[I]n my unsystematic, affectionate observation of our community, our movement, our campaign, whatever the right word is for it, I don’t see much that suggests we’re being successful in our outreach, or that suggests we’re growing and flourishing as a movement.
This isn’t to put down anyone’s commitment, my own included, or the solid moral reasoning it’s based on, but I’m guessing that what I wonder is, what would it be like to sit down at a gathering and raise a couple of new questions, which at least have the benefit of being new, however crackpottish they may seem?
Here are the ones on my list: 1) Why are we so disproportionately white (at least, at all the meetings I’ve ever attended)? 2) Why have we failed to become a larger and more powerful movement? and 3) in response to a visionary comment made at one gathering by Bob Bady (and this one I heard myself!), namely, “if we built a better movement, people would come to it,” what would we need to do to build a seriously better movement than the one we have now?
Rosenwald was responding to the preliminary minutes from the NWTRCC meeting in Nashville and reacting to a comment he heard from a participant at a regional gathering: “we always talk about two things: outreach to non-WTRs and sustaining ourselves as a movement.
When are we going to start talking about something new?”
I think Rosenwald is on to something.
The war tax resistance movement seems to be spinning its wheels and it’s time to reexamine what we’re doing.
To his first question, I have an observation or two.
I don’t know much about the demographics of the war tax resistance movement, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it is “disproportionally white” as he says.
I think this is probably because today’s war tax resistance movement in the U.S. descends from mostly-white religious movements like the Quakers and Catholic Workers with a more-recent infusion from the mostly-white anti-Vietnam-war movement.
Over time, certain aspects of white American (counter-)culture have permeated the movement — not because the people in the movement were deliberately trying to make it a white one, but because with few exceptions, they felt that such things were comfortable and unexceptional.
, when I went to the national NWTRCC meeting in Santa Rosa, I noted:
Because these sorts of things are par-for-the-course in the “white granola left,” it is easy for people who are part of that subculture not to realize that they may be somewhat off-putting to people who are not.
The war tax resistance movement often behaves as though we were trying to broadcast that we are very welcoming to white, mild-mannered, organic vegetarian, Dalai Lama supporting, folk-music-loving, gun-control advocates who voted for Kucinich.
That message comes through loud and clear.
Not that we should be broadcasting that mild-mannered et ceteras aren’t welcome, but if that welcome message is the loudest message we’re putting out, that’s the subculture we’ll be drawing our members from.
As for how to make this movement larger, more powerful, better, and more effective… I’ve got an even crazier idea.
People in the war tax resistance movement have two modes of trying to make change and influence people:
On the one hand, we try to influence the government not to be such a pack of scoundrels.
On the other hand, we try to convince people who also dislike the government’s scoundrelism to adopt tax resistance as a way of protesting it or of ending complicity with it.
When trying to convince the government, we use the whole assortment of sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, protest marches, blockades, angry denunciations of all varieties, lawsuits, petitions and the like.
When trying to convince the taxpayers, though, suddenly we get very timid.
To the IRS, the tax resister will say “I cannot pay, and I won’t pay, because if I did, I would be complicit in the murder and thievery that this government engages in.”
But to the taxpayer who is complicit in the murder and thievery, the tax resister will say, “y’know, if you’re interested, you can make a powerful statement by redirecting the thirty-four cents in phone tax you pay every month, but if it’s too much bother, I understand.”
It is a shame that we divide our energy in this way.
The government will ignore us no matter how obnoxious we are (because we’re a fairly small, powerless movement and because they don’t care what we think), and we pretty much invite everybody else to ignore us by the timidity of our message.
My suggestion is to turn this around.
Let’s take ourselves seriously and act as though we believe what I think we believe: that the government is only the monster that we allow it to be by feeding it, that there’s no anti-war bumper sticker clever enough to make you actually anti-war if you’re still supporting the war with your money, that paying taxes to the U.S. government is not a neutral act but a pro-war, pro-militarism, pro-government act.
Let’s turn around and protest the taxpaying peace movement with the same energy we have been using to protest the government in vain.
I’d like to see us picket the taxpayers Michael Moore and Ward Churchill.
I’d like us to remind the folks applauding Iraq war refuseniks that conscientious objection is for everyone, not just for those in uniform.
I’d like to see us start a letter-writing campaign to MoveOn or a sit-in at the next United For Peace and Justice meeting, asking them to join the opposition.
I want to see us blockading the next protest march, holding a banner reading “When you’re serious, get back to us!”
Let’s make it crystal clear to the people who just might care that the best way to start opposing the war is to cut off your support for it.
I’m being a little provocative here for effect.
Some of the ideas I mention might be counter-productive and following their example might turn us into the annoying nags of the peace movement rather than expanding our influence.
There’s a good way and a bad way to go about this.
But I think that our current strategy of not standing up and challenging the paper-thin opposition of the taxpaying peace movement is no strategy at all.
The Brattleboro Reformer reports on a group of tax resisters — including Daniel Sicken, Ellen Kaye, Bob Bady and Erik Schickendanz — who decided to write their checks to charity instead of to the U.S. Treasury :
In all, $5,000 was given to charities, including to the Windham County Reads program, to a group starting a community garden on Upper Dummerston Road and to the Citizens Awareness Network, a local activist group. ¶ Morningside Shelter received almost $800 from the tax resistors.
“We are opening a new building for homeless pregnant women and those who have just given birth,” said David Mattocks, the executive director of the shelter.
“This is a significant contribution to that project.”
Daniel Sicken, an East Dummerston resident and a member of Tax Resisters of Conscience, said, though he pays local and state taxes, he hasn’t paid federal taxes in .
He said giving the money instead to charity is much more appropriate.…
“But it’s hard to be a resistor,” said Sicken.
“It has a lot of rewards, but also a lot of difficulties.”
Sicken said though he has never been prosecuted for his failure to pay federal taxes, he and other resisters have had to learn to live with very little money or within the barter economy — trading goods and services for other goods and services.…
“Not paying taxes has liberated me from consumer society which has improved the quality of my life,” said Ellen Kaye, a 43-year-old Brattleboro resident who said she stopped paying federal taxes after a trip to Nicaragua in .
Kaye said she saw how her tax dollars were being used to kill innocent people and she was disgusted.
She said when it came time to file her taxes that year, she became physically ill, thinking about where her money was going.
Her husband, Bob Bady, 53, of Brattleboro, said the last time he paid federal taxes was during the Vietnam war.
He said though he was 18 at the time, he refused to serve in the military.
“And if I’m not willing to fight, why would I pay for someone else to fight for me?” asked Bady.
One summer day , Janet Hicks was putting up tomato sauce in her kitchen when she heard a knock at the door.
Outside stood a man wearing black shoes and an ID badge.
“He said, ‘Are you Janet Hicks?’ ” she recalls.
“I said, ‘Yes.’
He said he was from the IRS.
“And I said, ‘Oh, I’ve been expecting you for a few years. Come on in.’ ”
The agent had come to collect the taxes that Hicks, in an act of civil disobedience, had decided she would no longer pay.
Since the visit from the IRS, Hicks has taken care of some of her state and local fiscal obligations.
But as of last week, the Burlington cook still hadn’t paid a cent of the federal income tax she owes.
However they practice it, tax resisters tend to operate outside of the traditional economic system.
Hicks’ frugal lifestyle enables her to avoid paying income tax.
Robert Riversong, of Warren, used to transfer his savings to a girlfriend’s account and buy money orders from a gas station whenever he needed to pay bills.
And Bob Bady, who lives in Brattleboro, stopped practicing as a registered nurse in after the IRS threatened to seize his wages.
Still, the IRS had its way with Bady.
In , 19 years after he stopped filing tax returns, agents seized his Massachusetts home.
“There have been consequences to being a war-tax resister,” Bady admits.
“But then, supporting America’s military policy of exploitation also has consequences.
I feel better for having decided to choose consequences that were in line with my belief.”
in the United States, and all across the country people were scrambling to get to the post office in time to have their tax returns postmarked by the deadline.
There to meet them were tax resisters:
The Ryder Report has video of the protest in Keene, New Hampshire, including feedback from passers-by.
In Brattleboro, Vermont, war tax resisters including Bob Bady and Daniel Sicken redirected their taxes to local charities:
Kevin Flaherty, a postal employee who ducked out in the afternoon for a smoke break, said it was encouraging to see the war tax resisters give away their money.
“It’s great,” he said, pointing out that it was Kevin Flaherty the citizen — not Kevin Flaherty the postal worker — who was supporting the group.
“Sometimes when people are paying their taxes, I joke that somebody has to pay for the Iraq War.
Maybe this will make them pay attention.”
Tax resisters in New York City handed out War Resisters League budget pie charts at the midtown post office.
Joshua Klein of Nashua, New Hampshire filed his tax returns , but decided to include a protest letter instead of a check.
“Klein would not reveal how much he owed but said he’s donating the money to America’s Second Harvest, the largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the country, and the American Civil Liberties Union, although he’s not affiliated with either group.”
In Los Alamos, New Mexico, two protesters were arrested for trespassing during a vigil at the Los Alamos National Laboratories.
The protesters said they were there “to prayerfully encourage the nonviolent, safe, clean disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, along with the clean-up of LANL… [and] to visibly celebrate the war-tax boycott organized by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.”
War tax resisters in Bangor, Maine, including Larry Dansinger, protested at the post office and gave away redirected taxes.
One of the grants was a scholarship to a student who, because he has refused to register with the selective service system (for the military draft), will be ineligible to apply for college financial aid.
The Home News Tribune of New Jersey has a video report of the war tax protest at the post office there.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, peace activists held a “penny poll” in which they asked passers-by how they would prioritize the nation’s budget.
Meanwhile, constitutionalist tax protesters handed out documentaries and documentation about their theories.
In Berkeley, California, Code Pink was out with their “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” banner.
Free Speech Radio News covered national protests over war taxes, government spending priorities, and the Capitol Hill press conference.
Along with the news coverage, bloggers commemorated with more personal commentary:
At The Begging Bowl, Jake writes about his tax resistance: “The money I would have paid the government has gone to the Chicago Anti-Hunger Foundation.
When votes no longer matter we vote with our dollars.
I vote for the works of mercy and feeding the hungry.
And if it means the IRS is gonna come knocking on my door for $119, I will offer them some food too.
And if they ask for a check, I’ll go with them to jail.
That’s another work of mercy, visit the imprisoned.
If we took the works of mercy as seriously as we took our 1040s and economic stimulus package, the Kingdom of God would be at hand.”
J.D. Tuccille, at Disloyal Opposition, gives a thumbs up for tax resisters — “whatever their reasons, I think it’s worth saluting folks who go out of the way to avoiding feeding the beast.”
Kerrie, at State & Local Politics, reacts to news coverage of the Schwieberts: “It takes a whole lot of nerve to do what his couple is doing.
But I wonder if Bush would take notice and stop the war if more people took this route to protest the war?
I know that we have to do something because things are getting worse not better.”
Will Shetterly, at It’s All One Thing, discusses tax resistance, and includes some inspirational quotes from tax resisters.
Colrain, Mass., —
Three years before he founded the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in
St. Louis in
, Randy Kehler started protesting the
Government’s military budget by not paying his Federal income taxes.
the Internal Revenue Service
seized Mr. Kehler’s modest house, tucked in a valley among apple orchards and
farms, and told him it would be sold unless he paid $20,000 in back taxes
plus $7,000 in interest.
Mr. Kehler, a lobbyist, and his wife, Betsy Corner, say they will neither pay
money to the Government nor move out of their house if they are ordered to be
evicted. They have urged members of their community not to bid on their
house. So far, nobody has.
A spokesman for the revenue service, Frank Keith, said it had not kept
statistics on tax protesters since , when
there were 21,300. Tax resistance groups estimate that
year, 10,000 to 20,000 Americans will not
pay income taxes or will pay less than what they owe to protest military
spending.
Tax Money to Charities
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner pay state and local taxes each year. They figure
out how much they owe the Federal Government and send a Form 1040 to the
I.R.S.,
but the money involved is sent to charities.
