Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Ireland → household tax/water charge, 2012–16

Some years back, Cindy Sheehan, furious at the war that had killed her son, and increasingly upset at government deceit, decided to withdraw her financial support from the federal government by resisting taxes.

She chose to refuse to file returns — completely withdrawing her cooperation from the IRS. The IRS has since called her on the carpet and asked her to tell them details about her assets (so they can decide what to seize). She has also refused to comply with this.

In a recent post on her blog Sheehan discusses her case, and also some of the criticism she has been getting from pro-tax American liberals.

Even in the years that they are trying to collect 105k in back taxes, fines, and interest, I re-invested most of the money I ever made by speaker’s fees, donations, or book sales right back into the movement. Now, I intentionally live simply and don’t own anything the establishment considers of value. If the IRS goes looking for my assets, they will not find anything. If I had some kind of secret trust fund, I certainly wouldn’t be scraping by for rent money every month.

I don’t own anything and I don’t want or even need to own anything that the 1% tells me that I need to own to make my life “worthwhile.” I have had to pare my life down to one that is oriented, not around things, but around ideas, people, activism, peace and mostly, love.

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:
  • “Catholic Bishops’ Contraception Coverage Argument Ridiculed By Pacifist Activists” by Zach Carter, HuffPost, quotes war tax resisters Ruth Benn, Karl Meyer, and Bradford Lyttle
  • “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.”

• Resistance to the “Household Tax” continues in Ireland. For some reason, the government is requiring citizens to actively register themselves prior to paying this tax, which is a convenient point of leverage for the resisters, who are encouraging their neighbors to simply refuse to register. “The Household Tax can be defeated by mass non registration and mass non payment but this does mean organising every street and road in the country. The first step in opposing the tax is to refuse to register yourself but to win you must organise with your neighbors — if we all stand together we will win.” Irish parliament members are among the supporters of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, whose spokeswoman explained: “This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.”
• 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.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation has released its annual Overview of the Federal Tax System that gives you some idea of how the federal government gets its hands on our money.
• Veteran activist Staughton Lynd has some words of advice for the Occupy movement in the United States.
• Greek “we won’t pay” activists are at it again: occupying and disabling highway toll booths.
• Their counterparts in Ireland are rallying to the chant “Don’t register! Don’t pay!”
• Tim Huber at Mennonite Weekly Review writes of “taxing conscience one war at a time” in the wake of the kerfluffle over government-mandated health insurance coverage.
• The IRS doesn’t seem to be anticipating any sudden boost to its enforcement budget, judging from this news about the agency offering early retirement packages to the employees in their enforcement division.

In other news:

• In 2006, Congress decided to try to encourage people to inform on their employers and anyone else they knew of who was engaging in tax evasion — by offering informers a percentage of the take. How is that working out? “In the past five years, the IRS has given only one known whistleblower reward under the program.” This isn’t because nobody is trying to collect the rewards, but because the IRS is being stingy about paying them out.
• One sign that the Greek adoption of tax resistance is widespread is this one: when the government hiked the costs of transit tickets by 40%, revenues only went up by 6%.
• Here’s another note about the household tax resistance movement in Ireland.

New developments in the resistance campaign against the household tax in Ireland…

• with protests and leafletting in Dublin
• and the mobbing of a Cabinet Minister in Wexford

…and against the various tax and fee hikes in Greece:

• with a call for a social boycott of legislators who approved the latest plans — “do not talk to them, do not listen, do not socialize, do not invite, do not serve them, do not put gasoline in their cars…”

Meanwhile, Raoul Vaneigem has taken the side of the Greek rebels in Libération. Excerpt (roughly, anyway, as I don’t know French):

Although dramatic, what is happening in Greece is not a disaster. It is even an opportunity. For the power of money has, for the first time, overplayed its hand in its until-recently gradual, meticulous, and carefully-organized destruction of the public good and human dignity.

European finance wanted to make an example. And in its spite it hit the country that seemed to be the least of those in the Eurozone, and with its excessive violence, its mask fell. Now more than ever is the moment to point out its true face: that of totalitarianism. For that is what it is. And there is only one answer to totalitarianism: struggle, firm and uncompromising, to the point of combat, if necessary… We have a world, a life, of values to defend.

With the assemblies of direct democracy, the “We Won’t Pay Any More” civil disobedience movement, and the first experiences of workers’ control, a new Greece is emerging which rejects the commercial tyranny in the name of humanity.

A few updates on the Household Tax resistance campaign in Ireland:

• There’s now talk of the Civil and Public Service Union threatening to go on strike if the government attempts to deduct the tax from the salaries of resisting members.
• Resister Joe Conway puts the movement in historical context:

  I believe this to be a defensible form of civil protest against a measure that hits the poorest hardest.

  Tax resistance — such as the withholding of this latest charge — has been used for centuries. Our forefathers risked eviction or death when they refused to pay tithes or exorbitant rents during the Land War. American colonists refused to pay taxes to their putative overlords. French peasants risked everything when they refused to pay the corvee — an enslaving tax on their labour. When there is an unjust tax, resistance is a political right and a moral stance.

  I will be donating the €100 to two good causes in Tramore looking after our young people and our aged. I am infinitely happier to give the money to those who deserve it rather than conspiring in the transfers to Frankfurt or Paris to further fatten the bondholders’ wallets.

• Fewer than 20% of the households in Ireland have registered and paid the tax so far, with the registration deadline looming at the end of this month. It will be at least October before the government is equipped to pursue the hold-outs.

The photo above comes from Ireland, but the news I have about the anti-austerity tax resistance campaigns in Europe comes from Greece today:

• The Greek government says that they believe they have lost €17.1 million to the road toll-resisters so far.
• They are responding by trying to increase the legal penalties for interfering with road toll collection — now wanting to make it a criminal offense that would lead to a minimum three-month prison sentence.
• The Tireless Agorist takes a look at the burgeoning underground economy in Greece in the wake of the crisis, including the use of a difficult-to-tax alternative currency.
• The situation in Greece was dramatized by the spectacle of the annual independence day military parades — where the parading soldiers had to be protected by lines of riot police standing between them and spectators along the parade route.

And some notes from tax resistance campaigns overseas:

• The end of last month was the deadline for Irish households to register and pay the new household tax. Only about half of them did, and the tax resistance movement there is declaring a victory.
• critical media review notes that the news media are framing the Household Tax failure as a clumsy government fiasco rather than as a successful grassroots rebellion, and compares this to the Hollywood version of the Vietnam War, which is always lost by the Americans rather than won by the Vietnamese.
• A retired pharmacist and “won’t pay” movement sympathizer — named Dimitris Christoulas, but referred to in the Greek press, for reasons I don’t understand, as “77chronos” (“77yearold”) — killed himself in Syntagma Square, the location of many of the recent protests of the “indignants.” He left a note decrying the devaluation of his pension, saying “I find no solution but a dignified end, before I have to start looking through the garbage for my food.” Greek protesters are comparing this to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, which is credited for triggering the Arab Spring.

Last I looked at the “household tax” protest movement in Ireland, only about half of Irish households had complied with the law and registered to pay the tax by the March 31 deadline. How do things look today?

Protests continue, including the one pictured in Dublin last week where non-compliance remains over 40%. The government has been sending letters threatening penalties to non-registering households.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• As I’ve mentioned before, fraudsters have been filing tax returns that claim bogus refunds by stealing the identities of other people. This has turned into a thriving industry in some areas, particularly parts of Florida, with millions of such returns being filed. This story shows some of the fall-out for the people whose identities were stolen, and for the IRS. “Frustrated identity theft victims are swamping the Plantation office of the Internal Revenue Service, forming long lines to wait hours to speak to a representative — with one woman complaining of being told to come back at 4:30 a.m. to begin a new wait.…”
• Here’s some footage of the protests accompanying the Household Tax strike in Fál Carrach, Ireland and interviews with some of the resisters.

More tax resistance overseas:

• “Local authorities on the Greek island of Hydra have denounced an attack by a local crowd on tax police after they detained a restaurant owner who did not provide receipts to clients.”

  The Friday incident happened after the inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour’s ride away by fast boat. They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat’s crew.

  The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island’s police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived Saturday morning. Locals cut off the station’s electricity and water supplies. The owner was transported to Athens by coast guard ship Saturday.

• Meanwhile, wealthy Italians are parking their yachts in other Mediterranean ports to keep them from the snooping tax inspectors. Some 30,000 yachts have gone missing in the exodus.
• Half of the households in Ireland are still refusing to register for the Household Tax there, long after the registration deadline, according to tax resistance activists. “This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, 1989, and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition,” said Ruth Coppinger of Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes. “People realise that between property and water taxes, the charge will quickly rise to over €1,000 per year. The government’s persuading and threatening letters will only re-inforce people’s determination to resist.”

The story of the birth of Jesus, as given in the gospels, begins with his pregnant mother and her husband on the move to Bethlehem in order to enroll in the census that Caesar Augustus had launched as part of his plan “that all the world should be taxed.”

A government doesn’t launch a census just because it’s curious, but usually, as with Augustus, as the prelude to a tax. It’s the government’s way of “casing the joint” before the big heist.

And so some tax resistance campaigns have started by resisting a census. Today I’ll review some examples.

Poll Tax resistance in Thatcher’s Britain

Refusal to register was one of the ways people resisted Thatcher’s Poll Tax. And the government’s difficulties in tracking people as they moved from place to place, and from one council’s jurisdiction to another, made enforcement difficult.

Resisters also successfully refused to provide information about their employment that could be used to seize taxes from their paychecks. According to one account:

[T]he councils still had one insurmountable headache. They had to find out where people worked. This was a real nightmare because other than asking the people concerned, they had no real way of getting the information they needed. When a liability order was granted by the court, non-payers were sent a form which requested details of employment. Failure to fill it out carried a fine of £100 and £400 if the non-payer provided false information. But this didn’t act as a deterrent either, because, if people couldn’t pay the Poll Tax itself (and the court costs which were added), then it made little difference if the council added another £100. A survey carried out by the Audit Commission in late 1989 showed that, nationally, only 15% of people who received the form actually sent it back. Like electoral registration, it was widely ignored even though this was a criminal offence.

