When the IRS seized the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner for fourteen years of back taxes, their community rallied around them, and the civil disobedience was only beginning.
Then “When a young couple buys the contested home at auction from the U.S. government for $5,400, they become involved in a political and moral battle much larger than what they originally bargained for.”
Rick Gee published a very thorough review of the movie a few years back that, depending on your tastes, will either give away too much of the “plot” or whet your appetite to see it.
, war tax resisters in New England have been gathering at the Woolman Hill Conference Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
The Greenfield Recorder is covering the conference.
’s article mentions Ruthy Woodring, Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner, Aaron Falbel, Frances Crowe, Daniel Staub, Juanita Nelson, Erik Schickendanz, and Daniel Sicken.
Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable.
Hooray for Google, says I.
Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:
A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):
The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.
…
Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.
Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
[C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes
were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.
Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year
uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax
department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of
Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax
revenues totalled some $90 million.
The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting
taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks
urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no
police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under
Israeli control.
“Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef
Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the
ceremony today in Ramallah.
“Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of
praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying
means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”
Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said
he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.
Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective
because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to
places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and
would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force,
he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.
Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to
the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever,
one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the
editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what
you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche
on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might
take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the
shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but
in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader
(one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just
trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to
be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a
barely-legible photocopy.
Colrain, Mass., —
Three years before he founded the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in
St. Louis in
, Randy Kehler started protesting the
Government’s military budget by not paying his Federal income taxes.
the Internal Revenue Service
seized Mr. Kehler’s modest house, tucked in a valley among apple orchards and
farms, and told him it would be sold unless he paid $20,000 in back taxes
plus $7,000 in interest.
Mr. Kehler, a lobbyist, and his wife, Betsy Corner, say they will neither pay
money to the Government nor move out of their house if they are ordered to be
evicted. They have urged members of their community not to bid on their
house. So far, nobody has.
A spokesman for the revenue service, Frank Keith, said it had not kept
statistics on tax protesters since , when
there were 21,300. Tax resistance groups estimate that
year, 10,000 to 20,000 Americans will not
pay income taxes or will pay less than what they owe to protest military
spending.
Tax Money to Charities
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner pay state and local taxes each year. They figure
out how much they owe the Federal Government and send a Form 1040 to the
I.R.S.,
but the money involved is sent to charities.
“I spent years trying to stop nuclear weapons through legal channels, through
legislation and education, but not one single production line has been shut
down,” said Mr. Kehler, adding that he was more than willing to sacrifice his
home for the sake of his conscience.
The
I.R.S.,
imposes stiff criminal and civil penalties against people and organizations
that do not file tax returns or do not pay in full. People who do not pay for
reasons of conscience are treated no differently from other evaders. The
deadline for filing a Federal income tax return this year is
.
The Tax Resistance Movement
Tax resistance organizations say their numbers have been rising gradually,
especially among people who choose to deduct a token amount from what they
legally owe. Some boycott the Federal excise tax on telephone service, the
revenue of which has been used to help finance the military.
Like Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner, many other tax resisters shape their lives
around a decision not to pay taxes. They remain self-employed; employers
could withhold the hated taxes from their pay. Most do not have bank accounts
or other assets that could be seized. Some deliberately keep their income
below taxable levels: $4,950 for a single person, $8,900 for a married couple
under the age of 65.
Last week, a Federal district judge in Philadelphia heard arguments in a suit
filed by the Internal Revenue Service against a Quaker church that the
Government has charged with refusing to withhold over $11,000 in taxes from
employees who object to paying them.
How Some Penalties Worked Out
Prosecution of tax resisters does not appear uniform. Bob Bady, a next-door
neighbor of Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner, said he had not filed a return since
and had not been penalized. Rabbi Michael
A. Robinson of Temple Israel in Croton,
N.Y., began paying only
70 percent of his taxes to protest the Vietnam War, and the revenue service
seized his bank account and began a six-year audit that ended in
. “In the end, they got more money than they
would if I had paid my tax, because of the interest on it,” he said.
Americans have been protesting the use of tax money for military purposes
since before the Federal income tax was created in
by the 16th
Amendment. Thoreau refused to pay taxes levied for the Mexican War of
and encouraged other citizens to
do the same. He spent a night in jail.
The story of how Kehler & Corner lost and then regained their house, and
how a community of supporters used the seizure as an educational opportunity,
is told in the film An Act of Conscience.
Bob Bady is still resisting taxes, now from Vermont.
Michael Robinson had the honor of having been arrested alongside Martin Luther
King in . His home was a way station for
conscientious objectors fleeing for Canada during the Vietnam War. He moved to
California in and was active in the peace
movement there; he died in .
Colrain Journal; Peace Advocates Turn Tax Resistance Into a Ritual
Colrain, Mass., —
Every Thursday morning , a small group of out-of-towners has trudged down a dirt road in this quiet Berkshire community carrying colorful hand-sewn banners to the doorstep of a small white farmhouse.
Stopping in the front yard, they are greeted by others, who form a circle and join hands to sing songs of defiance and world peace in a ceremony evocative of the 60’s.
They have come to protest the size of the nation’s military budget in a house that has become a symbol of tax resistance.
The participants have two things in common: they do not believe in paying Federal taxes to finance the United States military, and, pointing to the end of the cold war and evidence of social unrest in the nation, they believe the time is ripe for a revival of their cause.
“Everybody’s become more restless and disgusted with the major parties in government,” said David Dellinger, who was a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial and who came to Colrain with a group from Vermont.
The Chicago Seven were anti-war protesters charged with various offenses related to disruptions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Everywhere people go now, there’s crime in the cities, homelessness, drugs, poverty, unemployment,” said Mr. Dellinger, now 76 years old.
“I think people are going to decide we didn’t win the cold war.
The Soviet people lost and we lost.”
Mr. Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain house, which was seized by the Internal Revenue Service in because its owners had not paid $27,000 in Federal taxes and interest.
The tax-resister owners, Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, did pay their local and state taxes.
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals .
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.
Seven protesters were arrested on the day the house was auctioned but were released after the auction.
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Others, like Purusha Obluda, come to resurrect values of their past.
Mr. Obluda met Mr. Kehler in California after being jailed for blocking the Oakland induction center.
During his week’s stay at Colrain house, Mr. Obluda, 64, typed a letter to the Government saying he would not pay his income tax .
“I don’t expect to file for the rest of my life,” he told others before he left to go home to Palo Alto, Calif.
The I.R.S. says it stopped counting tax refusers in the mid-80’s because the numbers were so small.
The sale of the house to Danny Franklin, a 22-year-old part-time police officer from the nearby town of Greenfield, has added a twist to the protest, which seeks among other things more attention for housing needs.
The house sits on land owned by the Valley Community Land Trust, a private trust formed to preserve open space and affordable housing in the area, said John J. Stobierski, Mr. Franklin’s lawyer.
Mr. Franklin is waiting for the trust to confirm that he can assume the 99-year lease before moving into the house with his fiancee and 5-month-old child.
From his office in the Traprock Peace Center in nearby Deerfield, Mr. Kehler said that he felt sorry for the young couple who bid on his house but believed that they had made a “mistake.”
“In our view, they have wittingly or unwittingly assisted the Government in collecting taxes from us,” he said.
Mr. Kehler, 47, a self-employed public policy researcher, spent 10 weeks in jail after his arrest and was released on the day the house was sold.
He and his wife, Ms. Corner, and their 12-year-old daughter are staying at a friend’s home near their former house.
Ms. Corner, a self-employed landscape architect, still returns to tidy up the house she lived in for 13 years.
She bristles at those who have written letters in the local paper saying she is setting a bad example for her daughter, Lillian.
“We aren’t paying for bombs and she understands that,” Ms. Corner said.
“People can’t get away from the fact that we’re breaking the law.
But this country was founded by breaking the law.”
The house siege was the subject of the movies An Act of Conscience and Path of Greatest Resistance, and you can also read more about how it played out in the following Picket Line entries:
Arthur Harvey, then an organic farmer from Hartford, Maine, was profiled in Samuel Fromartz’s book Organic, Inc. because of his legal battle to make sellers who use the “organic” buzzword adhere to the genuine standards of that variety of food production.
In the course of this, Formartz also mentions Harvey’s war tax resistance:
It was not the first time Harvey had gone up against the federal government.
As a tax resister opposed to military spending, “especially nuclear weapons, and the export of arms and military forces to many places around the world,” Harvey had refused to file or pay federal income taxes since .
His wife, Elizabeth Gravalos, hadn’t paid federal taxes since .
Instead, they donated time and money to social service and environmental organizations.
The IRS had come knocking at their door a couple of times, then seized the family’s property in and demanded $62,000 in back taxes and penalties — about three times the annual income of the farm.
When they did not pay, the IRS took the rare step of auctioning off the property at a town office across the street from their house, with protesters outside.
They initially lost the blueberry field to a bidder, though luckily no one bid on the house, perhaps because it had only rudimentary plumbing and no electricity.
Eventually, Gravalos’s mother bought the house, and the couple’s daughter successfully bid on another parcel of the land, which she later swapped for the blueberry field.
They were back in business.
Harvey, an affable and intelligent man with a wiry physique, perhaps owing to his vegetarian diet, said the lesson he learned from that fight was not to stop being a tax resister, but to avoid owning property in his own name that could be seized by the government.
“We own a couple of cars, so I guess they could go after those, but they aren’t worth much,” he told me.
Aaron Falbel wrote about the blueberry-growing couple for the War Resisters League’s magazine in :
Arthur Harvey has not filed a federal tax return or paid income tax .
His partner, Elizabeth Gravalos hasn’t filed or paid .
Until recently, the Internal Revenue Service gave them little trouble.
“They visited us twice, once around and again around , back when we lived in New Hampshire,” Harvey says.
“Probably they concluded we had nothing much worth taking and perhaps were not subject to much tax anyway,” he adds.
But after the Gravalos/Harvey family moved to Maine ten years ago, earned a bit more money, acquired a house, two wood lots and a blueberry field and started paying state taxes (New Hampshire has no state income tax, but Maine does), the IRS began to take notice.
, the IRS seized their properties in lieu of tax payments assessed at $62,000 (including interest and penalties) for an astonishing figure, considering the family’s annual income from their blueberry and flower business averages about $16,000.
Going Once…
The IRS held an auction at the town office across the street from the Gravalos/Harvey home.
“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted.
But she was far from alone.
About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.
To demonstrate the power and the good that can come out of war tax redirection, Harvey, Gravalos and their family and friends raised over $3,000 to pay off the local property tax liens of seven Hartford residents.
The auction didn’t last long.
When Gravalos and her family emerged stoically from the town office, she announced, “The good news is that no one bid on the house.”
Emily Harvey, Arthur and Elizabeth’s daughter and a sophomore at Wellesley College, bid on (and won) the small half-acre wood lot on behalf of her younger brother Max.
(Max, at age 16, was legally too young to enter a bid.)
The town selectman and town clerk teamed up to buy the larger 21-acre wood lot, and another Hartford resident bought the blueberry field.
Harvey speculated that the reason no one bid on the house was that the minimum bid was too high: $21,000 for a house with no electricity or indoor plumbing.
At the conclusion of the auction, the IRS declared that they would reevaluate the minimum bid and hold another auction .
Going Twice…
The minimum was eventually set at $7,900. Gravalos and Harvey had originally discouraged friendly bids on their house, feeling that the price was too high.
“We really did not want the IRS to get that much money,” Harvey said.
But for the second auction, with a lower minimum bid, they didn’t discourage people who would buy the house back for them, even though that meant surrendering money to the IRS.
Harvey explained that what matters most for him is making a strong public statement, bearing witness to the government’s violence: “Our reason for non-cooperating with the IRS is a reluctance to support war preparations, especially nuclear weapons, and the export of arms and military forces to many places around the world.
Others have gone a lot further in their war tax resistance than we have, and we honor and respect those people.
For [them], the most important thing is to withhold money from the IRS at all costs.”
That, he acknowledged, is not his style of war tax resistance.
“There are and there have been war tax resisters who have gone that far.
My friend Ammon Hennacy [the legendary pacifist connected with the Catholic Worker movement] was one.
Our approach is more complicated to describe and more flexible in practice.”
He scoffed at a news article that described him as “unwilling to pay one penny to the IRS.”
“We have three cars,” he noted, referring to the federal tax on gasoline that he pays every time he fills up at the pump.
About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine.
Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
(As at the first auction, money was given away, this time to groups doing the kind of work tax dollars could fund: $500 to the local Abused Women’s Advocacy Project and $500 to a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.)
Still Here
In the end, Elizabeth’s mother entered the winning bid for the house at $15,633. The town clerk and town selectman, who bid at the first auction, entered the only other bid of $8,000. The latter two were clearly miffed at having lost such a “bargain.”
(One war tax resister described them as “a picture of greed thwarted.”)
The clerk, clearly irate, asked, “Why was it okay for her [Elizabeth’s] mother to bid, but not for me?”
A week later, Arthur Harvey reflected on the clerk’s comment, questioning in turn the propriety of the town officials’ taking advantage of a family in a weakened financial position.
“That does not seem to me to be a proper thing for a town official to do,” he said.
Elizabeth Gravalos thinks the answer to the town clerk’s question is obvious: “The two of them were trying to take our house from under us, whereas my mother was trying to help us out, to help us continue our way of life here.”
Though Gravalos had dissuaded her mother from bidding at the first auction, she did not try to stop her at the second.
“It was harder to lose the blueberry field [at the first auction] than I thought.
I just didn’t feel I was ready to lose the house,” she admitted.
Harvey and Gravalos calculated that the house was worth somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 and suggested that $13,000 would be a reasonable bid.
Max and Emily were in favor of a friendly bid; Max especially did not want to have to move.
“The alternative,” Arthur noted, “would be to go the Randy and Betsy route and not countenance a friendly bid and then risk eviction.
We, as a family, decided not to go that route.”
(He was referring to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, war tax resisters from Colrain, MA, whose supporters maintained an 18-month-long occupation/vigil after Kehler was arrested in and his and Corner’s house was auctioned off by the IRS.)
In the end, Arthur admitted, the auction “was something of a letdown.”
The IRS got a fair amount of money, $39,460 in all more money, he speculated, than it would have gotten if the family had filed and paid taxes all along.
Gravalos reflected, “Betsy and Randy did a better job at resisting the IRS than we did.
But each family has to draw its own line.
I really did not want to stage an occupation [as they did].”
So what does it mean for war tax resistance when the IRS manages to walk away with such a considerable sum?
Interestingly, Gravalos and Harvey do not think of themselves as having failed.
Along the spectrum of war tax civil disobedience, they are tax resisters rather than tax refusers.
(War tax resisters do not willfully hand over money to the Pentagon, but if the government nonetheless forcibly seizes money from them, they take those lumps, as it were; war tax refusers tend to put up more of a fight and are unwilling to let the government collect any money or assets whatsoever.)
But they believe both resisters and refusers provide witness to the backward priorities of the federal government.
“When it comes to war tax resistance,” Gravalos adds, “anything is better than nothing.”
Their 51 years (between them) of resistance to military spending and the redirection through the years of those war tax dollars is not to be scoffed at.
And what of the future?
Gravalos and Harvey do not hesitate when they are asked whether or not they will continue their war tax resistance.
Says Arthur, “We will continue our stand of non-cooperation, but we will certainly make sure not to find ourselves in such a position where we own so much property.”
And Elizabeth adds, “I do feel that the risks of paying taxes are greater than the risks of refusing to pay them.”
“He almost failed to graduate from high school after refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the laws and constitution of the United States.
‘I could support the Constitution,’ he said, ‘but I certainly wasn’t going to support all the laws.
They told me I was failing the rest of the students in my home room.
But I didn’t have much loyalty to my home room.’
Eventually the school gave him his diploma anyway.”
“In Michigan, a man who had recently returned from India lent him a book by Gandhi.
He was immediately struck by Gandhi’s arguments in favor of self-reliance and against excessive consumption.
In the late 1950s, Harvey spent six months in prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, for invading a missile base in Nebraska with a group of fellow peace activists.
‘Prison was a blast.
I was in there with one of my very best friends [Ammon Hennacy] and we played horseshoes and Scrabble and spent lots of time in the library.’
His tenure as library clerk ended when he refused to compile a list for the prison authorities of the books each prisoner was borrowing.”
A newspaper article
on educational outreach efforts by the pacifist non-violent action group Peacemakers, quoted Harvey on the nature of the group: “We are a radical pacifist organization.
We are against war preparation and against use of income tax for war purposes.
Our members also oppose mandatory registration for the draft.
However, we are not communists.
We believe the best defense is a strong spiritual one, in the tradition of the Indian leader Gandhi.”
The Sun-Journal of Lewiston, Maine, covered the tax auction in a pair of articles:
“Hands off our homes”
Couple protests on day before auction
by Mary Lou Wendell Sun-Journal Staff Writer
Auburn — The message on one of the placards held by many of the 50 or so protesters marching down Center Street morning was simple: “Honor family values.
Hands off homes.”
Accomplishing their goal for the day was not going to be so simple, however.
They were on their way to Lewiston to convince the Internal Revenue Service to halt the sale of property seized for nonpayment of taxes.
Arthur Harvey, who, before it was taken, owned the house and land in Hartford Center together with his wife Elizabeth Gravalos, led the march.
In his pants pocket was a letter the group eventually hand-delivered to the Lewiston IRS office on Main Street after walking there from the Auburn Mall, which took about two-and-a-half hours.
The note detailed the couple’s reasons for not paying federal taxes.
Funds collected by the federal government will “support war preparation of all kinds,” the typewritten letter read.
“This is not acceptable to our moral and religious beliefs.”
In , IRS agents served Harvey and Gravalos with a seizure notice for their property, which includes a small home and out-buildings, a 13-acre blueberry field, and 21 acres of two combined woodlots.
Selling blueberries and pansies, which is how the couple earns their living, brings in a total of $18,000 a year, Harvey said.
Based on those earnings, the government calculated Harvey and Gravalos owe $62,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties for , according to the couple.
A spokeswoman for the IRS in Boston said she would not confirm the amount owed because of disclosure and privacy laws.
Furthermore, the couple wrote in their letter to the IRS, “it is inconceivable that a family could be subject to a 49 percent tax rate, especially a low-income family including two children.”