“I spent years trying to stop nuclear weapons through legal channels, through
legislation and education, but not one single production line has been shut
down,” said Mr. Kehler, adding that he was more than willing to sacrifice his
home for the sake of his conscience.
The
I.R.S.,
imposes stiff criminal and civil penalties against people and organizations
that do not file tax returns or do not pay in full. People who do not pay for
reasons of conscience are treated no differently from other evaders. The
deadline for filing a Federal income tax return this year is
.
The Tax Resistance Movement
Tax resistance organizations say their numbers have been rising gradually,
especially among people who choose to deduct a token amount from what they
legally owe. Some boycott the Federal excise tax on telephone service, the
revenue of which has been used to help finance the military.
Like Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner, many other tax resisters shape their lives
around a decision not to pay taxes. They remain self-employed; employers
could withhold the hated taxes from their pay. Most do not have bank accounts
or other assets that could be seized. Some deliberately keep their income
below taxable levels: $4,950 for a single person, $8,900 for a married couple
under the age of 65.
Last week, a Federal district judge in Philadelphia heard arguments in a suit
filed by the Internal Revenue Service against a Quaker church that the
Government has charged with refusing to withhold over $11,000 in taxes from
employees who object to paying them.
How Some Penalties Worked Out
Prosecution of tax resisters does not appear uniform. Bob Bady, a next-door
neighbor of Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner, said he had not filed a return since
and had not been penalized. Rabbi Michael
A. Robinson of Temple Israel in Croton,
N.Y., began paying only
70 percent of his taxes to protest the Vietnam War, and the revenue service
seized his bank account and began a six-year audit that ended in
. “In the end, they got more money than they
would if I had paid my tax, because of the interest on it,” he said.
Americans have been protesting the use of tax money for military purposes
since before the Federal income tax was created in
by the 16th
Amendment. Thoreau refused to pay taxes levied for the Mexican War of
and encouraged other citizens to
do the same. He spent a night in jail.
The story of how Kehler & Corner lost and then regained their house, and
how a community of supporters used the seizure as an educational opportunity,
is told in the film An Act of Conscience.
Bob Bady is still resisting taxes, now from Vermont.
Michael Robinson had the honor of having been arrested alongside Martin Luther
King in . His home was a way station for
conscientious objectors fleeing for Canada during the Vietnam War. He moved to
California in and was active in the peace
movement there; he died in .
In a spirited, harmonious opening session of the joint National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Fall gathering / 25th annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters, more than fifty war tax resisters from across the country (and a few WTR-curious from the Boston area and elsewhere) gathered at the Cambridge Friends Meeting house .
The rare joint gathering started with a panel session.
I took some notes along the way, but got carried away by the back-and-forth and the ideas and sometimes forgot to jot things down.
Local resister Mike Prokosch started things off by emphasizing what military spending costs us in terms of opportunity costs — that is, what things of common benefit we could be funding but are neglecting because of our pathologically bloated military spending.
He suggests that the future of an organized war tax resistance movement means “organizing on the basis of interest, not ideology.”
We need to find out whose ox is being gored when money is siphoned out of communities and into the Pentagon and appeal to them to join us based on, if not common objectives exactly, at least a common enemy.
Mike Prokosch addresses the gathering
Long-time war tax resisters Juanita Nelson and Bob Bady spoke next, giving an overview of the birth and growth of the modern American war tax resistance movement, from Ernest Bromley’s refusal to buy a tax stamp for his car during World War Ⅱ, to the founding of the Peacemakers in , through such highlights as the IRS siege of the Kehler/Corner house, to the present day.
Nelson told the story of being hauled off to jail in her bathrobe back in the day.
She says that in all of the decades she’s been resisting, the IRS has only gotten $4 out of her, when part of her pay as a model was withheld.
She also expressed that the war tax resistance community in her neck of the woods “has dwindled… now we’re half a dozen people meeting every other month.”
Bady suggested that a key to becoming a more effective and powerful movement is to speak up more.
Too many war tax resisters, he says, are satisfied with feeling that they have a clean conscience and are content to stay safely quiet, under the radar.
We need to make more noise and be more of a friction to wear down the mechanism of the war machine, which will also help us to get the attention and support of other activists.
Ruth Benn explained what the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is, how it operates, and the range of philosophies and methods used by its members.
This was old hat to me, so I didn’t take many notes, but it was an eye-opener I’m sure to some of the newbies or to those who are locally- or regionally-focused and don’t give much thought to the national organization.
Erica Weiland spoke of how she came into war tax resistance after a frustrating time trying to work within a peace movement that seemed to be counterproductive when it was productive of anything at all.
Hers is one of my favorite “salvation narratives” because she always mentions The Picket Line as one of the things that helped her take the plunge into being a war tax resister.
Katherine Fisher spoke next of how her decision to become a war tax resister grew out of her joining and working within the Society of Friends.
She says that when she was still in school, she heard some people from the New York Yearly Meeting (I think it was) talk about war tax resistance and she filed it away as something she’d need to consider.
Since she was still a dependent on her parents’ tax returns, the concern wasn’t urgent for her, but when she got out of school and got a full-time job she had to confront her choice.
She decided that she would refuse to pay her taxes to the government but would instead put the money in a war tax resisters’ escrow account and would write to the IRS to explain her position.
First, though, she took this tentative decision with her to a “clearness committee” in her Quaker meeting that she had asked to help challenge and clarify her decision.
She spoke of this process, and of the support she got (and continues to get) from her meeting throughout.
It was an inspiring, interesting, and well-told story, and a helpful contrast to the many go-it-alone stories of tax resistance that one commonly hears.
Earlier in , a handful of us who are on the administrative committee of NWTRCC got together to do business.
I’d love to share with you some insider tidbits of what goes on in our chamber of sedition, but… you’d be bored to tears.
One of these days we’ll have to put some sinister plot on the agenda, but as it is we mostly were talking budget, fundraising, schedules, objectives, who is going to be moderating what part of what discussion, and so forth — like just about any other small organization.
Useful stuff, certainly, for making the more interesting parts of the larger meeting flow smoothly, but not in itself the sort of stuff to get your blood racing.
was the first full day of the joint National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Fall gathering / 25th annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters in Boston.
The gathering began, as many such meetings do, with introductions.
To mix things up, we first spent some time getting acquainted with our neighbors and then went around the circle introducing each other and briefly summarizing some of their recent war tax resistance-related work.
This gave us a great overview of the variety of such activism.
For example, I introduced Andrea, who has spent the last several years concentrating in her work on the plight of political prisoners and on prison reform.
She is now starting a worker-owned cooperative and is intentionally designing its operating charter so that it will function to help facilitate the war tax resistance of those of its worker/owners who are resisters.
After introductions, people shared some of the challenges and boosts they had encountered in their recent war tax resistance practice.
Some examples I remember:
Several people remarked on how doing war tax resistance as part of a community of resisters — or even with just a single buddy — can help everyone involved, not only in their own practice but in some way making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Larry Rosenwald talked about how he refuses to pay his taxes, but doesn’t take steps to resist the inevitable IRS levy that follows.
Instead he uses the occasion to publicize the fact that he’s been levied and to explain why he resists (often in the form of an op-ed essay).
One person suggested that a winning message for reaching out to young people is “you’ve already been drafted,” meaning, of course, that though there’s no military conscription, the tax system forces us all to be galley slaves rowing the ship of state.
Bob Bady recalled that back when the IRS was trying to seize his house, he asked Ernest Bromley how he’d dealt with the stress when the IRS tried [unsuccessfully, see The Picket Line, ] to seize his house.
Bromley answered: “I just assumed it was God doing it and accepted it; that freed me up to do what I had to do.”
That threw Bady for a loop, but he says with some more perspective he gets it: “The things I spent years worrying about losing turned out to be no big deal.”
Clark Hanjian said that in his experience, we have a lot more allies than we might think.
When he, sometimes with trepidation, has to explain his resistance to someone like a potential employer, he finds that surprisingly often they respond not with bewilderment or hostility but with a sympathetic nod and a “that’s a good idea.”
[Clark asked me to correct the record: “It made me chuckle when I read the phrase ‘sometimes with trepidation,’ since I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘trepidation’ in reference to myself, and especially not in reference to my WTR.
On the contrary, I usually try to take a fearless (some might call it careless) approach to my WTR.
I recall my comment was in response to a woman who spoke about her fear of WTR, so perhaps some notes got interchanged?
Anyway, the only reason I mention this is because I think that part of the benefit of sharing our stories with others is to reduce fear.
I thought maybe you might want to revise this account so we don’t introduce fear into a story where none exists.”] (Case in point: on night we went out for beers after the meeting and got into conversation with the shift manager at the pizza pub, who then spent the next fifteen minutes at our table talking about a documentary on Afghanistan he’d recently seen and ended by telling us how important he thought our work was.)
One resister mentioned that when he went to court to be sentenced for civil disobedience (I forget whether it was tax resistance related or not; I think not), the court was packed with supporters who quietly stood up when he was being sentenced, and how important this support had been to him.
One resister read about how a local school was suffering from funding cuts, and so sent her tax payment directly to the school that year instead of to the IRS, and wrote them a letter explaining what she was doing and why.
Another talked about her struggle to withdraw from California’s CalPERS state employee pension system, out of disagreement with the military industry investing of that system.
A low-income / simple-living resister talked about how after an expensive emergency medical treatment, she wrote polite letters to the various medical staff who had treated her expressing her gratitude and explaining that she would be unable to immediately pay their bills (and why) and asking to work with them to come to an agreeable and possible payment plan.
Most either forgave the bill entirely or reduced it to an immediately-payable amount.
One even said that her letter had been appreciatevely passed around and posted in the office for others to read.
Another remarked that as a child of Holocaust survivors who owes his existence to noncooperators who took risks to shelter his parents, he comes to war tax resistance through asking “how can I thank those people in some small way?”
From here, we broke up into two groups to discuss more specific tactical challenges, opportunities, and inspirations.
The larger group was for people who earn a taxable income and use a variety of strategies to resist some or all of the taxes due.
The smaller group, that I joined, was for those of us who earn an income below the federal income-tax threshold as a method of war tax resistance.
Many of those in our group expressed that they were partially motivated to choose this tactic because it challenged not only taxes but our larger complicity with the warfare state by means of our participation in the consumerist/capitalist economy.
“I’m a war tax resister not just because of war,” Juanita Nelson said, “but what leads to war.”
Many also felt that this was a particularly easy form of tax resistance, and one with many fringe benefits.
Some expressed what I certainly found to be true: that while we may have less income than we could, we feel more wealthy in terms of non-material goods, and we appreciate being able to put more of our time and energy into non-money-earning activities.
This ease, and the fact that this form of tax resistance is relatively non-confrontational, was also seen by some as a drawback.
Some felt guilty when comparing their resistance to those resisters who risk fines and property seizures and prison.
Others missed having a dramatic opportunity to say “No!” on April 15th.
On the other hand, some liked the fact that this form of resistance was an ongoing, every-day, lifestyle change.
One said that the sort of constant attention it requires was a way of praying for and receiving the “daily bread of insight” that nourishes her practice.
One conferee worried that this form of resistance tended to be too solitary, and that it didn’t lend itself immediately to the sort of collective action necessary to push for change.
She recommended that we integrate consciousness-raising sessions about community and about attitudes toward money into our practice.
We also discussed a lot of practical challenges: what sorts of tax credits and deductions are available and how to apply for them; how to reduce big-ticket expenses like rent and transportation; how to afford health insurance, or how to best live without it; how to live on a low income while at the same time paying down student loan (or other) debt; whether it makes sense to resist the income tax with this method and the payroll tax by refusing to pay; whether it is hypocritical to accept government services or assistance while trying to avoid supporting the government, or whether it would be a “foolish consistency” to try to completely turn your back on government benefits; what to do when the law starts to require you to take minimum pension distributions.
Looking over the day’s schedule
After this session, the meeting split again, into smaller groups, deliberately divided up so that people from any particular region were scattered among the various groups.
Then each group brainstormed on the topic of how to strengthen the war tax resistance movement, and how to do better outreach particularly among specific groups like “youth, people of color, anarchists & political radicals, women, environmentalists, libertarians, faith communities, LGBTQ, working class / underpaid, and folks with disabilities” — many of which have been underserved by our outreach thus far.
