated.
This page seems to be describing a tax resistance tactic that involves paying a single euro in road tax to the federal government, accompanied with a letter of protest about how road taxes & fees are being siphoned off by foreign creditors rather than being used to keep the roads in decent repair.
The government is trying to promote a new social norm in which people will be free to refuse to pay for goods and services they receive, unless they are presented with a printed receipt — this in an attempt to crack down on off-the-books transactions.
The government has signaled that it won’t prosecute people who steal from merchants in such circumstances.
The National Taxpayer Advocate (a sort of ombudsman within the IRS) issued her annual report recently.
One bit caught my eye: the Advocate estimates that U.S. taxpayers spend a combined 6,100,000,000 hours per year doing the recordkeeping and filing they have to do to be tax compliant.
Janet Novak, at Forbes, puts that in perspective:
While I was busy going through Friends Journal back
issues, I didn’t attend much to tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so
I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the news about international tax
resisters that caught my notice:
Since the fall into hell of the American financial giant Lehman Brothers in
, international banks have
received injections of public money coming from various governments to the
tune of $4.6 trillion, an amount sufficient to eradicate world hunger 92
times over. This embarrassing data forms part of an investigation from Arcadi
Oliveres, professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona and president of the organization Justícia i Pau
(“Justice and Peace”). Oliveres was, 30 years ago, one of the originators of
the first tax resistance initiative organized in our country. He decided, in
defiance of the Law, but favoring his conscience, not to contribute to the
government’s military spending. He became a tax resister. Today, for reasons
like the data cited above, many citizens have begun processes of resistance
that involve new ways to use their money.
Those first war tax resisters of
opened a new path for the honorable citizen. It was not meant to trick the
Treasury so as to keep the money. The taxpayer challenged the collector, and
questioned the legitimacy of the spending they considered immoral. In the
absence of ethical behavior from the state, the good citizen, they argued,
did not have to obey it. “The people are afraid to disobey, but if nobody had
done so before there would still be slaves on the streets and blacks would be
standing in the back of the bus,” Oliveres told Números
Rojos. The professor took as model conscientious objectors who refused
to do compulsory military service in : “For not wanting to do their military year and a half they were
sent to prison for three years, even to penal colonies in the Sahara. They
had no fear; for this reason they were so important.” That struggle is
won — compulsory military service was abolished in Spain on
— though war tax
resistance, which began to be practiced in
continues to be considered illegal evasion.
Calculating the Deduction
The process of becoming a tax resister is very simple, although there is no
fixed rule. It amounts to adding to your tax return a new deduction of
x euros, corresponding to your personal contribution to government
military spending. But the calculation of this option can have a variety of
sources: some people estimate military spending in the total federal budget
each year and apply this percentage directly as a deduction on their return
(between 6–15%, depending on which items are considered military spending).
Others take as their reference the data suggested each year by antimilitarist
platforms (last year military spending of €666.14 per person was calculated).
And others redirect a fixed amount each year from the taxes owed on their
return (traditionally €84). Then, depending on how the final result changes,
the objector may have to pay less to the Treasury than is owed — if it is
positive — or may recover more money from the Treasury than it has to
pay — if it is negative.
In either case, before filing, the objector has already redirected the amount
he or she does not accept as legitimate government spending to an institution
for social good — whichever the objector wants, although there are lists of
groups to contribute to. Of course, the reasons for resisting are specified
on the return itself, and also communicated to the tax agency at the time of
filing. But what happens next? “if it comes out negative, you will claim an
amount from the Treasury, which is not returned to you, and generally that’s
that. But when it is positive, you neglect to pay a part. In this case, it
may be that nothing happens — according to Ecologists in Action, in 90% of
cases the incident goes undetected — but the tax agency may come after you
and end up levying not only the amount you refused to pay but also an
administrative penalty,” Oliveres said.
With exceptions, like in when the Supreme
Court of Catalonia found in favor of the former Catalonia Parliament deputy
Joan Surroca, who in deducted from the
amount that he had to pay in taxes a percentage corresponding to military
spending and gave the money to an
NGO
that assists African women. The treasury then fined him 54,896 pesetas (€329),
a penalty that Surroca appealed. Finally the court ruled in his favor by
understanding that the offender, by sending his resisted taxes to an
NGO,
did not have the intent to profit from his action. A landmark judgment, but
precise.
But how many pacifist tax resisters are there in Spain? It is difficult to
calculate — not everyone who does it talks about it — but according to the
associations and platforms associated with this movement there may be between
1,000 and 2,000 people each year: “the number is very stable, although there
are sharp peaks in times of armed conflict when Spain is involved, as with
the Iraq war,” explains Arcadi Oliveres. So in the fiscal
campaign, it is estimated that at least
5,000 people became tax resisters. Today, the economic crisis has not
produced a significant increase in antimilitarist objectors, “even allowing
for awful data, like the fact that in the
state spent €1,300 million to construct a combat aircraft, the same amount of
money that it saved by freezing pensions.”
From pacifism to rebellion
In , the Right of Rebellion movement
(www.derechoderebelion.net),
with the help of more than €8,000 raised through a crowdfunding initiative,
printed 5,000 copies of the “Manual of Economic Disobedience” (the edition is available on the web), a
document intended, in its own words, “to all of those people who would like
to take steps to make their lives exemplars of their thought and feeling.” So
the group intended to “initiate and extend a campaign of tax resistance aimed
at the Spanish state and at those who control it… to show that we will not
pay their debts, because we do not recognize the existing Constitution or the
existing puppet government of global financial capitalism…”
As the most important step of disobedience, the manual teaches the option of
making a partial income tax resistance, similar to that of the war tax
resisters, but including also deductions for such items as the amortization
of public debt, the interest on the debt, payments for the monarchy, the
Senate, the prisons, the police, or the church, until the total comes to
almost 30% of the federal budget. The authors of the manual make it clear that
the decision about what parts to deduct must be decided by the taxpayer, but
suggest a standard 25% of what is on the return.
