Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Greece →
in 2011–2019 →
road toll resistance
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Carl Watner, proprietor of Voluntaryist.com has put out an anthology of works critical of the practice of taxation: Render Not: The Case Against Taxation.
“Some goods and services are essential to human survival, but voluntaryists realize that they need not be provided by the government on a coercive basis.
What we oppose is the coercion involved in collecting taxes.
We oppose the means and take the position that the ends never justifies the means.”
Austerity for the citizens and tax payers, more money for the banks and tax farmers: that’s the message the European ruling class is giving the people of Greece, and the Greeks are experimenting with ways of saying “forget it,” or in Greek: “ΔΕΝ ΠΛΗΡΩΝΩ” (I won’t pay).
The Greek government intends to combat tax resistance and evasion by increasing fees, fines, and tolls, and by slapping a tax onto electric bills: so “sales of generators have shot up” and people are threatening to simply not pay the extras.
The government says it will shut off power to those who resist, but as one resister put it: “when 70% of Greek households don’t pay it, what are they going to do?
Cut off the whole lot?”
Greek resisters are also occupying toll booths and waving cars through, sabotaging public transit ticketing machines, and unionists at the power corporation have refused to print out and send bills that contain the new tax.
The IRS has finally taken notice of Cindy Sheehan’s tax resistance, and recently took the unusual step of issuing her a summons to bring all the details of her financial life to their office so they can decide how much of it to seize.
Her response?
“We will never pay, so stop harassing us.”
A while back, the U.S. government experimented with turning some of its naughty delinquent taxpayers over to private debt collection agencies.
This, they hoped, would result in increased tax revenue, a new source of corporate profit, and some nice campaign contribution kickbacks.
It was a bit of a boondoggle, was naturally opposed by the union representing IRS employees, and was scrapped in .
But then what happened to all those cases that had been given to the private debt collection companies and then reverted to the IRS?
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration took a look. In the sample of cases they investigated, on nearly half the IRS had taken no collection actions since the cases had been returned to them.
The «δεν πληρώνω» (“won’t pay”) movement in Greece is generating a lot of commentary in the press — but mostly in the Greek press, and so mostly in Greek.
But I’ve been able to extract a few tidbits from the news via Google Translate.
Some background: The Greek government, trying to get on a stronger financial footing and pay off international creditors, is raising taxes and cutting spending — in effect, giving Greeks that winning sales pitch: “you will get less from us and it will cost you more, all so we can give money to foreign banks.”
In Greece, tax evasion is notoriously something of a national sport, so raising taxes either means further goring the few bloody oxen who can’t run fast enough, or coming up with creative ways to tax the faster ones.
In this case, the government has decided to hike fees like highway tolls (or sell the rights to collect these fees to foreign companies) and tack new taxes on to utility bills.
The “won’t pay” movement is largely attacking these new taxes.
Members of union representing electrical power workers cut power to a federal government building on , protesting the hypocrisy of adding a new tax onto citizens’ electric bills while at the same time the government itself has been failing to pay its electric bills.
The U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation has released its annual Overview of the Federal Tax System that gives you some idea of how the federal government gets its hands on our money.
Tim Huber at Mennonite Weekly Review writes of “taxing conscience one war at a time” in the wake of the kerfluffle over government-mandated health insurance coverage.
The IRS doesn’t seem to be anticipating any sudden boost to its enforcement budget, judging from this news about the agency offering early retirement packages to the employees in their enforcement division.
Opponents of the “Household Tax” in Ireland are leading a mass tax resistance movement
The photo above comes from Ireland, but the news I have about the anti-austerity tax resistance campaigns in Europe comes from Greece today:
There is a semi-organized movement in Chicago to make parking meters unusable through vandalism, including smashing them, disassembling them, making them unreadable with spray-paint, stuffing them with pennies, jamming them with glue or expanding foam, or removing them entirely.
Disabling speed-trap cameras has become almost a popular sport in the United States.
I’ve seen video of people dressed up in Santa suits and temporarily disabling cameras by wrapping them in colorful gift boxes.
Others have used everything from “sticky notes, Silly String, and even a pick-axe” to stop the cameras from taxing speeders.
In Palmer Park, Maryland, recently, the authorities had to install a new set of surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their speed cameras because they were getting vandalized so frequently.