Following this brainstorming, we met again, this time grouped by region, to share some of the results of the brainstorming.
Some of what stood out to me from this discussion:
We might all benefit from some skills training in basic icebreaking and pressing the flesh.
The normal bell-curve of how comfortable people are reaching out to strangers is not ideally-tuned for outreach, and it is adjustable by some training.
One person made a big push for community television as a possible outlet for getting the word out.
I was skeptical (who watches community television?) but by producing such shows you can also become better acquainted with video production in general, which can have benefits beyond community television.
We might get more out of our actions if we also capture them on video.
Our movement has an image problem.
We’re typecast as “aging hippies” and this interferes with our ability to bring in people from different demographics.
Some of the things we do to create a comfortable space for ourselves at meetings like this (the way we run meetings, the songs we sing, the food and drink we prepare, the extracurricular activities we offer) do not necessarily feel welcoming to people who don’t already fit the stereotype or who don’t want to be identified with it.
One way of making our meetings more inviting to people outside of the usual suspects is to spend some time at meetings of activist groups of a different flavor.
One Boston-area group, recognizing that it had gotten into a pale-granola rut, sent emissaries to more diverse activist groups in the area and reformulated their meetings and other activities to better fit with the scheduling, amenities, location, and other expectations of a larger variety of people.
One person mentioned the challenge presented by the fact that April 15th is no longer such a climactic public event.
With more people filing electronically rather than taking that last-minute trip to the post office, Tax Day rallies are less effective.
Maybe we should try to compose some sort of viral email to circulate in early April to take the place of our post office banner waving?
Another attendee expressed that she felt that poor people were more and more connecting the lack of opportunities in their communities with the enormous military budget and imperial priorities, and thought that we could do fruitful outreach that way.
Other groups that people thought might be ripe for our message were Palestinian rights activists (who are already very conscious of the connection between U.S. tax dollars and the repression of Palestinians), and people in the “Time Bank” and other alternative currency movements.
After this we again split up into sessions, one with a South-East regional focus, another to plan next year’s New England gathering, and one (that I joined) to do Q&A for new resisters.
It was a short Q&A session — not our usual workshop — but we had an experienced resister there representing each of the three major divisions of resistance: below-the-tax-line resistance, filing but not paying, and not filing.
Questions were asked and answered, concerns addressed, scenarios teased out.
All in all a very well-run and well-hosted meeting, with most of the credit going to the New England gathering.
is our NWTRCC business meeting at which we will consider proposals, adopt a budget and objectives for the coming year, pick a spot for the next gathering, and take care of other such business.
Then we’ll have a counselor’s training session with some help from our legal advisor.
But more on that tomorrow…
Occasionally, tax resisters will join forces to form cooperative housing or business relationships that help to facilitate their resistance.
This is most often found among war tax resisters, for whom resistance is an ongoing commitment rather than a protest or rebellion against a particular government or policy.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of this that I have encountered in my research.
The Bijou community of Colorado Springs, Colorado is a living example of nonviolent community resistance in the “belly of the beast” of right-wing military and Christian extremism.
The members of this community live below a taxable income level so that they don’t pay for war.
In addition to ongoing bannering and civil disobedience at some of the 5 major military institutions in the area, the Bijou community runs services for the mentally-ill, homeless, working poor, incarcerated, and the general community including: a soup kitchen, food banks, a land trust, several homes for transitional and homeless folks, a free bicycle clinic, and a musical theater group.
The Agape Community
The Agape Community was founded in by a group of Catholics who wanted to live closer to the ideal of Christian community they found in the Bible.
Among the founders were tax resisters Brayton & Suzanne Shanley and Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
They formed the community in such a way that it could support itself with members earning less than a taxable income, for example by being able to grow their own food.
The Shanleys have stayed with the two-house community since its founding, and it has had dozens of more transient residents through the years.
The community hosts speakers and workshops on nonviolence and related topics.
The Whiteway Colony
A group of Tolstoyans made a go of creating a colony based on their interpretation of Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism, which included tax resistance, and was eventually the home to forty people.
The land was operated by a committee headed by noted Tolstoyan (and Tolstoy translator) Aylmer Maude, and this committee held the land in trust, while allowing anyone to settle on and work the land, with the understanding that nobody would own any of it except by virtue of being engaged in occupying and working on it.
(The Whiteway community still exists, but has abandoned the more radical communal-ownership principles — today the land is communally owned, but the homes on it are bought and sold as private property.)
Possibility Alliance
The Possibility Alliance farm is a simple-living showcase guided by the following five principles: radical simplicity, service, social activism, inner work, and gratitude.
It hosts free skills-share classes and a group called the Superheroes who dress up like caped crusaders and bike out to do good deeds here and there.
The founders are war tax resisters who resist by maintaining a very low (sub-poverty line) income.
Joanne Sheehan
When the Hartford Courant profiled war tax resisters Anna Aschenbach and Joanne Sheehan, who have been resisting taxes since the Vietnam War, it noted Sheehan’s participation in cooperative projects as being helpful to her resistance:
Along with her partner, who’s also a tax resister, Sheehan raised two kids with a family income of about $24,000. Now that their children are grown, and can no longer be claimed as deductions, each earns less than about $8,000 a year in order to keep from paying taxes.
They’ve lived in collectives and communes much of the time, sharing living expenses with other resisters.
They practice “radical simplicity” by going “back to basics” — doing things like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer, not going to restaurants or buying pre-packaged foods.
“Land League Villages”
During the rent strike that the National Land League organized against English absentee landlords in Ireland, when landlords were successful in evicting tenants who refused to pay rent, the League would try to find them (and sometimes their livestock) a temporary home on the land of someone who was sympathetic with the resisters.
These might grow to hold several families and were sometimes called “Land League Villages.”
Amish Milk Cooperatives
The cooperatives used by Amish communities to process and package milk turned out to be useful also when the Amish began resisting the then-new social security taxes (they believed the social security program would require them to violate principles of their faith, and after many years of resistance, they won a legal exemption from the program).
The government tried to levy the checks that the cooperative wrote to pay those of its milk suppliers who were resisting the tax, but the responsible officials of the cooperative refused to sign the checks.
Peacemakers attempted to build a decentralized and self-disciplined movement which stressed local initiative and group coordination along the lines of the nonviolent revolutionary movement in India.
Emphasis was put on building intentional communities which practiced communal living.
“Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement,” Peacemakers announced, “for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.”
Instead, Peacemakers emphasized a living program which included resistance to the draft and war taxes, personal transformation, and group participation in work for political and economic democracy.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place…
Juanita and Wally Nelson, founding members of Peacemakers, and war tax resisters Betsy Corner, Randy Kehler, and Bob Bady were among the organizers of the Valley Community Land Trust.
The trust resisted IRS attempts to seize the Corner/Kehler home for back taxes, and helped to get their home returned to them.
Art Harvey’s farm
Dorothy Day visited Art Harvey’s farm in and described it this way:
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal… by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
Peter Maurin Farm
Peter Maurin Farm
is a Catholic Worker project — a “hospitality house on the land” near Manhattan that also grows food for the urban hospitality houses.
Many of those involved in the project were conscientious objectors, and appreciated being able to be part of a self-supporting project that required its volunteers to earn little or no taxable income and so enabled them to stay under the tax line.
Collective Impressions
War tax resister Ed Guinan created a business to help facilitate the tax resistance of its employees.
One news profile described it this way:
[I]n Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS.
Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions.
A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says.
“They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.
Restored Israel of Yahweh
Similarly, members of the small religious group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh formed a small construction business and helped those of its employees who were also members of the group to resist their taxes — eventually facing criminal tax evasion convictions for this.
On , National Public
Radio’s Morning Edition did a story about the
IRS
seizure of the home of war tax resisters Art Harvey & Elizabeth Gravalos.
Here are some excerpts from the transcript:
Charlotte Renner reports on an anti-military protester whose house and land
have been seized by the
IRS
and offered at auction because of his refusal to pay taxes which support the
U.S. military.
Bob Edwards (host)
Every year, an estimated 8,000 anti-military protesters refuse to pay
their federal taxes. They say they don’t want the government to use
their money for defense or military spending. The Internal Revenue
Service rarely seizes the property of these politically motivated
non-taxpayers, so when the
IRS
decided to auction off the property of a tax protester in rural Maine,
it created quite a stir. From Maine Public Radio, Charlotte Renner
reports.
Charlotte Renner (Maine Public Radio)
For almost ten years now, Arthur Harvey has lived with his wife,
Elizabeth Gravlos and their two children, along a country road in a
sagging wooden house without electricity or indoor plumbing. They pay
their state and local taxes, but they refuse to hand over any money to
the IRS,
which estimates their tax debt at $62,000. Harvey says that figure is
probably too high, but he doesn’t keep careful records of the profit he
makes selling organic blueberries, and he says he’d rather lose
everything than contribute a single penny to the Pentagon.
Arthur Harvey (anti-military tax protester)
To me, the important issue was nuclear weapons, and I felt, as soon I
realized what was going on in the ’50s, that the human race very likely
would come to a bad end unless we did away with nuclear weapons. So that
has been the focus of my feelings about it.
Charlotte Renner
For Harvey’s wife, Elizabeth, the deciding moment came during the
Vietnam War. A staunch Catholic, she can still remember the conversation
with a college roommate that made her throw her
IRS
forms in the trash.
Elizabeth Gravlos (anti-military tax protester)
She said, “Well, how can you be against abortion and pay for the
war?” — that was the war in Vietnam. So I said I can’t, after a
while.
Charlotte Renner
Gravlos and Harvey have known for decades that the
IRS
might decide to take the house, their two wood lots, and the blueberry
barren they depend on for survival. What they didn’t realize was that
the seizure of their property by revenue agents would spark a protest in
Hartford, Maine, a village where mill workers and farmers struggle to
make ends meet.
[excerpt from protest song, “I’m not gonna pay for that killing machine
down by the riverside, down by the riverside.”]
Charlotte Renner
On the morning of the auction as the sun dries the dew, about 30 of
Harvey’s supporters form a circle in the vacant lot beside the town
office which happens to be right across the street from Harvey’s house.
About a dozen of the protesters have been invited here by the War Tax
Resistance Resource Center, a national organization based in Maine.
While the bidders file in and out of the one-room town office, refusing
to speak to the small army of reporters clustered at the screen door,
Harvey sympathizers take turns speaking into the microphone. Bob Bady
says he hasn’t paid federal taxes for 26 years. Bady blasts the federal
government for what he calls “bloated” military spending, but avoids
blaming
IRS
staffers for doing their job.
Bob Bady (anti-military tax protester)
I guess what I had to remember is that they’re just little cogs in a big
machine, and we’re little pieces of sand in the big machine — we’re
irritants. And I take great pride in being an irritant, and on a day
like today I need to remember to be proud of being an irritant and not
scared of being a little piece of sand.
Charlotte Renner
Bradford Lyttle considers the Harvey clan a shining example of family
values.
Bradford Lyttle (anti-military tax protester)
I have followed his life and I find it an expression of high moral
principle.
Charlotte Renner
Lyttle has come all the way from Chicago to say his piece, but closer to
home, some neighbors are outraged by Harvey’s refusal to pay his
taxes. Armand Rowe watches the protest from his sister’s lawn across the
street. Rowe spent five years in the Armed Forces and he calls the
resistance, “un-American.” He believes that military spending is
justified in a dangerous world, and if he had the $21,000 the
IRS
wants for Harvey’s house, Rowe says he’d gladly write the check.
Armand Rowe (military Supporter)
You know just to say, “Hey, I’ve put a big old
POWs flag
up there, a United States flag, and a Maine state flag up there,” just
out of spite and send that to Harvey wherever he goes a pitch every time
I turn around.