Household Tax resistance in Ireland today

The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland is defined by refusal by households to register to pay the tax.

This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.

When the registration deadline hit at the end of last March, only about half of Irish households had registered. Ruth Coppinger of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes declared victory:

This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, 1989, and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition.

Episcopalians in Scotland

The official church of Scotland had a habit through the centuries of taxing everyone in Scotland for the support of that church, whether they were members or not. This tended to annoy those who belonged to other churches. And this annoyance became especially loud whenever the “official” church got swapped from one denomination to another.

When the Presbyterians replaced the Episcopalians in the official chair in 1688, one way the Episcopalians resisted was by refusing to pay the tax and refusing to participate in a church-run census. William Maitland, in his History of Edinburgh, fretted over difficulties in estimating the population at this period of time, noting:

[T]he greatest Defect is owing to the Episcopalian Inhabitants, who, being of a different Communion from the established Church, are not subject to the Controul and Examination of its Ministers; wherefore, many of them refuse to give Accounts either of the Names or Numbers of Persons in their Families.

Queensland water tax strike

In Queensland, Australia, in 1926, the government tried to sneak in a tax on farmers who used wells or water pumps to irrigate their lands. The farmers rebelled.

Since the “tax” took the form of a stiff fee accompanying the mandatory registration of such wells or water pumps, it was natural that the tax resistance included mass refusal to register. Local Producers’ Associations across Queensland gathered and voted to refuse registration.

A month after the tax went into effect, facing mass refusal, the government backed down and rescinded the tax… though without eliminating the requirement to register wells and water pumps. Some Associations continued to counsel their members to refuse to register even after the tax resistance victory. A Mr. Roome of the Woodmillar LPA put it this way:

A lot of farmers were under the impression that because of registration fee had been withdrawn, everything in the garden was lovely. But the regulations were still there, and farmers who were under that impression would receive a rude awakening. Only formal registration had to be made, but they would find that if they furnished the particulars asked for they would give the Government an opportunity to later on impose the charges. The danger was still there, whereas if they refused to register the onus was on the Government to get the particulars, and prove that the farmers put down wells or sunk dams, etc. Once they gave the information they were at the mercy of the Government. … The excuse by the Government was that they wanted to get a survey of the water facilities which was absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing was a farce, and an excuse to impose a tax. The only way was to refuse to register, which he hoped would be done by members of all branches, and also refuse to pay the tax.

A motion that the members of the Association refuse to register was passed.

Zakāt resistance in Malaysia

When the Malaysian government assumed control of the traditional Islamic religious tithe called the zakāt, made it mandatory, and fixed its rate based on the acreage and yields of farmers, this also meant that the government had to do a census of agricultural land and monitor the crop yields.

This led to widespread, varied, mostly quiet, but strikingly effective resistance. James C. Scott, who studied the resistance, writes of one technique:

Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent.

Resistance to a pre-tax census in Fiji

A poll tax on indentured workers from India was initiated in Fiji in 1924. The Indians had no political representation on the island, were banned from the schools, and could only emigrate on a single ship voyage offered once per year: they were essentially considered disposable migrant labor. The workers thought the tax, which amounted to the pay of 12 days labor, was a sort of bait-and-switch on the contracts that had brought them to Fiji, and vowed to resist. As one account put it:

A start will be made in January to register all those liable to pay the residential tax, and prison will be the fate of him who does not comply with the law. Leading Indians in every district declare that they will willingly go to gaol before they register their names, and a general passive resistance is highly possible, with all its attendant strikes and bitter feeling.

The British women’s suffrage movement

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, more so than anywhere else, used tax resistance in its struggle. “No taxation without representation,” was the cry. Suffragists also resisted government attempts to get information from them, both because these attempts were part of the effort to tax them, and because the laws that governed such information-gathering were passed by a male-exclusive government.

In 1910, Winifred Patch wrote:

I have recently received a paper from the Inland Revenue Office headed “Duties on Land Values. Notice to Furnish Information,” asking for the names and addresses of any persons to whom I pay rent or for whom I may collect rents, a penalty not exceeding £50 being incurred if this information is willfully withheld. … As I am denied the rights of citizenship I absolutely decline to facilitate in any way the carrying out of the provisions of Mr. Lloyd George’s Finance Bill, and am returning my paper with this written across it. I am hoping, through the Women’s Tax Resistance League, of which I am a member, to obtain expert information which will enable me to make it impossible for the Government to exact the £50 penalty, and will leave them with no alternative but to imprison me in default. Will other women join me in making this protest? I feel that there must be many like myself who would gladly risk imprisonment for the cause, but who, for various reasons, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to take part in the more active protests which have hitherto brought women into conflict with the law. I cannot help hoping that we have here another vantage ground from which to attack a Government which refuses us justice.

Teresa Billington-Greig took up Patch’s suggestion and rallied the troops:

The famous forms on which the owners and lease-holders of the country have to prepare the necessary statistics for the levying of the new [land] tax have been issued now in practically all parts of England, and they will be issued in Scotland within a few days. Already these forms have been returned unfilled up, and with a curt comment as to the status of the women applied to, by some of our members in England. They will be so returned by many Suffragists across the border. Neither information nor money will be forthcoming in response to the Inland Revene Department’s demands. As far as possible this piece of Government business will be impeded first by the determined refusal of information, and, second, by the withholding of the money claimed in taxes.

Such refusal to yield to tyranny is always desirable. But at the present moment it carries an additional value in that it can be employed to improve the chances of the Conciliation Women’s Suffrage Bill. From now until the fate of the Bill is decided, every woman to whom any Government application for information or for taxes is made should not only refuse to comply because of the unrepresented condition of her sex, but should add a rider to the effect that she will gladly supply information and provide the money claimed if the Women’s Suffrage Bill at present before Parliament becomes law this Session.

Margarete Wynne Nevinson put it this way:

Here I have one of Mr. Lloyd George’s wonderful forms, with its numerous questions, to answer which intelligently I should require, apparently, the training of a lawyer and surveyor, and a fund of universal knowledge which I do not possess. I am asked to answer those questions, but am not considered fit to vote for a member of Parliament. This Form is addressed to me because I have a little freehold property, but it starts off with “Sir.” I am sending it back, pointing our that I must be addressed as “Madam,” and not “Sir,” and that as I have not vote, I do not see what this matter has to do with me. If you think of it, it is rather an insult to all women property holders to be addressed as “Sir,” and not by their proper title of courtesy. The State seems to take for granted that there can be no free women or women freeholders in the country, but that all the land must be owned by men.

The following year, Charlotte Despard announced that this strategy of non-cooperation would be extended to the census proper. One news account said:

The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor. So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.

“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women. We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”

Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship. Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?” That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.

Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week. Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.

Thursday I gave some examples of attacks directed at tax offices, Friday some examples of attacks on the apparatus of taxation, Saturday some examples of tax resistance campaigns using particularly humiliating violent attacks against individual tax collectors, Sunday some examples of attacks directed at the property of tax collectors, yesterday some examples of direct violent attacks on individual tax collectors.

Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of assaults and intimidation directed at collaborators with the tax system:

• In Paris during the French Revolution, legal proceedings against people who destroyed the tax offices were abandoned when neither the officers in charge of the investigation or the National Assembly itself had the courage to stand up to popular indignation and threats.
• Witnesses who were called to testify against the Fries Rebels “were generally very reluctant to give information, being afraid the insurgents would do them some injury.”
• In the Whiskey Rebellion, “William Richmond, who had given information against some of the rioters… had his barn burnt, with all the grain and hay which it contained…”
• During the Rebecca Riots, two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at an inn in Pontyberem and, during the course of the meeting, forced the innkeeper to swear not to admit the toll collector at the inn. In another example: “the dead body of Thomas Thomas… was found in a river near Brechfa! This man had been very much opposed to the Rebecca movement, and… had been to Carmarthen to make a complaint to the authorities against some Rebeccaites; on his return home that night he found his house, etc., on fire. Bearing this in mind, together with other circumstantial evidence, it is plain that he had some bitter enemies in the neighbourhood, and it was generally believed that he had been waylaid and murdered.” Thomas had on another occasion testified against his servant and had him jailed, and for this the Rebeccaites ransacked his house, destroying what they could.
• During the Tithe War in Ireland, resisters did what they could to prevent people from cooperating with attempt to seize and auction off resisters’ goods:

  [I]t almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it. The same observation applies to the crops. Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser. Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction. But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.

  One clergyman had to import some sixty workers to help him take his tithes “in kind” from the farmers in his parish, “from distant counties, and at high wages, who yet were incapable of obtaining more than a small portion of tithes, being interrupted by a rabble — chiefly women — though men were lurking in the background to support them.”
• In colonial North Carolina during the Stamp Act agitation, “The stamp masters were seized and forced to swear they would have nothing to do with the stamps, and it being known when the vessel bringing the stamps would come up to Wilmington, Colonels Ashe and Waddell, having called out the militia from Brunswick and the adjoining counties to the number of some 700 men, seized the vessel and held her until her commander promised not to permit the stamps to be taken from her.”
• During the Reform Bill uprising in the 1830s, “Threats had been employed to prevent auctioneers from selling distrained goods; and an auctioneer in Bath had been obliged, in consequence of intimidation, to issue a handbill, in which he gave public notice, that he would not receive for sale any goods distrained for the non-payment of King’s Taxes.”
• Irish Household Tax resisters recently mobbed Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, surrounding his car and chanting “fucking scumbag” Another politician who witnessed the event said: “In my view, there was an element of thuggery to it. Some of the protestors prevented him from getting out of the car park.”
• When Ondárroa tried to hire an outside debt collection company to go after resisters; “Upon learning of the assignment of this work to the Bilbaoan firm Gesmunpal, the nationalist left spread slogans via Internet in favor of ‘civil disobedience,’ as well as calls and letters against the company. Gesmunpal resigned.”
• During the Annuity Tax resistance movement in Edinburgh, a newspaper was sued for publicizing the names of the people who rented carts to the government for hauling away distrained goods — the grounds of the suit being that such publicity would be damaging to the business of the carters.
• The Poll Tax resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain included attacks and threats directed at collaborators with the tax, for example:
  • “Attacks and threats have been made against Bristol newsagents and shops where people can pay the Poll Tax. Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents for the Bristol-based company ‘Penalty Points.’ The firm installs special tills with its agents to collect the community charge on behalf of local authorities for a fee. Mr. Ross Hendry, a spokesman for the company… said ‘because of the attacks, one newsagent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window. He said another newsagent in Bishoport Avenue, Hartclife had the words ‘Poll Tax scab’ and ‘you’re the first’ scrawled in white paint across his window. A Circle K store in Cardiff where the revolutionary scheme was launched on April 9^th with 48 agents, had its door locks jammed with superglue.”