Toll-booths
Greek resisters occupy a highway toll plaza in .
During of the Rebecca Riots in Wales, there were over a hundred attacks on toll-houses, toll-gates, and toll-bars.
“During this period, all the gates and bars in the Whitland, Tivyside, and Brechfa Trusts were destroyed.
Two gates only out of the twenty-one survived in the Three Commotts Trust, whilst between seventy and eighty gates out of about one hundred and twenty were destroyed in Carmarthenshire.
Only nine were left standing out of twenty-two in Cardiganshire.”
Here is one account:
The secret was well kept, no sign of the time and place of the meditated descent was allowed to transpire.
All was still and undisturbed in the vicinity of the doomed toll-gate, until a wild concert of horns and guns in the dead of night and the clatter of horses’ hoofs, announced to the startled toll-keeper his “occupation gone.”
With soldier-like promptitude and decision, the work was commenced; no idle parleying, no irrelevant desire of plunder or revenge divided their attention or embroiled their proceedings.
They came to destroy the turnpike and they did it as fast as saws, and pickaxes, and strong arms could accomplish the task.
No elfish troop at their pranks of mischief ever worked so deftly beneath the moonlight; stroke after stroke was plied unceasingly, until in a space which might be reckoned by minutes from the time when the first wild notes of their rebel music had heralded the attack, the stalwart oak posts were sawn asunder at their base, the strong gate was in billets, and the substantial little dwelling, in which not half an hour before the collector and his family were quietly slumbering, had become a shapeless pile of stones or brick-bats at the wayside.
When the Scleddy turnpike-gate was attacked, they “broke the gates, posts, walls, and toll-boards into pieces so small that in the morning there was not a piece of the timber larger than would make matches”
Toll-booth destruction was also part of the riots in Naples in : “the toll-booths throughout the town were demolished; the mob went from one gate to another.
Everywhere the toll-gatherers had escaped — nobody thought of making any resistance…”
Toll-booth attacks are also a trademark of the current “won’t pay” movement in Greece.
Resisters there have mobbed highway toll plazas, raising the bars and waving cars through.
Miscellany
Danny Burns reports that during the Poll Tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, “In Lothian, it was widely reported that Anti-Poll Tax activists had managed to put a bug into the computer, which randomly wiped out every sixth record on the register.
The virus story was never proven.
However, a month before it was mentioned in the newspapers, its effects were accurately described to two Anti-Poll Tax activists by two computer hackers one of whom had worked for Lothian Regional Council and had been sacked.”
There are some examples in Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution:
“At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of their clerks.”
In Anjou, the tax clerks’ horses are seized and sold at auction.
“In Touraine, ‘as the publication of the tax-rolls takes place, riots break out against the municipal authorities; they are forced to surrender the rolls they have drawn up, and their papers are torn up.’ ”
“In Creuse, at Clugnac, the moment the clerk begins to read the document, the women spring upon him, seize the tax-roll, and ‘tear it up with countless imprecations;’ ”
When the IRS seized tax resister Mary Cain’s newspaper, and put a chain and padlock on the front door, “Mrs. Cain sawed off the lock and chain and mailed them to the Internal Revenue Department with a defiant note.”
Whiskey Rebels were known to steal the records of tax collectors.
During the resistance in Missouri against taxes to pay off owners of corruptly-issued railroad bonds, “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records.”
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Peter J. Reilly, who has a blog at the Forbes website, writes about how the IRS labels conscientious objectors to military taxation “frivolous” as a way of discouraging dissent, and how war tax resister Elizabeth Boardman is challenging this in court.
Some developments in the “won’t pay” movement in Greece:
I wish I could read Greek or that mechanical translation were more sophisticated.
This page seems to be describing a tax resistance tactic that involves paying a single euro in road tax to the federal government, accompanied with a letter of protest about how road taxes & fees are being siphoned off by foreign creditors rather than being used to keep the roads in decent repair.
The government is trying to promote a new social norm in which people will be free to refuse to pay for goods and services they receive, unless they are presented with a printed receipt — this in an attempt to crack down on off-the-books transactions.
The government has signaled that it won’t prosecute people who steal from merchants in such circumstances.
The National Taxpayer Advocate (a sort of ombudsman within the IRS) issued her annual report recently.
