How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → destroy the apparatus of taxation → modern roadside apparatus in particular

Tax resistance is a staple of nonviolent resistance, but not all tax resistance is nonviolent. There are also plenty of examples in which people have taken up arms against the taxing authority, have violently destroyed the apparatus of tax collecting, or have used threats of violence to intimidate or inhibit tax collectors.

For instance, lately in Chicago people upset at extortionate parking rates have been destroying parking meters.

“Mike The Parking Ticket Geek” … contacted us via Twitter and showed us his website, theexpiredmeter.com, which he used to give people advice on how to beat parking tickets. The site has become a lightning rod for peoples’ complaints about the new rates and operators.

Mike says the people who are writing to him have a sense of “anger, frustration, rage in some cases.”

To the point where some, it appears, are vandalizing the meters. Pictures on Mike’s website show meters deliberately smashed, taken apart, spray-painted, or deliberately jammed.

“People suggest taking a quarter, putting some super glue on it, and putting it in the coin slot,” Mike said.

Other tactics mentioned on the site are over-feeding the meters with pennies so as to make them too full to accept any other coins, spray-painting over their windows so their status cannot be seen by parking enforcers, filling the meters with expanding foam, or removing them entirely.

Speed cameras and other automated ticket-giving devices are also frequent targets. Here’s some video of folks in Phoenix, Arizona who dressed up in Santa suits and temporarily disabled red-light cameras there:

(Red-light cameras are ostensibly used to automatically ticket drivers who hazardously fail to heed traffic lights, and are promoted as a public safety measure — but governments end up seeing them as revenue-producing devices more than as traffic safety devices, and have been caught manipulating the timing of yellow lights in a way that increases the number of tickets while also increasing the danger of the intersection!)

Peter Hendrickson, one of the latest in a long line of constitutionalist tax protester amateur lawyers, got his original tax protester prison term after conspiring to mail a firebomb to the IRS.

And then there are the “suspicious powder” episodes that temporarily shut down IRS facilities from time-to-time. Though these suspicious powders are always found to be harmless, they’re clearly intended to resemble the 2001 anthrax-powder mailings that killed several people — and so are no less violent in practice than a bank robbery using an unloaded gun.

Here’s another example, reported on this day in 1952:

MEXICAN RIOTS OVER TAXES

NEW YORK, Sunday

Crowds in Oaxaca State, Mexico, in revolt over new taxes, stoned to death Diodoro Maldonado, the mayor of Tlacolula.

They attacked him near the gate of his home.

Eight others have been killed and at least 50 injured in riots.

Taxpayers of the city of Oaxaca, the State capital, are holding a general strike.

They are demanding the resignation of the State Governor, Manuel Heredia, because of his tax programme.

The Governor armed nearly 3,000 farmers with modern, carbines and marched them into Oaxaca’s main square to “protect State property” after the first outbreak of rioting.

The Governor blames Communists for the disorders.

Although the Governor has repealed his tax decree, which would have meant a sharply increased burden on the State’s poor as well as the rich, an Oaxaca “citizens’ committee” says that passive resistance will be continued until he resigns.

Yesterday General Augustin Mustieles said that army tanks and troops of Mexico’s only motorised brigade, rushed to Oaxaca after police had fired into a crowd of anti-tax demonstrators should have no trouble in preserving order.

“But if more trouble develops,” he said, “we will not hesitate to arm more peasants — 20,000 if necessary.”

Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:

• Not all tax resistance has to do with grand global issues or conscientious objection; some is just the protest of people who feel they’re getting shafted by a government that takes too much and provides too little. Case in point: Scott Frisby of Southend. He says the government has failed to provide even the minimum of services, and so he’s dropping his subscription (or at least 25% of it). Scroll down to the bottom to read the hilarious response from Southend Council’s customer service department.
• The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in 1983, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in the early 1990s, the IRS started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals, finally getting turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001. Here’s the story, with links to the court opinions.
• War Resisters’ International has released their Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns for free, on-line.
• A populist form of tax resistance is aimed at speed and red-light cameras that scan license plates of offending vehicles, snap photos of the drivers, and automatically issue traffic tickets. These cameras are more a revenue-raising program than a safety-encouraging one, and they’re causing lots of resentment.

  A driver has racked up dozens of speeding tickets in photo-radar zones on Phoenix-area freeways while sporting monkey and giraffe masks, and is fighting every one by claiming the costumes make it impossible for authorities to prove he was behind the wheel.

  It took Arizona state police months to realize the same driver was involved and was refusing to pay the fines. By the time they did, more than 50 of the tickets had become invalid because the deadline for prosecution had passed.

  Arizona began deploying the stationary and mobile cameras on state highways a year ago, and through Sept. 4 had issued more than 497,000 tickets. Of those, about 132,000 recipients had paid the fine of $165 plus a 10 percent penalty, netting the state more than $23 million. Arizona is the first to deploy such technology on highways statewide.

  Many of the remaining tickets are either new, being appealed or have just been ignored. The state didn’t have figures immediately available on the breakdown.

  The backlash against the cameras has been fairly constant, however. Arizonans have used sticky notes, Silly String and even a pickax to sabotage the cameras.

  Many believe the shooting death of speed-enforcement van operator Doug Georgianni on April 19 on a Phoenix freeway was a result of anger over the cameras, although authorities haven’t made that direct allegation.

  “It’s a peaceful act of resistance — that’s what this country was founded on,” VonTesmar said. “I’m not thumbing my nose at DPS, but photo radar is not a DPS officer protecting public safety. It’s nothing but a speed tax.”

• Tax resister NTodd Pritsky shares some meditations on civil disobedience, complicity, and knowing how much of yourself to devote to a better world when it seems like even 100% isn’t enough.
• Forbes reports that a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration investigation turned up evidence that IRS employees are issuing huge fraudulent “refunds” for fun and profit, but the IRS doesn’t have procedures in place to keep track of how manual refunds are generated, so nobody knows for sure.

What ever happened to the tollbooth-destroying family of Rebecca and Her Daughters? Seems they’ve recently been spotted in Arizona. Excerpts:

Arizona speed cameras incite a mini revolt

A masked man, a citizens group, a judge and other motorists are behind the fight against photo enforcement.

Arizonans drive long distances on their highways, and they like to do it fast.

But since the Grand Canyon State began enforcing speed limits with roadside cameras, motorists are raging against the machines: They have blocked out the lenses with Post-it notes or Silly String. During the Christmas holidays, they covered the cameras with boxes, complete with wrapping paper.

One dissenting citizen went after a camera with a pick ax.

Arizona is the only state to implement “photo enforcement,” as it’s known, on major highways and is one of 12 states and 52 communities, plus the District of Columbia, with speed cameras, according to the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The cameras, paired with radar devices, photograph vehicles exceeding the speed limit by 11 mph or more. A notice of violation — carrying a fine of $181.50 — is then sent to the address of the vehicle’s registered owner.

Initially, the cameras were thought of as a revenue generator, expected to bring in more than $90 million in the first fiscal year of operation.

But from October 2008, when the program began, to October 2009, the cameras generated about $19 million for the state’s cash-strapped general fund, according to a report on photo radar released by the Arizona Office of the Auditor General last month.

As of September, only 38% of issued violations were paid, the report said.

Dave VonTesmar, or perhaps not — who’s to say?

The program was designed to encourage people to pay the fine and not fight their violations: No points are added to an offender’s license, and it doesn’t affect insurance.

But, critics note, that hasn’t stopped people from wanting their day in court. About half of the total violations issued are still pending because people have ignored the tickets or have requested hearings to challenge them, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

The violations put an “inordinate” load on the courts, said Terry Stewart, a court administrator with Maricopa County. People have flocked to request hearings at Phoenix courts, and at one point last year, one court branch had cases set up through 2011.

“You just have irate litigants and irate defendants coming in, just mad at the entire photo enforcement system in general,” said Steven Sarkis, a Maricopa County justice of the peace.

The most high-profile protester has been Dave VonTesmar, who has achieved statewide fame through his efforts to fight the tickets with a monkey mask. The 47-year-old flight attendant has allegedly sped past the cameras at least 40 times.

His defense?

There’s no way to prove that he was the driver wearing the mask, he says. Lots of people, he adds, drive his car.

VonTesmar, who signed up for the military on his 17th birthday, says he doesn’t fancy himself a criminal.

Amid empty soda cans on the floor of his white station wagon are various rubber disguises, including the famous monkey mask, a Frankenstein, koala, panda bear and a ghost mask that glows in the dark.

So far, four of VonTesmar’s cases have been dismissed, and he’s been found responsible for seven. The remaining 29 are pending, said VonTesmar’s attorney, Michael Kielsky.

Another dissenter is John Keegan, a judge for the Arrowhead Justice Court, who has called the cameras a constitutional violation. He rejects every photo radar ticket that comes before him.

So far, Keegan says, he’s dismissed more than 7,000 violations, potentially worth more than $1 million.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

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

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

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

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

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

Taking a page from the Rebeccaite toolbook, tax resisters in Brittany have taken to destroying tollbooths. Here’s a great example (video):

Back in Rebecca’s time, toll gates were real wooden gates that barred the roads to drivers until they paid their tolls, and the resisters’ tools were bonnets and axes. Now, toll gates are automated portals that scan the license plates of passing trucks, and the resisters’ tools are red liberty caps and burning tires full of petrol.

According to a Reuters dispatch from a few days ago, the resisters “have destroyed more than two-dozen sensor-based toll-gates erected over major routes.” This is in addition to many smaller attacks on tinier radar-gun-like outposts.

The French version of Slate has tried to summarize what this rebellion is all about in its article: The “bonnets rouges,” a postmodern revolt.

The government is billing this as an “ecotax” designed less as a revenue-raiser and more as a way of trying to wean French shipping away from the highways and towards less-polluting transportation options. But a new group, the “bonnets verts” (green caps) are asking: if the government cares about the environment so much, why has it doubled the tax on people who use public transit?

The bonnets rouges came to my attention early last month after they held a 20,000-person strong demonstration in Quimper (Bretagne) and started a campaign of destroying the automated portals and traffic camera outposts that the government was using to enforce a new tax on trucks. The demonstrators are named by their trademark red caps, which are a deliberate reference to the 1675 Revolt of the Bonnets Rouges in Bretagne against the taxes of Louis ⅩⅣ (though the Phrygian cap is a symbol that is much older).

A new demonstration today, in Carhaix, drew perhaps twice as many people. It is being accompanied by dozens of blockades of trucks along highways throughout France, with the stated goal of letting cars through but halting commercial transport (this is snarling traffic to the extent that some demonstrators were having difficulty getting to the Carhaix rally).

At one point the demonstrators held an auction at which they sold off bits and pieces of previously-destroyed road tax portals as souvenirs.

The language barrier makes it difficult for me to interpret much of the news coming out of the area, but I’m trying to keep up (on the Twitter, it seems that #BonnetsRouges, #RevolteFiscale, and #ReveilCitoyen are the tags to watch today).

The so-called “ecotax” remains a focus of the demonstrations, but there is also a focus on demanding more regional autonomy, and calls for the resignation of the overwhelmingly unpopular French president. Other opposition groups with their own specific grievances have tried to latch on and put their messages on the agenda (notorious far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen put on a red cap at one point), but so far the bonnets rouges seem to be maintaining an ecumenical inclusiveness: protesters of the left and right, believing that Bretagne is being misgoverned and exploited by Paris, are keeping a united front and overlooking their differences.

Some international tax resistance news to wind up the old year:

• Fares in the government-run Mexico City metro system went up by 66% recently, and that’s making commuters hopping mad. They’ve formed a movement hashtagged #PosMeSalto (roughly, “Well then, I’ll jump”) and are encouraging passengers to leap the turnstiles and board without paying. Here are some photos of a modern dance troupe doing turnstile-vaults in the Coyoacan station to promote the protest.
• The Bonnets Rouges are still at it. three more traffic radar installations went up in flames a few nights back, in a reemergence of the tactic that has resulted in the destruction of more than 210 such installations since the beginning of the movement.

Your international tax resistance news round-up:

• In northern Italy, a group of small businesses have united under the banner “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” (tax protest to the bitter end) to begin to refuse paying taxes.

  We can no longer pay protection money to a phantom state. Join this group of people who have decided to lift our heads, a group of businesspeople who have had enough of this extortion practiced by a corrupt and criminal class with their legal scam of extorting money from businesspeople, from companies, from Italian households to expend revenues on their own interests, while starving citizens who cannot pay more under threats and victimization from the tormenters of the state.

  (Caveat: I pieced this translation together from Google Translate and some educated guesses based on Spanish grammar.)

• In Italy, Daniela Fregosi has started resisting taxes in protest against the way the government discriminates against the self-employed when it subsidizes medical treatment. Fregosi is battling breast cancer and, when she discovered how flimsy the social security benefits were for self-employed people like herself, she decided to stop paying for them:

  [I decided to begin resisting] in December, when I got the bill from INPS [for the social security tax] — about three thousand Euros! When they asked me for that money, I felt like an ATM with breast cancer. So after having paid the INPS contribution every year since 1992, I decided not to pay it.

  Dear Thoreau, father of the fight against the state and power, as well as an emblem of civil disobedience and tax resistance, help me. Sustain and encourage me with your wise words so I do not feel alone: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now.”

• In Italy, Giovanni Paolo Ramonda, general manager of the Community of Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, spoke at a conference on the theme of “peace is the best defense.” He called on the government to create a “Ministry of Peace” and to allow taxpayers to choose to direct their taxes there instead of to military spending, and, “in the absence of this… we call on everyone to perform war tax resistance.”
• In England, Hedley Lester has stopped paying his council tax in protest against the U.K.’s militarism.

  Mr Lester told the court that domestic and international laws stipulate that when war is illegal, the collection and payment of council tax to the government is a war crime.

  Mr Lester argued that the money going to Havant council went into a central pot of government cash.

  He told magistrates: “International law applicable to the U.K. as well as our own domestic legislation forbids me from becoming party to criminal acts being committed on an ongoing basis by the U.K. government.

  “It overrides any otherwise lawful requirement placed upon me by U.K. government. I submit it is beyond the scope of the powers of any public body, in this case Havant Borough Council, to require anyone to commit a crime.”

  He added: “I am not trying to achieve national chaos. I am trying to achieve the end of this country’s illegal and immoral use of war.”

  Lester lost his court case and is appealing.
• In Malakasa, Greece, the mayor, deputy mayor, and aldermen were among those arrested at a toll gate protest at which the protesters raised the gates and waved cars through, and later destroyed some of the tollbooths. In another action in 2011, the mayor of Pelasgias took a city-owned bulldozer and knocked down the railings along the roadside leading up to a tollbooth, creating a bypass around it.
• A movement that is resisting increased fares on government-run monopoly public transit, which I first noticed in Mexico under the name “Pos Me Salto” has gone thoroughly international. In Rio de Janiero, Brazil, protesters of the passe livre movement occupied the central station:

  After marching peacefully from the Candelaria area dozens of activists from the Black Block group sprinted off and entered the station before police could close the gates. They smashed turnstiles, waved flags and entreated commuters to enter the train system without paying.

  Riot police and station security temporarily regained territory with pepper spray and percussion grenades, but after a brief hiatus the demonstrators regained control of the concourse and started drumming, dancing and singing as passengers — many clutching handkerchiefs to their faces because of the pungent police gas in the terminal — passed by without paying.

  “I totally support this protest,” said Fabiana Aragon, a red-faced, teary-eyed health worker who was heading home after work. The 43-year-old said she spent almost a third of her 1,000 reals income on transport fares but still had to endure long delays, dirty trains and hot, crowded carriages without air conditioning. “The situation now is absurd.”

• Meanwhile, in London, England, a mini fare strike was launched to support the unions of transit employees. The government is hoping to cut back on ticket booth workers in favor of vending machines; the union, naturally, disapproves. As part of the union’s pressure tactics, they have decided on periodic “revenue actions:”

  This means that station staff will refuse to carry out “revenue duties”, including selling and checking tickets. Ticket office windows will be closed and ticket machines will be powered down. Revenue Inspectors will not conduct checks and issue penalty fares, and, except in cases where crowd control means it’s unsafe to do so, ticket gates will be kept open. In other words… free travel!

• The December 9 Committee in southern Italy, part of a movement popularly known as Forconi (“Pitchfork”) have started ramping up a tax resistance campaign. They’re starting with a small, easy-to-resist tax: the television licence fee.

  Resources are being organized with sample letters, flyers, and volunteer counselors who will inform and assist anyone who wants to stop paying a tax we consider illegitimate. “We expect a lot of participation, with tens of thousands of people participating and sending a strong warning to those responsible.”

• In Catalonia, the nationalist movement is pressing for a referendum on independence from Spain, though one which the Spanish government has already said it has no intentions of honoring (or even permitting). The movement has long been engaging in sporadic, and mostly symbolic, tax resistance actions. Recently the Catalan National Assembly considered launching a fresh tax resistance campaign.

  With this campaign (“From disobedience to sovereignty”) the ANC proposes that rather than paying taxes to the national Treasury to pay them into the Catalan Government, to initiate a “progressive disengagement from the State.”

  When the city council of Vilablareix backed a similar plan in 2012, they were taken to court by the state government for this show of rebellion. (The complaint was dismissed on the grounds that the support was rhetorical and did not involve the council in any overt impropriety.) More recently six more Catalan municipalities have begun illegally paying the income tax withheld from the paychecks of city workers as well as the value-added tax collected locally into the Catalan tax agency instead of the federal one. This brings the total number of such municipalities up to 59, with another 172 having expressed that they plan to do so at some point.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• A multi-day business strike in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is protesting the government’s attempt to extend and hike a tax.
• It’s very rare for a major U.S. political party to call for tax refusal, but that’s what the Republican Party in Seattle has done after that city passed a questionably-legal municipal income tax. “This law is unconstitutional, illegal, and against the voter’s [sic] will expressed nine (9) times at the ballot box and it deserves nothing less than civil disobedience — that is, refusal to comply, file or pay,”
• Stephen Ruth discovered that Suffolk County officials had unsafely manipulated the timing of traffic lights to trick drivers into running red lights and increase the revenue from the ticket-issuing red-light cameras. He was so furious that he not only blew the whistle, but he cut the wires to the cameras to foil the scheme.
• Save Lagos Group has called for tax resistance against the government of that Nigerian state.
• American war tax resister Frances Crowe is 98 years old. That didn’t stop her from getting arrested in a civil disobedience action against a planned natural gas pipeline. She was convicted, and is now refusing to pay the fine.
• Welt wonders where Thoreau would find himself in today’s political landscape, and concludes: “He belongs to nobody; he cannot be monopolized by any party. ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume,’ said Thoreau, ‘is to do at any time what I think right.’ Ideologies, even progressive ones, bothered him.”
• The Den Plirono movement is still sending out its Harry Tuttle-like engineers to reconnect the power to families who have lost electricity for failure to keep up with the tax hikes the government has added to utility bills.

Some recent links from here and there:

• “Tax Day,” the day when federal income tax returns are due in the U.S., is coming up next month. NWTRCC is keeping track of the ways American war tax resisters plan to meet the occasion with protest, education, and outreach.
• Here’s an aspect of the recently-passed federal tax reform legislation that had previously escaped my notice: People who became disabled early in life, and their families, have for a few years been able to establish something called an ABLE Account. These are a bit like Roth retirement accounts — the money you put into the accounts is taxed just like the rest of your income, but any returns on that money are not — but you can spend the money in the account on a variety of expenses connected with coping with the disability. Anyway, these accounts aren’t entirely new, but what is new this year is that people who contribute to these accounts now qualify for the Retirement Savings Tax Credit, which can be really valuable for low-income tax resisters.
• Another update on the water tax resistance campaign in Zaragoza says that nearly one in three households there have refused to pay.
• The D.C./Maryland/Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles posted a video of a driver destroying an automatic ticket-generating traffic camera to its Twitter account, pleading for help in identifying the suspect. Instead, they got an outpouring of tributes for the vandal.

  Video of the alleged suspect destroying a DC speeding camera. pic.twitter.com/NmLHulmrzu

  — DC Maryland Virginia (@DMVFollowers) February 25, 2018

A website calling itself TheNewspaper.com is collecting news reports about varieties of citizen rebellion against ticket-generating traffic cameras, such as those that enforce speed limits. According to the site, these reports came in during last month alone:

• Someone destroyed a ticketing machine in Washington, D.C.
• French resisters disabled two camera with spray paint, another with a power saw, and authorities removed another after resisters set it on fire.
• A man in North Ireland climbed on the roof of an occupied car to disable the ticket-issuing camera atop it.
• Yellow socks, stickers, and black spray paint were among the means used to disable nearly a dozen ticket cameras in France.
• French resisters burned a speed camera near Vivonne, and paint was used to disable ten others.
• English resisters used a flaming tire to burn a camera in Oldbury.
• Ecuadorian resisters disabled two speed cameras in Cuenca.
• Australian resisters put a camera to the torch in Victoria.
• Italian resisters pried open the box holding a camera, ripped out its electronics, and set it aflame.

I’ve spent most of the month vacationing with my brother in South America. I had been a little concerned, but apparently the IRS hasn’t gotten around to having my passport revoked for non-payment of taxes yet.

I hope to have some big news to share with you soon, but until then here are some links of interest to tax resisters that have accumulated during my absence:

• Claire Wolfe, on the downhill slope of her recent book project Basics of Resistance, gives me a shout-out over at her Practical Freedomista blog:

  He has written a book on tax-resistance techniques.

  In addition to being a personal inspiration, he’s written about other tax resisters like Ammon Hennacy, who conducted a One-Man Revolution and Henry David Thoreau, who wasn’t the pacifist some imagine.

  Some of his writing is political and philosophical, like “The Roots of Political Authority.” Other entries on his blog are highly practical, like “A Post-Game Analysis of a Civil Disobedience Action.”

  If you’re looking for helpful information from a man who has walked the walk, David’s blog is a good place to start.

• Barakaldo Digital reports on the outreach actions of war tax resisters from Barakaldo, Biscay. “They have protested that the ‘diversion of public resources’ to military expenses or bank bailouts ‘translates into a town like Barakaldo, with high rates of unemployment, poverty, and precariousness, with many deficits in social services.’ ” The Spanish government, under pressure from the U.S., says it plans to double its defense spending so as to take on a higher percentage of the total NATO budget. Concerned Basque taxpayers are encouraged to contact their Office of Tax Resistance in Bilbao.
• Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a technique for applying economic pressure to states, usually from without, by trying through multiple avenues to deny them economic resources. The tactic was famously applied to apartheid South Africa, and is now enjoying a resurgence in the attempt to curb Israel’s oppressive policies towards Palestianians. But isn’t it overdue to BDS the U.S.?
• I speculated last month that Congress was passing a set of window-dressing IRS “reform” bills as a way to cover for a boost to the agency’s budget. Looks like I hit that nail on the head: “Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released a spending bill on Wednesday that would increase the IRS budget, including new funds to help implement the GOP tax law.”
• Remember Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil” corporate code of conduct? A dozen Google employees took it seriously, and resigned from the company when Google refused to stop working on a Pentagon program to use machine learning to better identify targets for military drones. Thousands of Google employees signed a letter begging the company to “commit to not weaponizing its technology” and to express this commitment by ending its Pentagon contract, to no avail.
• Attacks on tollgates and traffic ticket cameras continue worldwide:
  • French and Italian cameras disabled with paint, a German speed camera was swiped from under the nose of its operator and smashed on the pavement, and a Scottish camera was torched.
  • Swiss camera swiped, Welsh camera blockaded, English camera sabotaged, French cameras spray-painted or burned, Italian and Polish cameras ripped apart or twisted.
  • Tollgates forcibly opened to drivers on the Biju Expressway in India by members of the local bar association.

Some tax resistance news of note:

• I’m seeing some signs of organized tax resistance as part of the ongoing protests in Nicaragua, which are aimed at the unpopular policies and the general repressiveness of the Sandinista government:
  • Attorney Julio Francisco Báez has produced a video for Nicaraguans who want to participate in tax resistance.
  • The Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences and Academy of Legal and Political Sciences have called on people and businesses in Nicaragua to stop paying taxes and bills from the state electricity monopoly.
  • There is talk of a tax strike in the Mercado Oriental in Managua, mirroring a general strike there in the last days of the Somoza regime in 1979. Merchants there met and voted to stop paying taxes and utility bills. Merchant Irlanda Jerez told an interviewer:

    When we talk about civil disobedience in the Mercado Oriental, we are talking about not paying city taxes, not paying Conmema [vendor fees], not paying trash, not paying any tax that has anything to do with government entities. First, as disobedience, and second, because it is prioritizing the salaries of the workers.

