How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
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The Agape Community →
Brayton & Suzanne Belote Shanley
Agape was founded in when Brayton and Suzanne Shanley and a few friends decided they needed to live their Catholicism according to the uncompromising dictates they understood from the Gospels.
“We had a strong conviction that we didn’t want to go the mainstream American way.
We had a deepening understanding that we had to be voluntarily displaced, you need to live differently to really follow Christ,” recalled Suzanne Shanley, former teacher and now a hearty woman in her early 60s with a wise bearing.
“I didn’t know how that would become concrete until I started studying my Catholicism through Daniel Berrigan,” she said, referring to the Jesuit priest, poet and longtime antiwar activist.
“What did it mean to be a Catholic teacher, to be a Catholic person?
It was a series of movements and revelations about what my faith really is.
It was reading scripture in a true and unvarnished way to find my faith.”
The Shanleys and cofounder McCarthy believed Christ preached an end to war.
But being American taxpayers made them complicit in the military actions of the United States, their dollars paid for contra weapons in Central America and for the nuclear arms race that was imperiling the planet.
So they decided to stop paying taxes.
Some tax resisters refuse to pay the government what they owe and instead redirect the same amount of earnings to nonmilitary causes they support.
The nascent Agape community instead decided to live below the taxable income, currently a household income of about $20,000 a year.
“We were reducing our lifestyle.
If you are going to live under taxable income, well, food is very expensive,” Suzanne Shanley said with a laugh.
So they looked for land where they could grow their own food.
The search led them to Hardwick, a tiny central Massachusetts village in the Worchester diocese, just up the road from Ware, a faded mill town.
On 32 acres of land they set up camp, planted vegetables, built a hermitage and began offering hospitality to anyone who wanted to join in their study of nonviolence.
Accompanying the interesting article is a sidebar on tax resistance that was lazily cribbed from Wikipedia.
(Whatever; I’ve put a lot of work into that Wikipedia page in part so that reporters will be more likely to treat the subject intelligently, so I shouldn’t complain.)
The documentary Path of Greatest Resistance is now available on-line.
It was made by Bill Hector Weye and Emily Harding-Morick in .
It focuses on the arrest of Randy Kehler during his war tax resistance, but covers the war tax resistance movement in general, particularly the local war tax resistance scene in Western Massachusetts.
Aside from Kehler, some of the resisters who appear in the documentary are Andrea Ayvazian, Daniel Sicken (who performs the best war tax resistance blues tune I’ve yet heard), Wally Nelson, Brayton & Suzanne Shanley, Henry Lappen, Amy Martyn, and Erik Schickendanz.
Tax resistance history buffs (there must be more of us out there somewhere) will appreciate the shout-outs to the Shays Rebellion, another tax revolt in Western Massachusetts 200 years earlier.
Occasionally, tax resisters will join forces to form cooperative housing or business relationships that help to facilitate their resistance.
This is most often found among war tax resisters, for whom resistance is an ongoing commitment rather than a protest or rebellion against a particular government or policy.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of this that I have encountered in my research.
The Bijou community of Colorado Springs, Colorado is a living example of nonviolent community resistance in the “belly of the beast” of right-wing military and Christian extremism.
The members of this community live below a taxable income level so that they don’t pay for war.
In addition to ongoing bannering and civil disobedience at some of the 5 major military institutions in the area, the Bijou community runs services for the mentally-ill, homeless, working poor, incarcerated, and the general community including: a soup kitchen, food banks, a land trust, several homes for transitional and homeless folks, a free bicycle clinic, and a musical theater group.
The Agape Community
The Agape Community was founded in by a group of Catholics who wanted to live closer to the ideal of Christian community they found in the Bible.
Among the founders were tax resisters Brayton & Suzanne Shanley and Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
They formed the community in such a way that it could support itself with members earning less than a taxable income, for example by being able to grow their own food.
The Shanleys have stayed with the two-house community since its founding, and it has had dozens of more transient residents through the years.
The community hosts speakers and workshops on nonviolence and related topics.
The Whiteway Colony
A group of Tolstoyans made a go of creating a colony based on their interpretation of Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism, which included tax resistance, and was eventually the home to forty people.
The land was operated by a committee headed by noted Tolstoyan (and Tolstoy translator) Aylmer Maude, and this committee held the land in trust, while allowing anyone to settle on and work the land, with the understanding that nobody would own any of it except by virtue of being engaged in occupying and working on it.
(The Whiteway community still exists, but has abandoned the more radical communal-ownership principles — today the land is communally owned, but the homes on it are bought and sold as private property.)
Possibility Alliance
The Possibility Alliance farm is a simple-living showcase guided by the following five principles: radical simplicity, service, social activism, inner work, and gratitude.
It hosts free skills-share classes and a group called the Superheroes who dress up like caped crusaders and bike out to do good deeds here and there.
The founders are war tax resisters who resist by maintaining a very low (sub-poverty line) income.
Joanne Sheehan
When the Hartford Courant profiled war tax resisters Anna Aschenbach and Joanne Sheehan, who have been resisting taxes since the Vietnam War, it noted Sheehan’s participation in cooperative projects as being helpful to her resistance:
Along with her partner, who’s also a tax resister, Sheehan raised two kids with a family income of about $24,000. Now that their children are grown, and can no longer be claimed as deductions, each earns less than about $8,000 a year in order to keep from paying taxes.
They’ve lived in collectives and communes much of the time, sharing living expenses with other resisters.
They practice “radical simplicity” by going “back to basics” — doing things like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer, not going to restaurants or buying pre-packaged foods.
“Land League Villages”
During the rent strike that the National Land League organized against English absentee landlords in Ireland, when landlords were successful in evicting tenants who refused to pay rent, the League would try to find them (and sometimes their livestock) a temporary home on the land of someone who was sympathetic with the resisters.