Offices of Disobedience
The goal of resistance is to divert money that doesn’t go to the Treasury to
“autonomous projects that will be useful to meet the needs of the people.”
After publishing its manual, and without much time to prepare, Right of
Rebellion began organizing a series of Offices of Economic Disobedience in
various cities around the nation, which learned about and advised anyone who
was interested in becoming a tax resister in the tax resistance campaign of
. Although it is difficult to know the exact
number of people who joined this campaign, the figures tossed about by
different offices were very modest, not reaching even a hundred or so
resisters. In spite of this, the constituents of the Office of Economic
Disobedience in Lavapiés (Embajadores, 49; Madrid), considered the
accounting “very positive”: “not so much with the economic level of project
supported — just over €18,000 in total — but by, above all, the number of
people, from all classes, who were interested in this issue.”
Meanwhile, as the tax season numbers are coming in, Right of Rebellion
continues to promote other forms of disobedience, such as certain techniques
of resistance to the
VAT (in the
declarations of independent companies or cooperatives), rent for people who
have been evicted (preventing or indefinitely delaying the eviction), or
bankruptcy (as freedom to carry out different actions). The ultimate goal
would be an actual departure from the “official” economic system and the
creation of new, alternative forms of living.
Integrated Cooperatives
The “Manual of Economic Disobedience” relies on a call for comprehensive
cooperatives, “a legal form that allows construction of an arena of
autonomous economic relations among the participants that is protected from
public or private liability, and quite legally minimizes tax and social
insurance liability, shielding as much as possible from the acts of the banks
or government.” Furthermore, this new way of life permits “bankrupt or
unemployed beings as people, according to the system and the existing legal
framework, but at the same time to be able to live completely normally,
working and consuming in an autonomous manner, without worrying about
seizures of prior debts.” In short, a permanent economic disobedience, a
collective evasion of the system clinging to a self-sufficient,
multisectorial structure, where the members, involved to a lesser or greater
extent, coexist and cooperate at the margin of the system. Indeed, the
cooperatives possess a system of communal services, using alternative
currencies and relying on self-financing social cooperatives to obtain credit
without interest.
The Solidarity Scam
One of the major promoters of the Catalan Comprehensive Cooperative is Enric
Durán. This activist burst into the limelight in
when he announced himself, in
an article in the self-published Crisi, which had
“stolen” €492,000 from the banks. Step by step, he described how he had taken
out 68 different loans from 39 banks on various pretenses: to buy a car,
renovate his house,
etc. And how he
had created a shell company and falsified documents to justify nonexistent
income, in order that the credit control system would not detect its growing
debt.
While the mainstream media were trumpeting his “exploit,” Enric fled to South
America with €8,000 in his wallet. The rest had been given, as was explained
in the manifesto, to autonomous social project. This action, whether described
as financial disobedience or a solidarity con, sounded around the world and
the press named its actor the “Robin Hood of banks.” Enric returned to take
credit for the legitimacy of his action, and was imprisoned
. He was finally
released, though with a pending criminal trial that was to have been held
. Enric failed to attend “because
he doesn’t believe that the judicial system has standing to judge,” so the
Provincial Court put out a bench warrant for him on
. The prosecutor asked for an
eight-year sentence, six for an ongoing offense of falsifying a commercial
document, and two for criminal bankruptcy.
While eluding justice, Durán continues to vindicate resistance: “any act of
insubordination is a welcome step, and although at first it may seem like an
isolated action, it is from such small actions that we build a strategy with
a long-term goal,” although clearly these processes are initially marginal,
“historically risky actions, if they involve individual responsibility, are
taken only by the minorities involved. The key is that these minorities are
able to organize to better influence the majorities.”
Disobedience of the system
Other citizens who dissent from the economic relations imposed by the system,
like the lawyer, writer, and expert on disobedience José Luis Carretero, do
not understand the processes of economic disobedience as an “exit”: “you have
to take a step toward disobedience, but not as an alternative to
confrontation. You can’t get anything without an effective, mass
confrontation.” Carratero has reservations about measures like tax
resistance, “it has a very limited and token run. I get these dynamics if
they are done with other actions, like the occupation of vacant housing for
instance. In the short run, I think we should try to find an alliance with
various sectors that are confronting austerity. In the long run, turn back
the social segmentation processes that have taken place in recent decades.
But from the grassroots, not from outside of the system.” For Carretero, since
the 15-M outbreak,
as the topic of disobedience is no longer taboo, “those who talk about these
things were once marginal — I felt like a Martian. Most saw capitalism as a
good thing that allowed you to have a house or a car. That has changed
somewhat, but the problem remains that they see no alternative.”
With less theory and more concrete actions, the campaigns of economic
disobedience of the “I won’t pay” movement have taken root in many sectors
through social networking, where they already have some 30,000 followers.
