Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” → Quakers → 20th–21st century Quakers → Joseph Olejak

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• A fellow named Kenneth O’Keefe has been making waves for his nicely seditious activities for some time now. In a recent interview he also made a case for tax resistance:

  When you look at citizenship, you have to understand that citizenship is a social contract between the state and the citizen. Under that contract you have, supposedly, rights and you also have obligations. Now, I look at the obligations of being a U.S. citizen and I realized I cannot pay into a tax system which is basically paying up debt to the bankers, but nonetheless, we pay into a tax system which is used to produce military capability that is also ultimately used in other parts of the world, which is ultimately killing my brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. I do not agree to contribute to a tax system that is being used to commit mass murder against people I consider to be my brothers and sisters halfway around the world. It’s violation of my ethics as a man, of someone who believes in justice for everyone and wants a better world for everyone. I cannot pay for the murder of my brothers and sisters — and that’s part of the contract of citizenship. So I said, which was to me a sensible thing and a moral thing to do, “Take my name off of that contract, because I do not agree to it and ultimately I will walk away.” I left a paradise life in Hawaii, had my own business, I was making money, lived on the beach, and did something I loved. I had a beautiful, beautiful life and I walked from that, because I absolutely, 100 percent disagree with the actions of my birth nation and I find them so criminal that I need my name taken off that list. I will enter into a contract again with the U.S. if indeed it carries itself with honor and will respect the US Constitution; if the U.S. Constitution is indeed made the supreme law of the United States, then I will happily come back to my nation and adhere to the contract.

  It’s a difficult process. It’s costly, you have to leave the country, you have to swear under oath, you have to hand over your passport, you have to fill up the forms — I’ve done all that. I would argue that probably the reason why they have not honored my right of self-determination, a human right of self-determination, is because it could have set the precedent, which could spark an imaginative idea that people can look out around the world and say, “You know what? I don’t actually agree with this contract with my nation any longer, I want to enter into a new contract.” This is why I refer to myself as a world citizen, we’re all world citizens. My human family is where my allegiance goes; I don’t give my allegiance to one unit, one group, one nation, one religion. My whole human family is my brothers and sisters and ultimately I give my allegiance to them. That’s the contract I will honor and if any other contract, inferior to that one, will try to compel me to pay for the murder of my brothers and sisters — I will not partake in that contract. I’m living here in the U.K. and haven’t made enough money to even be taxable for the last 12 years, but I might make enough money this year to actually be taxable, and I’ll tell you what: I will not pay into the U.K. tax system and fund the murder of my brothers and sisters halfway around the world. I simply refuse to do it, and I would argue that other people should look at the contract like that and, maybe, if we all decide to enter into a new contract like that we can end war for good.

• Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak has joined the rare pantheon of American war tax resisters who have suffered criminal sanctions for their stand. Earlier this year he was sentenced to 26 weekends in jail and ordered to pay $240,000 in back taxes he had been evading out of repugnance for the government’s militarism.
• I’ve seen a couple of summaries of tax resistance in the American colonies pass through my feed reader in recent days:
  • “Taxes, trade, and resistance” is part of an educational project meant to explain revolutionary-era North Carolina and is based on official government history (literally: it’s based on a report from the U.S. State Department’s “Office of the Historian”).
  • “American Resistance to British Taxes 1763–75” by Sanderson Beck sketches out a chronological view on the various taxes imposed on the colonies and the resistance that followed. Resistance tactics described include:
    • intimidation of tax enforcement collaborators
    • attacks on customs-enforcing ships
    • attacks on tax offices
    • petitions and legal challenges
    • boycotts of British manufactures
    • smuggling
    • bribes of tax officials
    • attacks on tax enforcers
    • attacks on the homes of tax enforcers
    • attacks on the homes of tax collaborators
    • encouraging tax officials and enforcers to resign or desert
    • humiliation attacks on tax officers (such as hanging in effigy, mock trials)
    • creating a parallel government
    • convincing the government to rescind the tax
    • signing public pledges of tax resistance
    • socially boycott taxpayers
    • interfere with arrest attempts

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out. Contents include:

