The Nehemiah Center 6515 Bridge Ave. Cleveland, Ohio
(Near west side of Cleveland at West 65th and
Bridge Ave.)
Deconstruct War: Use tax dollars to construct peace
A mini-conference about cutting off war’s money supply and funding
life-affirming programs. Save the dates!
Hosted by Dorothy Day Peace Tax Fund, Cleveland Catholic Worker, the
Cleveland Nonviolence Network, and the National War Tax Resistance
Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC)
The program includes presentations about war tax resistance and redirecting
tax dollars to peace, stories of individual resistance, discussion about
consequences and effectiveness, strategizing about all of our work against
war and creating the world we hope to see.
NWTRCC is holding its business meeting in Cleveland on Sunday
morning, November 8 (open to all). Along with local activists, people from
around the country who refuse to pay for war will participate in the
mini-conference.
Come for the whole weekend or one session
Registration Information will be available mid-summer .
For more information:
National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org or (800) 269‒7464
Some this-and-that, in brief:
I’ve added the section on “The Sufferings of many, for Refuſing to pay the wicked Exactions of the Ceſs, Locality, Fynes &c. Vindicated” from Alexander Shields’s book A Hind let looſe, or An Hiſtorical Repreſentation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Intereſt of Chriſt, vvith the true State thereof in all its Periods, &c as a stand-alone page.
I dropped the long “s”es for readability’s sake, and did some reformatting and breaking up of the multi-page paragraphs, but otherwise kept it pretty much as-was.
It’s tough reading, but represents an early and unusually methodical defense of tax resistance, and I hope to spend some time distilling its more interesting arguments into more modern English at some point.
Part of the new CIA Inspector General’s report that jumped out at me was this excerpt, found in an appendix, from the CIA Office of Medical Services [sic] guide on how to torture captives by waterboarding without inadvertently killing them:
“In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks.
Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excess filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.
An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.
If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required.”
Lets say you send an envelope full of powdered sugar to the IRS with a cover letter saying its anthrax and they’re all gonna die.
Furthermore lets say you’re none too bright, and you sent the envelope from “an automated postal center where [you] paid postage with [your] credit card” and they trace the envelope back to you and successfully prosecute you.
What sentence will you face?
A year and a day, apparently.
I’m off to the NWTRCC National Gathering that will be taking place in Cleveland.
I’ll update The Picket Line from the road if I can, otherwise I’ll take good notes and fill you in when I get back.
was .
I got here early to do some preliminary work as part of NWTRCC’s Administrative Committee.
While the last meeting was contentious, with the controversial issue of a possible Peace Tax Fund endorsement on the agenda, this meeting looks to be comparatively placid.
NWTRCC regulars were joined by curious locals like Tom Quinn of EcoWatch and Michael Patterson from Dennis Kucinich’s office (our meeting place is in Kucinich’s House district and he was curious enough to send an aide to take notes).
A few things jumped out at me during the opening introductory go-’round:
Jim Stockwell of North Carolina mentioned that after some initial mutual
suspicion there was surprising synergy between the traditional Tax Day
protest his war tax resistance group held
and the Tea Party protests going on
at .
Many of the local groups reported diminishing numbers and less-frequent
activity in the past months, mirroring a general doldrums in the peace
movement.
Bill Ramsey noted that it has become harder to set up alternative funds
in the post-9/11 financial paperwork era.
Ramsey also reported on an interesting and creative tax day protest in his
neck of the woods. A group grabbed hundreds of 1040 forms from public
places where such things are found (libraries, post offices, and the
like), then printed ghostly images of coffins and of children wounded in
war over the forms, and then replaced them where they had originally found
them.
Ginny Sсhnеider noted that in New Hampshire, the notoriety
of the Ed
and Elaine Brown tax protester stand-off fiasco has made it difficult
for her to do outreach in the progressive community. People hear “tax
resistance” and immediately their minds conjure up images of nuts holing
up with their arsenals and their conspiracy theories until the government
locks them up for life.
We watched a near-final cut of a film
NWTRCC is producing about war tax resistance and resisters:
Death and Taxes. It met with great acclaim (and
plenty of suggestions for last-minute edits). Last I heard, it’s due for
release .
Attendees watch a cut of Death and Taxes, an introductory war tax resistance film due to be released next month
Later, Phil Althouse, an election observer in El Salvador, updated us on conditions there, and Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace talked about how to move from activism to organizing and build bonds between disparate parts of the broader anti-war coalition.
Mike Ferner and Phil Althouse address the gathering
While coalition building always sounds great in the abstract, when it comes
down to actually doing it, it runs into the practical difficulty of finding a
common ground and deciding where to compromise and where no compromise is
possible. Ferner thought that organizing around the larger vision of
real democracy was the way to go. Other folks were skeptical. It can
be difficult to find anything approaching an ideological common ground even in
a small group like
NWTRCC
with an inherently common, specialized and political interest.
In members of
NWTRCC
there’s often a tension between avowed nonviolent principles and promotion of
progressive projects (like universal health care and publicly-financed
elections for instance) that fundamentally rely on a coercive, violent state
to carry them out. The avowedly nonviolent progressives either don’t see the
violent ramifications inherent in such projects or I have failed to understand
the ingenious way they have squared this circle. I usually avoid the
temptation to press the point, but sometimes give in.
Anyway, after this we split up into two groups: a War Tax Resistance 101
discussion group that I moderated, and a larger group that discussed issues of
interest to more experienced resisters. There were other groups that met over
the course of the afternoon as well, but by then I found it hard to be in even
one place at once.
In the evening we heard more in-depth stories of the tax resistance from our hosts, Maria Smith and Charlie Hurst, and from Juanita Nelson and Erica Weiland.