They called a rebellion against toll roads in Catalonia and managed to get
some 60,000 people, according to Abertis, the collecting company, to refuse
to pay to use the road. They managed to mobilize,
, hundreds of people in several
demonstrations in Madrid against the so-called “rate hikes” for public
transit, which upped the price of tickets for members of the community some
11%. Another action called “I won’t repay” inspired citizens not to pay the
euro-per-prescription in the communities where it was imposed — Catalonia and
Madrid — before it was suspended by the Constitutional Court. According to
the founder of “I won’t pay,” Álex Corrones: “Not only do we believe that it
is right to disobey laws that are unjust, but that it is our obligation as
responsible citizens.” For Corrones, it is not enough to demonstrate:
“demonstrations have been controlled. And if they get out of hand, there are
200 cops to fire on command.”
war tax resisters in Asturias
A report on
the war tax resistance campaign in Asturias this year said that it had
“led workshops in all parts of Asturias, conducted five street actions, and
has delivered thousands of information packets, which have been supplemented
by the educational conference with Tica Font and Pere Ortega of the
Centro Delás research center, and
the contributions of Arcadi Oliveres in another conference.”
The group is pushing for a referendum on Catalan independence, and is meanwhile trying to create a new state within the shell of the old, by creating new Catalan institutions and trying to vest in them the authority currently held by federal ones.
One of these is a Catalan tax agency, and some resisters have adopted the tactic of paying their federal taxes there instead of to the federal agency.
Italy’s is the latest government to try to slip new taxes into utility bills as a way of trying to sneak tax hikes past its subjects — the latest is something called “tares” which is ostensibly part of the garbage bill.
A “No Tares Steering Committee” is preparing a tax strike in protest.
Peggy Thomas, a retired teacher who lives in Hebden Bridge, is refusing to
pay the Inland Revenue some of her income tax. She is a conscientious
objector and against taxes being used for warfare.
Peggy told the HebWeb that the nature of conscientious objection had
completely changed. Today, it is not about young people refusing to fight; it
is about money. Today’s wars can be fought with just a few men but the
weapons are much far more expensive and deadly. That’s why she’s withholding
a proportion of her tax, a proportion which would otherwise be spent on war
and weapons.
Peggy told the HebWeb, “At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, the then
Chancellor Gordon Brown, told the House of Commons not to worry about how our
participation in the ‘coalition of the willing’ would be financed. He assured
MPs and the country that all the
money needed would be available. Of course it was; 10% of the Government
budget is set aside for warfare.”
Peggy is not alone in withholding taxes.
An organisation called “Conscience” is campaigning to end compulsory contributions to warfare.
Conscience believes that those who object in principle to warfare should be able to divert 10% of their taxes to peaceful pursuits.
For example, some people donate their 10% withheld tax to charities such as Oxfam.
When Peggy first started withholding her tax, the Inland Revenue ignored her,
and just took the tax she owed out of any refund she was due. If she sent a
letter explaining, they’d reply that they couldn’t enter into correspondence
about the matter.
But this year the Inland Revenue started to get a little more serious with
Peggy and started to talk about debt collection agencies. Conscience were
able to reassure Peggy that in the first instance the debt collection agency
would not be allowed to take anything from her. And that what she should do
is write to the debt collection agency explaining the situation.
In her letter, Peggy wrote, “The right of conscientious objection, which was
won, not without a struggle, during the First World war, protected people who
did not want to kill other people from having to take part in warfare. Once
conscription was abolished, this right was taken from us. Now our money is
conscripted and used to finance killing.”
“The poorest are footing the bill for those in multiple occupancy. The burden
is put on the very poor,” she said.
“I am doing this for many of us, not just myself. Everyone I speak to says
‘we support you, our mother or our father is like you, they are struggling
too.’
“The only weapon we have got is not to pay council tax.”
She said she has been paying some of her council tax but she could not afford
to pay all of it.
“I have been paying £25 a month and that is all I can afford,” she said.
Archanes, Greece —
The tax inspectors swept into this picturesque village in Crete during the middle of a saint’s day celebration recently, moving from restaurant to restaurant demanding receipts and financial records.
Soon, customers annoyed by the holiday disruption confronted them.
Pushing, shoving and angry words followed, and eventually the frightened inspectors were forced to flee.
“People are so angry and so poor,” said Nikolis Geniatakis, who has run his restaurant here on the main square for the last 34 years and who watched the confrontation from across the street.
“What were the tax inspectors doing here?
Why aren’t they going after the big fish?”
At , tax arrears totaled 45 billion euros, or about $62.1 billion.
At , €56 billion, or about $77.3 billion.
At , with the most active tax period to come, the arrears had risen to €60 billion, or almost $83 billion, equivalent to nearly a fifth of the government’s public debt.
Experts say many of the tax collection measures are not effective, especially those aimed at the rich.
Taxing yacht owners, for instance, only encouraged them to moor their boats elsewhere, emptying Greek marinas.
But perhaps as troublesome, some experts say, is the growing grass-roots anger that led the customers to turn against the four tax inspectors recently in Archanes.
Tax collectors have been threatened or chased out of many towns, union officials say, though only a few cases, like the one here, get much attention.
Anna Apostolou, an accountant who works mostly for small-business owners, said many of her clients just refuse to pay or turn to the courts, knowing that will tie up payment for years.
“They are so furious at what they see,” she said.
“They have just decided they will not pay.
If they are fined they will not pay.”
Next year, Greek officials will also have to give up on one tax collection system that has worked well so far: attaching property tax bills to electric bills.
The courts have ruled that the threat of losing electricity is illegal.
Parliament is due to vote next week on proposals to replace an emergency property tax included on electricity bills with a permanent levy, breaking a pledge made last year by the conservative-led coalition government to abolish the tax.
Which seems to contradict the Times’s reporting.
More than a thousand disabled demonstrators from all over the country blocked traffic outside the Labor Ministry building before filing through the city center in wheelchairs, on crutches and using white canes for the blind.