    Of course [we fear reprisals]. We know that this dictatorial government always takes reprisals against anyone who rises up. The merchants are afraid. I am afraid. It’s normal, but in this moment we have to put aside any fear of economic loss.

  • Student protest leaders called for tax resistance and boycotts of businesses owned by the ruling family as part of a nonviolent resistance campaign.
• Alex Tabarrok has an amusing post demonstrating the sort of magical thinking that progressives sometimes have about taxes and government spending.
• TheNewspaper continues to report on people around the world who are disabling traffic-ticket-issuing machines: in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many times over in France, in Italy, England, Russia, and several more times in France.
• Some people every year get it into their heads that it would be a good idea to donate money to the U.S. government to help it pay down the national debt. That debt stands at something like $21,000,000,000,000, so those donations, though they amount to millions of dollars a year (go figure), only pay down something like 0.00001% of this amount. People may be wising up, though. These voluntary contributions seem to be sharply down this year.

Some links of interest from here and there:

• Last month I noted that Google was getting push-back from some of its employees for its efforts to help boost the artificial intelligence of the U.S. military’s death drones. The company has since decided not to renew the project and has further vowed not to participate in the weaponizing of its artificial intelligence technology in a set of published principles on Artificial Intelligence at Google. Bending over backwards not to spin this as some sort of peacenik, anti-military decision, the company said “we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas. These include cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, veterans’ healthcare, and search and rescue. These collaborations are important and we’ll actively look for more ways to augment the critical work of these organizations and keep service members and civilians safe.”
• There’s an interesting trend suddenly emerging in which consumer brands are trying to get a public relations boost by taking action against the government or stepping in to replace it. In these cases: Country Time Lemonade offering to provide free legal assistance to children who are fined or otherwise harassed by The Man for setting up lemonade stands, and Domino’s Pizza filling potholes that have gone unfilled by the ostensibly responsible governments.
• Here’s a second tax resistance how-to video from Nicaragua’s Theo Báez (in Spanish).
• Under the Jacob Zuma regime in South Africa, the tax agency became so corrupt and unwilling to confront tax evasion by political elites, that a country with high “tax morale” (relative willingness by citizens to pay taxes voluntarily) has now become one in which “more and more South Africans have simply stopped paying their taxes… In the eyes of many experts, the government’s — and the country’s — ability to right itself is at stake.”
• Breizh-Info reports on the craze of destroying traffic ticket issuing bots in France. While the Bonnets Rouges of Brittany probably deserve some credit for getting the ball rolling on this, the acts have spread to other regions of France. And “with rare exceptions,” says the reporter, “the culprits are never found or denounced.”
• A peace activist convicted for his role in a demonstration against the Navy base being constructed on Jeju Island has refused to pay his fine, opting to serve 46 days in prison instead.
• Waging Nonviolence reports that tax resistance has been one of the tactics of Ambazonian separatists in Cameroon.

Some tabs that have schlepped past my browser window in recent days:

• The University Alliance for Democracy and Justice (Coordinadora Universitaria por la Democracia y la Justicia) in Nicaragua issued a call for increased tax resistance and a general strike last week (translation mine):

  In the face of the massacre by the Ortega-Murillo government of the Nicaraguan people, from the University Alliance for Democracy and Justice we call on the private sector and to Nicaraguan society in general, to strengthen their actions of tax resistance and to stand firm in the face of state violence, declaring a general strike for 48 hours or until the Ortega-Murillo government complies with the following conditions:

  1. Stop the cruel paramilitary repression in Masaya and other territories besieged by the National Guard and Sandinista Youth shock troops.
  2. Send invitations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Union, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to establish permanent missions of these organizations in our country.

  The call is to use every civic mechanism we have at our disposal to curb these criminal acts of the Ortega-Murillo government.

  We cannot live normal lives while they massacre our brothers!

• A survey of thousands of smokers in California showed that more than a third of them had used legal methods to get around the state’s prohibitive excise tax on tobacco, and nearly one in five had used illegal techniques. And that survey was taken before a $2-per-pack hike in the tax rate took effect. “About a third of cigarettes in California are estimated to be from out-of-state (and thus tax-avoiding) sources.”
• More tales of traffic ticket issuing camera or radar boxes being destroyed: from France & Italy; Saudi Arabia, Rhode Island, and France; and France & Italy again.
• One of the features of the big tax law that Republicans passed last year was one that caps the tax deduction for state and local taxes. This has the effect of raising taxes on wealthier people from high-tax states. These tend to be the Democrat-leaning, wealthier, coastal states, and so this has been seen as partially a partisan poke at the Democrat’s donor base and a thumb-in-the-eye at blue states in general — increasing the amount they’re subsidizing their red cousins. But blue state lawmakers are getting creative and trying to deny the U.S. Treasury this extra tax money. Some of these workarounds would even have the effect of allowing people to deduct more than before.
• No surprise: IT security at the IRS is a mess. Attention hacktivists: strike while the iron is hot.
• The ranks of war tax resisters in Lleida, Catalonia have risen to about fifty. Resisters there typically redirect tax money to non-governmental organizations and then declare an equivalent tax credit on their tax returns.
• The opposition coalition in Sri Lanka urged people to stop paying taxes if the government goes through on its plans to pay compensation to former members of the Tamil Tigers insurrection.

Today, some of the international tax resistance news that’s been collecting in my bookmarks in recent weeks:

Nicaragua

The tumult in Nicaragua continues.

• The University Alliance for Democracy and Justice has called on businesses to join a prolonged tax strike and a short general strike, aimed at forcing the resignation of President Ortega. The statement from the group accused the organized business sector of being “accomplices” and “complicit” with the Ortega regime because of their inaction thus far.
• I noted a list of tax resistance tactics being posted on Twitter (#SOSNicaragua). Here’s my translation:

  Tips for economically punishing the Daniel Ortega regime

  Tips for practicing autonomous tax resistance

  To win freedom by nonviolent means is not easy work. The force holding the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship together is money and with our taxes we are fueling that repressive force that treats us as though we were inferior beings, with hatred and contempt. The police do not protect us, they attack us, and incredibly we pay them to do it. No more! As citizens we can reduce our monetary contributions to this regime by making a tax boycott.

  Here is a list of tax resistance methods that we can practice in our daily lives:

  Limit your purchases to tax-exempt items

  • Domestic fruits and vegetables, unpackaged rice and sugar, domestic vegetable oil, eggs, bread, milk, and cheese.
  • Domestic meat and cuts of meat other than loins or steaks.
  • Personal hygiene and household products produced in Nicaragua.
  • Do not ask for a bill for your purchase. If it’s a “vandal” business, they will be free not to report the tax on your purchase. [Vice President Rosario Murillo has called anti-regime protesters “vandals.”]
  • Buy from the informal sector. Small businesses, stretches of the marketplace, groceries and businesses under the fixed-fee system. You can ask the business-owner which tax system they fall under if you have any doubt.
  • Reduce purchases made with credit or debit cards. The government keeps 1.5% of every purchase made with a card.
  • Reduce your spending on entertainment activities and on the consumption of alcohol.
  • If you do consume alcohol, try to do so in places that do not issue invoices. In general such places are where the drinks are less expensive.
  • If you are going to eat out, try to do so in traditional places, not in the chain restaurants.
  • Buy only what you need. The regime urges “normalcy” in order to encourage consumption.

  These methods will be effective if enough people join in for a considerable time. In addition, they will help you to save, which is welcome in these times of crisis.

  You will demonstrate our solidarity with the suffering of political prisoners and with the families of the victims who keep crying out for justice to a system that has no intention of giving it to them.

  Share this notice

  #SOSNicaragua

Elsewhere

• Robert McGee has published another in his series of studies of attitudes across cultures about the ethics of tax evasion. The latest probes Chinese business students — those studying in the United States and in China.
• TheNewspaper.com continues to do great work in tracking down examples of people disabling traffic-ticket-generating speed- and red-light-cameras, including, recently:
  • Several recent examples from France of cameras being spray painted-over, set on fire, or covered with bags or tape.
  • Several more examples from France of fire, paint, and ramming as disabling techniques.
  • Examples from France and Italy of paint, tape, boxes, fire, gunshots, power saws, and wire-clippers being put to good use.
  • Examples from France, Italy, and Russia of bags, taped posters, fire, power-drills, battering, spray paint, toppling, blocking, and disemboweling as techniques for disabling the cameras.
  • Examples from France, Italy, and Sweden of fire, paint of many colors, and saws being used against the hated devices.
• When the Kenyan government slapped a 16% tax on petroleum products, petroleum transporters launched a strike, leading to fuel shortages in Nairobi. “Kenya’s energy regulator has revoked the license of the Kenya Independent Petroleum Distributors Association for allegedly leading the fuel boycott,” a news report says, “equating their action to economic sabotage.”
• Attorney Carlos Muriete has called on residents of La Rioja, Argentina to stop paying property and vehicle taxes to protest inadequate municipal services. “The city is wrecked, there are craters that cars fall into and serious accidents can occur, it is dirty, full of rats, sewage is running in the streets, there is no control of the dogs and the health of the people is in danger,” he said.

War Tax Resistance

• Some war tax resisters are very public with their resistance, and consider protest and confrontation with the powers that be to be crucial parts of how they make their stand. Others are more private and understated, refusing to pay but not making a lot of hullabaloo about it. On the NWTRCC blog, Erica Leigh examines public vs. quiet resistance.
• War tax resister Larry Bassett looks at “the power of war tax resistance in 2018” — trying to measure the effects of his own resistance and that of the war tax resistance movement. (As found on Facebook and at Citizen Truth.)
• The Indypendent interviewed war tax resister Ruth Benn about the current U.S. anti-war movement.
• A flash from the past in the Lewis Center, Ohio, ThisWeek Community News gives us a glimpse of a war tax resistance tactic used in the United States during World War Ⅰ. The government had put a war tax on rail travel, but apparently the tax only applied on tickets above a certain threshold value. So some travelers split tickets, buying tickets from point A to point B and then point B to point C to avoid paying the war tax that would have applied on a ticket from point A to point C.

Tax Resistance Internationally

• Nicaragua’s Blue & White National Unity group has called for a consumer strike and energy strike. The consumer strike is meant to last three days and aims particularly at those consumer goods like fuel, alcoholic beverages, sodas, and tobacco that are most taxed. People are also encouraged to not use any utility power from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., indefinitely. The group seeks the release of 400 political prisoners.
• The Zimbabwe Congress for Trade Union went ahead with an anti-tax demonstration, which the government had banned under the pretense that public gatherings would contribute to a cholera outbreak. The government of Zimbabwe is trying to impose a 2% tax on all electronic funds transfers and is attempting to force citizens who hold their savings in foreign currency to convert that money into the notoriously hyperinflating Zimbabwean currency. Police raided the headquarters of the group and arrested 35 of its leaders in advance of the protests.
• A report on migrants from Central America reminds us that fleeing ruinous and immoral taxation is among the motives causing people to flee. The case of Guillermo, who as a Central American teenager became the head of his family, is one example:

  Criminal organizations targeted and killed Guillermo’s cousin. The relative had failed to pay a gang’s “war tax” — money the gang extorts from people through threats of violence.

  They then turned their attention to Guillermo for payment.

  In 2016, he was kidnapped and beaten by two uniformed police officers carrying out the gang’s orders. Their message was clear: Pay the war tax or face the murder and rape of his siblings. He realized that as long as they stayed in the region, they would never be free from gang violence — or the gangs’ attempts to pull them into a life of crime.

  Instead, he fled with his siblings on a 1,500-mile journey to the United States where he crossed the border, legally, as an asylum-seeker. But here he faces the threats of yet more criminal government gangs, this time in Trump’s ICE, the farcical court system set up to deny refuge in asylum cases, and the for-profit prison systems that exploit and abuse immigrant detainees.
• Drivers’ war on speed cameras and other traffic-ticket-generating robots continues:
  • Speed cameras were toppled, removed, burned, painted over, and blinded with glue and tape in the United States, Russia, Italy, and France.
  • A complete speed camera trailer was hauled away in Joplin, Missouri.
  • Paint, explosives, collisions, metal rods, and fire were used to disable cameras in Italy, England, Norway, France, and Taiwan.

Tax Administration

• Another news agency has noticed that after budget cuts, the IRS’s work against tax cheats is facing “collapse”. As the number of tax returns has grown, new responsibilities have been thrust on the IRS, and identity theft has turned tax filing into a cross between a minefield and a slot machine (thieves stole $1.6 billion from the U.S. Treasury via the IRS in 2016), IRS funding has plummeted. As a result, there hasn’t been a better time in recent years to cheat on your taxes.
• The economy has been chugging along pretty well for a while now, the job market is tight, and individual income tax receipts are up in the United States. So why has the budget deficit jumped up 17%? Two reasons, mainly: the recently passed tax law has led to a sharp reduction in receipts from corporate income tax, and Congress has been spending up a storm. Also, interest on the national debt continues to balloon, rising 24% just between 2017 and 2018.

Some tabs that have passed my browser in recent days:

• War Tax Resistance Can Look Like Opposition To State Tax Giveaways For Wealthy Corporations writes Lisa Savage at Went 2 the Bridge. Government military spending sometimes takes the form of “tax expenditures” — credits, deductions, and other such subsidies provided through the tax code rather than as overt budget spending. This can put principled war tax resisters in the strange position of opposing tax breaks that might reduce government revenue when those tax breaks are disguised military spending boosts. Specifically, Savage reviews the campaign to stop the state of Maine from giving $60 million in tax breaks to General Dynamics.
• U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement created a “Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement” office to help promote the bigoted fantasies of the Trump administration, and launched a hotline people could use to report crimes by immigrants. That hotline was immediately swamped by prank calls. “Prank calls fully upended the system, leaving operators unable to answer more than 98 percent of incoming calls during the protest as the media relations team attempted to contain the narrative.”
• Once in a blue moon, a tax resister receives a summons from the IRS, demanding that the resister show up at an agency office and bring along a bunch of documents that describe their finances and assets. Some resisters acquiesce, not feeling they have anything to hide, and not wanting to make this their battle. Others have successfully raised Fifth Amendment objections to being forced to testify against themselves in this way. If you’ve ever wondered what might happen if you just said “no” and left it at that, consider the case of Ronald Conner. Conner is one of those sovereign-citizen, “show me the law” types, and he just flat-out refused to cooperate. A judge then ordered him to, he continued to refuse, so the judge locked him up for contempt of court. He’s been behind bars for a year and a half now, and shows no sign of giving in.
• With some fanfare, the IRS rolled out a “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” some years back. But because there was no mechanism included for taxpayers to enforce these rights against the agency, it was widely seen as decorative rather than substantial. The 2018 Temple Law Review Symposium took a closer look, and tried to discover ways that taxpayers might wield the federal Taxpayer Bill of Rights (and its state-level cousins) against tax agencies.
• The global grassroots campaign against traffic-ticket-generating robots continues:
  • In South Africa, Italy, France, Ecuador, and Belarus resisters used hand tools, rodents, tar-and-feathers, fire, paint, and rope tied to a car bumper to destroy the hated machines.
  • In England, France, and Italy fire, a trash bin, and paint were among the tools used to disable the cameras.

Some links from here and there:

• The Literary Atlas of Wales has created an interesting interactive map-based exploration of the Rebecca Riots of the mid-19^th century — a grassroots rebellion that focused on destroying the tollgates that were going up all over Wales: Plotting the Rebecca Riots.
• Having been thwarted by the bonnets rouges (red caps) in its attempt to add a mileage tax to truck transport, the French government has attempted to attach an increased tax to vehicle fuel. Now a gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement has arisen to try to repeat the bonnets rouges’ success. The movement is organizing a highway blockade for November 17.
• Fuel tax protests are ramping up in New Zealand as well. In general, fuel taxes, carbon taxes, and other such “ecotaxes” seem to be a hard sell.
• The Greek “won’t pay” movement continues to deploy guerrilla electricians to reconnect the power at households that have gone dark because of their inability or unwillingness to pay the inflated prices of the state utility monopoly.
• NWTRCC held its Fall 2018 national gathering in Cleveland. Erica Leigh reports on the happenings, for the NWTRCC blog.
• The grassroots war on traffic ticket issuing speed cameras continues:
  • Perhaps in tribute to the yellow vests movement (see above), a resister in France blocked a speed camera with a yellow safety vest. Other resisters in France used bags, bubble wrap, fire, and paint to disable cameras, while a South African resister set such a camera on fire.
  • More French and South African resisters used a tarp, more safety vests, a Homer Simpson head, duct tape, fire, paint, and a trash bag to render speed cameras unusable.

The gilets jaunes movement in France, with its street protests and blockades, has been getting all the press — and has indeed forced significant and painful concessions from the government, while it has grown beyond the control of its founders. But under the radar (or upon the radars, as it were), another significant protest has been taking place: the widespread disabling of traffic-ticket-generating roadside cameras.

While the gilets jaunes were in the streets, they and their allies were also knocking those cameras out of service — by the hundreds! One site that has been tracking reports noted 200 cameras disabled over the course of a single weekend, making about 870 total over the gilets jaunes protest period — about 25% of all such cameras in the country. Another year-long estimate says there have been 1,500 attacks on the 3,200 speed cameras in the country, some 250 of which resulted in the complete destruction of the device.

Many other cameras have been only temporarily disabled, for example by having a yellow vest taped over the lens. Law enforcement can quickly bring these back into service. But others have been painted over, which necessitates hundreds of euros of repair time. The ones that have been utterly destroyed must be replaced at a cost of tens of thousands of euros. This in addition to the loss of revenue from foregone traffic fines, which can be tens of thousands of euros per day per camera.

Several of the many recent reports from around France and French territories:

• Five radars burned overnight in Haut-Doubs. Four were destroyed; this in addition to eight others earlier in the week.
• More than 60% of the radars out of service in Haute-Loire. Five were burned, one battered, and a dozen obstructed in some way, leaving only ten still operating.
• Nineteen radars taken out of service over three days in Eure-et-Loir.
• Vosges: gilets jaunes do not fear radars. On the tactic of temporarily covering radar cameras with yellow vests:

  “It is a nonviolent act, like our movement. Our goal is not to degrade anything, but to make the government understand that we can no longer make ends meet,” says Yvan, a gilet jaune from the beginning.

  His colleague Christophe shares the same point of view: “This gesture does not damage radars and is essentially symbolic. This is currently the only way we have to stop the state racket. If the device does not flash, it means less money in the state coffers.”

• Ille-et-Vilaine: six radars attacked by the gilets jaunes. Notes that the movement is spreading on social media, with an expressed intent of defunding the government.
• All of the radars around Caen vandalized during a full mobilization of the gilets jaunes. Notes that some suspected vandals have been arrested.
• Several radars covered in tarps or painted (in Vaucluse).
• Several vandalized radars in the department (Côte-d’Or).
• More radar disablings in Béarn.
• 21 of 22 radars are out of service in the Gers.
• Ten out of sixteen radars in the Cher are inoperative.
• More than half of Yonne speed cameras are out of service.
• 14 of the 15 automatic radars in the Cantal put out of service since the beginning of the gilets jaunes. Notes that in a poll, 64% of French people thought the cameras’ main purpose was taxation, not road safety. Also says that the government isn’t releasing statistics about the damage for fear of stoking the movement (the media had to go around inspecting the radar outposts itself to get the figures).
• Painted, wrapped up, or burned: radars disabled in the Alps.
• Épinal radars dressed for the winter. Says that “most” of the cameras in the department had been vandalized “in recent weeks.”
• Dordogne: a gilet jaune family Sunday in front of the automatic radar in Lembras. Family members held a picnic by a radar camera, taking turns to stand in front of it and obstruct its view.
• In Mayenne: the radar on the rue Ambroise-de-Loré painted. Fully half of the cameras in the department, including the ones high on poles, have been painted over or otherwise disabled.
• The two automatic radars in Chalonnais are out of order.
• Guidel: The radar painted yellow.
• Radar in yellow. Notes that “a large number of radars” were blinded in Bearn during the fourth wave of gilets jaunes protests.
• Yssingeaux: the radar on the RN88 burned next. (This after it had already been disabled by paint a few days before.) Another report. And here’s one where someone overturned a garbage bin atop a radar camera.
• Several automatic radars of the Mâconnais-Clunisois were burned.
• The automatic radar of Jozerand (Puy-de-Dôme) destroyed by fire during the night. That makes 21 out of 22 speed cameras in Puy-de-Dôme out of service.
• Mayenne: the radar on Nationale-12, in Pré-en-Pail, was set on fire. Notes that half of the 21 speed cameras in Mayenne had been damaged.
• More radars burned on the D538 and D532.
• Between Écouis and Grainville dans l’Eure, radar outposts still vandalized.
• Camera box spray painted in Martiniana Po.
• Vendée: several vandalized automatic radars.
• Talmont-Saint-Hilaire: The stationary radar again vandalized.
• The radar between Vire/Saint-Sever burned.
• A majority of radars in the Cotentin are inoperative.
• How many cameras can still flash in le Nord and Pas-de-Calais?
• Three-quarters of the automated radars neutralized in Seine-et-Marne.
• Seven radars have been burned in Limousin since 17 November.
• Of the 21 radars in the Corrèze, five are out of service.
• Thouars: Automatic radars taken out of service.
• A Tarbes radar covered… with gift wrap! A box covered with gift wrap and a ribbon, labeled “Joyeux Noel” covers a radar camera.
• Between Flers and Vire, the Tinchebray radar covered with a trash bag. Simple but effective.
• Arrageois-Ternois: Radars painted, burned, and damaged; several tens of thousands of euros in damage.
• At the Douvres-Caen crossroads: The radar station of Mathieu vandalized.
• Ain: Three radars burned in the night between Saturday and Sunday.
• Two radars burned in the South Ardennes.
• Seine-et-Marne: a radar burned on the N4 at Bannost-Villegagnon.
• Severac: radar station destroyed by fire.
• RCEA: the newly-installed Charolles radar was destroyed by the flames.
• Mertzwiller: a radar burned
• Charente: at least two radars burned, others vandalized in recent days.
• Quimper: The radar on the RN-165 burned.
• Perpignan: Tadar on the D-900 set on fire in the middle of the night.
• Deux-Sèvres: Automatic radar burned in Frontenay-Rohan-Rohan.
• Saint-Chamond: the radar of La Varizelle ignited on the RN-88. (After having been disabled by less-thorough means twice in the previous two weeks.)
• Saint-Léonard: After being painted and wrapped in bubble wrap, the A16-Port ring road radar burned.
• The radar of the A16 covered with yellow vests (at Grande-Synthe).
• Côtes d’Armour: Most stationary speed cameras damaged (24 or 25 of the 27 in the department had been damaged by that point). And: Côtes d’Armour: Radar burned in Plaintel, the second in a week.
• Haute-Loire: Two-thirds of the radars in the department vandalized. (Vandalized and out-of-service: five burned, ten painted, one battered.)
• Mâconnais: several automatic radars covered by yellow vests. Another one: from Dirinon (the police came by to remove the vest only to find that the camera lens had also been spray painted underneath).
• Automatic radar of Bavinchove vandalized. They were covered with paint. Graffiti reading “STOP TAXES” was written on the roadway nearby.
• On the Flers-Caen cross, pink paint makes the Clécy automatic radar inoperative. The article begins: “It has become almost a daily occurrence…”
• Yellow paint and cardboard on the radar between Flers and Condé-sur-Noireau.
• RN-57: vandalized radars from Besançon to Pontarlier and one in Saint-Nabord.
• Oloron Sainte-Marie: The four radars of the RN-134 vandalized. A couple others, also disabled, are mentioned in the short article.
• Saint-Forgeux-Lespinasse: the automatic radar spray painted (vandalizing it for at least the fourth time this year).
• Chartres: Ten radars damaged since the weekend of 17 and 18 November 2018.
• Basque country: a radar destroyed this weekend at the gates of Bayonne.
• Carcassonne: Montreal Road radar destroyed by deliberate fire.
• A radar found burned in Ariège.
• Near Flers, an automatic radar destroyed by fire.
• Aubigny-en-Artois: A radar burned, an open investigation.
• Bergerac: an automatic radar burned on Agen road. Someone had already disabled the camera with tape before the arsonists arrived to finish the job.
• Lambres-lez-Douai: The automatic radar out of order after fire.
• Automatic radar set on fire in Clermont-Ferrand.
• Bourogne (90): the radar on the RN-1019 set on fire.
• Assé-le-Bérenger: A stationary radar burned.
• A radar burned on the D-967 between Laon and Crecy-sur-Serre.
• Haute-Saône: The radar of Colombe-lès-Vesoul destroyed by arson.
• Pruniers-en-Sologne: Radar post burned.
• Yvelines: Three radars burned in one night, including two at Poissy.
• Annay: the RD-917 radar set on fire.
• Landes: more than half of the stationary speed cameras in the department out-of-service this Monday.
• 22 of 24 radars in la Manche damaged or disabled since the beginning of the [gilets jaunes] movement.
• In the Dordogne, more than 80% of stationary speed cameras are now out of service.
• Gilets jaunes in the Pyrénées-Orientales: most radars out-of-service.
• Bouzonville: a blanket to “protect” the radar. (The radar outpost was covered with a blanket, while a nearby hand-written sign advised people to protect radars this way from the coming winter cold.)
• Marmande: fixed radar covered with cardboard.
• Lamballe: The Mare-Jaune radar goes black.
• The radar on the Rue de Sully has a hard life. (Frequently obstructed by people or things.)
• Essonne: the gilets jaunes wrap radars.
• Lorient and Quimperlé: Five radars neutralized.
• Yellow vests dress the radars of the A16!
• Valenciennes: The stationary radar of the A23 wrapped up yesterday, toppled today.
• Paint, bags, cardboard: acts of vandalism against stationary speed cameras multiply on the roads of Yonne.
• Radar cameras of the Montluçonnais basin targeted.
• Mercureaux, Aubonne, Mamirolle, and Pontarlier: damaged radars. A cop was quoted: “Getting information about burglaries is less complicated. Concerning the radars, people tend not to say anything.”
• Radar coated on the A-31.
• Meaux: the radar on the RN-3 vandalized.
• Erstein and Benfeld sector: the three automatic speed cameras are inactive.
• Saint-Marcel: the radar of the D-673 repainted in blue. One of eleven taken out of service in the department.
• Neutralized radars in the Argentan country.
• Two radars burned in the South Ardennes.
• Haudainville: the automatic radar of the Blerupt Bridge burned.
• Near Tarbes, a speed radar burns, another shrouded.
• Radars targeted in Blois and surrounding areas.
• Vosges: the Bainville-aux-Saules construction site radar set on fire at night.
• Photo of the week: hot shot for a radar near L’Aigle (its charred shell).
• Bavent’s automatic radar destroyed in a fire.
• The Muizon radar was ignited on the RN-31.
• Another burned radar: the one on the N-7 at Beausemblant.