Charlotte Renner
Although Rowe doesn’t try to buy Harvey’s property, a few others do. But
they don’t stay around to watch
IRS
agent Diane Santoro open the envelopes. Just before noon, as the
protesters begin chanting and beating a drum, Arthur Harvey, Elizabeth
Gravlos, and their daughter Emily, file into the town office, followed
by more journalists than the spartan building can hold. A Hartford
resident snags one of the wood lots for $10,000. The Harvey’s 30-acre
blueberry barren goes for about $13,000 to a hunter who reportedly plans
to build a lodge on the land. Harvey says he’ll still grow blueberries
in other barrens he’s been renting. And a one-acre wood lot will stay in
the family.
Diane Santoro, (IRS agent)
For map 07, lot 56 at $727, the successful bidder is Emily Harvey.
Charlotte Renner
Twenty-year-old Emily Harvey takes some consolation in beating out the
town selectman for the slice of land she can see from her bedroom.
Emily Harvey (protester’s daughter)
It would have been very difficult for me to know that the selectman owns
that lot because it was across the street. The reason that I put my bid
in was because my brother asked me to. So it was a joint thing, because
he’s only 16 and not able to own property.
Charlotte Renner
But there’s no way to know how much longer Emily and her family will be
able to live near their wood lot. The house didn’t attract a single
buyer, so the
IRS
plans to lower the minimum bid and hold another auction in a few weeks.
A similar strategy worked a few years ago in Massachusetts when agents
sold two other properties seized from anti-war activists, but
IRS
spokesman Helen Hertzer says she wishes another auction weren’t
necessary.
Helen Hertzer (IRS spokesman)
To not be able to sell the properties and reduce the taxpayer’s debt, of
course, we’re not meeting our objective or the taxpayer’s objective
there.
Charlotte Renner
Hertzer hasn’t given up hope that a lower price will hook bidders next
time around, but Arthur Harvey figures they’d be crazy to buy a house
built on a foundation that’s caving in. And, while he won’t accept the
property as a gift from anyone willing to pay federal taxes, he still
hopes that more protests by all his friends and fellow resisters will
keep potential buyers at bay. After all, he needs his kitchen — not just
to cook the family’s meals, but also to brew up the herb tea he uses to
kill weeds choking his blueberries.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was lots about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , including an active debate about the worth of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation.
In the issue Jill Penberthy shared how a “committee on clearness” organized by the Middlebury (Vermont) Friends Meeting helped her decide how to use an anticipated IRS levy as an outreach opportunity.
Excerpts:
…I struggled to figure out how to respond to an Internal Revenue Service computer’s $1,800 bill for taxes, penalties, and interest on my account withheld as a war tax protest.
I also remembered a tai chi class in which we were taught to yield with the aggressor, using his or her energy and our own creativity to change the process.
I was puzzled about how to use these concepts with the IRS.
The computer was not listening to my numerous letters explaining my position as a war tax resister.
I was unable to contact anyone within the IRS with whom I could share my witness.
I brought my quandary to Middlebury Friends Meeting in Vermont and asked for a committee on clearness.
We gathered at my home and in the silence were moved to initiate a Peace Witness Fund under the care of the meeting that would be transferred to a local bank for seizure by the IRS.
The process became one of grace among us and within the Middlebury community.
The committee asked to share the penalty and commitment to peace represented by the withheld taxes.
Quaker history bears witness to conscientious objection through tax resistance.
We struggled to move beyond resistance to “yielding and overcoming,” and this we did with the guidance of the Spirit.
Letters of purpose were sent to Friends and sympathetic supporters requesting acknowledgment of the commitment to peace and offering a share in the assessed penalty.
They were asked to send copies of the purpose to elected officials and the IRS, and to join us on the Green in the center of Middlebury for singing and dancing before depositing the Peace Witness Fund in the bank.
We announced the peace gathering in the local papers — “Everyone is welcome.”
At the gathering we distributed leaflets explaining our concern about the present military escalation and preparation for nuclear war.
Babies and siblings, parents and grandparents, and retired military men all joined hands on the Green in a dance of peace, recognizing the Light within each of us.
“We are all one planet, all one people on earth,” sang a myriad of voices.
During the silence that followed, a professor from France said, “There are people you don’t even know about who are supporting you.
Let that be your strength.”
Another witness said, “This isn’t happening in my home state.
I’ll take it home with me.”…
…Our group proceeded up the hill and into the local bank where tellers and customers witnessed our Peace Fund deposit.
A brief note in the same issue said that “[s]ignatures of war tax resisters are being collected by the War Tax Resistance National Ad Campaign for placement in newspaper ads in ” and gave an address for the campaign.
A second brief announcement read:
A Peace Tax Fund has been established by Friends United Meeting.
The FUM general board established an escrow account this past fall into which war tax resisters who belong to FUM may deposit taxes withheld from the government.
Should the IRS take action against the depositor, the money may be withdrawn later.
Income generated from the fund will be used to finance FUM peace and justice programs. For more information…
The issue brought news that the Palo Alto (California) Meeting had endorsed phone tax resistance: “In keeping with our Peace Testimony,” a minute from the Meeting read, “Friends are encouraged to refuse payment of taxes which would otherwise be used primarily for killing and war preparation.”
The Meeting suggested redirecting resisted taxes to an alternative fund set up by the Pacific Yearly Meeting in .
At the Friends World Committee for Consultation meeting in , the group formed a new committee: “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.”
According to a Journal article on the meeting:
Sponsorship of the FCWTC followed two broad-based consultations the FWCC initiated in on questions of conscience raised by the use of Friends’ taxes for war and war preparations.
Drawing upon decades of experience with conscientious objection to conscription, representatives of all Quaker organizations formed the FCWTC to prepare a series of papers for discussion and to organize regional conferences and a conference for Quaker employers on the complex issues involved.
A later issue mentioned Wallace T. Collett as the new Committee’s clerk and Linda Coffin as “staff.”
It reported:
The FCWTC initially is focusing on three areas of work.
The first will be publication of educational materials, with the hope of reaching a broader understanding among Friends of the concern about war taxes.
The pamphlets will cover such topics as the biblical guidance for war tax refusal; Quaker history and recent Quaker statements on war tax concerns; recent experiences of individual Friends; positions of other churches and Christian denominations on the payment of war taxes; legal issues, IRS codes, and alternatives for those with war tax concerns; spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns; possible legislative remedies for conscientious objectors; and a general annotated bibliography.
The second area is consultative services to Quaker employers who are involved in the issue through the actions of their employees and through their own role in the collection of taxes.
A conference for Quaker employers is being planned for or .
The third area is facilitating consultation and study throughout the Society of Friends through a series of regional conferences.
The first of these conferences, “Paying for War; Paying for Peace,” was held in Washington D.C., , under FWCC auspices.
The FCWTC also hopes to develop informal ties with other groups working on the issue of conscience and war taxes, including both those of other denominations and those outside the United States.
Barbara Harrison mentioned in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue that as her husband has an income that “meets most of our needs (wants, though, are beyond us), and as I wish to limit the amount of money we pay in taxes that goes for military expenses, I avoid most paid employment” and that this has freed up her time to volunteer to help at a local elementary school.
The issue brought an update on Karl Meyer’s “cabbage patch resistance” technique:
The Internal Revenue Service seized a trailer and a station wagon from Karl Meyer of Chicago during the night of .
Early two IRS officers came to his door and served him with a levy for $20,160 in frivolous tax return penalties and a “Notice of Seizure” for the vehicles they had already removed.
In , Karl Meyer, a long-time peace activist and pacifist, filed a daily protest tax return to the IRS — 365 in all.
On the day after the seizure, about 30 supporters joined him in a protest demonstration at the Chicago IRS office.
Meanwhile, he has been taking public transportation to his work as a carpenter.
The same issue also mentioned a sort of round-about form of tax resistance being pursued by Lucy & Sheldon Clark and Dorothy & Edward Snyder, Quakers from Baltimore, who were filing a lawsuit against the government for the return of that portion of their taxes that they believed had been spent on illegal acts of military aggression in Central America.
The issue noted that the suit was dismissed.
That issue also mentioned a seminar on war tax resistance would be among those offered at “The Rise of Christian Conscience, a national conference of Christian nonviolence and civil disobedience sponsored by Sojourners Peace Ministry.”
It also noted a quarterly newsletter from a General Conference Mennonite Church-associated group called “God and Caesar” concerning conscientious objection to military taxes.
The Lake Erie Yearly Meeting in approved a minute that “suggested that Friends General Conference set up a fund for Friends who wish to withhold the military portion of their taxes.”
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
In a weekend retreat was planned in Voluntown, Connecticut to discuss “the Philosophy of War Tax Resistance”.
Bob Bady appears to have been an (the?) organizer.
The issue noted that NWTRCC had published some brochures on topics like “Your Taxes Pay for the War in Central America,” “Your Taxes Pay for the Nuclear Arms Race,” and “Your Telephone Tax Pays for War” as well as “a Telephone War Tax Resistance Poster Kit.”
The issue noted that the IRS had seized an alternative fund from a Meeting to collect a tax debt:
Four IRS agents seized Craig MacDonald’s pickup truck on in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., in lieu of his federal income taxes.
Craig MacDonald, a member of Purchase (N.Y.) Meeting, attends Cornwall (N.Y.) Meeting, where he is clerk of the Peace Committee.
The IRS had ordered Craig to pay $1,440.85, which includes interest and penalty charges.
The original amount of taxes owed, $1,159.90, was put into the Stamford-Greenwich Friends Meeting Peace Tax Fund.
The IRS seized this money in addition to the truck.
The IRS explained in a letter that it did not know about the account until after seizure of the truck.
Neither truck nor money has been returned to Craig.
To pay the additional IRS charges, Cornwall Meeting has set up a fund for suffering for Craig.
The same issue noted that the Quaker Council for European Affairs had published a second edition of its pamphlet, Paying for Peace containing “facts for Friends concerned about conscientious objection to military taxation,” and that Conscience Canada had published a booklet called The First Freedom: Freedom of Conscience and Religion in Canada to promote the Maple Leaf State’s version of the peace tax fund proposal.
The “Peace Tax Fund” Debate
In the issue was an article by Christopher Hodgkin entitled “Second Thoughts on the World Peace Tax Fund.”
Excerpts:
The World Peace Tax Fund ranks almost as a motherhood-and-apple pie issue for Friends.… [It] now offers a legal basis for conscientious objection to taxation along with the chance to support a national, tax-supported peace fund.
Indeed, a multitude of pacifist organizations have endorsed the fund, including such Friends organizations as the American Friends Service Committee, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference, and various monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings.
Such heavyweight support is impressive.
It is also, however, a nagging cause for concern.
Quakers have historically, and with good reason, been religious “contrarians.”
Often the proposals with the widest support need the closest scrutiny.
Truth most often comes on tiptoe and alone.
Is there something in this well-regarded and well-supported measure that needs to be more carefully examined?
[Proponents argue that] Conscientious objection to conscription of the body is recognized; why shouldn’t conscientious objection to conscription of the dollar be recognized equally?
Unfortunately, they are not parallel for two principal reasons.
First, one’s person and one’s dollars are not the same thing.
One’s person is a creation of God; one’s dollars are a creation of the state.
Jesus dealt with the different responsibilities for the two quite succinctly; I do not need to add to his teaching.
Second, military conscription and taxation have completely different scopes.
The draft is a single-purpose instrument.
It conscripts U.S. men for military duty.
It has no other dimension.
It is relatively simple to say that one accepts or rejects military service, and therefore accepts or rejects conscription.…
The income tax, on the other hand, is a multipurpose vehicle that supports the entire range of programs and activities of our government.…
Assume for a moment that our government conscripted people, as it conscripts dollars, to perform the complete range of government activities.
Does anyone doubt that the equivalent of C.O. status would be granted to, say, Catholics to exempt them from performing Medicare abortions?
If we conscripted people to teach the theory of evolution as truth in our schools, does anyone doubt that fundamentalist Christians would become conscientious objectors to that service?
If we conscripted people to perform death sentence executions, would all citizens perform such duty, or would some seek exemption?
Conscientious objection to war is the only conscientious objection currently sanctioned by our government not because there is something special about war resisters but because military service is the only bodily conscription now sanctioned by the government.
He later extends this point into the familiar slippery-slope argument in which if conscientious objectors to military taxes are granted a legal exemption from paying such taxes, the government would be acting inconsistently if it did not offer similar exemptions to people who have conscientious objections to other aspects of government spending.