Yannis Vardakastanis, a blind Greek who heads the European Disability Forum, said the protest was called after disabled people were denied an exemption from the new property tax.
“We are the poorest of the poor, but we must not let them turn us into victims,” he said.
Some other recent reporting in the Greek press (which I have a harder time interpreting because of the language gap) seems to show the acquittals of some of the first Δεν Πληρώνω (“Won’t Pay”) movement activists to be put on trial for reconnecting the power at homes where the power was shut off for refusal to pay the new taxes:
Here’s a video from the last of those links, showing one of the Archibald Tuttle-like unauthorized utility workers doing his good deed:
Some international tax resistance news:
France
There was an amusing scene last week when a hundred employees of Ecomouv, the quasi-private company responsible for collecting a new road tax in France, held a holiday party in Metz.
Posing for a group photo in front of the company offices in their santa hats, they were mistaken for a demonstration of the anti-tax bonnets rouges (red caps) by local police, who quickly intervened.
A bonnets rouges subgroup calling itself the “cash cows” showed up at the intermunicipal council of Saint-Brieuc to try to get some answers about their property taxes.
Not getting the answers they were looking for, they shut down the council meeting.
Another group of bonnets rouges blockaded a Swiss-French border crossing
to protest a new obligation on those who live in France but work in Switzerland to contribute to the French public health system (before, such workers could choose to join either the French or Swiss programs).
Joseph Graziani, head of an industrial union, threatened to lead a partial tax strike
in January in which people would refuse to pay more than a certain “reasonable” tax threshold if the government refuses to meet certain demands, which include reducing taxes, replacing the quasi-private tax collection company Equitalia, and reducing the cost of government bureaucracy.
A trial of several bonnets rouges on charges of highway tax portal destruction has been put off until September, and the defendants are now all out on bail.
But meanwhile, the government has won its first conviction in another case:
Samantha Prime, a 19-year-old student, was recently convicted of burning a highway radar outpost .
She was given a six-month suspended sentence along with 175 hours of community service and an as-yet-undetermined fine for damages.
Rural Catalans, who are legally organized under a quasi-municipal government called the Decentralized Municipal Entity, approved a tax resistance motion that would have people in Catalonia redirect their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government.
The federal government took them to court for this, but the court ruled that the non-binding motion of advocacy was “political speech” and was within the Entity’s authority.
El Confidencial, however, has declared the campaign a failure, claiming that fewer than 1,500 people have begun redirecting their federal taxes in this way so far, a much lower figure than the movement had hoped for at this stage.
Sales tax refuseniks in Salzburg, motivated by disgust at bank bailouts, have won the applause of their neighbors, but have had a hard time making their resistance stick. The government froze Wolfgang Reichl’s bank account until he paid taxes and penalties, for instance, but he vowed to resist again.
Princess “Infanta” Cristina of Spain has been indicted on charges of large-scale tax evasion.
The charges were filed by a private anti-corruption group, as the government was unenthusiastic about prosecuting someone from the royal family.
Indeed, the state prosecutor told the court that the tax agency motto “Hacienda Somos Todos” (“The Treasury is Everyone”) was “only an advertising slogan” and shouldn’t be applied to her highness.
So now, a group of retired taxpayers from Mallorca is saying “if la Infanta won’t pay, neither will we.”
In Greece, the «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Payment”) movement continues to disrupt auctions of homes and businesses seized “by state banks and bandits” from people with tax or other austerity-induced debts.
Meanwhile, guerrilla electricians from the «Δεν Πληρώνω» (“Won’t Pay”) movement continue their noble work of reconnecting the power to families who have been cut off for inability (or unwillingness) to pay the new taxes added to electricity bills.
“Do taxpayers pay the money to the government for such kind of acrobatics?
To eradicate the cancer of corruption, the ‘hydra-headed monster,’ it’s now high time for citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough of this miasma of corruption,” the High Court observed.
Some links that have clanked past my browser in recent days:
Catherine McKenna has been documenting the filthy state of the streets in her neighborhood and now says she will refuse to pay council tax until the Croydon Council gets its act together and starts providing decent services in return.
The government of France has given up on the despised ecotaxe that was opposed by the bold direct action tactics of the bonnets rouges.
The government had put the highway tax on indefinite suspension, in the wake of the many destructions of automated toll portals and other tax-collecting machinery, mostly in Brittany.
A recent vote of the French Assembly has gone further, formally taking the tax off the books.
Sam Koplinka-Loehr, the recently-hired outreach coordinator for NWTRCC, recently held an on-line seminar on “Refusing to Pay for Oppression”, a recording of which is available on-line.
Koplinka-Loehr also testified at the People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War, and spoke about this on the Clearing the Fog show.
The “Won’t Pay” movement in Greece is still engaging guerrilla electricians to reconnect the power to families who have been cut off for being unable (or unwilling) to pay the price hikes of the state power monopoly.
Some activists who are infuriated by the incoming Trump administration have started a “Stop Trump Tax Protest” on Facebook.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Wendy McElroy looks into the IRS’s sudden keen interest in bitcoin.
Activists from the South Korean People’s Democracy Party were in the U.S. recently and met with representatives from NWTRCC to learn about how they might incorporate tax resistance into their struggle against the corrupt South Korean government.
The “won’t pay” movement in Greece continues to score propaganda victories by illegally reconnecting the power to the homes of families who have had their utilities shut off for their inability (or unwillingness) to pay the austerity-enhanced bills.