One bit caught my eye: the Advocate estimates that U.S. taxpayers spend a combined 6,100,000,000 hours per year doing the recordkeeping and filing they have to do to be tax compliant.
Janet Novak, at Forbes, puts that in perspective:
According to a post on their website, War Resisters’ International plans to go to the tax agency in London today and pay the last five years of taxes that they have been withholding.
They say they will do so “under protest” and they invite like-minded people to demonstrate with them.
(I think I’d rather watch a bunch of vegetarian activists eat hamburgers “under protest” myself.)
According to a press release, the organization had its back to the wall, with the tax agency threatening to come to “confiscate computers, printers and other equipment that will make it impossible [for WRI] to continue working.”
They opted to pay rather than remain vulnerable to this property seizure.
The Greek government has indicted several activists whom it accuses of having been part of the toll gate raids.
In response, the “Won’t Pay” movement stormed three toll gates on , opening the gates for free passage, and handing the passing drivers leaflets describing the anti-toll movement.
The Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes continues its tax resistance campaign in Ireland.
The government introduced a set of amendments to the tax that are aimed at quieting the dissent, but campaign spokesman Bill Michael O’Brien says that, “the only change that can save this government is to scrap the property tax completely.”
The government is instituting something its foes are calling the “Bedroom Tax” — essentially a cut in the housing benefit of people who get government assistance in paying their rent, if the government deems their home to be too large for their needs.
In other words, if you have two children and each has their own room, the government may say: why don’t you move into a smaller place and double-up?
If you have a spare room, the government may say: you probably should rent that out to a lodger — we’re only going to help you pay for the rooms you need.
A veteran of the 1980s anti-poll tax movement [Liz Kitching] says she is not going anywhere.
“I feel worried, frightened, upset. But at the same time I am proud of the campaign and that does give me a little bit of confidence and hope because we did stop the poll tax.
I am not a victim.
This is a policy I am fighting back against.”
The economist Arcadi Oliveres is president of the Justice & Peace foundation, an organization that supported the first conscientious objectors [to military service].
For 30 years it has promoted war tax resistance; in total there are 3,000 people across the country who refuse to pay the Treasury a portion of their taxes proportional to the Defense budget.
Oliveres gives an example with quantities that illustrate how this action is done:
“If you are asked to pay 1,000 euros to the Treasury and during the year you have paid 800, when you make your tax return in June, 200 euros will remain to be paid.
Well, if the Defense budget is 5% [of the federal budget], from these 200 you refuse to pay 10 euros.
But you want to show that you don’t pay because of your disapproval of military spending and not because you don’t want to contribute.
So you make your contribution of 10 euros to a non-governmental organization and ask for the receipt.
When you make your tax return, you write a note explaining that you refuse a part of your taxes destined for Defense and provide the receipt from the donation you have made to the non-governmental organization.”
What happens next?
“If they happen to check your return (because it is proven that they do not check them all) they will send you a letter demanding the 10 euros.
You ignore it and then they come back and send another letter in which, in addition to the 10 euros, they require of you 20 more for interest.
Further demands follow and finally they will end up seizing the amount that remains from your bank account.”
To end up paying not only the quantity remaining to pay in your tax return, but also the interest, does not discourage Oliveres because “freedoms throughout history never have been given, they have been captured.”
He emphasizes that to avoid a year and a half in the army, the pioneering conscientious objectors spent three in jail, and, although the number of people in Spain doing tax resistance can be described as a “lackluster result,” he adds that “it is an educational and pressure tactic.”
When the Fuse Lights…
To violate the rule carries a punishment, normally in the form of a fine.
“I understand that people want to take these actions as a type of protest,” explains María Teresa Saez, spokesperson for the Professional Association of Magistrates.
“I think it is quite legitimate but has to assume the consequences and this will be implicit in such protest.”
Josep Casadellà was clear that he was doing an act of civil disobedience when he decided not to pay for passing a tollbooth on the road to Barcelona by Girona.
Joseph says that “I’ve already paid too long; 43 years paying for some highways doesn’t match up, it cannot be and that’s that.”
In he went by car with his son and heard on the radio some statements from the Minister of Development Ana Pastor who said they were going to bail out the highway deficit in Madrid with the income from the highways of Catalonia and elsewhere that were in surplus.
