While I was busy going through Friends Journal back
issues, I didn’t attend much to tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so
I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the news about international tax
resisters that caught my notice:
Since the fall into hell of the American financial giant Lehman Brothers in
, international banks have
received injections of public money coming from various governments to the
tune of $4.6 trillion, an amount sufficient to eradicate world hunger 92
times over. This embarrassing data forms part of an investigation from Arcadi
Oliveres, professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona and president of the organization Justícia i Pau
(“Justice and Peace”). Oliveres was, 30 years ago, one of the originators of
the first tax resistance initiative organized in our country. He decided, in
defiance of the Law, but favoring his conscience, not to contribute to the
government’s military spending. He became a tax resister. Today, for reasons
like the data cited above, many citizens have begun processes of resistance
that involve new ways to use their money.
Those first war tax resisters of
opened a new path for the honorable citizen. It was not meant to trick the
Treasury so as to keep the money. The taxpayer challenged the collector, and
questioned the legitimacy of the spending they considered immoral. In the
absence of ethical behavior from the state, the good citizen, they argued,
did not have to obey it. “The people are afraid to disobey, but if nobody had
done so before there would still be slaves on the streets and blacks would be
standing in the back of the bus,” Oliveres told Números
Rojos. The professor took as model conscientious objectors who refused
to do compulsory military service in : “For not wanting to do their military year and a half they were
sent to prison for three years, even to penal colonies in the Sahara. They
had no fear; for this reason they were so important.” That struggle is
won — compulsory military service was abolished in Spain on
— though war tax
resistance, which began to be practiced in
continues to be considered illegal evasion.
Calculating the Deduction
The process of becoming a tax resister is very simple, although there is no
fixed rule. It amounts to adding to your tax return a new deduction of
x euros, corresponding to your personal contribution to government
military spending. But the calculation of this option can have a variety of
sources: some people estimate military spending in the total federal budget
each year and apply this percentage directly as a deduction on their return
(between 6–15%, depending on which items are considered military spending).
Others take as their reference the data suggested each year by antimilitarist
platforms (last year military spending of €666.14 per person was calculated).
And others redirect a fixed amount each year from the taxes owed on their
return (traditionally €84). Then, depending on how the final result changes,
the objector may have to pay less to the Treasury than is owed — if it is
positive — or may recover more money from the Treasury than it has to
pay — if it is negative.
In either case, before filing, the objector has already redirected the amount
he or she does not accept as legitimate government spending to an institution
for social good — whichever the objector wants, although there are lists of
groups to contribute to. Of course, the reasons for resisting are specified
on the return itself, and also communicated to the tax agency at the time of
filing. But what happens next? “if it comes out negative, you will claim an
amount from the Treasury, which is not returned to you, and generally that’s
that. But when it is positive, you neglect to pay a part. In this case, it
may be that nothing happens — according to Ecologists in Action, in 90% of
cases the incident goes undetected — but the tax agency may come after you
and end up levying not only the amount you refused to pay but also an
administrative penalty,” Oliveres said.
With exceptions, like in when the Supreme
Court of Catalonia found in favor of the former Catalonia Parliament deputy
Joan Surroca, who in deducted from the
amount that he had to pay in taxes a percentage corresponding to military
spending and gave the money to an
NGO
that assists African women. The treasury then fined him 54,896 pesetas (€329),
a penalty that Surroca appealed. Finally the court ruled in his favor by
understanding that the offender, by sending his resisted taxes to an
NGO,
did not have the intent to profit from his action. A landmark judgment, but
precise.
But how many pacifist tax resisters are there in Spain? It is difficult to
calculate — not everyone who does it talks about it — but according to the
associations and platforms associated with this movement there may be between
1,000 and 2,000 people each year: “the number is very stable, although there
are sharp peaks in times of armed conflict when Spain is involved, as with
the Iraq war,” explains Arcadi Oliveres. So in the fiscal
campaign, it is estimated that at least
5,000 people became tax resisters. Today, the economic crisis has not
produced a significant increase in antimilitarist objectors, “even allowing
for awful data, like the fact that in the
state spent €1,300 million to construct a combat aircraft, the same amount of
money that it saved by freezing pensions.”