The government of Keene, New Hampshire has lost its state supreme court appeal, in a unanimous ruling that likely puts the final nail in the coffin of its attempts to get an injunction against the “Robin Hooders” who follow its parking enforcers around, filling expired meters and in other ways interfering with their attempts to boost the city coffers with parking enforcement revenue.
Some links of interest:
Frida Berrigan writes: Why tax resistance under Trump needs its antiwar edge. A nice article that’s not all that well-described by its headline, describing current American anti-Trump tax resistance and how it fits in to the long-standing war tax resistance tradition.
Manoj Viswanathan Presents Tax Compliance In A Decentralizing Economy — Viswanathan says the current tax authorities depend on centralized intermediaries (banks, employers, brokers) to report financial transactions to the government. But blockchain-related technologies like Bitcoin may displace banks and brokers, and gig-economy innovations may reduce the use of employers.
A coalition of grassroots anarchist / anti-authoritarian groups in Greece sabotaged more than 200 public transit fare-enforcement machines. The Greek government has been frustrated in its attempts to raise money through straightforward taxation, and has increasingly been relying on increases in fares, highway tolls, and utility bills. 40% of Greeks are unable (or unwilling) to pay their utility bills. Some have taken to using devices that interfere with the electricity meters; others have been assisted by Den Plirono activists who reconnect the power to residences that have been cut off for failure to pay the electric bill.
Kirk Johnson at the New York Times looks at counties in southwest Oregon where popular anti-tax sentiment has grown to the point where citizens have been able to largely defund their local governments through the ballot box.
Peter J. Reilly assesses the new IRS policy of deputizing private debt companies to pursue delinquent taxpayers, and he concludes: “You Should Just Hang Up On IRS Collection Calls, Legitimate Or Not.”
This is for two reasons: 1) there are still a lot of scammers out there impersonating the IRS who try to fool people into paying them money, and it may not be easy for the average Joe to distinguish “legitimate” collection calls from scammers;
and 2) the “legitimate” private debt collection agencies can’t negotiate or adjudicate the amount of your debt, nor can they seize the money from you.
All they can do is badger you about it.
So your best bet is just to stonewall them, ignore them, and wait patiently for the statute of limitations to run out on your debt.
Laura Saunders, in the Wall Street Journal, notes that many online sellers and workers in the gig economy fall into an income-reporting shadow:
A loophole is helping gig-economy workers, online sellers and home-sharing hosts cheat on their taxes.
Under a law enacted in and later clarified by the Internal Revenue Service, many online-platform businesses that connect buyers and sellers and take credit-card payments, such as Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Etsy and ride-sharing firms, fall into a special category.
These businesses have to report a provider’s income to the IRS only if that person earns more than $20,000 and has more than 200 transactions.
In that case, the company sends both the provider and IRS a Form 1099-K listing gross income.
By contrast, freelance workers who don’t use such platforms often face a much stiffer reporting threshold of $600 for Form 1099-MISC.
For example, if a hardware store pays a plumber $750 directly for work done, the store is supposed to send both the IRS and the plumber a 1099-MISC listing that amount.
Larry Bassett, a long-time war tax resister who, because of an inheritance, engaged in an unusually-large tax refusal this year, is now also the focus of a documentary-in-progress:
The Pacifist.
Marco Mori advocates a low-risk tax resistance strategy for Italians that seems to involve withholding taxes as long as possible, putting up with the civil penalties and interest, and only paying at the last minute before your case becomes a criminal matter.
I don’t know Italian, so have to piece things together from Google Translate.
The shit-stirrers and would-be provocateurs at 4chan’s “/pol/” forum (which stands for “politically incorrect,” but is largely just puerile racist caricatures), struck upon the idea of trying to invent a #NoTaxForBlacks (or #NoTaxFromBlacks) movement.
They would do this by means of a variety of more-or-less plausible-looking meme images, crowdsourced by the /pol/glodytes.
Ostensible Black Americans (fake Twitter accounts with names like “Tyrone Johnson”) would post these, saying they were refusing to pay taxes based on roughly the same sort of grievances that have motivated #BlackLivesMatter.
The way this was supposed to play out so as to titillate the 4chan crowd was that unsophisticated black people would go along with the ruse and refuse to pay tax, this would give the government an excuse to cut welfare and to arrest more black people for tax evasion, ergo much lulz for 4chan.
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.
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.
The latest on the tax resistance front:
Catalonia went to the polls to vote on whether to become an independent republic.
Spain sent in armed, masked troops to violently impede the voters.
This reminds me of what I wrote about political authority:
[B]y challenging the authority of the government, you call its bluff and force it to reveal its hand.
If it has a strong, persuasive hand, well, there you go, and maybe you’re even persuaded.
If it has a strong, coercive hand, suddenly people begin to feel its grip on their shoulders.
If the hand is weak on either count, suddenly this too is exposed, and the power-behind-the-throne is revealed to be not so powerful after all.
The point is that it may be important and useful to force the government to retrench from authority to its more concrete basis in coercion and persuasion, even if you do not have the power to overcome it once it has retrenched.
The Greek government is increasingly desperate for tax revenue, as the citizenry are reluctant to cough up anything they expect, with good reason, will only go into the pockets of greedy speculators rather than towards the needs of Greeks.
Among other things, the government has begun to add a large (50%) tax to coffee imports.
The “Fair Trade Is Not For Sale” campaign aims to resist this tax by smuggling fair-trade coffee from Latin America into Greece, while using FairCoin (imagine Bitcoin if the face of Che Guevara were stamped on every coin) to fund the transactions.
While I have income taxes due today, I have a bigger burden than taxes, something I owe more to than to you.
That is what I owe to democracy and my nation and my fellow citizens.
