Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
France →
gilets jaunes, 2018–19
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-19th 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 .
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.
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.
A grassroots anti-tax movement calling itself gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) is blockading roads, highways, and rail transit throughout France in a planned, one-day demonstration.
Demonstrators began massing in the pre-dawn hours.
In Paris, the ring road is completely blocked, and the police are trying to reopen the Champs-Elysées to vehicle traffic as demonstrators try to push towards the presidential palace.
Police used tear gas against demonstrators in some locations.
One protester died and several more have been seriously injured, largely it seems by angry drivers trying to push through the blockades.
At one, a driver burst from his car with a machete and had to be subdued by the police, one of dozens of arrests.
The movement has broad popular support, with about three quarters of those polled in France backing the demonstrators and urging a repeal of increased fuel taxes.
The gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) continue to demonstrate throughout France, extending what had been planned as a one-day traffic-stopping action to protest fuel tax hikes.
On the French island of Réunion, near Madagascar, schools and government buildings are closed today, and the airport is shut down, as yellow vests blockade the highways.
The government has announced a night-time curfew through the week.
Commerce in general has slowed, with many consumer-oriented businesses reporting 20–40% drops in business.
Frequent updates on the demonstrations can be found at BFM TV.
France has put its planned tax hikes on vehicle fuel on hold.
This is the second time in recent years that mass protests and direct action against tax increases has forced the government to back down.
The first case was the bonnets rouges of Brittany who forced the government to rescind a new tax on highway transport.
In this latest victory, the people called themselves the gilets jaunes or “yellow vests” after the vests they wore to identify themselves and each other in the protests (French drivers are required to carry a yellow safety vest around with them just in case, so this was an easy symbol for a mass movement to obtain on short notice).
They stopped traffic at highway, roadway, and roundabout blockades, and also blockaded fuel ports, depots, and refineries.
As the dissent grew, and proved to have wide popular support, and as the government proved intransigent — with president Macron insisting that the tax would go through as planned — the protests grew riotous in the heart of Paris.
The success of the protests has led to copycat movements elsewhere in Europe.
Some links that have bobbed up in my browser in recent days:
How does what was once seen as morally insignificant come to be seen as monstrous, and how does what was once seen as morally repulsive come to be just one of those things?
Cass R. Sunstein has a theory. The spectrum of what behavior we observe becomes the “normal” against which we contrast outliers.
As we become exposed to more aberrant behavior, that behavior shifts into the normal; as more conduct shifts into an unacceptable category, other things nearby to that category can get sucked into the objectionable void.
This has implications for “outrage culture” and how we share on social media.
The gilets jaunes movement in France has turned out to be more of a threat to the established order than anyone anticipated.
It started as a protest against fuel tax increases, but when its increasingly threatening demonstrations finally forced the government to delay, then drop those increases, rather than stopping, they continued, more emboldened than before.
I don’t have much to add to what is now being decently covered in the English-language press, but here are a few links I found interesting:
Amnesty International issued a statement against police brutality towards gilets jaunes demonstrators, including “rubber bullets, sting-ball grenades and tear gas against largely peaceful protesters who did not threaten public order and… numerous instances of excessive use of force by police.”
Consciousness of the cruelty and tyranny of the House of Saud is finally starting to enter the conversation in the United States.
Who is paying for the barbaric war on Yemen? U.S. taxpayers are.
In Luján, Argentina, a local tax on farmers went up 1200%. So an assembly of farmers voted to stop paying.
The National Network of Independent Producers backed the tax strike.
They are asking for a reduction in the rate and a guarantee that the proceeds will be used for rural road improvements.
335 Spanish war tax resisters documented their resistance for Antimilitarist Alternative / Conscientious Objectors’ Movement this year. Collectively they refused and redirected €35,882.34 (a little over €100 each, on average). The report lists dozens of organizations that received the redirected funds.
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.
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:
“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.”
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.)
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.
Furloughed IRS workers protest the federal government “shutdown” that delayed their paychecks.
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.
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 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.
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.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
The gilets jaunes movement in France continues its series
of weekend protests. The focus of the movement drifted over time from
opposition to increased motor fuel taxes to regime-change, with every other
opposition movement in the land seeming to want to try to hitch their wagon
to the cause as well (which made it hard for me to get a good grip on
things from this side of the language barrier). Recently, the government
began to crack down more severely on the protests: bringing in
counter-terrorist military units to supplement law enforcement, and banning
protesters and protest regalia from certain urban areas. Now the movement
seems to be struggling to maintain its momentum and the government is trying to wait it out.
[W]e want to examine the different practices and forms of withholding and
avoiding personal and financial duties, fees and taxes over time and
among different social, professional and other groups. This includes, on
the one hand, open and organized tax resistance on moral, economic and
political grounds, challenging the existing legal or political order and
claiming more or a different form of tax justice and redistribution, or a
modification of how taxes are collected. In these cases, personal or
financial duties were often seen as a form of humiliation and a marker of
subordinated status. On the other hand, taxes and duties were often not
resisted publically but rather avoided or evaded in secret. These terms
refer to notions that distinguish between legal practices of lowering the
intended burden and thus saving taxes or fees, and maneuvers that were
classified as illegal or criminal. Such categorizations, though, depend
on changing moral and legal perceptions and/or on class-related
negotiating power.
They are accepting proposals for papers until
.
Citizen Truth reviews the new documentary about war tax resister Larry Bassett: “The Pacifist” and American war tax resister and holocaust survivor Bernard Offen is also featured in a new documentary: “Love, Light & Courage”.
Every year, the Tax Foundation announces what it bills as “Tax Freedom Day” — the day when Americans have earned enough money to pay their annual tax bill.
This year that day comes on .
Up to now, we’ve all been working for The Man.
The calculation and the Tax Foundation’s publication of it is a reasonable attempt at making the tax bite less anesthetic.
Here’s yet another article about the staffing crisis at the IRS.
This one quotes the new Service Commissioner Charles Rettig as saying “the IRS ‘lost an entire generation’ of employees during a hiring freeze that took place between 2011 and 2018.”
Their trained, experienced employees are retiring in droves, with no replacements.
And they’re trying to fill crucial Information Technology positions at a time when there’s high demand for talent in that industry from the private sector, which is able to make much more attractive offers.
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.
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.