These might grow to hold several families and were sometimes called “Land League Villages.”
Amish Milk Cooperatives
The cooperatives used by Amish communities to process and package milk turned out to be useful also when the Amish began resisting the then-new social security taxes (they believed the social security program would require them to violate principles of their faith, and after many years of resistance, they won a legal exemption from the program).
The government tried to levy the checks that the cooperative wrote to pay those of its milk suppliers who were resisting the tax, but the responsible officials of the cooperative refused to sign the checks.
Peacemakers attempted to build a decentralized and self-disciplined movement which stressed local initiative and group coordination along the lines of the nonviolent revolutionary movement in India.
Emphasis was put on building intentional communities which practiced communal living.
“Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement,” Peacemakers announced, “for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.”
Instead, Peacemakers emphasized a living program which included resistance to the draft and war taxes, personal transformation, and group participation in work for political and economic democracy.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place…
Juanita and Wally Nelson, founding members of Peacemakers, and war tax resisters Betsy Corner, Randy Kehler, and Bob Bady were among the organizers of the Valley Community Land Trust.
The trust resisted IRS attempts to seize the Corner/Kehler home for back taxes, and helped to get their home returned to them.
Art Harvey’s farm
Dorothy Day visited Art Harvey’s farm in and described it this way:
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal… by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
Peter Maurin Farm
Peter Maurin Farm
is a Catholic Worker project — a “hospitality house on the land” near Manhattan that also grows food for the urban hospitality houses.
Many of those involved in the project were conscientious objectors, and appreciated being able to be part of a self-supporting project that required its volunteers to earn little or no taxable income and so enabled them to stay under the tax line.
Collective Impressions
War tax resister Ed Guinan created a business to help facilitate the tax resistance of its employees.
One news profile described it this way:
[I]n Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS.
Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions.
A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says.
“They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.
Restored Israel of Yahweh
Similarly, members of the small religious group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh formed a small construction business and helped those of its employees who were also members of the group to resist their taxes — eventually facing criminal tax evasion convictions for this.
Notes about an especially aggressive IRS levy of Social Security payments, and about the agency’s retreat from its overzealous infliction of “frivolous filing” penalties on people who added messages of protest to their tax forms
A note about an Independence Day war tax protest at which IRS forms went up in flames, and about pioneering war tax resister Juanita Nelson’s 90th birthday
Some resources that would be appropriate for the upcoming “Nuclear Free Future Month”
News about the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering and the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters
Nuclear weapons really keep the war economy going since their very
presence requires a constant readiness for war, not to mention
maintenance and supervision. Over the next ten years, the
U.S. is
estimated to spend about $348 billion on nuclear weapons. Why work for a
nuclear-free world but pay for those weapons yourself?
Members of the
U.S. Agape
community were at Walden Pond to commemorate the anniversary.
Suzanne Shanley remarked:
We join with peacemakers throughout the world in mourning and repentance
for this unspeakable act of deliberate slaughter of a civilian
population, our sisters and brothers in Japan.
, Agape members walked with
friends from the Buddhist Peace Pagoda through Walden Pond, commemorating
the Anniversary among the crowd on the beach as the spirit of Thoreau’s
refusal to pay a poll tax for war, inspired and sustained us.
But its chairman, Stephen Hadley, is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for
greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests
of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a
member of its board of directors.
Hadley, formerly George W. Bush’s national security advisor, was appointed
to the Institute of Peace by President Obama, recipient of the similarly
ironic Nobel Peace Prize. “Peace Tax” payers may one day be able to pool
their funds with Lockheed Martin, which made a $1 million grant to the
Institute in .
Some 17,000 taxpayers in Catalonia also are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than the Spanish one, in acts of civil disobedience.
There’s a tax strike underway in Beni, North Kivu to protest the failure of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to provide security in the region.
More roadside traffic ticket generating speed cameras have been attacked in recent weeks, in South Arica and France.
Spain has moved on to using drones instead.
There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here, but Andrew Leahey connects the dots and shows how Trump’s contempt for paying his own taxes and his undermining of the prestige of government are likely to undermine “tax morale” in the United States with long-term consequences for how willing traditionally sheepish American taxpayers are to cough up their tribute.
Of the furloughed workers surveyed, more than 35% missed a rent or mortgage payment, 30% went to a food pantry, 72% experienced mental health issues, 42% wanted to make a career change and 65% were very or somewhat concerned about their finances post-shutdown.
In the open-ended response portion of the survey, an employee wrote, “We are U.S.A. citizens that have families to support.
Often we hear we deserve it, because we work for IRS.
We are doing a job that is dictated by Congress.
It is surprising how people seem to want others to hurt.
It is sort of sickening.”
Another employee described going back to work during tax season:
“With a month of catch up at my busiest season, it is so stressful.
This is the first time in 15 years I am exhausted after work and do not want to go in the mornings.
That was never the case before.”
Some links from here and there:
There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter
out, with content that includes:
Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
I’ve covered the case of anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman a few times before.
He managed to get a hung jury in his previous trial, but then the judge decided he’d prefer a conviction and so refused to allow Bowman to present key parts of his defense during the retrial.
That strikes me as a significant thumb on the scales of justice, but such is how things go in the United States these days.
In any case, at his retrial without benefit of a jury Bowman was convicted and was recently sentenced to probation and $138,026 in restitution.
He says also that the court case has financially ruined him.
He plans to appeal.
War tax resister Alan Barnett has died.
Barnett organized a phone tax resistance group in California during the Vietnam War that included hundreds of resisters.
Spray paint seems to be the tool of choice in the latest human attacks on traffic ticket robots.
People blinded the cameras with paint in the United States, Germany, and France, while other methods were used elsewhere in France.
