Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Greece → in 2011–2019

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Cindy Sheehan again addresses her tax resistance and the IRS’s use of the adjective “frivolous” to describe conscientious objection, at Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.
• You can learn more of the background on the Greek tax resistance movement, in English, at Andy Worthington’s site.
• “Two farmers fed up with alleged bribery demands emptied three bags filled with snakes in a busy tax office in northern India, an official said yesterday.”

One way of reading this news is that the Greek tax resisters have made their point and won the day:

Greece has reached its limit in raising taxes and needs to refocus its austerity program on long-term spending cuts, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

In other news, amidst the other tax resistance actions in Greece, officials of the Greek tax agency have gone on strike.

The two-day strike coincides with the last two working days of the tax year, which amplified its effect.

The article reporting on the strike also notes a rise in the number of people who are turning in their car license plates rather than renewing their registration at an increased rate.

A while back, Greek economist Varufakis Yanis explained the recent outbreak of tax resistance in Greece (translation mine, from a Spanish language op-ed):

The last recourse for stolen dignity

With his outrageous satire Can’t pay? Won’t pay!, the playwright Dario Fo incited the audience to rethink their political responsibilities. During the last two years, Greece has witnessed a spontaneous application of Fo’s title. It began with the nation’s highways, when drivers refused to stop at toll-booths, demanding that they be permitted to pass without paying. Their defiance was prompted by the appearance of reports in which they were informed that the previous government had sold the future earnings from the toll-booths to private investors using complex financial derivative instruments that had been designed by the bank Goldman Sachs. The idea that the money that Greek drivers should pay the government during the following years for maintaining the highways had been usurped by politicians and financiers aroused the anger that propelled these protests.

Later came the continual assaults against the dwindling savings of the population, determined by a government whose panic over its own bankruptcy led it to lose any sense of decorum. All households, including those of low income, have received tax notices in which were required additional taxes of a retroactive character, without any justification, and in a form that any decent court would have declared illegal. And when, in consequence of the destruction of jobs and of salary cuts, many people found it impossible to make these payments, what did this socialist government think up? The brilliant plan to introduce new taxes, this time by means of the electric bill, with which families were extorted from by being told that if they would not cough up their dough [soltar la pasta], they would have to cook over coal stoves while their children would do their homework by candlelight.

In this climate of total bankruptcy of the social contract between the government and the governed, citizens find it easy to say that justice requires tax resistance and civil disobedience. This movement does not start as something political. The I’m not going to pay is all about the result of a sad and simple inability to cope with the payment of more taxes. But when the state reacts with aggression and without scruple, anger accumulates and, spontaneously, takes the form of a crusade to defy the predatory state.

It is likely that this will not help to resolve anything. But at least the disobedience that we are seeing everywhere, from the courtyards of the nation’s schools to the toll-booths on the highways, from the headquarters of the electric company to Syntagma Square in Athens before the Parliament, could well be the only recourse that citizens have to reclaim part of their stolen dignity.

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 bit more news from the tax resistance movement in Greece:

Some volunteers have started up something that I think they’re calling “το κίνημα της πατάτας” (“the potato movement”), which hopes to cut out the middleman and regulators between producers and buyers and grease the wheels of a freed market. The movement is named from their first big action, which in two four-hour weekend sweeps managed to distribute about 100 tons of potatoes in Nevrokopi at prices that undercut the supermarkets yet provided better prices to the farmers than what they could get from wholesalers. (Here’s an English-language story on the movement. And here is an article in Greek about some of the other forms the movement is taking.)

One movement activist, Dimitri Sianidis, wrote: “In a country betrayed by politicians, who have in essence enslaved us to (mostly) foreign interests, and whose citizens are experiencing a new ‘katochi,’ for nobody-knows how long, the initiative of the potato movement volunteers is ultimately an act of resistance, and a new ‘no!’ against a system of servitude and misery for the Greeks which foreign and local interests have imposed on us.”

Representatives from the potato movement and from various local branches of the “Δεν Πληρώνω” (“Not Paying!”) tax resistance movement, are holding a conference later this month to discuss strategy.

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.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Greek “Don’t Pay” movement has organized as a political party that is competing in the May 6^th elections. The video they have created to support their campaign, shown below, is a great collection of shots of the direct action campaign:

• Curious as to how the 1% lower or eliminate their income tax liabilities? Bloomberg Businessweek has a good overview of some of the strategies they use.
• Welcome, Maia Duerr, to war tax resistance.
• From the archives, here’s a photo that appeared (without an accompanying article) in the Yonkers, New York Herald Statesman in 1971:

The Greek “won’t pay” tax resistance movement fielded a small party in the recent national elections, though there were questions as to what extent they really represented the movement or to what extent they were just trying to ride the wave of it. (Kind of like what would happen if Michael Moore announced he were running for president as head of the Occupy Party.)

From what I can decipher of the reporting, Greece elects its government on a sort of regional proportional representation system, with a couple of quirks: the top-vote-getting party gets a bonus pack of seats in the parliament (this is supposed to make it easier for them to form a government on their own initiative), and a party must get at least 3% of the vote to seat any of its candidates.

In the recent election, voters abandoned the major parties in droves, for a variety of smaller fringe parties — including “won’t pay” — to the extent that 19% of the voters cast their votes for a party that failed to reach the 3% threshold. That’s as many as voted for the top vote-getting party, who with their tiny plurality, will attempt to cobble together a coalition that can form a government. A further 38% of those eligible to vote didn’t bother. This means that despite proportional representation, of a sort, half of Greece is not represented in parliament — including one-fifth of those who attempted to elect a representative.

“Won’t pay” itself reached only about the 1% mark, and so it won no seats.

For what happens when a tax administration does reach that “breaking point,” we can look to Greece, as the New York Times did recently. Excerpts:

An essential element of Greece’s recovery plan has been to collect more taxes from a population that has long engaged in tax avoidance. The government is owed 45 billion euros in back taxes, tax officials in Athens said, only a fraction of which will ever be recovered.

To understand the difficulty, just talk to Nikos Maitos, a longtime official in Greece’s financial crimes investigation unit.

When he and a team of inspectors recently prowled the recession-hit island of Naxos for tax evaders, a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.

“One repercussion of the crisis is that people are harder to find,” Mr. Maitos, an imposing, burly man, said last week in his sweltering office on the edge of Athens. “And when you do find them, they don’t have money.”

Even tax collectors, who have had to take large pay cuts, find that budget reductions make it hard to pay for the gasoline needed to reach their targets.

“After two and a half years of austerity, it’s really a difficult time to bring in revenue,” said Harry Theoharis, a senior official in the Greek Finance Ministry who helps oversee the country’s tax payment system. “You can’t keep flogging a dead horse.”

Income expected from a higher, 23 percent value-added tax required by the bailout agreement has fallen short by around 800 million euros in the first four months of 2012. That is partly because cash-short businesses that were once law-abiding have started hiding money to stay afloat, tax officials said.

Greece’s General Accounting Office said recently that the state collected 25 percent less revenue in May than it did a year earlier.

To some extent, government officials said the tax-avoiding mentality is starting to change amid an aggressive enforcement campaign aimed at 500 wealthy individuals and companies, including former ministers and heads of state agencies and enterprises. People took notice in April when a former defense minister was arrested on charges of corruption and making false declarations related to his income and taxes.

“They are awed when they see inspectors now because of recent cases showing people will be prosecuted or made to pay,” Mr. Maitos said.

Tax collectors got another potential lift recently when the government started enforcing a 1995 law that gives them access to bank accounts of suspected tax evaders.

But Nikos Lekkas, a top official at the financial crimes agency where Mr. Maitos works, said Greek banks had obstructed nearly 5,000 requests for account data since 2010.

“The banks delay sending the information for 8 to 12 months,” he said. “And when they do, they send huge stacks of documents to make it confusing. By the time we can follow up, much of the money has already fled.”

In the past two years, the agency managed to assess back taxes worth 650 million euros on 210 of the cases, he said. But only 65 percent could be collected.

One challenge lies in what Mr. Lekkas calls the big fish — 18,300 offshore businesses belonging to wealthy Greek individuals and companies. Authorities are trying to trace the owners through property records, and they recently seized several large properties linked to offshore companies whose owners owe tens of millions of euros to the state.

That leaves collectors having to go after mostly smaller tax evaders, often with mixed results.

During a surveillance trip on the resort island of Santorini, Mr. Maitos said he and two colleagues observed a gas station owner insisting on cash-only transactions to avoid declaring taxes. When confronted, the man lashed at them with a bullwhip while cursing the state for taking his money.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Greek being Greek to me, I had to rely on Google Translate to get the gist of this page, but that gist seems to be that the Greek “won’t pay” movement and the Spanish “indignants” movement are starting to coordinate and share tactics.
• One of the ideas I’m toying with for organizing my possibly upcoming book on historical and global examples of tax resistance campaigns is in terms of “gambits” — tactics and counter-tactics commonly used in the course of such campaigns. Here’s an example. In New York, it costs $6 less to cross the George Washington Bridge if you’re a “carpool” than if you’re not. So people started doing informal ride-shares, where people who needed rides would hitchhike near the bridge, and drivers wanting to avoid the excess toll would pick them up. But this cut into the Port Authority of New York’s revenue from the bridge tolls, so they sent the police out to ticket drivers who picked up such hitchhikers — in spite of there being no law against doing so. This extra-legal police harassment helps protect a government revenue stream and discourages resistance.
• Mike Gerber and Jon Schwarz penned a nice “Declaration of Independence” to celebrate the 4^th.
• William D. Hartung comments on our weird collective amnesia about the fact that a handful of nuclear-armed psychopaths are holding millions of lives in the balance.

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.”

One way a tax resistance campaign can get a leg up is through the acts of sympathizers within the tax collection bureaucracy itself. After all, they’re taxpayers too, and may feel more loyalty to their fellow-subjects than to the government they’re subjected to.

To this end, some tax resistance campaigns have made strides by encouraging resignations, defections, and goldbricking among those responsible for carrying out the tax laws.

In this, they’re following the lead of Thoreau, who wrote:

If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.”

Today I’ll give some examples of tax resistance campaigns that tried to persuade the tax collector to switch teams.

Free Keene

A group of activists in Keene, New Hampshire, ranging from Christian anarchists to “Free State Project” ballot-box libertarians, has been experimenting with a number of creative civil disobedience projects.

In 2006, Russell Kanning went to the Keene branch of the Internal Revenue Service and tried to hand out leaflets to the employees there. The leaflets quoted from the tribunal that presided over war crimes trials in Japan after World War Ⅱ to the effect that people are obligated personally to disengage from the crimes of their governments, and then provided a sample letter these employees could send to resign from their jobs.

Kanning was arrested by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and charged with distributing materials in a federal building and failure to obey a lawful order. After he was booked and released, he immediately returned to the IRS office to try again (without the leaflets, which had been confiscated). He was arrested again and charged with disorderly conduct.

A few months later, Dave Ridley followed-up on Kanning’s action, at the Nashua IRS office. He silently held up a sign that read “Is it right to work for the IRS?” and passed a leaflet through the window that read in part:

I have the right to remain silent. IRS agents have the right to quit their jobs. If that is not possible, they have a responsibility to work as inefficiently as possible when taking our money, and as quickly as possible when returning it.

The police were summoned and hustled him out of the building. They later cited him for “distribution of handbills.”

Kat Kanning and Lauren Canario were the next activists in line, going to the Keene IRS office with a “Taxes pay for torture” sign and a stack of leaflets. They were charged with “disorderly conduct and loitering, failure to obey a lawful order.”

At every stage in the process, they tried to directly but non-aggressively confront not only the IRS employees, but also the Homeland Security officers, court bailiffs, judges, and other government collaborators: asking them why they were interfering with American citizens “petitioning their government for redress of grievances,” and asking them to consider taking up a more honorable line of work.

The first intifada

At the launching of the first “intifada” resisting Israeli rule over Palestinians, Palestinians who worked for the tax department under the Israeli occupation resigned their posts. As a result of this and of organized tax resistance, only about 20% of Palestinians subject to Israeli taxes in the West Bank paid their taxes in 1993, the last year before Israel relinquished taxing authority there to the Palestinian Authority.

Greek tax and customs officials

Complicating the Greek government’s campaign to bring in more tax revenue during the recent Euro-region financial brouhaha, bureaucrats in the Greek tax and customs office periodically went on strike between 2010 and 2011 to protest the accompanying austerity measures that cut funding for state employees.

British nonconformists

British members of nonconforming Christian sects who did not want to see their tax money going towards schools that taught children the official, government supported faith, resisted their taxes. The newspapers reported:

In Lincolnshire, the sitting magistrate recently refused to try cases of resistance, and left the bench. Difficulty is experienced everywhere in getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.