The variety of methods used in these attacks, even in the same area — with attackers sometimes destroying or further-damaging radars that have already been taken out of service by other methods — suggests that it is relatively spontaneous, unorganized, and attracts many practitioners.

While I’ve been studying my Aristotle, links have been piling up in my bookmarks. Here are some of them:

• A new documentary film called The Pacifist is doing the festival circuit. It concerns war tax resister Larry Bassett, his large act of income tax resistance and redirection, and his attempts to provoke the U.S. government to respond to his stand. It features interviews of Bassett, interspersed with historical footage from government propaganda films encouraging people to pay their taxes to keep the war machine going, and with a collage of contemporary news footage about American militarism. It does a good job of helping you get to know Bassett better and to learn about the history of his pacifism and his war tax resistance stand.
• Speaking of documentaries, I thought this article on five lessons I learned while making a documentary film about FIRE (the “financial independence, retire early” community) was very interesting.
• Finland evidently publishes the taxable income of every citizen as a public record that any busybody can browse through. Do you suppose more or fewer people would resist their taxes if such a practice were typical? Ruth Benn considers issues of taxation, privacy, and openness about our finances at NWTRCC’s blog.
• Senator Rand Paul has published his Annual Festivus Report of federal government waste. Just the thing to infuriate some people about how their hard-earned taxes are spent. If that doesn’t do the trick, check out this map showing the 40% of the world’s nations in which the U.S. military is engaged in “counterterrorism” operations.
• Conscientious objector Halil Karapasiaoglou of Turkish Cyprus was convicted of evading the military draft. He vowed to go to jail rather than pay the fine.
• Some encouraging numbers here:

  Because of the repeated [budget] cuts, the IRS has drastically stopped pursuing “nonfilers” who do not submit their tax returns. The number of investigations into nonfilers fell from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 in 2017. The agency has also drastically reduced its investigations of filers who do not pay their tax debts. In 2010, the IRS let $482 million in old tax debt lapse, but by 2017, that number increased to $8.3 billion.

  It’s something of a golden age of tax evasion.
• Hey look: Another “suspicious package” evacuates an IRS building.
• The federal government “shutdown” is also taking its toll on the IRS. At a time of year when the agency is usually bulking up its temporary workforce and preparing for income tax filing season, instead it’s sending most of its workforce home, and making the rest work without pay. Protests by employees are planned, and there’s also a lawsuit in the works that claims forcing the agency workers to work without pay violates labor laws.

• “From the executive leadership of top weapons-makers, to the senior government officials designing and purchasing the nation’s military arsenal, the United States’ national defense hierarchy is, for the first time, largely run by women.”

  And: “CIA Director Gina Haspel has appointed another woman to the top level of the agency, naming Cynthia ‘Didi’ Rapp as deputy director for analysis, essentially the top analyst in the CIA. The appointment means that the top three directorates of the agency, for operations, analysis, and science and technology are now all headed by women.”

  Boy am I looking forward to all of the peace and justice I was promised would happen once that bad ol’ patriarchy got smashed.

• A family in Alberta has refused to pay the carbon tax portion of their heating bill in protest against broken promises from the government.
• The epidemic of speed camera destruction continues worldwide:
  • One got torched in Glazebury, England
  • Another was converted into a trash bin in Senigallia, Italy and several others were toppled or sawed down elsewhere in that country, some as quickly as they were installed
  • Frederick Gramcko took a baseball bat to one in Encinitas, U.S.A.
  • In the Netherlands, the elves use gaily-wrapped gift boxes to obscure the cameras.
  • And in Germany radar outposts were transformed into huge candy canes.
  • While South Africa uses the good old-fashioned firebomb to stop those ticket machines.
  This is especially widespread now in France, thanks to the gilets jaunes protests:
  • Yellow vests are the latest fashion trend for French speed cameras
  • There are no longer any functioning radars on the roads of Vaucluse after the last of them were burned
  • All of the radars on the Toulouse ring road have been disabled
  • 60% of the radars in Grand Reims were taken out
  • 50 radars vandalized in le Cher
  • 23 of the 33 radars in the Tarn are out of service
  • 21 out of 22 in Puy-de-Dôme no longer ticket drivers
  • All five of the radars in Pays-Haut are now monuments to direct action
  • “Almost all” of the radars in the Loire are out of service. The article seems to indicate that the government has stopped trying to repair them since they get vandalized again so soon.
  • A radar on the RD 9 became the tenth burned in Haute-Loire in recent months
  • Two more Alsatian radars, five in Vaucluse, one in Yzeux, another in Ploudaniel, four in the Rethélois, three in Pluneret, Ploeren, and Theix-Noyalo, and three more in Lapalisse were put to the torch in December
  • Three radars were taken out in Cambrésis, one in Cayenne, and five in Martinique
  • Radar cameras were painted over in Sochaux, Belfort, Cateau-Cambresis, and Surmoulin
  • Three radars burned in Lot-et-Garonne, making 46 of 49 disabled there; one burned in Saint-Herblain to join the ⅔s rendered inoperable in Loire-Atlantique; and two more burned in Mesnil-le-Roi and Mureaux, another two in Couvrot, four in Puy-en-Velay, two in Haute-Garonne, one on Bordes, one in Hérault, another in Matelles, one in Loudes, and three in Gers
  • A radar at Truttemer-le-Grand, one on the Mazures coast and another in town, one at Pinas, one in Ouilly-le-Vicomte, one in Fourdrain, two in Tarn, one in Landivisiau, one in Monbalen, two in la Vienne, and another in Chavagne were torched
  • A radar was sawed from its post then taken away and burned in Villerbon
  • One was wrapped up securely in Goult
  • Five radars burned in Ariège, and three of those were completely destroyed
  • Six days after it was first installed, a radar in Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres was destroyed
  • A nicely-wrapped gift box covered a camera in Domalain
  • A mobile radar station posted on the D-928 was taken out of service for the tenth time, and another was victimized at Thillot
  • “Not a week goes by without a machine taken out of service” reports Le Bien Public of the Côte-d’Or
• There’s a strange feature of Obamacare. If your income is low, the government subsidizes your health insurance premium. But if your income is higher than you thought it would be, you’re supposed to pay some of that subsidy back when you file your taxes. But there’s a limit to how much you have to pay back. Because of this, the government is paying out about a billion dollars in subsidies that people don’t qualify for and yet will never have to repay.
• Ministers in Samoa are defying the government’s attempt to tax them on the offerings they accept in church.

The U.S. federal government “shutdown” forced the IRS to furlough 88% of its employees. The agency then recalled about half of them, calling them “essential employees”, so they could back up Trump’s last-minute promise that the IRS would still send out tax refunds even without an operating budget.

But the agency could not issue paychecks while the shutdown continued, which was great for morale, as you might imagine. Many employees took advantage of a union contract provision to say “I would prefer not to” when asked to report to work without pay (one report says fewer than half of them showed up when ordered to do so; 14,000 stayed home). Some decided to do a little extra paid work on the side instead.

The grumbling broke out into public protests by IRS workers in some places. Another report said that each week of the shutdown roughly 25 information technology workers were bailing to take jobs elsewhere.

As a result, the agency told Congress it will need at least a year to recover from the resulting backlog of work and the disruption.

The government has only reopened temporarily. The political conflict underlying the kerfluffle was never resolved, and Congress will either have to pass a budget or another short-term spending patch (and President Bluster will have to sign it) by the middle of next month or the whole “shutdown” impasse begins again.

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

• Irlanda Jerez, a leader of the tax resistance movement in Nicaragua against the Ortega/Murillo tyranny, was arrested by masked police last July and has been held prisoner since then. She has said she has been drugged while in captivity, and the latest reports from her family say that she has been beaten so badly by her captors that she is currently bedridden. Torture, arbitrary arrests, and repressive brutality are frequently relied upon by the regime, amounting to “crimes against humanity,” according to Amnesty International.
• The pace of destruction of automated traffic ticket radars in France has slowed, perhaps just indicating that the low-hanging fruit have already been taken (as the government had stopped repairing frequently-targeted radars). Still:
  • 12 of the 42 radars in Indre-et-Loire are completely out of service. Eight of those were set aflame. Of the remaining thirty, these are regularly covered with bags or otherwise masked so that they don’t work. At any time, more than half are not operating. The radars issued less than half as many tickets last year than they had the year before.
  • Spray paint did the job at the Nantes-Pornic crossroads, and at Talmont-Saint-Hillaire.
  • Fire took out three radars at Lens and Courcelles-lès-Lens (three days after they had been repaired from the last attack), one at Pouilly-sous-Charlieu, one in Saint-Quentin, and one at Trilport.
• The same issue of MOON Magazine that carried the interview with me about “the one-man revolution” also had an interview with Julia Butterfly Hill that touched on her tax resistance. Excerpt:

  The MOON:

  You are a war-tax resister. How did you come to that decision, and what have its consequences been?

  Julia Butterfly Hill:

  About 10 years ago I sued three corporations for creating an ad using my image without my permission to sell a hand-held wireless device. I wasn’t looking for personal gain — I was planning to give all the money away — but I felt that their using my life and my work to promote consumption was against everything I stood for.

  We settled out of court, and I found out that I would have a federal tax liability of about $175,000 on the settlement. Everyone told me just to pay it, but I couldn’t stomach it. This was right as the Bush administration was beating the war drums after September 11. I marched in the streets in San Francisco with hundreds of thousands of other people, and we shut down the Federal Building and the financial district. We caused creative mayhem all day. In the back of my mind the whole time was the thought that all these hundreds of thousands of protestors were eventually going to go home and feed with their tax dollars the very same machine they were protesting. I made the decision that day that I was not going to give that $175,000 to the IRS. It turned out to be the largest single instance of war-tax resistance in history. There’s never been a larger single nonpayment of taxes in protest of a war.

  Defying the IRS is a scary prospect, so I took my time. I did my research. I went to the national War Resisters League, and I talked to people who had done war-tax resistance. I did everything I could to educate myself and keep the people I work with safe, because they were not signing up for the same choice. I took myself off all the governing boards I was on, including the one for my own organization, because my presence on the board could hurt it. I took myself off salary at my own organization. I did whatever I could to protect the people I work with. And then I filed my taxes.

  Along with my nonpayment I wrote a letter that said I was not refusing to pay my taxes — I was redirecting them. I’m not against paying taxes. I believe in what we can do when we pool our money together for the collective good. But the same is true for the collective bad, because our taxes were being spent not only toward war in Iraq but toward war on this planet.

  With penalties, interest, and fees, I now owe more than four hundred thousand dollars. I cannot own anything, or the IRS will take it. I face jail every single day. Although they’re not technically allowed to throw people in prison for not paying their taxes, because we don’t have debtors’ prisons anymore, they could take me to court and claim I’m evading my taxes, which I’m not. I’m consciously redirecting my money to causes I believe in.

  The IRS hasn’t gone so far as to file formal charges, but they have taken me to tax court twice now to try to scare me into submission. They don’t seem to realize that trying to scare me into submission doesn’t work.

  The MOON:

  How come? It works on just about everyone else.

  Hill:

  [Laughs.] You know, my father came out to California while I was doing my tree-sit and gave a press conference. He said, “If Maxxam Corporation thinks they can outwait my daughter, they don’t know my daughter very well.”

  If you try to threaten or scare me, it only makes me more determined. If Maxxam Corporation had left me alone, it’s quite possible I might have given up before they did. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have, but I do know that their harassing me and degrading me in the press — all the things they did to try to make me come down — only deepened my commitment.

  The same is true with the IRS. I didn’t decide to become a tax resister lightly. I knew going into this that it would alter the rest of my life; that I would have to be creative in providing for my own needs. I knew that I was risking prison. So the threats from the IRS didn’t take me by surprise. They only strengthened my resolve.

  The MOON:

  Do you have attorneys who represent you when you have to go to tax court?

  Hill:

  I did at the beginning. I wanted to make sure I’d done everything correctly, so that it was clear that I am not evading my taxes but redirecting them. I wanted to demonstrate that I was making this choice with the utmost integrity. But I don’t have the money to keep paying for lawyers. If they were to drag me back into court now, I’d probably go without one, because I understand my legal rights as well as the risks of representing myself.

• Trump’s tariffs, in addition to being economically foolhardy and otherwise ridiculous, are also something of a conundrum for war tax resisters. It is difficult to discover how much of one’s purchases are going towards these taxes that are largely hidden from the end-consumer. At NWTRCC’s blog, Lincoln Rice begins an investigation into the current state of tariffs.

In other news:

• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman has won another court victory. Prosecutors had tried to charge him with felony tax evasion, but a judge ruled that Bowman had been up-front about his resistance, not trying to conceal income or deceive the government and so the felony charge was not appropriate. Bowman is making legal arguments based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. Those arguments have not yet been addressed by the court, but are similar to those being entertained by those war tax resisters who hope to legalize a form of conscientious objection to military taxation.
• At NWTRCC’s blog, Ruth Benn examines how the IRS is coping with war tax resisters like her at a time when the agency is struggling.
• “Maybe it’s time for California’s taxpayers to go on strike,” says Jon Coupal in an op-ed in the Orange County Register. Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (Howard Jarvis is known for his promotion of the “Proposition 13” legal tax revolt in California in the 1970s). He believes California taxpayers should be concerned at the power public sector labor unions have to get ever more tax money without accountability. He seems to be raising the specter of a tax strike only rhetorically, alas: “I’m curious as to what would happen if, in reaction to the teachers’ strikes in L.A., Oakland and Sacramento, taxpayers decided to go on strike?”
• Merchants in Guanare, Venezuela, have declared a tax strike after the municipality unilaterally established a new tax without going through legal processes. The local Chamber of Commerce is coordinating the tax strike.
• The Tax Foundation has put out a useful graphic showing the sources of federal tax revenue between 1940 and today. This shows how excise taxes and corporate income taxes have shrunk, and social insurance and individual income taxes have risen, as a percentage of federal revenue.
• TheNewspaper.com continues to do remarkable work chronicling the global phenomenon of fed-up drivers attacking and disabling the robot radar cameras that automatically generate traffic tickets.
  • Attacks continue in France, England, Italy, and Saudi Arabia.
  • Other attacks took place in Belgium, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and England.
  • The latest estimate is that fully ¾ of such cameras in France have been destroyed or disabled. And there were some other attacks in New Mexico and Italy.
  • Government assertions that the ticket cameras are necessary for public safety have been hurt by statistics showing traffic-related fatalities, hospitalizations, and injuries have been falling in France as the machines have been destroyed.

In other news…

• The Pacifist, a documentary about war tax resister Larry Bassett, has now been released and is viewable on Amazon’s streaming service.
• Peter J. Reilly looks at the latest report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and concludes that complying with the tax law has become a sucker’s game. He notes for example the hundreds of thousands of cases where gig economy workers received 1099-K forms indicating they had earned income, but filed no corresponding schedule C forms reporting that income — and how few examples of this obvious discrepancy the IRS bothered to follow up on. He sees the same pattern in cases where one ex-spouse declares an alimony deduction but the other does not declare the alimony as income. And even in the case of crazy “show me the law” tax refusers, the IRS seems to lack the resources or the willpower to pursue them.
• At National Review, Daniel J. Pilla tries to dig past the initial hype about anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman’s recent court victories to discern what that really adds up to from a legal point of view and what implications this has for other conscientious objectors to tax-funded activities.
• The worldwide epidemic of speed camera destruction continues. TheNewspaper.com has tracked down several recent examples from France, Luxemborg, England, and Italy.

Some links that have slid past my browser window in recent days:

• The War Resisters League’s pie chart flyer: “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” has been updated for the proposed 2020 federal budget. The flyers, which show about half of the federal non-trust-fund budget going to pay for past and present military-related expenses, are good conversation-starters, especially during tax season as people in the United States tally up how much they’ve been contributing to this budget over the year.
• NWTRCC is keeping a running tally of “Tax Day” actions taking place in the U.S.
• Spanish war tax resisters are also in the middle of their tax season activities. They recently staged a demonstration at the port where a military aircraft carrier was docked. Here’s some video of the demo as well.
• The head of the police in Paris was dismissed and the government brought in the army, while banning protests in French cities, as it attempts to quell the frequent outbreaks of gilets jaunes protests. Meanwhile, the destruction of traffic cameras continues in France, and to a lesser extent elsewhere.

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

• NWTRCC co­ordin­ator Lin­coln Rice gives a run-down of some of the “Tax Day” actions taking place this year.
• Anne Barron relates war tax re­sist­ance to Cop­Watch activism.
• Some notes about the new Qual­i­fied Busi­ness In­come de­duc­tion, the IRS budget request, tax evasion of “gig economy” workers, the ongoing fake-IRS phone scam, and the difficulty of resisting tariffs.
• Some ideas and resources to help you with your outreach.
• Announcements on the death of Joffre Stewart, a memorial service for Tom Wilson, the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in D.C., and stats about NWTRCC’s social media presence.
• A profile of war tax resister redmoonsong.

In other news…

• A new initiative launched with a splash in Catalonia under the name Ni 1 euro x a la repressió (“Not one euro for repression”). Modeled on the Spanish war tax resistance movement, it is urging people to redirect the taxes that would otherwise go to pay for the Spanish monarchy, the judiciary and state prosecutor, and the internal security services. The aim is to stop financial support for the Spanish suppression of Catalan independence. The website is splashy, and its interactive how-to-resist page in particular seems worth emulating by other similar resistance campaigns.
• Ashley Powers of the New York Times took a long look at the still-thriving “sovereign citizen” movement, and how sovereign citizens leverage their strange mythology to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS by filing “frivolous” returns faster than the agency can keep up with them.
• The epidemic of destruction of automated traffic ticket machines along the roadways of France continues. According to the latest figures, government revenue from these cameras has dropped dramatically. The government believes it has lost €660 million in expected ticket revenue so far, and that’s in addition to the costs to repair or replace the damaged machines.

Some tabs that have passed through my browser in recent days:

War Tax Resistance

• CBC News profiles Canadian war tax resisters Charlotte & Ernie Weins.
• War tax resisters in the United States celebrated “Tax Day” with the usual protests, penny polls, leafletting, and other methods of outreach.
• The Berkeley Daily Planet covered the People’s Life Fund annual granting ceremony in which they redirected $15,000 in taxes from the federal government to local charitable groups.
• The war tax redirection movement in Spain has also been gearing up. Here’s an example page promoting this year’s campaign. Excerpt (translation mine):

  The refusal to collaborate economically with the state, in the financing of military spending and other things that we consider socially unjust or harmful, empowers us and allows us, collectively and cooperatively, to show our opposition to certain state policies, to generate a social debate about the model of society that we want, while at the same time to promote the construction of “another possible world” by giving economic support in solidarity with other transformative struggles that exist in our society and elsewhere.

Other Tax Resistance News

• The “Learnt” comic presents a one-page cartoon primer on tax resistance.
• J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, examines the ongoing collapse of tax morale in the United States: “Americans are increasingly reluctant to pay the IRS. Who can blame them?”
• Mike Causey, at Federal News Network, adds another article to the growing consensus that the IRS is in a world of pain. Causey includes a long quote from an anonymous “long-time career IRS manager” who says:

  …There are barely enough people left keeping the lights on to barely allow enough people to barely meet far reduced goals.… Millions of dollars of production are lost due to not having hundreds of dollars of resources on a regular basis.

  Most of the personnel with most of the talent and experience have retired or fled to the private sector…

• The Republican tax reform legislation does seem to have cut taxes for just about everyone. But only a minority of people think they personally got a tax cut. This may be in part because of Democratic talking points about the cuts having only gone to the wealthy — they seem to have hit their target and sown doubt about what the legislation accomplished. It may also be because tax refunds haven’t gotten any bigger for the typical taxpayer, and changes in tax withholding aren’t salient enough to make an impression. This may also erode tax morale by contributing to the impression that lawmakers are jiggering the tax code to favor the other guy. A majority of Americans believe the federal tax system is not fair, and among Democrats in particular, perceptions of the fairness of the federal tax system are lower than they have been in recent memory.
• Automated traffic-ticket-dispensing radar cameras in France have undergone an extraordinary wave of attacks by frustrated motorists. Statistics on the extent of the attacks and their effect on government revenue continue to come in. The latest show that revenue from radar vans in particular dropped 42% last year.
• The IRS is hoping to get a bunch of new funding for a desperately-needed computer modernization effort. Problem is, this isn’t the first time, and the last couple of times they’ve gotten a bunch of new funding for desperately-needed computer modernization efforts, they’ve bungled it badly. Will Congress let them take another swing? Do they have a choice?

Some links from here and there:

• Members of the gilets jaunes have begun borrowing a tactic from the Greek “won’t pay” movement and are lifting the gates at tollbooths and waving drivers through.
• El Confidencial has published a hand-wringing article about the tax resistance guide published by the Catalan independence movement.
• Meanwhile, the Spanish war tax resistance movement is also gearing up for tax season. El Salto reports, “Tax resistance is designed as a tool of civil disobedience that allows us to overcome the role of mere spectators or victims of these policies, and become active agents in the denunciation of military spending in particular and militarism in general.” Apparently, the government is responding more forcefully with fines against war tax resisters this year, and the campaign is ramping up its legal support and counseling to counter this.
• Ruth Benn reflects on how things went when she gave a presentation on war tax resistance to a group of American progressive activists.
• Aaron Falbel has written the IRS to let them know why they won’t be getting anything from him this year. “If I can’t support the policies of this government with my mind and my heart, then I can’t support them with my wallet either. I submit to whatever penalty this action may incur.”
• Empowering Nonviolence looks back at the campaign to stop the Larzac military base, which was supported by large-scale war tax redirection.
• Automated traffic ticket cameras continue to come under attack. TheNewspaper.com has documented some recent cases from France, Italy, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, and Saudi Arabia.
• Property owners in Denton County, Texas have been taking advantage of a law that permits them to challenge their property tax appraisal, and have been overwhelming the system with such protests.
• War tax resister Tom Shea has died. Fellow resister Robert Burrowes penned an obituary notice here.

Some tabs that have slid across my browser in recent days:

International Tax Resistance

• International direct action against traffic-ticket-generating robots continues, with such machines being destroyed or disabled in Italy, France, and Germany; France and Italy; France and England (plus news that the new president of Brazil plans to discontinue use of the machines); and France and Saudi Arabia.
• Here’s some more information (in Spanish) about the two war tax resisters from Spain who had their fines overturned in court, including what looks to be some excerpts from the ruling (see ♇ 7 May 2019 for an English translation of a newspaper article on the case).
• You may remember that Indian Prime Minister Modi abruptly removed high-denomination bank notes from the ranks of legal tender in late 2016. This was meant to strike a knockout-blow at the underground economy by forcing people to use more legible, traceable economic transactions than anonymous cash. It doesn’t seem to have worked. Despite the significant short-term inconvenience and blow to the economy, the amount of cash currency in circulation quickly recovered to its previous levels and is now back on-trend to where it was before the experiment. You may have heard calls to eliminate the U.S. $100 bill, for similar motives. This experience may discourage such an effort.
• Farmers in Kurdistan who have refused to pay a “war tax” to what remains of the Islamic State (Daesh/ISIS) have suffered reprisals, such as having their fields burned down for their refusal.
• Ugandan legislator and entertainer Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi) has been arrested on charges relating to an anti-tax street protest he helped to organize last year.