From pacifism to rebellion
In , the Right of Rebellion movement
(www.derechoderebelion.net),
with the help of more than €8,000 raised through a crowdfunding initiative,
printed 5,000 copies of the “Manual of Economic Disobedience” (the edition is available on the web), a
document intended, in its own words, “to all of those people who would like
to take steps to make their lives exemplars of their thought and feeling.” So
the group intended to “initiate and extend a campaign of tax resistance aimed
at the Spanish state and at those who control it… to show that we will not
pay their debts, because we do not recognize the existing Constitution or the
existing puppet government of global financial capitalism…”
As the most important step of disobedience, the manual teaches the option of
making a partial income tax resistance, similar to that of the war tax
resisters, but including also deductions for such items as the amortization
of public debt, the interest on the debt, payments for the monarchy, the
Senate, the prisons, the police, or the church, until the total comes to
almost 30% of the federal budget. The authors of the manual make it clear that
the decision about what parts to deduct must be decided by the taxpayer, but
suggest a standard 25% of what is on the return.
Offices of Disobedience
The goal of resistance is to divert money that doesn’t go to the Treasury to
“autonomous projects that will be useful to meet the needs of the people.”
After publishing its manual, and without much time to prepare, Right of
Rebellion began organizing a series of Offices of Economic Disobedience in
various cities around the nation, which learned about and advised anyone who
was interested in becoming a tax resister in the tax resistance campaign of
. Although it is difficult to know the exact
number of people who joined this campaign, the figures tossed about by
different offices were very modest, not reaching even a hundred or so
resisters. In spite of this, the constituents of the Office of Economic
Disobedience in Lavapiés (Embajadores, 49; Madrid), considered the
accounting “very positive”: “not so much with the economic level of project
supported — just over €18,000 in total — but by, above all, the number of
people, from all classes, who were interested in this issue.”
Meanwhile, as the tax season numbers are coming in, Right of Rebellion
continues to promote other forms of disobedience, such as certain techniques
of resistance to the
VAT (in the
declarations of independent companies or cooperatives), rent for people who
have been evicted (preventing or indefinitely delaying the eviction), or
bankruptcy (as freedom to carry out different actions). The ultimate goal
would be an actual departure from the “official” economic system and the
creation of new, alternative forms of living.
Integrated Cooperatives
The “Manual of Economic Disobedience” relies on a call for comprehensive
cooperatives, “a legal form that allows construction of an arena of
autonomous economic relations among the participants that is protected from
public or private liability, and quite legally minimizes tax and social
insurance liability, shielding as much as possible from the acts of the banks
or government.” Furthermore, this new way of life permits “bankrupt or
unemployed beings as people, according to the system and the existing legal
framework, but at the same time to be able to live completely normally,
working and consuming in an autonomous manner, without worrying about
seizures of prior debts.” In short, a permanent economic disobedience, a
collective evasion of the system clinging to a self-sufficient,
multisectorial structure, where the members, involved to a lesser or greater
extent, coexist and cooperate at the margin of the system. Indeed, the
cooperatives possess a system of communal services, using alternative
currencies and relying on self-financing social cooperatives to obtain credit
without interest.
The Solidarity Scam
One of the major promoters of the Catalan Comprehensive Cooperative is Enric
Durán. This activist burst into the limelight in
when he announced himself, in
an article in the self-published Crisi, which had
“stolen” €492,000 from the banks. Step by step, he described how he had taken
out 68 different loans from 39 banks on various pretenses: to buy a car,
renovate his house,
etc. And how he
had created a shell company and falsified documents to justify nonexistent
income, in order that the credit control system would not detect its growing
debt.
While the mainstream media were trumpeting his “exploit,” Enric fled to South
America with €8,000 in his wallet. The rest had been given, as was explained
in the manifesto, to autonomous social project. This action, whether described
as financial disobedience or a solidarity con, sounded around the world and
the press named its actor the “Robin Hood of banks.” Enric returned to take
credit for the legitimacy of his action, and was imprisoned
. He was finally
released, though with a pending criminal trial that was to have been held
. Enric failed to attend “because
he doesn’t believe that the judicial system has standing to judge,” so the
Provincial Court put out a bench warrant for him on
. The prosecutor asked for an
eight-year sentence, six for an ongoing offense of falsifying a commercial
document, and two for criminal bankruptcy.