Whiskey Rebellion

As I mentioned earlier this month, part of the problem the fledgeling United States government had when trying to enforce its excise tax against the Whiskey Rebels was that it had a devil of a time convincing anyone to serve as a prosecutor or exciseman.

From the beginning, the Whiskey Rebels counted on being able to convince their neighbors not to help the federal government enforce the tax. George Washington’s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton complained to him:

The opposition first manifested itself in the milder shape of the circulation of opinions unfavorable to the law, and calculated by the influence of public disesteem to discourage the accepting or holding of offices under it…

Annuity Tax resisters

During the resistance against the Annuity Tax in Edinburgh, Scotland, a number of members of the town council who were members of churches other than the tax-supported establishment church resigned rather than be party to administering the act that enacted the tax.

Auctioneers whom the government usually could call upon to preside at tax auctions refused to take the contracts, and carters whom ordinarily could be contracted to cart the goods refused, and so the town had to hire someone new at a higher rate, and purchase new vehicles to haul seized property about.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was the guest on David Swanson’s “Talk Nation Radio” to discuss war tax resistance a few days back:
  
• In Palmer Park, Maryland, locals have been vandalizing and destroying the speed and red-light cameras that the government has set up to extract money from drivers by means of automatically-generated traffic tickets. This has led to the amusing spectacle of the police there setting up surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their cameras.

  One man literally pulled out a pistol and used the camera for target practice. Police found another speed camera flipped over—leading police to believe a gang of people committed the crime, considering the weight of the camera. Then there was the camera set up on a stand, near FedEx Field. A man walked up to it, cut off one of the legs, and walked away. … [O]ne of the cameras incinerated.

• In another case, a man recently paid his $137 traffic ticket by folding 137 dollar bills into origami pigs, carefully arranging them in Dunkin’ Donuts boxes, and taking them to the police cashier.
• U.K. Council Tax resister June Farrow has been threatened with prison by the powers-that-be.
• The Greek “won’t pay” movement has launched a new phase of its constructive program — reacting to the closure of hospitals and other austerity-prompted decay of the public health system by creating its own “Social Solidarity Clinic.” The clinic launched a week ago with a blood drive.
• Tax resistance is on the agenda in Indonesia, though not in a language I know how to parse…
• Not only does the United States itself possess the world’s most threatening and fearful arsenal of weapons by a significant margin, but it also is by far the largest dealer of weapons worldwide.

  [T]he U.S. [sold] $66.3 billion in weapons abroad [in 2011], a record itself, but also by far the largest single year increase ever, over the $21.4 billion in 2010.

  The sales amounted to about 78 percent of all foreign arms sales on the entire planet. The second place arms dealer nation is Russia, which sold less than $5 billion themselves.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Los Angeles Times takes a look at tax troubles in Greece. People there feel like they’re being taxed more and more, while the government offers them less and less in return. Meanwhile the authorities are tying to crack down on tax evasion while at the same time cutting the salaries and benefits of the employees in the tax bureau, who respond with protests and strikes. An attempt to arrest a suspected sales tax evader in Hydra turned into a riot as hundreds of sympathizers surrounded the police station and cut off its power and water.
• According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, “As of December 31, 2011, 70 Federal agencies with 126 delinquent tax accounts owed approximately $14 million in unpaid [federal] taxes. In addition, 18 Federal agencies had not filed or were delinquent in filing 39 employment tax returns.”

And, from the wayback machine:

Refuse To Pay Tax

Allahabad, India, Sept. 29 [1946] —(CP)— Moslem leaguers refused today to pay a punitive tax of 10,000 rupees ($3,000) saying they did so on the orders of the league high command. The tax is imposed by the United Provinces government on Moslem residents for communal rioting.

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, Monday some examples of direct violent attacks on individual tax collectors, and yesterday some examples of attacks and intimidation aimed at tax system collaborators.

Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of attacks on police and soldiers when they attempt to enforce tax laws or to take reprisals against resisters.

• Earlier this year, a crowd of people on the Greek island of Hydra attacked local police after they detained a restauranteur for tax evasion:

  [T]he 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.



• In 2009, protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.” In 2011 another mob of tax protesters in China destroyed ten police vehicles including an armored car.
• There were battles between police and protesters during the Poll Tax rebellion in the Thatcher years. In Bristol, the crowd charged the police and rescued arrested demonstrators. “One police officer was kicked unconscious when he tried to make an arrest. Six more were dragged out of their van.” In London, “As the police baton-charged the crowd… they were resisted by a hail of bricks, bottles, and stones.” Police brutality turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot in Trafalgar Square. “Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd. The crowd, angered by this violent provocation, retaliated by throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles — anything they could find. Young people, armed only with placards, fought hand to hand with police. … As the missiles began to rain down the police retreated:

  …Pedestrian isles were being torn up and real serious lumps of concrete being thrown at the romper-suited police. I found myself with rock in hand. The first I threw was aimed at a group of police. I watched it bounce off a shield. My second rock was more specifically aimed at their front line. Again, it was well-deflected. I saw a rock strike a policeman’s visor and he didn’t even blink. The police were shielding themselves from the missiles raining down, but they were vulnerable to rocks aimed at their legs and midriffs. The police were taking a battering. Every now and then a policeman would crumple to his knees and the crowd would roar.”

  More than 100 police officers would be treated for injuries sustained during the riot. A spokesman for the police said, “I have never seen such sustained and savage violence used directly against the police.”
• During the Poujadist tax rebellion in France in 1955, “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.”
• At the tail end of the Dharsana Salt Raid, some Indian nationalist sympathizers, disregarding Gandhi’s guidelines and “abandoning, it was said, all pretenses at non-violence, stoned guards and police. Five police and three excisemen were injured by the pebbles. Six police who went to the rescue of some hardly pressed excisemen were themselves surrounded by the mob and obliged to retire.”
• In Spain in 1911, when guardsmen tried to disperse protesters angry at the arrest of a tax resisting cattleman, the crowd fought back — “two persons were killed and five wounded. Among the latter is a Sergeant of the Civil Guard.”
• After the Russian duma-in-exile issued a tax resistance manifesto, the government said that if people refused to pay taxes, it would send in troops who would show no mercy. “Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into execustion the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province. … Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.”
• In 1892, the military were called in to Guerrero, Mexico, to put down a tax rebellion. Instead, the rebels defeated the troops and took General Ranjel prisoner.
• “Half-breeds” (people of mixed European immigrant and Native American parentage) in the Dakota Territory refused to pay taxes in 1889. When the Sheriff tried to collect, “the half-breeds assembled from all directions, and pressing about the Sheriff and his one man they forced him to surrender his well-earned pittance of taxes … and say they will resist to the last man. Sheriff Flynn has been notified that he will be shot on sight if he again makes a similar attempt.”
• “When a deputy sheriff went to make seizures” against Irish settlers in Canada who were resisting taxes in 1881, “the residents threatened to string him to the nearest tree. Finally, they compelled him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out of the township.”
• A sheriff trying to enforce the “foreign miners tax” in California “in attempting to compel the foreigners to yield, was killed by them, and one or two of his posse wounded.”
• The Rebecca Rioters in Wales targeted the constables who tried to stop or investigate the riots, or to conduct tax seizures:
  • Two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at a Pontyberem village, and while there “made some special constables promise not to serve, and took away their staves.”
  • “They then attacked the house of the blacksmith, who had previously said he would face fifteen of the best Rebecca boys, and who also had been sworn in as a special constable; according to his own statements he was a man devoid of fear. The smith — fearless man of Vulcan — had, however, departed; but smash! went in his door and windows, and his deserted smithy was practically destroyed.”
  • “At the outset of these proceedings the toll-man ‘Dick’ contrived, by running over ditch and dell, to warn a parish constable, one Evan Thomas, otherwise ‘The Porthyrhyd Lion,’ of his own mishap, as well as the peril to which he thought him exposed, Evan being somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood. On receiving this hint, away bolted ‘Ianto,’ scampering over the ditches and fields until he found a cow-house where he lay concealed in anxious suspense the remainder of the night. Notwithstanding the retreat of ‘Ianto,’ about seventy of the tribe visited his domicile, smashed in his windows and doors, destroyed his shelf and dresser, and all his crockery, as well as the spokes of a new cart, put a cheese on the fire, cut down some of the trees in the garden, and then simultaneously raised the cry, ‘Alas! poor Ianto!’ … Evan the constable… if found, was to have his ears cut off.”
  • “These riotous proceedings caused considerable excitement and alarm… The different persons in the neighbourhood who were sworn in as special constables… gave up their staves, with the determination of refusing on any future occasions to interfere with the movements of Rebecca or the protection of the toll-house.”
  • “John Evans and John Lewis, two Sheriff’s officers from Carmarthen, were sent… to make a distress on the goods and chattels of William Philipp… They were attacked by about twenty-five of the ’Beccas, and beaten in a dreadful manner.… John Evans was compelled to go on his knees before them, and put the distresses and authority to distrain in the fire. He was then made to take his oath on the Bible, which one of them put in his hands, that he would never again enter the premises to make another distress. He was compelled to make use of the following words: ‘As the Lord liveth, and my soul liveth, I will never come here to make any distress again.’ After taking the oath, he was set free, and the two bailiffs returned to town.”
  • William Chambers, who led a police unit that wounded and arrested some Rebeccaites, was targeted multiple times. On one occasion, a stack of his corn was burned, on another, a stack of straw met the torch. Later his farm and outbuildings were all engulfed in flames. A horse of his that had been rescued from another of his farms as it burned down was later shot.



• During the Tithe War in Ireland, British troops killed 18 resisters who were trying to reclaim distrained livestock. In return, the resisters killed 18 troops in an ambush:

  A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch. Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors. But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless. Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead. The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood… In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped. A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.” Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.

• In Issoudun, France in 1830, a general who was sent to try to quell a tax rebellion there “entered the town only through a capitulation; the moment he reached the Hôtel-de-Ville a man of the Faubourg de Rome put his pruning-hook around his neck, exclaiming, ‘No more clerks where there is nothing to do!’ ”
• During the Fries Rebellion in the early United States, “it came to the knowledge of the authorities that several of the magistrates themselves were disaffected, and others were prevented doing their duty through fear of injury.”
• During the French Revolution, when the people of Peronne and Ham got wind that an order had been issued to rebuild destroyed toll-houses, they destroyed the soldiers’ barracks. In another case: “M. de Sauzay, commandant of the ‘Royal Roussillon,’ who was bold enough to save the [tax] clerks, is menaced, and for this misdeed he barely escapes being hung himself. When the municipal body is called upon to interpose and employ force, it replies that ‘for so small a matter, it is not worth while to compromise the lives of the citizens,’ and the regular troops sent to the Hôtel-de-Ville are ordered by the people not to go except with the butt-ends of their muskets in the air.”

One way tax resisters can foil the plans of the tax collectors is to send up the alarm when they’re on the way. Here are some examples:

• In rural Germany between the wars, a tax strike broke out, and when tax collectors came to distrain cattle from the resisters:

  they blew the fire horn, and on the road they lit a fire of straw, the age-old sign that help is needed. Peasants ran from all sides towards the smoke.

• “Horning” was a legal term of art describing the process under which tax debtors could be imprisoned for defying the King (because it was normally prohibited at the time to imprison someone merely for being a debtor in default). During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, one victim of this process declared “Horning! horning! — by the powers! if they bring a horning against me, I’ll bring a horning against them.”:

  When the King’s messenger-at-arms, as tipstaves are called in Scotland, brought his horning to the Cowgate, the Irishman, previously provided with a tremendous bullock’s horn, blew a blast “so loud and dread,” that it might have brought down the Castle wall; and a faction mustered as quickly as if it had sounded in the suburbs of Kilkenny. The messenger-at-arms took leave as rapidly as possible, and without making the charge of horning at this time.

• Poujadist tax rebels in France in 1954–5 used this tactic: “Some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers,” according to a Life magazine article on the movement. A Montreal Gazette reporter said of Poujade’s Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen:

  The loudspeaker is its symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning 18 months ago when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.

  “Attention,” it blared. “Attention. The tax inspector is in town.”

  There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere. …

  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 from St. Cere.

  The triumph of St. Cere lit the fires of rebellion in the hearts of tax-ridden shopkeepers all over France. Poujade was suddenly a national figure and he lost no time in organizing his Union to spread the message of the loudspeakers and the steel curtains.