War Tax Resistance in the U.S.

• The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee held a national conference in Washington, D.C. this month. Here’s a write-up by one of the attendees. Unfortunately they got tangled up in ongoing actions by leftist activists who were trying to occupy the Venezualan embassy there on behalf of the brutal, disastrous Maduro regime. It has been a disappointing thing to see groups like NWTRCC, CodePink, Veterans for Peace, and United for Peace and Justice carrying water for the cruel Maduro tyranny as though that were the only way to oppose disingenuous U.S. machinations there. It puts a shameful stain on what’s left of the U.S. peace movement every time a group like this uses a phrase like “the legitimate democratic Maduro government of Venezuela”.
• Lincoln Rice and Sue Barnhart recently talked about war tax resistance on the Spirit in Action radio show, as did Ann Barron and Larry Bassett in a follow-up.
• The Greenfield Reporter profiles war tax resister Thomas Wilson, who died last year.

U.S. Taxpayer Morale

A number of items that have been in the news lately concern how the U.S. tax system has become increasingly corrupt and imbalanced in favor of wealthy tax evaders. Stories like this tend to damage what’s known in tax wonk circles as “taxpayer morale” — the willingness of citizens to pay their taxes without evasion or the necessity of harsh arm-twisting and draconian oversight. For example:

• Income tax audits of the Americans with the highest reported incomes have fallen dramatically. Just in the last year alone the rate fell by half.
• Income taxes on corporations represent the lowest percentage of federal revenue since at least 1960, with the burden increasingly resting instead on individuals.
• The New York Times pointed out that in California, local governments and corporations have rigged the sales tax system in such a way that a portion of the sales tax people pay is gifted to the same companies who collect it. In other words, the sales tax becomes a “bonus profit” to those companies, collected from consumers and enforced by law.
• Millions of former U.S. tax filers appear to have dropped out — not filing returns in the last filing season. One theory is that the tax reform legislation that came into effect last year caused some people to owe where they hadn’t before, or to owe more, and that they decided not to file as a result. Three million people who received refunds in 2018 didn’t file at all in 2019.
• Trump’s tariffs are on target to reverse the benefits of recent income tax cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers by raising the prices of consumer goods.
• There’s been another report put out about the “tax gap” (the difference between what’s owed and what’s collected) in the U.S. However it still uses largely stale numbers, updating them largely based on estimates and trends rather than evidence.

Some links from here and there:

• Logan Marie Glitterbomb, at the Center for a Stateless Society, advocates a campaign of gradually transitioning to cryptocurrency as a way of facilitating war tax resistance. Such a campaign would “allow for us to take direct action against the war machine, by refusing to fund it. The campaign encourages people to move at least $1 of fiat per day into their choice of cryptocurrency. The goal is to aid individuals in a gradual transition away from fiat and into using crypto as their primary currency without asking people to dive in all at once.”
• The Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, a movement opposing the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, is trying to gather support for a civil disobedience campaign that would feature tax resistance as a key tactic: “Tax resistance to withhold economic oxygen from the regime for repression.” The “Blue and White National Unity” group has signed on to the call. They hope to pressure the regime to release political prisoners and to fulfill agreements it made in negotiations during previous strikes. The Ortega regime released 100 political prisoners to try to lure the opposition back to the negotiating table (not including tax resistance leader Irlanda Jerez, who has been tortured in prison, and is still being held).
• Arief Poyuono, deputy chair of the opposition Indonesian party Gerindra, called the 2019 presidential election in Indonesia a fraud: “Among the steps that the people who don’t recognize the government that resulted from the 2019 presidential election can take is to stop paying taxes to said government,” he said in a press release.
• The IRS is redesigning its W-4 form. This is the form that employees fill out when they start a new job, or when they want to change how much tax is withheld from their paychecks. The new form, though still in the drafting process, looks like it’s going to be much more complicated. This may also, alas, complicate the process for people wanting to get started with tax resistance by reducing the amount withheld from their paychecks.
• Some new photos from the 1898 Dog Tax War in New Zealand have emerged.
• Fed up drivers continue to disable and destroy traffic-ticket cameras. TheNewspaper.com cites several recent examples from France and Germany.
• Another potential contributor to worsening “taxpayer morale” in the United States: the word has gotten out that the poorest taxpayers are about as likely to be audited as the richest 1%.
• I thought this was interesting: I’d heard that the IRS could step in and claim top priority in a bankruptcy — pushing other creditors aside as it helps itself to what’s left of your assets. But what I didn’t realize is that this apparently only applies to the tax part of your tax debt: not to any interest & penalties the IRS has applied. For those, the agency has to get in line like everyone else.

• The rich already pay high tax rates. The tax code is already progressive. I hear this all the time from right- and neoliberal-leaning tax blogs and think tanks. This is usually followed by some graph or statistic showing that “the top” n% of taxpayers (by adjusted gross income or some other declared income measure) pay 90% of income taxes, or something like that: Q.E.D. But this is sleight-of-hand. To show that the tax rates are progressive isn’t enough. To make the case that the rich are paying “their share” of income taxes you have to also demonstrate that they are paying those rates on all of their income, not just on that portion of income they haven’t managed to shelter from taxation. So, in this regard, I was interested in this new paper on Tax Evasion and Inequality. It took advantage of a tax haven data leak, and existing records of tax audits in Scandinavia, to get a snapshot of how the very wealthy avoid having much of their assets subjected to taxation in the first place. They may pay high rates on what’s left over, but that isn’t the same as paying high rates in the first place. “[W]e find that the 0.01 percent richest households evade about 25 percent of their taxes. By contrast, tax evasion detected in stratified random tax audits is less than 5 percent throughout the distribution.”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Content includes a recap of this year’s tax day actions, some national and international war tax resistance notes, an obituary notice for resister Tom Shea, and a profile of resisters Howard Waitzkin and Mi Ra Lee.
• The international grassroots campaign against traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continues: new attacks in France and Germany.

Some links from here and there…

• Nicaraguan tax resistance leader Irlanda Jerez was released from prison as part of a government amnesty of political prisoners in the run up to negotiations with the opposition. Jerez says she was drugged, tortured, and sexually assaulted while in prison, and that her home was sacked and her family attacked by government-aligned paramilitary forces soon after her release. Her children are now refugees. Torture, arbitrary arrests, and repressive brutality are frequently relied upon by the Ortega regime, amounting to “crimes against humanity,” according to Amnesty International. She has renewed her call for mass civil disobedience. “We’re ready to pay any price necessary to free Nicaragua.”
• The 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns is scheduled for late this year in Edinburgh, Scotland.
• The international human revolt against the traffic-ticket robots continues, with new attacks in France and Australia in recent weeks.
• Residents of Faradje, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government to take action against the incursions of Wodaabe nomadic cattle-herders from neighboring South Sudan into the land they use for agriculture.
• In the United States, individual taxpayers paid $93 billion more in federal income taxes last year than the year before. “Interestingly, that number stands close to the tax break amount that corporations received from the TCJA in 2018. Last year, big businesses paid $91 billion less in taxes than they had in 2017, prior to the new law’s passage.”

I got another letter from the IRS today. Pretty much the same “LT16” notice as I got around this time last year and the year before. Nothing new and noteworthy about it.

In other news:

• Here’s a press release about the war tax redirection proposal the Mennonite Church USA will be considering at its convention next month.
• Nina Olson, who has been an energetic within-the-system voice for U.S. federal taxpayer rights as head of the official National Taxpayer Advocate Service, has retired from that position, but can’t keep away from the game. She’s formed a non-governmental nonprofit — the Center for Taxpayer Rights — to do similar work.
• The ongoing grassroots battle against traffic-ticket-generating robots continues, with recent attacks against the machines in Australia, France, Germany, Luxembourg, England, and Washington, D.C.

In other news…

• An international conference on war tax resistance is planned for later this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. It will also be the occasion for the general assembly of Conscience & Peace Tax International.
• The war on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continues, with several destroyed by rebels in France using fire and spray paint, and another destroyed by an accident it contributed to in Germany.
• Facebook has decided it will ban advertising that discourages people from voting. This should go to show that censorship is of course going to be practiced on behalf of the already powerful (who have the power to censor) and against unpopular heresies. But, you know, polite liberal golf claps is about all I hear.
• A poll of expatriate U.S. citizens showed that many are contemplating renouncing their U.S. citizenship, largely because of the tax (and onerous tax reporting) burden.
• Businesses in Pakistan are on strike to protest a sales tax increase.
• An IRS building in Kansas City, Missouri was shut down by a hazmat team because of “a brown substance on a package” discovered by an employee.

Some international tax resistance news of note:

• The “Extinction Rebellion” movement’s London branch is launching a tax strike to protest the city’s funding of projects that exacerbate climate change. They intend to begin withholding 20% of their council tax once they have a critical mass of signers-on to their strike proposal. The withheld funds will be redirected to a project to create a new city plan with a focus on ecological sustainability. They have created a London Tax Rebellion Information Booklet to support the campaign. They were inspired by Extinction Rebellion activist Imogen May who refused to pay council tax as part of her protest.
• Businesses in Pakistan have shut their doors in a hartal to protest sales tax hikes. There is an irony in that the strike is targeting the government of Imran Khan, who, when he was in the opposition, launched a tax strike of his own for similar motives.
• More reports of speed camera destruction around the world, lately in Russia, Ecuador, Germany, and France.
• Here’s another follow-up article on Mennonite Church USA’s recent decision to expand its war tax redirection fund.

Some links from here and there:

• The “Extinction Rebellion” group launched its council tax strike in London at its “summer uprising” earlier this month. The group is trying to get the government to stop spending money on transportation and infrastructure projects that exacerbate climate change, and are taking the lead by redirecting their taxes to greener projects in an act of civil disobedience. Here is some coverage of the tax strike launch in Al Jazeera and from Financial Times.
• Fire, spray paint, demolition, bags and tape, even an axe… People around Europe are using a variety of means to fight back against the speed camera radar outposts that ticket drivers.
• At his Forbes blog, Robert W. Wood reminds us that the new Prime Minister of the U.K., Boris Johnson, also renounced his U.S. citizenship so as to stop paying taxes to Uncle Sam.
• Merchants in Budalangi, Kenya, have organized to threaten the government there with a tax strike. The Mau Mau Market Business Association chairman issued a statement saying that unless the government makes necessary infrastructure improvements, the traders will begin refusing to pay taxes on September 1^st.
• The Société Civile group in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo, has again called for a boycott of taxes to protest the government’s inability to provide security.

Some recent links from here and there:

• Brayton & Suzanne Belote Shanley of the Agape Community are interviewed at NWTRCC’s blog about their war tax resistance and the intentional community they cofounded with war tax resistance at its core.
• Vendors in Pakistan are ramping up their anti-tax protest after a brief shut-down strike last month with new street protests.
• Venetian separatists are again refusing to pay taxes to Italy, paying their federal taxes instead to “Veneto State”.
• Some 17,000 taxpayers in Catalonia also are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than the Spanish one, in acts of civil disobedience.
• There’s a tax strike underway in Beni, North Kivu to protest the failure of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to provide security in the region.
• More roadside traffic ticket generating speed cameras have been attacked in recent weeks, in South Arica and France. Spain has moved on to using drones instead.
• There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here, but Andrew Leahey connects the dots and shows how Trump’s contempt for paying his own taxes and his undermining of the prestige of government are likely to undermine “tax morale” in the United States with long-term consequences for how willing traditionally sheepish American taxpayers are to cough up their tribute.
• Researchers into the impact of the government “shutdown” last Winter found that it landed blows against IRS workers in the community they studied.

  Of the furloughed workers surveyed, more than 35% missed a rent or mortgage payment, 30% went to a food pantry, 72% experienced mental health issues, 42% wanted to make a career change and 65% were very or somewhat concerned about their finances post-shutdown.

  In the open-ended response portion of the survey, an employee wrote, “We are U.S.A. citizens that have families to support. Often we hear we deserve it, because we work for IRS. We are doing a job that is dictated by Congress. It is surprising how people seem to want others to hurt. It is sort of sickening.”

  Another employee described going back to work during tax season: “With a month of catch up at my busiest season, it is so stressful. This is the first time in 15 years I am exhausted after work and do not want to go in the mornings. That was never the case before.”

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content that includes:
  • Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
  • Mennonite Church creates a “Peace Tax Fund” — a report back from the Mennonite Church USA national gathering, where a war tax redirection fund was relaunched.
  • Joseph Olejak reflects on what he did when his war tax resistance led the government to revoke his professional license.
  • Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley of the Agape Community interviewed.
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
• The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
• Attacks on traffic ticket radar robots continue, with French resisters disabling them as quickly as the government can prop them back up. Attacks have also taken place in recent weeks in Germany, England, and Spain.

Some links from here and there:

• YouTuber Alexis Buschmann has started to offer spoken-word interpretations of some of NWTRCC’s introductory war tax resistance material on her video blog. This could be a useful resource for people who prefer to get their information in the podcast/audiobook style rather than through text. Here’s a sample:
  
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman continues his streak of courtroom luck. This time, a hung jury foiled the government’s attempt to convict him of misdemeanor charges of failure to file. (In an earlier victory, the court threw out an additional charge of felony tax evasion.) The government may decide to refile the misdemeanor charges and try again. “They put me on the stand,” said Bowman, “they know what kind of witness I am. And round two, they haven’t seen anything yet; I’ve learned.”
  • Bowman’s attorney tried at one point to advance the argument that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to accommodate Bowman’s sincere religious objection to paying for abortion with his taxes. Although the courts have rejected such arguments in the past with reference to war tax resisters, the Supreme Court’s subsequent Hobby Lobby ruling seemed to possibly open the door to reconsidering this. The trial court disagreed.
  • War tax resisters have also considered using Hobby Lobby as a foot-in-the-door in this way.
• American war tax resister and tireless activist Frances Crowe has died at age 100:
  • Frances Crowe, Peace Activist and War Resister, Dies at 100 (New York Times)
  • Frances Crowe, WTR and Anti-War Activist Extraordinaire (NWTRCC blog)
  • Remembering Legendary Peace Activist Frances Crowe, Who Died at 100 After Decades of Resisting War (Democracy Now)
• Tax resisters in Beni (Democratic Republic of the Congo), who are protesting the government’s inability to provide security to residents of the war-torn region, are more formally organizing under the banner Nipe Amani Nami nilipe Ushuru na Kodi (Give Me Peace and I’ll Give You Taxes).
• Automated traffic ticket camera resistance continues around the world, with recent attacks on the machines in France, Italy, and Germany.

Some links from here and there:

• Rutgers International Institute for Peace has begun releasing a Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance with items from their archives. Among these is Organizing Tax Resistance, co-written by a team from Nonviolence International and Karen Marysdaughter from NWTRCC.
• Humans of Earth continue their valiant war against the traffic ticket emitting robot hordes. With fire, spray paint, and gunfire, burning tires, and toppling, radar cameras across Europe have been disabled in recent weeks.
• John Dangelo profiles American Quaker war tax resister Joan H. Nicholson, and Ralph J. Dolan looks back on the life of recently-passed American war tax resister Frances Crowe.
• The Delta Amacuro (Venezuela) state Chamber of Commerce has launched a tax strike to protest what they say are extralegal and “confiscatory” municipal taxes.
• The Nkafu branch of La Société Civile has signed on to the latest tax resistance campaign in the east Congo to protest the government’s inability or unwillingness to provide security in the region.

In other news, the group ADNic is promoting a Nicaraguan tax resistance / consumer strike campaign with a series of graphics. Here are some examples (translations mine):

In other news:

• One of the tools the IRS uses against tax scofflaws like myself is to file a federal tax lien in the local court system of the scofflaw. This puts creditors and the local legal system on notice that the IRS intends to step in and assert its rights to seize money. This can make it difficult to get credit, and also makes it easier for the feds to seize anything awarded by the courts in lawsuits, probate resolution, etc. However (and this is where it gets interesting and newsworthy), filing a lien costs money. And the IRS thinks several California counties are charging them too much, and so they have started to refuse to pay. In response, some counties are refusing to process the IRS liens. Alas, this filing fee, and the standoff between the bureaucracies, also applies to paperwork to release a previously-filed lien. So this doesn’t always work in the scofflaw’s favor. Here’s some news coverage:
  • Marin Independent Journal
  • The Press Democrat
  • SFGate
• War tax resister Larry Bassett was interviewed on the Parallax Views podcast. Bassett is the subject of the recent documentary film The Pacifist and is responsible for the largest known individual act of war tax resistance, in terms of the amount of dollars resisted at once.
• Another Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report points out that reduced IRS resources means collapsing tax enforcement capability. “As more taxpayers experience little to no consequences for non-filing, the long-term impacts may include potential erosion of the voluntary compliance rate.”
• Via a review by Ariel Jurow Kleiman of Marjorie E. Kornhauser’s American Voices in a Changing Democracy: Women, Lobbying, and Tax 1924–1936, I learned of a 1935 “Meat Strike” meant to protest New Deal-era taxes on meat processing by boycotting meat purchases. The offensive tax was eventually thrown out as unconstitutional.
• The IRS issued an update to its estimate of the “tax gap” (the difference between how much tax people are supposed to pay and how much they do pay). The upshot is that they think little has changed: people pay about 84% of what the agency believes they owe. However, the last time I looked at the details of one of these “tax gap” reports, I noticed a lot of hand-waving, guesswork, and extrapolation, and only a little empirical data collection, so I would recommend taking these numbers with a grain of salt.
• More attacks on traffic ticket issuing radar cameras — in France & Italy; Mexico, Germany, and France; and France again. Revenue from the cameras is only half of what the government had hoped for and budgeted for in France this year, and the government has had to divert some of that money to installing more heavily-fortified cameras.
• The simple home of war tax resistance legends Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts has been restored as a “living memorial” to the inspirational couple.
• The 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns will be held November 28 through December 1 in Edinburgh. The last such conference was held in 2013 in Bogotá, Colombia.

Some links from here and there:

• The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is holding a national conference and committee meeting this weekend in Oregon. This meeting will include a special focus on cooperation between the war tax resistance movement and climate/environmental activism.
• Nathan Goodman spoke on his research into how U.S. military spending makes Americans poorer and less free.
  
  He put in a kind word for war tax resisters: “If a cellphone, burger, or cup of coffee isn’t worth the price to me, I can choose not to buy it. Were you ever given an ‘unsubscribe’ option from American Empire? If I want to stop paying to subsidize the brutal Saudi war in Yemen for instance I have very few options. There is of course a noble tradition of war tax resistance in the United States, with Henry David Thoreau refusing to pay poll taxes that he believed funded the Mexican-American War and Noam Chomsky and others resisting taxes during the Vietnam War, but tax resisters face repression, they risk incarceration, they risk garnishing of their wages, they risk having their property seized, and even moving out of the United States isn’t enough to avoid paying for American Empire: When you criticize U.S. foreign policy you might get told ‘hey if you don’t like it you can leave’ — well even if you leave you still are seen as owing taxes to the U.S. government unless you go through a costly process of renouncing your citizenship. And that’s ignoring that there are also funds gained through inflation, through the printing of money, that’s a tax on everyone who holds U.S. dollars…”
• I noticed a campaign calling itself “Tax Resistance” suddenly appear on-line. It has appropriated photos from the U.S. war tax resistance movement, but it seems to be directed at potential war tax resisters in the U.K. Its Twitter account was suspended before I could even take a look at it. Its Facebook page is spare and generic. There’s no indication who’s behind it. I’ve got a suspicious eyebrow raised, but will keep my eyes on it.
• Attacks by motorists on traffic ticket machines continue worldwide. Some recent examples:
  • France, England, Saudi Arabia, and Germany
  • France, England, and Italy
  • France, England, and Australia
• If the IRS files a formal tax lien against you, expect a lot of deceptive junkmail from outfits hoping to capitalize on your plight.
• Remember Ed & Elaine Brown? The “show me the law”-style tax protesters who became causes célèbres in constitutionalist/sovereign-citizen circles? They were arrested after a long siege of their New Hampshire home about a decade ago and given lengthy — essentially life — prison terms. But one of the major charges against them was based on a law that was declared to be unconstitutionally vague in an unrelated Supreme Court case, and so now the Browns will be resentenced and may soon be released as a result.
• The government of Ontario is protesting the Canadian federal government’s carbon taxes by mandating that gas stations put stickers on the pumps that point out how carbon taxes are rising and contributing to the price of gasoline. Ontario is also spending millions of dollars on legal battles opposing the tax.

Some links from here and there:

• Peter Bagge gives us a comic-book introduction to lovable American anarchist (and tax resister) Lysander Spooner.
• A campaign for nonviolent direct action in the service of Catalan independence is ramping up under the “Huracà Econòmic” banner (Facebook, Twitter, Telegram). I don’t read Catalan well enough to understand all of the nuance, but I can tell they’re advocating tax resistance (insubmissió fiscal) as one of their tactics.
• As I mentioned a month ago, the IRS and some California county governments have been at loggerheads over the fees counties charge to entities that want to file liens. The counties have been tacking on extra filing fees to pay for tangentially-related government expenses, and the IRS has said it doesn’t intend to pay such extra charges when it files its federal tax liens. This led to a standoff in which some of the counties started to refuse to process IRS paperwork. It looks like the IRS was the first to blink.
• Human attacks on the traffic-ticket generating robot camera hordes continue to keep hope alive in the hearts of the rebellion, lately in
  • Germany, Italy, and several places in France
  • France, England, and Italy
  The meeker citizens of the United States are still trying to use the ballot box against the robots, but a judge recently refused to allow their votes to be counted.

In other news:

• At the NWTRCC national conference this month, attendees considered whether or how war tax resistance harmonizes with environmental activism.
• American war tax resisters also made their presence felt at the School of the Americas Watch gathering and the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
• Attacks on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continue, most recently in Italy and France, and in Latvia, Russia, France, and Reunion.

In other news…

• A large-scale strike in France this weekend, seemingly largely focused on opposition to government pension reform plans, coincides with a truck blockade across the country to protest diesel fuel tax increases. These blockades will snag highways, but related blockades also are specifically targeting fuel depots, with the result that hundreds of fuel stations in France have run out of gasoline.
• The Nouvelle Société Civile du Congo has called for a complete tax strike in North Kivu to protest the government’s failure to provide security in the region.
• The human war on traffic-ticket-generating robots continues, with the robot hordes taking casualties in Germany, Italy, and France in recent weeks. In France, according to a new government report, 17,886 photo radar devices have been attacked over the past two years.
• The Tax Foundation has run the numbers to show how increases in cigarette taxes cause increases in cigarette smuggling to match. For example, more than half of the cigarettes smoked in New York have been smuggled in from outside the state to evade taxes.
• Another hazmat scare — this one apparently an abandoned suitcase in a driveway — rattled the IRS office in Chamblee, Georgia.

Recent news and links of note:

• Tax resistance has played a role in the Hong Kong protest movement:

  Activists were temporarily able to exploit a loophole in the government’s tax payment system to undermine tax collections. [One Hong Kong activist] shares: “There is a tax resistance going on, so someone developed a ‘If I pay, you pay with us’ platform for taxpayers called PPS Automator.” Because the government pays $1 in transaction fees for each tax payment made through this portal, activists are urging taxpayers to pay in $1 increments, resulting in full loss of their tax revenue due to fees. The government eventually broke the tool by working with the payment provider to require users to manually submit their online payment once every ten attempts.

  Here’s a link to the PPS Automator program.
• I’ve rewritten my “Alice Turtle” appendix to Aristotle’s Politics into this long Medium essay: “Aristotle’s Guide to Anarchy”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • a recap of the recent NWTRCC national gathering
  • a report on the NWTRCC presence at the School of the Americas Watch and the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 trial
  • a note that the IRS apparently plans to ramp up its unannounced, in-person visits to recalcitrant tax scofflaws
  • and a personal account of such face-to-face meetings between IRS agents and a war tax resister by Paula Rogge
  Rogge shares some of her tactics for reducing the effectiveness of IRS reprisals (excerpt):

  The IRS has seized my car and checking account funds and has repeatedly levied my wages. My strategy has been to work several jobs, so that if a permanent levy were placed on my wages at one work-place, I could either reduce my hours at that job or quit and still have a backup job. When I’ve had the money, I’ve paid rent, health insurance, and food bills in advance.