  

  • Intimidation of bailiffs (people authorized to seize and sell property for tax arrears) was widespread: “Housing schemes and estates were plastered with posters. One showing a vicious dog, read ‘Bailiffs? Make my day!’ Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun looking out from behind the curtains, read: ‘Bailiffs we’re ready.’ A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose. It read ‘Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.’ In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read ‘wanted’ and listed their ‘crimes.’ These images were extremely popular… People were used to seeing images of themselves in the role of victim. Now wherever they looked there were images of their adversaries in this role.”
  • “Wherever the council registration officers went they were harassed. In Glasgow violent threats drove canvasser Robert Stevenson to quit his job. He was physically threatened twice in four weeks and continually harassed:

    I’d just put the form through the door when this guy across in the garden opposite started shouting. He was sitting in the garden with about four others and they were all giving me dirty looks. He said that if I came back to collect the form I would need a tank for protection. I was in no doubt that they were serious. I didn’t finish my last street. I just chucked it.

    “…another canvasser… was ‘harassed by a gang.’ In this case, it was reported that:

    Four or five youths cornered him in a close in Gairbraid Avenue and subjected him to abuse. A Strathclyde police spokesman revealed: “They said it was a ‘No Poll Tax Area’ and told the worker to get out, which he did.”

    “Following these reports, the Poll Tax registration officer admitted that ‘there had been at least four other incidents involving canvassers’ and… canvassers had been threatened (leaflets were grabbed from their hands). Already over two members of his staff had resigned because of fears about their personal safety.”
  • Mayors and municipal councils resigned en masse to support the French wine-growers’ tax strike of 1907, and, according to one account, “there have been threats to burn the property of those mayors failing to resign.”
  • “Mr. Trueman, a Poll Tax snooper whose job was to call on people and badger them into filling the registration forms, [was] unable to cope with the abuse…

    Mrs. Trueman found the corpse of her husband as she came back from shopping. Fred Trueman, 52, an employee of Bristol City, had hanged himself. “No-one can imagine what terrible pressure he had to work under,” she claimed. “He was sworn at and threatened; he couldn’t stand it any more.”

Tax resistance campaigns have found it useful to identify resonances with popular myths, esteemed tax rebellions of yore, and semi-fictional heroes. Here are some examples:

• Just about every tax revolt in the United States (and many elsewhere as well) appropriates the example of the Boston Tea Party as an evocative reminder of a grassroots uprising, the recent “Taxed Enough Already” TEA Party movement being just the latest of many, many examples.



• In Spain, the tancament de caixes plays a similar role to the Tea Party in America, with modern Spanish tax resisters comparing their campaigns with that legendary struggle. In England (and the British empire), John Hampden has long been the exemplar of choice, with his example being used from South Africa to Ireland to India to prove that celebrated patriots can refuse to pay their taxes.
• The phrase “no taxation without representation” has such resonance, especially in the descendant nations of the British Empire, that it gets trotted out even to support tax resistance campaigns in which representation isn’t really an issue at all. It was especially potent in the American revolution and in the women’s suffrage movements.
• The Rebecca Rioters in Wales, painting their faces and dressing in drag to destroy tollgates and mete out justice in the middle of the nineteenth century, were tapping into a folkloric form of grassroots justice that was centuries old. “Jack a Lents” painted their faces and dressed in women’s clothing to tear down turnpikes in England a century before, and I’ve found references to protesters led by men in women’s clothing and using the shared pseudonym of “Lady Skimmington” in the Western Rising in England a century before that.
• Resistance to the “Foreign Miners Tax” in California in 1850 gave birth to the myth of Joaquin Murieta, a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw who became a desperado when he was forced off his claim by the tax.
• The Robin Hood myth itself has taken on a tax resistance theme in recent years. The popular Disney animated version of the Robin Hood story makes the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham a tax collector, and Robin Hood’s robbery of him a case of redistributing the taxes back to the people they’d been seized from:

  While he taxes us to pieces
    And he robs us of our bread
  King Richard’s crown keeps slippin’ down
    Around that pointed head
  Ah! But while there is a merry man
    in Robin’s wily pack
  We’ll find a way to make him pay
    And steal our money back

• Urban legends helped to fuel tax resistance during the French Revolution. Rumors that the King had abolished taxes led people to refuse payment or to destroy the obsolete offices and apparatus of taxation. Here is a similar example from Russia (as found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance):

  After the emancipation [of the serfs] in 1861, the peasants in Biezdne (Kazan Province) were demoralized to discover that with redemption payments, labor dues, and taxes their burdens were, if anything, heavier than before. When one of their number claimed that the emancipation decree granted them complete freedom from such dues — the term volia (freedom) appeared in many contexts in the decree — but that the squires and officials had kept it from being implemented, they leapt at the opportunity, now sanctioned from on high, to refuse payment.

  The myth of the czar’s benevolence, which was of course promoted by the czarist government, could backfire in this way when peasants refused to pay onerous taxes or obey other commands of the czar’s subordinates, under the theory that because the czar was so good he could not possibly have ordered such terrible things:

  Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the myth was its plasticity in the hands of its peasant adherents. First and foremost, it was an invitation to resist any or all of the czar’s supposed agents, who could not have been carrying out the good czar’s wishes if they imposed heavy taxes, conscription, rents, military corvée, and so forth. If the czar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents were committing in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters. When petitions failed and oppression continued, it may simply have indicated that an impostor — a false czar — was on the throne. In such cases, the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy. … In a form of symbolic jujitsu, an apparently conservative myth counseling passivity becomes a basis for defiance and rebellion…

• Scott also talks (e.g. in his paper Everyday Forms of Resistance) about how “much of the folk culture of the peasant ‘little tradition’ amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of [resistance]…”

  In this and other ways (e.g. tales of bandits, tricksters, peasant heroes, religious myths, carnivalesque parodies of authorities) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, evasion of conscription, and so on. While folk culture is not coordinational in any formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, might require a public relations campaign.

• The very name “Poll Tax,” which came to be the most widely-accepted name for what Thatcher’s government hoped would go down as the “community charge,” was a potent propaganda coup for the resistance movement. Danny Burns, a chronicler of that successful tax rebellion, says that “the story of [Wat Tyler’s] peasants revolt against the Poll Tax in 1381 was told in virtually every meeting. Calling on these traditions was an important part of explaining why non-cooperation was needed…” Signs that people would hang in their windows reading “No Poll Tax Here” also hearkened back to the tax resistance accompanying the Reform Act agitation in the 1830s.
• Today, tax resistance actions like the ongoing Household Tax resistance in Ireland compare themselves in turn to the successful Poll Tax revolt.
• The Lady Godiva myth concerns a “noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.”
• A motley variety of myths about “common law,” about the True Constitution, about the significance of fringed edges to flags, and other what-not, fuel the often bizarre Constitutionalist tax protester movement in the United States.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The 200-person town of Gallifa in Catalonia, Spain, has begun tax resistance as a municipality — by refusing to pay €1,662.62 income tax due on the salaries of the employees at the tax office. The town government is controlled by the small separatist coalition party “Catalan Solidarity for Independence.” There have been other rumblings of tax resistance lately in Catalan independence circles, and some people have made a symbolic gesture of trying to pay their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government. A not particularly favorable Spanish-language news article about the Gallifa action gives a good overview of Catalan nationalist tax resistance in recent years (translation mine):

  The group from local Barcelona-area government is considering conducting the same action with other taxes, such as the contributions for Social Security.

  This action is in line with eight Catalan entrepreneurs and freelancers, grouped under the platform “Diem Prou” (“We Say Enough”), who in April of this year staged a tax evasion that came after months of protest against what they consider an unjust regional financing model that they believe qualifies as “looting.”

  In December of 2008, the then-secretary of General Policy of the ERC, Josep Ginesta, demanded “that not one new euro raised be sent beyond Fraga [the Westernmost town in Catalonia, which is the Easternmost province in Spain]” In October of 2009, former regional president Pasqual Maragall (PSC) proposed a “cierre de cajas [shutting of the cashboxes],” and eight months later he threatened “tax resistance.” A measure that was supported by the secretary-general of the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), Oriol Pujol, in August of 2010. In April of 2011, the then-leader of ERC, Joan Puigcercós, and the Member of European Parliament from CiU, Ramon Tremosa, also called for refusal to honor the demands of the Treasury.

  Also those media that survive thanks to public funds have taken sides in favor of these campaigns. In March of 2011, the chief political editor of La Vanguardia, Jordi Barbeta, hinted from the pages of the newspaper group Godó of the need to launch “collective tax resistance.” A month later, Vincent Partal, director and owner of Vilaweb, one of the most heavily subsidized journals in Catalonia, encouraged from its on-line edition the launch of a campaign of “planned and widespread civil disobedience” against the Spanish government finances. In fact, in this journal are given all sorts of details on how to carry out such evasion.

  In the Summer of 2011, Òmnium Cultural, a radical separatist group that tops the list in terms of subsidies received, launched a new challenge against the present law — more than those it is accustomed to raise — that the federal government grant the Catalan regional government an economic treaty [like the ones that make the Basque region and Navarre more fiscally independent] in the next four years, or it will promote “tax resistance” against the Tax Agency. This proposal was dismissed by the Catalan government — which considered it “interesting” — and by CiU, while the PSC called it “appealing” but “unrealistic.”