…paying income tax in the U.S.A. has now become a paycheck made out to “evil.”
I therefore respectfully decline to pay income taxes at this time.
I have this money in the bank, and I’ll pay it once this situation is taken care of which, I fear because of the cowardice of this Congress, might be a couple or more years.
The American activist group CODEPINK is launching a “divest from the war machine” campaign, aiming to get various institutions to stop investing in arms manufacturers and the like.
So far, not much about war tax resistance can be seen in the campaign’s preliminary material, but perhaps this will change as it gets closer to launch date.
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
Miscellany:
The U.S. Department of Defense budget is notoriously sloppy.
This is by design, as it allows for a lot of kickbacks and graft and such, and is the most popular place for politicians to put their pork projects.
An independent audit recently conducted by “a Michigan State University economist [Mark Skidmore], working with graduate students and a former government official,” concentrating on the budgets for , found trillions of dollars of Pentagon spending that was never authorized by law.
The Defense Department has announced that for the first time ever (!) the agency will conduct an audit of its finances.
According to a new study by Marius Frunza, the underground economy in the European Union succeeds in resisting €132 billion in Value-Added Tax each year, about 14% of the total amount of that tax the Union collects.
Compare this to the “tax gap” in the U.S., which is estimated to be about 16%.
This suggests to me that if the U.S. were ever to drop its income and payroll tax in favor of a VAT (as so-called “Fair Tax” promoters advocate), this might not have much effect on the over-all tax gap.
Quaker Peace & Social Witness is a project of Britan Yearly Meeting.
They have a new project called “Take Action on Militarism.” War tax resistance is nowhere mentioned as one of the actions you might consider taking, however, so chalk this up as another example of the decay of the practice of war tax resistance among Quakers since the end of the Cold War.
Kimberly Amadeo, at the balance, has written up a good summary of the various aspects of the new U.S. federal tax law.
Some of it is still sketchy (she documents parts of the bill that were dropped before the bill was passed, for instance), so read it with caution, but it’s more thorough than most summaries I’ve seen.
Parts of the new law reduce the ability of people to deduct state taxes on their federal tax returns.
This has the effect of raising federal taxes on people in higher-tax states — these are typically states like California and New York with high property values and affluent cities… also, not coincidentally, states that tend to vote Democrat.
Those states are now considering ways to fight back by rejiggering their own tax systems in such a way that they can bring in as much revenue while preserving their citizens’ federal deductions.
This may end up making the new tax law even more damaging to the fiscal health of the federal government than had been originally anticipated.
Greek Orthodox Archbishop Theodosios has declared his intention to defy Jerusalem’s attempt to tax church property.
The Archbishop has a history of clashing with Israel over Palestinian rights.
The Jerusalem municipal government is looking to expand its tax base by taxing property owned by religious groups that is not largely used for religious purposes; the Greek Orthodox church has been shedding some of its Jerusalem property under suspicious circumstances.
Theodosios says he believes these tax proposals, which largely target Christian groups, are “a deliberate attempt to extend [the occupation authorities’] control over the city of Jerusalem and to marginalize and weaken the Christian presence in particular, and the Arab Palestinian presence in general.”
Jerusalem has already put liens on several churches to cover back taxes.
In theory, you can make the federal government shrink in size and invasiveness and ambition by cutting its income through lower tax revenue.
In reality, this “starve the beast” theory doesn’t seem to work. The growth of government spending and reach doesn’t seem to slow at all in reaction to fiscal pressure of this sort.
Of course, experiments are hard to do in this context — would more revenue have resulted in even greater growth of the beast?
Is the day of reckoning merely postponed, and inevitably the government will have to shrink?
Still, it’s fair to say that the evidence for the ability of revenue restriction to shrink the growth of government, at least in the short-to-medium-term, is lacking.
Some links that have crossed my browser tabs in recent days:
Arcadi Oliveres was recently in Bilbao to speak at a conference on war tax resistance.
He was interviewed for El Salto. Excerpts (translation mine):
What is war tax resistance? What does it cover?
In Spain, war tax resistance launched in
, following our incorporation into NATO
.
At that time it was said that in order to standardize all of the Spanish armed forces into NATO systems, it was necessary to increase spending a lot on the military tech budgets, arms manufacture budgets, etc. We realized that this was barbarous and began to practice tax resistance, following an analogous path with what had already been done with conscientious objection to military service.
There were people who did not want to participate in the preparation for war with their bodies and their effort and who therefore declared themselves to be conscientious objectors.
The same thing goes for those who do not want to participate with their money in the financing of war.
That means that in your taxes, which is where you you can act, you stop paying the percentage that the Defense Department gets in the federal budget.
If military spending is 2% of the budget, and I have to pay 100, I will pay 98 because I want to stop paying this amount to the state.
The way to go about it is to choose an NGO or some social action, send those two resisted euros, and tell the Treasury: “I would be willing to pay 100 but as two are going for very bad spending, here are the other 98.”
Is this treated as an act of civil disobedience?
Obviously the act is not recognized by law, and if they catch you,
which doesn’t always happen, they can demand that amount.
For all that, things take their course.
Up to now you stopped paying the two euros, they demanded them, and furthermore added a fine or costs and so you end up paying eight.
Concerning this there is a judgment of the Catalan Superior Court of Justice in which an objector was told that he should only pay the delinquent tax but not the fine.
With good sense, the judgment held that the Treasury can only impose a fine when the taxpayer has intended to be deceptive.
It’s clear that the objector doesn’t have such an intent because from day one he turns up with a receipt from the NGO or group to which he has donated.
A single judgment does not create jurisprudence but I realize that it is necessary to keep winning more so that, finally, this is so.