While eluding justice, Durán continues to vindicate resistance: “any act of
insubordination is a welcome step, and although at first it may seem like an
isolated action, it is from such small actions that we build a strategy with
a long-term goal,” although clearly these processes are initially marginal,
“historically risky actions, if they involve individual responsibility, are
taken only by the minorities involved. The key is that these minorities are
able to organize to better influence the majorities.”
Disobedience of the system
Other citizens who dissent from the economic relations imposed by the system,
like the lawyer, writer, and expert on disobedience José Luis Carretero, do
not understand the processes of economic disobedience as an “exit”: “you have
to take a step toward disobedience, but not as an alternative to
confrontation. You can’t get anything without an effective, mass
confrontation.” Carratero has reservations about measures like tax
resistance, “it has a very limited and token run. I get these dynamics if
they are done with other actions, like the occupation of vacant housing for
instance. In the short run, I think we should try to find an alliance with
various sectors that are confronting austerity. In the long run, turn back
the social segmentation processes that have taken place in recent decades.
But from the grassroots, not from outside of the system.” For Carretero, since
the 15-M outbreak,
as the topic of disobedience is no longer taboo, “those who talk about these
things were once marginal — I felt like a Martian. Most saw capitalism as a
good thing that allowed you to have a house or a car. That has changed
somewhat, but the problem remains that they see no alternative.”
With less theory and more concrete actions, the campaigns of economic
disobedience of the “I won’t pay” movement have taken root in many sectors
through social networking, where they already have some 30,000 followers.
They called a rebellion against toll roads in Catalonia and managed to get
some 60,000 people, according to Abertis, the collecting company, to refuse
to pay to use the road. They managed to mobilize,
, hundreds of people in several
demonstrations in Madrid against the so-called “rate hikes” for public
transit, which upped the price of tickets for members of the community some
11%. Another action called “I won’t repay” inspired citizens not to pay the
euro-per-prescription in the communities where it was imposed — Catalonia and
Madrid — before it was suspended by the Constitutional Court. According to
the founder of “I won’t pay,” Álex Corrones: “Not only do we believe that it
is right to disobey laws that are unjust, but that it is our obligation as
responsible citizens.” For Corrones, it is not enough to demonstrate:
“demonstrations have been controlled. And if they get out of hand, there are
200 cops to fire on command.”
war tax resisters in Asturias
A report on
the war tax resistance campaign in Asturias this year said that it had
“led workshops in all parts of Asturias, conducted five street actions, and
has delivered thousands of information packets, which have been supplemented
by the educational conference with Tica Font and Pere Ortega of the
Centro Delás research center, and
the contributions of Arcadi Oliveres in another conference.”
The group is pushing for a referendum on Catalan independence, and is meanwhile trying to create a new state within the shell of the old, by creating new Catalan institutions and trying to vest in them the authority currently held by federal ones.
One of these is a Catalan tax agency, and some resisters have adopted the tactic of paying their federal taxes there instead of to the federal agency.
Italy’s is the latest government to try to slip new taxes into utility bills as a way of trying to sneak tax hikes past its subjects — the latest is something called “tares” which is ostensibly part of the garbage bill.
A “No Tares Steering Committee” is preparing a tax strike in protest.
Peggy Thomas, a retired teacher who lives in Hebden Bridge, is refusing to
pay the Inland Revenue some of her income tax. She is a conscientious
objector and against taxes being used for warfare.
Peggy told the HebWeb that the nature of conscientious objection had
completely changed. Today, it is not about young people refusing to fight; it
is about money. Today’s wars can be fought with just a few men but the
weapons are much far more expensive and deadly. That’s why she’s withholding
a proportion of her tax, a proportion which would otherwise be spent on war
and weapons.
Peggy told the HebWeb, “At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, the then
Chancellor Gordon Brown, told the House of Commons not to worry about how our
participation in the ‘coalition of the willing’ would be financed. He assured
MPs and the country that all the
money needed would be available. Of course it was; 10% of the Government
budget is set aside for warfare.”
Peggy is not alone in withholding taxes.
An organisation called “Conscience” is campaigning to end compulsory contributions to warfare.
Conscience believes that those who object in principle to warfare should be able to divert 10% of their taxes to peaceful pursuits.
