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Fall 2014 NWTRCC national in Richmond, Indiana
Earlham is a Quaker educational institution, and so there is more than usual interest in the history and current practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends at this gathering.
But we have war tax resisters here from a variety of backgrounds, and from all over the country… and even as far away as Kipkarren River, Kenya.
They include relatively new resisters, and some legendary veterans of the movement.
The evening began with Lonnie Valentine (the Trueblood Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of Peace & Justice at Earlham), speaking on the topic of “Quakers and the War Tax Concern: Unfinished Business?”
He believes that peace-minded Quakers need to become more “militantly nonviolent” if they want to recapture the way in which their movement was once a real threat to the status quo.
Radical societal change can only come about if the powers that be are undermined on multiple levels — economically, militarily, politically, and ideologically.
Early Quaker tithe and tax resistance was conducted in that fashion, but now (when such things are practiced at all) they tend to be much less confrontational and much narrower in scope.
Ari Rosenberg introduces members of the local community to the NWTRCC gathering
He recapped the struggle the Society of Friends had when trying to determine the limits of war tax resistance, and how the eventual compromise (to resist explicit war taxes, but not taxes “in the mixture”) proved unsatisfying and unstable, and was challenged by John Woolman and others.
Valentine told the story of Quaker William Rotch of Rhode Island, who, after receiving some bayonets as part of a payment of a debt due him during the Revolutionary War, threw them overboard rather than risk having them requisitioned by the military.
Valentine then challenged the audience to consider whether property destruction of a similar sort might be a worthy addition to their war tax resistance tactics.
What if, he asked, instead of only having a war tax resisters’ penalty fund to reimburse resisters who had penalties and interest seized by the IRS, we also had a more assertive response, in which we destroyed federal government property equal in value to any seizures it made?
Valentine believes that Quakers, not only because of the important role they have played in American war tax resistance, but also because of the ways they have also dropped the ball in that movement, have a special responsibility to lead now.
He was a little less certain about how to make this happen… suggesting that maybe a campaign to try to get a lot of Quakers to resist a small, symbolic amount might be a good start.
Joanna Swanger, Director of Earlham College’s Peace and Global Studies Program, addresses Strategizing for Social Change in 21th Century America
After dinner, Joanna Swanger, Director of Earlham College’s Peace and Global Studies Program, gave the opening convocation on the subject of Strategizing for Social Change in 21th Century America.
Swanger’s talk concentrated on the theory of peace action. She believes that the principles of non-violent action as studied by Gene Sharp and others are not necessarily applicable to our place and time.
This is in part because she believes that the U.S. government does not respond to nonviolent pressure in the way expected by this school of nonviolence theory, and also in part because the internet and corporate control of media have changed the rules of visual communication in society.
What should we do instead?
Well, I’m not too sure what she recommends.
It all sounded pretty abstract to me and I tuned out after a while.
is the first full day of the conference, full of workshops and then a keynote address by Peter Goldberger on the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision for American war tax resisters.
We have reached the end of the NWTRCC national gathering, held this time at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.
The bulk of ’s portion of the conference was largely a series of workshops on subjects like:
basic war tax resistance (what we call informally “WTR101”)
the peace tax fund campaign
military counter-recruitment and support for conscientious objectors
advanced war tax resistance
the history of Quaker war tax resistance
“economic disobedience”
the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and its alternatives: a case study in East Africa
war tax resistance questions & answers
conscientious objection to the military and taxes for the military
Some of these sessions ran at the same time, and for a couple of them (the WTR101 and history of Quaker war tax resistance) I was one of the presenters, so I only was able to take notes on one of the two “economic disobedience” sessions.
In that session, Erica Weiland began by summarizing my report on the Spanish “desobediencia integral” movement and then she brought us up to date with new developments.
These include the fair.coop “Earth cooperative for a fair economy” and its alternative currency, the “FairCoin,” which is somewhat Bitcoin-like but is explicitly designed to promote a certain sort of economic model.
(I’ve looked at some of the FairCoin outreach material, but whether from translation difficulties or my amateur economics knowledge, I can’t quite figure out what makes it tick.)
The war tax resistance movement in the United States has made some contact with this Spanish movement and we’ve started to explore situating our work in the terminology and framework of this “comprehensive disobedience” movement, which helps to connect our work with the emerging sharing economy movement, Occupy, the modern environmentalist movement, and things of that sort.
Erica was joined by Jim Stockwell, who gave us a more historical perspective of how this sort of thinking weaves into a long thread connecting decentralism, Georgism, cooperative villages, the thought of Ralph Borsodi, and other related ideas.
Erica added some insight from her research into the cooperative movement among African-Americans in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods.
Erica then introduced us to some of what the Strike Debt group have been doing lately.
This group grew out of Occupy and the Rolling Jubilee project.
One of the actions associated with this group was the purchase and retirement of a large amount of medical debt.
They then purchased and retired some student debt in the same way.
Debts like these are packaged into groups based on how likely the debts are to be recovered.
Those debts that are very unlikely to be recovered, often because the debtor is too poor to pay, can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.
By retiring these debts, the project can reduce the stress of collection agency harassment on such people.