[The promoters’ statement that war taxes mean “conscientious objectors must either violate their beliefs or violate the law”] is, of course, not true.
A number of individuals who object to paying taxes for war arrange their incomes and live so that they are not subject to taxation and therefore pay no taxes for war.
No law is violated.
What this argument really says is that conscientious objectors who are unwilling to undergo economic discomfort in support of their beliefs must either violate their beliefs or violate the law.
These objectors would not be likely to impress those early (and not so early) Friends who over the years have suffered a great deal more than economic discomfort in their commitment to Truth.
The simple fact is that any person who objects to paying taxes for war can legally avoid paying them.
What they may not be able to do is avoid paying taxes for war without making some sacrifices.
It is not the exercise of conscience that is at stake, but convenience.
Are Friends ready to endorse a major change in national policy and in the principles of shared representative government to support those whose principles may be less important to them than their comfort?
Those who would ask for the crown without the cross?
Perhaps the greatest irony in this issue is that the bill diverts attention from the real issue of peacemaking.
The World Peace Tax Fund bill is a special interest bill for a special interest minority.
If we truly believe in the need for a national peace effort — and I believe that many individuals who are not conscientious objectors recognize the urgent need for serious new approaches to peacemaking — we should be supporting legislation to add a serious commitment to peacemaking to the budget, legislation supported by all taxpayers, not just conscientious objectors.
Many U.S. citizens not yet ready to reject all defense spending are desperately afraid of nuclear war and would strongly support an active national peacemaking program.
But the World Peace Tax Fund allows no role to such individuals.
It demands that its supporters renounce all military spending at whatever level as a condition for participating in a tax-supported peace effort.
This exclusionary approach reduces the funds and personal commitments that could be available to a nationally supported peace program.
The World Peace Tax Fund claims to protect conscientious objectors to war from having their dollars conscripted for military purposes.
But that right already exists.
This proposal does not create the right; it makes its exercise painless.
The World Peace Tax Fund seeks special privileges for one religious minority that will inevitably lead to special privileges for a multitude of other religious minorities, quite possibly doing serious damage to programs that the fund’s supporters consider most important.
The World Peace Tax Fund seeks to provide taxpayer support for a national peacemaking effort, but ironically the approach taken may actually reduce the funds that could be made available if such an effort were undertaken as a normal part of our national budget.
As you might expect, this led to some debate in subsequent issues:
Brandt Chamberlain thought that Hodgkin’s slippery slope didn’t have anything very frightening at the end of it: “Laws permitting the diversion of tax dollars from programs felt to be morally objectionable could meet the demands of individual conscience while increasing our democratic influence on setting government priorities.”
He also is skeptical that resisting taxes by lowering income is such a great idea, as “economic disengagement in this manner could limit us in our efforts to help define and meet the material needs of our society.”
Wallace T. Collett wrote in to say that he is on the whole supportive of the federal income tax system as “the most equitable way to raise the funds needed for necessary government services,” and regrets that an overwhelming conscientious imperative forces him to noncooperate with it.
“But… we cannot separate the collection process from the use of the funds that are collected… military policies that lead toward the death of all life on earth.”
He hoped that once “a million” Americans either refused to pay war taxes or chose to pay into the World Peace Tax Fund, “then the dominance of the military on our nation’s policies will be overcome and our country and the world will be set on a new course.”
Robert Hull, then chairperson of the National Campaign for a World Peace Tax Fund, also wrote in.
He disagreed with Hodgkin’s scriptural interpretation of money as being a creature of the State, and therefore the State’s to do with as it will.
Conscripting a person’s money is tantamount to conscripting the time they took to earn that money.
When such large proportions of the exchange value of one’s labor (i.e., money) is confiscated through the federal treasury for military purposes, I believe there is a strong case for speaking of “military conscription.”
And if “military conscription” is operating, then conscientious objection is appropriate.
In our technological age, the young few have at times been conscripted for military duty; the many older are continually being conscripted through their labor.
Hull also had no fear of Hodgkin’s slippery slope.
…Hodgkin’s fear [is] that if we are allowed to divert our taxes away from military expenditures, the floodgates will open to every group with a conscientious dissent.
So be it!
Let each of them go to Congress and make their case, as we are doing.
We trust our representatives to sort out the true grievance of conscience from the false greed of opportunism.
Alan Eccleston defended the World Peace Tax Fund bill this way (excerpts):
…[A]t either a symbolic or substantial level, we can refuse voluntary compliance with a tax system that has God’s priorities turned upside down.
The institutional wheels of government start grinding and, in time, the IRS will collect the money withheld plus interest and penalties.
What has been accomplished?
Is this just an act of self-righteousness?
Has the world changed?
Yes, it has changed!
I know this experientially.
Praying for peace is powerful in itself.
When the prayer is made manifest in one’s daily life its power multiplies.
There are many ways for the manifestation to be expressed, and each of us must listen to our inner guide for direction.
Those of us who, through love, are led to say no to war taxes announce we trust God, not armaments, for our security.
In addition to creating a new ethical choice for most of the adult population, the World Peace Tax Fund bill establishes a separate trust fund that will disburse over one billion dollars a year for programs of health, education, and welfare.
I know of no other peace initiative that has this potential.
James B. Eblin wrote that the option of lowering his income below the tax line was not available to him as “I am morally and legally obliged to support my children.”
He therefore sees the World Peace Tax Fund as his only possible relief.
Lissa Field also criticized Hodgkin’s stark distinction between conscription of bodies and taxation of earnings.
“[W]e are responsible for both… as my taxes pay for the destruction of other humans and that of God within them, I am responsible for responding on the level of God’s rules, not Caesar’s.” She also, as someone who had faced a $5,000 fine for her resistance, found “particularly tedious” Hodgkin’s casting of tax resisters as unwilling to sacrifice.
Joe Marinello also thought that since income is the fruit of his labor, his person is very much wrapped up in his income, and so Hodgkin’s distinction does not hold.
“My labor (directly represented by my earned income) is the fruit of my being in this world.
I will not let my actions, my labors, be used to create weapons of mass destruction.
Nor will I allow my labor to be used by others to kill our neighbors.”
And he reminded Hodgkin of the sorts of sacrifices above-the-line resisters have to make so “that the government does not steal my labor.
I am self-employed, have no savings accounts, no property in my name, and I give away most of my income.
I have no desire to go to jail, but I will go to jail before I willingly pay any war taxes.”
Linda Coffin prefers the World Peace Tax Fund to living below a taxable income because the latter “would be shirking our responsibility to support the life-affirming programs of our government.
I could not take that option because it would mean ceasing my support for public schools, federal programs for the poor, health assistance programs, U.S. contributions to the United Nations and international aid agencies, and so on.”
In contrast, “The Peace Tax Fund bill… uniquely demonstrates the depth and sincerity of our concern for the moral use of our tax dollars.”
Ira Byock felt that conscientious objection wasn’t really what the World Peace Tax Fund was about.
“The real value of the Peace Tax Fund — like so much of what we do in peace work — lies in its symbolism, in its potential for heightening general public awareness of the percentage of our tax money spent on the military.
We bear witness to the morally objectionable so that others may pause to notice.”
That said, “the issue of conscience remains real.
To write one’s elected representatives, contribute to peace campaigns and organizations, take part in public peace activities, and then send in money for guns, subs, missiles, and bombs is inconsistent.”
And this is true even for people not willing to live below the tax line.
Anne Friend agreed with Hodgkin in his opposition to the World Peace Tax Fund.
Weirdly, though she was most persuaded by Hodgkin’s argument “that having a witness made easy dilutes its power and will probably deflect it from its ultimate goal,” she didn’t see this as a call for her to make a difficult witness instead, but rather to wait and meanwhile do nothing: “I am not yet ready to refuse the military portion of my income taxes.
But when that becomes an option [?], I expect the action required of me will be noncooperation, even if special status is available.”
Historical Notes
Margaret Hope Bacon penned an article on “Effective Peacemaking” in the issue that discussed the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends:
[T]he Quaker testimony against paying war taxes began with a few individuals who felt an opening and a “stop in my mind.”
Theirs was an even more difficult path than that of C.O.s, for the Society itself was not always behind them.
Friends have always refused to pay purely military tithes, but when the taxes are “in the mixture,” that is, war taxes and civilian taxes mixed together, or when the tax is not publicly stated as being for war, they have urged members to pay.
In , London Yearly Meeting disciplined a woman member who was advocating that Friends refuse to pay a new tax that she thought was clearly for war purposes.
She was told that for the past 1600 years Christians have always paid their taxes.
In this case the individual was trying to respond to the dictates of conscience (religion) while the group was concerned to prevent further persecution (politics).
This uneasy balance continued for years, until today, at last, monthly and yearly meetings are beginning to give more support to tax objectors, and some believe we will eventually have legal provision for the conscientious objection for our tax dollars as well as ourselves — a political result of a religious impulse.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a great deal about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , in part because of the occupation of the Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner home which the IRS was trying to auction off, and in part because of the IRS suit against the Journal to try to force it to pay its editor’s resisted taxes, and in part because of the Peace Tax Fund bill’s first congressional hearing.
A note in the issue pointed out that politicians were playing a name game that had apparently fooled some Quakers into thinking that the telephone excise tax had been transformed into something benign:
The telephone tax continues as a source of money for military expenditure, contrary to recent confusion about its status.
The tax, which was due to expire in , was extended under the Act for Better Child Care.
Those who proposed the act were searching for a way to finance their new program and seized upon the telephone tax as their “new” source of money.
However, the phone tax revenues continue to go into the General Fund, as always, and are not earmarked for the child care programs. More than 50 percent of the General Fund is used for military expenditure.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee recommends that conscientious resistance to the telephone tax continue, as it can have a powerful impact if enough people are involved.
an ad for NWTRCC in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also had a follow-up on the “Alternative Revenue Service” protest:
In , the Alternative Revenue Service reports that individuals redirected $104,740 of their federal income taxes away from the military to areas of human need.
The total includes $12,898 redirected through the ARS, $38,416 redirected by Alternative Funds, and $53,426 that individuals redirected to social action and relief programs. The Alternative Revenue Service campaign is designed to educate taxpayers about how their federal income tax dollars are used.
The service provides the EZ Peace Form, which participants can use in registering their opposition to military spending at the time they file their taxes.
The service reports that 70,000 EZ Peace Forms were distributed nationwide last year.
This year’s form is simplified, with clearer instructions.
The issue brought the news that the Peace Tax Fund promoters had finally managed to get a Congressional Committee hearing for their bill, which was scheduled for .
“The hearing will be informational to determine the need for such legislation, not a preparation for floor action.
The need is assessed from the testimony of both individuals and religious bodies.
The hearing will support the bill by providing a permanent public record, by lending it legitimacy, by possibly attracting more serious consideration from prospective cosponsors, and by providing a record of congressional scrutiny.
The hearing will be brief, not lending itself to extended exchanges.
However, written testimony can be added and will become part of the official record.”
A follow-up in described the latest Peace Tax Fund bill as one that “would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit qualified conscientious objectors to have part of their federal taxes — that part equal to the military portion of the federal budget — to be paid into a fund for peace-related projects.”
It encouraged readers to submit “written testimony for the official hearing record,” to publicize and perhaps attend the hearing, to contact Congressional representatives and encourage them to attend and to support the bill, and to donate money to the cause.
The issue described how the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures went — “the first actual hearing held since a Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in Congress .”
Excerpts:
“If we give the right to a person to withhold their body from a war as a conscientious objector, that person should be able to withhold his money as well.”
So spoke Sen. Mark Hatfield in his lead-off testimony…
…Several hundred spectators from across the country packed the hearing room.
Many attended as concerned individual taxpayers.
Others came as members of religious denominations and peace groups long associated with the Peace Tax Campaign.
Three chartered buses, one from Lancaster, Pa., two others from Philadelphia, swelled the numbers by some 150 supporters.
When the last of them filed in from a late-arriving bus to find all spectator seats occupied, Chairman Charles Rangel stopped the hearings momentarily, inviting standing-room only observers to move forward and to occupy empty seats normally reserved for officials and the press.