For example, some people donate their 10% withheld tax to charities such as Oxfam.
When Peggy first started withholding her tax, the Inland Revenue ignored her,
and just took the tax she owed out of any refund she was due. If she sent a
letter explaining, they’d reply that they couldn’t enter into correspondence
about the matter.
But this year the Inland Revenue started to get a little more serious with
Peggy and started to talk about debt collection agencies. Conscience were
able to reassure Peggy that in the first instance the debt collection agency
would not be allowed to take anything from her. And that what she should do
is write to the debt collection agency explaining the situation.
In her letter, Peggy wrote, “The right of conscientious objection, which was
won, not without a struggle, during the First World war, protected people who
did not want to kill other people from having to take part in warfare. Once
conscription was abolished, this right was taken from us. Now our money is
conscripted and used to finance killing.”
“The poorest are footing the bill for those in multiple occupancy. The burden
is put on the very poor,” she said.
“I am doing this for many of us, not just myself. Everyone I speak to says
‘we support you, our mother or our father is like you, they are struggling
too.’
“The only weapon we have got is not to pay council tax.”
She said she has been paying some of her council tax but she could not afford
to pay all of it.
“I have been paying £25 a month and that is all I can afford,” she said.
Over the past few years, an interesting hybrid has developed in Spain: a combination of elements from the traditional war tax resistance movement, which in Spain has a largely pacifist or anti-militarist conscientious objection focus much like the war tax resistance movement in the U.S., and elements of the critics of neoliberal state capitalism who emerged in new forms during the recent economic crisis — roughly the counterparts of the “occupy” movement in the U.S.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this for two reasons: first is that it’s obviously an interesting development in terms of this blog’s subject matter and my pet interest, and second is that people in NWTRCC have been toying with the idea of trying to increase their influence in activist circles by reaching out to other movements and trying to find ways of linking up — and this looks like one possible model they could consider.
So to the end of understanding this a little better, today I’m going to try to translate the introduction to the second edition of the Manual de Desobediencia Economica, which recently came out, and represents some of the ideas that are fermenting in this hybrid movement:
In these times when corruption has become unmasked, we live at a turning point of a historical cycle at which the portrayal of the State can no longer hide the extent of its villainy.
The impunity enjoyed by the usual suspects contrasts with the criminalization of all social movements and the persecution of all those people who daily tell themselves: enough.
In this context, disobedience and rebelliousness transcend a purely ideological issue.
It’s about giving some meaning to the word justice.
It’s about our dignity, but even more, of shedding fear, because they want to take everything from us except for the right to consume and the duty to obey.
There is much that we can recover if we also disobey fear: another social order in which the people are the most important.
We have much to do, and who knows how far we can go this time… we’ll see you on the road.
In this second edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience, we invite you to take some steps to make your life more in line with your manner of thinking and feeling.
Specifically, we address those of you who may want to stop acting under the force of economic pressure and instead to dedicate your time to activity that would really make you feel accomplished.
Also, those who want their money, as the fruit of their labor, to go to what they believe and not to the banks, or politicians’ salaries, or armaments, or grand infrastructures… among other misuses with which we do not want to collaborate.
The State is paying to indulge and engorge the fortunes of the banks and other financial speculators — more money than it has been “forced” to cut from various budget items.
Throughout this Handbook, we take part in a call to initiate and extend an action of tax resistance against the Spanish State and those who control it, and consistent action to demonstrate that we will not pay their debts, because we do not recognize the current Constitution nor the current government which is a puppet of global financial capitalism, nor the 2013 State Budget.
In place of this we put our money towards self-managed taxation.
This way we will funnel the resources we do not want to pay to the State into self-managed projects that are helpful for meeting the needs of the people.
Although the Handbook, to the extent that data, laws, and experiences are referenced, is written for the Spanish State, we hope to inspire disobedience anywhere on the globe, since the situation we are living out in the Spanish State is common to many countries in the world.
In this way we hope to have the cooperation of dozens of volunteers to translate it into multiple languages.
The centralized distribution of this Handbook of Economic Disobedience on paper will only be made thanks to funding from the CoopFunding crowdfunding campaign “Disobedience Cannot Be Imprisoned” and is available on derechoderebelion.net and in the offices of economic disobedience with the corresponding local appendix of self-managed projects, where we hope that they can self-publish copies as needed and possible.