• More recently, in Greece, when tax official Nikos Maitos took a team of inspectors to the island of Naxos to hunt for tax evaders, “a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.”
• During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and other government enforcers were tracked by the resisters, who warned villagers when they were on the way. Resister Govardhandas Chokhavala said, “We have provided our volunteers with drums and conches, and the moment they sight a Government servant, the drum or the conch gives the alarm. That is work which is after the heart of these youngsters.” Some other notes from The Story of Bardoli read:

  [E]very village had its volunteers ready with their bugles or drums which Were pressed into aid as soon as they caught sight of the Talati and Patel out on their japti [attachment] depredations

  The youngsters on duty announced [the Collector’s] arrival by a hearty beating of their drums. and all the doors were closed.

  [T]he other [new legal] notification which was over the signature of the District Superintendent of Police prohibited the beating of drums, playing music, or blowing conches or horns on or near public roads or public places or Government buildings.

  Some of them had to post themselves at and keep a strict watch over the various approaches to the village, and no sooner was a japti party sighted or the whank of a car heard, than they were to be on their alert, and the warning of the fact to be given to the village people. Some of them had always like sleuth hounds to be on the trail of the Government officials. Their business was to scent their plans and warn the village people against their machinations.

  Some boys were arrested, tried, and imprisoned for nothing more than keeping a watchful eye on a government building from across the street.
• Tax resisters in Alwar, India in 1932 used this system: “The paths are blocked by huge boulders and at intervals along the hills remote from the towns are watchers with giant tom-toms which are heard for five miles, giving warning of the approach of troops or the revenue collectors.”
• The horn became the symbol of the Rebeccaite uprising in Wales, because of incidents like this one:

  The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on. After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty. The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants. The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required. The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates. There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither. Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.



• During the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, resisters tracked and shadowed bailiffs, and declared certain areas to be bailiff “no-go” zones, with watchouts established to raise the alarm if any approached. They first modeled this approach on tactics used in South African townships during the anti-apartheid resistance there, and then improvised from there:

  Throughout Britain, city-wide bailiff busting groups were formed. Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios, and squadrons of cars. Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas. Camden, in London, followed their example in 1991:

  We have organised a rota so that we know who and when people are available to do whatever shift. We have organised a “knock up system” giving people different responsibilities for knocking up each part of the estate when the bailiffs are spotted. Telephone trees have also been established. We have approached a couple of mini-cab firms who have agreed to be bailiff spotters.…

Yesterday I covered strikes, including consumer strikes, being used to supplement tax resistance campaigns. Today I’m going to cover a specific variety of consumer strike — a strike against goods sold by the government or by a government-protected monopoly, or goods that are subject to a particular tax. Here are some examples:

• As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
• In 2003, as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general. “The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy. “Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant.”
• When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail. He wrote to a friend:

  Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage? or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property? Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters. Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war? Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. … I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.

  Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents. One Quaker wrote in 1900:

  I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses. Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been. … at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.

• Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses. Joshua Evans wrote:

  About the year 1791, I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. … I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.

  Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:

  [A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England. I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. … I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax. So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may. But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.

• Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
• Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government. John Payne wrote a tract in 1793 entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:

  [T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired. But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility. The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.

  No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System. As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity? What then is the conclusion? The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.

  Payne himself went even further. Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
• Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.



• The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
• The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
• The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots. Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk. Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye. One patriotic song included the lyric:

  The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
  (Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
  May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)

• Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
• During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of 1832, “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
• In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.” For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.” Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
• In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”

Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:

• In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
• Farmers in Argentina decided in 2009 to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
• In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.

Social boycott can also be a potent tactic to use against tax collectors or collaborators with the tax collection process. Here are some examples:

• Adolf Hausrath writes about how social boycott was used to discourage tax collectors in Roman-occupied Judaea:

  The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,” “tax-gatherers and Gentiles,” “tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.

• The current Greek “won’t pay” movement included a joint statement from several outraged groups that called for a social boycott of legislators who went along with the tax-and-austerity 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…”
• A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution. John Adams wrote:

  At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.

  Sam Adams led those opposed to the tea tax to declare “That whoever shall directly or indirectly countenance this attempt [to send and collect duties on East India Company tea to America], or in any wise aid or abet in unloading, receiving, or vending the tea sent or to be sent out by the East India Company while it remains subject to the payment of a duty here is an enemy to America.” and to decide “that a committee be immediately chosen to wait on those gentlemen, who it is reported are appointed by the East India Company to receive and sell said tea, and to request them from a regard to their own characters and the peace and good order of this town and province immediately to resign their appointment.”
• During the Whiskey Rebellion, the rebels passed a social boycott resolution that said in part:

  …[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:

  Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.

• Islanders living off the coast of Galway County in Ireland refused to appoint tax collectors from among their number, and “where collectors are available on the mainland owners of boats have refused to facilitate their passage to the islands,” according to a 1932 newspaper account. “On a few occasions the Civic Guards have persuaded the owners to lend their service and their boats, or their boats alone, for the guards to cross. In such cases the guards have met with anything but a cordial reception.”
• During the Dublin water charge strike:

  Through contacts in the trade union movement we were able to discover the names of all the water inspectors and imagine their surprise the night before disconnections were due to begin when each of them received a hand-delivered letter appealing to them as trade union members not to cut people’s water off. They decided not to respond positively to our polite request so the next morning when they left home under the cover of darkness, they each discovered a car-load of activists sitting outside their homes ready to follow them wherever they might go to try to do their dirty work. One of them didn’t like it so much that after driving around and being followed for an hour he went to the local copshop to complain about being intimidated.

• During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and collaborators were vigorously shunned. Here are some excerpts from Mahadev Desai’s The Story of Bardoli:

  There were meetings in talukas contiguous to Bardoli… calling upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by helping in the attachment of property by engaging as labourers or sending carts on hire…

  …the police proceeded to hire a taxi. The driver, whose car had been engaged by the Satyagrahis, refused to break his engagement and place his bus at the disposal of the Collector. His licence was demanded, it was not with him, but he showed his brass badge, which he was asked to surrender. Another taxidriver whose car had been engaged by [campaign commander] Sjt. Vallabhbhai was deprived of his licence too.

  Kadod… was trying to go one better than other villages by resolving to cut off supplies of provision, etc. to the attachment officer posted in the village. Sjt. Vallabhbhai in a long and moving speech expounded the principles of Satyagraha, and told them that their resolution was not in keeping with principles and must be canceled: “In a struggle based essentially on truth and nonviolence we must not do anything in resentment or anger. It is a sign of weakness. …do not refuse them the ordinary amenities of life. They must get whatever they want at market rates.”

  It would appear, that three carts were commandeered. for removing the kit and luggage belonging to the Deputy Collector from the Bardoli thana [district] to Valod. The man to whom the carts belonged came to realise his mistake and went to the thana in company with Sjt. Ravishankar to call back his men. One of the cartmen, as soon as he saw his master, said, they were not at all willing to go but they were helpless. Sjt. Ravishankar pleaded with the Mamlatdar that if the men were not willing they should not be forced. He was ordered to leave the thana which he did; and the cartman leaving the cart followed him. The other cartmen also ultimately left leaving the carts in the thana compound.

  Moderate reformist K.M. Munshi wrote to the government after visiting Bardoli:

  Your japti officer has to travel miles before he can get a shave. Your officer’s car which got stuck would have remained in the mud but for Mr. Vallabhbhai, officially styled “agitator living on Bardoli.” Garda to whom lands worth thousands have been sold for a nominal amount does not get even a scavenger for his house. The Collector gets no conveyance on the railway station unless one is given by Mr. Vallabhbhai’s sanction.

  The threat of social boycott also played out at other points in the Indian independence struggle, with one account noting for instance that “the native police, fearing social boycott if they pressed their own kinsmen too hard, in some cases sat idly by and watched proceedings,” during the Dharasana salt raid. When the salt march reached the sea near Danmi, where Gandhi planned to harvest sea salt in violation of the taxed monopoly:

  The police and labourers [who had been hired by the government to try to destroy all the natural salt deposits in the area] are boycotted by the villagers in the neighbourhood and have to journey to a village ten miles away to procure food.

• During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, social boycott was practiced against tax enforcers:

  Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend. What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?

  The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another…

  During the government investigation of the Annuity Tax resistance campaign the following exchange took place:

  Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?

  A: He was very much inconvenienced on that occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any customer who was of that party.

• During the Fries Rebellion, social pressure made it difficult for the government to recruit collaborators:

  [I]n every tavern [Jacob Eyerley] stopped at, the law was the subject of general conversation and denunciation, and great pains were taken to find the friends of government, in order to persuade them not to accept the office of assessor. In consequence of this feeling there was great difficulty in finding suitable persons for these appointments.

• When Thatcher’s poll tax was being introduced, the government tried to recruit convenience stores and newsstands to be tax collection points. When the resistance got wind of this, they contacted the stores, letting them know they would be boycotted if they allowed themselves to be used in this way. Several then refused to participate.
• A threat of social boycott was used to deter potential buyers of property seized from Steuben County resisters of taxes meant to pay back purchasers of crooked railroad bonds:

  The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks. We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.” The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.

• During a tax resistance campaign in the German countryside between the world wars:

  The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants. One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.

One way of taking resources from the government is to engage in economic transactions that are not easily-traceable: for instance, by paying directly in cash.

When you pay for things in cash, you make it easier for the recipient to evade taxes on the income or sale. Although the government could respond to this by raising the tax rate on the people it does catch in its net, such an approach increases the financial incentive for evasion and can serve to make the government’s problem worse overall.

In Greece, for example, restaurants and bars will often simply tell patrons the amount of the bill rather than writing up a formal receipt. Then, if the patrons pay in cash, the businesses will pocket the money but never put the transaction on the books.

Greece has recently responded to this form of evasion by telling patrons that they are free to refuse to pay the bill unless it comes in the form of a paper receipt — they can just walk out the door with a free lunch, legally. Fortunately, the social norms against cheating people who feed you are pretty strong, so people so far seem to be more inclined to continue to help assist tax evading businesses than to get government-approved freebies at their expense.

An ex-waiter in the U.S. explained that you can help waiters there evade taxes by paying tips in cash:

Cash tips are easy to under-report. …most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.

(100 meals served. 50 payed with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)

You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the busboy if that is the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.

It is inherently difficult for the government to discover just how much it loses because of its inability to tax cash transactions. At one point the U.S. government estimated that only 68% of business income that can be off-the-books ever gets reported to the IRS — that drops to less than 50% for sole proprietors. Certain categories of “informal suppliers” who work off-the-books on a cash basis are thought to declare only 20% of their income (and many of them, I suspect, declare the income in order to qualify for tax credits, rather than to subject themselves to income tax).

Some people have tried to use alternative currencies (alternatives to official government-created legal tender, that is) to facilitate tax resistance. Here are some examples:

• Missouri started issuing what it called “Time Dollars” to people who volunteered to spend their time helping the elderly. These volunteers could in turn use these Time Dollars to hire help if they needed it later on. And the state vowed that it would honor these Time Dollars if no home care workers were available who would themselves accept such currency. Though Missouri did not have a tax resistance motive in establishing this program, they did seek and obtain an IRS ruling that these Time Dollars did not represent taxable income. (Here is some background, and some additional commentary.)
• Many alternative currency projects in the United States are trying to follow the Time Dollar model, in some cases with the explicit goal of being a way of helping tax resisters.
• The currencies in massively-multiplayer online games are taking on the appearance of a plausible challenger to legal tender. A silly on-line currency called the “QQ coin” became a craze in China, which exposed a latent demand for an alternative to the tightly-controlled legal tender there.
• For a time in the United States, you could go to a bank and buy an “honor bond” (or “bearer bond”) for the face value of your purchase. Such bonds were anonymous, and earned interest, and so for a certain class of savvy people, tax resisters in particular, were better than money for conducting high-denomination transactions. The government has since cracked down on the practice.
• The U.S. government also cracked down, hard, on a fellow who started coining a parallel currency called the “Liberty Dollar” that he hoped would be more reliable and valuable than the stuff they print out at the Mint.
• In present-day Greece, people are turning with creativity born of desperation to a variety of alternative economic tactics, including the use of an alternative currency called “tems” which the government there has not yet figured out how to tax.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Anthony Bing reflects on his time in Beit Sahour during the tax strike there.
• Shopkeepers in an Athens suburb sent four policemen to the hospital while defending themselves against a raid by tax officials.
• Eric Frank Russell’s satyagraha sci-fi story …And Then There Were None is now on-line in a new and improved format.
• Tom Cordaro remembers Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan, who supported Cordaro during a dispute with the IRS over his war tax resistance. “I could not believe that this man — who had never personally met me — was willing to stand with me and my parish in this struggle against the U.S. government. Because of Bishop Sullivan I knew that we were not alone and that support for war tax resistance existed in the Church.”
• James Drummond reviews the course of the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax: “[I]t is worth pointing out the significance of this, and what it means for all of us fighting against cuts and austerity today. Firstly, this was a struggle which united the left. Secondly, not only did it unite the left, but it mobilised millions of working class people to take direct action and break the law in their own interests, in open defiance of the Labour Party and trade union leaders. Thirdly, it was a campaign which sank real roots into working class communities. Finally, after years of defeat both before and since, it was a victory for our class. The campaign brought down Thatcher and forced the abolition of the tax.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Peter J. Reilly, who has a blog at the Forbes website, writes about how the IRS labels conscientious objectors to military taxation “frivolous” as a way of discouraging dissent, and how war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman is challenging this in court.
• Some developments in the “won’t pay” movement in Greece:
  • The movement’s guerrilla electricians reconnected the electricity to a poor family in Bournazi that had been unable to pay the tax-swollen rates. They invited the media along, as there’s something newsworthy about the tax collector leaving an unemployed man, his oxygen-tank-using mother, and school-aged child in the dark: “The cold and lack of power create medieval conditions for the poor family who lacked the basics: could not cook, heat, wash, preserve food and medicine in the refrigerator, or read to the young schoolgirl. In a nutshell: hell.”
  • Twenty toll-gate-lifters in Larissa and Volos have been indicted for inciting people to pass without paying tolls. The Panhellenic Federation of Workers Associations of the Local Government has taken the side of the resisters, saying that “the trial is a clear criminalization of the mass political movement against tolls.… the criminalization of ideas and therefore constitutes a flagrant violation of democratic and constitutional liberties and criminalization of belief… it is a clear attempt to terrorize the resistance of our people, especially the practices of those who in an increasingly massive way endorse social disobedience and resistance to act against the tax hike…”
  • I wish I could read Greek or that mechanical translation were more sophisticated. This page seems to be describing a tax resistance tactic that involves paying a single euro in road tax to the federal government, accompanied with a letter of protest about how road taxes & fees are being siphoned off by foreign creditors rather than being used to keep the roads in decent repair.
  • The government is trying to promote a new social norm in which people will be free to refuse to pay for goods and services they receive, unless they are presented with a printed receipt — this in an attempt to crack down on off-the-books transactions. The government has signaled that it won’t prosecute people who steal from merchants in such circumstances.
• The National Taxpayer Advocate (a sort of ombudsman within the IRS) issued her annual report recently. One bit caught my eye: the Advocate estimates that U.S. taxpayers spend a combined 6,100,000,000 hours per year doing the recordkeeping and filing they have to do to be tax compliant. Janet Novak, at Forbes, puts that in perspective:

  That’s the equivalent of more than 3 million workers toiling away full time, all year. By way of comparison, the Federal government employs the equivalent of 2.1 million full-time civilian workers and Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has 1.4 million workers in the U.S., although not all are full time.

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 creative activists of the Free Keene movement are at it again. This time they’ve formed a group called “Robin Hood of Keene” that shadows parking enforcement officers on their rounds and quickly fills expired meters before they can reach them to write out tickets.

  Members of the group place cards under windshield wipers that read, “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Please consider paying it forward,” and includes an address where donations can be sent.

  Alleging that the Robin Hooders have “repeatedly and intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed, and intimidated” the meter officers, the city has filed for a restraining order (the activists insist that this has nothing to do with any intimidation or harassment on their part, but with the city’s loss of revenue from the thousands of parking tickets they have prevented).

  In the filing, parking enforcement officer Linda Desruisseaux said, “Besides following me, crowding around me, making video recordings of my activities, and placing coins in expired meters to prevent me from writing tickets, these individuals repeatedly taunt and harass me, asking why I am stealing peoples’ money and telling me to get another job… In particular, Graham Colson likes to taunt me by saying, ‘Linda, guess what you’re not going to do today — write tickets.’… The taunting and harassment tends to get worse when there is a group, as they try to one-up each other at my expense.”

• The IRS scandal that all the frogs are croaking about is largely a steaming pile of political bullshit… but the winds are blowing the smell directly into the offices of the IRS, which which is making it an unpleasant place to do business:

  A former Internal Revenue Service official who ran the unit now at the center of scandal says the agency is about to be hit by a wave of resignations that he fears will hobble its operations.

  “I think there’s going to be a significant number of departures from the agency,” said Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who served as director of the exempt-organizations’ office from 1990 to 2000.

  The same post is now occupied by Lois Lerner, who has come under fire for her agency’s treatment of conservative groups. “That’s going to have an impact on tax collections and tax administration,” said Mr. Owens, who said he thinks the controversy has been overblown.

  Mr. Owens, who worked for the IRS for 25 years, said a number of IRS officials have talked to him about their plans to leave. He said the investigations underway have crushed morale, while some IRS officials are starting to get threatening anonymous calls at home.

• Dan Carpenter uses the occasion to note how the IRS treats anti-war tax protesters — along the way mentioning or quoting war tax resisters Julie Garber, Phil & Louise Rieman, Kenneth & Viona Brown, and Lonnie Valentine.
• In the other IRS scandal, the one that to me seems more actually scandalous, the agency has backed down from its repulsive legal opinion that Americans have no legitimate privacy expectations in their email communications, so agency investigators should feel free to rifle through them without bothering to get a warrant. The new policy says the agency won’t aim to read your email at all if it is only pursuing a civil action against you, and will “in all cases” obtain a warrant when trying to get your email from whichever Internet service provider is storing it, when pursuing criminal cases.
• Fran Quigley at Counterpunch takes another look at the Transform Now Plowshares case, and in particular how the government progressively ratcheted up a misdemeanor trespassing charge against the three pacifists until now they stand convicted of federal terrorism felonies, awaiting sentencing from jail as they’ve been deemed violent criminals too dangerous to release.
• The fabled Greek crackdown on tax evasion seems mostly for show: “of the estimated 13 billion euros that government officials say is owed by Greece’s 1,500 biggest tax debtors, only about 19 million euros [≈0.1%] has been collected in the last two and a half years.”

A few more interesting bits and pieces that flew past my eyeballs in recent weeks:

• Ever wonder what all those acronyms and code numbers mean on your IRS transcripts and other correspondence? If so, take a look at IRS Processing Codes and Information. The cover page is marked with the delightful message “ATTENTION: OFFICIAL USE ONLY — WHEN NOT IN USE, THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE STORED IN ACCORDANCE WITH IRM 11.3.12, MANAGER’S SECURITY HANDBOOK. Information that is of a sensitive nature is marked by the pound sign (#).” However, it is publicly available on the IRS website, and some of it is redacted, so I don’t think there are any national security secrets within.
• Someone posted scans of a “Political Art Documentation / Distribution” zine, the first issue of which was devoted to the subject of “Death and Taxes” that celebrated an art show of the same name: “From April 1–18, 1981, P.A.D. presented a public art event called Death and Taxes, to protest the use of taxes for military spending and cutbacks in social services… Twenty artists installed works in and out of doors in Manhattan and Brooklyn… The event included posters, graffiti, stickers, overprinted 1040 forms redistributed in banks, typed dollar bills, street theatre, outdoor films, environments, and performances.” Lots of punk rock aesthetic stuff with a war tax protest theme.
• The constitutionalist, “show me the law”-style tax protesters (or “tax deniers,” as the IRS spins it), which have long been an entertaining staple of the scene in the United States, are apparently becoming a rapidly-spreading phenomenon in Canada as well. “The National Post has identified 385 pending tax cases — most using florid and arcane language and claiming bizarre laws that supersede or nullify Canada’s regulations and laws; it prompted the Tax Court to adopt a triage approach to cope with the deluge, grouping cases and directing them to specific judges.”
• When tax auditors showed up at a restaurant in Archanon, Greece, last month, “there were strong reactions from customers in a large tavern, leading the auditors of the Financial Crimes unit to quickly leave.”
• Thanos Tzimeros, founder of the fledgling Greek political party “Recreate Greece,” has issued a call for tax resistance — or “robbery resistance” as he puts it. His perspective is a bit different from that of the largely leftish “don’t pay” movement. Rather than opposing the austerity and public-sector shrinking that Greece has been strong-armed into accepting by international lenders, he thinks these reforms haven’t gone nearly far enough and that the problem with Greece is that it is being strangled by a political/criminal class. If I’m parsing a Google Translate version of the Greek news article correctly, Tzimeros is encouraging people to pay their taxes into an escrow account and to refuse to turn the money over to the government until such time as it can give a satisfactory accounting of how it spends its budget. He points to bloated and redundant government agencies as examples of taxpayer money being siphoned off to fund a class of parasitical political appointees.
• Here’s the official IRS Office of Chief Counsel memorandum in which the Counsel reminds IRS employees that they cannot willy-nilly assess “frivolous filing” penalties on people who include letters of political protest along with their (otherwise accurate and complete) tax forms. And here is Peter J. Reilly’s take on the case at his Forbes blog.
• And here is another example of governments rigging traffic lights and automatic ticket-generating cameras in a way that makes intersections more dangerous… but more profitable to the taxers.
• NWTRCC has produced a set of war tax resistance talking points for media interviews that might help war tax resisters get their point of view across more effectively through the news media.
• Ruth Benn reflects on her war tax resistance, and the hapless but persistent response from the IRS, at NWTRCC’s new blog, War Tax Talk.

The New York Times recently covered the tax resistance movement in Greece. Here are some excerpts that highlight some of the tactics being used there:

Archanes, Greece — The tax inspectors swept into this picturesque village in Crete during the middle of a saint’s day celebration recently, moving from restaurant to restaurant demanding receipts and financial records. Soon, customers annoyed by the holiday disruption confronted them. Pushing, shoving and angry words followed, and eventually the frightened inspectors were forced to flee.

“People are so angry and so poor,” said Nikolis Geniatakis, who has run his restaurant here on the main square for the last 34 years and who watched the confrontation from across the street. “What were the tax inspectors doing here? Why aren’t they going after the big fish?”

At the end of 2011, tax arrears totaled 45 billion euros, or about $62.1 billion. At the end of 2012, €56 billion, or about $77.3 billion. At the end of July, with the most active tax period to come, the arrears had risen to €60 billion, or almost $83 billion, equivalent to nearly a fifth of the government’s public debt.

Experts say many of the tax collection measures are not effective, especially those aimed at the rich. Taxing yacht owners, for instance, only encouraged them to moor their boats elsewhere, emptying Greek marinas.

But perhaps as troublesome, some experts say, is the growing grass-roots anger that led the customers to turn against the four tax inspectors recently in Archanes. Tax collectors have been threatened or chased out of many towns, union officials say, though only a few cases, like the one here, get much attention.

Anna Apostolou, an accountant who works mostly for small-business owners, said many of her clients just refuse to pay or turn to the courts, knowing that will tie up payment for years.

“They are so furious at what they see,” she said. “They have just decided they will not pay. If they are fined they will not pay.”

Next year, Greek officials will also have to give up on one tax collection system that has worked well so far: attaching property tax bills to electric bills. The courts have ruled that the threat of losing electricity is illegal.

That last assertion, about the government giving up on its attempt to add taxes to electric bills, surprised me. A 31 October Associated Press article reported that “Retirees, the disabled, and high school teachers were among thousands of protesters who clogged the Greek capital’s streets Thursday to demonstrate against a new property tax and other austerity measures. The show of anger disrupted traffic for more than eight hours.” The article continued:

Parliament is due to vote next week on proposals to replace an emergency property tax included on electricity bills with a permanent levy, breaking a pledge made last year by the conservative-led coalition government to abolish the tax.

Which seems to contradict the Times’s reporting.

More than a thousand disabled demonstrators from all over the country blocked traffic outside the Labor Ministry building before filing through the city center in wheelchairs, on crutches and using white canes for the blind.

Yannis Vardakastanis, a blind Greek who heads the European Disability Forum, said the protest was called after disabled people were denied an exemption from the new property tax. “We are the poorest of the poor, but we must not let them turn us into victims,” he said.