  Gallifa is not the only municipality that has initiated an action of this sort. The Consistory of San Vicente dels Horts (Barcelona) — chaired by the ERC leader Oriol Junqueras — or of Gerona — with Carles Puigdemont (CiU) in charge — also attempted to cheat the national Treasury, but eventually backed down.

• I’ve had less luck trying to parse this article (in Italian), but the gist of it seems to be that Italy’s “Northern League” is threatening tax resistance (though it seems I’ve heard similar bluster from them in the past, without much to show for it). The gist of the grievance is similar to that of Catalonia — that taxes paid by people that live in the region don’t go to provide services there but to prop up economically poorer regions of the country. Northern League-allied mayors are threatening to kick out the agency that collects federal taxes, and to instead collect and spend these taxes themselves at the local level.
• Household Tax resisters disrupted a Cork City Council meeting last week, where nearly 40% of households were still refusing to register for and pay the new charge.

  Laura McGonigle said: “I’ve always enjoyed being a public representative and taken the rough with the smooth but tonight was horrendous.

  “While everyone is entitled to protest, I felt extremely intimidated and unsafe in our democratically-elected chamber.”

• Bill Evans, a pensioner living near Hartlepool, England, is refusing to pay his council tax because the government services it pays for have become so shoddy. “It has reached the stage where I feel the only thing I can do now is stop paying my council tax,” he says. “The council is not fulfilling its commitment and I will have my day in court.”
• Mahadev Desai’s 1929 book The Story of Bardoli: Being a History of the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and its Sequel is available on-line.
• The U.S. government recently seized $269 from war tax resister Cindy Sheehan’s bank account, leading her to reflect on “Stealing Rent Money from a Gold Star Mother.”
• The New York Times profiles American alternative currency martyr Bernard von NotHaus, who is facing serious prison time for minting a set of coins for people who were losing faith in the government’s official legal tender.
• IRS employees “are closing delinquent taxpayer accounts [categorizing them as ‘currently not collectible’] without following the proper procedures and without managerial approval” according to a new TIGTA report.

Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities. In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made. Here are several examples:

Labor strikes

• In Germany, in 1920, “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days. The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
• A tax strike in 2003 aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
• Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in 2010, refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
• In Savannah, Georgia, in 1867, the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay. The city then locked them out of the wharves.

  This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3. This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.

• During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
• Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in 1923. The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
• In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1901:

  The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax. Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down. … The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional. The citizens all side with the strikers.

Hartals and business strikes

• When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in 2009, farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
• American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in 2008 to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
• For a week in 2008, a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business. They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them. Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the 1979 Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
• 20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in 2009, “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
• In 1810 in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax. The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed. Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
• Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids. During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions. Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in 1913 that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.” That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.



• When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes: “The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
• During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…” The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
• In 1981, in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
• In 2010, Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
• In the Dutch West Indies in 1921, “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
• In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in 2006, people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
• In 2011, cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike: “We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
• In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in 1906, there were often business strikes:

  …all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…

  …merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…

  Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…

• In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of 1923, businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:

  The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French… The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke. They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.

  This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.

Consumer strikes

• In Cairo in 1947, a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay. This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
• In Melbourne, Australia, in 1917 “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer. They were patrons of the lower-priced seats. The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
• In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.” One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.

(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• According to a post on their website, War Resisters’ International plans to go to the tax agency in London today and pay the last five years of taxes that they have been withholding. They say they will do so “under protest” and they invite like-minded people to demonstrate with them. (I think I’d rather watch a bunch of vegetarian activists eat hamburgers “under protest” myself.) According to a press release, the organization had its back to the wall, with the tax agency threatening to come this weekend to “confiscate computers, printers and other equipment that will make it impossible [for WRI] to continue working.” They opted to pay rather than remain vulnerable to this property seizure.
• The Greek government has indicted several activists whom it accuses of having been part of the toll gate raids. In response, the “Won’t Pay” movement stormed three toll gates on Sunday, opening the gates for free passage, and handing the passing drivers leaflets describing the anti-toll movement.
• The campaign against the Household Tax in Ireland continues. Hundreds of activists met for a strategy meeting last Saturday to discuss the ongoing household tax resistance, a new property tax, and the possibility of augmenting the campaign with registration resistance, with a general strike, or by fielding candidates for political office. Richard Forbes of the Drogheda Campaign against Household and Water Tax said, “Saturday’s rally clearly shows that there is a determination to defeat this tax and that many see it for what it is: an austerity tax on peoples’ homes to pay for the banking crisis. The Drogheda campaign was instrumental in ensuring that tens of thousands of households in Drogheda and Louth did not pay the household tax. This has laid a solid basis for building a mass campaign of resistance and boycott of the property tax.”

Some international tax resistance news:

Ireland

The Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes continues its tax resistance campaign in Ireland.

The government introduced a set of amendments to the tax that are aimed at quieting the dissent, but campaign spokesman Bill Michael O’Brien says that, “the only change that can save this government is to scrap the property tax completely.”

[C]ompletely scrapping the property tax [would] reflect the reality for the hundreds of thousands of people out there struggling to make ends meet who didn’t pay the household charge last year and have no intention of paying the property tax this year.

Among the escalations in the campaign have been disruptions of council meetings. A few weeks ago, meetings in Dublin, Galway, and Kilkenny were disrupted by protesters — including a member of the European parliament — who were arrested. One protester noted: “The politicians are refusing to listen. They have refused to come to meetings organised by the campaign so it seems we have to bring our voices to them.”

Britain

The government is instituting something its foes are calling the “Bedroom Tax” — essentially a cut in the housing benefit of people who get government assistance in paying their rent, if the government deems their home to be too large for their needs.

In other words, if you have two children and each has their own room, the government may say: why don’t you move into a smaller place and double-up? If you have a spare room, the government may say: you probably should rent that out to a lodger — we’re only going to help you pay for the rooms you need.

The Bedroom Tax affects nearly 700,000 households in the U.K. From the 1^st of April 2013, tenants of housing associations & social landlords will be hit by a possible 25% cut in their housing benefit if they under-occupy their home. This means: 1 spare room will see a 14% reduction in housing benefit; 2 spare rooms will see a 25% reduction in housing benefit. Many tenants will be expected to uproot their families, move away from their communities, their support networks and downsize to properties that simply do not exist; those who decide to stay will be constantly battling to make up the shortfall in rent. This should not be a question of move or stay; it should be about refusing to pay the tax full stop.

According to The Independent, “Increasing numbers of poor communities are pledging to defy eviction threats amid mounting opposition to the Government’s ‘bedroom tax’, claiming they cannot — and will not — pay higher rents.”

A veteran of the 1980s anti-poll tax movement [Liz Kitching] says she is not going anywhere. “I feel worried, frightened, upset. But at the same time I am proud of the campaign and that does give me a little bit of confidence and hope because we did stop the poll tax. I am not a victim. This is a policy I am fighting back against.”

Spain

In Unfollow, Ariza Elisenda writes about civil disobedience in Spain, including tax resistance. Excerpts (translation mine):

From Conscientious Objection to Tax Resistance

The economist Arcadi Oliveres is president of the Justice & Peace foundation, an organization that supported the first conscientious objectors [to military service]. For 30 years it has promoted war tax resistance; in total there are 3,000 people across the country who refuse to pay the Treasury a portion of their taxes proportional to the Defense budget.

Oliveres gives an example with quantities that illustrate how this action is done: “If you are asked to pay 1,000 euros to the Treasury and during the year you have paid 800, when you make your tax return in June, 200 euros will remain to be paid. Well, if the Defense budget is 5% [of the federal budget], from these 200 you refuse to pay 10 euros. But you want to show that you don’t pay because of your disapproval of military spending and not because you don’t want to contribute. So you make your contribution of 10 euros to a non-governmental organization and ask for the receipt. When you make your tax return, you write a note explaining that you refuse a part of your taxes destined for Defense and provide the receipt from the donation you have made to the non-governmental organization.” What happens next? “If they happen to check your return (because it is proven that they do not check them all) they will send you a letter demanding the 10 euros. You ignore it and then they come back and send another letter in which, in addition to the 10 euros, they require of you 20 more for interest. Further demands follow and finally they will end up seizing the amount that remains from your bank account.”

To end up paying not only the quantity remaining to pay in your tax return, but also the interest, does not discourage Oliveres because “freedoms throughout history never have been given, they have been captured.” He emphasizes that to avoid a year and a half in the army, the pioneering conscientious objectors spent three in jail, and, although the number of people in Spain doing tax resistance can be described as a “lackluster result,” he adds that “it is an educational and pressure tactic.”

When the Fuse Lights…

To violate the rule carries a punishment, normally in the form of a fine. “I understand that people want to take these actions as a type of protest,” explains María Teresa Saez, spokesperson for the Professional Association of Magistrates. “I think it is quite legitimate but has to assume the consequences and this will be implicit in such protest.”

Josep Casadellà was clear that he was doing an act of civil disobedience when he decided not to pay for passing a tollbooth on the road to Barcelona by Girona. Joseph says that “I’ve already paid too long; 43 years paying for some highways doesn’t match up, it cannot be and that’s that.” In March 2012 he went by car with his son and heard on the radio some statements from the Minister of Development Ana Pastor who said they were going to bail out the highway deficit in Madrid with the income from the highways of Catalonia and elsewhere that were in surplus. Then he denied, but at this moment, he says, he would pass through the tollbooth, and said the now-famous phrase “no vull pagar” (“I don’t want to pay”). They recorded it, posted it on YouTube, and lit the fuse.

Over the following weekends, people imitated Josep and made the same statement. Thus, thousands of refusals to pay the tolls: Something previously unheard of. Although it wasn’t the first time that Josep called for disobedience: the previous year there had been a campaign on Facebook on 11 September 2011 — the National Day of Catalonia — for people not to pay tolls. “And I did it myself,” he jokes. Why did it not work then and then yes one month later? “I think that it was the right time,” Josep says. In matters of civil disobedience there needs to be a fuse and a spark, but if there is no explosive there will be no bang. “It was a very particular time, with the crisis on one hand and on the other the media that published it… and all together it pulled the trigger.”