Then he denied, but at this moment, he says, he would pass through the tollbooth, and said the now-famous phrase “no vull pagar” (“I don’t want to pay”).
They recorded it, posted it on YouTube, and lit the fuse.
Over the following weekends, people imitated Josep and made the same statement.
Thus, thousands of refusals to pay the tolls: Something previously unheard of.
Although it wasn’t the first time that Josep called for disobedience: the previous year there had been a campaign on Facebook on — the National Day of Catalonia — for people not to pay tolls.
“And I did it myself,” he jokes.
Why did it not work then and then yes one month later?
“I think that it was the right time,” Josep says.
In matters of civil disobedience there needs to be a fuse and a spark, but if there is no explosive there will be no bang.
“It was a very particular time, with the crisis on one hand and on the other the media that published it… and all together it pulled the trigger.”
…and the Fuse Fizzles
We followed in Catalona: in different weekends during there have been some 50,000 refusals to pay tolls on the part of 25,000 people, according to the “no vull pagar” platform, and Albertis, the tollbooth operator, made an appeal to the government.
Fines of 100 euros began to arrive and the protest deflated.
“When I first did the ‘no vull pagar,’ I was conscious that I was breaking a rule, a decree that comes each year with fees to be paid.
So I was aware that it was an act of civil disobedience that could result in repercussions against me.
Now I don’t know if the people who later refused to pay the toll were also conscious of this,” explains Josep.
Fines that, on the other hand, were not legal and that could be appealed since at that time it was considered a contractural infraction and it was the operator, Albertis, and not the Catalan Traffic Service that was responsible for reporting drivers who had not paid the toll.
Furthermore, Josep says that so far he has not paid anything because he has been making appeals.
The “no vull pagar” campaign has had an impact, though not in the form that the promoters of the protest would have liked:
In the general budget for , the government has changed the law to allow sanctioning, now indeed, of people who refuse to pay a toll.
If to this we add the new court fees it is easy to understand the discouragement of even the promoter of the idea, who has opted not to use toll roads.
Nevertheless, the campaign continues to brainstorm new demonstrations to maintain the protest.
For now they will demand accountability for using the highway code to punish an act, failure to pay, that was not punishable at the time.
Nuanced Disobedience
We resumed the conversation with Martí Olivellas, who tells us that, 40 years after the campaign for conscientious objection [to military service], he is about to launch a new civil disobedience campaign called “A call to civil disobedience for civil rights and against the financial dictatorship.”
According to Martí this concerns reviving a campaign made three years ago called “Pledge for fiscal transparency” that included not paying the Treasury and depositing the money in an ethical bank account, until the government could explain with transparency how it was spending the taxes.
Now the campaign is resuming but in order to be huge they intend to make their deposit in the Government Depository, an administrative body of the Economic Ministry that is charged with the management and control of securities and deposits that have been made with the Civil Administration.
Martí Olivellas says that “you’re not evading.
What you say is that the day on which they [the government] have the transparency law, end corruption, and know how to manage our money, I’ll pay my taxes that I have retained in the Depository.”
But until then, you are not failing to pay but are retaining the money in an account in the same agency, are we still talking about civil disobedience?
“This is a very nuanced action of disobedience and is intended for the general public.
But everyone can modulate the risk: for example sending that which you have to pay to the Treasury in an interest-free loan to a social entity that should have received money from the State but has not received it.”
And do they think anything will happen next?
“We hope so, next 16 February there is a gathering which will finish the outline.
And then tax season begins.
It is the right moment.”
At that time we will see if society is willing, or not ready, to disobey.
Catalan separatists are trying to keep Catalan taxes in Catalonia, and some have used tax resistance strategies — including paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan local government.
Chile
Guillermo Durand Cornejo, president of the government-owned mining monopoly Codelco, and a legislative representative, called on Salteños (citizens of Salta, Chile) to refuse to pay a municipal tax, in the wake of property tax increases and new taxes in electricity and water bills.
“Until such time as the mayor gives a response to the people concerning the tax hike, I suggest that you do not pay this month’s municipal tax,” he said.
“I call for civil disobedience.”