They are also trying to unionize students who have debt to particularly exploitative colleges to encourage them to strike collectively for debt relief.
The Strike Debt Operations Manual was republished a while back with a new chapter on tax resistance, which was largely based on NWTRCC literature.
We brainstormed some ideas for trying to connect the U.S. war tax resistance movement with a movement for a larger grassroots economic transformation.
Some ideas we tossed around included:
the use of community development loan funds (such as Equity Trust) as investments for our alternative funds or as ways of shielding assets from the IRS in less-visible zero-interest loans
encouraging the various regional alternative funds to coordinate their grants so as to support projects that build new economic models in a more systematic and well-publicized way
creating an alternative fund that uses a different granting model — rather than giving grants annually at a particular time, give grants at irregular intervals in reaction to acute needs.
War tax resistance legal advisor Peter Goldberger
Yesterday, attorney Peter Goldberger, who has worked closely with the war tax resistance community for many years, brought us up to date on how the climate for pressing for the legal recognition of conscientious objection to military taxation in the courts has changed in recent years, particularly in the wake of the recent “Hobby Lobby” case.
When I read the “Hobby Lobby” ruling, I didn’t see much that seemed encouraging.
There were some hopeful-sounding parts of it, like this bit from the majority opinion’s summary:
The belief of the Hahns and Greens implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is immoral for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.
It is not for this Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable.
But the justices were careful to remind war tax resisters that we’re out of luck if we think we can use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to assert the legal validity of our beliefs:
United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, which upheld the payment of Social Security taxes despite an employer’s religious objection, is not analogous.
It turned primarily on the special problems associated with a national system of taxation; and if Lee were a RFRA case, the fundamental point would still be that there is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
The “Hobby Lobby” opinion itself expands on this a bit:
Lee was a free-exercise, not a RFRA, case, but if the issue in Lee were analyzed under the RFRA framework, the fundamental point would be that there simply is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
Because of the enormous variety of government expenditures funded by tax dollars, allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious ground would lead to chaos.
Recognizing exemptions from the contraceptive mandate is very different…
The “Hobby Lobby” dissent goes so far as to describe the opinion as one that grants new powers of legal conscientious objection to just about everybody except tax resisters:
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
If you hoped the dissenters might be more sympathetic to the use of the RFRA in war tax resistance cases, you won’t find much support for your hopes here.
The dissenters for the most part seemed inclined to generally weaken the reach of the RFRA.
But again, this was all just my first impression, and I’m not a lawyer.
Peter Goldberger is, and he’s worked in the area of conscientious objection and the free exercise clause for a long time, and he gave the “Hobby Lobby” decision a lot of thought and found some interesting angles.
For one thing, when the Supreme Court used conscientious objection to military taxation as a reductio in Lee and Hobby Lobby, it did so in cases that themselves did not concern conscientious objection to military taxation.
They assumed that the government could not accommodate the beliefs of such resisters without “chaos” breaking out — that it would be too onerous for the government to accommodate such objectors.
But there was nobody there to argue the objectors’ side and to present evidence that this was not necessarily true.
Perhaps in a more direct case, objectors might be able to present evidence that would convince the court to revise its point of view.
The Hobby Lobby case also seems like it might usefully expand the right of conscientious objectors to military service.
Previously the court had ruled that there was no constitutional right to conscientious objection, and so objectors enjoyed only those rights that Congress had chosen to grant them by statute.
The language of Hobby Lobby seems to suggest that now, the government will have to prove a fairly strictly-defined compelling government interest if it wants to restrict the rights of draftees or military personnel who are or who become conscientious objectors for religious reasons.
For example, Goldberger suggests, Congress has defined legal conscientious objection to military service so that it only applies to pacifists — that is, to people who object to all war.
It does not apply to religious objectors, for instance Catholics, who belong to a “just war” tradition which asks them to evaluate war by certain criteria and conscientiously object only to a subset of them.
Goldberger suggests that the new RFRA standard, as elaborated in Hobby Lobby, could invalidate this and force the government to accommodate more varieties of religious conscientious objection.
Goldberger thinks this might also be a good time for a challenge from someone of the variety of war tax resisters who resists by putting the amount of the tax into an escrow account and telling the IRS that it may seize the money if it wants to, but that the resister is unwilling to pay it voluntarily.
Since the IRS could accommodate the resister’s religiously-based conscientious objection, without undue difficulty for the government and without unleashing “chaos,” by simply seizing the money, perhaps the objector has a legal right not to be further penalized or subject to legal sanctions of other sorts for such a stand.
Finally, since Hobby Lobby (somewhat notoriously) decided that corporations can, under some circumstances, have some rights of their own under the RFRA, this may be a way to ask the Court to revisit a case similar to the Priscilla Adams case that it turned down on procedural grounds back in the day.
Adams was a Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (a Quaker corporation) employee and a war tax resister.
Her employer went to court to try to gain the right not to have to withhold taxes from her salary as this would force them to participate in violating her conscience.
Myself, I don’t see a lot of use in looking to the legal system for help, but I think this sort of thing is interesting and kind of fun to explore.
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.”