Harvey and Gravalos have a daughter in college and a teen-age son, Max, who also marched on .
IRS
spokeswoman Peggy Riley did say the sealed-bid auction will go on as scheduled at at the town office in Hartford Center.
And if minimum bids were offered, the house and property will be sold, she said.
The minimum bid for the single family home was $20,476.98, Riley said.
The total minimum bid for everything else, which is divided into three properties, is roughly $16,000.
Against a backdrop of car dealerships, retail outlets and quick-change oil places, the protesters, who came from as far away as Chicago, walked in groups of three and four down Center Street.
Some came from New Hampshire and Vermont.
Most were from Maine.
Many of the protesters were also war-tax resistors and friends with Harvey and Gravalos.
Some had never met the couple but were marching to support their cause.
Sheila Dormody, a member of the 800-member organization, Peace Action Maine, pays her taxes, she said.
But she had sympathy for Harvey and Gravalos because she opposes disproportionate military spending, she said.
As the group hiked along, making their way across the Longley Bridge and around downtown Lewiston, Dormody passed out red fliers decrying the practice of “bloating the Pentagon… starving our communities.”
“This year Congress will give the Pentagon $7 billion more than requested,” the filer stated.
Education, mass transit, housing programs, job training and environmental spending are all the things that will be cut in order to pay for increased military spending, it said.
If the property is indeed sold , “we’ll have to find some place we can rent,” Gravalos said as she walked.
“I have a friend in Buckfield who has offered land so I can plant my pansies.”
Her husband thought it was a mistake to buy land, Gravalos said, adding he may have been right.
In hindsight, Harvey said, he would have preferred renting over owning property, which can be taken away.
But, while he and his wife have always paid their state and local taxes, he’s not sorry for not paying federal taxes, he said.
“We both understood the risk and we accepted it,” Harvey said.
It’s a matter of “personal responsibility.”
Withholding federal taxes is “a job that we can do,” he said.
Home survives IRS sale
Some of tax protesters’ Hartford property sold
by Judith Meyer Special to the Sun-Journal
Hartford — As sealed bids were opened morning, Arthur Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos heard an Internal Revenue Service employee award three pieces of their property to others, but their home was spared, at least temporarily.
The couple, who are vocal about their resistance to paying federal taxes to a government that they say is spending irresponsibly, were served a notice of seizure on their property in .
That property was offered at a public sale in a sealed bid process inside the Town Office while a large crowd of supporters from throughout New England and reporters waited outside on the lawn morning.
Harvey and Gravalos, who say they earn about $18,000 a year growing blueberries and pansies, owe the IRS $48,555 in unpaid taxes .
Their properties were seized to satisfy that debt.
Attending the bid opening were dozens of other tax resisters, including one couple who carried a large painted poster proclaiming their nonpayment of federal taxes since .
The properties offered for sale included the couple’s home, which is not equipped with running water or electricity and which uses an organic compost septic system, a small house lot, a 21-acre wood lot and a 13-acre blueberry field.
No bids were submitted for the house, and a second sealed bid opening has been scheduled for at the IRS office in Lewiston.
If the property is not sold at that time, said IRS agent Diane Santoro, who conducted the sale, the federal agency will re-evaluate the $20,476 minimum bid established for the property.
Bids were opened inside the Town Office, which was restricted to bidders, the property owners, town and federal officials and five media representatives chosen by Capt. James Miclon of the Oxford County Sheriff’s Department from a pool of reporters standing in the side yard.
The couple’s children, Emily and Max Harvey, purchased the small house lot for $727, using money 16-year-old Max had earned raking blueberries, beating out a $600 bid from the town of Hartford.
Gravalos was visibly upset that the town bid on the property.
The Town Office stands directly across the street from Gravalos’ house on Route 140, and the piece of property the town bid on was being considered as a new Town Office site.
The couple’s wood lot was sold for $10,000 to Kathleen Hutchins and Linda Rowe, both of Hartford, beating out a $9,560 bid for the land.
Hutchins is the town’s tax collector, clerk, treasurer and administrative assistant, and Rowe is a selectman, but both women said they bought the land as private citizens.
The third piece of property, the blueberry field that has been cultivated for the past eight years by Harvey and Gravalos, was sold to Alan Noyes of Hartford.
Noyes, who left immediately after the bid opening, indicated that he liked the view at the property and would be willing to talk to Harvey and Gravalos about some kind of arrangement to continue farming the land.
Harvey said after the sale, which lasted less than 10 minutes, that he and his family intended to remain in Hartford, would continue to live in their home and would continue farming blueberries on fields they planned to lease from other property owners.
“The good news is that nobody bid on our house,” Gravalos told the crowd after the sale was finished, and Harvey expressed his pleasure at seeing so many people supporting their cause.
“This is not a victory or defeat for anyone,” Harvey said.
“It’s just a part of life.”
That observation drew a large round of applause from the crowd.
And although the IRS seizure is nearly complete, Harvey said his views on tax resistance haven’t changed and he has no plans to pay any money to the federal government.
Harvey has not paid federal taxes , and Gravalos hasn’t paid .
Supporter Jim Stockwell of Albion said, “I think (Harvey and Gravalos are) very proud of what they’re doing.”
Stockwell praised their resolve to stand firm for their beliefs against increased military spending and decreased spending for education and health care.
Lee Holman, a supporter and neighbor of Harvey and Gravalos, said the couple’s commitment to paying local and state taxes and resisting paying federal taxes comes from their desire to “redirect tax dollars to build real security in this town instead of investing in a false sense of security” with the federal government.
The couple can redeem their properties in the next 180 days if they pay the bid price, plus another 20 percent, and any costs associated with the sale to the IRS.
IRS
agent Santoro declined to talk to reporters before or after the sale.
Along with that second article was this sidebar:
Anti-tax group pays off liens of five families
Hartford — The tax resisters who demonstrated in support of Arthur Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos say they are not against America’s tax system in itself and support payment of local and state taxes to help their own communities.
What they protest is the federal government’s use of the tax money, a use that they claim they have no control over.
In an effort to show support for the local property tax system, the group of resisters, who are calling themselves Spears into Pruning Hooks, walked into the Hartford Town Office just before the public sale of the Harvey/Gravalos property and paid off outstanding tax liens for five local families.
Harvey said the group paid nearly $2,200, choosing the liens to be paid off based on whether the property owner had children and actually lived in Hartford, rather than being a part-time resident.
The tax resisters did not have contact with the property owners; the payoffs were arranged through the Town Office.
The group originally offered to pay seven liens, but only five were paid because two of the families declined the group’s offer.
Tax Collector Kathleen Hutchins said the payment retired tax liens for property owners Joseph Bedard, Ann Carro, Penny Stubbs, Matthew Piantone and James Guilmet.
According to Hutchins, the property owners who declined the resisters’ offer of payment said they did not agree with Harvey and Gravalos’ stand on tax resistance.
Hutchins, who said the town has never seized any property for nonpayment of property taxes, indicated that there are others in Hartford who oppose the stand taken by the Harvey-Gravalos family.
Speaking for the group, which still has $800 in an account reserved for payment of other tax liens, Harvey said Spears into Pruning Hooks plans to continue raising funds and making goodwill gestures for struggling local taxpayers.
Harvey and Gravalos were still at it :
Federal income tax
Resisters keep incomes below filing threshold
by Kelly Morgan StaffWriter
Hartford — While many people across the country will be rushing to meet today’s deadline for filing federal income taxes, Arthur Harvey will more likely be home binding books or working on the mowers he’ll soon use to cut his blueberry fields.
It’s not that the 72-year-old organic farmer, inspector and book seller has filed early this year.
Instead, Harvey, who lives with his family across from the town office on Main Street, has not paid federal income taxes .
He won’t pay because he is opposed to where his dollars would be spent.
“My fundamental objection is to nuclear weapons,” he said Thursday while seated at a small table off his kitchen, surrounded by copies of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi.
“And also to sending U.S. military forces to other countries.”
Harvey and his wife, Elizabeth Gravalos, 61, have joined as many as 200 Mainers and 10,000 people nationally who refuse to pay their federal income taxes in protest of military spending.
“We say about 8,000 to 10,000 people,” said Ruth Benn of the Brookly, N.Y.-based National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee on , “but it’s really hard to count.”
Benn said many, like Harvey and Gravalos, keep their incomes low so they won’t have to pay.
Many others protest by refusing to pay federal taxes on their phone bills, another action that’s difficult to track.
According to information from IRS spokeswoman Peggy Riley, who’s based in Boston, the federal government faces what it calls a “gross tax gap” of $300 billion a year.
The gap, Riley explained, “is the difference between what taxpayers should pay and what they actually pay.”
Riley said the IRS does not track those who refuse to pay on the grounds of opposing military spending.
Personal property seizures and deductions from paychecks are tools the IRS uses to collect unpaid tax dollars.
In , Harvey and Gravalos nearly lost their home and 13 acres of blueberry fields they farm in Hartford.
At an auction after the properties were seized, Gravalos’ mother bought back the house.
Their daughter Emily later received back the blueberry fields in a trade after the man who had purchased them found farming difficult, Harvey said, laughing.
Harvey, Gravalos and their son Max continue to farm the fields today.
They use wood heat and kerosene lamps and drive old Volvos.
Harvey sells books on the teachings of Gandhi, which he purchases from India, through the on-line marketplace Amazon.com.
The only electricity in the house comes from a small solar panel that runs a laptop computer and, on sunny days, a copier in a back room.
Because Gravalos now works as a part-time massage therapist, she does pay Social Security taxes, Harvey said.
But she hasn’t paid income taxes .
The two file separately, each having to earn less than $3,100 in order to fall below federal tax filing requirements.
Harvey and Gravalos have taken part in efforts of the War Tax Resistance Resource Center of Maine.
People affiliated with the organization often hand out fliers at IRS centers on tax deadline day.
Larry Dansinger, a Monroe-based representative of the group, said that people are expected to be handing out fliers from Portland to Ellsworth
He himself doesn’t pay federal phone taxes.
“In our calculations, about 50 percent of every (federal income) tax dollar that people pay is going either directly or indirectly for military purposes,” he said.
Not paying, he added, “is not a nice, easy thing to do.”
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.
Another way people can assist and show solidarity with tax resisters is by coming to their assistance if their property is seized.
Here are some examples:
Practical support
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was established in .
It helps war tax resisters who have had penalties and interest added to their tax bills and seized by the IRS by reimbursing them for a large portion of these additional charges.
The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes.
The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight.
In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more.
In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
When the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner was seized for back taxes, supporters came from near and far to maintain a 24-hour occupation of the home:
[David] Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain [Massachusetts] house…
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December.
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction in , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.…
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Suffragist tax resister Dora Montefiore barricaded her home and kept the tax collector from seizing her property for several weeks in , in what came to be known as the “Siege of Montefiore.”
She noted:
The tradespeople of the neighbourhood were absolutely loyal to us besieged women, delivering their milk and bread, etc., over the rather high garden wall which divided the small front gardens of Upper Mall from the terraced roadway fronting the river.
The weekly wash arrived in the same way and the postman day by day delivered very encouraging budgets of correspondence, so that practically we suffered very little inconvenience…
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the [first] morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent.
Examples like this also proved to be vivid anecdotes that the press could use when describing the siege and the support from sympathizers.
When the U.S. government seized Amish tax resister Valentine Byler’s horses and their harnesses while he was in the field preparing for spring planting, sympathetic neighbors allowed him to borrow their horses so he could continue his work.
Other sympathizers throughout the country who heard about the case sent Byler money — more than enough to buy a new team.
An auctioneer who was dragooned into helping the government sell some of the livestock of a man who had been resisting taxes meant to pay for sectarian education in , donated the fee he had earned for conducting the auction to the resister.
During the water charge strike in Dublin, “local campaign groups successfully resisted attempts to disconnect water and in the couple of instances where water was cut off, campaigners re-connected it within hours.
The first round was won hands down by the campaign and it was back to the drawing board for the councils.”
Similar monkeywrenching is being practiced today in Greece, where activists promptly reconnect utilities of people who have been disconnected for failure to pay the increased taxes attached to their utility bills.
During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh, people sympathetic to the resisters would bid on and return furniture and other items that had been seized and sold by the tax collectors.
The Rebecca Rioters, on the other hand, were characteristically more direct in their resistance:
Warrants of distress were issued… and the constables proceeded to execute them…
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.…
At Maesgwenllian near Kidwelly, several bailiffs were put in possession for arrears of rent to the amount of £150, but about , Rebecca and a great number of her followers made their appearance on the premises, and after driving the bailiffs off, took away the whole of the goods distrained on.
As soon as daylight appeared, the bailiffs returned, but found no traces of Rebecca, nor of the goods which had been taken away.
A group in Olive Hill, Kentucky in followed the Rebecca model, to an extent, “in a raid… by a band of between 800 and 900 men, who forced Levi White, Collector of Taxes, to give up a stock of goods which had been seized.
The goods were then taken back to the store of Levi Oppenheimer, where the official had seized them.”
Last year in Oaxaca, the PRI said that the would “defend up to the point of injunctions those citizens who suffer from liens imposed as well as judgments in order to prevent the impounding of vehicles, considering it unconstitutional that the police will impound them to stop the driver and remove the unit if the striker does not pay the corresponding [vehicle] tax.”
The IRS auctioned off a portion of Ralph Shinaberry’s property in after he refused to pay a fine for growing more wheat on his farm than his government-assigned quota.
“I don’t believe the Government can tell me how much I can grow,” he said, explaining his resistance.
The winning bidder, Herbert Jessup, told a reporter:
“I have no intention of taking possession of the property.”
When war tax resister Cosmas Raimondi’s car was seized by the IRS in , a handful of families in his parish offered to permanently loan him their car so he could still get around, and many others loaned him their cars temporarily.
“I’ve not had to ask one person,” he said.
In Beit Sahour, when the Israeli occupation authorities seized furniture and appliances from resisters, relatives and others would loan them spares, or camping furniture to use as replacements.
“In Bedfordshire in community pressure persuaded a minister to return goods seized from a Quaker for non-payment of tithes.”
Moral support
When Dora Montefiore was first formulating her “siege” strategy with fellow-activists Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, they agreed to organize daily demonstrations outside of her home while she was defending it.
Montefiore remembered:
The feeling in the neighbourhood towards my act of passive resistance was so excellent and the publicity being given by the Press in the evening papers was so valuable that we decided to make the Hammersmith “Fort” for the time being the centre of the W.S.P.U. activities, and daily demonstrations were arranged for and eventually carried out. …
The roadway was… ideal for the holding of a meeting, as no blocking of traffic could take place, and day in, day out the principles for which suffragists were standing we expounded to many who before had never even heard of the words Woman Suffrage.
At the evening demonstrations rows of lamps were hung along the top of the wall and against the house, the members of the W.S.P.U. speaking from the steps of the house, while I spoke from one of the upstairs windows.
…shoals of letters came to me, a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging.
Some Lancashire lads who had heard me speaking in the Midlands wrote and said that if I wanted help they would come with their clogs but that was never the sort of support I needed, and though I thanked them, I declined the help as nicely as I could. …
The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house…
When the IRS seized and auctioned off the home and farm of Art Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos in , other war tax resisters and supporters were by their sides:
“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted.
But she was far from alone.
About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.
About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine.
Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
In , the IRS levied 78-year-old war tax resister Ruth McKay’s social security checks to recoup the taxes she had been refusing to pay over the previous 20 years.
To show their support of her stand, 40 activists from New Hampshire Peace Action joined her for a vigil at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire.
When war tax resister Maria Smith’s wages were garnisheed by the IRS in , fifty supporters held a special church service in her honor.
“One of the Valod Vanias,” whose land was seized by the government during the Bardoli satyagraha, “who thus lost all his valuable property, celebrated the event by inviting friends and soldiers of Satyagraha to a party.”
On the other hand, some campaigns have taken the position that sacrifices for the cause are their own reward — that martyrdom is a blessing and that it would be foolish for such resisters to seek or accept recompense.
Nathaniel Morgan was speaking with someone curious about the Quaker stand on war and war taxes, and had this to say:
I told him then that I and my father had refused to pay the income tax on account of war, and had refused it on its first coming out, and withstood it 16 years, except when peace was declared, and that our goods were sold by auction to pay it.
This seemed to excite his curiosity, and made a stand to hear further, on the steps above the engine, going down to the river; asking me if we got anything by that, meaning, was anything refunded by the Society for such suffering.
I immediately replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”
Tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns have at times made use of barricades, blockades, and occupations to keep tax collectors at bay.
Here are some examples:
There were a number of prominent “sieges” in the tax resistance campaign that accompanied the British women’s suffrage movement.
Dora Montefiore barred the arched doorway to her home against the bailiffs in and held out for six weeks before the bailiffs broke through,
…addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.
WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.”
After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”
The “Siege of Montefiore” was a publicity coup for the movement, and served as a useful rallying point for activists.
On the little terrace of the front garden hung during the whole time of the siege a red banner with the letters painted in white: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.”
Kate Harvey barricaded her home in and it took seven months for the authorities to crowbar their way in and seize her dining room furniture to auction for back taxes.
The following year they needed battering rams to break her barricade.
The Women’s Freedom League reported, of her first barricade:
Passers-by read the bold declaration that she refuses to be taxed by a Government that refuses her representation because she is a woman.
Her continued resistance has aroused keen interest in the London and Provincial Press, and afforded excellent “copy” for numerous illustrated papers.
and of the second:
An ingenious plan of protection had been devised and carried out, and the King’s officers wrestled with the fortifications for two hours before an entry was effected by means of a battering-ram!
A newspaper article gives more details:
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
When the tax collector and bailiff came to seize goods from Isabella Harrison,
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
… The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
On an earlier occasion, Harrison had barricaded herself inside her home.
Supporters brought her food and supplies by means of a basket she lowered from a window by a rope.
There is at least one report of similar barricades in the American women’s suffrage movement.
Lillie Devereaux Blake addressed a New York Women’s Suffrage Society meeting in , and
…narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
War tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner refused to leave their home when it was seized by the U.S. government in , defying a federal court order.
When Kehler is arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court, a dozen affinity groups maintained a round-the-clock occupation of the home through .
During the Dublin water charge strike:
People were told how to block up their stopcocks to make it difficult for their water to be cut off.