Cornejo says he views the thirty-day tax strike as a wake up call for the government, and suggests that strikers who restrict their strike to the single month will not be subject to government reprisals.
The tactic has a name, redditometro, and it involves a detailed “lifestyle” audit that tips off tax authorities to noncompliance.
If the police observe an Italian resident living the high life (for instance, by zooming around in an expensive sports car) they can stop the individual and demand their taxpayer identification numbers, regardless of whether any criminal offense has taken place.
The information is conveyed to the tax authorities, the Agenzia delle Entrate, which subsequently audits the driver.
On audit, revenue officials ask probing questions about how the taxpayer was able to afford the fancy wheels given their meager reported income.
Nowadays being seen driving a Ferrari isn’t so cool; it has become a glaring audit flag.
Ditto for renting a weekend villa in the Tuscan hill country, or applying for membership at a Ligurian yacht club.
And don’t even think about heli-skiing at Cortina.
Other activities being monitored include shopping for high-end fashion items.
So think twice before you hit the Gucci boutique.
Redditometro was approved by Parliament in , but wasn’t widely enforced until .
Most Italians don’t like the practice.
They find it intrusive.
Piero Ostellino, an Italian news commentator, recently told the BBC:
“I’m against the Redditometro not because I’m in favor of evading taxes, I don’t think tax collection should be done by trampling on individual liberties.”
He then added, “I would like to live in a country where a cardinal can, every month, buy a pornographic magazine without having to explain this to the tax authorities.
This is like the former East Germany.”
Greece
Tax resistance continues in Greece, where the government has been raising taxes and reducing government benefits and services.
The numbers could have been worse as the government gained revenues from doubled property taxes and big hikes in income taxes that have hit most Greeks except for tax cheats who continue to largely escape sacrifice or prosecution.
Direct tax revenues increased by about 9 to 10 percent in compared with a year earlier.
Given the country’s devastating recession, which has created a record 26.8 percent unemployment and is in its sixth year, the only options left for the government is to collect from tax evaders and improve tax collections, although tax hikes have led to many more Greeks trying to hide their income, statistics showed.
Meanwhile, the government won a court victory against the tollgate runners.
The Greek Supreme Court ruled against Oropos mayor John Oikonomakou who had challenged his €200 fine for running the gate on the grounds that the toll and fine money was being siphoned off by foreign companies rather than being used for road maintenance and traffic safety.
The government has recently also added a €5 tax to medical services, which the movement is urging people to refuse to pay, and offering their legal support to anyone denied service for such refusal.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Earlier this year I went through all the back issues of Friends Journal to review how the practice of Quaker war tax resistance underwent a revival and then retreated again in the last half century or so.
We’re at the bottom of the retreat trough today.
There has been almost nothing about war tax resistance in the Journal this year.
The latest issue does have some mentions, but they’re pretty much all in the obituaries:
The obituary notice for Mary Caroline Mendenhall notes that she was part of the Fairhope single-tax corporation — a “cooperative community that hoped to address the challenges to conscience that came through the payment of taxes” — and that she was one of those Quakers who emigrated to the Monteverde settlement in Costa Rica after she “became uncomfortable with the draft and with paying taxes that contributed to militarism.”
The obituary notice for Edward Webster says that he and his wife Susan “stopped paying war taxes for a period [in ], started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund as a place for war tax resisters to redirect a portion of their taxes to, and counter-recruited at high schools.”
Spanish war tax resister Paco Ortega has joined up with the Stop Evictions group from Granada’s 15M assembly and has expanded his war tax resistance so that now he also refuses to pay the portion of his taxes devoted to the state police and national guard, legislature, monarchy, prison, election and party financing, and interest on the debt — a bit over 31% of his tax bill.
He’s redirecting the resisted portion of his taxes to the Stop Evictions project.
The government of Thailand was contemplating a law that would have granted amnesty to politicians who had perpetrated a variety of crimes over the past decade.
The opposition called for general strikes and tax resistance, and the government abandoned the amnesty plan.
In Greece, the toll resisters depended less on destruction and more on mass action — mobbing the toll booths, lifting the gates, and waving the drivers through.
Some of these activists are being prosecuted now (with mixed success).
But yet more infuriating?
The country’s legislature has voted itself a new benefits package, and among those benefits: legislators don’t have to pay highway tolls!