…and the Fuse Fizzles

We followed in Catalona: in different weekends during the Spring of 2012 there have been some 50,000 refusals to pay tolls on the part of 25,000 people, according to the “no vull pagar” platform, and Albertis, the tollbooth operator, made an appeal to the government. Fines of 100 euros began to arrive and the protest deflated. “When I first did the ‘no vull pagar,’ I was conscious that I was breaking a rule, a decree that comes each year with fees to be paid. So I was aware that it was an act of civil disobedience that could result in repercussions against me. Now I don’t know if the people who later refused to pay the toll were also conscious of this,” explains Josep. Fines that, on the other hand, were not legal and that could be appealed since at that time it was considered a contractural infraction and it was the operator, Albertis, and not the Catalan Traffic Service that was responsible for reporting drivers who had not paid the toll. Furthermore, Josep says that so far he has not paid anything because he has been making appeals.

The “no vull pagar” campaign has had an impact, though not in the form that the promoters of the protest would have liked: In the general budget for 2013, the government has changed the law to allow sanctioning, now indeed, of people who refuse to pay a toll. If to this we add the new court fees it is easy to understand the discouragement of even the promoter of the idea, who has opted not to use toll roads. Nevertheless, the campaign continues to brainstorm new demonstrations to maintain the protest. For now they will demand accountability for using the highway code to punish an act, failure to pay, that was not punishable at the time.

Nuanced Disobedience

We resumed the conversation with Martí Olivellas, who tells us that, 40 years after the campaign for conscientious objection [to military service], he is about to launch a new civil disobedience campaign called “A call to civil disobedience for civil rights and against the financial dictatorship.” According to Martí this concerns reviving a campaign made three years ago called “Pledge for fiscal transparency” that included not paying the Treasury and depositing the money in an ethical bank account, until the government could explain with transparency how it was spending the taxes. Now the campaign is resuming but in order to be huge they intend to make their deposit in the Government Depository, an administrative body of the Economic Ministry that is charged with the management and control of securities and deposits that have been made with the Civil Administration. Martí Olivellas says that “you’re not evading. What you say is that the day on which they [the government] have the transparency law, end corruption, and know how to manage our money, I’ll pay my taxes that I have retained in the Depository.” But until then, you are not failing to pay but are retaining the money in an account in the same agency, are we still talking about civil disobedience? “This is a very nuanced action of disobedience and is intended for the general public. But everyone can modulate the risk: for example sending that which you have to pay to the Treasury in an interest-free loan to a social entity that should have received money from the State but has not received it.” And do they think anything will happen next? “We hope so, next 16 February there is a gathering which will finish the outline. And then tax season begins. It is the right moment.” At that time we will see if society is willing, or not ready, to disobey.

Catalonia

Spanish cabinet member José Manuel García-Margallo acknowledged a rising tax resistance sentiment in Catalonia. “Increasingly, Catalan society is noticing that what is ‘sent to Spain’… is ‘sent to Europe’ ” — meaning that instead of the tax dollars going to provide services for Catalonia, they’re being used to pay for European creditor bailouts.

Catalan separatists are trying to keep Catalan taxes in Catalonia, and some have used tax resistance strategies — including paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan local government.

Chile

Guillermo Durand Cornejo, president of the government-owned mining monopoly Codelco, and a legislative representative, called on Salteños (citizens of Salta, Chile) to refuse to pay a municipal tax, in the wake of property tax increases and new taxes in electricity and water bills.

“Until such time as the mayor gives a response to the people concerning the tax hike, I suggest that you do not pay this month’s municipal tax,” he said. “I call for civil disobedience.”

Cornejo says he views the thirty-day tax strike as a wake up call for the government, and suggests that strikers who restrict their strike to the single month will not be subject to government reprisals.

Italy

Italy’s government is responding to widespread tax evasion by doing spot checks of people who appear to be living large to see if they’ve paid their taxes.

The tactic has a name, redditometro, and it involves a detailed “lifestyle” audit that tips off tax authorities to noncompliance. If the police observe an Italian resident living the high life (for instance, by zooming around in an expensive sports car) they can stop the individual and demand their taxpayer identification numbers, regardless of whether any criminal offense has taken place. The information is conveyed to the tax authorities, the Agenzia delle Entrate, which subsequently audits the driver. On audit, revenue officials ask probing questions about how the taxpayer was able to afford the fancy wheels given their meager reported income.

Nowadays being seen driving a Ferrari isn’t so cool; it has become a glaring audit flag. Ditto for renting a weekend villa in the Tuscan hill country, or applying for membership at a Ligurian yacht club. And don’t even think about heli-skiing at Cortina. Other activities being monitored include shopping for high-end fashion items. So think twice before you hit the Gucci boutique.

Redditometro was approved by Parliament in 2010, but wasn’t widely enforced until January 2013. Most Italians don’t like the practice. They find it intrusive. Piero Ostellino, an Italian news commentator, recently told the BBC: “I’m against the Redditometro not because I’m in favor of evading taxes, I don’t think tax collection should be done by trampling on individual liberties.” He then added, “I would like to live in a country where a cardinal can, every month, buy a pornographic magazine without having to explain this to the tax authorities. This is like the former East Germany.”

Greece

Tax resistance continues in Greece, where the government has been raising taxes and reducing government benefits and services.

Despite big tax hikes as part of austerity measures demanded by international lenders, tax revenues fell precipitously in January, with the Greek Finance Ministry reporting a 16 percent decrease from a year earlier, and a loss of 775 million euros, or $1.05 billion in one month.

The numbers could have been worse as the government gained revenues from doubled property taxes and big hikes in income taxes that have hit most Greeks except for tax cheats who continue to largely escape sacrifice or prosecution.

Direct tax revenues increased by about 9 to 10 percent in January compared with a year earlier. Given the country’s devastating recession, which has created a record 26.8 percent unemployment and is in its sixth year, the only options left for the government is to collect from tax evaders and improve tax collections, although tax hikes have led to many more Greeks trying to hide their income, statistics showed.

The “Won’t Pay” tax resistance movement is still active. An Athens-area branch of the group is putting up 100,000 posters there to urge people to join an expanded tax strike in March.

Meanwhile, the government won a court victory against the tollgate runners. The Greek Supreme Court ruled against Oropos mayor John Oikonomakou who had challenged his €200 fine for running the gate on the grounds that the toll and fine money was being siphoned off by foreign companies rather than being used for road maintenance and traffic safety.

Tollgate raids are continuing in spite of the ruling. Other court challenges are also in progress.

The government has recently also added a €5 tax to medical services, which the movement is urging people to refuse to pay, and offering their legal support to anyone denied service for such refusal.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland has adopted a new tactic. Two Cork city council members, among others, were arrested for demonstrating inside a Bank of Ireland branch. The bank was targeted in part to protest that the government has been using tax money to bail out banks while raising taxes and imposing austerity budgets on citizens.
• Enric Durán had another plan to strike back at the banks: he visited 39 banks, and took out 68 loans for a total of €492,000, which he donated “to various social movements that are building alternatives to capitalism.” Then he went underground and left the banks holding the (empty) bag. Waging Nonviolence recently interviewed Enric Durán in hiding, and published an article about his actions. Apparently he’s at the core of the group that is promoting “Desobediència Integral” (Comprehensive Disobedience) that I mentioned last month.
• The Washington Post published a nice long-form piece about the Transform Now Plowshares activists who boldly broke into and vandalized the Y-12 (Oak Ridge) nuclear weapons facility last summer.
• Bill Buppert, at Zero Gov, has written a nice profile of incorrigible moonshiner Popcorn Sutton.

While I was working my way through the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience and trying my hand at some amateur translation, interesting links were accumulating in my bookmarks. I’ll share some of these today:

• A site called CommunityCurrenciesLaw.org has assembled a good collection of legal information about alternative currencies, including a page about the tax treatment of barter, swapping, and gifts.
• I’ve started a Twitter feed (@99Tactics) for my upcoming book, 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns. I’ll post updates there about ongoing tax resistance campaigns around the world, about the upcoming book release, and about workshops and other events associated with the book.
• The erosion of the IRS budget and the expansion of its responsibilities has led to a drop in revenue from its collections/enforcement branch. “Diminished enforcement could also affect voluntary compliance over time,” according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report that revealed the numbers.

  In 2011, enforcement revenue dropped by more than $2 billion. Last year, it dropped by $5 billion more, to a little more than $50 billion. At the same time, the IRS is opening more delinquent taxpayer accounts than it is closing, the inspector general said…

  The IRS has shed about 8,000 jobs since 2010, the report said. It comes as the IRS is taking on big new responsibilities implementing President Barack Obama’s new health care law, with congressional Republicans wanting to cut the agency’s budget even more.

  Over the past two years, enforcement revenue has dropped by 13% and the number of agency personnel working on enforcement has dropped by 14%. Those effects took place before this year’s sequester, which forced furlough days and cancellations of bonuses on IRS employees, and also before the morale-sapping “IRS Scandals” that have made the news in recent months. They also preceded, of course, the so-called “government shutdown” which will also put most IRS enforcement on hold.
• Speaking of IRS scandals, the Republican politicians who have been piling-on to every whiff of agency impropriety went strangely silent when it was recently revealed that companies seeking rulings from the agency on their tax dodges of choice have been able to choose which IRS attorneys will process their requests — in essence, allowing them to choose the judge in their own cases.
• Dublin household and water charge strikers are fighting back against government attempts to install water meters that would enforce the new tax. This video demonstrates how resisters have poured concrete blocks to prevent the installation of the meters:
• War tax resister Ed Hedemann appeared on Breaking The Set to explain “how Americans can stop financially supporting the military industrial complex by withholding taxes”:

It’s time for another international tax resistance round-up:

France

The French government arrested eleven Breton activists and charged them with conspiracy to attack highway tax portals. Four remain in custody, and the trial has been delayed until the middle of next month. Supporters of the bonnets rouges have been rallying outside the courtroom.