Empty bean tins and a little bit of cement were the necessary ingredients.
In a group of French syndicalists and unemployed workers rallied at the home of “two of their comrades who refused to pay the income tax” and successfully deterred the police and bailiffs from appearing.
During the Fries Rebellion, officials tried to arrest Henry Shankwyler, but were foiled by a crowd of fifty supporters, who “went in advance of the officers, and, reaching the house before them,” intimidated the marshal into withdrawing without his prey.
“Some said if he were taken out of his house they would fight as long as they had a drop of blood in their bodies.
… Seeing that nothing further could be accomplished there, the officers took their leave.
As they left the house the people set up a shout and hurrahed for ‘Liberty.’ ”
Irish “Blue Shirts” held a rally in County Cork to protest government property seizures against tax resisters, and “[w]hile the conference was sitting, County Cork farmers felled trees in the roads, cut telephone wires and made other efforts to prevent further seizure of cattle for unpaid annuities.”
At one point “police fired upon a crowd attempting to prevent the forced sale of cattle seized for non-payment of taxes,” killing one.
Una Ridley, an English council tax resister, told a reporter in :
…how the couple had managed to foil efforts by bailiffs to remove property.
“So long as you make yourself secure, close all the downstairs windows and all the upstairs ones too, the bailiffs cannot make an entry,” she said.
In Samoa in , officials tried to arrest Tamasese, the head of the Mau movement, for tax refusal:
…a party of civil police attempted to arrest Tamasese at Apia, but were prevented by crowds of Mau supporters, who obstructed the police and managed to get him away in a car.
On , at Vaimoso village, another attempt was made by a party of civil police at his home.
On that occasion the police were covered by a party of 30 men from the cruisers.
Resistance was again made, and the police and the naval party, to avoid bloodshed, retired. further attempt to make an arrest was made at the home of Tamasese at Vaimoso on .
The party of six military police was stoned by women and others, and it retired.
Barricades were used successfully in the battle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
In one early case:
Over 300 people turned up outside [Jeannette McGuin’s] house.
Banners were hung out of the window saying “God Help the Sheriffs.”
The sheriffs didn’t show up and Jeannette McGuin never heard another word from them.
In some others:
[I]n Edinburgh over 300 people filled a central high street to prevent a poinding… 200 activists guarded flats in the Grass Market area… and 150 people guarded 11 flats in Stockbridge and Comely Bank.
In another:
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
Jackie Moyers of the Mayfield/Newtongrange Anti-Poll Tax Union reported:
The very first poinding which was supposed to have been taking place was in a small village called Pathead…
The back of eight o’clock everybody started coming up, they actually started running a relay service, a shuttle service with cars going to collect people, and I’d say by about half-past nine to ten o’clock we had 110 people standing in the garden.
It was a beautiful day, it was like everybody was sunbathing, having a day out; we stood about there, everybody singing songs, we had the records on, a couple of them had a wee drink, things like that, waiting on the sheriff officers coming…
The sheriff officers turned up, got on the phone and, lo and behold, a police car turned up… So the police came up and asked us if the sheriff officers could get in and I said, “Well, I’m telling you, under no circumstances whatsoever are we allowing any sheriff officers into anybody’s house to carry out a poinding.”
…So the sheriff officers turned around to the police, and says “I want him arrested, because he’s organising this,” and the police says, “well, we can’t do a thing.”
And everyone in the garden, I says to them, well, “They want me arrested.”
They says, “Well, if you’re getting arrested then all of us are getting arrested.”
And by this time, the local coalman had come up the road in his lorry, stopped his lorry and blocked the street.
The two guys at the back jumped off, and the coalman who was driving the lorry, they jumped over the fence and joined us.
The local council workers, who were doing the windows at the time, downed their tools and got in the garden and supported us.
It’s worse than jungle drums, because the local baker heard it, he came around with his baker’s van and started dishing out cakes to us.
The sheriff officers were getting quite panicky by this time.
The police got in their car and left the sheriff officers.
I told them again.
I said, “You’d better get going.
It’s a waste of your time.
We know you’re not going to get in, so there’s nothing else you can do.”
… They tried to get in for five or ten minutes and by this time the crowd were getting quite hostile, and I says, “I think you’d better go to your car while you’ve still got four wheels and you’re still able to walk.”
At Bishops Lydeard, people “divided up into small groups, and blockaded every road into the village.”
Barricades were constructed and every vehicle which tried to enter was stopped and asked its business.
… In the end, the bailiffs didn’t come near the place.
Poll tax resisters also sometimes occupied or blockaded the offices of sheriffs and bailiffs.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, blockades were used to obstruct the movement of constables when they were seeking to arrest resisters, and barricades were used to prevent property seizure.
Here are excerpts from one government investigation of the Annuity Tax disturbances:
…I saw sledge hammers and other instruments there to open the premises and get at the goods, but after labouring for half an hour or more they could not effect an entrance.
Q: Was that because Mr. Dun used some of the metal in which he was a dealer to barricade his premises?
A: Yes; tons of metal were put up against the back door, and it was impossible for them to get in.
Mr. Dunn had barricaded the door of the room where the poinded effects were, so that an entrance could not be had… I found that the room where the poinded goods were was filled up to above the centre of the room with boxes filled with plates of iron of immense weight.
We were told that the poinded goods were lying beneath those, and that we might get at them as we could.
I sent for labourers, and had the whole of those boxes removed into the front shop until I got access, after great trouble, to the sheets of brass, which were the poinded articles.
These were then declared by the sheriff officers to be of a different description, and inferior to what they had previously poinded; they refused to take them; and the only articles they recognised were some coils of copper wire; those they took to the police office, and those were all that were obtained on that occasion.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, farmers famously barricaded their homes with their cattle inside to protect them from seizure.
When the attachment operations began, minute instructions were issued to meet every situation.
In the beginning only those who had received notices were to greet the attachment parties with closed doors.
Then whole villages were turned into blackholes, and people who could not put up with the terrible strain involved were humourously asked to undertake a pilgrimage.
When it was found that in spite of the greatest precautions, the Pathans managed to carry away carts, break into enclosures and unhinge closed doors, the Sardar [resistance commander] said: “Pull your carts to pieces.
Keep the body in one place, wheels in another, and shafts in a third place; make your hedges extra strong with thorns and bushes; and fortify the doors in such a way that they might not be able to open them except by breaking them open with axes.
Exhaust them thoroughly.”
In order to save their beloved cattle 80,000 men, women, children with these cattle have locked themselves up in small and insanitary houses for over three months.
As I passed through villages, silent, empty and deserted with sentinels posted at different ends, I saw women peeping through the barred windows to see whether it was the arrival of the japti [attachment] officer and on being reassured the doors being opened I was taken inside and I saw the darkness, the stench, the filth; and the men, women and children who had herded for months in the same room with their beloved cattle — miserable, lacerated, grown whitish by disease — and as I heard their determination to remain in that condition for months rather than abandon their cattle to the tender mercies of the japti officer I could not help thinking that the imagination which conceived the dire japti methods, the severity which had enforced them and the policy which had sanctioned them were difficult to be found outside the pages of a history of medieval times.
In Alwar, India, in , blockades were used against tax collectors:
Thousands of armed Hindu Moslem [sic] peasants of splendid physique with fighting spirit are concentrating in an area of 22 square miles to repel the State tax gatherers.
The roads by which the lorries have been bringing troops have been made impassable.
The paths are blocked by huge boulders…
“Early one morning in Karl North (Rochester, N.Y.) was alerted by neighbors that the IRS had seized his car and was about to have it towed for $11.29 in unpaid telephone tax.
Without time to grab his car key, Karl rushed out of the house and lay down under the car.
This disconcerted the IRS enough that when they stopped everything to call the police, he ran back into the house, got the key, rushed back out, and drove the car off.”
Landholders in Tasmania launched a tax strike in , and when the police came with distress warrants, “Householders padlocked their gateways, and mastiffs were chained at the approaches.”
The tax resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in assembled a force to prevent the jailing of one of their comrades who had refused to pay a fine.
The Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone began when a king named Bai Bureh assembled an armed group which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that a later government investigator labeled “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities.”
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
In , drivers parked their cars in the middle of the streets in downtown Paris, blocking all traffic for 45 minutes at mid-day to protest a fuel tax.
Property seizures were also used by the British women’s suffrage movement as opportunities to hold protest rallies or for propaganda.
Here are some examples from the news of the time:
“Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.”
“Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.”
“A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L. By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.”
There’s another wave of “Tax Day” protests coming this year.
Here’s a press release from the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee about some of them:
Refusing to Pay for Cruise Missiles and Drone Strikes:
30 Years of Tax Day Antiwar Protests
On people in communities across the United States will be leafleting, marching, doing street theatre, committing civil disobedience, and picketing at post offices, IRS offices, federal buildings, among other public spaces, using materials calling attention to the harmful effects of military spending.
A list of U.S. Tax Day events with links to international actions can be found at www.nwtrcc.org/taxday2013.php.
is also the third annual Global Day of Action on Military Spending.
, during his first term, President Ronald Reagan set off a massive buildup in the U.S. armed forces that stands out on historical graphs of U.S. military budgets since World War Ⅱ.
This motivated thousands of taxpayers to resume the civil disobedience (begun during the Vietnam War) by refusing to pay taxes to buy cruise missiles and other weapons, and led to the formation of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC).
In that same year Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, risking official censure, withheld half his income tax to protest nuclear weapons, calling on others to do the same.
The spike in military spending surpasses that of the Reagan years.
Today U.S. taxpayers are buying even more expensive weapons systems, new nuclear weapons plants, assassinations by unmanned drones, and soaring interest payments on the national debt along with burgeoning health care costs for thousands of wounded veterans.
On , an ad placed in a Massachusetts weekly began, “We refuse to pay taxes for the violence of war preparations and other military expenditures including present military involvement in other countries.
Over half of the federal income taxes are used for military expenses.”
Many of the 120 signers still refuse today and still protest on tax day, joined by newer activists who have been provoked into protesting taxes for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the endless war on terror.
Massachusetts residents Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner were signers of that ad.
Despite a house seizure and other collection efforts by the IRS, Kehler and Corner say, “With the federal government running up huge deficits by spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on weapons and war, at the expense of its own people (especially its soldiers) and the people of other countries, we invite our fellow citizens to join us in saying ‘No!’ and to begin re-directing their federal tax money to local projects that meet genuine human needs.”
We were talking last week about tax resistance, and an interesting article came to our attention about a group of tax resisters in western Massachusetts
It seems that one family has refused to pay federal income tax for the past 13 years, and the IRS finally tried to auction off the family’s house to pay the tax bill.
The IRS set a minimum “floor bid” of $5,100 for the home — and no one bid it.
One bidder offered 42 blocks of ice, to symbolize the end of the 42-year Cold War.
Another bid free psychotherapy for stressed-out IRS employees.
Others offered food and other barter items.
It seems that the free spirit of Thoreau’s Walden and Shay’s Rebellion has not faded from the western Massachusetts hills, and the IRS now has title to the family’s home — but has yet to take possession.
It will be interesting to see what the taxman does with the house after throwing the family onto the street.
We’ll keep you posted.
And by the way — it appears that there are thousands of quiet tax protestors all over the nation, all refusing to pay some or all of their federal taxes.
Most of them are protesting the fact that 87% of the tax money raised goes to the Pentagon.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a great deal about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , in part because of the occupation of the Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner home which the IRS was trying to auction off, and in part because of the IRS suit against the Journal to try to force it to pay its editor’s resisted taxes, and in part because of the Peace Tax Fund bill’s first congressional hearing.
A note in the issue pointed out that politicians were playing a name game that had apparently fooled some Quakers into thinking that the telephone excise tax had been transformed into something benign:
The telephone tax continues as a source of money for military expenditure, contrary to recent confusion about its status.
The tax, which was due to expire in , was extended under the Act for Better Child Care.
Those who proposed the act were searching for a way to finance their new program and seized upon the telephone tax as their “new” source of money.
However, the phone tax revenues continue to go into the General Fund, as always, and are not earmarked for the child care programs. More than 50 percent of the General Fund is used for military expenditure.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee recommends that conscientious resistance to the telephone tax continue, as it can have a powerful impact if enough people are involved.
an ad for NWTRCC in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also had a follow-up on the “Alternative Revenue Service” protest:
In , the Alternative Revenue Service reports that individuals redirected $104,740 of their federal income taxes away from the military to areas of human need.
The total includes $12,898 redirected through the ARS, $38,416 redirected by Alternative Funds, and $53,426 that individuals redirected to social action and relief programs. The Alternative Revenue Service campaign is designed to educate taxpayers about how their federal income tax dollars are used.
The service provides the EZ Peace Form, which participants can use in registering their opposition to military spending at the time they file their taxes.
The service reports that 70,000 EZ Peace Forms were distributed nationwide last year.
This year’s form is simplified, with clearer instructions.
The issue brought the news that the Peace Tax Fund promoters had finally managed to get a Congressional Committee hearing for their bill, which was scheduled for .
“The hearing will be informational to determine the need for such legislation, not a preparation for floor action.
The need is assessed from the testimony of both individuals and religious bodies.
The hearing will support the bill by providing a permanent public record, by lending it legitimacy, by possibly attracting more serious consideration from prospective cosponsors, and by providing a record of congressional scrutiny.
The hearing will be brief, not lending itself to extended exchanges.
However, written testimony can be added and will become part of the official record.”
A follow-up in described the latest Peace Tax Fund bill as one that “would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit qualified conscientious objectors to have part of their federal taxes — that part equal to the military portion of the federal budget — to be paid into a fund for peace-related projects.”
It encouraged readers to submit “written testimony for the official hearing record,” to publicize and perhaps attend the hearing, to contact Congressional representatives and encourage them to attend and to support the bill, and to donate money to the cause.
The issue described how the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures went — “the first actual hearing held since a Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in Congress .”
Excerpts:
“If we give the right to a person to withhold their body from a war as a conscientious objector, that person should be able to withhold his money as well.”
So spoke Sen. Mark Hatfield in his lead-off testimony…
…Several hundred spectators from across the country packed the hearing room.
Many attended as concerned individual taxpayers.
Others came as members of religious denominations and peace groups long associated with the Peace Tax Campaign.
Three chartered buses, one from Lancaster, Pa., two others from Philadelphia, swelled the numbers by some 150 supporters.
When the last of them filed in from a late-arriving bus to find all spectator seats occupied, Chairman Charles Rangel stopped the hearings momentarily, inviting standing-room only observers to move forward and to occupy empty seats normally reserved for officials and the press.
Many did so.
Veterans of peace demonstrations, several parents holding small children, young bearded men in simple dress, older couples from the peace churches created a colorful patchwork as they mixed with congressional aides, heads of foundations, and Capitol bureaucrats in business suits.
…Over 2,300 letters in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill were bound in large volumes and set on a front table to be presented to the committee.
From 50–100 such letters a day continued to arrive as of the time of the hearing.
Following the introductory testimony of Mark Hatfield, lead sponsor of the bill (S.689) in the Senate, there were also presentations by four members of Congress: Andy Jacobs (lead sponsor of the bill in the House), Nancy Pelosi, and John Conyers.…
…[A] panel of religious leaders testified.
One, Thomas Gumbleton, Roman Catholic bishop from Detroit, and past president of Pax Christi, pointed out that two of the first leaders of the church, John and Peter, said that sometimes it is necessary to obey God before obeying the law.
How much better it would be, Gumbleton said, for COs to be able to pay all their taxes, knowing their money would be used for life-affirming purposes.
William Davidson, retired Episcopal bishop of western Kansas, a CO in World War Ⅱ, has actively opposed war .
“Having lived past draft age, I have been saddened and conflicted each year having to pay taxes to support war,” he said.
The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has consistently supported war tax resistance as a religious witness.
John A. Lapp, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pa., spoke on behalf of the three historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren).
The issue of war-related taxes is one of religious freedom, Lapp said.
“Many of us feel the pain of having our religious institutions serve as tax collectors for war.”
During committee questioning, Representative Jacobs asked Rabbi [Phil] Bentley [with the Jewish Peace Fellowship], “Is [passage of this bill] going to give rise to requests for similar legislation from people who don’t want their money going for a golf course?”
…[Friends Journal] editor-manager Vint Deming, associate editor Melissa Elliott, typesetter Susan Jordhamo, and board members Robert Sutton and Sam Legg joined several hundred other citizens in packing the hearing room…
The hearing was informational, to give legislators material to use in future considerations, rather than to schedule the bill for action.
As such, it gave supporters a chance to formally present the case, get testimony in the written record, and show the depth and breadth of people’s interest in the bill.
The pace of this legislative process is frustratingly slow, but, for many of us, the hearing was a heartening experience.
There, we heard people testify in a formal legislative setting to our most deeply held beliefs.
One activist-participant said, “All my life I’ve been on the side that opposes government decisions.
It was a weird experience to see all those peace movement people in the same room with legislators.
I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor ever imagined it.
It gave me a different vision of what might be possible.”
The Peace Tax Fund Bill has come a long way , with many technical refinements, and it has a long way to go in gathering widespread support.
On we witnessed one small step in validation, acknowledgment of our beliefs, and moving the dream closer to reality.
Perhaps one day we will look back, as do those who watched the process of legalizing conscientious objection, and be glad we were involved in making it legal to follow our beliefs with our money-as well as with our bodies.
“This is not a political issue, but a moral issue of conscience,” responded Bentley…
Jacobs, in response, thanked the Rabbi and others of religious conscience who had testified.
“I am a sponsor of this bill,” he said, “but I am not a pacifist.”
He called to mind one of his favorite movies, Friendly Persuasion, and the lines spoken toward the end of the film: “It’s good to know that somebody is holding out for a better way of settling things!”
Terrill Hyde, tax legislative counsel for the Department of the Treasury, presented the Bush Administration position opposing the PTF.
She mentioned “problems of complexity, confusion, and increased administrative burden,” sure to arise if the bill were passed.
There would be no deterrent either, she said, to restrain taxpayers from inappropriately claiming CO status.
If taxpayers were allowed to designate the uses for which their tax dollars were spent, “our entire budgetary process would be undermined.”
There would likely be loss of revenue to needed federal programs.
Others, however, presented differing views.