Much of the funding for starting up this project, as I understand it, came from an interesting bank robbery masterminded by Enric Duran.
Duran took out loans from dozens of banks under false pretenses and then donated most of the money as start-up capital for these radical self-managed projects, went bankrupt, and then went underground to escape prosecution.
This raises the question of how self-sustaining this movement really is (that is, how dependent it is on this one-time influx of funds) and also how grassroots it really is (does this manifesto represent the gestalt of a movement, or just the axe being ground by its sugar daddy).
If I have time and interest, I’ll try to translate some other sections of the Handbook.
The usual disclaimers apply about my sub-par command of Spanish.
When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering.
It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle.
When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience.
The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.
And here’s some more information about the Spanish movement that is the inspiration for this work: an interview with Enric Duran on the Shareable site and the video Come Back: A Story We Wrote Together (subtitled in English) which tells the story of Duran’s bank heists and how a coalition of pioneers used the funds to build a parallel solidarity economy.
Spanish war tax resisters and activists from the 15-M, or
indignados, movement (the Spanish version of “Occupy”) have
joined forces to organize a sharing economy network and to nourish it with
redirected taxes.
How this came about is an interesting story, and though their project is
decidedly edgier and more confrontational than most of what goes on under the
sharing economy umbrella, we can learn a lot from what they have accomplished.
Catalonia, banned from holding a formal vote on independence, held a more informal plebiscite on the question recently.
The voters overwhelmingly approved of an independent Catalan state.
This will probably revitalize a long-simmering tax resistance campaign in which Catalan municipalities and taxpayers were paying their taxes to the regional government rather than the federal government.
There are also more traditional pacifist war tax resisters in Spain, such as Antonio Martín Canaves, who explained his stand in a recent letter-to-the-editor.
Italy
Governments seem to be increasingly using public utility monopolies as ways
of increasing government extractions of money from citizens without raising
“taxes.” New fees, increased rates, and complex bureaucratic reorganizations
that leave the government richer and the citizens poorer, are among the tools
in this chest.
The VAT is very
similar to what is being promoted as the “Fair Tax” idea in the United States.
“Fair Tax” promoters ought to take heed from this warning from victims of the
German VAT:
People are realizing that they have been living a fairy tale. The politicians
swore that VAT taxes
would reduce income taxes. They did not. They were more repressive and have
reduced the long-term economic growth throughout Europe. The administrative
burden upon business is outrageous with each layer having to account up the
chain rather than a sales tax that only the seller need collects.
The government had contracted with a private company to administer and collect
the tax. That contract guaranteed that company a certain amount of money,
whether or not the tax was collected. The government suspended the tax, but it
is still on the hook for about €1 billion in payments to this company.
some notes on practical issues of interest to war tax resisters including the possibility of reducing taxes through charitable giving, how to react to letters from the IRS, and the use of no-interest community investment loans to keep assets secure from collection
I’ve also seen some new interest in the tactic of tax resistance popping up here and there on-line.
Twitter is full of people threatening to stop paying taxes with 140-character bravado over everything from police impunity to Obama’s immigration policy tweaks.
That’s nothing to get too excited about, except that I haven’t seen so many people hit on tax resistance as a possible activist response to political issues all at once before.
Tax resister Gary Flomenhoft posted a couple of meditations recently at ClubOrlov:
“The only action that can possibly stop the empire in its tracks is cutting off its food supply — the tax money on which it lives.
We have to starve the beast through divestment, capital expatriation, tax resistance, tax refusal and tax revolt.
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig told us this flat out in the 1980s when, being confronted with huge protests over U.S. Central American policy, he said: ‘Let them protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes.’
Truer words were never uttered by a U.S. official.
Is there any evidence to contradict his statement?
Has any other measure had any impact on the war machine?
The honest answer is no.
Millions of people around the world protested before the invasion of Iraq.
These protests were ignored.
No amount of protest or other efforts can stop it, because it doesn’t cut off the empire’s food supply of money and fear.
Only by cutting off its funds by not paying taxes can we stop the empire.”
Disobedience.eu is born, a consultancy designed to resist the Troika
An old guy on my block used to say: “If you’re going to steal, steal big.
