Suffragist tax resister Abby Kelley Foster is getting some overdue recognition.
The Worcester, Massachusetts city council “voted unanimously to honor Abby Kelley Foster (1811–1887) for her long struggle for human rights, setting in motion an effort to erect a monument or statue in her honor,” thereby doing some measure of reparations for the city’s persecution of the woman for her refusal to pay taxes to a government in which she was not represented.
The presidency of Donald Trump is dangerous, and his policies are cruel and destructive.
But if we survive, the long-term damage he will have done to the prestige of the American government may be a blessing in disguise.
The Edelman marketing consultancy firm conducts an annual “Trust Barometer” survey of world public opinion.
Here’s what they found this year about America:
[T]rust in institutions in the United States crashed, posting the steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured.
…The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully undermined and has been replaced with a strong sense of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment.
Among the informed public, the trust crash is even steeper, with trust declining 23 points, dropping the U.S. from sixth to last place out of the 28 countries surveyed.
Vast swaths of Americans no longer trust their leaders.
Government had the steepest decline (14 points) among the general population.
Fewer than one in three believe that government officials are credible.
Some links that have bobbed up in my browser in recent days:
How does what was once seen as morally insignificant come to be seen as monstrous, and how does what was once seen as morally repulsive come to be just one of those things?
Cass R. Sunstein has a theory. The spectrum of what behavior we observe becomes the “normal” against which we contrast outliers.
As we become exposed to more aberrant behavior, that behavior shifts into the normal; as more conduct shifts into an unacceptable category, other things nearby to that category can get sucked into the objectionable void.
This has implications for “outrage culture” and how we share on social media.
The gilets jaunes movement in France has turned out to be more of a threat to the established order than anyone anticipated.
It started as a protest against fuel tax increases, but when its increasingly threatening demonstrations finally forced the government to delay, then drop those increases, rather than stopping, they continued, more emboldened than before.
I don’t have much to add to what is now being decently covered in the English-language press, but here are a few links I found interesting:
Amnesty International issued a statement against police brutality towards gilets jaunes demonstrators, including “rubber bullets, sting-ball grenades and tear gas against largely peaceful protesters who did not threaten public order and… numerous instances of excessive use of force by police.”
Consciousness of the cruelty and tyranny of the House of Saud is finally starting to enter the conversation in the United States.
Who is paying for the barbaric war on Yemen? U.S. taxpayers are.
In Luján, Argentina, a local tax on farmers went up 1200%. So an assembly of farmers voted to stop paying.
The National Network of Independent Producers backed the tax strike.
They are asking for a reduction in the rate and a guarantee that the proceeds will be used for rural road improvements.
335 Spanish war tax resisters documented their resistance for Antimilitarist Alternative / Conscientious Objectors’ Movement this year. Collectively they refused and redirected €35,882.34 (a little over €100 each, on average). The report lists dozens of organizations that received the redirected funds.