• V. Schneider’s take on the ramifications of the Affordable Care Act for war tax resisters. I’ve shared some of my experiences with the Act’s provisions as a low-income, return-filing resister here at The Picket Line. Ms. Schneider writes about the challenges of the Act from the perspective of a resister who does not file returns, and therefore has no clear way of proving that she qualifies for the Act’s insurance subsidies. Schneider has some helpful recommendations for non-filling resisters who cannot afford non-subsidised insurance.
• Some notes on the new federal standard deduction and personal exemption amounts for the upcoming tax year, on the new IRS program that allows you to download some of the files the agency keeps on you, on a new website that keeps track of the legal aspects of alternative currencies, and on the troubles of the increasingly overwhelmed and under-budgeted IRS.
• Jason Rawn’s review of 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns, which begins: “As you may have just been thinking, three bags of cobras, homespun cloth, home-brewed beer, and transvestite Welshmen are all things that relate directly to tax resistance…”
• Some war tax resistance news, including a report of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day war tax resistance display at a recent anti nuclear weapons protest, a mention of some recent honors given to war tax resisters Robin Harper and Joanne Sheehan, and a brief note on the conviction and jailing of Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak.
  • You can find more about the Olejak case in this recent article from the Times-Union. Olejak is spending several consecutive weekends in prison, and has agreed (in a plea bargain) to partially and incrementally pay the $242,684 the IRS says he owes since he stopped paying in 1994.
• Some news about NWTRCC itself:
  • The group is looking for people who want to serve on its Administrative Committee.
  • The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund — which helps to reimburse any penalties and interest seized from a war tax resister by the government — is now under new management.
  • The next NWTRCC national gathering is scheduled for May 2–4 and will be held in San Diego, California.
• Robin Harper reflects on the development of “redirection” as a war tax resistance tactic: “I think it is fair to say that the essence and origins of the very widespread practice today of WTRs conscientiously redirecting their refused taxes into channels of constructive activism, community building, and addressing human needs, can be traced to [his own case in] 1958.”

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

Friends Journal has finally gotten around to reviewing American Quaker War Tax Resistance, briefly anyway.

I unfortunately released the book during a lull in the magazine’s interest in the topic of war tax resistance (which may correspond to a similar lull in the Society of Friends generally), and it looked for a long while as though they weren’t going to consider the book worthy of mention at all, so I’m pleased to know their readers will learn about it after all.

In other war tax resistance news:

• War tax resisters Susan Cundiff and Peg Morton were on Jefferson Public Radio in Oregon yesterday to explain how and why people refuse to pay taxes for war. You can hear a recording at this link.
• The Nuclear Resister covers the case of war tax resister Joseph Olejak who was recently convicted of federal criminal charges for his resistance.
• Erica Weiland of NWTRCC spoke last night at a conference on “Economic Disobedience: Taking Action to Challenge the Status Quo.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there…

• Italy’s “Northern League” says it plans to lauch a tax strike later this year, but it seems to me they’ve made similar threats in the past and nothing has come of it. Sure enough: Next Quotidiano gives us a run-down of every time the League has threatened a tax strike since 1992.
• If you decide to resist the federal income tax, you have to decide whether to file a tax return or not. One of the disadvantages of non-filing is that if the IRS notices, they’ll file a sort of dummy return for you: and usually one that considerably overstates the income tax you would have owed if you filed yourself. Tony Nitti at his Forbes blog, describes how this screwed over tax resister Thomas Salzer, who went to tax court to try to get them to accept a more accurate, less expensive, but tardily-filed tax return, but lost his case.
• American war tax resister Joseph Olejak, one of the few such resisters to have served time on criminal charges for his resistance, shares some of his thoughts about activism, resistance, and how he can continue to resist when being tax-compliant is a condition of his probation at The Nuclear Resister.
• The state secretary of one of India’s Communist Parties — CPI(M) — has called on residents of Kerala to refuse to pay new taxes announced by the state government.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

War Tax Resistance

• Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
• Peg Morton writes of the opportunity she had to help the war tax resistance of John Lindsay-Poland through her participation in the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an interview with long-time anti-nuclear activist Frances Crowe. In that interview, she touches on her war tax resistance:

  I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent to my federal taxes to charity.

  So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my conscience.

• American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak explains how he came to take his stand, and how his Meeting supported him when he went to jail for it:

• Henry Braun, a poet and Vietnam-era war tax resister, died recently. “In the 1960s, he organized poetry readings against the Vietnam war and participated in the War Tax Resistance movement. He was convicted of tax evasion because he chose to give a portion of his taxes to the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital and to the city’s public schools.”
• War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.