Some other recent reporting in the Greek press (which I have a harder time interpreting because of the language gap) seems to show the acquittals of some of the first Δεν Πληρώνω (“Won’t Pay”) movement activists to be put on trial for reconnecting the power at homes where the power was shut off for refusal to pay the new taxes:

• Βιομηχανία δικών κατά των Δεν Πληρώνω
• Πανηγυρικά αθώος ο Νίκος Ασλάνογλου των “Ρομπέν της ΔΕΗ”
• Επανασύνδεσαν ρεύμα λίγη ώρα πριν τη Δίκη τους (βίντεο)

Here’s a video from the last of those links, showing one of the Archibald Tuttle-like unauthorized utility workers doing his good deed:

In other news:

• At NWTRCC’s blog, War Tax Talk, Erica Weiland has posted a thoughtful piece on the various ways tax resisters choose to interact with the IRS.
• There’s a new web site Tax Rebellion that is trying to push the case that citizens of countries like the U.K. or U.S. that habitually engage in war crimes and aggressive warfare have a legal obligation to withdraw their support (particularly their taxes) from their governments.
• By the playbook of the great “privatization” swindle that has been so popular among governments in recent years, when the government of France designed its new tax on freight trucks, it contracted with an Italian company to implement the program. But then the bonnets rouges came along and burned down all the truck-scanning portals and forced the government to suspend the tax. The Italian company that won the contract, Ecomouv, was however smart enough to anticipate such an outcome in their contract, and they’re guaranteed an €18 million payment from the government every month whether they’re collecting any tax or not.
• Taxi drivers in Tunisia are posting signs in the windows of their cabs that read “I will not pay tax!” and are daring the police to try to enforce new taxes on motorists against them.
• Meanwhile, some Greek motorists have adopted the strategy of paying only a single euro of their road tax, while submitting a protest, as a way of baffling the bureaucracy.
• An article I wrote has been picked up by the Popular Resistance site. It explains how my method of tax resistance has helped me lead a more abundant life and one I can be more proud of.

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

Austria

Gerhard Höller’s tax resistance in protest against government spending priorities (see ♇ 24 March 2014) seems to have struck a nerve.

• Ralf Hillebrand and Angelika Wienerroither debate the wisdom of Höller’s stand.
• Another article quotes some other businesspeople who support Höller’s action, and says that Höller plans to set up some sort of web platform to organize a broader tax strike.
• I think the web platform in question is 1414: Der Steuer Streik.

Greece

Whether from inability or unwillingness to pay, some 2.6 million Greeks are behind on their income taxes — and that’s out of a population of about 11 million, which includes children.

Cyprus

Attorney Michael Paraskeva has started refusing to pay his social security contributions in protest against the government’s decision to raid the social security fund to satisfy government debts. He hopes his stand will help build a civil disobedience movement. One supporter explained: “I have not paid social security since 2011. I am a victim, not a perpetrator, of the economic crisis and I’m being made to pay for those who brought it about.”

Ireland

Anti-austerity demonstrators occupied a tax office in Dublin, shutting it down for a period of time during property tax paying season.

The Republic of Venice?

Venetian separatists voted last month to begin the process of seceding from Italy.

The milder voices among them have started collecting commitments from taxpayers to begin refusing to pay taxes to Italy once a critical threshold of commitments has been signed. Once that threshold is reached, they will begin resisting taxes in earnest, in the hopes that their numbers will protect them from government retaliation at that point.

The less patient wing, which includes the delegates who were elected to launch the new Republic, have, as one of their first acts, enacted a “decree of total tax exemption,” freeing Venetians from their tax obligations until the tax collecting institutions of the new Republic are up and running. Gianluca Busato, one of the drivers behind the initiative, has gone so far as to say that “The payment of taxes to foreign governments [e.g. Italy’s], as well as immoral, it’s illegal.”

Meanwhile, a bit south of Venice, in Ferrara, businesswoman Alessandra Marazzi raised a bit of a stir by launching a tax strike recently. She got an outpouring of support from other small business owners who say that they have to choose between taxes and solvency, and that the government takes far more than it gives in return.

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.

The Coalition of the Radical Left, an important Greek political party, has launched a “Won’t Pay” movement, inspired by the more grassroots movement of the same name.

The new movement, organized under the slogan “Have Not, Pay Not,” is resisting the “Enfia” or small-property tax.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• When people in Scotland registered in huge numbers to vote on the independence question, they may not have realized that Scottish council governments were licking their chops, hoping they could use all the new voter registrations to track down people who had refused to pay Thatcher’s poll tax way back in 1989 and wring the money out of them at last. But the head of state (First Minister) put the kibosh on that plan: “After 25 years, it’s about time the poll tax was finally dead and buried in Scotland,” he said. About £425 million in resisted poll taxes remains uncollected. The Scottish Conservatives pounced on the news, saying “It sets a terrible example on responsibility, and effectively says if you don’t want to pay your council tax — or any other levy you think might be unfair — don’t bother, we might have a government that writes it off 20 years down the line.”
• According to Économie Matin, four French tax offices have been put to the torch since the beginning of September. “Hardly a week goes by without farmers dumping manure in front of some public building… or locks are vandalized. Every day, tax officials are attacked by outraged taxpayers who are tired of getting stonewalled when they ask why their taxes have increased so much.” Le Figaro also reports that French tax officials are getting nervous. “Now our agents, who are only the executors of a policy implemented by the government, have become indirect victims of the wrath of taxpayers,” said a tax employee union representative. “Our colleagues are all the more concerned in that they feel the attacks against the tax centers remain unpunished.” One tax official whose job puts him in direct contact with angry taxpayers said, “I never leave a stapler lying on my desk, or any other object that might serve as a projectile when I meet with a taxpayer. My colleagues do the same.”
• 45 groups met at the Athens Labor Center last month and pledged their support for a tax resistance campaign targeting the “ΕΝΦΙΑ” tax. The groups have enlisted the Athens Bar Association to counsel people on how to use legal appeals to delay or rescind the tax.
• There was another “suspicious powder causes evacuation of IRS office” incident the other day.

Some news in brief from here and there:

• The IRS Commissioner and the National Taxpayer Advocate are each predicting that the upcoming federal income tax filing season will be especially challenging for the agency. Indeed they’re throwing around adjectives like “miserable,” “worst,” and “unacceptable” and they haven’t even really gotten started yet.
  
  Among the factors making this year particularly bad are the launch of Obamacare’s tax credits (and penalties), hostility from Congress, and uncertainty in tax law because Congress has yet to decide which expiring tax laws it will retroactively extend at the last minute.
  
  Good luck getting help from the agency over the phone if you get confused. They’re expecting to be able to answer only about half of the calls they get, after an average on-hold time of over a half-hour, and even then will only be able to answer the most elementary tax questions.
  
  All of this is bound to increase taxpayer frustration and anger towards the tax-collecting bureaucracy, as well as making it a more unpleasant place to work.
• A fellow named Valentin from Chicheboville decided to protest the enormity of his taxes by paying them with an enormous check — a piece of cardboard two-meters long.
• You may have heard of mass protests in Mexico over the government’s collusion in massacres of student demonstrators there recently. The protesters have admirably started burning government buildings including the statehouse in Guerrero and the headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. A side-note of interest here is that some businesses in Acapulco, Guerrero, have launched a tax strike to protest the government’s failure to protect the tourist trade from the losses caused by demonstrators!
• The government of Greece keeps adding to the Greek tax burden, and more Greeks keep reaching their last straw. In September, another 851,201 Greeks were added to the delinquency lists, raising the total from 2,451,909 to 3,303,110 — about 30% of the population of Greece. The government is using a variety of carrots and sticks to try to bring these numbers down.
• l’intraprendente takes a look at the fizzling of the Northern League’s anticipated tax strike.

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 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.

Your tax resistance news round-up

• The third war tax resistance podcast, sponsored by the War Tax Talk blog, features war tax resisters Shirley Whiteside, Juanita Nelson, Randy Kehler, Betty Winkler, and Beth Seberger sharing the fruits of their experience.
• “Tax evasion” has a bad reputation because governments have successfully convinced people that paying taxes is of public benefit, and that those who dodge their share reap these benefits while pushing the burden off on others. But there are a lot of assumptions packaged in with that story that don’t hold up under scrutiny. Under a more realistic set of assumptions about the nature of public spending and taxation, tax dodging is an important public service that benefits all of us by limiting the invasiveness of government.
• The scam in which callers impersonating IRS agents trick people into sending them money to settle spurious tax debts continues to grow. According to the latest news:

  When the law enforcement agency that oversees the Internal Revenue Service warned in the spring of 2014 of the “largest-ever phone fraud scam targeting taxpayers,” it did not realize the 20,000 victims would be just the tip of a growing iceberg.

  As of today, close to 300,000 consumers have reported to the Treasury Inspector General for Taxpayer Administration, or TIGTA for short, that they’ve been contacted by callers claiming to be from the IRS. As we head into tax season in 2015, 12,000 people are complaining to TIGTA about the IRS impersonation scam every single week. At least $14 million have been reported to be extorted by criminals, and the actual number may be twice that high.

• The tax resistance movement that’s sprouting from the Occupy Central / Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong continues to seek guidance from tax resistance campaigns around the world. In the latest example, they look to Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s enormous war tax redirection action for inspiration.
• In Greece, a left-wing coalition loosely aligned with the “won’t pay” movement, and pledging to abolish the hated “ENFIA” tax, is leading in the polls. In response, many Greek taxpayers are keeping their money in their pockets, refusing to pay taxes until they see how the election turns out.
• The Italian tax resistance movement growing under the hashtag “#IoNonMiAmmazzo” now has a rap video to dramatize its campaign:

Today, an international tax resistance news round-up:

Hong Kong

The “Occupy Central” movement, which has been pushing for political liberalization in Hong Kong, is exploring the tactic of tax resistance. Inspired by American war tax protester Evan Reeves, who paid his taxes in protest by writing 5,574 checks, each with a name of a fallen U.S. soldier written in the memo field, Raymond Kwong launched a similar protest against the Hong Kong government.

On Saturday, Kwong sent off the last of his 9,280 checks. He used rubber-stamps, some hand-carved, to fill out each check, and hand-signed each one. He says he felt like something out of the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times while going through all the motions of stamping and signing each check, a process that took about 54 hours. Between the cost of the checks, the postage, the stamps & ink, he also says he had to spend about HK$500 above and beyond the amount of the tax.

The number of checks — 9,280 — is meant to commemorate the September 28 launch of Occupy Central’s “umbrella revolution” campaign.

The U.K.

The New Statesman looks back on the life of women’s suffrage activist Sophia Duleep Singh:

She was one of the early tax resisters, refusing to pay for licences for her dogs and carriage. She ignored all letters demanding payment until she was issued with a fine. Instead, she equipped her lawyer with a disquisition on female suffrage and the injustice of taxation without representation and sent him to court to read it to the judge. Eventually bailiffs turned up at her house and seized a seven-stone diamond ring, worth far more than she owed. But the suffragettes won the war: when the ring came up at auction, they flooded the auction house and refused to bid for it until the auctioneer was forced to lower the starting bid to £10 — at which price it was bought by a suffragette and returned to Sophia, amid rapturous applause.

Greece

Members of the “Won’t Pay” movement stormed the Nea Ionia County Court to successfully prevent a foreclosure auction.

Costa Rica

Al Jazeera America looks at the Monteverde Community in Costa Rica, which was founded by Quaker conscientious objectors and war tax resisters in 1951.

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.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Esteban Duarte at BloombergBusiness has written up a rare English-language report on the tax resistance strategy of Catalan separatists. Excerpt:

  [T]he group is encouraging Catalans to use an arcane legal formula to pay their taxes to an escrow account controlled by the regional government. That would potentially deny more than 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to the Spanish state, which is legally entitled to collect taxes directly in Catalonia and most of the rest of country

  The technique allows taxpayers to meet their legal obligations to the state before the regional government transfers the money to Madrid. If the dispute over Catalan sovereignty turns nasty, the regional government can then withhold revenue from Spain without exposing voters to legal or financial reprisals from the central government.

• American peace activist and war tax resister Kathy Kelly is profiled at War Tax Talk. Excerpt:

  “One of the most important spiritual directors in my life has been the Internal Revenue Service. Janis Joplin’s lyric, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ comes to mind. War tax refusers learn ways to become impervious to collection, and that generally means finding ways to live without owning property, relying on savings, or growing attached to a job that one couldn’t leave in the event of an IRS notice about wage garnishment.

  “Becoming a war tax refuser was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made and one of the easiest decisions to maintain. I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”

• The War Resisters League have come out with their annual U.S. Federal Budget Pie Chart, which purports to tell you “where your income tax money really goes.” This is based on the Obama administration’s budget proposal for next year, which is more than usually an exercise in showmanship as the Republicans who control Congress will get the final say. Still, the chart makes for a useful conversation starter in some contexts.
• Scotland’s parliament has approved a bill that effectively grants an amnesty to people who refused to pay Thatcher’s poll tax and who have, until now, been considered to have an enforceable tax debt.
• In Greece, too, the new government has moved to make things easier for those who practiced tax refusal in recent years. Such resisters can, if they agree to begin paying something, have large hunks of their arrears written-off, and can make plans to pay the rest in up to 100 small installments without any interest of penalties. As in the case of Scotland, critics are suggesting that these moves will encourage future tax resisters to be more bold in the hopes that they too might benefit from a future amnesty.

