Clare Hanrahan will be facilitating a workshop on “The Power of the Purse: Women and War Tax Resistance” at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking in Memphis, Tennessee. Panel participants will include Judy Scheckel, Pam Beziat, and Kathy Kelly.
Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Pam Beziat
War tax resisters Pam Beziat, Kathy Kelly, Clare Hanrahan, and Judy Scheckel held a panel discussion about “The Power of the Purse: Women and War Tax Resistance” at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking .
According to a news account of the panel:
Whenever Pam Beziat, Nashville peace activist, thinks about paying federal income taxes, she looks at pictures of children who have been maimed, bruised and broken by war.
“I would look at the pictures and decide I was never going to pay taxes again,” said Beziat, one of four female panelists who discussed war tax resistance at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking on Saturday.
Conference keynote speaker and panelist Kathy Kelly, who was sentenced to a year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites in , said she came to the personal conviction that she would not support “bloody” government practices almost 30 years ago.
“There is no way, no how I would give my money to the Mafia, much less the IRS,” she said.
“We face a serious question about whether or not to continue to pour resources and productivity into military projects while we cannot meet human needs,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea to take that question seriously, as a personal question.”