Juanita Nelson told the story of her arrest-in-a-Sears-bathrobe that she also tells in A Matter of Freedom.
Erica described her transformation from a young Dean Democrat to a tax resisting anarchist (a salvation narrative in which, to my delight, The Picket Line plays a role).
Juanita Nelson tells her story
was
.
The morning was our coordinating committee meeting, in which the general
membership formally decides on things like objectives, a budget, and any
proposals that need consensus approval. No big news to report here. Like many
such groups in our sour economy,
NWTRCC
has a thinner-than-usual budget to work with, but we adjusted as best we could
and devoted some extra energy to fundraising to compensate.
The afternoon was taken up by counselor training, in which experienced
resisters shared techniques and experiences and shared wisdom hard-earned from
many encounters with the tax collector, so that we can go back home and be
better-informed counselors who can help new resisters and prospective
resisters pick the tax resistance techniques that work best for them.
I wish I had been taking better notes in this section so I could share more of
this here, but I was feeling like trying to participate in a less journalistic
role. Suffice it to say this was one of my favorite parts of the weekend:
dense with information and experience.
These NWTRCC National Gatherings are intense. By the end of the
day my brain is all mushy and I have to strain to process one more piece of
information. The time difference got to me too, a bit. I thought I was clever,
booking an early-morning flight so I could get home mid-day and have some time
to unwind. I didn’t think that it would mean waking up at 2:30
AM home-time to get to the airport.
While I was in our session on war
tax resistance counseling skills training, coincidentally, I got an email
from someone seeking war tax resistance counseling who had read my blog and
had gone from feeling like tax resistance would be too overwhelming and
difficult to feeling hopeful that there would be a method that would be right
for her. So the heartwarming glow from the meeting has followed me home to my
inbox.
I’m home, hopefully for a good while. I’ve been away more than not lately, and
as the lady with the nice shoes says, there’s no place like home. My
work-for-a-living work is on an uptick lately, too, but I hope I’ll be able to
keep up the pace here at The Picket Line.
Are some people incontinent in general, or do people display
incontinence with respect to certain things?
What is the relationship between continence and temperance, and between
continence and endurance?
Aristotle says that there are two categories of pleasure that can prompt
incontinent behavior: “necessary” pleasures (things like food and sex), and
certain other pleasures that are worth pursuing but that people are prone to
pursue to excess (things like victory, honor, and wealth).
The pleasures in the first category (and associated pains, like hunger,
thirst, and excesses of heat & cold) are the same as those that were the
concern of temperance and intemperance (a virtue and vice Aristotle covered
in book three). When incontinence is
displayed here it is incontinence without qualification — not only a
fault but a kind of vice, Aristotle says.
The difference between continence/incontinence and temperance/intemperance is
that temperance or intemperance is a choice and a habit of character — an
exercise of the will — while incontinence is contrary to choice — a
failure of will.
For those pleasures in the second category, however, continence and
incontinence is only so with respect to the particular pleasure.
Indeed, it is not continence or incontinence proper, but is only given those
names by analogy. People who display one of these qualified varieties of
incontinence are not vicious but are merely excessive to a fault in pursuit
of good things.
I’m not sure why Aristotle distinguishes this from a vice; it seems to me
that a habit of character that leads to someone pursuing some good or
avoiding some bad excessively would qualify as a vice if in fact it is a
fault and “bad and to be avoided” (not just a harmless eccentricity).
You can find minutes and reports from ’s NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland on NWTRCC’s website.
There is typically a statute of limitations for federal tax crimes.
However, during wartime the statute of limitations for crimes “involving fraud or attempted fraud against the United States or any agency thereof in any manner, whether by conspiracy or not” goes into suspended animation “until 5 years after the termination of hostilities as proclaimed by a Presidential proclamation, with notice to Congress, or by a concurrent resolution of Congress” where the definition of “the term ‘war’ includes a specific authorization for the use of the Armed Forces, as described in section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(b)).”
There are some indications that the government is seeking to suspend the statute of limitations for federal tax crimes because of the present state of war.
TaxProf Blog reports: “The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration yesterday reported that 372,000 taxpayers erroneously claimed education tax credits in , totaling $532 million (an average of over $1,400 improper credit per taxpayer).”
Those tax resisters lucky enough to be expecting a large inheritance may take heart from this story of someone who successfully engineered her will so that her heir could donate to charity exactly enough of her estate so that she would owe no estate taxes on the remainder.
Anti-abortion political pressure has led to Congress inserting language in the upcoming health care legislation that would prohibit taxpayer money from going to pay for abortion.
Tom Tomorrow wonders when people opposed to their tax money being spent on war will get that kind of respect:
Another aspect of the upcoming health care legislation is that it includes a big role for the IRS.
This isn’t because the IRS is particularly skilled at administering social welfare programs (indeed fraud is rampant in programs like the earned income tax credit or those education tax credits mentioned earlier in this post), but because legislators have various incentives to hide the spending behind their legislation by not spending outright but only via tax credits and deductions and such.
Since increasing funding for the IRS is not politically popular, this all may have the effect of saddling the agency with more responsibility without giving it sufficient resources.
“Relationships: When One is a WTR” — about “mixed marriages” in which one partner is a resister and the other one isn’t, and the challenges this can present.
There’s a short bit from me in this article, and a photo of me and my sweetie on the cover.
News about war tax resistance actions like the South-East gathering coming up in Georgia; outreach at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking, the anarchist bookfares in Tacoma and Seattle, and the School of the Americas mobilization last month; and two upcoming nuclear weapons abolition events.
Notes about a new war tax resistance counselors’ packet, the case of long-time Maine resister Frank Donnelly (who may be facing jail time for his resistance), the possibility that health savings accounts may be levied for back taxes, and some notes about how tax liens affect your credit rating.