Several speakers argued that there would likely be substantial increases in revenue as a direct result of the bill.
Many who currently refuse to pay a portion or all of their taxes would gladly pay.
Also, large costs resulting from IRS efforts to collect from tax resisters would be avoided.
Answering the criticism of how the act might increase paperwork and administrative costs, several people testified to the simple nature of the bill and of the tax filing process.
As to IRS claims that the bill raises possible legal questions, a panel of two law specialists responded.
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown University, said, “A nation that wants to protect the religious freedom of its citizens can reasonably be expected to enact legislation to enable the freedom to be expressed.”
It seems perfectly appropriate, he concluded, that such legislation be enacted.
“It is needed in addition to the Religious Freedom Act.”
Philadelphia, Pa., attorney and war tax specialist Peter Goldberger agreed.
“Legislation of this kind has a noble history in our country,” and he quoted from a letter from then-President George Washington to Philadelphia Quakers.
The nation’s laws, Washington wrote, must always be “extensively accommodated” in cases of individual conscience.
Alan Eccleston, a Quaker and an organizational development consultant from Hadley, Massachusetts, told about how, in his own tax witness, he has endured penalties, punishments, and the threat of losing his home.
The IRS has a lien on his house right now.
“Conscience must be taken into account.
Spiritual values are real.
They are not to be treated as incidental or expendable to fit the needs of the state.
This is what the First Amendment is all about.”
Ruth Flower, legislative secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation, emphasized that the Peace Tax Fund Act would not offer an escape to those who do not wish to pay their taxes, because they would have to pay the same amount either way.
It would, however, provide a legal way out of violating one’s religious beliefs in order to comply with the laws of the land.
Her point was born out by Patricia Washburn, who gave perhaps the most moving testimony of the hearing.
She talked about the challenge presented to each of us, and to her personally, in Micah 6:8: “…what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love constantly, and to walk humbly with your God?” Walking humbly requires us to acknowledge the seeds of violence in our own hearts, rather than projecting them onto someone else.
“Loving constantly” can be a discouraging and difficult task, especially in today’s climate of distrust and alienation.
“I am not opposed to paying taxes, but I find no alternative form of tax payment… Thus, I see no current alternative to withholding the military portion of my taxes… I pray that my witness is done in love and that it will help to build a bridge across the chasm of violence and fear.”
After the hearing and following the press conference, [Marian] Franz [executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund] gave a brief workshop on lobbying for the bill.
She pointed out that the testimony would now be entered in written record and could be referred to in the future.
She added, “the fact that we got a hearing is absolutely amazing.”
Many other pieces of legislation have not yet been so lucky, and the demand is great.
“If all members of the committee had been present, they all would have been deeply moved, and we would be a lot further down the road.”
Franz encouraged people, when lobbying, to talk in terms of conscience, as defined by Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, who said, “Deep inside, each one of us finds a law that we did not put there.
It tells us to do this and shun that.”
That is what puts the issue of paying taxes for war in the arena of religious decisions and touches on every individual’s right to follow their faith — whether they are housewives, bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, or politicians.
That is why it is important to keep trying to open doors and ears and minds.
Marian Franz has a suggestion for how to approach people: “Talk to aides and legislators as though you’re sharing something personally.
You will often find that when you are talking about conscience, people are moved deeply.”
The issue also plugged “Good Use: Songs of Peace, Tax & Conscience” — “a tape of War Tax Resister Songs, featuring Charlie King, Luci Murphy, Geof Morgan, Lifeline, and others.
It was produced by Don Walsh, who donates the royalties.”
The lead editorial (by Vinton Deming) in the issue concerned the ongoing Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner case:
Finding Affinity
Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have been tax resisters .
They have given the tax money instead to a variety of groups doing constructive community work.
the IRS has been trying to sell their house in Colrain, Mass., in an effort to collect $25,896 in back taxes — but it hasn’t been easy.
First of all, there’s been a growing tax resistance movement there in Franklin County.
Bob Bady and Pat Morse, for instance, had their house seized and auctioned in .
(They still live in the house, however, and the buyer hasn’t taken possession.)
Shelburn Falls dentist Tom Wilson had his dental license revoked when he refused to cooperate with IRS.
(He continues his practice, however; even the local sheriff remains one of his regular patients).
So when the word got out that IRS planned to auction Betsy and Randy’s house, supporters in large numbers turned up on the announced day to oppose the sale.
There were lots of signed bids (such as an offer to clean the teeth of an IRS agent, others pledging to do community work or to be peace activists for life) — but no cash buyers came forward.
Not a one.
So, in , IRS upped the ante.
Betsy, Randy, and daughter Lillian, 12, were given an eviction notice.
When Randy decided to stay, he was held in contempt and tossed in the county jail for 6 months.
This didn’t go unnoticed by friends and neighbors, however.
A sign-up sheet got circulated, and volunteers committed themselves to stay in the house around the clock.
There’s been a continuous presence there .
Groups from as far away as Washington, D.C., have signed up to come and help out.
In , members of Mount Toby (Mass.) Meeting formed such an affinity group for a week.
Meanwhile, Randy stays in jail and makes the most of his time there.
He has made friends with many of the prisoners, has organized a chess tournament, and does what he can to interpret his tax witness.
Allan Eccleston, member of Mount Toby Meeting, has been approved as the meeting’s official minister and visits Randy twice a week.
So what’s next?
IRS has scheduled another auction, this time out of the area in Springfield, Mass. — in the hope, it seems, of attracting a buyer for the house, someone who doesn’t know about this whole chain of events.
Randy will not be there to talk about it, but lots of his friends will.
Even if the house is sold, the issue will be far from over.
The house is part of a land trust (Randy and Betsy own the house but not the land on which it stands) — and there’s the likelihood of a continuing nonviolent presence in the house to welcome any potential new buyer.
How might Friends respond?
I asked this question in of Francis Crowe, long-time head of the American Friends Service Committee office in western Massachusetts and a supporter of Randy and Betsy.
She suggests:
Form an affinity group to help sustain the presence in the house.
(To be scheduled, contact Traprock Peace Center…
Funds are also needed to support the action (checks made out to “War Tax Refusers Support Committee”…).
Letters to the editor on the subject of taxes and militarism are always helpful.
More sponsors are needed in Congress for the Peace Tax Fund bill.…
At a rally in support of Betsy and Randy, Juanita Nelson — who, with husband Wally, has been a tax refuser for decades and is known to many Friends — offered these words by Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it.”
Good advice as another tax season is upon us, when many of us seek to find our way on this difficult question of taxes for war.
In a later issue, David Zarembka reported in a letter-to-the-editor about how the occupation / blockade of the Kehler/Corner home was proceeding:
On , federal marshalls arrested seven members of the Flowing River Affinity Group who were occupying the Kehler/Corner home and removed the furniture into storage.
At , the IRS sold the house to the highest bidder in an auction for $5,400. The seven affinity group members were released from jail later in the afternoon.
So was Randy, who had served two months of his sentence.
Do not think, however, that Betsy and Randy have lost their home in an exotic cause!
As soon as the federal marshalls left the house, an affinity group reoccupied it, and other groups, including one from Washington, D.C., of which I am a member, have continued to occupy the house on a 24-hour basis.
Affinity groups, which occupy the home for a week each, have been organizing , but new ones are still being formed…
The “buyers,” a young couple with a two-month-old son, have visited the house several times but have not as yet forced the issue.
They are consulting with their lawyers.
Betsy and Randy have become members of the Colrain Neighbors Affinity Group, which will occupy the home for the week beginning .
They and their twelve-year-old daughter, Lillian, will move back into their home when they can comfortably live there once again.
I would hope that this action would lead Friends to consider how their cooperation with the federal tax collection process — even those who are symbolic tax resisters or those who force the IRS to take their taxes from them — allows the present military system to thrive.
A report in that issue on the Canadian Yearly Meeting that had taken place noted that:
Canadian Yearly Meeting, in its role of employer, was asked to refuse to remit that portion of its employees’ taxes that will be used to support the military.
Concern was expressed by the yearly meeting’s trustees, who would bear the legal results of such actions.
Although the yearly meeting came close to supporting a minute for this action, it agreed to seek clearness with the trustees and monthly meetings and return to this issue next year.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was largely devoted to war tax resistance.
It began with an editorial from Vinton Deming concerning his war tax resistance and the response of his employer, the Journal.
Excerpt:
From the outset, I knew it wasn’t a very practical thing to do.
The government was too powerful, and all the tax laws were against me.
I’d just end up paying much more in the end, so why not choose a better way to work for peace?
A good letter to my congressman, for instance, or a tax vigil at the federal building on Apri1 15.
But this was in .
Our war in Vietnam was just over, but the Cold War continued.
As the Reagan years unfolded, with still larger military expenditures and big cuts in domestic programs, I became even more clear: I must resist as fully as possible the payment of taxes for war.
The Journal board was always supportive of my witness.
It refused twice to honor IRS levies on my wages.
In doing so, Friends openly accepted the possibility of being taken to court one day and fined severely.
The board wrote to IRS: “Our position of noncompliance to the requests of the Internal Revenue Service is not an easy one.
We do not question the laws of the land lightly, but do so under the weight of a genuine religious and moral concern.”
Well, as they say, “What goes ’round comes ’round.”
, Friends Journal was told by the U.S. Justice Department to pay up or we’d be taken to court.…
I am grateful for the steadfastness of the Journal’s board of managers.
, it has been faithful to the Quaker peace testimony.
The road has been an uncertain and confusing one at many points, but Friends have shown courage in continuing.
In my own personal war tax journey, these words by John Stoner have served to guide: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
Sam Legg, clerk of the Friends Journal Board of Managers, gave his take on the Deming situation and on why the Journal had decided to throw in the towel and pay the IRS’s demands.
Excerpts:
… Vinton refused to pay any federal taxes.
Each tax year he sent a blank 1040 along with a letter to the president explaining his opposition to war and his unwillingness as a Friend to pay for it.
Since there was no Peace Tax Fund, Vinton reasoned, he would instead contribute the money to worthwhile projects and see that it was used for peaceful purposes.
In , the IRS served a levy on Friends Journal for $22,714.16, Vinton’s taxes for the period, plus interest and penalties.
The IRS asked Friends Journal to withhold part of Vinton’s salary each month, but the Journal Board refused, writing that “We… are in support of Vinton Deming’s conscientious witness.”
In , Friends Journal received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice reminding us of the levy on Vinton’s salary and asking us to try to “resolve this matter short of litigation.”
That is, to pay the original assessed amount plus interest and a possible 50 percent penalty on the total.
We were given until to respond.
If we were to continue refusing to honor the levy, an immediate court action would follow.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith vs. Oregon, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee have learned, teaches us that there is no way we could win such a case in court, nor could our assets be protected from seizure.
More troubling, this seizure could make others who are not involved in our decision, undergo unwelcome investigation.
Finally, a court case offers IRS the opportunity to set a legal precedent requiring the payment of the 50 percent penalty (which a sympathetic judge excused in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case last year).
We fear that the inevitable negative decision could establish that precedent and thereby restrict other individuals’ or groups’ religious freedom.
And so, most reluctantly, the Friends Journal Board has agreed to negotiate with IRS and to pay the least amount IRS will accept ($31,300) as settlement of this claim.
Our painful recognition of failure is heavy upon us.
We have to accept that our witness in its present form can no longer serve a useful purpose.
We can hope Vinton’s action and our support will have brought the issue of tax refusal to the attention of others, thereby becoming a part of the tradition of citizen pressure that in the long run eliminates or diminishes social evils such as slavery and war.
Our protest is on record.
What we will do now is support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of … which aims to reestablish the first amendment religious rights lost in the Smith vs. Oregon decision.
We also urge support for the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… which makes the same witness, but provides money to finance peace-enhancing projects.
(Needless to say, if there had been a Peace Tax Fund in , Vinton’s taxes would have been paid gladly, and there would have been no need for an IRS levy.)
We ask all those who share our concerns to join in these legal approaches to the continuing effort to convince ourselves and others of the futility of armed conflict and the necessity of finding other means to resolve human disputes.
The immediate financial challenge to the Journal is a very real one.
In a year in which we already face a substantial budget deficit, the payment of such a large lump sum adds an enormous burden.
Vinton has engaged to repay the Journal through payroll deductions over time.
We have been heartened as well, as word of our tax witness spreads, to receive gifts of support from our readers.
One contributor writes: “I hope everyone at the Friends Journal can be made aware of Friends’ approval of [your] Board action.
To help this happen, I encourage the Journal to go as public with the story as is consistent with respect for Vint’s privacy and the Journal’s limited resources.
I am convinced that other Friends will wish to help financially when so informed.”
For such words, and unexpected gifts, we are most grateful.
Readers wrote in with their feedback about the Journal’s decision, and some of their letters were printed in the issue:
Duane Magill wrote to “applaud” and “sympathize” with the Journal’s stand.
“As a war tax resister myself for the past quarter of a century, I have had some brushes with the IRS myself and know what it is like.
I also appreciate your giving publicity to the subject.
I know that not many Quakers take this position, and giving the matter this extensive coverage just might encourage more to take this stand.”
Yvonne Boeger wrote in on behalf of the Live Oak (Texas) Meeting to say that the meeting had recently “discussed the importance of war tax resistance as a means of witnessing to Friends’ long-standing opposition to all forms of war and violence” and that the Meeting was supportive of the Journal’s (and Deming’s) action.
“We send the enclosed check as a token of our support and solidarity in Friends’ resistance to war.
Thank you for the example you have set for us all.”
Lillian and George Willoughby wrote to express gratitude for the Journal’s “courage in standing in support of Vint Deming.”
They wrote: “Most important is the example of a Quaker religious employer providing support to staff who endeavor to live according to Friends’ teachings.
The Journal has run considerable risk and incurred heavy expenses.
We enclose our check as a demonstration of our support.
We think that many other Friends will want to help carry the financial burden of this witness.”
An editorial note in the letters column expressed “thanks to all those who have sent checks!” and a later editorial note (in the issue) said that they had received “$8,000 from individuals and meetings, $7,000 from a Sufferings Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” and almost $4,000 from Deming himself.
Mennonite war tax resister (and, according to his author bio, “itinerant prophet and spiritual retreat leader”) John K. Stoner wrote about the call he got from an IRS employee.
Excerpts:
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said “no” to paying the full amount of our income tax.
The man could not understand why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the IRS upon themselves by withholding some taxes.
But by the time the conversation was over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was, for us, a matter of faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9 kind of experience of being called before the authorities, “before governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them.
By the sound of Mark 13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you is quoting Romans 13.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes.
Taxes for Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to 1 penny for every billion dollars in the military budget.
For tax year this is $3.03, which can be mailed to Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes.
Write a letter of witness to the IRS, with copies to Congress and your local newspaper.
Redirect some taxes to education through CPT.
If the IRS calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law and that you do not enjoy being harassed by the collectors of blood money.
Go on to say that you are far more apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law.
Tell them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the bulldozed mass graves of Iraqi conscripts, fathers and husbands, and the nightmares of their children.
Explain that you are really afraid to harden you heart to the cry of the victims and that you have decided you will not take their blood upon your hands.
When Randy Kehler was thrown in prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to vacate the home that had been seized by the IRS, he prepared a statement that he hoped to read.
The court denied him permission to address it.
The Journal printed the statement he’d hoped to have made, which is a good thing: it would be a shame if such an articulate statement was left to sit unread in a file folder somewhere.
My refusal to give up our home is not an act of contempt or defiance of your court order.
I regard it as an act of conscience and also an act of citizenship.
The two go hand in hand.
The first obligation of responsible citizenship, I believe, is obedience to one’s conscience.
Obedience to one’s government and to its laws is very important, but it must come second.
Otherwise there is no check on immoral actions by governments, which are bound to occur in any society whenever power is abused.
I want to assure you, however, that I am not someone who treats the law lightly.
Even when a particular law seems at first to have no clear purpose or justification, I try to give it — that is, give those who created and approved it — the benefit of the doubt.
In an ideal sense, I see law as the codification of those rules and procedures by which the members or citizens of a community, be it local or global, have agreed to live.
A decent respect for one’s community requires a decent respect for its laws.
At their best, such laws express the conscience of the community, causing conscience and law to coincide.
The international treaties and agreements that my wife, Betsy, and I cited in the legal documents recently submitted to, and rejected by, this court are wonderful examples of the coincidence of law and conscience.
These agreements, each one signed by our government, include the United Nations Charter, which outlaws war and the use of military force as methods of resolving conflicts among nations; the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use or threatened use of weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians and poison the environment; and the Nuremberg Principles, which forbid individual citizens from participating in or collaborating with clearly defined “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against peace,” even when refusal to participate or collaborate means disobeying the laws of one’s government.
These international accords — which, as you know, our Constitution requires us to regard as “the Supreme Law of the Land” — are at least as much affirmation of conscience, rooted in universal moral standards, as they are statements of law.
Betsy and I regret that you chose to deny our request for a trial, which would have allowed us to argue the relevance of these international laws before a jury of our peers.
Even in the absence of such laws, however, I believe that citizens would still have an affirmative obligation to follow their conscience and refuse to engage in or support immoral acts by governments.
It is not true, as is commonly thought, that if large numbers of people put conscience ahead of the law and decided for themselves which acts of government were immoral, civilized society would break down into violence and chaos — that is, greater violence and chaos than there is now.
In fact, the opposite would likely occur.
There would likely be greater compliance with those laws that are fundamentally just and reasonable — in other words, most laws — and there would be greater public pressure to abolish or reform those laws (and policies) that are unjust or unreasonable.
There would be exceptions for the worse, of course.
In the name of conscience, certain individuals would, no doubt, do some terrible things and cause much injury and death, which happens now.
On balance, however, the historical record is clear: from the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade, to Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and our own devastation of Vietnam and Iraq, far more killing and suffering, has resulted from people following “legal” orders and obeying the law than from people refusing to do so in obedience to conscience.
My own refusal to kill (which led me to spend nearly two years in federal prison rather than cooperate with the Vietnam draft), Betsy’s and my refusal to pay federal taxes used for killing (which caused the IRS to seize our home), and now our refusal to turn over our home in lieu of taxes, are all acts of conscience.
It has not been easy for us to deliberately violate the law in these instances, and in so doing incur the anxiety and disapproval of some of our friends and family, as well as the scorn and censure of many members of the community.
