How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → reach out to potential resisters at the time and place of payment → Tax Day actions → 2014

I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my screen in recent weeks:

War Tax Resistance News

• Erica Weiland penned a thoughtful piece on War Tax Resistance as Self-Care at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.

• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is right around tax day (April 15) again this year, and the coalition is making plans for a variety of protest actions.

U.S. Tax Law News

• If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the U.S., you’re supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J. Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor” though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid SE/payroll taxes entirely.”
• NPR looked into Why More Americans Are Renouncing U.S. Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes, and how the U.S. tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.

Tax Resistance in Spain

• Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes. Excerpts:

  Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes, created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the particracy of lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.

  It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the exclusive benefit of the people.

• Meanwhile the number of towns in Catalonia that have stopped paying their taxes to the federal government, sending them to the regional government instead has risen to 54. This is currently only a sort of quasi-tax-resistance, as the regional government dutifully forwards these taxes to the central government, but it is part of a strategy of strengthening the regional tax agency in anticipation of eventually making the buck stop there in “the transition to statehood.”

Tax Resistance in France

• Yes, they’re still burning “ecotax” portals in Brittany. The latest one was partially burned on the night of the 5^th, which damaged it enough that the authorities ordered it to be removed.

A Look Back at the Poll Tax Resistance Campaign

• Chris Robinson has published a series of reminiscences of the campaign against the poll tax that brought down Thatcher’s reign in Great Britain:
  1. The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign
  2. A Paler Shade of Red
  3. Get Militant
  4. Revolution Down Below
  5. The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
  6. The Art of Self-Defence
  7. Demo
  8. Victory
• I also found some archives about the poll tax resistance effort at an Anarchist Communist Federation website.

Tax Resistance in Greece

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement won’t quit either. Thousands of Greeks marched at Afidnes and raised the toll gates there last month.

Tax Resistance in the Dominican Republic

• I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to support a business strike in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.

Tax Resistance in Argentina

• Last month, twenty “productores, industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly: “manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads. The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their businesses impossible to operate.

Tax Resistance in Great Britain

• “A mother of three is so incensed by the Isle of Man’s new sewerage charge she has pledged to go to prison rather than pay it.”

The list of upcoming Tax Day actions in the U.S. is beginning to fill out.

Here’s the list NWTRCC is putting together. The Global Day of Action on Military Spending (the previous day) is also assembling a list.

And just in time for events like these the War Resisters League has just updated their popular “pie chart” flyer which is meant to show the percentage of your income tax dollar that goes to military spending.

The chart is based on Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2015, but from what I hear, nobody really expects his budget to even come up for a vote. Instead, a divided Congress will wrangle their own budget together. Knowing that his budget would be ignored by Congress, Obama decided to use it more as a public relations vehicle than an actual budget.

Part of this public relations included Pentagon budget “cuts” which, though they’re the sort of “cuts” that always seem to leave the budget bigger than it was last year, and though they are accompanied by an anticipated supplemental slush-fund that isn’t part of the budget, still raised howls from the usual warmongers. In any case, the real budget Congress passes is predicted to stuff all of the usual military pork back in.

So the “pie chart,” which is based on the for-show Obama budget, as bad as it looks, probably understates how dreadful the budget will end up looking.

The April issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, with content that includes:

• a preview of the “Tax Day” actions planned this year
• notes on how war tax resisters are reacting to IRS policies
• Joseph Olejak, who was recently convicted of criminal charges for his war tax resistance, tells his story.
• prospects for convincing Amnesty International to take on the case of American conscientious objectors to military spending, an interesting note about John & Pat Schwiebert’s resistance, and brief reports from two recent workshops on war tax resistance
• a summary of some recently-released on-line resources
• announcements about the May national gathering in San Diego, November’s in Indiana, and about the newly-reorganized War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
• the story of Jack Herbert’s painstaking (but successful) effort to get his “frivolous filing” penalty overturned

The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:

• Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn. Excerpt:

  “They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance. Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime. And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem. Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”

  Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned). She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government. If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined. “I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.

• NWTRCC put out its annual press release about “Tax Day” protests going on nationwide.
• The Independent Video Archive published a couple of excerpts from television shows first broadcast in 1991 & 1992 concerning the war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner, and Wally Nelson.
• William Ruhaak published his thoughts on “What would Jesus do about paying taxes for war?” on the Pax Christi blog.
• Jack Payden-Travers has commentaries on war tax payment up at WVTF Public Radio and at the Las Vegas Informer.
• The Sonoma Press Democrat covered war tax resister Ruth Paine.
• Engaging Peace published Erica Weiland’s thoughts on war tax resistance.
• SeacoastOnline plugged Seacoast Peace Response’s annual “penny poll” demonstration.

Here’s a bit more news from Tax Day this year:

• Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman interviewed war tax resister Lida Shao.
• Brandywine Peace Community held a war tax resistance forum featuring Robin Harper
• Seacoast Peace Response held their annual “penny poll”.
• Cindy Sheehan discussed Thoreau and war tax resistance on her blog.

Also, NWTRCC is collecting photos and reports from Tax Day war tax resistance actions across the country at its website.

There seems to have been less tax day protest than usual in the news this year. I saw next to nothing from the TEA Party folks, for instance.

A new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter has just come out, with content including:

• a look back at this year’s “tax day” actions
• concerns about the statute of limitations for tax debt and about IRS audits
• updates on the Peace Tax Fund (including an amusing note about an American Legion chapter that felt duty-bound to oppose it)
• some international news including a municipal pension munitions divestment campaign in Britain and the Comprehensive Disobedience movement in Spain
• a report back from the NWTRCC national gathering in San Diego
• Robert Randall’s personal look at the ramifications of the Affordable Care Act for war tax resisters

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

• NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn gives us a look at the sorts of questions she fields from war tax resisters and prospective resisters around the country.
• New information on complications for some war tax resisters in dealing with unemployment compensation, social security, and IRS installment plans.
• A review of The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual.
• A recap of some tax day actions from around the country.
• An announcement of the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering (in Richmond, Indiana this November).
• Lincoln Rice shares the story of how he became a war tax resister, and his experiences since.