Many did so.
Veterans of peace demonstrations, several parents holding small children, young bearded men in simple dress, older couples from the peace churches created a colorful patchwork as they mixed with congressional aides, heads of foundations, and Capitol bureaucrats in business suits.
…Over 2,300 letters in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill were bound in large volumes and set on a front table to be presented to the committee.
From 50–100 such letters a day continued to arrive as of the time of the hearing.
Following the introductory testimony of Mark Hatfield, lead sponsor of the bill (S.689) in the Senate, there were also presentations by four members of Congress: Andy Jacobs (lead sponsor of the bill in the House), Nancy Pelosi, and John Conyers.…
…[A] panel of religious leaders testified.
One, Thomas Gumbleton, Roman Catholic bishop from Detroit, and past president of Pax Christi, pointed out that two of the first leaders of the church, John and Peter, said that sometimes it is necessary to obey God before obeying the law.
How much better it would be, Gumbleton said, for COs to be able to pay all their taxes, knowing their money would be used for life-affirming purposes.
William Davidson, retired Episcopal bishop of western Kansas, a CO in World War Ⅱ, has actively opposed war .
“Having lived past draft age, I have been saddened and conflicted each year having to pay taxes to support war,” he said.
The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has consistently supported war tax resistance as a religious witness.
John A. Lapp, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pa., spoke on behalf of the three historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren).
The issue of war-related taxes is one of religious freedom, Lapp said.
“Many of us feel the pain of having our religious institutions serve as tax collectors for war.”
During committee questioning, Representative Jacobs asked Rabbi [Phil] Bentley [with the Jewish Peace Fellowship], “Is [passage of this bill] going to give rise to requests for similar legislation from people who don’t want their money going for a golf course?”
…[Friends Journal] editor-manager Vint Deming, associate editor Melissa Elliott, typesetter Susan Jordhamo, and board members Robert Sutton and Sam Legg joined several hundred other citizens in packing the hearing room…
The hearing was informational, to give legislators material to use in future considerations, rather than to schedule the bill for action.
As such, it gave supporters a chance to formally present the case, get testimony in the written record, and show the depth and breadth of people’s interest in the bill.
The pace of this legislative process is frustratingly slow, but, for many of us, the hearing was a heartening experience.
There, we heard people testify in a formal legislative setting to our most deeply held beliefs.
One activist-participant said, “All my life I’ve been on the side that opposes government decisions.
It was a weird experience to see all those peace movement people in the same room with legislators.
I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor ever imagined it.
It gave me a different vision of what might be possible.”
The Peace Tax Fund Bill has come a long way , with many technical refinements, and it has a long way to go in gathering widespread support.
On we witnessed one small step in validation, acknowledgment of our beliefs, and moving the dream closer to reality.
Perhaps one day we will look back, as do those who watched the process of legalizing conscientious objection, and be glad we were involved in making it legal to follow our beliefs with our money-as well as with our bodies.
“This is not a political issue, but a moral issue of conscience,” responded Bentley…
Jacobs, in response, thanked the Rabbi and others of religious conscience who had testified.
“I am a sponsor of this bill,” he said, “but I am not a pacifist.”
He called to mind one of his favorite movies, Friendly Persuasion, and the lines spoken toward the end of the film: “It’s good to know that somebody is holding out for a better way of settling things!”
Terrill Hyde, tax legislative counsel for the Department of the Treasury, presented the Bush Administration position opposing the PTF.
She mentioned “problems of complexity, confusion, and increased administrative burden,” sure to arise if the bill were passed.
There would be no deterrent either, she said, to restrain taxpayers from inappropriately claiming CO status.
If taxpayers were allowed to designate the uses for which their tax dollars were spent, “our entire budgetary process would be undermined.”
There would likely be loss of revenue to needed federal programs.
Others, however, presented differing views.
Several speakers argued that there would likely be substantial increases in revenue as a direct result of the bill.
Many who currently refuse to pay a portion or all of their taxes would gladly pay.
Also, large costs resulting from IRS efforts to collect from tax resisters would be avoided.
Answering the criticism of how the act might increase paperwork and administrative costs, several people testified to the simple nature of the bill and of the tax filing process.
As to IRS claims that the bill raises possible legal questions, a panel of two law specialists responded.
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown University, said, “A nation that wants to protect the religious freedom of its citizens can reasonably be expected to enact legislation to enable the freedom to be expressed.”
It seems perfectly appropriate, he concluded, that such legislation be enacted.
“It is needed in addition to the Religious Freedom Act.”
Philadelphia, Pa., attorney and war tax specialist Peter Goldberger agreed.
“Legislation of this kind has a noble history in our country,” and he quoted from a letter from then-President George Washington to Philadelphia Quakers.
The nation’s laws, Washington wrote, must always be “extensively accommodated” in cases of individual conscience.
Alan Eccleston, a Quaker and an organizational development consultant from Hadley, Massachusetts, told about how, in his own tax witness, he has endured penalties, punishments, and the threat of losing his home.
The IRS has a lien on his house right now.
“Conscience must be taken into account.
Spiritual values are real.
They are not to be treated as incidental or expendable to fit the needs of the state.
This is what the First Amendment is all about.”
Ruth Flower, legislative secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation, emphasized that the Peace Tax Fund Act would not offer an escape to those who do not wish to pay their taxes, because they would have to pay the same amount either way.
It would, however, provide a legal way out of violating one’s religious beliefs in order to comply with the laws of the land.
Her point was born out by Patricia Washburn, who gave perhaps the most moving testimony of the hearing.
She talked about the challenge presented to each of us, and to her personally, in Micah 6:8: “…what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love constantly, and to walk humbly with your God?” Walking humbly requires us to acknowledge the seeds of violence in our own hearts, rather than projecting them onto someone else.
“Loving constantly” can be a discouraging and difficult task, especially in today’s climate of distrust and alienation.
“I am not opposed to paying taxes, but I find no alternative form of tax payment… Thus, I see no current alternative to withholding the military portion of my taxes… I pray that my witness is done in love and that it will help to build a bridge across the chasm of violence and fear.”
After the hearing and following the press conference, [Marian] Franz [executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund] gave a brief workshop on lobbying for the bill.
She pointed out that the testimony would now be entered in written record and could be referred to in the future.
She added, “the fact that we got a hearing is absolutely amazing.”
Many other pieces of legislation have not yet been so lucky, and the demand is great.
“If all members of the committee had been present, they all would have been deeply moved, and we would be a lot further down the road.”
Franz encouraged people, when lobbying, to talk in terms of conscience, as defined by Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, who said, “Deep inside, each one of us finds a law that we did not put there.
It tells us to do this and shun that.”
That is what puts the issue of paying taxes for war in the arena of religious decisions and touches on every individual’s right to follow their faith — whether they are housewives, bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, or politicians.
That is why it is important to keep trying to open doors and ears and minds.
Marian Franz has a suggestion for how to approach people: “Talk to aides and legislators as though you’re sharing something personally.
You will often find that when you are talking about conscience, people are moved deeply.”
The issue also plugged “Good Use: Songs of Peace, Tax & Conscience” — “a tape of War Tax Resister Songs, featuring Charlie King, Luci Murphy, Geof Morgan, Lifeline, and others.
It was produced by Don Walsh, who donates the royalties.”
The lead editorial (by Vinton Deming) in the issue concerned the ongoing Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner case:
Finding Affinity
Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have been tax resisters .
They have given the tax money instead to a variety of groups doing constructive community work.
the IRS has been trying to sell their house in Colrain, Mass., in an effort to collect $25,896 in back taxes — but it hasn’t been easy.
First of all, there’s been a growing tax resistance movement there in Franklin County.
Bob Bady and Pat Morse, for instance, had their house seized and auctioned in .
(They still live in the house, however, and the buyer hasn’t taken possession.)
Shelburn Falls dentist Tom Wilson had his dental license revoked when he refused to cooperate with IRS.
(He continues his practice, however; even the local sheriff remains one of his regular patients).
So when the word got out that IRS planned to auction Betsy and Randy’s house, supporters in large numbers turned up on the announced day to oppose the sale.
There were lots of signed bids (such as an offer to clean the teeth of an IRS agent, others pledging to do community work or to be peace activists for life) — but no cash buyers came forward.
Not a one.
So, in , IRS upped the ante.
Betsy, Randy, and daughter Lillian, 12, were given an eviction notice.
When Randy decided to stay, he was held in contempt and tossed in the county jail for 6 months.
This didn’t go unnoticed by friends and neighbors, however.
A sign-up sheet got circulated, and volunteers committed themselves to stay in the house around the clock.
There’s been a continuous presence there .
Groups from as far away as Washington, D.C., have signed up to come and help out.
In , members of Mount Toby (Mass.) Meeting formed such an affinity group for a week.
Meanwhile, Randy stays in jail and makes the most of his time there.
He has made friends with many of the prisoners, has organized a chess tournament, and does what he can to interpret his tax witness.
Allan Eccleston, member of Mount Toby Meeting, has been approved as the meeting’s official minister and visits Randy twice a week.
So what’s next?
IRS has scheduled another auction, this time out of the area in Springfield, Mass. — in the hope, it seems, of attracting a buyer for the house, someone who doesn’t know about this whole chain of events.
Randy will not be there to talk about it, but lots of his friends will.
Even if the house is sold, the issue will be far from over.
The house is part of a land trust (Randy and Betsy own the house but not the land on which it stands) — and there’s the likelihood of a continuing nonviolent presence in the house to welcome any potential new buyer.
How might Friends respond?
I asked this question in of Francis Crowe, long-time head of the American Friends Service Committee office in western Massachusetts and a supporter of Randy and Betsy.
She suggests:
Form an affinity group to help sustain the presence in the house.
(To be scheduled, contact Traprock Peace Center…
Funds are also needed to support the action (checks made out to “War Tax Refusers Support Committee”…).
Letters to the editor on the subject of taxes and militarism are always helpful.
More sponsors are needed in Congress for the Peace Tax Fund bill.…
At a rally in support of Betsy and Randy, Juanita Nelson — who, with husband Wally, has been a tax refuser for decades and is known to many Friends — offered these words by Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it.”
Good advice as another tax season is upon us, when many of us seek to find our way on this difficult question of taxes for war.
In a later issue, David Zarembka reported in a letter-to-the-editor about how the occupation / blockade of the Kehler/Corner home was proceeding:
On , federal marshalls arrested seven members of the Flowing River Affinity Group who were occupying the Kehler/Corner home and removed the furniture into storage.
At , the IRS sold the house to the highest bidder in an auction for $5,400. The seven affinity group members were released from jail later in the afternoon.
So was Randy, who had served two months of his sentence.
Do not think, however, that Betsy and Randy have lost their home in an exotic cause!
As soon as the federal marshalls left the house, an affinity group reoccupied it, and other groups, including one from Washington, D.C., of which I am a member, have continued to occupy the house on a 24-hour basis.
Affinity groups, which occupy the home for a week each, have been organizing , but new ones are still being formed…
The “buyers,” a young couple with a two-month-old son, have visited the house several times but have not as yet forced the issue.
They are consulting with their lawyers.
Betsy and Randy have become members of the Colrain Neighbors Affinity Group, which will occupy the home for the week beginning .
They and their twelve-year-old daughter, Lillian, will move back into their home when they can comfortably live there once again.
I would hope that this action would lead Friends to consider how their cooperation with the federal tax collection process — even those who are symbolic tax resisters or those who force the IRS to take their taxes from them — allows the present military system to thrive.
A report in that issue on the Canadian Yearly Meeting that had taken place noted that:
Canadian Yearly Meeting, in its role of employer, was asked to refuse to remit that portion of its employees’ taxes that will be used to support the military.
Concern was expressed by the yearly meeting’s trustees, who would bear the legal results of such actions.
Although the yearly meeting came close to supporting a minute for this action, it agreed to seek clearness with the trustees and monthly meetings and return to this issue next year.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was largely devoted to war tax resistance.
It began with an editorial from Vinton Deming concerning his war tax resistance and the response of his employer, the Journal.