Some international tax resistance news:

• Current affairs in Greece are often described by American commentators as being about a spoiled populace that wants to keep a generous welfare state doling out pensions and plum jobs but won’t pay taxes to pay off the creditors who have sustained the party. But the Workers World reminds us there’s another side to the story:

  …austerity and unemployment in Greece have brought the proportion of people living under the poverty line from 3 percent in 2010 to 44 percent today.…

  Why did this austerity hit Greece with the most devastating blow?

  The Wall Street Journal of July 10, 2010, answered this question for its business audience: “Greece, with a population of just 11 million, is the largest importer of conventional weapons in Europe — and ranks fifth in the world behind China, India, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. Its military spending is the highest in the European Union as a percentage of gross domestic product. That spending was one of the factors behind Greece’s stratospheric national debt.”

  An article in the April 19, 2012, British newspaper the Guardian explained the impact of the years of weapons purchases:

  “According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute… from 2002 to 2006, Greece was the world’s fourth biggest importer of conventional weapons. It is now the 10th.

  “ ‘As a proportion of GDP, Greece spends twice as much as any other EU member on defense.… Well after the economic crisis had begun, Germany and France were trying to seal lucrative weapons deals even as they were pushing us to make deep cuts in areas like health,’ said Dimitris Papadimoulis, who now represents Syriza in the European Parliament.”

  For many years, Greece was the biggest customer in Europe for German military corporations and also a major purchaser of French weapons. These are the two imperialist countries that hold the largest share of Greek debt.

  The contracts for these weapons purchases and decades of maintenance and parts supplies are provided by bank loans from the countries supplying the weapons — Germany, France and the United States. The incentive for the huge unneeded purchases is a network of bribes from the military corporations, especially to the generals and top political leaders.

  Angelos Philippides, a prominent Greek economist, explained: “For a long time Greece spent 7 percent of its GDP on defense when other European countries spent an average 2.2 percent. If you were to add up that compound 5 percent from 1946 to today, there would be no debt at all.

  “ ‘If Athens had cut defense spending to levels similar to other EU states over the past decade, economists claim it would have saved around €150bn — more than its last bailout. Instead, Greece dedicates up to €7bn a year to military expenditure — down from a high of €10bn in 2009.” (Guardian, April 19, 2012)

• The government of Venezuela is cracking down on tax resistance there. The legislature created a set of new tax crimes, including the crime of publicly inciting tax non-compliance or organizing collective tax refusal which can earn a one- to five-year sentence.
• Foes of a new value-added tax in Puerto Rico have launched consumer and business strikes there.
• The General Confederation of Labor has launched its annual war tax resistance campaign in Spain.
• Merchants at the Polatsk marketplace in Vitebsk, Belarus have gone on strike and are refusing to pay taxes.

Some international tax resistance news:

• A couple from Llanllwni, Wales, has stopped paying the so-called “bedroom tax” to the Carmarthenshire Council. They say their council home is so poor that, to avoid the condensation and subsequent mold in the bedroom, they have been forced to sleep on the living room floor. If the government is going to play slumlord, they’ll go on strike.
• Two monasteries in Greece have refused to pay the controversial new property tax called “ENFIA” claiming that such institutions should be exempt from the tax.
• “War is financed with your taxes,” headlines an article in Spain’s Nueva Tribuna about the war tax resistance movement there, which is probably the most-active such movement in the world today.

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.

Your tax resistance news round-up:

International News

• Tax collectors turned up at a festival in Maritsa, in Rhodes, Greece, and were forced to flee under police protection when the crowd turned on them with jeers and insults. The papers note: “This is the second time that tax officers have been prevented from performing their duties on the island in a period of less than two weeks.”
• Market areas across Pakistan shut down in a business strike protesting a new tax withholding system. According to one account: “This was the first time in the history of Pakistan that traders, goods transporters, custom clearing agents and traders’ bodies gave the strike call.”

U.S. News

• The right-wing of the domestic internet has lately been outraged about Planned Parenthood, over the issue of abortion in particular. I’ve lost track of how many tweets I’ve seen that are variations on “I’m going to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t stop funding Planned Parenthood!” Easier tweeted than done, of course, and today’s American right-wingers have a pretty poor record of follow-through on threats like these. But then there’s Ann Barnhardt. She’s a Catholic counter-reformist who burned a Koran on camera (“bookmarked with raw bacon”) and who shut down her financial services business in 2011 to “Go Galt” and stop paying taxes. In a post on her blog, Barnhardt explains why the Bible’s “Render Unto Caesar…” verse doesn’t discourage her from refusing to pay federal taxes. Her conclusion:

  Enough is enough. You cannot subsidize this government and still claim that God is “first” in your life. It is mathematically, metaphysically and morally impossible. You must choose your allegiances now. You must now choose who or what it is that you truly worship. Do you worship God or do you worship your wealth? Here’s a simple litmus test for you: are you or are you not willing to give up all of your wealth in bearing witness to God in His Truth? If the answer is no, then stop calling yourself a Christian, because you very simply are not.

• The IRS hung up on 8.8 million callers who tried to contact the agency during this year’s tax filing season. Only 37% of those who called actually managed to hear a non-recorded voice. The IRS calls these hang-ups “courtesy disconnects.”

Some links of interest:

• The Nuclear Resister reprints some historical information about nonviolent resistance to U.S. nuclear weapons in the Pacific Northwest. Prominent in this history is the strong stand taken by Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, who called the Trident nuclear submarines the “Auschwitz of Puget Sound” and rallied Christians to oppose it. Hunthausen also refused to pay a portion of his income tax to protest against U.S. military spending. While Hunthausen deserves credit for making a bold, forthright stand and following it up with action, this didn’t happen in a vacuum — the ongoing civil disobedience of the Ground Zero activists influenced him. But he in turn opened the floodgates for other religious leaders to come forward to strongly condemn the American “first strike” policy and nuclear weapons in general. Here’s some excerpts from an interview with Jim Douglass, conducted by Terry Messman:

  Terry Messman

  Why was Hunthausen such a significant voice in the movement for nuclear disarmament?

  Jim Douglass

  He gave a speech in which he stated to a very large number of religious leaders gathered in Tacoma, Washington, that Trident was the “Auschwitz of Puget Sound.” And he took a stand of refusing to pay his income taxes in order to resist Trident.

  Terry Messman

  After he made that statement, we invited him to speak at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley where he urged hundreds of religious leaders to resist nuclear murder and suicide.

  Jim Douglass

  Yes. And as a result, roughly six months later, he actually stated publicly, “I have now decided to stop paying half of my taxes” — the half of his taxes that would have gone to military appropriations and nuclear weapons.

  Terry Messman

  It was such an important turning point when an archbishop actually called for massive civil disobedience.

  Jim Douglass

  Yes, and he not only called for it — he did it! His tax resistance was nonviolent civil disobedience in the most radical sense possible.

  Terry Messman

  When Archbishop Hunthausen declared that Trident was the Auschwitz of Puget Sound, what effect did it have on your work at Ground Zero? And what effect did it have on the general public?

  Jim Douglass

  It electrified the general public. And it profoundly encouraged us. We all knew Archbishop Hunthausen. We’d known him for years and he’d already done all kinds of things to support our work. He supported a 30-day fast that we engaged in. He sent information on the Trident campaign to his entire body of priests and religious leaders in the diocese. He brought over to Ground Zero all of his administrative leaders in the archdiocese for a retreat on the issue of Trident. He’d done everything he could — up to refusing to pay his own taxes — before he took that step. So we were one in community with Archbishop Hunthausen before he took that further step.

  Terry Messman

  What was the response of the Church hierarchy to Hunthausen’s call for massive resistance to the arms race?

  Jim Douglass

  Well, I would say it was a mixed response. A number of Catholic bishops within the United States made statements of their own against nuclear weapons in the months following Archbishop Hunthausen’s statement. I think they were to some degree, if not largely, inspired by his courage. I found that remarkable because there had been so much silence before then.

  ---

  Terry Messman

  In what way did Hunthausen’s statement play such a huge role in the bishops speaking out?

  Jim Douglass

  There was nothing vaguely like Archbishop Hunthausen’s statement before him. And following his statement there were many!

  ---

  Jim Douglass

  Archbishop Hunthausen really was a catalyst in a movement of religious leaders, not only Catholics but others as well. Remember that the statement by which he began to become so prominent was made to the Lutheran leaders of the Pacific Northwest. He wasn’t speaking to Catholics; he was speaking to the Lutheran leaders who had invited him to speak because he had already become a leader on this issue. That’s when he made the statement that gained national attention. He had an effect on everybody. In the Pacific Northwest, especially, he was meeting every week with all the other key religious leaders. They ate breakfast together. I joined them a number of times so I met these people and Archbishop Hunthausen was the most prophetic voice and the inspiration in their midst. These were all the most prominent religious leaders at that time in Seattle and everyone at these breakfasts was very supportive of Archbishop Hunthausen. The Jewish leaders were very supportive of Archbishop Hunthausen. So it was right across the board that religious leaders said, “This man is speaking out in a way that is both prophetic and pastoral.”

• Wake Forest University is sponsoring something called “The Beacon Project.” The theory behind the project seems to be that to discover more about how to be most ethical, it would be wise to pay close attention to people who exhibit uncommonly extraordinary moral behavior — moral “geniuses” perhaps. I can think of some big challenges for an approach like this, but it also seems like it could be very promising.
• A family in Rutland, Vermont has begun a tax strike against the education tax there. Excerpts from the letter they used to announce their stand:

  On August 31, when first-quarter property tax was due in Rutland, we paid 49 percent of the amount due, covering our municipal tax liability, and withheld the 51 percent slated for education. We will continue this practice every quarter until the Legislature gains the political will to pass meaningful and fair education reform.

  I work at two part-time jobs, and my pay at one of those has recently been reduced. My wife is self-employed. We have no family members in public school. Yet habitually frugal as we are, in order to pay the tax levied for the maintenance of Vermont’s education system, we are frequently forced to defer paying some bills or to put off filling some prescriptions. We can purchase fuel only in small amounts.

  In fact, we are denying payment precisely for the greater good, and for the good of Vermont, in the hope that even a small action will speak louder than words and bring to the attention of the Legislature the seriousness of the plight of those whom they are supposed to serve.

  We are aware of the repercussions our action may have. Governments tend not to smile on civil disobedience, especially when it affects their income. Yet Americans have learned throughout history that when our governments do not act in the public’s interest it becomes necessary for the public to act for itself.

  We hope that some other aggrieved Vermonters will join us in this action. If not, we will stand alone, but we will stand.

• Tax receipts in Greece continue to plummet as the government wavers about whether to stick with the euro and people decide to wait out the uncertainty with their money in their own pockets.
• I keep waiting for the folks in the anti-abortion movement to catch on to the tax resistance idea, but when it comes to taxes, they’re mostly just talk. Lately the talk is all about refusing to pay taxes that might end up going to Planned Parenthood, but it’s a rare day when I see a pro-lifer put money and mouth together. Here’s an example — a video-blog or something of the sort from Garrett Johnson in which he advocates tax resistance in the anti-abortion cause. Another example is that of Scott Roeder, currently serving a long sentence for murdering a doctor who performed abortions, who gave an interview in which he promoted Constitutionalist tax protest theories. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and let you know if any of this catches on.

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.

Some international tax resistance news that has flashed over my screen in recent days:

Catalonia

• A report in Negocios.com suggests that the campaign to get Catalan municipalities to send their taxes to the Catalan government rather than to Spain has flopped. According to the report, only 70 to 80 of the 941 municipalities signed on to the largely-symbolic tax resistance plan, even though in 248 of them, Catalan separatists have a governing majority.
• On the other hand, this report says that Catalonia is well on its way to creating an independent tax agency and that mass tax resistance is only a matter of time.

The U.K.

• Low-income workers in Britain are becoming subject to council taxes from which they were previously exempt. The councils are expecting mass tax refusal and some are comparing it to Thatcher’s Poll Tax.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo

• Tax collection in the North Kivu region ground to a halt in a protest against degraded security in the region.

Spain

• The High Court of Valencia recently declared that Spanish citizens do not have the right to withhold tax payments for reasons of conscientious objection to military spending.

Greece

• 4,000 people in Crete have each paid only €1 of their road taxes in a protest there. The action was organized by «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Paying”), which last year held a similar protest that only attracted some dozens of participants. The group is protesting against rising taxes at a time of increasing economic difficulties, and that the taxes are not actually going to crucially needed road improvements. That group is also organizing protests at government auctions of seized property.

global

• A record number of U.S. citizens renounced their citizenship last quarter and we’re set for another record year of this.