Some international tax resistance news:
France
There was an amusing scene last week when a hundred employees of Ecomouv, the quasi-private company responsible for collecting a new road tax in France, held a holiday party in Metz.
Posing for a group photo in front of the company offices in their santa hats, they were mistaken for a demonstration of the anti-tax bonnets rouges (red caps) by local police, who quickly intervened.
A bonnets rouges subgroup calling itself the “cash cows” showed up at the intermunicipal council of Saint-Brieuc to try to get some answers about their property taxes.
Not getting the answers they were looking for, they shut down the council meeting.
Another group of bonnets rouges blockaded a Swiss-French border crossing
to protest a new obligation on those who live in France but work in Switzerland to contribute to the French public health system (before, such workers could choose to join either the French or Swiss programs).
Joseph Graziani, head of an industrial union, threatened to lead a partial tax strike
in January in which people would refuse to pay more than a certain “reasonable” tax threshold if the government refuses to meet certain demands, which include reducing taxes, replacing the quasi-private tax collection company Equitalia, and reducing the cost of government bureaucracy.
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.)
some of the participants in “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” declaring that they won’t pay any more protection money to the government
[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 , I decided not to pay it.
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.”
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 , 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!
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.”
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.
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.
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
, 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.
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 links that have flashed by my browser in recent days:
IRS
Follies
It takes so long to reach the IRS by phone that a company has gone into business selling places in the phone queue.
That’s right.
They have many lines on which they call the IRS and stay on hold, and then you call them and buy the line that has been on hold longest so you don’t have to wait so long.
Somewhere, a star on Obama’s economic team is tallying this up as “innovative job creation.”
Padamsee claimed that he always does everything legal and correct.
He said, “I checked with lawyers.
We are a group of like-minded people, and the tax paying population of this country, and they said, anyone who works together could form a union.
And by law, a union is allowed to strike.
We will strike by not paying tax.
We plan to assemble a million people with a fee of Re 1 each, but all this is at the planning stage.
We are talking with senior lawyers and will have them on board.
Our main aim will be to make the government accountable.
If there are any recommendations, people can contact me.”
However, it is not yet specified which tax the Tax Payers’ Union will not pay, as there are various taxes in India, and most of them are indirect tax, which one pays in form of service, or while buying products.
The other important taxes which concern an individual directly, include income tax and professional tax.
This idea seems to be catching on.
Justice Arun Chaudhari, from the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court, in a ruling during a recent corruption case, said:
In my considered opinion, corruption can be beaten if all work together.
To eradicate the cancer of corruption — the “hydra-headed monster,” it is now a high time for the citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough.
That is the miasma of of corruption.
If the same continues, taxpayers may resort to refuse to pay taxes by “non-cooperation movement.”
Tommaso Cerno, a journalist and gay rights activist in Friuli, Italy, has made waves by announcing, in a letter published in Repubblica, a tax strike for gay rights.
If the government does not allow us the freedom to direct our taxes toward more enriching and sustainable funds, we will begin the process of taking that freedom for ourselves.
We will discontinue paying taxes to the government, and instead redirect our money into a community fund that distributes our income in a way that serves all of us.
As long as we continue paying for the current system in the form of taxes, we are complicit in the violence and corruption committed by it.
By withdrawing our funding of it, we withdraw our consent of its actions.
Bernard J. Berg recalls how he came out of the U.S. military doubtful that what he was doing deserved to be called “service”:
I too served in the Navy, just before Vietnam, helping to keep the sea lanes safe for United Fruit Co. and the Dulles brothers.
I later joined the war tax resistance effort sponsored by Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern.
Money which should have gone to the IRS to pay for our war crimes went into the fund to be used for worthy causes.
But the IRS had the last laugh as it garnered my bank account and got more money for illegal wars with the fines it extracted from me.
Miscellany
I just learned about the following presentation which was made at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference, and features Angela Keaton from AntiWar.com, Carla Gericke of the Free State Project, and Teresa Warmke of Fr33Aid, discussing how nonprofits can benefit from using BitCoin:
The number of U.S. citizens who are renouncing their citizenship is climbing, continuing a dramatic trend since 2008.
The Greek government has indicted several activists whom it accuses of having been part of the toll gate raids.
In response, 