We are painfully aware that even though we do pay our town and state taxes, and even though we have given away to the poor and to the victims of our war-making in other countries every cent that we have withheld from the federal government, nevertheless we are still regarded by some as irresponsible and not contributing our fair share.
These are times, however, when all of us are confronted with difficult choices.
Betsy and I, and many others like us, feel we must choose between knowingly and willingly paying for war and killing, and openly and nonviolently breaking the law with respect to federal taxes.
Our consciences compel us to choose the latter.
For me, the issue is larger than simply the taking of another human life, or even the instance of a particular war in which many lives are lost.
I have increasingly come to see the larger issue as war itself.
Whereas there has always been a moral imperative to end war and refrain from killing, today the imperative is much greater.
Today the logic of peace, the logic of nonviolence, is also the logic of survival.
It is impossible to dis-invent today’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and so-called conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, we have no alternative but to effectively abolish war.
This is the one essential adaptation the human species must make — and, I firmly believe, can make — if life as we know it is to continue.
War today is the scourge of the planet.
It is tragic enough that war is daily claiming the lives of people, maiming more, leaving orphans and widows, and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals — to say nothing of the irreplaceable treasures of human civilization destroyed in Baghdad last year and in Dubrovnik over the past several months.
What makes war today even more tragic, more horrible, are the incalculable economic, social, and environmental costs that go along with it.
Instead of using our human and material resources to produce food, medicine, housing, schools, and other desperately needed commodities, the world’s nations, led by our own, are annually spending trillions of dollars to purchase more and more weapons of even greater destructive capability.
The hundreds of millions of children, women, and men whose lives are ravaged by poverty, hunger, and homelessness — around the world and here in the States — are as much victims of our addiction to war and militarism as are those who are hit directly by the bullets and bombs.
While the awful gap between the rich minority and the poor majority of the world’s people grows wider and wider, war’s assault on the earth — the earth that sustains us all — becomes more savage and less reversible with each new armed conflict.
The severe and longterm ecological damage to the Persian Gulf region that resulted from only a few weeks of war last year is just the tip of the iceberg.
The cumulative impact of the many smaller, less publicized wars elsewhere around the globe is no less severe and, ultimately, no less threatening to the well-being of people everywhere, including the United States.
Furthermore, here at home, where ecological damage to our own environment is proceeding at a frightening pace, the single largest polluter by far, producing more toxic and radioactive waste than any other single entity, is the U.S. military.
I am not at all suggesting that our country bears sole responsibility for the global state of affairs.
But we bear a good deal of it, and therefore any steps we take to move away from war will have great influence upon other countries around the world.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had the most powerful armed forces in the world, the most sophisticated weaponry, and by far the largest number of military bases outside our own borders.
Since World War Ⅱ, we have used our military might to bomb, invade, or otherwise intervene in more countries around the world than any other nation.
We were the first to develop the atomic bomb, and we are the only nation ever to use it.
For years we have led the Soviets in atomic test explosions, and we ani continuing these tests even though Soviet testing has stopped.
In addition, we have long been the world’s largest arms merchant, today supplying 40 percent of the entire overseas arms market.
We have been told that all of this is necessary for our security, but the opposite is true.
This military colossus we have created has greatly undermined our security — by creating more enemies than it destroys, by wasting our precious resources and poisoning our environment, by degrading our democracy with “national security” secrecy, covert actions, and official lying, and by undercutting our highest Judeo-Christian values with the insidious doctrine of “might makes right.”
Betsy’s and my actions that have brought us to court are testament to our belief that there is another way for us to live in the world, and another way for us to resolve our conflicts with our fellow human beings.
It is a way that is rooted in the best of our values: the values of generosity and justice, of human dignity and equality, of compassion and mutual respect.
The seeds of this alternative way — the way of nonviolence that Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us — already exist within our society, and within each person.
We have only to honor and nurture those seeds, individually and collectively.
This is a prescription based not on wishful idealism, but on practical necessity.
It is our only real hope for survival.
The transformation required cannot be accomplished without our accepting some measure of personal responsibility for the mess we are in.
It would be futile to expect our government, or any other, to initiate it.
In any event, we cannot afford to wait.
The transformation must begin with us.
Because we profess to be a self-governing people, it is all the more our responsibility.
We can exercise this responsibility by means of the choices each of us is called upon to make.
For example, we can choose to speak out publicly against governmental practices and priorities that we know to be wrong.
Many of us can also choose not to hand over to the federal government some part of our tax money — instead redistribute it to those in need, until such time as those in need become our government’s first priority.
And each of us can choose to continue leading lives based on materialism, consumerism, and environmental exploitation, or we can find ways of living based on simplicity, sharing, and respect for the Earth.
The choices we make as individuals will determine the choices we make as a nation.
This is, no doubt, a dangerous and ominous time to be alive in the world.
Yet it is also a very exciting time to be alive.
People all over the world, despite the opposition of their governments, are taking initiative to bring about momentous and long overdue changes.
These winds of change are sweeping the planet, and they are not likely to stop at our borders.
If the people of Prague and Moscow can overthrow Soviet communism and bring about democracy and human rights; if the people of Soweto and Johannesburg can abolish South African apartheid and establish an egalitarian, multi-racial society; then, I feel sure, it is equally possible for us to dismantle U.S. militarism and replace it with attitudes and institutions of nonviolence.
It is my great hope, my silent prayer, that Betsy’s and my struggle to see that the fruits of our labor are used for nurturing and healing, rather than for killing and war, will somehow contribute to that process.
Following this, Christopher L. King had a piece promoting the Peace Tax Fund.
He described it as the brainchild of David Bassett, who some twenty years before had come up with the idea of allowing taxpayers to perform “alternative service” money the way conscientiously objecting draftees could with their labor.
King wrote that he was surprised to find little awareness of the bill in Quaker circles and described some of the work that he and his comrades were doing for the bill.
Those of us who meet each month and a quiet group of supporters in the surrounding communities believe in our consciences that war and militarism are wrong.
We don’t believe they should be the major tools of our foreign policy.
We sympathize with citizens like Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, who have chosen to pay no taxes because they are pacifists.
We empathize with those brave souls who choose alternative lifestyles so they can keep their income below taxable levels.
It often means their children must learn to sacrifice at an early age.
It means stepping out of the mainstream culture.
Most of us don’t want to change our lifestyles radically or go to jail for our beliefs.
Some might argue that if we are true to our faith, we have no other choice.
On the other hand, there is a need to resist the fundamental tyranny that requires that we must become rebels if we wish to stand firmly for peace.
King’s article was pretty vague on the mechanics of what the Peace Tax Fund bill would actually accomplish, and it was written as if there were no reason why a conscientious objector to paying to war might not find it a satisfactory solution.
The issue included a brief review of the video Paying for Peace: War Tax Resistance in the United States, which was produced by Carol Coney.
Excerpt:
Among those interviewed are Brian Willson, a war tax resister and Vietnam veteran who in was run over by a train while blocking munitions shipments at the Concord naval weapons plant in California.
Also interviewed is Maurice McCrackin, a minister who was sentenced to jail for war tax resistance in ; Ernest and Marion Bromley, who have lived under the taxable income level to avoid paying taxes for military purposes; and Juanita Nelson, an early civil rights organizer who was the first woman to spend a night in jail for war tax resistance.
The issue included an op-ed from Allan Kohrman suggesting Quakers ought to be more patriotic, perhaps singing “God Bless America” during their Sunday meetings, and in particular should rethink their permissive attitude toward civil disobedience and war tax resistance.
“Many Friends seem to define civil disobedience as breaking any law they feel is morally wrong.
Some will not pay war taxes, testifying that God has called them to resist.
I would argue that paying taxes is a basic responsibility of citizenship, a function of my almost mystical relationship to my country.
God calls me to pay my taxes much as God calls others to resist them.”
That’s what “an almost mystical relationship to my country” will get you, I guess.
Another note in that issue concerned two Quakers in Germany — Christa & Klausmart Voigt — who had been prosecuted for war tax resistance.
“About 40 Friends from all over Germany attended the hearing, which was overseen by five judges.”
Klausmart had “placed his money in an account for a peace tax initiative,” and at press time they were still awaiting the court’s decision.
There was another note about the Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund in the issue, which described it this way: “When a request for assistance comes in, the committee that oversees the fund takes it under consideration, then notifies people who have agreed to participate of the amount each would need to contribute to cover the tax resister’s penalty and interest debt.
Contributions are not used to cover the tax liability itself.
The fund is administered in cooperation with the North Manchester (Ind.) Fellowship of Reconciliation.”
The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:
Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn.
Excerpt:
“They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance.
Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime.
And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem.
Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”
Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned).
She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government.
If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined.
“I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.
Some interesting links that have tabbed their way across my browser in recent days:
At the New Republic, Cale Guthrie Weissman reflects on having grown up in Colrain, Massachusetts at the time when the IRS was seizing the home of their tax-resisting neighbors Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner: Growing Up With the War Tax Resisters.
Although Trump’s new Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, told Congress he’d be trying to boost the IRS budget and hire more agents, it seems more likely that Trump’s budget will further slash IRS funding, and Congress isn’t likely to go out of its way to resist.
Here’s a revenue resistance tactic I haven’t seen before:
In Sweden, people deliberately overpay their federal taxes.
Why? In Sweden, interest rates have fallen below 0%, but the government is pledged to pay 0.56% interest on tax overpayments.
So if you overpay the government, the government ends up poorer.
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite.
Today we finish off the 1980s.
The issue announced that a new poster was available from the MCC:
Seattle Mennonite Church established a Northwest Peace Fund in to receive donations and recoverable deposits from people withholding a portion of their federal income taxes or phone taxes because of the large military buildup in the United States.
Anyone who wishes to may donate to the fund so that the resulting interest can be used for local peace activities.
Interest from the Northwest Peace Fund has been used to support peace-related projects in the Puget Sound area, such as the Emergency Feeding Program and the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP).
While the Seattle Mennonite Church’s Northwest Peace Fund will accept deposits and contributions from outside the Northwest, we strongly encourage each Mennonite congregation to establish its own peace fund.
We approved these seven operating guidelines:
This fund will be called the Northwest Peace Fund.
It will be a non-profit investment fund that will generate income.
This income will be distributed for peace and social concerns projects in the Pacific Northwest.
The peace fund will be administered by three peace fund representatives selected by the peace and social concerns committee of the Seattle Mennonite Church initially for one-, two-, and three-year terms, and for two- year terms thereafter.
Current peace fund representatives are Charles Lord, Bob Hamilton and David Ortman.
Money may be deposited into the fund through a peace fund representative either on a donation or recoverable-deposit basis:
(a) Donations will be retained to generate income for the fund,
(b) Recoverable deposits may be placed in the peace fund for a period of up to five years.
During this time period such funds may be returned to the depositor within 30 days upon written request of the fund’s address, given below.
Recoverable deposits will be used to generate income during the time these funds remain available.
After a period of five years, if not reclaimed, such deposits will revert to the status of donations.
The fund will operate on a fiscal year ending on May 31.
One meeting of the peace fund representatives will be held each April to prepare an annual report, copies of which will be available upon request.
At this meeting the peace fund representatives are also authorized to distribute up to all income generated from the fund to peace and social concern projects in the Pacific Northwest.
Any disbursement must have prior approval of the Seattle Mennonite Church advisory council.
The peace fund is authorized to budget up to 10 percent of any income generated by the fund to cover costs of advertising the fund to attract additional deposits and to provide copies of the annual report.
Any peace fund representative is authorized to withdraw within 30 days any recoverable deposit to a depositor upon a written request by the depositor.
In the event of the dissolution of the peace fund, all funds will be transferred to another peace fund escrow account and the depositors notified.
The mailing address of the fund will be…
Peace Tax Fund campaign director Marian Franz also wrote in with a brief note in which she suggested war tax resisters prompt their Congressional representatives to become Peace Tax Fund law supporters:
Sometimes the sequence goes like this (and I wish it would more often):
Carl Lundberg, a United Methodist pastor from New Haven, Conn., refuses to pay the military portion of his taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service comes to garnishee the wages.
The congregation has a meeting.
The vote is unanimous.
The answer is, No, they will not cooperate with the IRS because they will not be tax collectors, because they will not violate the pastor’s right to his own views of conscience and living by those, etc.
Then in the same year the U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Lowell Weicker, becomes a co-sponsor of the Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Is there a connection?
I think there is and that more will be coming.
That is because I am a person of hope.
Another invitation for war tax resisters to redirect their taxes through the MCC U.S. Peace Section’s “Taxes for Peace” fund appeared in the edition.
This time the funds were to be disbursed to both the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and to the Christian Peacemaker Teams program.
The note said about $4,000 had been donated to the fund .
The Commission on Home Ministries is interested in hearing from Mennonites who have placed some of their resisted military taxes into alternative peace funds.
Information on recent judicial decisions affecting such peace funds is available from the General Conference Peace and Justice office…
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner’s Colrain, Mass., home is scheduled to go on the auction block any day.
The Internal Revenue Service seized their house for non-payment of $20,000 in taxes and $6,000 in fines and fees.
The couple has been withholding their federal taxes for 12 years, donating the money to a shelter for homeless women and children, a veteran’s outreach center, and a local peace group.
Kehler says they are willing to risk the consequences “because we can’t not do it.”
While the IRS is looking for a buyer, many local realtors will not touch the sale of the house because of strong community sentiment in favor of the couple’s decision.
After 7½ years of litigation, 27 hearings, and with a case file that grew two inches thick, the Tokyo District Court has ruled against a taxpayers’ organization that sought to end the Japanese government’s collection of income taxes for military purposes.
The case had its origin after the bank accounts of Akiteru Nakagawa and Mennonite minister Michio Ohno were attached by the government and the telephone of Yoshinori Tan was seized, in each instance due to their non-payment of taxes.
The Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church voted to combine into a single organization at their joint conference in .
This, I hope, will simplify things for me at least, as it’s been difficult to keep track of the subtle differences in names between the two organizations and their subcommittees.
Also at that conference:
The Mennonite Church narrowly (59 percent) approved a resolution calling for its General Board to take four steps on military tax-withholding.
It will establish a policy of not withholding (U.S.) federal income taxes from wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to war.
The resolution supports “other church boards and agencies that may adopt similar policies,” giving direction, not a mandate.
The General Conference took a similar action in in Bethlehem, Pa., but with a stronger vote, 71 percent.
The edition included an editorial by Muriel T. Stackely that brought readers up to speed on the history of the withholding debate.
Excerpt:
Our conference [the General Conference Mennonite Church] now does not withhold federal tax from those employees requesting this.
“We immediately notified the Internal Revenue Service,” says conference treasurer Ted Stuckey, “explaining our actions, being open, concealing nothing.
That was .
We still have not heard any more from the IRS — after getting its initial response, which told us that this was illegal.
We answered that we knew it was illegal but that it was in response to the action taken by the delegate body.”
Currently three employees of our conference offices in Newton, Kan., are requesting that tax not be withheld.
They are treated as self-employed people.
They say, observes Ted, that they have appreciated the opportunity to witness in this way.
The amounts not paid to IRS have been symbolic rather than comprehensive.
One expression of our commitment to non-violence has been war tax resistance.
Thus we and our friends found that our commitment to practice war tax resistance encouraged our commitment to a simple lifestyle.
We have defined war tax resistance as filing our taxes, but refusing to pay 50 percent of what is owed because that is the portion of U.S. income tax that goes toward military spending.
Fifty percent is a conservative estimate because parts of the U.S. military budget are hidden or secret.
We have learned that if we own a car, even one that is six years old, the IRS will sell it at a public auction to collect back taxes.
It became obvious that consumerism and war tax resistance are incompatible.
As a result several of our friends have made a conscious decision to do job-sharing or half-time employment.
It has worked out that between couples both parents can act equally as care-takers for the children while also having employment, which is psychologically rewarding and complementary to their vision of participating in God’s reign on earth.
Our choice of war tax resistance as a way of reducing our participation in the U.S. war machine has made a simple lifestyle almost mandatory because it has led us to lower our tax liability and lower our material consumption.
Another editorial by Muriel T. Stackely, this one in the edition, complained that “the 7,000 brochures about the Peace Tax Fund distributed at our triennial session in Normal, Ill., among 8,000 Mennonites netted one, one new membership for this campaign that says to the U.S. government, I want my tax dollars to be used to promote life, not death; peace, not war.”
War Resisters League is initiating organizing for major Tax Day demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco on .
Based on the theme “Alternative Revenue Service,” the actions will emphasize the U.S. government’s militaristic spending priorities and will feature a 1040 EZ Peace tax form and the distribution of redirected tax dollars to peace and social justice programs.
WRL is inviting other tax resistance and peace groups to join in planning the actions.
For more information contact Ruth Benn, War Resisters League…
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
At Riversong HouseWright, war tax resister Robert Riversong recalls
the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner house seizure of
in the context of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” theory. He also shares
many photos from the protests that accompanied the seizure, and from the
cooperative home-building project that grew out of it.
The surge in the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship
seems to have slowed
after having accelerated for several years.
The recent Republican tax rate cuts were offset by a growing economy such
that while corporate taxes have fallen so far , individual income taxes have risen enough to
more than make up for it.
Rebel neighbors in McKillop, Sasketchewan, have organized to refuse to pay property taxes after they were nearly doubled by their Rural Municipality council.
“None of us really cared before,” one of the resisters said.
“We just shut up and paid our taxes. But something like this is bringing us together.”
This is the thirty-second in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
In I felt the tide start to recede. The war
tax resisting faction had gotten thoroughly distracted by the promise of Peace
Tax Fund legislation, and the conservative taxpaying faction went back on the
offensive in favor of paying taxes without concern.
One of the symptoms of the decay of the war tax resistance position (that I’ve
also seen exhibited elsewhere) was the plea for new resisters to refuse to pay
some tiny, safe token amount of taxes in lieu of more firmly-motivated and
whole-hearted resistance. From the issue:
Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT)
is asking U.S.
taxpayers to deduct $3.03 from their federal taxes, as a symbol of their
objection to the $303 billion Defense budget.
CPT
would like congregations to collect withheld money and send it to become part
of the offering at the organization’s conference in Richmond.
Va. The offering will go to
school districts such as the one in Petersburg.