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.

Some international tax resistance notes

• An article on modern-day Christian martyrs in Crux includes this passage:

  In Honduras, Maria Francisca Sevilla, 39, was a mother of three who co-pastored the “Church of God for Life Ministry” in the city of Choloma alongside her husband. In April 2014, she was stabbed to death by two young gang members, reportedly after she had refused to pay what the gangs call a “war tax” to ensure her church’s safety.

  One year before, Sevilla and her husband claimed they had been abducted and beaten by gang members in an effort to extort “war tax” payments, a practice observers describe as increasingly common.

  “This dedicated couple, who ministered in their church for 10 years, could have moved away for safety, but they felt called to the city and remained even though they were in danger,” said Tim Hill, director of Church of God World Missions, after Sevilla’s murder.

• Business owners in Eastleigh, Kenya have decided to stop paying taxes to Nairobi County in protest against the government’s failure to provide basic services. Eastleigh North Ward representative Osman Adow Ibrahim, a member of the County Assembly, wrote: “As your representative, I fully support the decision you have made and have engaged a lawyer to get an injunction through the courts. The law and Constitution of Kenya allows for peaceful protest to get one’s rights. I hope we all stand together on this, so that we get the service we need.”
• Greek tax resisters have discovered that they can keep the tax collector at bay, at least for a while, by paying only a single euro of their taxes.
• A curious looking Indiegogo crowdfunding project called world citizen solutions has raised (last I checked) about half of its $79,000 goal towards developing a vaguely-described war tax resistance strategy. It is so vaguely described that it’s surprising to me that people are willing to chip in to support it, so maybe I’m missing some context. It has the odor of a sovereign-citizen or maybe a seasteading/micronation plan of some sort. Some excerpts:

  [T]he world citizen solution [is] a no compromise yet peaceful and lawful way to extract ourselves from tax obligations that literally make us accomplices to perpetual war. Or in other words, financiers of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

  [We] are currently developing a legal and social strategic initiative that will have profound effects on releasing humanity from its current paradigm.

  That all sounds pretty woo-woo to me, but it seems to have lit a fire under some folks anyway.

Some links that have graced my browser in recent days:

• The Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy is “building a European network of companies which support a European tax disobedience movement.” In short, they’re trying to use the same bag of tricks that multinational corporations use to evade taxes on their profits in order to build an alternative economic network of European dissidents. Fair.coop also has some commentary on the campaign.
• The Scotsman looks back at the Poll tax protest [of] 1990: When Strathclyde council issued 250,000 warrants.
• Abolitionist Quakers from Philadelphia pioneered “fair trade” ideas with their attempts to build a network of producers, merchants, and consumers to support alternatives to slave-produced products. Here’s a look at the experiments they tried and the challenges they faced.
• Italian pacifist Turi Vaccaro climbed up a satellite dish at a U.S. military base near Niscemi, Italy, and, over the course of about 34 hours, with manual hand tools, did about €800,000 in damage.
• 24 Greek toll-hike protesters were acquitted of charges related to a protest action they participated in last April.

The Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies recently came to my attention. It has a few pages that touch on tax resistance, including:

• An interview with Kathy Kelly. Excerpts:

  Street Spirit

  Did the U.S. government ever press charges against Voices in the Wilderness for violating the sanctions?

  Kathy Kelly

  They would bring us into court with some regularity. It was curious because at one point there was a $50,000 fine. I thought, “What are you going to take — my contact lenses?” I just had to laugh. I mean, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes to the U.S. government as a war tax-refuser since 1980. So there is nothing they could take from me. The people that would go over were in the same boat. So good luck collecting from them!

  Spirit

  But as it turned out, they did fine your group $20,000, didn’t they?

  Kelly

  Yeah, they finally took us into court. And I think Condoleezza Rice inadvertently might have saved us. This is speculation on my part, but this much is true. Chevron settled out of court, acknowledging that they had paid money under the table to Saddam Hussein in order to get very lucrative contracts for Iraqi oil.

  Condoleezza Rice was the international liaison for Chevron while it was paying money under the table to get these lucrative contracts. So when we finally had our day in court, Sen. Carl Levin’s staffers were still digging up this information and it was beginning to become public evidence that Chevron, Odin Marine Inc., Mobil and Coastal Oil had all been paying money for these oil contracts under the table to Saddam Hussein.

  So there were big fish in the pond that broke the sanctions and there were little fish in the pond that broke the sanctions. I think some of the big fish said, “That is one hot potato. You drop that hot potato as fast as you can, and don’t make a big deal because those people are little fish but they’re mouthy little fish.” So they never tried to collect a dime from us. The money was just sitting there.

  Spirit

  Well, what exactly did happen to you when the U.S. government took you to court for violating the sanctions?

  Kelly

  We were found guilty and were fined $20,000. Federal Judge John Bates wrote in his legal opinion that those who disobey an unjust law should accept the penalty willingly and lovingly.

  Spirit

  Unbelievable! A federal judge lectures you about lovingly accepting this unjust fine using the words of Martin Luther King?

  Kelly

  Yes. We said to Judge Bates, “If you want to send us to prison, we will go, willingly and lovingly. We’ve done that before already. But if you think we will pay a fine to the U.S. government, then we ask you to imagine that Martin Luther King would have ever said, ‘Coretta, get the checkbook.’ We are not going to pay one dime to the U.S. government which continues to wage warfare.” At that time, supplemental spending bills appeared every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and congressional representatives and senators continued to vote yes on those spending bills for the military. So we said, “No, we won’t pay a dime of that fine.”

  Spirit

  You have also been a war tax resister for a long time.

  Kelly

  I’m a war tax refuser. I don’t give them anything.

  Spirit

  Oh, you’re not a 50 percent withholder, like many war tax resisters. You’re a 100 percent withholder?

  Kelly

  Yes, I’m a 100 percent withholder. I think war tax resistance is important but I happen to be a refuser. They haven’t got one dime of federal income tax from me since 1980.

  Spirit

  Why did you begin refusing to pay federal taxes entirely?

  Kelly

  I won’t give them any money. I can’t and I won’t. I won’t pay for guns. I don’t believe in killing people. I also don’t want to pay for the CIA, the FBI, the corporate bail-outs or the prison system. But particularly, I began as a war tax refuser. I wouldn’t give money to the Mafia if they came to my door and said, “We’d like you to help pay for our operations.” I’m certainly not going to pay for wars when I’ve tried throughout my adult life to educate people to resist nonviolently.

  Spirit

  How have you gotten away with not paying federal taxes since 1980? Do you keep your income low?

  Kelly

  Many years I have lived below the taxable income. But in 1998, someone from the IRS came to my home. I had in some years claimed extra allowances on the W-4 form. And I just don’t file. I haven’t filed since 1980. Now, that’s a criminal offense and they could put me in jail for a long time for that. If I was earning over the taxable income, I would just calculate how many allowances I have to claim so that no money is taken out of my paycheck. It says in the small print on the W-2 form to put down the correct number of allowances so that the correct amount of tax is taken out. Well, that’s easy. The correct amount of tax to take from me is zero, so I just do the math.

  Spirit

  Why do you think they haven’t come after you?

  Kelly

  Well, they have come to collect taxes. But I don’t have a savings account, and I don’t own anything. The IRS is like my spiritual director [laughs]. I don’t know how to drive a car, and I’ve never owned any place that I’ve lived in. I just don’t have anything to take.

  Spirit

  So has the IRS given up on even trying to collect?

  Kelly

  Once they came out to collect in 1998 when I was taking care of my dear Dad, who was wheelchair-bound, and a bit slumped over in the chair. Dad liked to listen to opera and I had a really awful old record player playing a scratchy record. I had been in the back of the house and I didn’t know she was coming, so I ran down to answer the door while the record player was making such a horrible noise. The apartment was fine but it only had a few sticks of furniture.

  The woman asked me if I was going to get a job, and I told her I couldn’t leave my father. Then she asked if I had a bank account, and I said no. She said, “And you don’t own a car?” And I told her I didn’t even know how to drive. Then she just kind of leaned toward me and said, “You know what? I’m just going to write you up as uncollectible.” And I said, “That’s a very good idea.” [laughs] They’ve never tried to collect since. There was just nothing to take! Zero. Nothing.

• Correspondence between Bart de Ligt and Mohandas Gandhi. Here’s some of what de Ligt wrote in late 1929:

  On your side, you state that those who set themselves against Western wars pay, nevertheless, taxes, which are used by the State for war and the oppression of the colored peoples. That is quite true. In fact our anti-militarist struggle also is as yet only something very relative, and it must go on extending. But in any case, we have fixed clear and inflexible borders: we refuse absolutely all direct, personal participation in war and in its social and moral preparation. But several of us employ still other means of fighting against it.… Moreover, a few of us have already decided individually to refuse to pay any taxes, whilst the organization of which I am a member has already several times been the propagandist of collective refusal of taxation. But whereas refusal, even on a very restricted scale, to do military service has been morally and socially efficacious, the refusal to pay taxes by a restricted number of citizens only has so far had very little result, as the authorities, in confiscating property and inflicting fines, take possession of sums much larger than a direct payment of taxes would have brought them. From this point of view, your compatriots have already given some impressive examples of collective refusal, although they also were not able to avoid regular unfair demands of the Government.

  I think “the organization of which I am a member” may have been War Resisters International. Gandhi’s response to this point is an interesting one:

  A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system, which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice being left to him. I belong to a world, which is partly based on violence. If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistent with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades.

  You can find more of Bart de Ligt’s thoughts on tax refusal, non-violent struggle, and Gandhi’s campaigns in the essay The Effectiveness of Non-Violent Struggle, also on the Satyagraha Foundation site.

And from the academic and related worlds:

• A paper by Jay A. Soled and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas on Revisiting the Taxation of Fringe Benefits notes that many companies are compensating their employees with “a cornucopia of fringe benefits, including frequent-flier miles, hotel reward points, rental car preferred status, office supply dollar coupons, cellular telephone use, home Internet service, and, in some instances, even free lunches, massages, and dance lessons.” Some of these are proving difficult for the government to effectively tax as income.
• Gregg Polsky has come up with a potentially useful way of using Roth IRA conversions to keep money away from the tax collector.
• Cass Sunstein reviews attempts to discover how much money is hidden away by the rich and powerful in “tax havens”
• Benjamin Powell and Edward Peter Stringham present Public Choice and the Economic Analysis of Anarchy: A Survey.
• Richard Lavoie tries to discover the elements that contribute to a “taxpaying ethos”.
• Maciej Bartkowski looks at what causes people to break out of their apathy and join risky movements for social change, in Forming a Movement: Cognitive Liberation.
• Anthony C. Infanti, reviewing Robin Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery looks at Tax As Urban Legend, saying “the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.”
• Molly F. Sherlock and Donald J. Marples give us an Overview of the Federal Tax System.
• Peter Boettke tells us all about Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Bloomington School.

Some international tax resistance news:

• Princess “Infanta” Cristina of Spain has been indicted on charges of large-scale tax evasion. The charges were filed by a private anti-corruption group, as the government was unenthusiastic about prosecuting someone from the royal family. Indeed, the state prosecutor told the court that the tax agency motto “Hacienda Somos Todos” (“The Treasury is Everyone”) was “only an advertising slogan” and shouldn’t be applied to her highness. So now, a group of retired taxpayers from Mallorca is saying “if la Infanta won’t pay, neither will we.”
• In Greece, the «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Payment”) movement continues to disrupt auctions of homes and businesses seized “by state banks and bandits” from people with tax or other austerity-induced debts.
• Meanwhile, guerrilla electricians from the «Δεν Πληρώνω» (“Won’t Pay”) movement continue their noble work of reconnecting the power to families who have been cut off for inability (or unwillingness) to pay the new taxes added to electricity bills.
• In Russia, truckers have gone on strike to protest a new road tax and the corruption behind it — one of a number of protests that are worrying the Putin regime.
• An activist who was arrested protesting against the Jeju Naval Base in South Korea has elected not to pay his fines but to serve prison time instead.
• Justices of the Bombay High Court, exasperated by corruption in the government of India, nigh endorsed mass tax resistance as a response:

  “If the same loot continues, taxpayers may resort to a ‘non-cooperation movement’ and refuse to pay taxes,” observed Justice Chaudhari of Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court.

  “Do taxpayers pay the money to the government for such kind of acrobatics? To eradicate the cancer of corruption, the ‘hydra-headed monster,’ it’s now high time for citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough of this miasma of corruption,” the High Court observed.