Other Links of Interest

• Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
• The latest numbers suggest that a record number of people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in 2014.
• After a New York Times exposé about the IRS’s use of civil forfeiture to seize money from innocent people, the agency released a statement announcing that it would be reforming its use of the practice.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• The Friends Journal has started, in its latest issue, to publish the prison journals of convicted American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak.
• NWTRCC has begun to assemble its list of Tax Day actions for 2015. Find out if anything is going on in your area, or let them know if you have anything planned.
• A couple of artists — Núria Güell and Levi Orta — decided to form a shell company in an off-shore tax haven as an experiment. They then turned the company, along with its tax advantages and ease of evading government regulations, over to a group of activists who are trying to create counter-capitalist autonomous projects. Here’s a video of a panel on which they are joined by some other speakers to discuss whether there’s any “implicit contradiction in replicating capitalist strategies to build anti-capitalist social dynamics” (in Spanish).
• There’s been a lot of buzz around the interwebs about a celebrity news report that actors Greg Wise and Emma Thompson have pledged to stop paying taxes until the U.K. government cracks down on big-business tax evaders and enablers like HSBC. I saw the original report this story came from, and to me it just sounded like Wise was blowing off steam in a “why I oughta!” sort of way and the reporter, perhaps for effect, took it more seriously than that. I haven’t seen anything from the couple since the story broke and got legs either confirming or denying the supposed pledge. But it is getting people talking about the circumstances under which it is appropriate to cut the government off.

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

• a look back at the life and work of Juanita Nelson with contributions from Bob Bady, Karl Meyer, Ginny Sсhnеider, Ed Hedemann, Lori Barg, and Ed Agro
• some notes about trends in tax enforcement including IRS levies on royalty income, the sudden decline in property seizures for the past 15 years, phone tax resistance, and Elizabeth Boardman’s attempt to get some respect for war tax resistance in the courts
• a note about the passing of Dirk Panhuis, who had been active with Conscience and Peace Tax International
• some updates about war tax resisters Julia Butterfly Hill and Joseph Olejak, the Spring Rising anti-war action, Greg Wise’s mouthing off about tax refusal, and the Mennonite Central Committee’s war tax redirection program
• news about tax day outreach on social media, at the U.S. Social Forum, at the Jewish Voice for Peace conference, and the Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship
• and a profile of Peter and Mary Sprunger-Froese of the Bijou Community — excerpt:

  Members of the Bijou Community were already involved in war tax resistance when Peter and Mary arrived. Early on, money was held in common, but that evolved over the years to each doing their own thing. One year the community did a tax protest and filed a 1040 saying they didn’t want to pay anything “because we don’t want to support the war.” That seemed to trigger an audit, which took an exhausting six months of collecting receipts to convince the IRS that members were not living off donations that came in for the soup kitchen and houses of hospitality. “The IRS said don’t file like that anymore because it messes up our system, and we said don’t audit us anymore because it messes up ours!”

Also, on the War Tax Talk blog, Jason Rawn reviews David Hartsough’s book Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Excerpt:

David Hartsough is a Quaker and a War Tax Resister who has for decades been redirecting a large portion of his “tax obligations,” believing that if war is abolished, “humanity can not only survive and better address the climate crisis and other dangers, but will be able to create a better life for everyone. The reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination.” (Editor’s note: The 2016 U.S. budget for past, present, and future wars is $1,300 billion.) He cofounded the Nonviolent Peaceforce, inspired in part by Gandhi’s idea of a shanti sena, a peace army, and this organization is now active in 40 countries, stationing trained professional peaceworkers in conflict areas around the globe and is sustained by an $8 million budget. He works with World Beyond War and is currently executive director of Peaceworkers in San Francisco. Waging Peace has been in the works for 27 years.

And Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was a guest on Law and Disorder radio recently.

The Friends Journal has run a second collection of writings from Joseph Olejak’s jail experiences. Olejak served a series of 26 weekends at Columbia County (New York) Jail as part of his sentence for tax resistance.

Here are a couple of excerpts that concern the unusually difficult path of this war tax resister:

Weekend 11

This weekend was the most boring of all the weekends. My mind began to turn about all the loose ends in my life that have been unraveling since I began the peace witness. The frayed edges are many and are getting more and more difficult to manage as time marches on. I keep thinking of the central question in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22: “What does a sane man do in an insane society?”

My situation is becoming more insane by the day. I made what seemed to be a sane response to violence, but the price is very high. The sums I have been required to pay — restitution to the court, keeping current with taxes, paying child support, paying lawyers to manage this giant mess, and maintaining an apartment and staying current with business expenses — are completely unmanageable.

Weekend 18

…Back in November when I was sentenced to the 26 weekends, I had to inform my employer — a company I do consulting work for — that I could no longer work on the weekends. Since the information was public knowledge and there would be a good chance my war tax resistance would be known, I opted to tell them the truth.