Because if you stay small, you’re just a thief, but if you steal big you’ll be a millionaire.
All it takes to be rich is to skim a little from everybody.”
“You make a lot of sense!”
I thought.
But the old guy never stole, at least not on a grand scale, and to me, frankly, the proof is in the pudding.
The world is an unfair place, sir, and what are you going to do?
He who has the most pays the least, and this, at least when it comes to taxes, goes without saying: all of the companies in the IBEX 35 — those that are publicly traded and have the most liquidity in Spain — are located in tax havens and pay minuscule amounts to the Treasury in comparison to their earnings.
Citizens, small- and medium-sized businesses, aren’t so fortunate with the tax collector.
It’s unfair, but legal.
They bask in the sun on a private beach, and to the rest of us they leave only a miserable puddle to splash around in.
Is there really nothing that can be done?
Beyond complaining, there’s a new plan — a yet untried option: drag our towels and camping chairs onto the private beach to say, “Hello, buenos días, good morning, guten morgen, we are also in the club.”
, Disobedience.eu, the first tax rebellion consultancy meant for the common people, was launched.
It all began when the artist Núria Güell contacted Enric Duran, the activist known as the “Robin Hood of the banks” for swindling — or expropriating, you might say — some half a million euros from various financial institutions in , with the motive of finding a way to buck the Troika.
From there a small tax advisor emerged, the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy.
A score of European activists, and Duran from the underground, launched what may come to be the largest hack of the financial system in Europe, at least on the part of the citizenry.
“It starts by resisting the Troika through financial strategies, by playing with the law in the same ways as the neoliberal corporations,” says Güell.
The idea is to imitate Apple, Google, and Banco Santander — not for personal gain, but “to stop paying an illegitimate debt and to start financing the common good.”
“The Troika is dedicated to commandeering and privatizing the commons, it has a colonizing nature: all the countries that are subjected to it, like Spain, Ireland, or Greece, lose their sovereignty.
We must create a parallel financial system.”
Fiji, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, your home
If we were to do a math problem, it might go as follows: Say that John has a balance last trimester that comes to 2,000 euros VAT.
John sends an email to Disobedience.eu with the amount he wants to resist (2,000 euros) and they will supply him with an invoice for that amount.
John will pay 8% for the service: management fees (1%) and a contribution to a common fund (7%).
“The rest (92%), although recorded as paid, will not actually be charged.
As far as I know, to forgive a debt is not a crime,” says Güell.
So John has an invoice that states that he has made a tax payment in Spain, although in reality no such thing happened.
“In the EU there is free trade, but in practice there is no common fiscal policy, and the justice system is not coordinated.
The countries as a result have trouble obtaining information from one another.
The big companies benefit from this, and now the little guy can do so as well.
It would be very difficult for the administration of the country where he is consulting to know who has not claimed the income.”
John has evaded taxes, mimicking the techniques of the big multinationals, but for another purpose.
“92% of the money is yours.
The idea is that you can dedicate it to projects for the common good, which are increasingly privatized or abandoned by the state.”
For example, a support network for refugees or school libraries.
Desobedience.eu was inspired by the Coperativa Integran Catalana and the Right of Rebellion Collective, and will be linked to the international Fair Coöp collective.
For this reason, Güell expects there will be a rapid increase of clients, projects, and affinity groups: “The assignment of the funds is up to each client.
Nobody will be monitoring or checking on where it is going.”
Isn’t this a do-gooder form of tax evasion?
How can you prevent “dishonest” evaders from using this tool?
Activists will sift the clients: “If a capitalist business wants to use this service to evade taxes, it will be turned down.
On the other hand, a group of lawyers with a social focus have already been accepted.”
Gandhi versus Starbucks
The tax disobedience initiative has sparked interest, but also an understandable fear of possible legal problems. Güell asserts that the activists involved have everything sorted out: “The only people who run a real risk are those who put in their names to form the company, but they are insolvent and that protects them.”
Throughout history there are numerous examples of economic disobedience.
“From the Boston Tea Party in to the Salt March of Mahatma Gandhi in .”
Though there are also much more recent examples:
In the residents of Crickhowell, a town in Wales, grew tired of paying much more in taxes than Starbucks and decided to declare themselves a tax-free town and to create a company in the Cayman Islands: “They initiated a collective action of tax resistance, and since then the State has not done anything.”