• The details in the English-language press are vague, but apparently “[h]undreds of Lebanese business owners gathered in central Beirut protesting the delay in forming a new government and threatening a collective tax strike. Organisers said most private businesses have already been unable to pay taxes and are still getting slapped with penalties.”
• The human guerrilla war on traffic ticket robots continues its punishing swarm of attacks, lately in France, Switzerland, and Germany.

Some tabs that have crossed my browser in recent days:

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

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

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

Some links from here and there

• Talking Radical Radio has published a podcast about conscientious objection to military taxation in Canada, featuring Doug Hewitt-White, Murray Lumley, and Scott Albrecht of Conscience Canada.
• James Maule loves a story about a disgruntled taxpayer paying in a wagonload of small change. The latest story comes with a couple of twists: first, the county anticipated such protests and has an official policy of refusing to accept large payments in coins; second, over the course of the protest it was discovered that the tax assessor was sitting on 8,600 unread emails, which may explain why less-theatrical avenues of protest failed to work.
• Speed camera vandals continue their bold assaults on traffic-ticket robots in Europe. The latest reports are of several attacks in France and Italy, and several more in France. Fire seems to have become a more popular weapon as winter has come on.
• A retrospective of the history of the Project Learn School notes that the school, an independent cooperative, got a $5,000 loan from a war tax resistance redirection fund at a critical moment at its founding, and has been in operation for fifty years now.

Lebanon

I’ve been frustrated at the lack of detail in the English-language reporting out of Lebanon about the tax strike there. It’s difficult to know how widespread it is, how central it is to the larger protest movement, or which tax resistance tactics are most prominent. But here is some reporting:

• “Protesters Are Wielding the Ultimate Weapon” (Haaretz) — “[T]he people behind the tax protest aren’t prepared to sit tight and wait patiently. They are calling on the Lebanese to stop paying their electricity and water bills, municipal taxes, fines and even their bank loans payments.” But who these people are goes unsaid. The reporter just quotes from a recently-created anonymous Twitter account. The article does have a good analysis of why the government power monopoly and its utility bills are a major focus of the protests.
• “We’re Not Paying: Lebanese People Protest Banks Shutdown as Economic Situation Worsens” (albawaba) — explains that restrictions on bank withdrawals and delayed payment of salaries to government employees are among the grievances.
• “Appels à la désobéissance fiscale: sit-in devant le siège de l’ABL à Beyrouth” (L’Orient-Le Jour) — a brief report on a protest at the Association of Lebanese Banks headquarters.

In other news…

• If you’re a Facebook user, you can visit the Facebook page of Conscience U.K. and can view videos there from the 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns that took place earlier this year.
• Corruption in traffic-ticket generating red light cameras has gotten bad enough in Illinois that the state comptroller’s office said as far as it’s concerned the fines are optional and it will not enforce them against victimized drivers.
• Meanwhile, in France, Washington D.C., and Malta drivers have attacked and disabled ticket-issuing traffic cameras in recent weeks.

In other news…

• The New York Times reports on how some clever fraudsters used an opaque scheme called “cum-ex trading” to get tens of billions of dollars in double-tax refunds from European countries.
• The war on speed radar cameras continues, with recent attacks in France and Italy. The French government is trying to refortify the cameras with designs that are resistant to attack, but these too are being knocked out of service as fast as they are deployed.
• A while back I noted that the IRS was in a tussle with some county governments over the fees those governments were charging to file liens (including tax liens). The IRS refused to pay a portion of the fees, and so the counties refused to register the agency’s liens. It looks like the IRS was the one to blink in this stand-off.
• In Goma, North Kivu a group calling itself Lutte pour le Changement / LUCHA (“Struggle for Change”), has called on merchants at the Alanine market to stop paying their market taxes in protest against the government’s unwillingness to address unsanitary conditions there.

Some links from here and there:

Rebels removed a radar camera and replaced it with this rat d’art.

• The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues. In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
• If the Democrats running for President can agree on one thing, it’s more money and power for the IRS. The just-released Trump administration budget proposal aims for small budget increases for the agency as well.
• A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week. The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government. In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province. They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
• Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. It seems to mostly recycle recent blog posts, but also includes reports that the IRS may be over-zealously (and extra-legally) applying “frivolous filing” penalties again, news on how to use the revamped W-4 form to adjust your tax withholding so you can resist payment, and a brief note on the NWTRCC national gathering coming up in May in Chicago.

In other news…

• Protesters in South Kivu were denied a permit to march and were stopped by a line of police when they tried. So they did as they do in Kivu, and announced a tax strike.
• Attacks on traffic-ticket-issuing robot cameras continue around Europe, with machines destroyed or disabled in Italy and France in recent weeks. Meanwhile in New York City, protesters held up signs warning drivers about speed camera placements.
• An IRS mail room employee in Alabama “became sick today after being exposed to a package containing an unknown, potentially hazardous liquid” that spilled from “an international letter”.
• A homeowner in Cornwall stopped paying council tax when her property was made worthless by damage from a leaking water pipe the council refuses to fix. The council relented and wrote off some of the back taxes but she keeps resisting, and they’re fighting her again.
• Crispin Sartwell reminds progressives that increasing taxation is a poor method to fight economic inequality. Excerpt:

  Taxing rich people redistributes their wealth to defense contractors, which are owned and run by rich people. About 40 percent of discretionary spending goes to federal contractors; a primary result of a wealth tax or a much higher tax rate on the wealthy will be a recirculation among corporate titans.

  Service on the national debt totaled $325 billion, so a significant and ever-growing portion of the money obtained in the apparent pursuit of equality will be redistributed to bondholders, or recirculated through the world banking system. The governments of China and Japan each own over a trillion dollars in U.S. debt, for example, and so we’ll be taxing American rich people and redistributing their wealth to foreign governments, and to rich people elsewhere in the world.

In other news…

• Tax resisters in South Kivu have supplemented their campaign, which started last Friday, with a shutdown of the airport and with protest marches.
• Fire, spray paint, stickers, a burning tire, projectiles, and saws are among the tools drivers have been using in recent attacks on speed radar ticketing machines in Italy, The Netherlands, and France.
• A new (I think) site — ProuMonarquia.cat (with associated hashtag #ProuMonarquia) — is coordinating nationalist tax resistance in Catalonia. The site recommends that people redirect the amount of their federal taxes that would go to the support of the Spanish monarchy and to the state security apparatus that represses Catalan independence, giving that amount instead to the separatist Council for the Catalan Republic.

Some recent links from here and there…

• The journal Taxation features an article by Helen Thornley on the “Impact of the Women’s Tax Resistance League”.
• Some 30-year-anniversary remembrances of the struggle against Thatcher’s poll tax are appearing, including:
  • Today in London riotous history, 1990: local anti-poll tax demo erupts, Brixton (past tense)
  • Police officers from all over the county were called to poll tax protest in Southampton (Daily Echo)
• Erica Leigh reports back from the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns last year in Scotland.
• Deborah White of Ukiah, California, has gotten fed up and has decided to stop paying federal income tax. She declared her tax resistance in a letter-to-the-editor of her local paper.
• More recent attacks on traffic ticket radar cameras in France and Belgium.

Some links that have floated through my facemask in recent days:

• Thousands of IRS Employees Are Currently Home With Pay, But Not Working is the sort of headline that brings a smile to my face. The gist of the accompanying article is that most of the IRS workforce has been sent home to avoid infecting one another at the office, but only a minority of the employees are equipped to work from home. The rest continue to collect paychecks, but have nothing to do.
• People are travelling less, commuting less, and shipping less. As a result, people are burning less motor vehicle fuel, and as a result large drops in gasoline excise tax revenue are expected.
• The hashtag #RebeliónFiscal is trending on the Twitter, as small business owners in Argentina plot a tax strike. The business owners are upset that the government has offered them no tax relief as business activity has gone into an epidemic-induced slump. They’re joined by antiauthoritarian activists and by the general public, who are throwing coordinated cacerolazos (noisy pot-and-pan banging protests) from the windows of their apartments as they remain sequestered.
• The thirty-year anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion is being met by a new book on the movement and a recap of what the tax strikers accomplished by movement organizer Tommy Sheridan.
• Ruth Benn previews the upcoming Global Campaign on Military Spending and our out-of-the-ordinary tax filing (and tax protest) season this year (at NWTRCC’s blog).
• Protest has to take on a different look during a time of “social distancing” Ruth Benn examines “Protest in the Time of Coronavirus” at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Now, while mostly at home, we find plenty of things to do, but running out to a big demonstration is not one of them. This got me thinking about war tax resistance as a perfect protest for the isolated. That led me to think of the many individual acts of resistance in antiwar history and thus to Ammon Hennacy and his “one man revolution.”

• There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with the latest news from the U.S. war tax resistance movement.
• War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Ruth Benn were on Northern Spirit Radio to discuss “the methods, mechanics, motivations, & consequences of refusing to pay for war.”
• The war against traffic ticket cameras continues in Europe, even as some areas are suspending their use of the cameras.

April 15^th — the usual federal income tax return filing deadline in the U.S. — was in the more whimper than bang category this year. The powers that be decided to extend the filing deadline to July, and for that and other reasons, taxes are less on people’s minds than usual this time of year.

But here are some items that have recently come to my attention:

• The U.S. government is sending out “stimulus” payments willy-nilly. Thousands of dollars in forgivable “loans” are being made available to businesses (though it’s something of a crapshoot which businesses will and won’t get them), and most Americans are also getting some free money as well. The individual stimulus checks are already starting to go out. Americans who got tax refunds direct-deposited in their bank accounts last time they filed their taxes were the first to see money. The rest of us have to wait a bit. There was some worry that people who are so poor that they don’t have to file tax returns would be overlooked, but the IRS has created a method for non-filers to apply for the stimulus money too.
• War tax resistance season has arrived in Spain. Here’s some material from Catalonia, where the theme is: “you can’t kill a virus with armaments” as they encourage people to redirect their war taxes to healthcare expenses.
• In the U.S., tax day was subdued for war tax resisters, with a press release and some on-line actions.
• The Bold Italic published a piece by Mary Finn on the People Who Refuse to Pay Their Taxes (war tax resisters, mostly from the San Francisco Bay area)
• I completed assembling an eBook version of The Discourses of Epictetus, and this is now freely available on the Standard Ebooks site.
• There’s a new documentary about paleocon-to-anarchist tax resister Karl Hess.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots took more casualties in Austria recently.
• Businesses in Mexico are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government into granting tax relief or other financial aid during the pandemic crisis, and some state governors there are also making noise about withholding taxes from the federation.
• The Daily Echo dug into the archives and pulled out some photos of the Poll Tax protests of 1990.

The latest news on the tax resistance beat:

• Lindsey Britt, at Waging Nonviolence, looks at the up-and-coming generation of young American war tax resisters.
• The IRS is getting desperate. It is trying to process millions of stimulus payments, implement a bunch of hastily-crafted tax law changes, and cope with a delayed tax filing season, all with a workforce that was decimated by budget cuts and then sent home to avoid infection. Now it’s begging its employees to come back to the office and offering them bonus pay, but telling them to bring their own protective equipment — even sending them information on how to create their own facemasks from old T-shirts.
• Restaurant owners in the Marche region of Italy, suffering under CoViD-lockdown closures, have launched a tax strike. “We are going on a tax strike because we can’t pay because our businesses are closed forcibly,” wrote Lucio Pompili, one of the pioneers of the strike. The strike launches this week, and aims to refuse all taxes through the end of the year.
• A similar movement is sweeping Argentina. A viral video, featuring small business-owners complaining that they cannot survive if 60% of their earnings are swept up by the government and their businesses are locked down, has touched a nerve, and the #RebeliónFiscal has spread like wildfire.
• The Catalan independence movement has relaunched a federal tax resistance campaign. Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has asked Catalonians to redirect the portion of their federal taxes that would otherwise go to support the Spanish monarchy, giving that money instead to the “Republican Fund for Solidarity Action” which will devote the funds to CoViD-19 relief efforts. The campaign is organized via the #ProuMonarquia site.
• I’m used to seeing on-again/off-again tax strikes in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now the tactic seems to have spread to Ituri. Though a local government committee denounced the idea, a more grassroots group has insisted on withholding taxes until the government takes steps to improve security in the region.
• In France, fire and satirical art have been the weapons of choice in recent attacks on automated traffic ticket cameras, while in Germany, a tractor was used to pry such a machine from its moorings.

Some recent links of note:

• The right-wing British press is aghast at news that the Extinction Rebellion movement plans to add tax resistance to its tactics. However, I haven’t seen anything about this from Extinction Rebellion itself, so I’m left wondering whether this is just a manufactured brouhaha for headlines. That movement did launch a brief council tax strike in London last year, but as far as I have been able to tell, nothing much came of it.
• During the Great Depression, property taxes went up even as people became increasingly unable to pay. A result was organized taxpayer leagues and property tax strikes. Stephen Mihm, at Bloomberg Opinion, wonders whether such tax revolts might return as businesses shutter and rent strikes bloom, reducing the ability to pay of property owners.
• The number of Americans who renounced their U.S. citizenship reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2020.
• Attacks on traffic ticket robots continue in Europe, with recent attacks in France and Italy and yet more in France. The number of tickets and the revenue from them were both down about 25% last year in France.

Some links that have bubbled up in my browser over the past few weeks as I’ve been on my Brethren binge:

• Businesses in Chattanooga, Tennesseee held a one-day strike in support of #BlackLivesMatter, as a way to withhold sales tax dollars in order to pressure the city government to redirect funding from the police department to less-nefarious uses.
• American war tax resister Ed Agro has died. Agro was one of the founders of the New England War Tax Resistance regional group, and was also the admin behind the wtr-s war tax resistance email list.

• The Mennonite Church USA is promoting its reinvigorated “War Tax Alternative Fund” through which Mennonites can redirect their taxes from the U.S. government to more worthy causes.

  Richard Yoder responds in a letter: “I am grateful that there seems to be a renewed emphasis on the historic peace witness of the Mennonite tradition, including war-tax resistance and redirecting of our tax dollars to life-giving activities. The nature of warfare has changed from the past when the military needed our bodies to now needing our dollars to pay for high-tech warfare. So in the same way Mennonites in the past found a way to say no to participating in war through conscientious objection, we now need to do the same with our tax dollars.”

• NWTRCC coordinator Lincoln Rice explores the connections between war tax resistance and resistance to militarized and militant domestic police forces, and Chrissy Kirchhoefer notes that while some of the troops have come home, that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped trooping.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.
• Jim Loewen reflects on his token tax resistance efforts during the Vietnam War — and how he got an in-person visit from an IRS agent over a $6 tax bill.
• The human rebellion against traffic ticket radar robots continues, with robot hordes falling to the rebels in France, England, and Germany; France a few more times; Belgium and France; France again; Mexico, Spain, and France; and France and Germany in recent weeks.
• Paolo Bozzi shares some notes from a recent workshop on “Not Paying Taxes: Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance, and Tax Resistance in Historical Perspective.”
• An Italian “orange vest” nationalist movement is calling for a tax strike to pressure the government to call new elections and withdraw from the Euro.
• Aidan Collymore gives a whirlwind tour of existing studies in “The Ethics of Tax Evasion: Literature Review.”
• Karen Robinson looks back at the history of the campaign for a “peace tax” in the U.K. parliament.
• A Glasgow man whose apartment keeps getting flooded has accused the city of negligence for signing off on the building’s construction, and is refusing to pay his council tax as a pressure tactic.

In the United States, prisoners are supposed to file income tax returns like anyone else. And unless the law says otherwise, the same tax rules apply to them. When Congress passed the last stimulus bill, giving taxpayers a tax credit and then pre-paying that credit to them by mailing out checks, prisoners were among those who benefited. Because that was the law.

But the IRS decided the law should have prohibited prisoners from getting their hands on that money. They think Congress should have passed a more restrictive law than it did.

So they sent out notices to prisons across the country, asking them to intercept stimulus relief checks coming to prisoners, or to seize them if they had already been received. Prisoners were threatened with criminal prosecution if they did not return the money. There is no legal basis for this threat. The IRS is just making it up.

In other news:

• Israeli musician Hemi Rudner has gone on tax strike to protest the lack of government support for the self-employed during the pandemic shutdown.

  I’m a normal citizen. And aside from a joint here and there, I abide by the law, love my country, and of course, pay taxes. Around half of my income has gone to the state for decades already. Only God knows how many meetings I’ve funded.

  Myself, and millions of other citizens in the State of Israel, are stuck in a horrible situation, where in addition to fears about our health, we don’t have any way to make a living and support our families. In other Western countries independent workers get an economic safety net as an integral part of their rights. In Israel, the tyrannical government toys with us as if we’re invisible, like there are no faces behind the masks.

  I want to say that as long as we don’t receive our rights as citizens, without the terrible and discouraging bureaucracy, I’m declaring that I’m not paying taxes to the State of Israel. I call on all Israelis to do the same. Maybe then, at the end of the day, something will change here.

• Gwen Jaspers issues a call to Defund the Pentagon, and says this we don’t have to wait for the politicians to act: “We may even decide, eventually with trusted supporters, not to pay for the Pentagon’s war budget by omitting the amount from our tax payment that the Pentagon receives — a whopping 50 percent or more of what we pay in federal income taxes.”
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, lately in Wales, Germany, and France, and in Australia, Canada, France, Luxembourg, and Saudi Arabia.
• Tax Day comes late this year, so also does NWTRCC’s Tax Day press release about war tax resistance actions around the country.
• In April, the war tax redirection fund “People’s Life Fund” redirected $21,850 in resisted taxes to several social justice organizations in the San Francisco bay area. They’re at it again this month, with $12,000 more in grants going out.
• As the (delayed) 2020 Tax Day approaches, J.D. Tuccille asks taxpayers to consider what they get for their money: public health incompetence, abusive security forces, and economic instability.

Some links from here and there:

• War tax resisters David & Jan Hartsough share their letter to the IRS this year.
• Kay Bell, at Don’t Mess with Taxes, reports on how the IRS’s fleet of private debt collection companies tangled with the wrong guy. The victim, who did not actually owe the IRS anything (his debts had been discharged in bankruptcy), sued the debt collectors for illegal harassment and won.
• Neighbors of a homeless encampment in a park in Vancouver are threatening to withhold their taxes to pressure the government to do something about it. The Vancouver Sun painted this as a NIMBY-hostility-to-the-homeless issue, but one of the neighbors took to Twitter to explain that they’re trying to pressure the government not to act against the homeless encampment, but in assistance of those who live there.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.
• The human war on traffic ticket issuing radar robots continues, with the robots taking casualties in Saudi Arabia, France, and Italy; Italy and France; and the United States, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Germany in recent weeks.

In the wake of the enormous explosion at the Port of Beirut, protests by enraged citizens have led to the collapse of the Lebanese gov­ern­ment.

Dany Chakour, owner of the Em Sherif restaurants, has gone a step further. He says his restau­rants will no longer pay taxes to the corrupt and inept gov­ern­ment of Lebanon, but will in­stead pay that money direct­ly to non-gov­ern­ment­al org­an­i­za­tions that are act­u­al­ly help­ing peo­ple.

“We decided to help the NGOs who are the only ones helping on the ground,” Chakour said. “We won’t pay the government, that’s for sure.”

And he says other business owners are thinking of following his lead.

Chakour says he intends to file his value-added tax returns as usual, but without including the demanded 11% payment. Instead he will indicate the charities he funded with the money.

Tax resistance news from hither and yon:

• Mark your calendars, as NWTRCC will be hosting a webinar on Defunding Militarism: The Basics of War Tax Resistance at the “Peace Week 2020” events of Campaign Nonviolence. The webinar will be held on 22 September 2020 at 5 p.m. Pacific time. “This session will be an introduction to the why and how of war tax resistance, with discussion of potential consequences and resource referral. This session is for people new to war tax resistance or just getting started.” Register for the webinar at the NWTRCC site.
• I’ve covered the case of anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman a few times before. He managed to get a hung jury in his previous trial, but then the judge decided he’d prefer a conviction and so refused to allow Bowman to present key parts of his defense during the retrial. That strikes me as a significant thumb on the scales of justice, but such is how things go in the United States these days. In any case, at his retrial without benefit of a jury Bowman was convicted and was recently sentenced to probation and $138,026 in restitution. He says also that the court case has financially ruined him. He plans to appeal.
• Suzanne and Brayton Shanley, war tax resisters who helped found Agape Community, a Christian intentional community in Massachusetts, have written a book about that project. An article in the National Catholic Reporter gives some background and also clued me in that Agape Community now has a website.
• War tax resister Alan Barnett has died. Barnett organized a phone tax resistance group in California during the Vietnam War that included hundreds of resisters.
• Murmurs of tax resistance have been growing in South Africa as taxpayers have become fed up with corruption in the ruling African National Congress, and with the government’s poor response to the CoViD epidemic.
• Spray paint seems to be the tool of choice in the latest human attacks on traffic ticket robots. People blinded the cameras with paint in the United States, Germany, and France, while other methods were used elsewhere in France.

In other news…

• Listen along as Jamie Maclaren, one of the organizers of the Strathcona tax resistance campaign, discusses what’s going on, on The Mike Smyth Show.
• Another tax strike in South Kivu, as the Federation of Businesses of Congo organized a hartal in Baraka that includes tax resistance along with a general strike.
• A Hazmat team was sent to a local IRS office to check out “a suspicious letter.”
• The human rebellion against traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taking casualties in France & Germany and more in France in recent weeks.

Some recent links of note:

• Earn less money so you owe less taxes and fund less of the government’s bad deeds, or earn more money so you can donate more to good causes and offset the damage done by your taxes? Such a decision becomes even more complex when your finances are entwined with those of a partner. Lindsey Britt thinks over her options at NWTRCC’s blog.
• The Congressional Budget Office recently released its projections for what the U.S. federal government budget is likely to look like in the future based on current law and economic conditions. It is an eye-opener. Last year when they issued their report, they thought the U.S. government debt would be about 79½% of the nation’s gross domestic product, a number that raised eyebrows at the time. But that was before the coronavirus. Now they say the number will be upwards of 98% — a level the country has not seen since the all-out mobilization for World War Ⅱ. And it just keeps climbing from there. By 2050 it is projected to nearly double to 195%. This is because government spending as a percentage of GDP is expected to rise, from “rising interest costs and the costs associated with an aging population and excess health-care cost growth”. The federal budget deficit this year is projected to be $3.3 trillion, which is just freaking unprecedented. “It is hard to overestimate what a dismal fiscal future the Congressional Budget Office foresees.”
• The human battle against traffic ticket robots continues, with the robots taking casualties in Belgium and France; France and Italy; and Canada and France in recent weeks.
• Businesses in Galkayo, Somalia have launched a hartal to protest tax increases.
• Panorama recently interviewed Venetian separatist Federica Piran. Veneto voters elected to seek greater autonomy from Italy in a 2017 referendum. But that has not translated into much real change. Piran thinks a tax strike is all that is needed to make independence a reality, but doubts the Venetians have the will to pull it off.
• Catalan separatists, on the other hand, seem to be turning up the heat. They have identified a set of basic infrastructure companies that are in favor of Catalan secession and that are working to disentangle their Catalan operations from the Spanish state: companies in the telecom, energy, petrol, insurance, and banking sectors for example. They are encouraging people in Catalonia to shift their consumption to those companies, and also to pay their federal taxes through the Catalan tax agency, as a way of easing the eventual transition to independence.

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

• I recently noticed that The Sparrows’s Nest Library and Archive has made a lot of material from the poll tax rebellion in the U.K. — posters, pamphlets, newsletters, and such — available on-line. You can also find this collection at the Internet Archive if you prefer its interface.
• Some Boston homeowners are contemplating tax resistance — putting their property taxes in escrow — to protest the failure of the local government to address “safety and quality of life issues.”
• More traffic ticket robots have fallen to spray paint and fire in France in recent weeks.
• As you may have heard, The New York Times finally got ahold of Donald Trump’s tax returns. They show that he didn’t pay income taxes most years, and when he did in recent years it was token amounts ($750). This seems to be largely because of grandiose business losses combined with sketchy deductions for business expenses (like $70,000 in annual hair care, or “consulting fees” to his family). The upshot of this to us here at The Picket Line is that this contributes to the public impression that the rich evade taxes with impunity and that taxpaying is for suckers, thus degrading “taxpayer morale” and the willingness of taxpayers to cough up their tribute voluntarily. See ♇ 25 November 2012 for more about attacks on the pillars of taxpayer compliance.