Excerpt:
From the outset, I knew it wasn’t a very practical thing to do.
The government was too powerful, and all the tax laws were against me.
I’d just end up paying much more in the end, so why not choose a better way to work for peace?
A good letter to my congressman, for instance, or a tax vigil at the federal building on Apri1 15.
But this was in .
Our war in Vietnam was just over, but the Cold War continued.
As the Reagan years unfolded, with still larger military expenditures and big cuts in domestic programs, I became even more clear: I must resist as fully as possible the payment of taxes for war.
The Journal board was always supportive of my witness.
It refused twice to honor IRS levies on my wages.
In doing so, Friends openly accepted the possibility of being taken to court one day and fined severely.
The board wrote to IRS: “Our position of noncompliance to the requests of the Internal Revenue Service is not an easy one.
We do not question the laws of the land lightly, but do so under the weight of a genuine religious and moral concern.”
Well, as they say, “What goes ’round comes ’round.”
, Friends Journal was told by the U.S. Justice Department to pay up or we’d be taken to court.…
I am grateful for the steadfastness of the Journal’s board of managers.
, it has been faithful to the Quaker peace testimony.
The road has been an uncertain and confusing one at many points, but Friends have shown courage in continuing.
In my own personal war tax journey, these words by John Stoner have served to guide: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
Sam Legg, clerk of the Friends Journal Board of Managers, gave his take on the Deming situation and on why the Journal had decided to throw in the towel and pay the IRS’s demands.
Excerpts:
… Vinton refused to pay any federal taxes.
Each tax year he sent a blank 1040 along with a letter to the president explaining his opposition to war and his unwillingness as a Friend to pay for it.
Since there was no Peace Tax Fund, Vinton reasoned, he would instead contribute the money to worthwhile projects and see that it was used for peaceful purposes.
In , the IRS served a levy on Friends Journal for $22,714.16, Vinton’s taxes for the period, plus interest and penalties.
The IRS asked Friends Journal to withhold part of Vinton’s salary each month, but the Journal Board refused, writing that “We… are in support of Vinton Deming’s conscientious witness.”
In , Friends Journal received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice reminding us of the levy on Vinton’s salary and asking us to try to “resolve this matter short of litigation.”
That is, to pay the original assessed amount plus interest and a possible 50 percent penalty on the total.
We were given until to respond.
If we were to continue refusing to honor the levy, an immediate court action would follow.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith vs. Oregon, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee have learned, teaches us that there is no way we could win such a case in court, nor could our assets be protected from seizure.
More troubling, this seizure could make others who are not involved in our decision, undergo unwelcome investigation.
Finally, a court case offers IRS the opportunity to set a legal precedent requiring the payment of the 50 percent penalty (which a sympathetic judge excused in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case last year).
We fear that the inevitable negative decision could establish that precedent and thereby restrict other individuals’ or groups’ religious freedom.
And so, most reluctantly, the Friends Journal Board has agreed to negotiate with IRS and to pay the least amount IRS will accept ($31,300) as settlement of this claim.
Our painful recognition of failure is heavy upon us.
We have to accept that our witness in its present form can no longer serve a useful purpose.
We can hope Vinton’s action and our support will have brought the issue of tax refusal to the attention of others, thereby becoming a part of the tradition of citizen pressure that in the long run eliminates or diminishes social evils such as slavery and war.
Our protest is on record.
What we will do now is support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of … which aims to reestablish the first amendment religious rights lost in the Smith vs. Oregon decision.
We also urge support for the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… which makes the same witness, but provides money to finance peace-enhancing projects.
(Needless to say, if there had been a Peace Tax Fund in , Vinton’s taxes would have been paid gladly, and there would have been no need for an IRS levy.)
We ask all those who share our concerns to join in these legal approaches to the continuing effort to convince ourselves and others of the futility of armed conflict and the necessity of finding other means to resolve human disputes.
The immediate financial challenge to the Journal is a very real one.
In a year in which we already face a substantial budget deficit, the payment of such a large lump sum adds an enormous burden.
Vinton has engaged to repay the Journal through payroll deductions over time.
We have been heartened as well, as word of our tax witness spreads, to receive gifts of support from our readers.
One contributor writes: “I hope everyone at the Friends Journal can be made aware of Friends’ approval of [your] Board action.
To help this happen, I encourage the Journal to go as public with the story as is consistent with respect for Vint’s privacy and the Journal’s limited resources.
I am convinced that other Friends will wish to help financially when so informed.”
For such words, and unexpected gifts, we are most grateful.
Readers wrote in with their feedback about the Journal’s decision, and some of their letters were printed in the issue:
Duane Magill wrote to “applaud” and “sympathize” with the Journal’s stand.
“As a war tax resister myself for the past quarter of a century, I have had some brushes with the IRS myself and know what it is like.
I also appreciate your giving publicity to the subject.
I know that not many Quakers take this position, and giving the matter this extensive coverage just might encourage more to take this stand.”
Yvonne Boeger wrote in on behalf of the Live Oak (Texas) Meeting to say that the meeting had recently “discussed the importance of war tax resistance as a means of witnessing to Friends’ long-standing opposition to all forms of war and violence” and that the Meeting was supportive of the Journal’s (and Deming’s) action.
“We send the enclosed check as a token of our support and solidarity in Friends’ resistance to war.
Thank you for the example you have set for us all.”
Lillian and George Willoughby wrote to express gratitude for the Journal’s “courage in standing in support of Vint Deming.”
They wrote: “Most important is the example of a Quaker religious employer providing support to staff who endeavor to live according to Friends’ teachings.
The Journal has run considerable risk and incurred heavy expenses.
We enclose our check as a demonstration of our support.
We think that many other Friends will want to help carry the financial burden of this witness.”
An editorial note in the letters column expressed “thanks to all those who have sent checks!” and a later editorial note (in the issue) said that they had received “$8,000 from individuals and meetings, $7,000 from a Sufferings Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” and almost $4,000 from Deming himself.
Mennonite war tax resister (and, according to his author bio, “itinerant prophet and spiritual retreat leader”) John K. Stoner wrote about the call he got from an IRS employee.
Excerpts:
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said “no” to paying the full amount of our income tax.
The man could not understand why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the IRS upon themselves by withholding some taxes.
But by the time the conversation was over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was, for us, a matter of faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9 kind of experience of being called before the authorities, “before governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them.
By the sound of Mark 13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you is quoting Romans 13.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes.
Taxes for Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to 1 penny for every billion dollars in the military budget.
For tax year this is $3.03, which can be mailed to Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes.
Write a letter of witness to the IRS, with copies to Congress and your local newspaper.
Redirect some taxes to education through CPT.
If the IRS calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law and that you do not enjoy being harassed by the collectors of blood money.
Go on to say that you are far more apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law.
Tell them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the bulldozed mass graves of Iraqi conscripts, fathers and husbands, and the nightmares of their children.
Explain that you are really afraid to harden you heart to the cry of the victims and that you have decided you will not take their blood upon your hands.
When Randy Kehler was thrown in prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to vacate the home that had been seized by the IRS, he prepared a statement that he hoped to read.
The court denied him permission to address it.
The Journal printed the statement he’d hoped to have made, which is a good thing: it would be a shame if such an articulate statement was left to sit unread in a file folder somewhere.
My refusal to give up our home is not an act of contempt or defiance of your court order.
I regard it as an act of conscience and also an act of citizenship.
The two go hand in hand.
The first obligation of responsible citizenship, I believe, is obedience to one’s conscience.
Obedience to one’s government and to its laws is very important, but it must come second.
Otherwise there is no check on immoral actions by governments, which are bound to occur in any society whenever power is abused.
I want to assure you, however, that I am not someone who treats the law lightly.
Even when a particular law seems at first to have no clear purpose or justification, I try to give it — that is, give those who created and approved it — the benefit of the doubt.
In an ideal sense, I see law as the codification of those rules and procedures by which the members or citizens of a community, be it local or global, have agreed to live.
A decent respect for one’s community requires a decent respect for its laws.
At their best, such laws express the conscience of the community, causing conscience and law to coincide.
The international treaties and agreements that my wife, Betsy, and I cited in the legal documents recently submitted to, and rejected by, this court are wonderful examples of the coincidence of law and conscience.
These agreements, each one signed by our government, include the United Nations Charter, which outlaws war and the use of military force as methods of resolving conflicts among nations; the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use or threatened use of weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians and poison the environment; and the Nuremberg Principles, which forbid individual citizens from participating in or collaborating with clearly defined “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against peace,” even when refusal to participate or collaborate means disobeying the laws of one’s government.
These international accords — which, as you know, our Constitution requires us to regard as “the Supreme Law of the Land” — are at least as much affirmation of conscience, rooted in universal moral standards, as they are statements of law.
Betsy and I regret that you chose to deny our request for a trial, which would have allowed us to argue the relevance of these international laws before a jury of our peers.
Even in the absence of such laws, however, I believe that citizens would still have an affirmative obligation to follow their conscience and refuse to engage in or support immoral acts by governments.
It is not true, as is commonly thought, that if large numbers of people put conscience ahead of the law and decided for themselves which acts of government were immoral, civilized society would break down into violence and chaos — that is, greater violence and chaos than there is now.
In fact, the opposite would likely occur.
There would likely be greater compliance with those laws that are fundamentally just and reasonable — in other words, most laws — and there would be greater public pressure to abolish or reform those laws (and policies) that are unjust or unreasonable.
There would be exceptions for the worse, of course.
In the name of conscience, certain individuals would, no doubt, do some terrible things and cause much injury and death, which happens now.
On balance, however, the historical record is clear: from the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade, to Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and our own devastation of Vietnam and Iraq, far more killing and suffering, has resulted from people following “legal” orders and obeying the law than from people refusing to do so in obedience to conscience.
My own refusal to kill (which led me to spend nearly two years in federal prison rather than cooperate with the Vietnam draft), Betsy’s and my refusal to pay federal taxes used for killing (which caused the IRS to seize our home), and now our refusal to turn over our home in lieu of taxes, are all acts of conscience.
It has not been easy for us to deliberately violate the law in these instances, and in so doing incur the anxiety and disapproval of some of our friends and family, as well as the scorn and censure of many members of the community.
We are painfully aware that even though we do pay our town and state taxes, and even though we have given away to the poor and to the victims of our war-making in other countries every cent that we have withheld from the federal government, nevertheless we are still regarded by some as irresponsible and not contributing our fair share.
These are times, however, when all of us are confronted with difficult choices.
Betsy and I, and many others like us, feel we must choose between knowingly and willingly paying for war and killing, and openly and nonviolently breaking the law with respect to federal taxes.
Our consciences compel us to choose the latter.
For me, the issue is larger than simply the taking of another human life, or even the instance of a particular war in which many lives are lost.
I have increasingly come to see the larger issue as war itself.
Whereas there has always been a moral imperative to end war and refrain from killing, today the imperative is much greater.
Today the logic of peace, the logic of nonviolence, is also the logic of survival.
It is impossible to dis-invent today’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and so-called conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, we have no alternative but to effectively abolish war.
This is the one essential adaptation the human species must make — and, I firmly believe, can make — if life as we know it is to continue.
War today is the scourge of the planet.
It is tragic enough that war is daily claiming the lives of people, maiming more, leaving orphans and widows, and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals — to say nothing of the irreplaceable treasures of human civilization destroyed in Baghdad last year and in Dubrovnik over the past several months.
What makes war today even more tragic, more horrible, are the incalculable economic, social, and environmental costs that go along with it.
Instead of using our human and material resources to produce food, medicine, housing, schools, and other desperately needed commodities, the world’s nations, led by our own, are annually spending trillions of dollars to purchase more and more weapons of even greater destructive capability.
The hundreds of millions of children, women, and men whose lives are ravaged by poverty, hunger, and homelessness — around the world and here in the States — are as much victims of our addiction to war and militarism as are those who are hit directly by the bullets and bombs.
While the awful gap between the rich minority and the poor majority of the world’s people grows wider and wider, war’s assault on the earth — the earth that sustains us all — becomes more savage and less reversible with each new armed conflict.
