How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → conferences & gatherings → Spring 2021 NWTRCC national (on-line)

Some recent tax resistance links of note:

• Long-time war tax resisters Arcadi Oliveres and David Zarembka have died. Oliveres was one of the founders of the modern war tax resistance movement in Spain, while Zarembka was one of those who helped NWTRCC get off the ground in the United States, serving as its first treasurer. More info:
  • An interview (in Spanish) with Arcadi Oliveres about war tax resistance from 2018
  • “We cannot go to the protests saying that we don’t want war and then finance it” (brief excerpt from another interview with Arcadi Oliveres)
  • Obituaries of Arcadi Oliveres: Catorze, TOT Sant Cugat, El País
  • Chuck Faber’s tribute to David Zarembka on A Friendly Letter, including autobiographical writings from Zarembka himself that go into his five decades of war tax resistance in detail
  • David Zarembka memorial on Keeper
• In my last update I noted that the city government of Vic had decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead sending those taxes to the independence-minded Catalan government. Vic has now been joined by Girona, capital of Girona province, as well as some other medium-sized towns.
• The latest issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out. It includes information about the upcoming NWTRCC National Gathering and other news of interest to American war tax resisters.
• NWTRCC has also put out its annual tax season press release about war tax resistance actions.
• The “Lutte pour le changement” (LUCHA) movement in North Kivu has called on the citizenry there to refuse to pay taxes until peace is restored to the Congolese province. The group and other activist groups in the region have augmented their tax resistance campaign with a multi-day hartal and sit-in protests.
• The War Resisters League has released the fiscal year 2022 version of its popular “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart.
• The U.S. State Department can refuse to give you a passport or can revoke your existing passport if the IRS tells them you’re way behind on your taxes and aren’t doing anything about it. And the IRS can make this happen just by notifying the State Department. Is that unconstitutional? To take away your fundamental right to travel without due process of law? Paul L. Caron, at TaxProf Blog, investigates the issue and a recent test case that did a poor job of trying to test it in Tax Court. Caron doesn’t think the constitutionality argument will work, even if it is raised more competently in a more receptive legal forum. For one thing, the right of an American citizen to travel internationally is not very well protected by American law: the courts do not consider it to be all that important. For that reason, the courts’ threshold for what they consider sufficient “due process” to deprive you of such a right is pretty low.
• President Biden has now come out and said explicitly what had been suspected: that he hopes to help fund his spending spree by increasing IRS enforcement spending, as part of a sock-it-to-big-business plan that also includes increasing corporate tax rates, broadening the corporate tax base, and eliminating big business loopholes. We’ll have to keep an eye on this as it burbles through the legislative tract.
• Hey look: more traffic ticket camera destruction in Germany and France.

The latest news on the tax resistance front:

• The latest tax strike in South Kivu has come to a negotiated end after four days of talks, with the local government agreeing to the strikers’ demands to rehabilitate transportation infrastructure.
• The annual Global Days of Action on Military Spending included some war tax resistance events, particularly in the United States and in Spain — two places where war tax resistance is better-established as a vital part of antimilitarist action.
  • In Biscay, resisters held another food-themed protest at a Treasury building, featuring a cake decorated as Picasso’s Guernica: “No weapons, no bombs, better chocolates, no war!”
  • In the United States, that campaign culminated on Tax Day this year. War tax resisters took action from coast to coast.
  • Ruth Benn reflected on tax resistance during the recent Gaza attacks.
  • And war tax resister Lindsey Britt spoke up in the Brattleboro Reformer.
• Restaurants in Rosario, Argentina have gone on a tax strike, and were soon joined by gymnasiums. The businesses say they cannot afford taxes while they are under Covid-related restrictions that prevent them from operating at capacity.
• The Philadelphia Tribune reminded readers about war tax refuser Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson.
• There’s a roadblock to the Democrats’ plans to use increased IRS enforcement to bring in more money to pay for their ambitious federal budget: The fact that under Congressional budgeting rules, increasing the IRS budget counts as an expense, but increases in tax revenue that might be expected as a result don’t offset that expense. Which means Congress has to jump through extra hoops to justify that extra spending.
  • As part of the proposals, the Biden administration hopes to force banks to report on how much goes into and comes out of their customers’ bank accounts.
  • Republicans smell blood in the water, and suspect that beefing up such IRS tax enforcement might not be politically popular. They hope they can exploit anti-tax-snoop sentiment to stymie Democratic spending priorities.
• The IRS expects to lose 52,000 of its 83,000 employees to retirement over the next six years. Hiring freezes and budget cuts have aged its workforce. But now they’re going on a hiring spree to try to make up for it.
• NWTRCC held another national (on-line) gathering.
• Human attacks on traffic ticket robots took casualties in Réunion, France, and Germany and in France, the U.K., and Spain in recent weeks.
• Tax resistance is on the agenda in South Africa as taxpayers there are increasingly fed up with government corruption.

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out. Contents include reports on this year’s “tax day” actions, a report back from the recent NWTRCC national conference, and some memories of recently-deceased war tax resisters Dave Zarembka & Gladys Kamonya.