Some recent links of note:

• As I reported back in July the IRS was refusing to issue stimulus payments to people in prison, and was trying to claw back the payments it had already issued — even though the law did not authorize the agency to do these things. Now a court has granted an injunction against the IRS, ordering it to release the funds to the unjustly robbed prisoners.
• There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with news of interest to war tax resisters in the United States.
• The human revolt against traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taking casualties from rebels armed with spray paint, an angle grinder, and hot tar in Canada and France in recent weeks.
• In the wake of the anticlimactic reveal of Trump’s tax returns, the op-eds about how America’s tax system screws the little guy and lets the rich skate have made their predictable and somewhat half-hearted appearance.

Some tabs that have passed through my browser in recent days:

• Two limericks I wrote, inspired by current events, were selected for the Center for a Stateless Society’s Fall 2020 poetry feature.
• Milwaukee’s WUWM profiled war tax resister Don Timmerman.
• The IRS looks unlikely to be able to comply gracefully with the terms of the Paperwork Reduction Act as it rolls out its 2021 income tax forms. This might give taxpayers some creative avenues for gumming up the system.
• On the 300^th anniversary of the birth of Quaker war tax resister John Woolman, FEE gave an overview of Woolman’s abolitionist work.
• Traffic ticket robots continue to suffer attacks, lately in France, Germany, & Italy, yet more in France, France again, and France & Italy.
• In the New York Times, economist Robert H. Frank explains how tax evasion can balloon quickly when tax enforcement falls below a tipping-point.
• Ruth Benn, at NWTRCC’s blog, takes aim at the “All or Nothing Syndrome” in which some people give up on doing war tax resistance at all because they don’t feel capable of going all-in and resisting everything.
• David S. D’Amato, at libertarianism.org pens an admiring look at the life of Christian anarchist tax resister Ammon Hennacy.
• The number of Americans declared to be renouncing their U.S. citizenship hit an all-time high this year and only three quarters into the year, too.
• Peace activists in Ireland who broke into Shannon Airport to decommission U.S. military aircraft stationed there have been found not guilty by a jury, who apparently agreed with the defense argument that they were lawfully justified in their actions.

Some tabs that have festooned my browser in recent days:

• Rob Greenfield has announced that “as an act of civil disobedience I will not pay federal income taxes for my lifetime.” He seems to have stopped paying in 2015 but only now made a formal announcement, in part prompted by the news stories about President Trump’s frequent non-payment of federal taxes. Greenfield is fond of bold and flashy lifestyle experiments. For example, he lived for a year on only foraged food. He’s cycled across the United States multiple times on a bamboo-frame bicycle. He lives on a poverty-line income while donating the income from his media appearances to charity. That’s all just the start.
• The president of the Tuscany branch of Confcommercio (the Italian General Confederation of Enterprises, Professional Activities and Self-Employment), Anna Lapini, announced that fifty thousand Tuscan businesses will stop paying taxes and duties. “Our companies have no more resources, and we prefer to continue to pay employees and suppliers as a priority over a state that does not understand — indeed tramples on — our reasons for existing.” Lapini explained that the group was resorting to a tax strike “for the same reasons for which Mahatma Gandhi or the founding fathers of the United States or the French people during the revolution used it in other times.” The strike went into effect on November 30^th when a set of taxes came due, and striking businesses refused to pay.

• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with brave mortal renegades defeating the mechanical hordes in Italy, Canada, and France (where one “device has not been able to operate for more than a week without being attacked since it was installed two years ago”), Germany, France, and Australia (where a “GoFundMe was set up to pay for a lawyer to help the… driver arrested for the camera’s destruction”), France, Guadeloupe, and Germany and France again.
• Predictably, the prohibitively high cigarette taxes in states like New York and California has led to increases in smuggling to evade the taxes, with more than half of the cigarettes consumed in New York now being smuggled in from low-tax areas.

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
  • a recap of the on-line lecture on tax resistance tactics I gave for the #MoneyRebellion group of environmental activists from the U.K.
  • an overview of the last NWTRCC national conference
  • counselors’ notes, including:
    • The IRS is still (improperly) threatening people with frivolous filing penalties if they send letters of protest along with their tax returns.
    • The new QR-codes that the IRS has started to include on past-due notices present a possible security issue for some tax resisters.
    • An appeals court affirmed that you cannot discharge federal tax debt in bankruptcy if you have willfully “attempted in any manner to evade or defeat” the tax.
  • Ruth Benn shares her thoughts on how “all-or-nothing syndrome” keeps some people from considering resistance, and Ilene Roizman shares her struggle to purchase health insurance as a self-employed non-filer (both of these have appeared previously on NWTRCC’s blog).
• Traffic ticket robots continue to succumb to attacks of enraged motorists, lately in Canada, France, Reunion, & Germany, and France, Reunion, Guadeloupe, & Qatar.
• Meanwhile, I’m starting to think it would be more newsworthy if there weren’t another tax strike brewing in South Kivu.

Recent tax resistance news of interest:

• The human rebellion against the traffic ticket robots continues to rage. Here is a collection of recent reports:
  • In Italy, one speed camera was felled and another bombed, while in France one was burned, another blinded with spray paint, and a third attacked with an explosive.
  • A bomb destroyed another Italian speed camera, another was uprooted, another cut in half, while in England a camera was disemboweled, and in Germany two were smashed to bits.
  • Two speed cameras were burned in Belgium, two in Germany were blinded with duct tape, one in Italy was disabled for the third time, while in France two were burned and another one blinded by spray paint (that one “for the twenty-first time in three years”).
  • In Canada a speed camera was knocked over, in France one was burned and two blinded by spray paint, and in Guadeloupe, one was burned and another shot.
  • In France, two cameras were toppled and torched, and another blinded with paint (“less than 24 hours after being installed”), while in Italy five speed cameras were knocked out of service.
  • In Italy, an artist converted a speed camera into a sculpture, in Germany a single suspect is thought to be behind a dozen speed camera attacks, in Saudi Arabia a camera was burned, while in France more cameras were dragged down and torched or blinded with paint.
  • In France, one camera was destroyed 48 hours after it was installed, while another was chopped down at the trunk. Another camera was torched in Belgium.
• Now that Democrats have more power in Washington, will the long decline of the IRS budget slow or reverse? Could be. Increasing collections could give the new administration more money to work with. Unionized government employees are usually reliable Democratic voters. It’s become the fashion to run more social programs out of the IRS via tax incentives (e.g. Obamacare). The Democratic base is peeved about wealthy people and companies not paying their “fair share.” All of this suggests the new administration has motives to increase the agency budget. And the Wall Street Journal says there are already plans in the works to slip an IRS budget boost into a bill that boosts the per-child tax credit. On the other hand, the Democratic majority in Congress is razor-thin, and making the IRS bigger and more powerful isn’t all that popular among the marginal voters. Let’s wait and see.

Some recent links of note:

• The Mennonite Church USA is holding a Cost ☮f War webinar this Thursday. Mennonite war tax resisters will be among the presenters.
• The war tax resistance movement in Spain does a periodic census of war tax resisters there, asking them how much they resisted and, if they redirected the taxes, where they redirected. I don’t know how representative census-responders are of the war tax resistance movement there. I have a feeling that if we tried the same thing in the United States, we’d get a pretty small percentage of resisters responding. We’re not very good survey people. But anyway, according to their census the 258 people who responded to the Spanish survey redirected €18,088 to 92 different projects. The average resister redirected €70. Follow the link for more details.
• Peter J. Reilly, at his Forbes tax blog, writes about the “hey hey just don’t pay” tax strategy. He writes about war tax resisters who see their tax debts erased by the statute of limitations and notes:

  I find this situation demoralizing. I believe that making an effort to be reasonably tax compliant (Perfection is impossible unless your situation is pretty simple) is one of the duties of good citizenship. I also used to believe that it was prudent even for people who are of the “taxation is theft” school of thought. I am doubtful of the latter now. It is still too risky for my taste, but I can’t make the argument that scofflaws are being reckless.

• More attacks on speed cameras in France.
• And more evidence that the Democratic party is gunning to use its new power to try to give the IRS a bigger budget and a more aggressive mandate.

Some recent links of note:

• One of the Extinction Rebellion tax resisters, Jane Rogers, tells her story. Excerpt:

  Money, even in tiny amounts, talks. If money — money from a growing number of tax rebels — refuses to go where the government is trying to put it, then together we can make a difference.

  That’s why I’m appealing to other self-employed writers to join me in this tax resistance.

  Rogers is part of “The Earth Tax Strike” group, which is holding its withheld taxes in an escrow account which they say they’ll pay when the government meets their demands.
• In South Kivu, the government locked a group of women traders out of the marketplace. The women have been refusing taxes there as part of a campaign to pressure the government to fix roads in the region.
• At the NWTRCC blog, Ruth Benn looks back at the creative tax resistance street theater of John-Ed Croft.
• Bob Bady discussed the lives of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson on KZFR (segment starts at 32:40).
• The human battle against traffic ticket robots continues, with recent attacks in the United States, Germany, France, and Martinique.

In other news…

• In the wake of the recent military coup in Myanmar, Financial Times reports that some domestic and foreign businesses have begun to boycott companies that are too close to the military regime.
• The human rebellion against traffic ticket robots continues. The machines were disabled by stickers, spray paint, and fire in France; by toppling and fire in Martinique; and by shotgun in Italy in recent weeks.

Recent links from hither and yon:

• Tax resistance is heating up in Myanmar in the wake of the military coup there. The national legislature passed a law suspending tax collection and ordered government departments to stop collecting taxes, though the head of the central tax agency downplayed this. There are also campaigns afoot to boycott lottery tickets, stop using sales tax stamps, and stop paying government monopoly utility bills. Consumer pressure forced one restaurant chain to make a public statement that customers were welcome to refuse to pay sales tax in its restaurants.
• You can learn more about the Extinction Rebellion U.K. project #MoneyRebellion in its latest newsletter. Among its projects is Earth Tax Strike — a coordinated tax resistance campaign designed to pressure the government to enact more sensible environmental policies. Here is an example of a letter the resisters will be sending to the government to explain their refusal and their demands.
• The IRS continues to exceed its authority by assessing “frivolous filing penalties” against people who write them letters that protest how their tax dollars are spent — even if those letters aren’t “filings” at all, or are accompanied by filings that are accurate and complete and that don’t assert any “frivolous” positions. This has understandably intimidated some people from petitioning their government for redress of grievances in this fashion. Small loss though that may be, Ruth Benn urges us to not roll over too quickly: “if we want to make a statement about refusing to pay for war, hassles come with the territory and are actually the least of the risks that a resister could face.”
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues. In recent weeks, radar cameras were toppled or blinded by spray paint in various locations in France.
• The U.S. government has been sending out stimulus payments as direct-deposits, as checks, or as debit cards. It would do this even if the recipient was behind on their taxes and owed the goverment money: it did not deduct what you owed from the stimulus you received. If the IRS couldn’t find you, though, or didn’t think you qualified for a payment, there was a backup option: you could apply for the stimulus on your tax return. However if you did that, the IRS would treat it as any other deduction or credit, and offset it against the taxes you owed. Which put people who had to use this backup at a disadvantage… or at least it did so until recently: The IRS now says it will not offset such stimulus credits against federal tax debts.
• The IRS, after insisting that it would stick with the April 15^th tax filing deadline this year, finally threw in the towel and extended it to May 17^th. Part of what convinced them? They are still trying to finish up last year’s returns, and a growing backlog of taxpayer correspondence. There were also some significant tax changes in the recently-signed stimulus bill (such as big changes to the child tax credit, and exemption of a large hunk of unemployment benefits from taxable income) that threw a wrench into things even as tax filing season was already officially underway.

Some recent links of interest:

• War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:

  Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death. But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.

• The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity. This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich. And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
• The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government. In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign. Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign. But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
• War tax resistance also continues in Spain, with offices of tax resistance opening in various cities to counsel potential resisters this tax season.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robot cameras blinded with spray paint in France and Germany, pilfered in South Africa, stickers and graffiti reading “non-essential” blinding the cameras in France, along with other spray paint and fire attacks, and more camera destruction in Italy and England.
• In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
• NWTRCC is collecting 2021 “Tax Day” protest and outreach actions around the United States.
• Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.

Some recent tax resistance links of note:

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

Recent links of note:

• Some more details have emerged about the Biden administration plan to beef up the IRS enforcement budget. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the administration is seeking a $1.2 billion / 10.4% total increase in the agency budget, most of which would go to tax enforcement.
• Every once in a while, the IRS crunches the numbers and tries to figure out the size of the “tax gap” — the difference between what Americans owe and what they actually cough up. The problem is that there are a lot of unknowns — unpaid taxes that the government currently has no way of knowing that it is owed. So it has to make guesses and extrapolations. Now, in testimony to a Congressional committee, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has admitted what I’ve long suspected: the agency’s estimates of the “tax gap” have been far too low and the real number is more than double what has been reported.
• Meanwhile, the IRS is still struggling to get through its backlog of tax year 2019 income tax return filings as this year’s tax filing season hits its peak. This is further complicated this year by the agency’s role in administering a new stimulus check dispersal, and last-minute retroactive changes to the tax laws that made some already-filed returns incorrect and that gave the agency responsibility for rolling out a new tax credit.
• United for Peace & Justice highlights how war tax resisters are organizing for this year’s tax season.
• Sojourners highlights Christian war tax resisters.
• Cartoonist Peter Bagge examines the life of Henry David Thoreau at Reason.
• The war tax resistance season has also begun in Spain.
• More traffic ticket robots are disabled by rebels in France, Italy, and Germany.

Some recent links of note:

• Extinction Rebellion is launching a “Climate Emergency Council Tax Strike”

  Our movement has only scratched the surface of what non-violent civil disobedience can achieve. While they deceive and seek to oppress us further, we can take a stand against their ecocidal leadership — by simply withholding council tax then telling the world why we’ve done it.

  The campaign is asking local groups in the U.K. to demand that their local councils declare a climate emergency and suspend projects that are ecologically irresponsible.
• Conscience U.K. held an on-line seminar exploring the history of conscientious objection to military taxation featuring Karen Robinson, Robin Brookes, Mary Lou Leavitt, and Monica Frisch.
  
• Another detail of the Biden administration’s plan to beef up IRS tax enforcement has come out. They hope to force banks to report information about everyone’s bank accounts: how much came into and out of each account over the year. This would help them identify income sources that people and businesses fail to report on their tax returns. But it would also put more bank accounts on the agency’s radar. Currently, they only seem to be very aware of interest-earning bank accounts, via the reporting of this interest on annual 1099 filings. This has allowed some tax resisters to have bank accounts that are relatively invisible to the IRS (and thereby less-vulnerable to seizure) by having non-interest-bearing accounts. The proposed reporting changes might remove this protection.

• Catalan separatists have amplified their tax resistance campaign. For some time now the Catalan National Assembly has been promoting a campaign in which individuals, businesses, and (an increasing number of) municipalities would redirect their national taxes from Spain to the Catalan regional government. That government would forward those taxes along to Spain, so the effect of this (and its risk) was minor, but in theory if the Catalan regional government decided to pull the trigger on political independence, this would establish the groundwork for fiscal independence as well.

  But now, the separatist “Council for the Republic” is trying to push things further: asking resisters to redirect €300 of their taxes from the government to the Republican Fund for Solidarity Action. That money will not be forwarded to Madrid, and so this is a more confrontational act of civil disobedience.

  The group has launched the campaign with the #Proumonarquia site (“Build the Catalan Republic with your taxes”) and two videos: a how-to narrated by actor Toni Albà and an overview of tax resistance by long-time war tax resister Josep Manel Fontdevila.

• Attorney Peter Goldberger will discuss the prospects for people who might try to assert that people have a legal right of conscientious objection to military taxation in U.S. courts. The discussion will be held online, on Zoom next Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. EST.
• In South Kivu, the government is striking back at the three-month-old tax strike, announcing that it will call in police to enforce the tax law. Strikers are protesting the lack of road maintenance in the region, and the spokesperson for the strike says it will continue until the main road is repaired.
• Chrissy Kirchhoefer, over at NWTRCC’s blog, recaps some of the Tax Day actions war tax resisters have engaged in this extended tax season.
• War tax resisters in Spain, organized under the Tortuga Antimilitarist Group, have sent letters to various political figures. The letters, accompanied by dried flowers, encourage the recipients to “stop collaborating with their respective institutions or roles in the service of violence and injustice and to join the 2021 war tax resistance campaign.” The flower-bearing messages were meant as a peaceful contrast to letters with death threats and accompanying bullets that were sent to the same figures last month by parties unknown.
• There has been yet more grassroots destruction and disabling of speed cameras in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Australia.

Today is International Conscientious Objection Day, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions. It comes a couple of days before this year’s delayed income tax-filing deadline in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:

• The Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters of Vermont are gathering to talk shop.

  “I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”

• War tax resister Sue Barnhart has a letter-to-the-editor in the Eugene Weekly. Excerpt:

  I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder. The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment. Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.

• War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Robin Brookes are hosting a discussion group at the upcoming World Beyond War #NoWar2021 conference on on June 4^th: “War Tax Resistance: Tax resistance to paying for the military began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day. Let’s talk about the practicality and efficacy of refusing to pay for war.”

In other news:

• People in Myanmar are standing up to the military junta there by refusing to pay taxes and government-monopoly utility bills.

  “I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity. If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money. I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”

  The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.

  Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for January but had no intention of paying.

  “They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on March 14. “Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes. If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”

  A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.

  “I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets. I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said. “We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”

• In this year’s Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival, author Simon Hannah hosted an online talk called “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax.”
• U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is spearheading a Democratic Party effort to expand and further empower the IRS. “I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations.”
• But right now, one of the things that’s disempowering the agency is… poorly-maintained office equipment.

  During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.

  The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions. At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.

• The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with the robots taking casualties in Guadeloupe and France and in Italy in recent weeks.

The latest news on the tax resistance front:

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

The following short promo video announces the launch of Extinction Rebellion U.K.’s “Earth Tax Strike:”

In other news:

• Attorney Peter Goldberger recently gave an on-line talk about “Conscientious Tax Objection as a Matter of Religious Freedom” that discusses the evolving legal landscape from the perspective of people who hope to assert a legal right of conscientious objection to military taxation in U.S. courts. This is a follow-up to a similar talk Goldberger gave at a NWTRCC gathering in 2014 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with the robot hordes suffering losses in Germany, France, and Spain in recent weeks.
• Someone directed my attention to Robert W. Wood’s write-up about an interesting hack of California’s tax process:

  You may donate to that SBE [State Board of Equalization] member who will vote against you. This may sound counterintuitive, but the idea is that both you and the SBE member must then disclose that contribution. Any contribution of $250 or more must be disclosed. Your contribution will disqualify that SBE member from considering your case. The only exception is if the SBE member returns the contribution within 30 days from the time he or she knows, or has reason to know, of the contribution. Often, though, a contribution will not be returned.

  With a five-member board, if you identify two members who will vote against your client and make contributions to them, they will likely be disqualified. Your board is now three members. If you can garner two positive votes out of the three remaining, you have won. Non-Californians may find this kind of playing field strange or even untoward. It is certainly different, and not for the untutored, but until they change the rules, that is our system.

• Bitor Abarzuza Fontellas shared his letter to the Basque Treasury Department in which he makes his declaration of conscientious objection to military taxation.
• The Niskanen Center is a U.S. “state capacity libertarian” think-tank. They are of the opinion that a strong, capable, competent, central government can be the bedrock foundation of a libertarianish political order. Strikes me as far-fetched, but let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Anyway, as part of their investigation of where the current central government falls short, they’ve published a useful overview of how the IRS got into its current sorry state.
• The Biden Administration has released what it calls The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda. They hope to boost IRS enforcement funding, increase the amount of financial information that gets reported to the government, finally update the IRS’s comically-archaic computer systems, and crack down on professional tax preparers who help people evade taxes. Senator Elizabeth Warren has decided to carry the ball for some of this, in a bill she has proposed to boost IRS funding and force banks to report how much money comes into and goes out of their customers’ bank accounts. Republicans hope to capitalize on public suspicion about a bigger and more-empowered tax agency with ads targeting vulnerable Democratic representatives that tie them to these plans.

In other news…

• Hotels in Mar del Plata, Argentina announced a tax strike, saying that they cannot both pay their employees and their taxes while the tourist trade is lost to Covid.
• Ruth Benn connects the dots between war tax resisters Max Sandin and Randy Kehler and the whistleblowing of Pentagon Papers revealer Daniel Ellsberg.
• A research paper into tax resistance in Ivory Coast finds that it does not behave according to theory. For example, Ivorians who believe elected officials are corrupt and the government is opaque are no more or less likely to resist taxes than those who believe elected officials are honest and the government is open. A stronger sense of national identity corresponds to a greater enthusiasm for tax resistance there (which is the opposite of what is usually found). It goes to show that reality is complicated.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues to rage, with the robot hordes taking casualties in France, Luxembourg, and Italy (more of the same). Tiny Luxembourg installed 24 such cameras five years ago, and more than half of them have been knocked out of service, while none of the human rebels have yet been caught.
• A new war tax resistance season is culminating in Spain. The movement there is particularly active, with “tax resistance offices” counseling resisters in several cities during tax-filing season, and lots of coordination between war tax resisters, climate activists, border demilitarizers, and other such activists.

Some recent links of interest:

• In recent years, something in the neighborhood of 40–45% of American households have not owed any federal income tax. This is due to a combination of factors including progressive tax rates and tax deductions & credits that shield a certain amount of income from tax. Although fabulously wealthy people who do not pay income tax are certainly a thing, most of this group of “lucky duckies” come from the bottom half of the income scale. In 2020, with its pandemic-related economic disruption and the stimulus payments that took the form of refundable tax credits, the numbers jumped: the Tax Policy Center estimates that 61% of U.S. households paid no federal income tax last year.
• Under a newish law the U.S. government will be issuing advance “Child Tax Credits” to qualifying families with children as checks periodically throughout the year. These checks take the place of the refundable tax credit that such families would have used to offset their federal taxes at annual tax filing time in past years. Interestingly, the IRS has directed its enforcement personnel to avoid seizing money from bank accounts in which these Child Tax Credits have been direct-deposited and to refund any inadvertently seized Child Tax Credits.
• “Council Tax Strike” is a subproject of the Extinction Rebellion movement in the U.K. They claim: “There are people all over the U.K. withholding their council tax and demanding action on the things that matter to them.”
• The human war on traffic-ticket-issuing robot cameras continues, with the drones smashed and spray painted over in Italy and France, blocked bodily in Britain and set on fire in France, blown to bits in Germany and disabled in various ways in France, cut down in France and destroyed in the Netherlands, foamed in France, torched in Guadeloupe, and toppled in Italy in recent weeks.
• The National Catholic Reporter looks back on the nuclear disarmament activism of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen: “ ‘I think the teaching of Jesus tells us to render to a nuclear-armed Caesar what that Caesar deserves — tax resistance. And to begin to render to God alone that complete trust which we now give, through our tax dollars, to a demonic form of power,’ he said in his ‘Faith and Disarmament’ speech. ‘Some would call what I am urging “civil disobedience.” I prefer to see it as obedience to God.’ ”
• TaxNotes reminds us that Thoreau’s arrest for tax resistance wasn’t even legally authorized and so it’s something of a lucky fluke that Thoreau spent the night in jail that led to his influential essay.

Some tabs that have passed across my browser in recent days:

• As part of the Biden administration’s plan to reduce the “tax gap,” they proposed that the government be given more visibility into people’s assets by requiring banks and other financial institutions to report to the IRS the amount of gross inflows and outflows from all accounts holding at least $600. There was pushback, both from opposition lawmakers and the banking industry. Now, it appears that this proposal has been dropped from the budget reconciliation package making its way through Congress. That’s not the final word, but it’s an encouraging sign.
• Avi Wolfman-Arent’s tweeted a series of tweets that form an interesting recap of some of the activism of war tax resisters Eroseanna Robinson and Juanita & Wally Nelson.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with radar cameras torched, smashed, spray painted, or otherwise disabled in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, England, and Martinique in recent weeks.