Va., which cannot afford to
buy textbooks.
“The Peace Tax bill is not going to be passed anytime soon,” says [Marian]
Franz frankly. “Not enough people have said they care — and that includes
Mennonites.
“I see a bitter irony in that,” she continues, “because if there were such a
fund, pacifist Christians would say that it was God’s will that they use its
provisions. Yet these same people are doing little to make this fund a
reality.”
The issue printed this
syndicated short news item:
Peace activist Randy Kehler has been jailed and his family’s house confiscated
because of his decade-long refusal to pay
U.S. taxes.
Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have withheld their federal taxes since the
late 1970s. Instead, they have sent their tax dollars to nonprofit
organizations that assist war victims and the poor.
The Internal Revenue Service laid claim to the couple’s house in Colrain,
Mass., to recoup some
$32,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Discussion by a panel of war tax resisters highlighted a Lancaster,
Pa., meeting sponsored by
the group Taxes for Life. Some 20 people attended the meeting, which also
included a showing of the video Paying for Peace.
Taxes for Life urges individuals to withhold a small, symbolic amount from the
payment of their
U.S. income taxes
and to give the money instead to a local school project. More information is
available from Taxes for Life…
The statement on “Christian Conscience and Military Taxes” says that Illinois
Conference “will seek to support our members who feel a genuine call from God
to withhold payment of military taxes.”
The statement cites examples of this support as including prayer and personal
encouragement, finances, and witness to “political and social powers.”
The resolution also calls on Illinois congregations to contribute a minimum of
$5 per household to the Peace Tax Fund campaign.
The “Taxes for Peace” tax redirection fund gave its annual report and plea for
new funds in the issue:
The U.S. Peace
Section of Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC)
is inviting contributions for the Taxes for
Peace fund. Established in , the fund gives
people who withhold war taxes a way to give their money for peaceful purposes.
This year’s contributions will go to
MCC
U.S. peace
education projects. More information is available from
MCC
U.S. Peace Section…
John K. Stoner tried to blow on the fading coals in the
issue:
The voice of the victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of children, abused and traumatized by war, will not be still.
by John K. Stoner
Last Thursday my phone rang. The voice at the other end of the line asked for
John or Janet Stoner. “I’m John Stoner,” I replied. “Hello. I am Charles Price
of the Internal Revenue Service. I am calling about the letter you sent
indicating that you are withholding part of your income tax payment.”
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said no to
paying the full amount of our income tax. The man could not understand why
anyone would invite the collection pressures of the
IRS upon
themselves by withholding some taxes. But by the time the conversation was
over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was for us a matter of
faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9
kind of experience of being called before the authorities. By the sound of
Mark 13,
Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
“Why do they have to keep bringing up this business about taxes for war?”
someone asks after a congregational meeting. “Why doesn’t this war tax
question just go away?” asks another at a session on strategies to reduce the
military portion of the
U.S. budget.
The reason war keeps coming up and won’t go away is because the voice of the
victims of war keeps rising up. The cry of the children, abused and
traumatized by war, doesn’t go away.
Every discussion about peacemaking in these times must face the question of
how taxes are collected and spent.
Americans watched their tax dollars at work in Iraq. They killed between one
and two hundred thousand people in a month’s time. They left a nation of 17
million people strangled — its water polluted, its hospitals without
electricity, its homes dark, and its classrooms cold. Today malnutrition,
disease, and destitution are the continuing results of this man-made plague of
death and despair.
Since then, an international study team on the Gulf crisis found that the
mortality rate of children under five years of age was almost four times
greater then than before the Gulf War. More than 75 percent of Iraqi children
feel sad and unhappy, worry about the survival of their family. They are
haunted by the smell of gunfire, fuel from planes, fires, and burned flesh.
Taxes paid for all this. It is for those of us who are Christians, as
taxpayers, to sidestep our share of the responsibility. We can choose to “just
say no” (how simple that sounds when we prescribe it to someone else’s moral
choice and how difficult it sounds when it is ours).
Your $3.03 Taxes for Life equivalent can be sent to Christian
Peacemaker Teams…
CPT
also suggests you write a letter of witness to the
IRS with
copies to your representatives in Congress, your
pastor, and your local newspaper. Taxes for Life funds will
be used for education purposes.
I believe God is calling us to plead for the end of the
destructive social institution of war by
refusing to pay for it. We are called to this as clearly
and inescapably as our forebears were called to
abolish slavery. The question is not whether we can achieve that
goal in a year or decade. The question is whether that is our goal — and
whether the world knows that it is our goal. It was Jesus’ goal, and it should
be ours.
One way to enhance this witness is through a symbolic war tax refusal called
Taxes for Life. Sponsored by the Christian Peacemaker Team, this plan would
have taxpayers redirect an amount equivalent to one penny for every billion
dollar of the U.S.
military budget to education. For ,
this is $3.03.
If you do this, and the
IRS
calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law. Go
on to say that you are far more apprehensive about breaking God’s law. Tell
them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the victims of war, and that
you have decided that you will not take their blood upon your hands. Then
leave the outcome with God.
For U.S.
Mennonites, one way we can work at it at this time of year is to take yet
another look at the tax question. As John Stoner reminds us…, it is our taxes
that keep the military going, that make possible aggression and belligerence.
Because of this, some choose not to pay a part of their taxes as a protest.
Others consider that overreaction.
But let us not make that our battle. While we do, more people starve. Let us
rather join hands to find all the ways possible to address the huge military
expenditures of our country, and of the world.
Members of a Newton, Kan.,
group heard reports on the
U.S. Peace Tax Fund
bill in a meeting. The Peace Tax
Group also discussed ideas for creating a local alternative tax fund. Carla
Morton and Stan Bohn reported on their visits to Washington,
D.C., in
connection with a Congressional hearing on the tax fund bill. In addition,
group members talked about starting a local fund for such projects as
environmental protection, mental health care for veterans, and retraining of
military workers.
The following disheartening news was carried in the
issue:
Friends Journal, a Quaker monthly published in
Philadelphia, has agreed to pay $31,343 to the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.
The payment covers back taxes for the magazine’s editor, who had refused to
pay them because of religious objections to their use for military purposes.
The magazine’s board had refused
IRS
demands that it pay the taxes on behalf of the editor, Vinton Deming.
However, the Justice Department warned the board that it would face legal
action unless the matter was settled, and the magazine’s lawyer advised the
board that it could not win such a case in court.
Now that the pro-taxpaying conservatives were no longer on the defensive, they
apparently no longer felt the need to promote the Peace Tax Fund legislation as
an alternative to lawlessness for Mennonites concerned about their taxes paying
for war. Now they could attack the Peace Tax Fund as being also
scripturally unsound. Or so said
Ernest E. Mummau
in a letter to the editor
that evoked the usual Romans 13 / the government is divinely ordained to bear
the sword / Christians are told to pay taxes without complaint / the Church
should stay in its own domain and shouldn’t meddle with the state line of
argument to tell Mennonites to stop trying to tell the government what to do
with their taxes.
The fourth international conference on war tax resistance and peace tax
campaigns was held in Brussels in . The Gospel Herald article,
and especially the quotes from Peace Tax Fund activist Marian Franz, tried to
spin it as though it was more or less exclusively a Peace Tax Fund promoting
event, with very little mention of actual war tax resistance:
Conference participants came with at least one thing in common, [Marian] Franz
said: “We all find it a clear violation of conscience to pay the military
portion of our taxes; we seek statutory recognition of conscience against
paying for arms as an extension of the right to refuse to bear arms.”
The conference, which draws primarily European and North American
participants, has met every two years .
The gathering allows participants “to hear stories of resistance and to
compare our progress in gaining conscientious objection
(CO)
status to payment of military taxes within our respective countries,” Franz
said.
For instance, NCPTF
hopes to convince Congress members to pass a law permitting people
conscientiously opposed to war to have the military portion of their taxes
allocated to peacemaking.
“Most countries have a similar approach to war tax resisters,” Franz noted.
“The standard response of governments, when they do respond, is to add civil
penalties and collect the unpaid taxes forcibly. Imprisonment for war tax
resistance is rare.”
Court responses to these cases are usually predictable as well. “The issue
usually raises a ‘political’ question which the courts cannot address, or the
courts decide that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience or
religion do not outweigh the duty of the citizen to pay taxes,” she said.
[Franz said:] "Most European war tax resisters entered the scene in
. The presence of Cruise and Pershing
missiles woke them up. They suddenly realized that Europe had become a giant
football field on which the two superpowers could bounce their nuclear
weapons.”
This prompted another
letter to the editor,
this one from Russell J. Baer, which also used the Render-unto-Caesar / Romans
13 beef to complain about activists who have an issue with paying war taxes.
In , the U.S. government began the process of seizing the Colrain home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner.
War tax resisters fought back, with protests and a nearly two-year occupation of the home that galvanized the movement.
Last weekend, veterans of the Colrain actions met at the annual gathering of New England war tax resisters in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Among those who participated was Terry Chranesky, who at the time was one of the antagonists in the drama — having purchased the seized house at auction along with her husband, but who is now reconciled with those she once clashed with.
[“We have no need to stockpile nuclear weapons and threaten our planet Earth under the guise of ‘security.’ We cannot find a reason to help finance the death squads of right-wing governments in Central America.” This is part of a statement by Bob Bady and Patricia Morse, war tax resisters from Western Massachusetts.
The house which they built with their own hands over a ten-years period was put on the auction block by the IRS, for taxes owed the federal government.
A bid was made by two unknown persons and the property sold to them.
Bob and Pat have been given a 180 day period in which to “redeem” their place and then apply the repurchase price against the still due taxes.
The couple say they will not do this, and will also resist any attempt to remove them from their house by means of a nonviolent occupation.
By the time this issue is put in the mail, the fate of another house, that belonging to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, may have been decided.
They and their nine-year-old daughter, Lillian, are neighbors of Bob, Pat, and her seventeen-year-old son.
Randy and Betsy’s house was auctioned on , but in that case the IRS ended up as the owner of the house, after “bids” in the form of Nicaraguan currency, canned goods for the poor, and offers of community service, were turned down by the IRS.
They, too, will prepare for a Gandhian nonviolent occupation if the IRS attempts to remove them.
Acts of civil disobedience against war taxations take many forms.
Karl Meyer sees the value of tactical efforts to avoid a date with the IRS; Randy, Betsy, Bob, Pat and many in the Catholic Worker movement find it imperative to inform the IRS directly of any such actions, and welcome others to write for more information on the possible Satyagraha campaign, American style, which may occur if the IRS attempts to evict them from their homes.
Please contact: War Tax Refusers Support Committee, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
Karl Meyer is always happy to discuss questions and problems concerning war tax resistance.
He may be reached at: 1460 W. Carmen, Chicago, IL 60640, (312) 784‒8065.
―Eds. Note]
By Karl Meyer
In , when Mohandas Gandhi searched for a tactic of civil disobedience that would galvanize India in the struggle for self-rule, he recognized that the use of salt was a necessity at the heart of Indian village life, yet salt production was a monopoly controlled by the British rulers.
Every time Indians bought salt they paid a burdensome tax to the British.
He began a campaign for self-rule with a march to the sea, to take untaxed salt from it, in violation of British rule.
His campaign was rooted in resistance to taxes on an elemental commodity of everyday life, just as our own American Revolution began around resistance to a British tax on tea.
Striking at these basic taxes struck at the heart of British rule.
In , in Gandhi’s India, jail was the ordinary ultimate sanction for enforcing government control.
Death was the extraordinary ultimate sanction.
During the salt campaign, hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten with clubs when they tried to enter a saltworks.
In two months of , more than 32,000 Indians were convicted of political offenses and jailed.
Gandhi once said, “Rivers of blood may have to flow before India gains her freedom, but it must be our own blood.”
In North America [today], the system of control seems far more benign than this.
The front line agencies of government coercion, which are Selective Service and the IRS, believe that they can control U.S. dissenters adequately by compiling computerized data about them, their whereabouts, their means of education, their livelihood and their financial assets.
With this information the enforcement agencies can apply adequate pressure with civil penalties, by withholding benefits or by seizing a punitive share of income or assets.
They think they can pin us down while they extract our teeth, and then allow us to gum our verbal protests as much as we please.
In , at the height of the Vietnam War, we started a tax refusal campaign to beat the withholding system by claiming extra allowances on W-4 Withholding Exemption certificates.
It worked. Hundreds of refusers began to do it.
At first in , the IRS tried to squash that movement by putting a handful of resisters in jail.
But that didn’t work well.
Putting conscientious war tax refusers in jail created martyrs, martyrs created publicity and publicity created more resisters.
So the IRS stopped putting us in jail and began to search around for better control tactics.
I think they understood the potential of classic jail-going civil disobedience better than we do.
Today, the U.S. government basically declines to imprison war refusers for their ordinary crimes.
Hundreds of thousands refuse to register for the draft — none is in jail today.
Thousands openly refuse taxes for war — none is in jail today.
The Warfare State
In America today, the internal systems of control by the warfare state have evolved to more benign forms.
For many people this apparent benignity masks the horror of reality.
The U.S. administration and Congress have repeatedly said: “Rivers of blood may have to flow before we suppress the struggle for self-rule in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, but that will be all right because it will be their blood.
North Americans will not care because we will see to it that none of their own blood will flow.
We will control them with media manipulation and with electronic information gathering and processing systems.” They believe that they will control adequately the society of the future by gathering information efficiently and processing it instantaneously.
They will have information about the flow of every dollar that represents our personal belongings and our personal productivity.
These streams of dollars will be the blood of the future.
Once the IRS has identified and located every vessel of human interchange through which they flow, the tax gatherers will tap those vessels where they please and gather the blood of our productivity and our belongings, without a word of acquiescence or protest on our part.
The machine grinds on, impervious to picketing and ordinary letters of protest.
It ignores them because they have no numbers and produce no dollars.
Perhaps electronic information is not bad in itself; but if we allow these systems to divest us of our human work, and to use it to harm people in other countries, the end of this stream of dollars will flow red with human blood, as it does today in Salvador.
(Excerpted from a longer article, “Satyagraha in 1984: Gandhian Resistance to War Taxes in the Age of the Computer.”)
By Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler
The federal government’s policies regarding nuclear weaponry and military interventions contradict our deepest moral and spiritual values — values which, we believe, should apply as much to public as to private life.
We are not religious in a formal way, but we do struggle to accept and live by the proposition that we are all children of God.
We take this to mean, in a very real sense, that all people everywhere are our sisters and brothers whom we must try to love and, in any case, refrain from deliberately injuring.
For us, this applies especially to the poor, including our sisters and brothers in Central America who are suffering and dying as a result of U.S. policies and U.S. arms, and our sisters and brothers here in our own country who are hungry and homeless while our government pours billions of dollars into an insane nuclear arms race that threatens to kill us all.
How can we willingly give money to the federal government when we know that it will be used to cause, or threaten, so much harm to other members of our human family?
Our answer is that we can’t.
We are convinced that our government’s policies are not just immoral, but also illegal.
The United States is a signatory to international treaties that prohibit the manufacture of genocidal weapons of destruction and forbid the use of force to overthrow foreign governments.
According to the U.S. Constitution, these treaties have the same binding force as domestic law.
Yet we continue to produce more and more nuclear bombs capable of destroying all life on earth, and we persist in sending arms and material to groups attempting to topple governments deemed “unfriendly” to U.S. interests.
Who is the real lawbreaker — we who refuse to pay for these criminal activities, or the U.S. government, and their tax collectors, who carry them out?
The Nuremberg Principles that resulted from the trials of Nazi war criminals, and which were subsequently ratified by the U.S. government, hold that individual citizens who commit or collaborate with “crimes against humanity” must be held responsible for their actions even though they were “only following orders” or “only obeying the law.”
We believe that preparing for nuclear war, and waging actual war against people in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, are both crimes against humanity — and that helping to pay for them is a form of collaboration.
We view our war-tax resistance not only as serving our country’s best interests, but also as highly consistent with the rich American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience — a tradition that includes the Boston Tea Party, the early colonists’ refusal to pay British stamp taxes, Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes during the Mexican-American War, and the refusal by black Americans to obey racially discriminatory laws during the Civil Rights Movement of .
Nonviolent acts of protest and noncooperation have always been crucial to the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Are we nervous about the possibility of losing our house? Sure we are to some degree.
We don’t want to lose our house any more than anyone else does.
It has been our home for ten years and it represents the only material security we have.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by U.S.-sponsored bombing in El Salvador or by U.S.-sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash if the nuclear arms race is not halted and reversed?
If, by risking the loss of our home, we can raise one more voice in protest against all this needless destruction, then it will be worth it.
When we grow anxious about the consequences of our war-tax resistance, it also helps to remember the good that comes from redistributing our federal tax money.
Last year Don Mosley, who coordinates a project called “Walk In Peace,” which raises money for people who have lost arms and legs in Nicaragua, wrote to us:
“Your contribution all by itself is nearly enough to finance the complete rehabilitation (including the making of artificial limbs) of five people.
I hope you can grasp that in human terms…”
For us, that’s what it all comes down to: human terms.
And that’s what keeps us going. At this point in our lives, we can’t not resist the federal government’s taxes.
The issue of The Catholic Worker reported on the inspiring tax resistance campaign of the mostly-Christian Palestinian village of Beit Sahour against the taxes collected by the Israeli occupation:
Peaceful Tax Resistance in Beit Sahour
By Terry Rogers
The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, founded in East Jerusalem in by Mubarak Awad and others, offers a wide range of educational programs and research in the history, theory, and methodology of nonviolence for Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general.
In , the PCSNV published an analysis of the 22 most recent leaflets of the Unified Command of the Intifada.
These leaflets, printed anonymously every two weeks, give specific instructions to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Center’s study, which counted the frequency with which various actions were urged, found that only 9.6% of the leaflets’ instructions proposed violent acts.
The rest included such nonviolent actions as strikes; boycotts of Israeli jobs, goods, and services; tax resistance; participation in popular committees; cancellation of celebrations; surrounding and protecting children who are beaten by soldiers; and others.
The authors of the study conclude: “It has not been proven that the Intifada is a nonviolent struggle, only that violence is not necessary for the intifada to continue.”
The tax resistance of the village of Beit Sahour in the West Bank is a recent example of one of these nonviolent tactics and has attracted widespread international attention.