Some links that have flashed by my browser in recent days:

IRS Follies

• It takes so long to reach the IRS by phone that a company has gone into business selling places in the phone queue. That’s right. They have many lines on which they call the IRS and stay on hold, and then you call them and buy the line that has been on hold longest so you don’t have to wait so long. Somewhere, a star on Obama’s economic team is tallying this up as “innovative job creation.”
• Identity thieves have been so successful at stealing “refunds” from the IRS by filing phony tax returns by using the social security numbers of other people that the IRS started issuing a supplemental identification number — an “E-file PIN” — that taxpayers could use to prove that it really was them filing their return. Because they figured the identity thieves, having stolen one identification number, wouldn’t be able to steal the second one, I guess.
• The number of IRS employees continues to fall. The agency says it plans to shed another 2–3,000 people this year.

International Tax Resistance News

• Anjali Damania and Alyque Padamsee have started a taxpayers union and have launched a tax strike to protest government corruption in India.

  Padamsee claimed that he always does everything legal and correct. He said, “I checked with lawyers. We are a group of like-minded people, and the tax paying population of this country, and they said, anyone who works together could form a union. And by law, a union is allowed to strike. We will strike by not paying tax. We plan to assemble a million people with a fee of Re 1 each, but all this is at the planning stage. We are talking with senior lawyers and will have them on board. Our main aim will be to make the government accountable. If there are any recommendations, people can contact me.”

  However, it is not yet specified which tax the Tax Payers’ Union will not pay, as there are various taxes in India, and most of them are indirect tax, which one pays in form of service, or while buying products. The other important taxes which concern an individual directly, include income tax and professional tax.

  This idea seems to be catching on. Justice Arun Chaudhari, from the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court, in a ruling during a recent corruption case, said:

  In my considered opinion, corruption can be beaten if all work together. To eradicate the cancer of corruption — the “hydra-headed monster,” it is now a high time for the citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough. That is the miasma of of corruption. If the same continues, taxpayers may resort to refuse to pay taxes by “non-cooperation movement.”

• Tommaso Cerno, a journalist and gay rights activist in Friuli, Italy, has made waves by announcing, in a letter published in Repubblica, a tax strike for gay rights.
• George Theofanou, who participated in the “won’t pay” protests against road tolls in Greece, has been charged €21,787.20 by the Greek tax agency for his failure to pay €427.20 in tolls. Theofanou issued a defiant letter, denouncing the “mafia” government and vowing to continue resisting.
• Farmers are the latest group to organize to protest taxes in Greece, driving their tractors to Athens, blocking highways, and attacking government buildings.
• Textile businesses in Vaishali were shuttered as the textile union launched a strike against a new tax.

War Tax Resistance

• My Waging Nonviolence article, on how the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund is a model for civil disobedience campaigns by demonstrating how to blunt the force of government deterrents, has been picked up by Truthout and OWSNe.ws.
• The POWERevolution blog has a new post about war tax resistance. Excerpt:

  If the government does not allow us the freedom to direct our taxes toward more enriching and sustainable funds, we will begin the process of taking that freedom for ourselves. We will discontinue paying taxes to the government, and instead redirect our money into a community fund that distributes our income in a way that serves all of us. As long as we continue paying for the current system in the form of taxes, we are complicit in the violence and corruption committed by it. By withdrawing our funding of it, we withdraw our consent of its actions.

• Bernard J. Berg recalls how he came out of the U.S. military doubtful that what he was doing deserved to be called “service”:

  I too served in the Navy, just before Vietnam, helping to keep the sea lanes safe for United Fruit Co. and the Dulles brothers. I later joined the war tax resistance effort sponsored by Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern. Money which should have gone to the IRS to pay for our war crimes went into the fund to be used for worthy causes. But the IRS had the last laugh as it garnered my bank account and got more money for illegal wars with the fines it extracted from me.

Miscellany

• I just learned about the following presentation which was made at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference, and features Angela Keaton from AntiWar.com, Carla Gericke of the Free State Project, and Teresa Warmke of Fr33Aid, discussing how nonprofits can benefit from using BitCoin:

• The number of U.S. citizens who are renouncing their citizenship is climbing, continuing a dramatic trend since 2008.

In other news.

• Someone going by the name “Litmus A Freeman” has embarked on a baroque and methodical legalistic personal declaration of independence from Her Majesty’s government, which includes refusing to pay taxes because they fund illegal wars. He’s even composed a protest song to celebrate his “No Tax For War” decision.
• Greek activists obtained the names of public transit ticket inspectors, whose homes have since been spray-painted “Snitches.”
• Indian anti-corruption activists are responding to demands for bribes from government officials with fake bank notes bearing Mahatma Gandhi’s image and anti-corruption messages in the hopes of shaming those officials and underlining their refusal to pay such bribes.

  

Some tabs that have opened in my browser in recent days:

• Some relatives of victims of last year’s terrorist attack in Paris are refusing to pay the victims’ tax arrears, saying the money is doing more to promote terrorism than to protect them, and specifically that it is insulting to tax the victims to pay for the legal defense of the perpetrators.
• Activists in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are using tax resistance to pressure the government to provide better security.
• Haringey retiree Paul Nicolson has been refusing to pay his council tax in protest against austerity measures that made Britain’s most poor subject to this tax for the first time.

  By refusing to pay, Nicolson says he wanted to get “on the receiving end of the enforcement procedure in solidarity with the poorest residents of Haringey”. “Threats of eviction are being shelled out by computers all the time,” he says. “Food, clothes, fuel, transport and other necessities are all competing with council tax and rent for the £73 benefit — there is a massive competition which simply can’t work. People might give up food to pay the taxes because of the threat of court or eviction.”

• The Greek-style protest of storming toll gates and waving the drivers through appears to have spread to Toulouse.
• Die Presse looks at the dismal state (for the State) of tax collection in Greece.

Some links of interest:

• Frida Berrigan writes: Why tax resistance under Trump needs its antiwar edge. A nice article that’s not all that well-described by its headline, describing current American anti-Trump tax resistance and how it fits in to the long-standing war tax resistance tradition.
• Professor plans to resist federal income taxes in protest of Trump administration — Andrew Newman of Stony Brook University says he won’t pay until the Democrats are back in the White House.
• Manoj Viswanathan Presents Tax Compliance In A Decentralizing Economy — Viswanathan says the current tax authorities depend on centralized intermediaries (banks, employers, brokers) to report financial transactions to the government. But blockchain-related technologies like Bitcoin may displace banks and brokers, and gig-economy innovations may reduce the use of employers.
• Here’s another example of the pay-in-pennies technique of tax protest: Manchester Marine Veteran Pays $75 Parking Fine in Pennies; Cop Lies to Cameraman.
• A coalition of grassroots anarchist / anti-authoritarian groups in Greece sabotaged more than 200 public transit fare-enforcement machines. The Greek government has been frustrated in its attempts to raise money through straightforward taxation, and has increasingly been relying on increases in fares, highway tolls, and utility bills. 40% of Greeks are unable (or unwilling) to pay their utility bills. Some have taken to using devices that interfere with the electricity meters; others have been assisted by Den Plirono activists who reconnect the power to residences that have been cut off for failure to pay the electric bill.
• The Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies looks at The Quaker John Woolman on War Tax Resistance.
• Citizen Truth covers war tax resistance in a recent “couch talk”:

• Greek “won’t pay” movement activist Stratos Daskarolou was recently sentenced to a 42-day prison term for refusing to pay road tolls. Supporters of Daskarolou rallied in Kalamata, and one supporter, Zoe Konstantopoulou, former speaker of the Hellenic Parliament, filmed herself driving from Athens to Kalamata, lifting the tollgates out of her way along the path.
• Filmmakers in Tamil Nadu have halted all film releases. They are protesting against the state’s refusal to lift a 10% entertainment tax in the wake of the launch of the new nationwide 28% goods and services tax. In a typical year, “Kollywood” puts out hundreds of films worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.
• “Employees of the Internal Revenue Service are the target of a fast rising number of threats…”
• Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya, told vendors at Kongowea market to stop paying regional taxes. He also said he had instructed police not to act against tax resisters. From the looks of things, this is part of a feud between Kenyatta and political rival Ali Hassan Joho, governor of Mombasa.
• As I mentioned last week, disgraced credit reporting agency Equifax was untimely awarded a no-bid fraud prevention contract by the IRS. Howls of outrage ensued. Then the Equifax website was hacked, tricking visitors into installing malware. That was the excuse the IRS needed to back out of the contract.
• A columnist for the Dallas News created an #EverybodyFileAProtest campaign, encouraging people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to challenge their property tax assessment. He claims 40,000 more people than usual have filed protests so far this year. “The idea was to clog up the system so that appraisal districts would settle informally, either in person or online, with homeowners to avoid so many appeal hearings.”
• Widespread resistance to the “soda tax” in Cook County, Illinois, led the Board of Commissioners to repeal the two-month-old tax on a 15‒1 vote.

  [A] significant number of residents of Cook County began buying their soda and other sweetened beverages of choice outside the city limits. Yes, you read that correctly. The passage of the Cook County Soda Tax spurred residents to go out of their way to make sure that they bought their sugary drinks in other counties. They basically began importing their own sugary drinks — thus depriving the County not only of revenues from the new Soda Tax but all other tax revenues from those sales (or other sales that might occur in conjunction with those sales) as well. And of course this also meant depriving Cook County businesses of their own revenues from those sales — with some retailers reporting overall beverage sales declines of up to 47%.

  But more embarrassing yet for the County, sugar-addled tax protesters even began tweeting about it — posting pictures of their receipts from sugary drink purchases outside of Cook County (many of which were promptly picked up and retweeted by the more beverage industry organized forces pushing for retail).

• Jay A. Soled and James Alm suggest that the “tax gap,” between what the government thinks people should pay and what they actually pay, is going away. This for three reasons: diminishing use of cash is making transactions easier for the government to track; the databasification of everything is making it easier to surveil the population; and globalization & concentration means more people are employed by large firms, which shrinks the underground economy.

Tax resistance is still an active part of the Greek Den Plirono movement. Here’s a video from several years back (new to me) of a driver destroying the toll bar across a Greek highway. And here are a couple of more recent reports of guerrilla electricians reconnecting the power to people who have been cut off by the state utility monopoly for inability (or unwillingness) to pay the austerity-inflated charges.

Some tabs that have crossed my browser in recent days:

• Pete Brace, an environmental activist from the U.K., stopped filing his tax return in 2014, relying on a law that makes it a crime to encourage or assist the commission of various crimes (such as crimes facilitated by taxpaying, thanks to government negligence about climate change). Brace shares his correspondence with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs at his website. This may be helpful to other resisters trying to navigate that government’s tax collection bureaucracy, and perhaps also a source of inspiration to climate change activists curious about adding tax resistance to their set of tactics.
• Some more details are emerging about the tax strike launched in Lebanon. The activists have been testing the waters for some time now to see how much support they can expect, but now seem to be putting a broad tax strike into effect including municipal taxes, income taxes, value-added taxes, government-run utility bills, and traffic tickets. Businesses are being encouraged to pay wages in cash to facilitate resistance by their employees.
• The IRS has declared that it plans to step up its face-to-face visits with “taxpayers with ongoing tax issues”.

  The IRS routinely conducts these face-to-face visits. The primary factors of these visits are to make contact with taxpayers who have a previously known tax issue that wasn’t resolved through mail contact. The first face-to-face contact from a revenue officer is almost always unannounced.

  The article notes that the IRS will announce that it plans to conduct such visits in a particular area ahead of time (how this announcement will be made is left vague).
• I noted a news mention of some “sovereign citizen”-style tax resisters from Florida. One thing that caught my eye was their insistence that they’re “aboriginal indigenous Moorish Americans” which I remember from the bizarre mythology of the Nuwaubian cult which I’d investigated years ago. But I was also intrigued by the outline of their interesting fraud, which involved claiming to the IRS that they’d won the lottery but (apparently) had had too much money withheld for taxes, and so were due a refund. “The IRS paid them $3.4 million before the agency realized the pair had never purchased a winning ticket, prosecutors say.” Flush with success, they pushed their luck, claiming to win the lottery year after year after year, and not giving up even after the IRS raided the home of one of the schemers.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with the robot hordes taking casualties in France, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Australia in recent weeks.
• The Greek government is considering extreme measures to crack down on a culture of tax evasion. The Prime Minister has proposed legislation that would require people to use traceable, electronic payment systems rather than cash for many transactions. One way they would enforce this would be that if a Greek citizen did not spend at least 30% of their income via these traceable means, they would be subject to an additional 22% tax on the untraced portion.