They fired me.

I applied to the probation department this week to attend a speakers’ conference in Las Vegas to jump-start my speaking career. I filled out all the forms and wrote a nice letter.

Request denied.

I got a call on Monday, March 24 from my probation officer. She sounded like she wanted me to take this opportunity, but her hands were tied by the bureaucratic nightmare she works in. “We got your request. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to deny it.”

Getting fired and losing the income from consulting was a big blow both financially and emotionally. What it meant from a practical standpoint was clear. I could not pay the tax bill for 2013 for New York State or federal income tax. They’d set me up to fail.

As I sat in my office with a dead phone in my hand, I came to the sickening realization that the prison-industrial complex was not some abstract thing that affects other unfortunate people. It was directly impacting my life. I am now and — as far out as I can see — will be in a debt spiral to various agencies of government until the day I die.

Lots of tax resistance news sliding by my browser in recent days as the federal income tax filing deadline approaches in the U.S.:

• A syndicated feature about American tax resisters — featuring Rod Nippert, Jay Sordean, Ruth Benn, Peter Smith, Cindy Sheehan, Ann Barron, and Joseph Olejak — appeared in newsweeklies around the country this week, including the Colorado Springs Independent, Salt Lake City Weekly, Athens, Georgia Flagpole, and Baltimore City Paper
• The author of that piece, Mary Finn, was interviewed on Democracy in Crisis.
• The Independent also ran a second article — The new tax resistance? — about a Baltimore woman named Kesh, who has stopped paying her taxes:

  This year she isn’t paying because she began thinking more about where her tax money goes and she feels like she can’t keep paying the government. “It’s not going to anything that I can see personally that is going to benefit me,” Kesh, who asked that only her first name be used, says. “But me paying it is definitely going to hit me. Not having that money that needs to go towards other things that I have to pay — that affects me immediately. That’s a loss for me.”

  The inauguration of President Donald Trump only worsened her feeling about the situation. First, because she has her doubts about whether Trump has bothered to pay his fair share of taxes, and second, because his administration seems to be waging a war against people like her. “I’m all the groups that are hated. I’ve decided to come to earth in this body and be black, be a woman, gay, so you know, I get hit on every side of it,” she says. “I was a teenaged mother, I’m a single mom — I’m all the things [Trump and Republicans] hate.”

  Living in Baltimore, where Freddie Gray died in police custody in April 2015 and where just last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to hamper police reform, taxes funding the police are an issue for her as well. (Police are primarily funded through local and state governments, but Kesh isn’t paying state taxes either.)

  “I know that my tax money is going to the police and I can walk down the street and get shot,” she says. “I can get shot by my own money and get killed by my own money and there’s no one that’s gonna do shit about it. So basically I’m giving you money to kill me and people that look like me.”

  Unlike long-time tax resisters, Kesh is new to this. She doesn’t know where it will lead her yet — hence her decision not to use her name. The Internal Revenue Service may target her, but not paying feels right.

  “I’m basically saying, ‘Fuck you.’ ” she says. “I’m keeping my money.”

• There are lots of war tax resistance-related actions going on around the country in the tax-filing season this year.
• The Alaska Dispatch looks back at the Alaska photo [that] did for the IRS what that passenger video did for United Airlines. (In this case, IRS agents who broke the windows of a car to drag out the passengers so they could seize it in 1979. This was photographed, and the outrage led to IRS policy changes on using violence during collection.)
• The Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies is continuing its series on tax resistance with A Call for Tax Resistance — “a joint appeal from leading nonviolent activists and organizations, urging US taxpayers to nonviolently express their opposition to the policies of the Trump administration by refusing to pay a symbolic amount of their US federal income tax, and instead donate that amount to a deserving charity or institution.”
• War tax resisters’ letters-to-the-editor and op-eds are starting to appear, too, including ones from:
  • Daniel Sicken, and
  • Sue Barnhart

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content that includes:
  • Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
  • Mennonite Church creates a “Peace Tax Fund” — a report back from the Mennonite Church USA national gathering, where a war tax redirection fund was relaunched.
  • Joseph Olejak reflects on what he did when his war tax resistance led the government to revoke his professional license.
  • Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley of the Agape Community interviewed.
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
• The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
• Attacks on traffic ticket radar robots continue, with French resisters disabling them as quickly as the government can prop them back up. Attacks have also taken place in recent weeks in Germany, England, and Spain.