Some recent tax resistance links of interest:

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Content includes:
  • IRS Circumvents “Statute of Limitations” by Ruth Benn. Normally, the IRS has ten years to collect unpaid taxes from you before they have to give up. Also, normally, if you decide to voluntarily pay your taxes, you can also decide for which tax year you are paying them, and by IRS policy, they’ll respect that. Ruth Benn’s tax resistance takes the form of refusing to pay her income tax, but voluntarily paying her self-employment tax. As the ten year statute of limitations approached on one of her unpaid years of income tax, the IRS tried to pull a fast one and used some sleight-of-hand to apply the money Benn was paying for the current year’s self-employment tax to the expiring year’s income tax amount. She is hoping to get the agency to change its mind and to respect its own policy, and promises to keep us up to date on how the red tape tangles.
  • Counseling Notes. Including a reminder that Social Security levies can continue past the ten-year statute of limitations date because the levy is considered “continuous” when it is first applied (not reapplied with each new Social Security check).
  • An announcement of the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering, which will have an international focus, featuring speakers from Money Rebellion (U.K.) and Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga (Spain).
  • News of a new regional war tax resistance group starting in western Massachusetts called Taxes for Peace New England.
• Democrats are keen to force banks to report how much their customers have put into and taken out of their accounts each year. They hope this will bring to the surface some of the money in the underground economy that the government has been frustrated when trying to tax. This proposal has gotten a lot of pushback, and has been an on-again / off-again part of the budget package currently oozing through Congress. The latest guesswork suggests that the Democrats may reactivate the proposal but restrict it to accounts with $10,000 or more in them.
• There’s a nice website that’s been established by the caretakers of The Nelson Homestead — the modest home of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It has good recaps of the lives and activism of the Nelsons, including photos.
• Helen Thornley’s “No Vote, No Tax! The Women’s Tax Resistance League from 1909 to 1918” is featured in volume 4 of Contemporary Issues in Tax Research.
• Environmental activists hoping to stop a new incinerator in Edmonton, north London, are refusing to pay their council tax.
• The Biafra Nations League, which is trying to establish a break-away nation more representative of the Igbo people, has issued an ultimatum to oil firms in the area, ordering them to stop paying taxes to Cameroon and Nigeria, which currently claim sovereignty over the region.
• Argentina legalized abortion earlier this year. Now a group of Argentine legislators have proposed a law that would permit a sort of conscientious objection to taxpayer-involvement in abortion, of a similar sort to what is proposed in the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act” in the U.S.

  …a bill which, if approved, would allow conscientious tax objection to those who are against abortion for moral, ethical, religious, or scientific reasons. In essence, the practice of abortion would draw the necessary resources from a special fund, without using budget items or subsidies from the national treasury. The taxpayer could at this point expressly ask that the money paid in taxes not go to feed this fund, avoiding participating with their own money in the killing of children in the womb.

• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taken out of service by human rebels in the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany & France in recent weeks.

Some recent tax resistance news of note:

• The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have been looking for coins under the couch cushions that might help them pay for some of their expensive ambitions. One plan they came up with was to require banks, credit unions, and other such financial institutions to make annual reports to the IRS of all accounts that had more than $600 of combined deposits or withdrawals over the course of the year. The theory was that the IRS could match this information with the declared income of the account owners, and, if there was a significant discrepancy, could launch an audit to investigate — thereby making it a bit more difficult for people to earn and spend undeclared income, and so increasing the tax base.

  Republicans seized on this proposal as a good wedge with which to spoil the Democrats’ plans, and painted it as an Orwellian nightmare of the government peering into everybody’s private business. At first, the Democrats doubled down, but as anticipated, they have now pared back the proposal such that it will only apply to accounts with at least $10,000 of combined deposits and withdrawals, and exempting certain deposits (such as direct deposit paychecks or social security checks) and withdrawals (such as for the purchase of a home). Exemptions like those may make the proposal easier to sell on the talk shows, but they would make it considerably more complex for banks to comply, and so this is unlikely to dampen their increasingly loud and organized opposition. And the Republican kvetching, which had predictably floated free from the actual facts about the legislation almost immediately anyway, isn’t likely to get any quieter. It remains to be seen whether the proposal will survive its further journey through the legislative meat grinder.

  Why this matters for American tax resisters is this: One of the easiest and most common ways for the IRS to take money, from a resister who refuses to pay voluntarily, is to seize it from their bank account. For the agency to make such a seizure, though, they must first become aware of the bank account. The usual way they discover such an account is when the bank sends an annual 1099 report to the IRS indicating how much interest income was earned by the account. But in recent years, with interest rates so low, banks and credit unions have often offered accounts that do not generate any interest (they use other sorts of perks to entice customers instead). Such accounts therefore do not generate 1099s and so do not create a paper trail for the IRS to follow. So resisters have been able to use accounts like this to protect their money from IRS seizures. Under the new proposals, such accounts would be reported to the IRS if they had a sufficient amount of deposits and/or withdrawals, and so this protection would be diminished or eliminated.

• If you’re a low-income/simple-living tax resister, or just a frugal sort of person, you may be interested in this new guide to healthy eating on an affordable budget.
• Federal tax revenues are sharply up this year, largely thanks to booming fortunes of corporations and the wealthy. This appears to be more than just a rebound from the economic challenges of the pandemic, as the numbers are also way up from the pre-pandemic 2019 fiscal year.
• The global human ragtag guerrilla defense against the traffic ticket robot hordes continues. A robot collaborator lost his cool while being thwarted by a parked car in England, while French rebels have found spray paint to be a quick and easy way of blinding and disabling the machines there.

In other news, the human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with several successful attacks in Italy, Germany, and France in recent weeks. The video below shows a particularly dramatic attack:

France 🇫🇷 The Revolution begins... Security Camera's taken to by grinders. Long Live the People 👊 pic.twitter.com/J6g7uSTO3N

— 𝙍𝙄𝙎𝙀𝙈𝙀𝙇𝘽𝙊𝙐𝙍𝙉𝙀 (@risemelbourne) October 24, 2021

Some recent tax resistance news of note:

• Jane Rogers & Alex Pension from Extinction Rebellion’s “Money Rebellion” tax resistance campaign in the U.K. and José “Cuti” Cutillas from Spain’s Antimilitarista Tortuga war tax resistance movement spoke at the recent NWTRCC national gathering about how tax resistance plays out in their work:
  
• A coalition of student unions in Myanmar released a statement asking international companies to withhold taxes from the military junta that seized control of the country earlier this year.
• The “Build Back Better Act” as currently proposed includes among its many provisions $498 million for the Department of Justice specifically to prosecute tax evasion, and $80 billion for the IRS (both figures are spread out over ten years). Both Democrats and Republicans have reason to exaggerate the practical effect of this. Democrats will insist that this new funding will mean the government can finally pursue fat cat tax evaders, close the tax gap, and result in lots of new tax revenue that will pay for the rest of the spending in the bill. Republicans will paint a picture of vast swarms of jack-booted thugs running rampant over innocent families and small businesses across the land. The purportedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the bill and said that according to their calculations, the new IRS funding would lead to less than a third of the increased revenue that the Democrats were trumpeting. As a result, the bill as a whole will put the government yet further in the red. I have seen no signs that the IRS bank-account-monitoring proposal will sneak its way back into the bill, despite some Democrats’ hopes.
• The human war against the traffic ticket robot hordes continues. In the U.K., Darrell Meekcom, terminally ill and in a hurry to check items off his bucket list, dropped trou’ and mooned a speed camera. Half a dozen furious police officers were dispatched to his home to drag him away with the brutality typical of the breed. Famed graffiti artist Banksy (perhaps) hurried to the scene to immortalize the event in style. Meanwhile spray paint and fire disabled speed cameras in France and the U.K., in Germany someone just walked off with a camera and disassembled it at home while a few more were torched in France, and others were disabled by a variety of means in Germany, France, and Italy.

Some links from here and there:

• NWTRCC is promoting a “Refuse to Pay for War Sign-On Statement” next year.

  We are divesting from war by refusing some or all of our federal tax dollars that fund it, or by living below the taxable income level. We invite you to join us publicly in this act of civil disobedience to war and war funding.

  If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, sign up on their page and thereby band together with your fellow-resisters.
• The Mennonite Church USA issued a Statement on the value and morality of the 2022 U.S. defense budget. Excerpt:

  Our… 2015 resolution, “Faithful Witness Amid Endless War,” calls us to seek and implement public ecumenical witness to our confession: “Some trust in their war chariots and others in their horses, but we trust in the power of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7).

  How do we place our trust in the power of God while a massive expenditure of our tax dollars trusts in high-tech weaponry to keep us safe? In this routine legislative act, we are challenged to reflect deeply on where we place our security and allegiance.

  The creation of MC USA’s Church Peace Tax Fund provides individuals with a tangible way to support the church’s ongoing peace mission, while symbolically protesting government spending on war and militarism.

  Are there 100 new war tax resisters among us?

• The number of Americans who formally renounce their citizenship hit new highs last year.
• José Luis Espert, a member of parliament in Argentina, called for tax resistance in a recent editorial (and then doubled down in a series of tweets). Espert notes that the tax burden and government spending have both doubled as a proportion of gross domestic product over the past fifty years, as deficit spending has repeatedly put the Argentine economy into crisis. This tax burden falls heavily on the above-ground economy, whose workers, he claims, work half of their working year just to pay their annual taxes. He despairs of politicians ever overcoming the perverse incentives that drive this problem, and so:

  To adjust public spending, the powers that be are clear that they will never do it the right way, but prefer that it be done the hard way with the people starved into a crisis, and this is why a tax rebellion by Argentine taxpayers is necessary. In order to put an end to the immorality of a clique of disgraceful politicians who prefer that we be a Maduro-less Venezuela than for them to be responsible when it comes to collecting and spending.

  Yes. The people have to stop paying taxes…

• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the robot traffic ticket camera hordes continues, with saws and spray paint disabling cameras in France and fire, gunfire, and blunt force taking out a few more in France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.

Some tax resistance links from hither and yon:

• The Greenfield Recorder features an article about anti-war activist Randy Kehler. Excerpt:

  At age 77, the soft-spoken Kehler is still inspiring nonviolent anti-war activism. Locally, he and his wife of 45 years, Betsy Corner, are possibly most remembered for their stand against the Internal Revenue Service, as “war tax-resisters” whose rural Colrain home was seized for non-payment of taxes in 1991 and sold by the IRS for $5,400.

• The Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action’s newsletter includes an interview with war tax resister Kathy Kelly and an article about war tax resistance by Lincoln Rice and Glen Milner.
• Richard M. Schickel, a former IRS Revenue Officer, has put out a new book: Why The IRS Doesn’t Work Anymore: An Insider’s Guide to the Agency. It airs the dirty laundry at the IRS that the agency tries to distract you from with their rah-rah glossy reports.
• Bloomberg Businessweek has an article about IRS “customer” service and how awful it is.

  Its customer service workforce has shrunk more than 40% since 2010, according to the most recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor shortage — handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates at little more than fast-food wages.

  It’s so bad, that tax professionals can’t even reach the agency on the special back-channel line designed just for them. One person’s hopeless bureaucratic dysfunction is another person’s opportunity: A company has launched a $100/month service “that makes robocalls to the agency’s special practitioner line… waits on hold, and then, when it makes a connection, puts the client through to an IRS agent.”
• The human war on traffic ticket camera robots continues. In France and Italy, fire and spray paint took out several cameras, while Santa Claus converted another one into a pose-with-Santa photo booth. Spray paint was also the weapon of choice in several attacks in France and Germany in recent weeks.

  

Tax resistance notes from hither and yon:

• Activists who oppose North London Waste Authority’s plans to build a new, bigger incinerator in Edmonton have been promoting a council tax strike. Last I looked, two dozen strikers were holding back a portion of their tax. The group has composed a North London Incinerator Council Tax Strike Handbook which, I’m delighted to report, is clearly inspired by the work I did for 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns. For example:

  

• Democrats in Congress are having more trouble than expected getting everyone in and out of the clown car. The upshot is that the painstakingly-negotiated “Build Back Better Act” is in jeopardy — along with the $80 billion in new IRS funding that was part of the bill.
• The Taxpayer Advocate released her annual report. Some excerpts:

  Calendar year 2021 was surely the most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced — long processing and refund delays, difficulty reaching the IRS by phone, correspondence that went unprocessed for many months, collection notices issued while taxpayer correspondence was awaiting processing, limited or no information on the Where’s My Refund? tool for delayed returns, and — for full disclosure — difficulty obtaining timely assistance from TAS.

  Over the last decade, examination coverage has decreased, enforcement efforts have been negatively impacted, and the Level of Service has continued to drop as the IRS’s workforce and budget have declined. On the resources side, the IRS’s baseline budget has been reduced by about 20 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis since fiscal year (FY) 2010, and its workforce has shrunk by about 17 percent.

  There is no way to sugarcoat the year 2021 in tax administration: From the perspective of tens of millions of taxpayers, it was horrendous.

  [T]he number of individual income tax returns the IRS receives — a reasonable approximation of its workload — has increased by 19 percent since FY 2010, while its baseline appropriation on an inflation-adjusted basis has decreased by nearly 20 percent. This imbalance has left the IRS without enough resources to meet taxpayer needs, let alone to invest in additional personnel and technology.

  The IRS has not finished processing millions of original and amended returns from TY 2020, even though TY 2021 returns will soon arrive for processing.

  According to the Department of the Treasury, the gross tax gap — the difference between taxes paid and taxes owed — is estimated to have totaled about $580 billion in 2019, up from an estimated amount of nearly $440 billion in 2013, and is expected to rise to about $7 trillion by 2029 if left unaddressed.

  Processing a paper-filed return is significantly more expensive for the IRS than processing an e-filed return due to the costs associated with training, recruiting, and staffing for manual data transcription. In fact, the cost to process a paper-filed Form 1040 in fiscal year (FY) 2020 was $15.21, which is substantially higher than the $0.36 cost to process an e-filed return.

  The report also included some 2021 totals for levies, liens, and seizures, so I can update these graphs:
  

  

• More excitement from the human war on traffic ticket robot cameras, as fire, spray paint, and other sorts of sabotage knocked cameras out of commission in France, Germany, and Italy in recent weeks.

Recent links of note:

• The Catalan independence group Assemblea Nacional Catalana asked the Generalitat de Catalunya to give formal legal protection to taxpayers who send their taxes to the Catalan regional government rather than to the Spanish central government. Currently, the Catalan tax agency forwards such payments to the Spanish government, so resisters who pay their taxes to Catalonia instead of Spain are engaging in a mostly-symbolic action. But separatists hope that the Catalan government at some point could end such forwarding, or threaten to do so, as a tactic to further the cause of independence.
• The military junta in Myanmar is sending soldiers door to door to threaten to kill resisters who have been refusing to pay government bills.

  Myanmar’s shadow Opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity. In September, it said that 97 percent of people in Mandalay and 98 percent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime $1 billion by that point.

• For a while now, U.S. taxpayers have been able to access some of their tax records held by the IRS via the agency’s on-line portal. This required a somewhat onerous process of signing up for an account — a process that’s a bit more invasive and difficult than signing up for a similar account at your bank. I’ve tried to talk a few war tax resisters through the process because it can be useful to have better visibility into what information the IRS is assembling about you. But often, they throw up their hands at some point and say it’s not worth it, because it really does seem like more trouble than it ought to be.

  Apparently it wasn’t nearly awful enough yet. “We’re bringing you an improved sign-in experience,” says the agency. Improved how? Read it and weep.

  The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.

  [C]ompleting the process requires submitting at least two secondary identification documents, such as as a Social Security card, a birth certificate, health insurance card, W-2 form, electric bill, or financial institution statement.

  After re-uploading all of this information, ID.me’s system prompted me to “Please stay on this screen to join video call.” However, the estimated wait time when that message first popped up said “3 hours and 27 minutes.”

• The income of “closely-held businesses” (Schedule C / pass-through / non-corporately structured) in the United States is taxed at special rates and with special rules, but on the owners’ individual tax returns. A new report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center says that these special rules, combined with some clever gaming of the rules and some outright noncompliance, mean that about half of that income goes completely untaxed.
• More traffic ticket radar robots fell to gunfire, paint, and fire in the ongoing human rebellion, in New York, Kazakhstan, France, Germany, and Italy, in recent weeks.
• The latest encouraging trend: clever children as young as nine years old launching distributed denial of service attacks against the computer networks of the schools that institutionalize them.

  One theory is that youngsters can fall into denial-of-service attacks by firstly playing online games, and then falling into installing mods, hacks, and even remote access trojans to get the upperhand on their gaming rivals.

Your up-to-the-minute tax resistance news:

• The IRS is giving off a powerful odor of desperation as it enters tax filing season. The agency has a backlog of some fourteen million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence from previous years still to get through. Some taxpayers have complained of getting upsetting notices that the agency had no record of them filing their taxes last year, when in fact their tax return is still sitting in this gigantic pile (or has been lost in the shuffle). Members of Congress, smelling blood in the water, signed a letter demanding that the IRS stop harassing taxpayers in this way. (Memo to Congress: you don’t have to resort to pleading in a letter; the IRS is part of the federal government and you could pass legislation to fix this if you really meant it.) The agency responded by suspending some such taxpayer notices but also noting that by law, if they don’t send certain notices out, they lose the ability to pursue people who actually did fail (or refuse) to file. Meanwhile, the agency is shifting 1,200 employees from their regular duties (like enforcement) to doing data entry so as to try to whittle down this backlog.
• Florida Man is back in the news, this time for using IRS databases to download people’s past tax returns and then filing additional fake returns in their names in order to get fraudulent refunds.

• That sort of identity theft and refund fraud has made the IRS eager to tighten up security. They’re under pressure to allow taxpayers to conveniently view their tax statements and other such information on-line in the same way they have come to expect to view their bank accounts, utility bills, and everything else in our digital age. On the other hand, cunning and not-so-cunning fraudsters like Florida Man see such convenient access as a recklessly-guarded vault full of government money ripe for the picking. What is the IRS to do?

  Their response was to invite the usual suspects in government contracting to bid on a contract to square the circle and make the problem go away. The winning bidder apparently was military contractor ID.me, and the IRS has begun rolling out their solution and telling users of on-line IRS account services that they’ll need to reenroll with ID.me if they want to continue to access their accounts. However, the rollout has gone poorly. As I noted last month the sign-up process is clumsy, time-consuming, and buggy. It’s also uncomfortably invasive — requiring a face scan and copies of a variety of documents. ID.me sent out a press release claiming that those face scans were only used in a very limited way to verify identity but then had to walk back that claim when it was shown to be untrue. Privacy advocates and people & groups with a host of other concerns have been urging the IRS to reconsider.

• Lincoln Rice, who heads the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), was interviewed on the Tax Chats podcast.
• Danny Burns’s excellent history of the Poll Tax Rebellion has been released in free text and PDF forms on-line, apparently with the blessing of the author.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.

• As I noted late last year, the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs again. But that’s not the whole story. As it turns out, in order to renounce your citizenship, you first have to appear in person at an embassy or consulate for an “exit interview.” And, with the covid epidemic as an excuse, these offices have been refusing to grant such interviews, meaning that thousands of Americans who would like to formally renounce their citizenship have been prohibited from doing so.

  Clarification: the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs in 2020, according to numbers released last year, but it looks like last year’s numbers dropped considerably from there, with the unwillingness of embassies to process renunciations being one reason for the drop. ―♇ 6 February 2022

• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the robot traffic ticket hordes continues, with humans taking robots out of action in the United States, France, Martinique, and Italy and in the United States, Italy, New Zealand, and France in recent weeks.

Just when I think I’ve heard it all about the troubles at the IRS, everything turns out to be worse than I heard:

• Remember a few weeks ago when I told you about how the IRS was rolling out a new way for people to sign on to their on-line systems, and that it was a bit invasive, difficult, and buggy? And then remember last week when I told you how the rollout was going poorly and generating a lot of push-back? Well, the awful just continues to pile up and now the IRS is scrapping the new sign-on process and going back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, some seven million people may have tried to use the new process to log in, a process that included sending in “selfies” for biometric testing, which attracted the ire of privacy advocates. The contractor who designed and operated the identification verification service says these people can request to have these selfies deleted. Reading between the lines, I think this contractor is going to try to force everybody to use the back-up plan that was already in place for if the automatic selfie-check didn’t work: to have a video chat with an employee who would “eyeball” the chatter to see if their identity matches up with what’s on their paperwork. This isn’t really any less invasive than the selfie method, but maybe it triggers people’s “big brother” alarms less. It’ll certainly be less automated and therefore more expensive and time-consuming.
• But the IRS is no stranger to doing things the more expensive and time-consuming way. For example, their mail-sorting and -opening machines have been broken for a long time, and IRS employees now have to do the work by hand. This means that if you send them a check, it takes them longer than it should for them to get that check out of the envelope and into the U.S. Treasury. This delay also means the government loses out on interest they could be earning on that money. How much interest? About $165 million a year. It would only cost $650,000 to buy completely new machines, or $365,000 to repair the broken ones.
• And remember how last week I told you how the IRS had stopped sending out some enforcement notices to taxpayers? Taxpayers were getting frightening notices suggesting that the IRS didn’t think they’d filed their taxes, when in fact their tax returns were sitting in an enormous pile of tax returns the agency hadn’t gotten around to processing yet. So the IRS said it would stop sending out a few types of notice until it got all that sorted out — but said that it couldn’t stop sending out a bunch of others because it might mean they’d lose their chance to go after genuine tax scofflaws. Well, now they’ve thrown in the towel and said they’ll stop sending out a dozen more types of notices including the balance due, balance due second notice, notice of intent to levy, and withholding compliance letters that are standard issue to tax resisters like myself.
• And remember how last week I told you that the IRS had a backlog of some 14 million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence? Turns out it’s more like 24 million. Meanwhile: “The agency sought to fill 5,000 positions for several campuses across the country in time for this tax season but was able to hire fewer than 200.”
• In other news, the IRS is eager to reduce the size of the underground economy by demanding more reports on gig workers and others who get irregular payments through platforms like Paypal, Venmo, Etsy, and Zelle. But this isn’t going smoothly either. It seems to be raising more resentment than tax money, at least so far. And it’s easy to bypass. If you pay someone using one of these platforms and explicitly say you’re paying for goods or services, maybe it’ll eventually get reported as income. But if you don’t say this, as far as the platform is concerned maybe you’re just sending a gift or reimbursing someone for part of a meal you shared where they picked up the tab. Is today’s IRS going to send auditors out to make sure nothing falls through the cracks this way? Yeah sure.

In other news:

• The tax strike against the Edmonton Incinerator continues to attract more strikers as the early adopters prepare for their first day in court.
• Turkish opposition politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu announced that he plans to refuse to pay his utility bills until president Erdoğan withdraws 50% price hikes instituted at the beginning of the year. Some Alevist cemevis have also stopped paying.
• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the traffic ticket robots continues, with robots succumbing to human attacks or being frustrated by human ingenuity in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Italy, and France in recent weeks.

Some links from hither and yon:

• A CoinDesk article on cryptocurrency highlights how tax resisters helped popularize bitcoin: “How Tax Protesters Set Off the Bitcoin Revolution”
• The NWTRCC blog has had a couple of recent articles on “symbolic” tax resistance:
  • Symbolic Tax Resistance by Rick & Carolyn Yoder
  • I Am a Symbolic Resister by Shirley Whiteside
• Scrappy ragtag bands of human rebels continue to inflict casualties on the traffic ticket robot hordes, with recent attacks taking out robot cameras in France, Italy, & Germany, Italy & France, and the U.S., France, & Italy in recent weeks.
• Anabaptist World features a letter from Harold A. Penner urging Mennonites to redirect their war taxes to the Mennonite Church USA Peace Tax Fund.

And here is some more news about the ongoing troubles at the IRS.

• This CNN Business story goes in some depth into how a loose coalition of activists forced the IRS into an embarrassing and costly retreat from its plan to use facial recognition technology to verify the identity of taxpayers using its online account portal.
• This note from the National Taxpayer Advocate gives more details about the IRS plan to stop issuing certain enforcement action notices while it tries to deal with the enormous backlog of unprocessed returns and other correspondence. For example: “If a taxpayer’s account has been assigned to one of the IRS’s automated levy programs (ALPs), the IRS is also suspending the levies made by those programs…” The agency will also not be able to pursue many new levies because in order to do so, it must first send the taxpayer a letter informing them of their right to request a Collection Due Process hearing, and they’ve temporarily stopped the automatic sending of those letters.
• The New York Times took a dive into the woes at the IRS: “Decades of Neglect Leave I.R.S. in Tax Season ‘Chaos’.”
• Politico did the same: “ ‘They went down hard’: IRS’ tax season woes rooted in pandemic, long funding slide.” Excerpt:

  Some 53,000 IRS employees are still on remote work — about two-thirds of the agency’s workforce, which an IRS spokesperson characterized as “a maximized telework posture.”

  But privacy rules prevent remote processing of the millions of paper tax returns mailed to the IRS, as well as the examination of returns with discrepancies from IRS records, the issuance of refunds and dealing with other taxpayer mail.

• The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University issued a report showing that the IRS audits the poorest American households at five times the rate as the rest. This seems to be an effect of the agency’s plummeting rate of audits of the well-to-do combined with its increasing use of cheap-and-easy “correspondence audits” against low-income taxpayers who apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. As the National Taxpayer Advocate puts it:

  The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations — resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance.