A small middle-class village of 12,000 near Bethlehem, Beit Sahour is a close-knit community of extended families, most of whom have lived there for generations.
The population is eighty percent Christian, and its economic base consists of several hundred small family enterprises.
Residents of Beit Sahour have the highest percentage of university graduates of any village in the occupied territories.
Since the occupation, they have a history of strong political organization, and many cooperatives and neighborhood committees have been established there.
Recently, the village has been known for welcoming Israeli peace activists into its homes and churches, organizing dialogues and joint peace demonstrations.
The commitment to tax resistance in Beit Sahour began in and intensified in .
The rationale for tax resistance in the occupied territories has several bases.
The sales tax, or VAT, was imposed by Israel after the occupation; its legality is disputed by Palestinians because, according to international law, an occupying power has no right to impose new taxes.
Also, Palestinians under occupation maintain that only a small portion of their taxes pays for the limited public services in the occupied territories, and Israel cannot prove otherwise as it does not publish a budget of its income and expenses there.
Finally, since Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip cannot vote, they have no control over taxes or public expenditures.
A statement from Beit Sahour on stated, in part:
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children, the growing number of prisons, the expenses of the occupying army.
We want no more than what you have: freedom and our own representatives to pay taxes to.”
Tax resistance is risky, for without a certificate that all taxes have been paid one cannot, for example, register a car, renew a drivers’ license, travel out of the country, register the birth of a child, or receive permission to bury a family member.
Nevertheless, significant numbers of Palestinians under occupation have refused to pay taxes or file tax returns.
Beit Sahour was recently singled out for harsh collective punishment as an example to others in the territories.
, the village was declared a closed military zone.
For the first five days a 24-hour curfew was imposed, and the subsequent curfew was 5 pm to 5 am.
Many telephone lines were cut, soldiers were posted on rooftops throughout the town, and press, solidarity, and religious groups were denied entrance, including the consuls-general of six Western European countries.
Under military protection, tax authorities visited ten residents daily, confiscating and sometimes destroying business and personal property that was sometimes worth much more than the taxes owed.
At times property was taken from the members of the extended families of tax resisters.
Three hundred families had property confiscated and five hundred other families had their bank accounts frozen.
Much property was receipted, but not all receipts were signed and some were receipted only as boxes.
Forty Sahouries were jailed for nonpayment of taxes and forty-two placed in administrative detention.
To protect tax authorities during these raids, the soldiers forced drivers of passing cars to park their cars in a ring around the house being raided, and commanded passersby to stand in a ring outside the cars.
Residents of Beit Sahour described the tax raids as harsh and arbitrary.
Some who had paid taxes were mistakenly raided and some of the soldiers taunted and threatened family members and children during the raids.
On , the United Nations General Assembly, in a nearly unanimous resolution, condemned the Israeli government for the tax raids in the occupied territories.
By the end of the siege, much of the productive base of the village had been destroyed, yet the mood there was one of celebration.
On , with the soldiers gone, observers heard whistles, chants, and cheers echoing through the streets.
In their all but empty homes, residents who had been raided spoke proudly of the village’s steadfastness and the villagers’ mutual support.
In recognition of the devastating effect of the siege and confiscations, the Palestine Central Council, meeting in Baghdad, voted to ask contributions from PLO members and employees to help compensate the villagers.
Israeli peace activists, many of whom have made friends in Beit Sahour through the previous months of dialogue, have also shown solidarity.
After the siege, they were invited to a service for peace in the Beit Sahour Roman Catholic Church, and though sixty were turned back by soldiers at roadblocks outside the town, a dozen who had spent the night there were able to take part in the service.
Their spokesman, Hillel Bardin, told the two thousand Palestinians in the congregation,
“There is a group of Israelis here with me today who’ve known you for a long time; who’ve had the honor of meeting you, talking with you, learning about you in a way few Israelis have…
I admire the courageous people of Beit Sahour for coming together today to call for peace between our peoples.”
The Mufti of Jerusalem also attended the service, and the presence of a Muslim holy man in a Christian church was a sign of increased unity among Palestinians themselves.
Another expression of support for Beit Sahour was an Israeli gift of a truckload of tree and vegetable seedlings, delivered .
Some Israelis have held protest demonstrations during the selling of the confiscated goods at the Ben Gurion airport.
Israeli and Palestinian women are protesting the harsh exposure to cold at the Anata Detention Center where 35 tax resisters from Beit Sahour are being held.
Members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, were stopped by an army roadblock when they tried to make a solidarity visit on , but hundreds of Sahouris arrived by side paths to greet them outside the town.
The increasing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who are organizing against the occupation, both jointly and in their own communities, are drawing from, and making a significant contribution to, the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle.
Military authorities have told the villagers of Beit Sahour to expect another tax siege within six months, but there is no sign that the Sahouris will change their stand.
International pressure and expressions of concern are an essential part of the protection and encouragement desperately needed by Palestinians and Israelis working for a just and peaceful solution to this conflict.
Although acts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection take varied forms in our country, few in recent memory have resulted not only in loss of freedom but of hearth and home as well.
It is perhaps the latter event which placed North Americans closest to those who lose homes through eviction, war and other forms of violence.
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner were arrested in , after the Colrain, Massachusetts home, where they lived with their daughter Lillian, was forcibly seized by the federal government for non-payment of taxes.
Betsy was later released, while Randy remains in jail as we go to press, to serve a six-month sentence for contempt of court.
Their home was put on the auction block in , with the federal government ending up as the only bidder and subsequent “owner” of Randy and Betsy’s place, but it has taken two-and-a-half years of other legal maneuvers before they have finally been removed and charged with contempt, despite strong local support and publicity.
Betsy and Randy lease the land on which their home is situated through the Valley Community Land Trust, a non-profit corporation using land for conservation, garden and agricultural purposes, and for affordable housing.
Like many resisters who pay local and state taxes, Randy and Betsy are in disagreement with federal levies used for nuclear weapons production, military intervention and other acts deemed criminal by international law.
Despite all talk of arms reduction carried out in saw Congress giving its approval to $270 billion dollars for the military budget.
The court ruling in favor of ownership by the United States further stated that the government had the right to padlock the house since it “had proper title to, and was entitled to possession of” the home in which Randy, Betsy and Lillian have lived for the last twelve years.
When asked in their court appearance if they planned to reenter their home, Betsy agreed not to when released, and Randy added, “It is my intention neither to occupy or not occupy my house.
It is my intention to oppose the use of my tax dollars for killing and preparations for war.”
But friends, neighbors and other sympathetic supporters have, since the time of the seizure, occupied the house.
On the following morning, for instance, a group of fourteen resisters, including the indefatigable 84-year-old Wally Nelson, who has been “just saying no” to federal war taxes , removed the government’s padlocks and remained in the house for several days, risking arrest in doing so.
As of this date, these occupations continue.
The eloquent response of Betsy Corner to those who have asked if they were “nervous” about the loss of their home, illumines one method of solidarity for these hard times:
“Sure we are. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, and our twelve-year-old daughter Lillian was born here.
We love this place, and the land, and our neighbors too.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by our brutal bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Panama and Iraq or by the US-sponsored bombing that’s going on at this very moment in El Salvador?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash or irradiated forever, if we don’t stop building nuclear weapons and generating more and more nuclear waste?”
For further information on Betsy and Randy’s current status and ways of assisting their efforts, please contact:
War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR), c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Rd., Deerfield, MA 01342, (413) 774‒2710 or (413) 773‒7427.
―Jane Sammon
The same issue had an additional article about war tax resistance:
War And Taxes
The CW listed some boycotts suggested as one route to follow “the little Way" of peace.
Now, as the income-tax-returns season is in full swing, is the time to urge a further boycott — of the Internal Revenue Service.
Once we know about the military pursuits in the Persian Gulf over the past year…, surely we must say “No!" to the government as clearly and as concretely as possible.
Nor can the Persian Gulf War be seen as an isolated incident, a regrettable aberration from national policy.
The very existence, for instance, of a “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, shows how deep-seated is the pursuit of violence in the practices of the US government.
The fact of the matter is that more than half the money collected by the IRS goes to pay for war or to prepare for war.
According to the old adage, “Death and taxes are inevitable” but, according to our faith, murder is not allowed.
True, our Lord did say, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6 and Mark 13:7);
He did not add though, that we should take an active part to promote them.
And, on the mundane level of financial considerations, modern warfare would be rendered well nigh impossible if nobody would foot the bill.
During the war in Vietnam, someone who promoted tax resistance was once asked what to do about the money to be withheld.
He answered, “Better to flush it down the toilet as waste-paper than to pay for the war.”
In reality, though, practicalities about the dollars and cents demanded for taxes cannot be quite so simply swept aside, nor considered only at the moment of the due date.
Peter Maurin taught a full life of voluntary poverty when he interpreted Jesus’ enigmatic reply about taxes with “The less you have of Caesar’s, the less you have to render unto him.”
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner are now paying the price, in prison, and through the loss of their home to the IRS.
The War Resisters League has proposed the Alternative Revenue Service as a means to hold and channel monies not handed over to the government.
These are all “hard" suggestions which reveal the iron grip of taxes.
Even if success for the tax resistance movement is not imminent, any withholding of federal income taxes marks a break in the deadly power of the economic system in which we are all complicit.
It is a system whose principal “product” is war, whose motive is profit, whose organizing principle is usury.
Usury (charging interest on a loan to make money from money) is the word Peter Maurin emphasized in his discussions on economics, one we seldom hear anymore.
It is the basis for all our financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund and the world debt to the Savings and Loan frauds (which have been described as “pure capitalism,” that is, effectively unfettered from constraints of either human labor or natural resources) to the stock market to insurance plans, right down to your local bank account.
But the guarantor of usury is the Federal Reserve System, through our taxes.
Barry Peters’ study on the ban on usury in the Hebrew Scriptures, makes it clear how this practice is violent robbery and oppression.
January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, his memorial was eclipsed by the formal outbreak of hostilities against Iraq.
This year, let us rekindle the light of his life and martyrdom by a dedication to his ways of active nonviolence, by a refusal to render unto Caesar the ways of violence.
Instead, let us find alternative ways to render the fruits of our labor unto God, and to His children, to whom they belong.
―Katharine Temple
An Alternative Revenue Service
The Alternative Revenue Service (ARS) is a project of the War Resisters League (cosponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign) designed to educate public opinion about the realities of military spending in the federal budget, and to give people a chance to redirect $1 or more of their money “owed” in federal taxes to an established alternative fund.
Last year, people who wished to practice tax resistance, to put that money towards peaceful purposes, put $12,000 into the ARS.
For further information or advice, please write to Lisa Harper, Alternative Revenue Service, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, or telephone their “hot-line” 1‒800‒955‒7322.
Attention New York City CW Readers!
Are you interested in finding ways to channel the grief and anger felt in the aftermath of the Gulf War, while discovering alternatives to war in general?
New York City War Tax Resistance (WTR) offers support and information meetings the first Monday of each month — , , etc. — at 6:30 pm.
The meetings are held at 339 Lafayette St. (IRT Number 6, Bleeker St. station).
For more information, please contact Sallie Marx at: (212) 929‒4833.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included an article by Karl Meyer about a road-trip taken by him and Kathy Kelly.
Here are some excerpts that touch on tax resistance:
After we went on to Salina, Kansas and Newton, Kansas, where we visited with Mennonite friends in the war tax refusal movement.
Everywhere we stopped we found the peace movement vibrant, active and numerous, contradicting the falsehoods that President Bush and much of the press tell about the demise of our efforts.
In New Mexico
The same energy was evident in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we visited friends in the war-tax refusal movement.
Don Schrader in Albuquerque had arranged two television news interviews, two newspaper interviews, eight radio talk show appearances, and a lively public meeting.
We renewed acquaintances that showed us how the web of peace action stretches its stands all over North America and Central America.
Perhaps these were the very fields and ditches where Ammon Hennacy worked when he came to Phoenix in , with only a penny in his pocket.
He worked as a farm laborer in order to avoid the withholding of taxes for war.
, he picketed the IRS to let them know why he refused to pay any taxes for war.
In , he began to fast and picket one day for each year that had elapsed since Hiroshima.
(A few copies of his autobiography, The Book of Ammon, are still available from his widow, Joan Thomas, P.O. Box 25, Phoenix, AZ 85001, for $20.)
I am eager to picket with the Peace House this spring at the IRS office in Phoenix, to remind them of Ammon Hennacy, who made a radical and a tax resister out of me thirty-five years ago:
We have come back to bother you again.
This society, and each one of us personally, must put our income into servicing human needs, not into the works of war.
Only then can we rise from the economic ashes of the arms race, the Vietnam War, and our brutal indifference to the needs of the poor in the years since then.
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Besty Corner house seizure:
War Tax Refusers Update
Although Randy Kehler, Colrain, Massachusetts war tax resister (CW ), was released from jail after a little more than two months, the occupation of his family’s home by friends and supporters continues.
The federal government seized the house for non-payment, and later arrested Randy and his wife, Betsy Corner (briefly held) for contempt after their refusal to surrender it.
Their home has been auctioned off, and is now owned by someone from a nearby town.
At press time, the new “owner” has yet to move in, while groups sympathetic to the cause of tax resistance are taking turns at occupying the home, despite threats of arrest.
For more information, please call the War Tax Refusers Support Committee at: (413) 774‒2710, or write: c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
There were also a handful of brief passing references to tax resistance in other issues of The Catholic Worker in .
The issue of The Catholic Worker brought an update about the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner home seizure, sale, and occupation:
Now That April’s Here
By Brian Hynes
Randy Kehler, Betsy Corner and their 13 year-old daughter, Lillian, had not been in their Colrain, Massachusetts home for sixty weeks when I was last up for the vigil in their yard.
They were evicted in , when the IRS finally seized their home as compensation for unpaid taxes.
The house is currently occupied by a couple who “bought” it from the IRS.
The hope is that these folks will come to see the seizure, and subsequent sale and purchase, as illegitimate.
The argument of the War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR) is that “It is wrong to take people’s homes to force them to pay for war.”
Betsy and Randy have refused to pay their federal taxes since the ’70s.
Although they file with the IRS every year, they don’t pay what they are said to owe.
Instead they pay that amount to charities — some local, and some for other worthwhile endeavors.
In , the IRS started to take steps to confiscate the Kehler-Corner property, culminating in the auction of their home in .
At this time, the IRS received many non-monetary bids from Randy and Betsy’s supporters but no outside bids, and ended up buying the place themselves.
In a subsequent auction one monetary bid was received, just above the $5400 minimum.
This was the famous bid by the current occupants, who were then given title to the house.
By then, Randy had already been arrested for contempt of court and the whole family had been evicted. ( CW)
The occupation of Randy and Betsy’s home in support of their stand to resist this seizure, began immediately after the eviction.
Despite its around-the-clock presence in the house, the new owners managed to move in when several people were at a war tax resistance demonstration.
Since that time the support vigil has moved to the yard.
Most recently a beautiful trailer, one room and a porch, built especially for the purpose, has been moved on to the property.
There is one additional complexity to the situation.
The house in question is on land owned by the Valley Community Land Trust.
This means that the land itself was never confiscated, and therefore was never “sold” to the family now occupying the house.
Furthermore, the members of the Land Trust, while certainly sympathetic to WTR, also have legitimate claims and concerns about what is happening, as the IRS transferred title to the house while disregarding the stipulations of the land lease.
Pursuant to these concerns, the Land Trust has filed suit against the family who bought the house from the IRS.
At the time of my last visit, lawyers were preparing for a future hearing on this problem.
The vigil has been a time to think about many issues in discussion with people of diverse backgrounds.
The concern and commitment that I have seen there are noteworthy.
It is daunting, in an environment of such diversity, to reach common ground for moral commitment.
In Colrain, however, there is a strong consensus.
The consensus is for active nonviolence in the context of the refusal to pay for war.
It has been argued that taxation is a societal responsibility but the history of carnage is too great for us to avoid the moral issues of militarism and its support through taxation, by claiming that societal responsibility gives it legitimacy.
In fact, societal responsibility is exactly the point, and nonviolence is exactly the confrontation of moral issues by moral methods. (Militarism, instead, confronts moral issues by immoral methods.) The continuing use of military force by our nation is a moral issue that requires confrontation.
This confrontation is the consensus in Colrain.
The consensus proceeds from a long and loving tradition of nonviolent transformation of society.
The question that is worked and reworked there is now to give this living tradition rebirth in the changing situation up at Colrain.
I suggest a visit to lend your strength to theirs.
Please contact War Tax Refusers, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 03142.
(413) 774‒2710, or, (413) 773‒7427.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included a book review that again told the story of Saint Hugh of Lincoln and promoted his claim to be the (unofficial) patron saint of war tax resisters. (See ♇ for a previous Catholic Worker article on that topic.)
The issue of that paper carried a statement from jailed war tax resister Bill Ramsey:
No Limits On The Promise Of God
By Bill Ramsey
As I reflect back on the path that brought me to this cell, along with the many points of decision and sharp turns of the legal process, there was one reliable trail mark — the interplay between conscience and community, between risk-taking and relationship building.
Any way I measure it, the trail to this cell is a long one, but never a lonely one.
Most immediately, it began on with an action in the public waiting room of the IRS Taxpayer Information Service in St. Louis.
With other members of the St. Louis Covenant Community of War Tax Resisters, I planned to pass out a federal spending piechart to the steady stream of hundreds of people with taxes on their minds and time on their hands as they waited for service.
No disruption was planned, only an orderly attempt to communicate.
Within an hour, two of us were arrested after refusing an order to leave the waiting room.
In , a federal judge convicted me of unlawful leafleting.
I was acquitted of charges that we disrupted taxpayers and IRS employees.
At the US Attorney’s insistence, a pre-sentencing investigation was conducted.
It displayed my 20 years of public war tax resistance to the judge.
In , he sentenced me to three years of federal probation, with a special condition that required that I file and pay all taxes due.
From this point forward, this court-ordered condition and my conscience were on a collision course.
War tax resisters around the country urged me to consider the potential chilling effect that the probation condition would have if applied to other war tax resisters.
They introduced me to Peter Goldberger, an attorney who specializes in First Amendment appeals, who would take my appeal to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The national war tax resistance network was alerted and offers of support came from around the country.