Italy/Venice

The newly-declared Venetian Republic issued its first decree — that Venetians are exempt from taxation until the Republic is able to set up a tax agency independent from Italy.

The government has responded with raids and arrests there as well.

Fabio Padovan has called for a “satyagraha”-style hunger strike to support hunger-striking prisoner Lucio Chiavegato.

Ireland

Resistance to new water charges continues in Ireland. Protesters in Cork blocked workers who had come to install water meters at a housing project there. This has reinvigorated protests elsewhere in Ireland.

Spain

The Spanish war tax resistance season has kicked into high gear under the slogan “disarm your taxes — not with our money.” The periodical Diagonal added an eye-catching infographic about how to go about resisting:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC casts a critical eye on Obamacare, and explains some of its complications for war tax resisters.
• Three major corporations have announced that they are pulling their investments from “private” prison companies in the United States under pressure from activists.
• Robert W. McGee continues his series of investigations into attitudes on the ethics of tax evasion, this time surveying philosophy professors about which circumstances, if any, they think may justify tax evasion. He’s also done a meta-study of some of his earlier work to try to determine if there are gender differences in evaluating the ethics of tax evasion.
• At Hit & Run, Jesse Walker takes note of the rise of the underground economy in Zimbabwe.
• Breton “bonnets rouges” are holding rallies outside the prison where some of their comrades are being held awaiting trial on charges of destroying highway tax portals.
• The fight against new water charges in Ireland is escalating, with protesters blockading contractors for Irish Water who had been sent to install meters in Cork.
• The folks behind the Spanish “comprehensive disobedience” project have launched a multi-lingual, international website: IntegraRevolucio to coordinate the work of people around the world who are working on similar lines. They also plan to launch a new media project — RADI.MS — soon.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• A new website called earthineer is designed for the do-it-yourself, homesteading sorts… and it is developing a barter & marketplace feature that looks like it could be very useful to those of us trying to move as much as possible into the solidarity economy. (ᔥ Claire Wolfe)
• Some families in Sligo and in Carlow, Ireland, barricaded their neighborhoods to prevent the installation of water meters that are going to be facilitating a new stealth tax on water.
• The Richmond Times-Dispatch did a profile on war tax resister and gay-rights activist Jon Klein.
• The snack bar at the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., was shut down when inspectors found rodent droppings and other health violations.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Irish protesters are continuing their campaign to block the installation of water meters, including recently at the Ardmore Estate neighborhood in Cork.
• While home-brewing is legal in the United States, home distilling is not. Distillation of drinkable alcohol is highly regulated (and taxed). But nonetheless, home distilling has become a popular hobby, and the federales have been largely looking the other way and not harassing hobbyist-level distillers (as opposed to commercial moonshiners). That sadly appears to be changing.
• The Other Eye, a Catalan journal, recently published Carles Valentí’s essay on tax resistance, which is another example of the Spanish tax resistance movement expanding beyond war tax resistance to a broader critique of corrupt, wasteful, and harmful government spending.
• Italy’s “Northern League” likes to talk about tax resistance a whole bunch, but I don’t see as much evidence of them moving from talk to action as I’d like. The latest example of this big talk comes from party Secretary Matteo Salvini, who called for a tax strike to begin on 14 November. We shall see.

Some international tax resistance news:

Italy

It came as news to me, but I think it may have been established last year: Sciopero Fiscale (Tax Strike), a project of Democracy in Action. They believe that the Italian government is taxing excessively and performing dismally, and that the time has come to stop buying it. “Paying taxes is a duty, but it should be the right of every citizen not to pay them if they are used for evil or immoral purposes.”

France

A Breton farmer, Joseph Baron, is being pursued by the government for over a million in euros in damages for an attack on an “ecotax” highway portal. Supporters joined Baron in the courthouse, and also carried banners outside. They have also formed a support committee and are raising funds to assist him.

Ireland

Activists with Bray Water Meter Watch captured two junction boxes that workers intended to install to facilitate the metering and taxing of residential water service. They held the boxes hostage until the workers reinstalled the old, unmetered stopcocks and repaired the torn-up sidewalk.

Spain

War tax resister Pepa Pretel, under threat of having her home seized and sold by the government, gave in and paid the amount due. She says, however, that “the important thing is that people know that there is this disobedience.” Pretel was one of several hundred people in Spain who redirected a percentage of their tax bill, equivalent to the military percentage of the Spanish government budget, to charitable causes. “These resources wasted in the preparation for war, could be redirected to satisfy the basic necessities of the people and to promote egalitarian and nonviolent values that surpass the values of fear and aggression promoted by the military system we suffer from.” She says that despite the setback, she plans to continue resisting.

Greece

The Journal of Journalists (or something like that, it’s Greek to me) wrote up a backgrounder highlighting some historical tax resistance campaigns from around the world.

The “ΔΕΝ ΠΛΗΡΩΝΩ” (Not Paying) movement has launched a political party.

Some tax resistance news from Europe:

Spain / Catalonia

Catalonia, banned from holding a formal vote on independence, held a more informal plebiscite on the question recently. The voters overwhelmingly approved of an independent Catalan state. This will probably revitalize a long-simmering tax resistance campaign in which Catalan municipalities and taxpayers were paying their taxes to the regional government rather than the federal government.

In other Spanish tax resistance news:

• NWTRCC’s Erica Weiland interviewed Enric Duran of Spain’s “desobediencia integral” movement.
• There are also more traditional pacifist war tax resisters in Spain, such as Antonio Martín Canaves, who explained his stand in a recent letter-to-the-editor.

Italy

Governments seem to be increasingly using public utility monopolies as ways of increasing government extractions of money from citizens without raising “taxes.” New fees, increased rates, and complex bureaucratic reorganizations that leave the government richer and the citizens poorer, are among the tools in this chest.

In Syracuse, some citizens are drawing the line. They held a demonstration in the Piazza Duomo to announce their refusal to pay a new garbage tax.

Ireland

• A protest against a new water tax in Dublin drew thousands of demonstrators. They held banners reading “No Way: We Won’t Pay” and burned their Irish Water new customer packets. A companion protest in Limerick was Halloween-themed, with people in costumes, and the packet-burning taking place in a witch’s cauldron.
• Truck drivers in Dublin blockaded the Dublin Port Tunnel as part of a protest over a high heavy goods vehicle tax in Ireland.

Germany

High value-added tax (VAT) rates in Germany have led to a boom in the sale of used goods which are not subject to the tax.

The VAT is very similar to what is being promoted as the “Fair Tax” idea in the United States. “Fair Tax” promoters ought to take heed from this warning from victims of the German VAT:

People are realizing that they have been living a fairy tale. The politicians swore that VAT taxes would reduce income taxes. They did not. They were more repressive and have reduced the long-term economic growth throughout Europe. The administrative burden upon business is outrageous with each layer having to account up the chain rather than a sales tax that only the seller need collects.

France

The bonnets rouges were successful in their campaign to get rid of the “écotaxe” — and this is going to end up costing the French government even more than the lost revenue it had been expecting from the tax.

The government had contracted with a private company to administer and collect the tax. That contract guaranteed that company a certain amount of money, whether or not the tax was collected. The government suspended the tax, but it is still on the hook for about €1 billion in payments to this company.

Britain

James “Sandy” Steel decided to stop paying his council tax, claiming that council elections are being illegally corrupted by the machinations of national political parties.

Greece

Nineteen members of the Greek “Won’t Pay” movement were acquitted on charges of incitement for their actions during a toll gate opening raid.

More international tax resistance news:

• Protesters against new water usage taxes in Ireland stumbled on the country’s deputy prime minister leaving an unrelated event, surrounded her car, and trapped her there for two hours.
• In a clever protest against high theater taxes in Spain, a theater company there has begun selling pornographic magazines with “free” theater tickets attached to avoid the tax. Magazines are taxed at about 4% while theater tickets get hit with a 21% tax.
• London Mayor Boris Johnson was born in the United States, though he hasn’t lived there since he was five years old. But that makes him a U.S. citizen, and so the U.S. government presumes to be able to tax him no matter where he lives or where he earns his income. Recently, Boris told the IRS to take a hike.
• Greece’s “won’t pay” movement is expanding into auction disruption. “Vampire-banks, recapitalized with tens of billions of euros from the balance belonging to the Greek people, return to boldly vacuum up their riches by taking people’s property. All of us who participate in the vast movement against the auctions say we will not help them.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Erica Weiland’s session on war tax resistance from Bethany Theological Seminary’s “Peace Forum” series of lectures is now available as a webcast.
• IRS employees have been instructed to “neither confirm nor deny” that they use the Department of Homeland Security’s database of “historical travel information such as records of commercial airline flights, border crossings, and specific dates that individuals have traveled to and from the United States” when trying to collect intelligence about taxpayers.
• Hong Kong’s “umbrella movement,” protesting against Chinese tyranny, are considering moving from Occupy-style street protests to tax refusal and refusal to pay rent in government-run housing. Benny Tai Yiu-Ting, one of the movement’s organizers, wrote: “Blocking government may be even more powerful than blocking roads. Refusal to pay taxes, delaying rent payments by tenants in public housing estates and filibustering in the Legislative Council, along with other such acts of noncooperation, could make governing more inconvenient. No government can govern effectively if the majority of its people are unwilling to cooperate.”
• A survey in Ireland found that one third of those polled plan to refuse to pay the new water charges and fewer than half plan to pay (the rest are undecided or aren’t affected by the new charges).
• Pedro Enrique Polo gives a history of his involvement in the conscientious objector movement in Spain which includes a tax resistance angle.
• Seven bonnets rouges were sentenced to three months in prison for their roles in the destruction of the highway tax portal at Guiclan.