With the activists of Disobedience.eu there is more resolution to attack the core of the system than fear of the possible repercussions.
Furthermore, for Güell, economic disobedience is better politics than voting in democratic elections.
“If we do not have autonomy with respect to the Troika and the markets, there is no way to advance the many initiatives that we put forward.
They are the obstacle, because they are above democracy.
The dictator is only a dictator if he has subjects; disobedience is the only way remaining to us.
Furthermore, disobedience is intrinsic to democracy.”
The real hurdle is to go beyond the environmental activists and the more politicized minorities and to extend the initiative across the whole population.
“Workplace exploitation; inability to make ends meet; a rainbow assortment of pills for depression; daily suicides from eviction, foreclosure, or meaninglessness; and murderous barbed-wire over some fictitious dividing lines.
Why dedicate your life to feed this machinery that only benefits a minority?” asks Güell.
“You just need to open your eyes to notice that Europe is at a dead-end, caught between the technocrats of the Troika and the anti-immigration nationalists.
The European Union is no more than a financial plan for plundering social wealth and impoverishing the workers, a set of legalized financial crimes that act to transfer the income of citizens to the banks and large corporations.”
And as such, the response should be collective and in the financial sphere.
As Aristotle told us, politics does not manage the public sphere, rather our everyday actions are what create policy.
The actual mechanism by which the tax evasion happens is left a little obscure by this article, but as best I can gather it’s something like this:
In Europe there is a value-added tax, which is something like a sales tax.
It is added to the price of the good as it increases in value during its manufacturing stages, but intermediate goods that are sold to other sellers (for instance, goods purchased by merchants for resale) do not have more tax added to them.
If you’re buying something for resale, rather than paying the tax at the time you buy it, you indicate to the seller that you’ll be adding the tax to the price of the goods at the time you resell it, and then whoever sells the goods to you sells you the goods tax-free.
An exchange of invoices allows the tax agencies, in theory, to follow the supply chain to whoever is responsible for collecting and remitting the tax.
But this process is frequently gamed.
For instance, if the final seller is a sort of Potemkin business that vanishes before taxes are due, then the taxes never have to get paid.
Or, apparently, if that seller is officially domiciled outside the European Union — say, in the Cayman Islands or something.
So what the Consultancy seems to be doing is to be providing invoices saying that they’re responsible for paying any value-added tax that ordinarily would be paid by a resisting small business.
They charge the business for the cost of the goods, but they don’t bother to collect most of the money.
So the business is off the hook for the tax, the Consultancy doesn’t generate any income that might make it liable, and everyone walks away a little happier.
Something like that, anyway.
They also seem to be doing some of their transactions (the percent of the invoice they do intend to collect, for instance) in “FairCoin” — a bitcoin-like currency.
I’m not sure what advantages if any this gives to the Consultancy or the businesses that use it, but it seems like something that could boost the value of FairCoin as a currency, and maybe that’s the point.
In other news…
Enric Durán reflects on the crisis in Catalonia, and how decentralized autonomous cooperatives are an alternative to independent states when considering models of rebellion against control by the Spanish government, in El Temps.
Excerpt:
[We] seek autonomy. We do not seek control of the territory in which we live.
We seek to be free in our direct actions.
Therefore, we build our parallel system of fees and taxes and make fiscal disobedience to the state, to any state.
With these resources, we manage alternatives.
We protect our activity even if it is not legally recognized or is disobedient to the State.
In this way, we exercise the right to community self-determination.
We do not recognize state sovereignty over our community actions.
It means that we first recognize the decisions of our assemblies before any law — collective decisions that are open and have nothing to hide.
We look for ways to not pay taxes and the added revenues derived from this we use for our community.
Anyone can join these openly by participating in a local cooperative or group.
Durán is currently championing a new bitcoin-like alternative currency called “Faircoin”, with the explicit goal of making transactions less taxable and less subject to the demands of the official banking system.
Newly released figures from the Pentagon say that the government of the United States has spent $250,000,000 every day for on its Terror War.
That doesn’t include what’s being spent by off-the-books secret agencies (where Congress hides a lot of Terror War spending), and it also doesn’t count veterans’ benefits (currently $46,000,000 per day for Terror War vets).