What other alternatives do citizens have to oppose spending on the
military and arms industry?
There are some that form part of what we would call conscientious
objection, and others that would be broader.
I think that a basic way of fighting is in education for peace, which is already practiced but less than is needed.
From television shows to schools, and especially from families, we have to try not to impose a violent response to conflicts.
Certainly, we also have to work politically, with actions for disarmament.
If we look at conscientious objection, until now we have discussed two actions: objection to military service and tax resistance, but there should be others, such as labor objection.
Right here in Bilbao, there was the case of a firefighter who refused to work overseeing the exportation of military equipment.
A few years ago in Catalonia, two sailors refused to participate in the transport of Spanish soldiers who were going to the Iraq War, and lost their jobs, but these are isolated cases.
There is also another type of objection.
Some 15 years ago, there was a conference in Zaragoza in which more than a thousand professors declared ourselves scientific objectors, which is to say, signed a manifesto to say none of our scientific investigations were to be used for military purposes.
Or, also, there is financial objection.
I refuse to put money in a bank so that it will wind up invested in weapons, starting with the one that invests the most money in that business, BBVA.
Cincinnati.com looks at the long career in direct action of war tax resister DeCourcy Squire.
The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement’s guerrilla electricians have reconnected the power at the home of another needy family cut off by the government utility monopoly for inability to pay new surcharges.
Three foes in particular are enabling tax dodgers, making their ploys more common and more damaging: reduced support for the IRS, new incentives for people to become cheaters and widening partisan distrust.
Links have been piling up in my bookmarks as I spent
poring through
back issues of The Mennonite.
International Tax Resistance News
A new law in Samoa requires previously untaxed church
ministers to pay income tax. Many, including those from the country’s
largest church,
are refusing to pay.
The United States government has begun
denying passports to people with large tax debts.
If you’re one of the 362,000 or so Americans who owe more than $51,000 and
you haven’t entered into an installment payment plan (I’m one of those),
you will likely soon find that you cannot successfully apply for or renew
your passport. While the government also has the legal authority to revoke
existing passports from such people, it is not yet exercising that
power.
Guerrilla electricians in Greece continue to
reestablish electric power
to households who have had their power cut off for inability or
unwillingness to pay the state utility monopoly’s bills which have been
inflated to support the state’s austerity budget policies.
Veterans of the successful campaign to abolish the
“écotaxe” in Brittany held
a celebratory picnic
on the anniversary of the destruction of one of the highway portals that
would have enforced the hated tax. In part the picnic was meant to show
solidarity with those who had been convicted of criminal charges for the
parts they played in destroying such portals, and in part it was meant as a
show of strength to let the government know they would not tolerate any
attempts to reestablish the tax.
The increasing use of traffic-ticket-issuing cameras worldwide as a
government revenue booster has led to a rash of direct action by the victim
population. This usually takes the form of destroying, disabling, or
blocking the cameras. Here are several recent examples:
Launched on as another variety of civic struggle against the dictatorship, the proposal to carry the thesis of civil disobedience to the extreme of applying a “tax strike” is still in force, but has not yet switched on, except in the Mercado Oriental.
On that date, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Legal and Political Sciences, called for “civil disobedience as a national imperative to be put into operation immediately,” inviting employers, workers, students, and taxpayers to immediately suspend the payment of taxes to DGI, DGA, and city hall, in particular “withholding of Income Tax from salaries.”
Although the call for tax resistance enters the popular imagination as a civil form — and for that reason a legitimate one — of resisting the regime of Daniel Ortega, neither businesses nor individuals have responded with determination to the proposal, from fear or from caution.
Caution as demonstrated by the sources consulted for this article, who requested anonymity as they explained that people, business-owners and managers in particular, are afraid that the tax administration will fine them or, worse yet, temporarily take over operation of their companies or shutter their business.
Not all of the sanctions are catastrophic.
There are cases in which the fine applied is equivalent to 2.5% of the amount not paid in the case of the monthly advance payment of the business income tax, or 5% in the case of the value-added tax or of income tax withheld from the salaries of employees.
“Technically, it’s an invalid appropriation of withholdings, and can be criminally sanctioned,” in addition to being shut down, fined, or temporarily put under government management, explained a source with extensive experience in tax matters.
That said, this source sees a variety of reasons to doubt that they would decide to take such extreme measures, beginning with “as far as I know, they have never applied them to anyone.”
Another is that to close a business means sending its workers into unemployment, which implies that they will not receive taxes from the business or from those consumers.
But beyond believing in the mercy that any of these reasons implicitly assumes, the source points out fact that is easier to accept:
“If the resolution is massive, the tax administration simply does not have the capacity to audit and penalize everyone at once.”
Larger Companies Have More Fear
If it is decided to penalize only some in order to set a precedent that strikes fear into the others, surely one of the larger ones will be chosen, which not only has more ability to defend itself in the courts, but also to negotiate, precisely because of its size.
Another source asserts that “although it may seem obvious, the businesses that take the least risk are the most powerful ones, for the simple reason that they are not big taxpayers but big tax collectors.
“The DGI, does not want to be bothered with them, because if they weaken them, this affects tax revenues, principally value-added tax withholding.”
When the big companies that could take such measures don’t apply them, despite their intrinsic power, they are demonstrating “the cowardly face of big capital.
If they would decide, the blow to DGI would be immense,” s/he says.
Róger Arteaga, former director general of Revenue, agrees, saying that “big capital has not wanted to go all-in.
It is true that it gave its approval to the strike, but did so with fear and only temporarily.”