Some international tax resistance news briefs:

• The Socialist Worker covers the anti-water charge movement in Ireland. Included in a sidebar is a link to this video in which Nicky Coules explains how people can uninstall and bypass a water tax meter installed at their homes:

• In the South China Morning Post, Louise Lee suggests that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists launch a tax resistance campaign:

  Tax resistance, or the act of consciously not paying tax, would enable residents from all walks of life to directly throw a wrench into the gears without having to risk life and limb.

  Symbolically, tax resisters would be sending a loud and clear message to the administration that it does not have the mandate to govern. And since tax records are properly kept, this form of civil disobedience would also produce an indisputable number of participants and, by extension, act as a de facto referendum.

  Tax resistance also satisfies the Occupy movement’s principle of non-violence. No participants can escape the legal ramifications of their action, either, avoiding the problem of “free riders”.

  Some might argue that tax resistance would hurt innocent citizens such as those who rely on government assistance and social services. My response is that pro-democracy activists can perhaps learn from Julia “Butterfly” Hill, an American activist, who took US$150,000 of tax money and donated it to civic organisations to help various causes. To paraphrase Hill, the act of tax resistance is not refusing to pay tax, but paying the money where it belongs because the government has failed to do so.

  Campaigns to pay taxes in multiple, inconvenient, symbolic amounts, and to delay rent payment in government-owned housing, have already begun, as I noted a few days back, and there is also now a campaign to refuse outright to pay a small (HK$10) amount of the tax bill.
• A self-employed Italian tattoo artist (sounds better in the Italian: “tatuatrice”) named Chiara Rizzi has made waves by announcing her refusal to pay extortionate taxes:

  I am self-employed, and first and foremost a single mom of a beautiful baby girl, and I declare openly that I am unable to pay, with my income, all of the taxes that the state demands from me. I appeal to the principle of necessity and to the capacity to pay in proportion to income, respectively, as established by articles 54 of the criminal code and 53 of the Italian Constitution to justify my categorical refusal to continue to contribute, by means of taxes, to the expenses for the maintenance of the privileges of the political class that governs us: the real villain of this economic crisis.

  She explains: “This is not a new idea. To pay to able to work, to pay to be able to survive, this is called extortion. This is called mafia. This is called usury.… I’d rather die fighting than suffocate in silence.”
• A poll conducted by Tilder-LCI-Opinionway found that people in France feel that the most significant economic event of 2014 was the abandonment of the écotaxe by the government in the face of a vigorous campaign of direct action from the bonnets rouges.
• Tens of thousands of Greek drivers are turning in their vehicle license plates rather than pay vehicle registration taxes.
• In what is beginning to seem like one of those jokes that goes on and on until it starts seeming funny again, Italy’s Northern League is once more threatening a tax strike.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• According to a Government Accountability Office report, people filing phony tax refund claims by using appropriated identities stole $5.2 billion from the IRS during the 2013 tax filing season. (An additional $24.2 billion in such refund claims were detected before the IRS sent any money.) To put that into perspective, $5 billion is roughly the amount of money that was in the entire IRS enforcement budget (before recent cuts, anyway). Which is to say that nowadays the government pays more to organized tax cheats than it pays to combat tax cheats. The identity theft industry is a significant (and growing) part of the federal budget.
• When the Syriza coalition looked like it was on track for a shocking victory in the Greek elections, people across Greece stopped paying their taxes. After all, Syriza had campaigned in part on the abolition of some new taxes, and had hitched its wagon to the “won’t pay” tax resistance movement. Well, now that they’re in power, they’re more apt to be caught talking about tax-paying as a “patriotic duty,” but the Greeks don’t seem to agree: tax collection is down by 23% from expectations.
• An Italian priest, Don Marino Ruggero, has been making waves by promoting tax resistance to his flock. In his parish bulletin he wrote: “Catholic doctrine notes that there are fair taxes that are to be paid under pain of mortal sin and of the penal law, unfair taxes that you may evade without sin and without offense, and even perverse taxes that are contrary to the divine law and that should not be paid even if you have to risk your life.” He says he feels that the tax burden has become so grotesque in Italy that the taxes are no longer fair enough to be obligatory to Christians: “I wonder if it is better to pay utility bills and taxes and then have to go begging for charity. When a family sinks into despair because they have nothing to eat, one has to decide. I call for a tax strike. Yes, a peaceful revolution, in which it would be enough that everyone fearlessly stop paying any tax, with a single purpose: to undermine an out-of-control ‘meat grinder’ tax system. Gandhi said: ‘Withholding payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.’ He and his people, they got it.”
• Thirty thousand people marched in Dublin to protest an impending Irish water tax. Some 660,000 Irish households had refused to register for the new tax by the registration deadline.
• Colectivo Utopía Contagiosa has issued its impressive annual report on the amount and the impact of Spanish military spending which is used, in part, as a basis for the practice of many war tax resisters in Spain.

Today, a pile of tax resistance links from hither and yon:

International Tax Resistance News

• There seems to be something of a tax insurrection in Denmark including the torching of a tax office and ten tax administration vehicles.
• Dave Ridley, on The Ridley Report podcast, ponders whether or not it is ethical to try to drain resources from the government in order to weaken it (for example, by filing lawsuits against it, or forcing its bureaucracy to waste time) or whether this is just adding insult to the original injury the government performed by taking the wasted funds from the taxpayer.
• Protesters in Detroit, Michigan, blocked the street in front of the county treasury building to protest the fact that despite plunging property values in Detroit, many homes have not been reassessed in years (in spite of a law mandating annual reassessments), and so the owners are on the hook for artificially inflated property taxes, which is pushing some of them into tax foreclosures.
• A brothel in Salzburg, Austria, has launched a free drinks and free sex promotion to protest high taxes on its receipts. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the protest has been wildly popular with the brothel’s clientele as well as with clickbait “news” sites.
• Residents of Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have launched a tax strike to protest against the government’s failure to provide them with adequate security against atrocities committed by the Allied Democratic Forces rebels. The tax resistance comes on the heels of a week-long general strike, and is being organized by “civil society” groups. The taxes being resisted are largely business taxes, both those on larger businesses and stall-fees paid by market vendors. Some of the organizers have reported being subjected to death threats.
• Palmerstown (Ireland) Residents against Water Charges held a mass burning of their water bills a little while back. Meanwhile, petitions signed by 15,000 anti-water charge protesters were given the cold shoulder in Cork.
• Market vendors in Githurai, Kenya have started withholding taxes from the county government to protest the government’s unwillingness or inability to provide basic services to the market.
• As Greece prepares to bid a national “δεν πληρώνω” (“won’t pay”) to their international creditors, the domestic δεν πληρώνω movement continues to innovate — lately with a new smartphone app that tells public transit users where they can expect ticket auditors and which stations are free-and-clear. Fines are down by ¼ to ⅓ from their numbers last year. In addition, overall tax revenue is in a tailspin in Greece. The government hoped to bring in €3.728 billion in May, for example, and only managed to scrape up €2.722 billion.

War Tax Resistance News

• Pioneering American war tax resister Juanita Nelson, who helped found the first modern American group devoted to war tax resistance (Peacemakers) in 1948, and who died earlier this year, was honored with a festive parade in her hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
• War tax resister Don Schrader explains his stand in the New Mexico Daily Lobo: “How much good is it to pray, hope, and march for peace if we pay for war?”
• The group Conscience, which had been an important voice for war tax resisters in the U.K., has been undertaking an image makeover lately, in which it has deemphasized tax resistance in favor of lobbying and, alas, lately is lobbying for a particularly pathetic “taxes for peace” bill that is a somewhat new formulation of the “peace tax”-style legislation but that has at least as many flaws as such bills usually have.

IRS Woes

• I see another IRS building has been evacuated because of a “suspicious package” — this time in Andover, Massachusetts.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identified an estimated two and a half billion dollars in previously-unnoticed fraudulently-requested tax refunds issued by the IRS for tax year 2012. That’s roughly the size of the budget of the National Parks Service. Many of the payments went to addresses outside of the country, like to Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Ireland, so maybe I should have compared it to a foreign aid program: in the same ballpark as the amount the State Department gave to Israel.
• The problem (or is it a solution) of identity theft playing havoc on the U.S. tax system is only likely to get worse… especially after hackers managed to lift personnel records for just about every employee of the federal government including social security numbers and a wealth of other identifying information.

Some links that floated by my screen in recent days:

• A new book, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India by Mary Elizabeth King, takes a closer look at the Vykom satyagraha campaign and deflates some of the myths about it. Analyses of nonviolent action campaigns often suffer from a desire to prove that nonviolence works or is better than alternatives. This desire can shape the analysis so much as to make it less credible. So careful, detailed, less-agenda-driven analyses are very valuable. I haven’t read this one yet, but the review on nonviolence.org whet my appetite.
• Irish legislator and anti-austerity activist Paul Murphy says the campaign against the “water charge” — the Irish government’s latest attempt to hide taxes in utility bills — is on the verge of victory. Half a million households, or about a third of them, have not registered with Irish Water. This in the face of the government offering a €100 prebate to households who registered by the deadline.
• A political opposition party in Burundi is calling for a tax strike to protest what it characterizes as a violation of term limits by President Pierre Nkurunziza. “We want to significantly target the economy of the country to be sure that the president has no other choice but to yield to the people’s demands,” said opposition figure Jérémie Minani. As most of the government revenue comes from indirect taxes (and foreign aid), the opposition is asking merchants to stop importing goods that are subject to duties, and is asking people to stop using fuel, smoking, and drinking alcoholic beverages, and to reduce their use of cell phones, to avoid the value-added taxes on those products.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• The campaign against the new water charges in Ireland has hit a milestone. At the end of the first billing cycle, only 43% of households had paid their bill.

  While Irish Water will consider this to be a solid start and in keeping with international experience related to the introduction of such new charges, the anti-water charges movement is already claiming the fact that just 43% of households have paid the charges as a victory for their side.

  Sinn Féin Deputy Leader Mary Lou McDonald said it signals to the Government in no uncertain terms that the majority of the people do not support water charges.

  Anti Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy said it represents a massive victory for people power and that a clear majority of 57% of people have sent a message that they will not pay these charges.