• Last Summer, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a spending bill that would have boosted the IRS budget. That bill got bogged down in Congress before anything could come of it. A recent appropriations bill resurrected the IRS budget boost, but pared it way back, so now the agency budget will only rise by 6%. These days that’s hardly enough to keep up with inflation. And the appropriations bill restricts how various parts of the increase can be spent, so some parts of the agency budget — tax enforcement for example — will see even smaller increases.

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

War Tax Resistance

• The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is holding its biannual conference from April 29 through May 1 this year. It will be an on-line conference. You can find the conference schedule and information about how to register at the NWTRCC website.



• War tax resistance season has kicked off in Spain. Activists in Bilbao scaled the fence surrounding the Juan de Garay military barracks and hung banners reading (in Basque) “Military spending €43,000 million”/“#TaxResistance”. They have also opened up “Tax Objection Offices” in various parts of the country at which people can come to get counseling on how to resist their taxes effectively.
• At the NWTRCC blog, tax resister William E. Ruhaak shared his experience trying to get the government to acknowledge his carefully-drafted, personal “statement of conscience.” He fought a determined pro se legal battle to get the U.S. Tax Court to admit his statement of conscience as evidence in his tax appeal. He believes such a struggle is important in order to defend “The fundamental human right to publicly express an opinion or belief. And also the right to have a written expression of that belief included in government documentation for future reference.” The Court eventually gave in and added his statement as a piece of evidence, but seemingly only to humor him. The ruling in his case reads in part:

  We nevertheless admonish petitioner that instituting future proceedings before the Tax Court for the purpose of advancing frivolous arguments relating to his conscientious objection to the payment of Federal taxes is likely to result in the imposition of a significant section 6673 penalty against him. We recognized four decades ago that “there has been a long and undeviating parade of cases in this and other courts” rejecting the arguments of conscientious objectors who sought to avoid paying “the part of their taxes which they estimated to be attributable to military expenditures and to which they objected because of their religious, moral, and ethical objections to war and because of their claimed ‘rights’ under various constitutional provisions, the Nuremberg Principles, international law, and numerous international agreements and treaties.” Greenberg v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 806, 810 (1980). At this late date, the Court will not condone the continued assertion of similar frivolous positions in meritless litigation that wastes both its own limited resources and those of the IRS.



• The War Resisters League has released its annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart fliers, based on the Biden Administration’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2023. As Pentagon spending continues to rise, and yet more millions are being spent to arm Ukraine, pie chart aficionados may be surprised to see that the military-spending slice of the pie chart seems to have noticibly shrunk this year. Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn, who do the research and composition for the pie chart, explain why. In part, the reason is that they are operating on the proposed budget, not whatever budget (and supplementary appropriations) Congress will eventually, tardily enact. The Biden Administration’s proposed budget is chockablock with a wish list of non-military spending that Congress will probably not enact. The absolute amount of military spending has risen substantially, but relatively it looks smaller because of all that extra wish list spending.
• The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with a preview of the upcoming tax filing season and other news from the American war tax resistance scene.

IRS Woes

• Nina Olson was the “National Taxpayer Advocate” from 2001–2019, a sort of independent ombudsman/oversight office within the IRS. She says the agency now is the worst she’s seen it. Excerpt:

  The only thing that comes close to the problems we’re seeing now at the Internal Revenue Service was in 1985, when the agency was rolling out some new technology—technology it’s still using today. Back then, the processing centers got so behind on their work that employees started hiding tax returns in closets and putting them in bags in the trash. Now it’s way worse, with the IRS, for the second year in a row, entering the filing season with a backlog of millions of not yet processed returns and pieces of correspondence.

• The current National Taxpayer Advocate released an amusing blog post about how pathetic and outdated the IRS processes for handling tax returns are. Excerpts:

  When I released my annual report in January, I said that paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite and the IRS is buried in it. The reason paper returns are so challenging is that the IRS still has not implemented technology to machine read them, so each digit on every paper return must be manually keystroked into IRS systems by an employee.

• The IRS has announced that it plans to hire thousands of new workers to try to deal with its paperwork backlog. But, in a tight labor market, and unable to offer competitive pay rates to compensate for the soul-crushing tedium ($15.61/hour anyone?), they’re finding it a challenge to turn those plans into personnel. The Washington Post took a look at a recent job fair the agency held.
• A while back, the U.S. government decided it would take some of the IRS’s stale inventory of unpaid tax debt out of its hands and turn those accounts over to private debt collection companies to see if they’d have any more luck collecting. That initiative “has brought in only about half as much money as projected, according to a new audit, while racking up costs the agency has not properly reported.”
• IRS employees don’t follow the rules on paid time-off, with a suspicious pattern of sick leave days allowing employees to make their own three-day weekends and extended holidays.

Miscellaneous

• The human battle against robot traffic ticket cameras continues, with cameras spray painted in France, chopped down in Italy, shot in England, rammed in Belgium, shattered in Spain, torched in France, belled in Australia, destroyed in France and Réunion, and stoned in Germay in recent weeks.
• Catalan separatist group / government-in-exile Council for the Republic is promoting a tax redirection campaign in which Catalan citizens withhold the portion of their taxes that would go to the Spanish monarchy or to its repression apparatus, and give that money instead to Front Republicà d’Acció Solidària or some such group working for Catalan independence.
• Doomed, quixotic, gonzo tax resister John McAfee is trying to get in the last word by means of a set of interviews he gave when he was on the run from the law. In them, he explains why he stopped paying. Excerpts:

  I’d just had enough. I’d paid $50 million in income tax over the years. I thought that was plenty. I hadn’t paid tax since I went to Belize, but technically, as an American citizen, even if you’re not living in the country, using the services and driving on the roads, you still have to file and pay 30% of your income to the United States. The only two countries in the world that enforce that rule are the United States and Eritrea! How [frigging] bizarre is that? Anyway, I just said, “I’m sorry. This is insane. I’m not doing this anymore.”

  [I]n America, income tax is in fact unconstitutional anyway. It was only ever created to fund the war effort in 1913, but that edict, like many others, was never extinguished after the need for it ceased to exist.

  I was telling people that I thought taxes were illegal, and if they also felt that they were illegal and/or unjust they should just stop paying, too. Not just that, I was showing them how to do it without getting caught.

  Sounds like McAfee drank the constitutionalist tax protester koolade.
• I stumbled somehow on the No Obligation Challenge website. It looks like a U.K. version of the familiar U.S. tax protester song-and-dance (“Did you know there is no law obligating you to pay council tax?”) but I was impressed by the quality of the graphic design and layout of the website, which is head and shoulders above what I usually see from that segment of the fringe.

Some recent links from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC reports back from the Tax Day protest at Wall Street that united the War Resisters League and Extinction Rebellion.
• Turkish opposition politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu says he plans to refuse to pay his utility bills until president Erdoğan withdraws 50% price hikes instituted at the beginning of the year. He recently addressed supporters from his home where electricity has been shut off for non-payment.
• Robert McGee has conducted or supervised many surveys about the ethics of tax evasion in countries around the world. He has now summarized several of those studies along with a bibliography of additional cross-cultural tax evasion attitude research.
• War tax resistance season in Spain is in full swing.
• What was sometimes billed as the “Confessions of a Failed Tax Resister” (Rebecca Gordon) did the rounds around Tax Day in the United States this year. Gordon was a war tax resister in the 1980s but eventually threw in the towel, paying her taxes, penalties, and interest, and returning to being a compliant taxpayer. “It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.” Meanwhile, Owen Silverman at the University of Connecticut’s student paper put in a plug for conscientious tax resistance, though it sounds like he thinks we should wait for the government to legalize it first or something.
• ProPublica has been continuing to do exposés about how the tax system is rigged in favor of the rich at the expense of the little guy. One of the latest is “If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker” which is specifically about how wage-earners get the shaft. Peter J. Reilly looks at the comparative woes of the 1099 granfaloon and finds them not too bad all things considered.
• The scrappy human underdogs who are taking on the traffic ticket robot cameras have won more battles in recent weeks, burning and blinding cameras in France, chopping one down in the Netherlands, smashing one in Russia, toppling one in Italy, burning and blinding a few more in France, chopping down yet more in France, and torching & dropping a couple more in Italy in recent weeks.

Tax resistance links from hither and yon:

• Jacqui Germain penned an article on Economic Disobedience (What Is It and How Does It Work?) for Teen Vogue. It concludes with a few paragraphs on war tax resistance.
• The tax filing deadline came and went in the United States. Now that fewer people are filing last-minute paper returns, this is less of a spectacle than it once was, but war tax resisters still like to mark the occasion as a sort of ceremonial holiday. For example, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Taxes for Peace group redirected taxes from the government to useful groups. The People’s Life Fund in California also redirected $61,000 of would-be tax dollars to better causes.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued yet another report. According to them, the IRS still had about four and a half million unprocessed paper tax returns to get through as of March 12^th, only a couple hundred thousand less than they started the year with, while meanwhile half a million new returns had come in and hadn’t been processed. The agency had a goal of hiring 5,473 new submission processing employees to cope with this, but as of March 15^th, they’d managed to onboard only 521.
• The IRS destroyed thirty million “information return” documents without processing them last year when the agency realized it would never catch up to the backlog in time to upgrade its systems for the next tax season. Information return documents are things like W-2s and 1099s that document sources of income. The agency relies on such returns to cross-check what taxpayers reveal on their income tax returns. The upshot of this is that for millions of taxpayers, if they did not reveal certain sources of income on their returns, the IRS is likely none the wiser about it. The decision has gotten scathing reviews, particularly from accountants who painstakingly generate and file these returns.
• In response to repeated massacres in Djugu, activists in Ituri have launched a 15-day hartal and a tax strike.
• The human struggle against the robot traffic ticket cameras continues, with the machines getting the worst of it in New Zealand, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium in recent weeks.

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on how the war is going between the ragtag human rebels and the robot traffic ticket hordes. Looks like things have been busy.

• Rebels smashed up a camera van in New Zealand, disabled three cameras in Russia, toppled cameras into ditches in Italy and France, burned another in France, and blinded a pair in Germany and Belgium.
• Several more cameras were cut down, torched, knocked over, or painted blind in France.
• Drivers of camera vans report constant harassment in Australia, while more French cameras are toppled, blinded, or burned.
• An angle grinder, fire, and spray paint took out cameras in France, Réunion, and Germany.
• More cameras toppled and painted-over in The Netherlands and France.
• Cameras lost to fire, paint, and other attacks in Germany, Spain, and France.
• More French cameras disabled.
• A photo radar van rammed by a truck in Australia.
• Speed cameras “necklaced” in Tennessee, smashed to bits in Australia, and disabled in Italy & France.
• Cameras absconded with in New Mexico, smashed in Australia and Germany, bricked in Belgium, chopped down in Italy, and torched and blinded in France.
• Photo radar van blocked in Australia, blinded and burned in Italy, and painted out of service in France.
• Cameras painted blind in Germany, burned in France, toppled in Italy, and foamed into submission in Belgium.
• More cameras Blocked in England, insulted in Italy, and blinded in France.

In other news…

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.
• A campaign urging people to stop paying their energy bills is taking off in the U.K., with promoters comparing it to the Poll Tax rebellion. The Don’t Pay U.K. website is collecting signers to a pledge to begin refusing to pay on October 1^st if the pledge gets a million signers. As of today they have collected over 108,000 signers. The campaigners are reacting to recent increases in home energy bills and are demanding that the government reduce them to more affordable levels.
• Attacks continue on roadside robot radar units that issue traffic tickets. Tactics include slashing tires, setting fires, blinding the radars with spray paint, simply spinning them around to face the wrong way, chopping them down, or smashing their lenses.

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.”
• War tax resisters Betsy Corner & Randy Kehler were recently interviewed for the Spirit in Action radio show on Northern Spirit Radio.
• Long-time Catholic Worker activist Tom Cornell died last month. Joel Schlosberg summarized some of his work, including his war tax resistance, for Antiwar.com: “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War”
• Vice magazine recently featured an intriguing article about how Russian Anarchists Are Sabotaging Railways to Stop Putin’s War on Ukraine.
• More traffic ticket radar cameras smashed, absconded with, and spray painted blind in Germany in recent weeks.

The latest tax resistance news to hit the web:

• Bridget J. Crawford and W. Edward Afield have a forthcoming paper in Tax Law Review in which they analyze the tax resistance of Dorothy Day. The paper has some good background and overview of her tax resistance and her reasoning behind it, but the authors seem to mostly have the perspective that Day was mistaken and if she only realized what a marvelous social service and wealth-redistribution agency the government is, she would have changed her mind.
• Speakers from NWTRCC have been spreading the word about war tax resistance. They’ll be putting on a free “War Tax Resistance 101” seminar for beginners on Thursday the 29^th.
• The IRS now has its hands on the big budget boost that was recently passed, and one of its first orders of business is to try to boost its depleted and aging workforce. But that may be easier pledged than done, reports The Wall Street Journal. The current job market is tight (especially in the finance sector, where the IRS is competing), and agency wages are stagnant against a background of inflation and wage growth in the private-sector. Expedited hire authority and pay flexibility that were part of early versions of the funding bill were stripped from the final version, so the IRS must plod along as before, though with more budget to work with. In addition, some of the positions the IRS is hoping to fill are in its hollowed-out human resources department: the same people responsible for recruiting, interviewing, and training new hires.
• The founder and former owner of the outdoor recreation gear company Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, has transferred the ownership of the company to a non-profit focused on environmental causes. If he had sold the company — which is worth something like $3 billion — or if his heirs had inherited it, this would have resulted in a huge tax bill. But by giving the company entirely to a 501(c)(4) non-profit instead, he avoids those taxes. So not only was Chouinard generous to environmental causes, he also was able to avoid funding the environmental wrecking ball of the U.S. government.
• The U.S. federal government is seeing a surge in tax revenue. Federal tax collections as a percentage of gross domestic product are higher than they’ve been since World War Ⅱ. The largest component of this recent increase is from personal income taxes. In part this is because wages are rising due to inflation and employer competition for labor.
• There was an evacuation and large-scale police response at an IRS building in Memphis, Tennessee in response to reports of an “active shooter” in the building. Those reports were later labeled “misinformation.” This begins to look like it may have been a case of “swatting” — the use of false, anonymous reports of violent crime in progress to provoke a militarized police response against some target. I’ve reported on a number of garden-variety bomb threats and “suspicious powder”-style incidents at IRS buildings in the past, but this is the first swatting I’m aware of.
• The human war against the plodding but relentless traffic ticket radar robots continues. Machines were sabotaged in Hawaii, smashed in Germany, painted blind in France, knocked over in Belgium, shot and cut down in Italy, toppled in Italy, and burned in Germany in recent weeks.
• I continue to be impressed at how tax resistance seems to be just part of how politics works in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The latest example comes from a rally by small businesspeople in Butembo, North Kivu who are protesting heavy-handed tax enforcement there.

Some recent news from here and there:

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. This is a special issue focusing on the 40^th anniversary of the founding of the organization, and includes some reminiscences from war tax resisters from throughout the history of the group.
• The Republican party seems to believe that opposition to the recent IRS funding boost is a winning issue for them, so they are campaigning on pledges to rescind the spending. I wouldn’t take that too seriously. I mean, they also promised to rescind Obamacare back in the day, but just kind of flailed around once they had the opportunity. I’m categorizing this as campaign bluster rather than a serious proposal. But, in case I’m wrong, The Wall Street Journal breaks down how Republicans might try to claw back this extra funding should they retake Congress.
• Merchants in Marimanti, Kenya, have organized a tax strike to protest county government inattention to maintaining toilet facilities at the market.
• Guerrilla attacks on traffic ticket robots continue, with spray paint and fire disabling machines in Canada, Germany, and Italy, while vigilantes use their bodies and vehicles to block the cameras in Australia and the UK, and spray paint took out more in Germany and France, and others were taken out of service in a variety of ways in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and France. In Alburquerque, the city plans to install security cameras to watch the speed cameras because they keep getting vandalized.

Meanwhile:

• NWTRCC is holding an on-line gathering, celebrating its 40^th year as an organization. The gathering will be held on November 4^th and 5^th. The group has been in a reminiscing mood lately, having met this 40-year-milestone. Ruth Benn shared some war tax resistance content from the War Resisters League archives on a recent blog post.
• Ruth Braunstein examines “How the threat of ‘taxpayer-funded abortion’ is being used to mobilize conservative religious voters” at The Conversation.
• The percentage of U.S. tax-filers who pay no federal income tax at all jumped during the pandemic to nearly 60%, but, according to the Tax Policy Center, the numbers are expected to drop this year back to the pre-pandemic level of about 40%.
• The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with fire and paint taking out cameras in France and Italy, while thieves strip the cameras for parts in Sweden, blind them in Cyprus, burn them in Germany, and destroy them in a variety of ways in France.

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

• The IRS published a new estimate of the federal “tax gap” — the difference between the amount of taxes people legally owe and what they actually fork over. The new estimate, which is based on data from the 2014–16 period, puts the tax gap at almost $500 billion dollars. The government recovers some of that through nagging and enforcement actions, leaving about $428 billion that never gets captured. I haven’t looked into the methodology by which these numbers were conjured up. Several years ago I took a deeper look and found that these estimates typically did a lot of extrapolating from even older guesstimates. It’s also the sort of calculation that must necessarily concentrate on “known unknowns” while the “unknown unknowns” remain in the shadows. As a result, it’s the kind of number that ought to have broad error-bars around it, but for some reason it’s always reported as a single, precise amount.
• Last time I checked in with the “Don’t Pay” U.K. campaign, it was collecting signers to a pledge to begin refusing to pay home energy bills on October 1^st if the pledge were to get a million signers (they had collected 108,000 when I checked). When I look at their site to day, I see that they have pivoted a bit. Now they claim that 256,924 people “have pledged to strike” on December 1^st, and they don’t mention anything about a one-million-person threshold.
• The scrappy human rebellion against the traffic ticket robots continues. Shotgun fire in Cyprus, blinding paint in Germany and France, fire and paint in France, blunt force trauma in Germany, lens-smashing and legal action in Spain, an angle grinder in France, more paint in Germany, a dozen stacked tractor tires in France, ramming and yet more paint in Germany were among the tactics used against the radar cameras.
• Spartacus Educational profiles Women’s Tax Resistance League pioneer Octavia Lewin.

Some tabs that have slid across my browser in recent days:

• The IRS is not making as much progress as it promised on its backlog of tax returns from past years and it abruptly abandoned plans to increase mandatory reporting of smaller transactions on platforms like Venmo and PayPal. This confirms to me that the agency is still struggling and is going to take a lot of time to turn its newly increased budget into competence and capacity.
• NWTRCC has a new newsletter out. It includes some news on new U.S. tax policies and official actions and their implications for war tax resisters, and some recaps of the recent 40^th anniversary gathering of the organization.
• War tax resister Karl Meyer was interviewed on Northern Spirit Radio.
• John LaForge explains why he’s refusing to pay the fine imposed on him by a German court after he trespassed at nuclear weapons sites.

  One reason is because my protest was not wrong or a mistake in any sense, whereas paying the fine implies I’m guilty of some sort of offense or misconduct. Further, agreeing to pay has the appearance of an apology or remorse on my part when none is warranted. I believe any nonviolent action against preparations to commit mass destruction with nuclear weapons is in the public interest. Further, my so-called “trespass” was an attempt at crime prevention, or interference with ongoing government criminality, and as such was a civic duty.

• The ragtag human rebel forces continue their global campaign against the relentless traffic ticket robot cameras. Someone smashed a camera van in New South Wales, motorcyclists taped bags over nearly every camera on the ring road in Tolouse and Caen, cameras were disabled in Walldorf, Hunfeld, Llandrindod Wells, and Telford, othes were burned, disorientated, and painted blind in various parts of Europe.
• When the IRS won a big one-time budget bonus recently, there was some speculation that Congress would claw some of it back by cutting the agency’s annual budget. Sure enough, the recently passed omnibus package cut the IRS allocation by about 2.2%. Expect more of this when the Republicans take over the House of Representatives next year.

Some tax resistance news from hither and yon:

• A group of people in the Netherlands called “Belastingstaking voor Klimaat” (“Tax Strike for Climate”) have decided to no longer “silently pay for global warming” via government subsidies of fossil fuels. They are refusing to pay 5% of their income tax, as that is their rough estimate of how much of central government spending (and tax breaks) subsidizes CO₂-generating companies: about €17.5 billion per year. They are also using the official tax adjustment and appeals process to press their claims

  

• The “Don’t Pay U.K.” has been ramping up its public protests. One of their tactics is to stage protests in warmed public buildings (to highlight how prohibitively expensive it is to heat their own homes). In one action, the protesters sang a song to the tune of Your Cheatin’ Heart including the lyrics “your heating chart will tell on you”.

  

• American war tax resisters Robert Randall and Marjorie Nelson have died. Randall was a regular participant at NWTRCC events like their periodic national meetings and the School of the Americas protests, and is one of a small, select group of war tax resisters who have had their homes seized by the IRS for their refusal. Marjorie Nelson worked as a physician with a Quaker war relief program in Vietnam during the American war there, and survived 50 days as a prisoner of war after she was captured during the Tet Offensive. In 1994 she tangled with the IRS in court after the agency hit her with a “frivolous filing” penalty for taking a “war tax deduction” on her tax return.
• In response to a surge in Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship, the U.S. Department of State abruptly raised its fees for processing such renunciations from $450 up to $2,350 some years back. Now, in response to a lawsuit by some expats who claim this amounts to unjust coercion and a violation of their 5^th and 8^th Amendment rights, Rina Bitter, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, told the court “the Department intends to pursue rule-making to reduce the fee for processing CLN requests from the current amount of $2,350 to the previous fee of $450.”
• More attacks on automated traffic ticket-generating speed cameras in Germany and France.

Tax resistance news from hither and yon:

• American war tax resisters are fond of pointing out the outrageous sums the U.S. government spends on the military, and the various ways that government tries to hide the price tag by disguising military spending as being something else (for example the recent $53 billion domestic computer chip industry subsidies). Sometimes the deception is extra-clumsy. Here’s a great example from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

  

  Notice how all the military budgets are plotted in the same space on the same graph, but the U.S. budget gets its own separate Y-axis? Here’s how it looks if everything is plotted using the same Y-axis:

  

  Expect this graph to show up in many future “how to lie with statistics” slide decks.
• Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have launched a tax strike and other civil disobedience actions to protest an accelerating campaign of “harassment and aggression” by Israeli police.
• The newly-Republican House Ways and Means Committee hopes to make the IRS squirm. And so they will have a steady stream of excuses for outrage and maybe some televised hearings, they have created their own on-line IRS Whistleblower Complaint Submission form, meant “[f]or IRS agency personnel interested in providing… information regarding any wrongdoing within the IRS or misuse of taxpayer information.”
• The human resistance against the traffic ticket robot hordes continues apace. Highwaydroids were shot in Italy, torched in Martinique, toppled in France, and painted blind in Belgium in recent weeks. Others chopped down in Martinique, burned and blinded in Germany, smashed in Italy, downed and charred in France, smeared in Germany, painted in Italy, necklaced in England, blinded and toppled in Canada, consigned to the flames in Martinique, battered in Germany, and toppled, torched, and painted in France.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Among the news: the group plans to hold its first post-covid in-person national conference this Spring in Indiana.
• Here’s another example of “a suspicious package” containing white powder (which turned out to be harmless sodium carbonate) causing a hazmat evacuation at an IRS building.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• Caleb Shenk, a junior accounting major, was a contestant at the 2023 C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. He won the second-place award for his speech on “Protesting Taxation as a Peace-Seeking Accountant.”
• The “Don’t Pay” movement targeting utility bill hikes has spread to Lebanon.
• Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul raised a stink a few days ago when he suggested that Russian taxpayers bear some of the blame for the Ukraine invasion: “This is Russia’s war, not just Putin’s. Putin decided to invade Ukraine. But other Russians, not Putin, are killing people in Ukraine. Other Russians continue to pay taxes to finance those killings. Some brave Russians are protesting the war. Most are not.”
• Thousands of workers from dozens of labor unions in Sri Lanka have gone on strike to protest IMF-demanded austerity measures and tax hikes.
• Catalan separatists are again encouraging people to redirect their taxes from Madrid to the Republican Solidarity Action Fund.
• About 150,000 employees of the U.S. federal government collectively owe $1.5 billion dollars in overdue taxes.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, giving us practice perhaps for the coming struggle against the artificially-intelligent drone hordes. The latest mechanical victims included a camera muffled by packing tape in Italy, cameras smashed and blinded in Germany, dozens burned, toppled, blinded, or torched in France, others smeared, battered, painted, and blocked with haybales in Germany, and more chopped down, burned, and blinded in France.