There is at least one group that risks more in a tax strike: import and export companies, which require clearances that can only be obtained once they have paid the corresponding taxes.
“If one of these business doesn’t make its monthly statement, or makes it but doesn’t pay, it falls into insolvency, and can neither import nor export.
The only importers who could afford that ‘luxury’ would be those that have sufficient product already on hand, especially at times like these, when there is little movement of inventory,” explained one of our sources.
Small- and medium-sized businesses — both fixed-quota and general regime — can stop paying taxes as long as the situation does not normalize, and while this makes them vulnerable to penalties, it is not likely that this will occur, especially, again, if a critical mass applies this measure of fiscal chastisement.
How long can the government last without taxes?
Our sources note that before making tax payments, the employer must guarantee the salary of its employees, and that the decision not to pay taxes is “protected by the higher legal concept, legally enshrined in the national legislation, as the Act of God and the Force Majeure.
Nobody is obligated to do the impossible, and the reason for this impossibility lies outside the control of the employer or employee.”
Citizens, on their part, could put pressure on big and medium-sized business, offering to act together if the Treasury moves against them.
“In this context, big capital must play a consistent role, acting firmly in the face of a Treasury that has granted them such special privileges.
It would be their most authentic repentance for the eleven years of tax advantages they have taken in the shadow of power.
That stain should be washed out right away,” they say.
As an expert, Arteaga proposes “that the businesses do not charge value-added tax, and the citizens not pay it.
Income tax also.
There are penalties, but the penalties and decisions of this government must be ignored, as they have no legitimacy.
How long can the government last without taxes?” he asked.
“Tax resistance aims to respond to Ortega’s claim that he will stay on through : we must find a solution, and one of these is for the private sector finally to decide on civil disobedience of a monetary and tax nature,” he explained.
Pedro Muñoz Fonseca, president of the executive committee of Costa Rica’s Social Christian Unity Party, urged Nicaraguans to use tax resistance against their government:
Social Media Tax Protest in Uganda
The government of Uganda has imposed a 5¢-per-day tax on using social media and
other services. This was designed as both a revenue measure and a way of
reducing what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls lugambo
(“fake news”). Amnesty International has been among those to see through the
government’s rhetoric and cast the tax as
“a
clear attempt to undermine the right to freedom of expression.”
Robert Kyagulanyi, a Member of Parliament better known by his musician
stage name Bobi Wine, whose election is in part credited to his success on
social media, has been at the forefront of protests against the tax.
He was arrested, along with
three reporters when a march protesting the tax was attacked by police
with tear gas and rubber projectiles, but they managed to escape.
Ugandan protest marchers wearing shirts featuring a smart phone screen that
reads “This Tax Must Go”
War Tax Resistance Around the World
ABC reports on war tax resisters in Valencia — “the new refuseniks”.
War tax resisters there typically refuse to pay some percentage of their taxes, often basing this on the percentage of the federal budget that is spent on the military and similar items, and redirect this money to more worthy charities.
They declare this deduction on their tax forms in such a way that the tax agency typically does not treat it as illegal tax evasion but as an error or mistake.
The Global Day of Action on Military Spending Final Report has been released.
It gives a summary of the various events that took place around the world, including several by war tax resisters and groups promoting war tax resistance.
There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
Ideas & Actions concerning weapons-free investing, responding to arguments against war tax resistance, a fast for nuclear disarmament, and more
You can now listen to audio excerpts from the upcoming documentary The Pacifist, about war tax resister Larry Bassett, on Spotify.
Erica Leigh pores through back issues of Conscience, the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, an American war tax redirection group that slightly predates the founding of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Raymond Hunthausen has died.
As Catholic archbishop of Seattle, he took a remarkably strong stand on nuclear weapons — famously calling the Trident nuclear submarine program being developed nearby “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — and began practicing war tax resistance in response.
This earned him enemies in Washington and in the Catholic hierarchy. Here are some of the obits and remembrances:
A biography of Hunthausen, A Disarming Spirit, will be released soon.
David McReynolds has died.
He was a long-time War Resisters League and Socialist Party activist and was also on the staff of the Committee for Nonviolent Action which helped to spearhead war tax resistance as a tactic during the campaigns opposing the American war in Vietnam.
He was among the signers of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in and of a similar public pledge .
David Paul Irish has died.
He was active with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peace Brigades International, and Witness for Peace.
He was an advocate for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, drafting a minute in favor of of war tax resistance that the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Meetings approved in .
Some links from here and there:
The Literary Atlas of Wales has created an interesting interactive map-based exploration of the Rebecca Riots of the mid-19th century — a grassroots rebellion that focused on destroying the tollgates that were going up all over Wales: Plotting the Rebecca Riots.
Having been thwarted by the bonnets rouges (red caps) in its attempt to add a mileage tax to truck transport, the French government has attempted to attach an increased tax to vehicle fuel.
Now a gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement has arisen to try to repeat the bonnets rouges’ success.
The movement is organizing a highway blockade for .
Fuel tax protests are ramping up in New Zealand as well.
In general, fuel taxes, carbon taxes, and other such “ecotaxes” seem to be a hard sell.
The Greek “won’t pay” movement continues to deploy guerrilla electricians to reconnect the power at households that have gone dark because of their inability or unwillingness to pay the inflated prices of the state utility monopoly.
The grassroots war on traffic ticket issuing speed cameras continues:
Perhaps in tribute to the yellow vests movement (see above), a resister in France blocked a speed camera with a yellow safety vest.
Other resisters in France used bags, bubble wrap, fire, and paint to disable cameras, while a South African resister set such a camera on fire.