• Two sex workers in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand stood up to a would-be pimp who tried to impose a tax on them for the privilege of working there. They endured threats and violence and have now found allies of a sort in the local police.
• It’s hard to tax you if you don’t bother with money. Mark Boyle gave up on money in 2008. Click that link to see a brief interview with him about how his experiment in living a moneyless life has gone.

Some links from here and there:

• The Center for a Stateless Society has reprinted an interview with Karl Hess from a 1976 edition of Mother Earth News in which he describes his transition from Republican speechwriter to homesteading tax resister.
• Authorities in Ireland have prohibited water tax protesters there from raising funds door-to-door — denying them a permit on the grounds that “the money may be used for the ‘commission of an unlawful act.’ ”
• The britishprotest.com site covers Sophia Duleep Singh of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.

Some international tax resistance news:

United States

• J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, takes a look at Americans who stay outside of the banking system and otherwise engage in the “underground economy.”
• The Pope came to visit, and gave a shout-out to Catholic Worker activist and war tax resister Dorothy Day in his address to Congress. It’s been amusing watching politicians and activists from just about every ideological niche try to claim the Pope as one of their own… it reminds me of the old saw about the blind men and the elephant. Or maybe it’s similar to how so many different ideologies, practices, and beliefs all claim to be interpretations of the real teachings of Jesus — nowadays we all get to interpret the Pope in our own way too… Is the Pope Catholic? Perhaps with a lower-case “c”.
• New York restaurants are using “sales suppression” software to underreport receipts for tax purposes, to the anguish of the local taxfeeders. This, according to the opponents of the practice, means the restaurants “can offer lower food and beverage prices, and afford higher rents, than honest restaurants can.” Perish the thought.

Catalonia

• A coalition of nationalist parties won the recent Catalan election, which they were billing as a referendum on independence. They have vowed to begin to separate from Spain within the next couple of years. Part of this independence campaign has already begun, with a number of municipalities, businesses, and individuals paying their federal taxes to the state government of Catalonia. “The key element that will permit us to exercise and maintain our independence will be the collection of all of the taxes by the government of Catalonia,” according to planning documents of the coalition. The state currently forwards those taxes on to the central government, so this form of tax resistance is largely a symbolic gesture. But the new government hopes to make this currently somewhat-illicit process official and then, eventually, to cut off the central government. In case of conflict with the central government over how taxes are to be paid, they may launch a blockade of the federal tax offices so as to encourage people to file with the Catalan tax authorities instead.

India

• The Patidar community in Gujarat, which has been agitating for some sort of government-protected minority status for several months now, is incorporating bank runs and tax resistance in an “economic non-cooperation” movement.

Ireland

• The Gardai in Dublin have forbidden the Anti-Austerity Alliance, which has been central to the anti-water tax protests and nonpayment campaign, from having a permit to conduct house-to-house fundraising, on the grounds that the funds raised might be used to further illegal activity. “The collection permit has been refused,” said Garda Chief Superintendent Orla McPartlin, “because I believe that the proceeds of the collection or a portion thereof would be used to facilitate protests sponsored by the Anti Austerity Alliance.”

Pakistan

• Merchants across Pakistan have been conducting strikes to protest a new withholding tax on bank transactions. “If the government does not accept our demands,” said Naeem Mir, one of the strike leaders, “we will observe a series of shutter-down strikes… in the four provinces and in each and every small and big city in protest against the cruel taxation measures of the so-called business-friendly government.” The new taxes are being blamed on IMF-required austerity and on the expenses of Pakistan’s version of the “war on terror.”

Greece

• The economic crisis in Greece has crushed what was already a pretty weak state of “taxpayer morale” — the “won’t pay” movement that practiced noncompliance with taxes and road tolls helped bring down the government and sweep a left-wing coalition into power. One of this new government’s officials, deputy finance minister Alexis Haritsis, was a “won’t pay” activist. Greeks are turning away in disgust from the official economy in general, increasingly turning to barter to get their needs met.

Italy

• Fifty condominium owners in Prino, Italy, have organized to stop paying the “IMU” municipal property tax in response to the city’s neglect of public spaces, including a filthy public square with a broken fountain that’s become a rubbish heap, poor upkeep of drainage that leads to flooding, and bad traffic management. A letter announcing the strike, signed by all fifty, was sent to the mayor and other city officials.

An international tax resistance news round-up:

Catalonia

• The Diputació de Barcelona, which governs the largest province in Catalonia, voted to stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead forwarding the money to the Catalan Tax Agency. The left-wing separatist party Candidatura d’Unitat Popular proposed the measure, which managed to also win support of the center-left Entesa bloc. The Catalan Tax Agency currently forwards such taxes to the Spanish government, so the practical effect of this is currently minimal, but it sets the stage for an eventual Catalan independence bid in which its government will stop relinquishing such funds.
• Meanwhile the Spanish Constitutional Court declared Catalonia’s attempts to strengthen the independence of its own tax agency “unconstitutional and nullified.”

France

• I recently became aware of the French Revolution Digital Archive, on which I discovered the following propaganda images or political cartoons from that struggle:

Greece

• Six Δεν Πληρώνω (“won’t pay”) activists who engaged in a protest against transit fare increases in Thessaloniki in 2011 were given suspended sentences.
• The Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών (“people stop paying”) movement continues its campaign of disrupting auctions of seized property.

Honduras

• In many parts of Honduras, crime syndicates / protogovernments rule the streets, often extorting more money from their subjects than does the internationally-recognized Honduran government. Some people resist these taxes, known locally as “impuesto de guerra” or “war tax,” but the consequences of refusal can be, and frequently are, deadly. The latest victims included eight bus company employees in Choloma, who were gunned down in broad daylight, a block away from a police station and by attackers in police uniforms, in retaliation against drivers who did not pay the tax. In May, 2013 bus drivers there took collective action, going on strike to demand better security.

Ireland

• Right 2 Water Galway claims that it has learned via a Freedom of Information disclosure “that 71% of those expected to pay a water charges bill hadn’t done so by May of this year.” They are urging people to continue to hold out, noting that there are no penalties for nonpayment until four quarters have passed without paying, and collection action cannot take place until much later still.

Spain

• The Spanish war tax resistance movement has recently released its tallies of war tax resistance and redirection for this tax season. According to the group, some €92,514 was resisted by the 647 people whom they were able to find in their census. The complete report breaks this down by region and municipality and lists the 162 destinations to which these resisted taxes were redirected.

Wales

• The town of Crickhowell has decided it’s no use complaining about the strategies big multinationals use to avoid paying taxes — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! They’re pairing up with a television show to try to come up with similar “offshoring” tax strategies to those the big guys use:

  By mimicking the methods multinational companies use to pay less tax in Britain, business owners in Crickhowell hope to protest against those who do not pay their fair share of tax.

  Advised by experts and followed by a BBC camera crew, family-run shops in the Brecon Beacons town have submitted their own DIY tax plan to HMRC.

  Residents want to share their tax avoidance plan with other towns, in a bid to force the treasury into legislation to close loopholes which allowed companies such as Amazon to pay just £11.9m in tax last year on £5.3bn of U.K. internet sales.

  They’ve created a website, Fair Tax Town, and hope, if they’re successful in their scheme, to share their techniques, open-source-style, with other towns, in hopes of getting the government to close the loopholes that allow the multinationals to outcompete them by avoiding their taxes more successfully. The movement is using tax resistance in service of a pro-tax agenda, which they acknowledge may seem ironic:

  We do have reservations about tax resistance as a protest tool. Some within the tax justice movement ask whether it is a legitimate protest tool at all. We generally argue that tax is the lifeblood of democracy and encouraging people not to pay tax is a perverse way of approaching the question. However, tax resistance has a long and honourable tradition — think back to the tax protests of the Suffragettes, of Mahatma Gandhi; or of the Poll Tax movement.

various

• Robert McGee, whose scholarship on the attitudes of people concerning tax evasion and resistance in different cultures has been a topic here before, has published a new paper, this one on The Ethics of Tax Evasion in Islam. In contrast to his more typical work, this one is more speculative than empirical, and summarizes the opinions of Muslim authorities about the proper limits of the government’s authority to tax, and of the subject’s obligation to submit to such taxation.

The latest tax resistance news:

• Workers in the Codevi (Free Trade Zone) in Ouanaminthe, Haiti have gone on strike to protest a new 10% tax on their wages. It’s a zone where the multinational clothing companies enjoy access to cheap labor (the minimum wage is something like $5.15 per day) and almost entire exemption from corporate taxes and customs charge. Labor apparently doesn’t get to take advantage of a similar boon in economic freedom.
• The U.S. war tax resistance group NWTRCC is coordinating a collective tax redirection project this year, asking those of its members who practice redirection “to collectively redirect taxes to resistance organizations led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.” This represents a more confrontational approach than their previous collective redirection effort, in 2008, in which the group coordinated the redirection of $325,000 from the government to humanitarian projects. The group is asking people who redirect to send them a report about it so they can compile information about the effects of the redirection program.
• The Catalan independence movement continues to lay the groundwork for what it anticipates will be a mass tax strike leading to the political separation of Catalonia from Spain. Already some people and municipalities are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax office instead of to the federal government. Currently, this is a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan tax office forwards these payments to Madrid. But when a critical mass of taxpayers make their payments this way (€7 billion total, they estimate), the separatists plan to cut off the flow.
• The French Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors) has released a report on the écotaxe fiasco. France introduced a new tax on trucking that met a bold and sustained resistance campaign in Brittany which eventually forced the government to abandon the tax. The Auditors determined that the government lost over €1 billion directly from its abandonment of the tax, and gave up an additional €10 billion in anticipated revenue.
• Here’s an example of a mainstream liberal starting to give tax resistance a lazy, non-committal, but curious look-over: Bill Berry: Good reasons for tax resistance are piling up.
• ROAR Magazine looks at The Irish water insurgency. The government of Ireland has long been trying to extract more money from its subjects via increasing rates at the public utility monopolies, rather than through more above-board taxation. And the people of Ireland have long been using a variety of tactics to try to stymie these moves.