Meanwhile in St. Louis, a local support committee was formed.
War tax resisters, homeless shelter workers, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, sanctuary providers, domestic violence counselors, educators, a priest, and a community development planner all came together to provide assistance.
They raised legal fees, set up an emergency response phone tree, served as a clearness committee, and planned a public challenge to my probation.
Two members wrote an op-ed piece published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch proposing that the US government, rather than myself, should be placed on probation for violating international law, refusing to pay dues to the United Nations, and trafficking in arms.
It served as our indictment.
This community of support convened a People’s Tribunal on .
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law at Princeton, presented the case against the government.
Former Secretaries of Defense and Treasury were invited to represent the government but sent letters of regret.
Domestic victims of the arms race testified.
One hundred thirty “jurors” placed the government on probation, listing the conditions which were presented to the St. Louis US Attorney on by a delegation from the Tribunal.
Collective Challenge
As I approached the collision of my conscience with the court-ordered condition, preparing to refuse to pay my taxes on , I was upheld by this community of support I was also inspired and grateful that they had been able to turn the questions around my probation into a collective challenge of the fundamental contradictions underlying US policy.
After a public refusal to pay my taxes on , I was summoned to a probation revocation hearing on .
The national war tax resistance network was alerted and letters from around the country arrived on the judge’s desk.
Locally, the support community planned an overnight vigil at my church for the night before the hearing.
I invited the judge to the opening service. He did not respond.
One hundred thirty people participated in the vigil which concluded an hour before the hearing with a Catholic Mass.
Fifty supporters attended the hearing.
But that night, I had a decision to make.
I felt that the government was using the probation revocation hearing as a way to circumvent the need for a trial in front of a jury of my peers.
I would not get my day in court to publicly explain my reasons for refusing to pay war taxes.
Do I remain in the church, refusing to recognize the constitutionality of the hearing?
The appeal on the constitutional grounds of freedom of speech and religion had failed.
Or do I answer the summons, appearing in court, but remain silent in my own defense — only making a brief statement of my motives which the court had refused to take into consideration?
I was without an answer.
After deliberation with members of the support community, my wife, and war tax refusers in Colrain, Massachusetts, we came to a resolution.
Respond to the summons, make the statement, and direct the public eye to my refusal to pay for death, and not to a refusal to show up in court.
My statement in court cited my responsibilities to Nuremberg principles, knowing that my government used tax money to commit war-crimes in Panama, Nicaragua, and Iraq, and fearing the US military operations in Somalia and Bosnia would soon result in indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
The statement also focused on my religious convictions.
The resources we hold are a divine trust not to be surrendered to war-making.
Looking back on US interventions during my lifetime and on testimony offered in the Bible, it is clear that when nations resort to violent force, it is usually to protect privilege, not people.
No situation or person stands outside God’s transforming work in history.
To kill is to assume that we have the right to place limits on the promises of God.
These are the beliefs I placed before the court.
In return, I received a 30-day sentence, to be followed by another year of supervised release with the same special condition that I pay taxes.
On , the order came for me to surrender to the Williamson County Jail in Marion, Illinois.
My refusal to surrender brought a summons to appear in court.
Again the larger community of support gathered for Mass at my church and then filled the spectators gallery in the court room.
After I refused to sign a bond guaranteeing that I would surrender, I was taken into custody.
Jailed for two days in the overcrowded and violence-laden conditions of the St. Clair County Jail, I discovered another community among the young men from East St. Louis who shared my cell block.
We slept toe to toe, many of us on the floor. We ate inadequate meals shoulder to shoulder.
They were without resources. Many seemed to have no one on the outside who cared about them.
Others were hardened by their life experiences.
Bantering and talk of drugs, guns, and sex resounded through the cell block until the middle of the night.
And yet, as we offered each other a little more space, plotted to get more food into the cell block, and shared our stories and one Bible among us, I began to sense camaraderie and a community forming.
In the blessed silence of the second morning, the faces of my support community on the outside merged with the faces of the young men sleeping all around me.
I knew then that I could do the entire 30 days in that cell block.
Several hours later, federal marshals arrived to take me to a new cell block in Williamson County.
It amazes me that anyone could believe that placing me in these county jails would somehow change my mind about paying war taxes.
Somehow, confined to these jails that expose the obscured violence of the status quo in our society, I am supposed to see the light and admit that the spending priorities are “right enough,” that the system is “just enough,” and that perhaps, after all, force and violence are appropriate ways to correct human behavior and resolve conflict.
The authorities wager that fear of those around me in these cell blocks and my physical separation from my primary communities will drive my conscience underground.
What they don’t realize is that these jails and the people in them are just another opportunity for community and that these walls cannot separate me from the communities of support.
They just don’t get it. Acts of conscience thrive on community!
A longer view of my path to this cell would include the community in Durham, North Carolina, that first challenged me to resist war taxes in .
Down the path would be my colleagues over the last 17 years in the American Friends Service Committee, an organization that not only tolerates civil disobedience, but affirms employees’ acts of conscience.
Add to all these the St. Louis Catholic Worker Community where I lived and worked in and the extended Worker community that remains at my side through everything.
As the path continues, there are members of my inner-city parish, struggling together to understand and act on our faith.
All along the path is the St. Louis Covenant Community of War Tax Resisters, linked to communities and humanitarian efforts throughout the world through alternative gifts from our resisted taxes.
And then there is the beloved community of my family, Cathy and my five children.
As we traveled this summer visiting friends and relatives with the prospect of my imprisonment before us, a more refined closeness grew among us.
We hold each other a little tighter these days, even over the distance that separates us for these 30 days.
As I write from this cell, Cathy and our children are surrounded by acts of kindness as the broader support community assists her with the day to day chores of running our household and caring for our children.
My absence seems to have become the occasion for further experiments in community.
As I look back on all of this, I am convinced that the convergence of heart and will that we call acts of conscience is a gradual slope, with many small steps.
Each risk taken clears the way for the next.
Everytime I raised my foot to take that next step, a community of people was there, prepared to steady my stride and to catch me if I fell.
I am now certain that this journey is impossible, unless one is accompanied.
In the end, it is the collective courage and transforming gifts of community that empower our individual acts of conscience.
“Step by step the longest march, can be won, can be won,
Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none.”
The issue of The Catholic Worker summarized the then-current argument for war tax resistance this way:
Resist Taxes! April Is Coming!
The peace dividend — the transfer of military funds to humanitarian purposes after the end of the cold war — was indeed only wishful thinking.
The percentage of the federal budget spent on the military has remained virtually the same since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Also, a law ensured that any defense cuts would be applied to the deficit.
No weapons systems have been eliminated, and the 24% troop reduction doesn’t mean any change in the strategic power of the US armed forces.
In light of all this, we remind our readers once again: tax resistance is a concrete way to refuse to participate in preparing for war.
Some suggestions — don’t pay all or part of your federal income tax — subtract the federal excise tax from your phone bill — and follow in Ammon Hennacy’s footsteps by fasting and picketing the IRS on April 15.
Tax resistance in any form is not an easy thing, but in the spirit of St. Francis’ Holy Poverty, to earn less than the taxable income level (to have less of Caesar’s, to paraphrase the Gospels) is to resist military spending as well.
That amount is $5,550 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple, and is, admittedly, easier to manage in the context of community.
A similar announcement appeared in that paper , adding the U.S. contribution to global sales of military hardware to the list of complaints, and recommending that readers contact NWTRCC (at a post office box in Monroe, Maine).
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner house seizure saga:
Colrain Resolution
The War Tax Resister Support Committee (WTRSC) in Colrain, MA celebrated their two year nonviolent campaign in .
The celebration comes after a settlement between the Valley Community Land Trust (VCLT) and the young couple who purchased the seized home of tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner at an auction from the IRS.
Negotiations concluded with the VCLT being deeded the house from Danny and Terry Franklin in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money as well as the withdrawal of civil suits between the parties.
The WTRSC celebrates the resolution and more so, the sustained support of individuals who nonviolently refuse to pay for war.
The prolonged action in Colrain (CW and CW ) always had its complexities, perhaps best reflected in the WTRSC’s assessment of the situation:
“There had been hopes that Danny and Terry would have a change of heart and remove themselves from between us and the IRS because of the action, or that the courts would invalidate the transfer of the land-lease, or that they’d affirm Randy and Betsy’s Nuremberg/International Law argument and strike down the IRS seizure altogether, or that the resistance action would carry on in high gear.
Was it our nonviolent action, the legal conflict with the VCLT, the lack of water, a new baby, or all of these things over time that brought the Franklins to the negotiating table with the Land Trust?
We may never know.
That all parties are relieved to be free of that situation and moving forward is clear and, in that sense, there has been a victory for everyone.”
At present the VCLT is in the process of finding a new lessee for the house.
Randy, Betsy, their daughter Lillian and Betsy’s mother are exploring the possibility of building a new, larger home on the Land Trust and rejoining the community.
In nearby Greenfield, a housing project spawned by the Colrain action progresses and contributions of labor, materials and money are welcome.
With approaching, the WTRSC is available to inform you about war tax resistance and the Colrain action.
(WTRSC c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01341)
―Brian Harte
Catholic Worker was itself a beneficiary of tax redirection, according to letters in the and issues:
Bronx, NY
Dear folks at the Catholic Worker,
Hello!
Once again I am withholding 32% of my federal tax in an act of war tax resistance.
I wanted to send you (and other peace groups) a contribution instead.
So here it is.
Keep up the good work — and I’ll do my best to visit every so often.
Sincerely, Gail Presbey
Bronx, NY
Dear Folks at the New York Catholic Worker,
I am enclosing a donation to your ongoing worthy cause.
The money I am sending is from my personal war tax resistance funds.
I withheld 37% of my federal income taxes from the IRS, and told them that I was instead sending it to organizations which:
are working on an international level to find nonviolent resolutions to world conflicts; and/or
are providing needed services to the members of our own society who are neglected and shortchanged because of our nation’s over-funding of the military.
Our government still spends billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.
Trident subs are still being built and launched.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants to continue funding ballistic missile defense spending.
At the same time, the poor will have their meager, underfunded programs cut even more.
This state of affairs goes against my conscience, and I cannot pay for war.
I am sure that you will put these funds to good use.
In the meantime, I can only hope that my small witness by this act of war tax resistance can, when joined with others, challenge the budget priorities of our government.
The issue of The Catholic Worker announced the publication of a newish (first published in ) NWTRCC pamphlet:
Keep in mind the deadline for the payment of income taxes.
Looking for good alternatives to paying the deadly dues?
Contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, PO Box 774, Monroe, ME 04951 for the pamphlets they put out.
In “Practical War Tax Resistance #5, Fow Income/Simple Living as War Tax Resistance,” there’s a one-page entry by two heroes of the nonviolent revolution, Wally and Juanita Nelson, now 86 and 72 respectively.
Also, there’s a small section on voluntary poverty, which the CW advocates, as opposed to involuntary poverty, which the writers tell us Gandhi called “the worst form of violence.” Truly, this little brochure is an uplifting guide for the perplexed when it comes to the nonpayment of war taxes and how to get started or to live below the taxable income.
The issue of that paper reprinted parts of an Ernest Bromley essay about war tax resistance that it had originally published in (see ♇ ).
A note by Ric Rhetor in the issue read:
One way of practicing nonviolence at the grass-roots level is through some form of tax resistance.
Maybe you’ll receive this paper before (we hope).
Perhaps tax resistance, withholding or some other form of saying no will be considered.
We wonder what will happen to long-time tax resister and teacher of resistance methods, Ed Hedemann, who goes to court as we go to press for his refusal to pay.
If you do pay federal taxes, you might be unaware that over 50% of these monies go to war and its preparation.
Melissa Jameson discussed her war tax resistance, and the decisions and compromises she made along the way as she adopted it, in the Catholic Worker:
One Way to Resist War
By Melissa Jameson
I became a tax resister in .
My introduction to resisting federal taxes because such a high percentage of them go to pay for war, came through the War Resisters League (WRL) organizers’ training program in .
During the 10 days of the program, I met people who lived below taxable income as a means of not contributing to the world of the federal government and its war machine, and read about not paying taxes as another tool of resistance.
One of the people I met there was Randy Kehler of Colrain, Massachusetts, who, along with his partner, Betsey Corner, was a longtime tax resister; their house had just been seized by the IRS after many years of redirecting their taxes to places that help build up the world, not destroy it.
I was struck by Randy and Betsy’s story and its impact on the community around them.
Later on, when the house was purchased from the IRS by a couple up that way, members of our War Resisters League local group became part of the campaign around “occupation” of the property.
We participated in the 24-hour-a-day vigil at the house, where I met even more more tax resisters.
First Steps
The vigil began in and ended in , when the people who bought the house finally sold it back to the land trust.
(Randy and Betsy now live in another house on the land trust property.)
The vigil was an amazing experiment in nonviolent resistance and building community.
It opened me up to whole new worlds of thought.
Somewhere along the line, I started reading up on the subject in the WRL’s “Guide to War Tax Resistance,” and I determined that, as much as I could, I would resist.
I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with my level of participation in the system.
To the extent possible, my partner and I tried to avoid federal taxes, concentrating on the things people can avoid by not purchasing them, like cigarettes and liquor.
(I am still searching for someone who can teach me how to make wine!)
Obviously, the taxes on tires and gasoline and such are much more difficult.
One does what one can, when one can.
We then started withholding payment of the federal excise tax on our phone bill, dutifully — mostly — sending in notes saying why we were not paying the small percentage that is this tax.
What is supposed to happen is that the phone company takes the amount you don’t pay off the bill, then informs the IRS you are doing this.
However, the amounts are often so small that nothing happens.
This practice led to some interesting, even entertaining, conversations with Bell Atlantic.
Eventually, it also led to them dropping the money from the “Past Due” section of the bill.
Whether they ever actually told the IRS, I don’t know.
Given where we were living (suburban, northern NJ) and how much our rent and other expenses were, living below taxable income did not seem viable.
We — mostly me — were not ready for community living at that point, where perhaps a group of us could have shared expenses, enabling us to live below the taxable income line.
We were busy with other peace activism, too, and for this and other reasons, being self-employed also did not seem to be an option.
Living the way we did gave us certain choices we could not have had otherwise.
My partner earned below the income guidelines at two of his jobs, and, at first, did not earn enough in both combined to pay taxes.
We decided that it was great at least one of us could do this.
As for myself, the job I have full-time now was then only part-time, and they were withholding.
I eventually got a second job, for one day a week, where my employer agreed to pay me as an independent contractor and did not withhold any taxes.
I was thrilled!
Then, in my reading, I found out that I could change my W-4 form and increase the amount of deductions claimed, which would mean that I would have less money taken out of my paycheck each week.
This is, of course, illegal, and can have serious consequences.
However, I felt that I needed to take this step.
My happiness was dimmed a bit when I realized that I had not claimed enough deductions and so some federal taxes were still being taken out.
Feeling foolish, I changed my withholding form again, trying to ignore the quizzical look on the face of our personnel director, the all-powerful dispenser of forms.
(Legally, the people in the accounting department are not supposed to stop you from filling out these forms however you wish, but that does not mean that the various and sundry individuals you meet along the way of the process — witness our personnel director — will not wonder what you are doing.)
And now, believe it or not, it still isn’t enough — I got a raise, and need to change my withholding once more!
Continuing the Walk
After a few years, maybe in or so, I received a form letter from the IRS saying they did not have a record of my taxes for .
I wrote back, explaining why, as a pacifist, I did not believe in paying for war, and also told them I was redirecting my tax dollars to peaceful causes.
I enclosed a copy of the War Resisters League pie chart that breaks down the federal tax dollar into how it is spent.
After some time, I received another request, this time for me to fill out a return and send it in.
I wrote back again.
There were more letters and, finally, a bill for an amount due: as they had no record of taxes being taken out of my one-day-a-week job, they assessed me accordingly.
They tacked on some penalties and interest, and asked me to send them the six or seven hundred dollars right away.
I wrote them another letter.
I have heard from them a couple of times since, asking me to send them a check as soon as possible.
The last time was near last summer, when the letter I received told me that if I didn’t pay them by a certain date, they could take steps to get their money.
I knew this could happen, and so am more or less waiting for the other shoe to drop.
To the IRS, my several hundred dollars is not even a drop in the bucket, so they may not do anything.
But, they could garnish my wages or seize my bank account.
(However small, I do have one, having succumbed, for other reasons, at my job to get direct deposit — this also makes it easier for the IRS to find my money.)
I then would have to decide whether or not to leave my job, something I have contemplated doing, or continue and keep resisting here, in this way.
When co-workers talk about getting refunds from the IRS or about filing their taxes, I confess that I have not always been that forthcoming about my own practices.
However, I have also found that each successive step along this path becomes a little surer, a little easier, and I talk more about this now.
I have also found, as with many things, that once you introduce a topic, others welcome the chance to share their own stories.
One of my co-workers told me she has a friend who claims a lot of deductions so that she can have more money to take home during the year, and then in the spring, just pays the IRS what she owes.
Most people I speak to never think of questioning the IRS about anything, let alone challenging them.
Resistance can be hard, but it is always so worthwhile.
Compared to many people, I have hardly faced the IRS at all — my “tiny" bill is nothing compared to others, over the years, who have been assessed tens of thousands of dollars in penalties and taxes, who have been taken to court, who have even gone to jail.
At this point, I am feeling more and more as if I need to continue the walk and explore ways in which I can further my life of resistance to weapons and war.
I realize that the particular form of resistance I have been doing is not for everyone, but for me it is a step in the right direction.
There were also occasional announcements of national, international, and regional gatherings of war tax resistance groups, and a few other mentions in passing of tax resistance during these years.
Some recent links of interest:
Merchants in San Francisco’s famed Castro district have gotten fed up with the city’s ineffective response to mentally-ill and/or addicted people wreaking havoc while living outdoors on city streets.
So fed up that the Castro Merchants Association sent a letter to city officials demanding that the city take more effective action and threatening to “stop paying taxes and stop paying the fees for licenses because the city is not providing the services that are supposed to be guaranteed based on what we’re paying to the city.”
Long-time Catholic Worker activist Tom Cornell died .
Joel Schlosberg summarized some of his work, including his war tax resistance, for Antiwar.com: “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War”