The severe and longterm ecological damage to the Persian Gulf region that resulted from only a few weeks of war last year is just the tip of the iceberg.
The cumulative impact of the many smaller, less publicized wars elsewhere around the globe is no less severe and, ultimately, no less threatening to the well-being of people everywhere, including the United States.
Furthermore, here at home, where ecological damage to our own environment is proceeding at a frightening pace, the single largest polluter by far, producing more toxic and radioactive waste than any other single entity, is the U.S. military.
I am not at all suggesting that our country bears sole responsibility for the global state of affairs.
But we bear a good deal of it, and therefore any steps we take to move away from war will have great influence upon other countries around the world.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had the most powerful armed forces in the world, the most sophisticated weaponry, and by far the largest number of military bases outside our own borders.
Since World War Ⅱ, we have used our military might to bomb, invade, or otherwise intervene in more countries around the world than any other nation.
We were the first to develop the atomic bomb, and we are the only nation ever to use it.
For years we have led the Soviets in atomic test explosions, and we ani continuing these tests even though Soviet testing has stopped.
In addition, we have long been the world’s largest arms merchant, today supplying 40 percent of the entire overseas arms market.
We have been told that all of this is necessary for our security, but the opposite is true.
This military colossus we have created has greatly undermined our security — by creating more enemies than it destroys, by wasting our precious resources and poisoning our environment, by degrading our democracy with “national security” secrecy, covert actions, and official lying, and by undercutting our highest Judeo-Christian values with the insidious doctrine of “might makes right.”
Betsy’s and my actions that have brought us to court are testament to our belief that there is another way for us to live in the world, and another way for us to resolve our conflicts with our fellow human beings.
It is a way that is rooted in the best of our values: the values of generosity and justice, of human dignity and equality, of compassion and mutual respect.
The seeds of this alternative way — the way of nonviolence that Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us — already exist within our society, and within each person.
We have only to honor and nurture those seeds, individually and collectively.
This is a prescription based not on wishful idealism, but on practical necessity.
It is our only real hope for survival.
The transformation required cannot be accomplished without our accepting some measure of personal responsibility for the mess we are in.
It would be futile to expect our government, or any other, to initiate it.
In any event, we cannot afford to wait.
The transformation must begin with us.
Because we profess to be a self-governing people, it is all the more our responsibility.
We can exercise this responsibility by means of the choices each of us is called upon to make.
For example, we can choose to speak out publicly against governmental practices and priorities that we know to be wrong.
Many of us can also choose not to hand over to the federal government some part of our tax money — instead redistribute it to those in need, until such time as those in need become our government’s first priority.
And each of us can choose to continue leading lives based on materialism, consumerism, and environmental exploitation, or we can find ways of living based on simplicity, sharing, and respect for the Earth.
The choices we make as individuals will determine the choices we make as a nation.
This is, no doubt, a dangerous and ominous time to be alive in the world.
Yet it is also a very exciting time to be alive.
People all over the world, despite the opposition of their governments, are taking initiative to bring about momentous and long overdue changes.
These winds of change are sweeping the planet, and they are not likely to stop at our borders.
If the people of Prague and Moscow can overthrow Soviet communism and bring about democracy and human rights; if the people of Soweto and Johannesburg can abolish South African apartheid and establish an egalitarian, multi-racial society; then, I feel sure, it is equally possible for us to dismantle U.S. militarism and replace it with attitudes and institutions of nonviolence.
It is my great hope, my silent prayer, that Betsy’s and my struggle to see that the fruits of our labor are used for nurturing and healing, rather than for killing and war, will somehow contribute to that process.
Following this, Christopher L. King had a piece promoting the Peace Tax Fund.
He described it as the brainchild of David Bassett, who some twenty years before had come up with the idea of allowing taxpayers to perform “alternative service” money the way conscientiously objecting draftees could with their labor.
King wrote that he was surprised to find little awareness of the bill in Quaker circles and described some of the work that he and his comrades were doing for the bill.
Those of us who meet each month and a quiet group of supporters in the surrounding communities believe in our consciences that war and militarism are wrong.
We don’t believe they should be the major tools of our foreign policy.
We sympathize with citizens like Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, who have chosen to pay no taxes because they are pacifists.
We empathize with those brave souls who choose alternative lifestyles so they can keep their income below taxable levels.
It often means their children must learn to sacrifice at an early age.
It means stepping out of the mainstream culture.
Most of us don’t want to change our lifestyles radically or go to jail for our beliefs.
Some might argue that if we are true to our faith, we have no other choice.
On the other hand, there is a need to resist the fundamental tyranny that requires that we must become rebels if we wish to stand firmly for peace.
King’s article was pretty vague on the mechanics of what the Peace Tax Fund bill would actually accomplish, and it was written as if there were no reason why a conscientious objector to paying to war might not find it a satisfactory solution.
The issue included a brief review of the video Paying for Peace: War Tax Resistance in the United States, which was produced by Carol Coney.
Excerpt:
Among those interviewed are Brian Willson, a war tax resister and Vietnam veteran who in was run over by a train while blocking munitions shipments at the Concord naval weapons plant in California.
Also interviewed is Maurice McCrackin, a minister who was sentenced to jail for war tax resistance in ; Ernest and Marion Bromley, who have lived under the taxable income level to avoid paying taxes for military purposes; and Juanita Nelson, an early civil rights organizer who was the first woman to spend a night in jail for war tax resistance.
The issue included an op-ed from Allan Kohrman suggesting Quakers ought to be more patriotic, perhaps singing “God Bless America” during their Sunday meetings, and in particular should rethink their permissive attitude toward civil disobedience and war tax resistance.
“Many Friends seem to define civil disobedience as breaking any law they feel is morally wrong.
Some will not pay war taxes, testifying that God has called them to resist.
I would argue that paying taxes is a basic responsibility of citizenship, a function of my almost mystical relationship to my country.
God calls me to pay my taxes much as God calls others to resist them.”
That’s what “an almost mystical relationship to my country” will get you, I guess.
Another note in that issue concerned two Quakers in Germany — Christa & Klausmart Voigt — who had been prosecuted for war tax resistance.
“About 40 Friends from all over Germany attended the hearing, which was overseen by five judges.”
Klausmart had “placed his money in an account for a peace tax initiative,” and at press time they were still awaiting the court’s decision.
There was another note about the Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund in the issue, which described it this way: “When a request for assistance comes in, the committee that oversees the fund takes it under consideration, then notifies people who have agreed to participate of the amount each would need to contribute to cover the tax resister’s penalty and interest debt.
Contributions are not used to cover the tax liability itself.
The fund is administered in cooperation with the North Manchester (Ind.) Fellowship of Reconciliation.”
“Transformative Nonviolence” — Bob Bady wonders whether the war tax resistance movement is taking a wrong turn by trying “to make war tax resistance more attractive by making it less disruptive and risky.”
Instead, he thinks, “we need to find a way to harness risk rather than shy away from it.”
He concludes that if war tax resisters are going to be willing to take on such risk, “we need to develop a substructure that better supports, sustains, and nourishes the resister.”
Counseling Notes — including the new taxable income levels, a question about whether people who are not tax-compliant can sponsor non-citizens for permanent residency, and some notes about tax law changes and IRS struggles.
International News — from tax resistance campaigns in Hong Kong and Italy.
Ideas & Actions — some activity of local NWTRCC affiliates, news of the Satyagraha Institute’s upcoming summer training program, a note about the imprisonment of Kathy Kelly for her participation in a protest against the military drone assassin program, and a brief review of David Hartsough’s new autobiography, Waging Peace.
NWTRCC News — including announcements of the upcoming national and New England gatherings, a call for nominations for the Administrative Committee, and a note about the War Resisters League honoring NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn with its Ralph DiGia Award.
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
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!”
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.
The Wendell Post, a cute, typewriter-layout-style zine that covered the scene in Wendell, Massachusetts for several years, not infrequently featured articles on war tax resisters.
The following example, an article by Floyd Borakove, comes from its issue:
Wendell may be unique in the high concentration of war tax resisters.
War tax resisters’ techniques vary from intentionally keeping their income below the taxable level to openly refusing all Federal tax.
Many of us have experienced the collection of penalties and interest.
At times these penalties and interest amount to a great burden and makes it more difficult for our witness.
In the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was started by members and friends of the North Manchester Fellowship of Reconciliation.
The founders invited sympathetic people to form a broad base that would help sustain and support war tax resisters.
Resisters needing assistance with interest and penalties which have already been collected by IRS submit requests to a committee for review.
Documentation must include a copy of the IRS collection form, [and] a copy of their original letter of conscience to IRS or Congress.
Approximately three times per year the committee combines requests for reimbursement and sends out an appeal to all names on their mailing list.
The fund does not reimburse any taxes collected, just the penalties and interest.
For example, if the requests totaled $2000 and the fund has 500 names they ask participants to send $4.00 ea[ch].
To date the fund has reimbursed over $50,000 to more than 100 war tax resisters in 24 states.
Stephen Broll is behind bars, the latest of a goodly number of Wendell citizens who have been jailed in recent months for vigiling in Colrain.
The Wendell father, teacher, Post staffer, and war tax refuser violated parole on a conviction of “wanton destruction of property.”
(He had helped repair — not destroy — the roof of the Colrain house seized by the IRS from Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, but the roofing work was without authorization from its new inhabitants.)
His parole violation was in keeping with the theme of nonviolent tax refusal that has been a large part of his life for the past dozen years or more: vigiling last summer against a court injunction, “too near” the Colrain house with other protesters, then refusing to leave when warned to by police.
Also convicted with him for that episode of nonviolent expression of belief were Bob Bady, Michael Klein, and Vince O’Connor.
A domino-arrangement of court and administrative decisions now keeps Randy and Betsy out of their house.
There’s a chance this latest injunction will be struck down by the same legal processes that issued it, once the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly are weighed more carefully against the new occupants’ disputed claims to the land — owned by the land trust — which Steve and his companions were vigiling on.
Meanwhile, for their dubious crime and the parole violation it represented, Steve and Bob started serving 15-day sentences on .
A patient and procedurally liberal judge, brought in from another jurisdiction, heard the trial.
This removed the tension of a heavy court schedule.
As the arresting officers testified, and as Steve and his codefendants spoke, the elements of the growing knot of issues — war tax refusal itself, the IRS’s seizure of property, and the ongoing civil disobedience in Colrain — shone clear.
In an atmosphere of the best the law has to offer, the IRS’s reliance on threat and obedience stood in a kind of contrast.
There is no provision for conscience in the realm of federal income taxation.
My mind wandered as I wondered: does it injure all people to define pacifists as outlaws?
Does this represent the sort of aggression against the spirit that precipitates physically violent crimes — child abuse and drive-by shootings, to name the current showcased symptoms?
The Selective Service has provisions for conscience; why not the Internal Revenue Service?
Money has the curious effect of “laundering” conscience; maybe that’s why the American people haven’t insisted on a Peace Tax Fund.
In that courtroom, the hidden essence of our governmental/legal system showed itself to be distrust and delegation of authority — kind of a Cold War against the conscience — and while some of us felt it, and even saw the hint of an alternative right in that courtroom, I think others had to fight not to.
The IRS, by failing to recognize that land trust property is not the usual kind of property that can be simply bought and sold with a direct exchange of money and pieces of paper, made a big mistake in seizing this particular property in its showcase action.
Defendant Vince O’Connor made it clear that the question of who has the right to control the land around the house is, at the very least, an unsettled question, injunction or no injunction.
The presiding judge had to rather lamely pass the buck by saying the copy of the injunction he held was a “certified copy” — therefore legal.
He couldn’t question the merits of the injunction, he said.
Even if a court someday upholds that injunction — or confirms the IRS seizure and auction of the house as well as the leasehold — the question will remain, in a space beyond legalism: if a land trust is created specifically to introduce stability into property use and ownership, by requiring transactions to take more than just a willing buyer and a willing seller, can even a branch of the federal government override it?
Many land trusts are created to modify the excesses of the free market; by what authority may the government smash them?
Finally, Steve’s court case spotlighted the ratcheting-up of the drama between our authoritarian tax system and people who simply ask to be allowed to live free with their consciences intact.
The law enforcement apparatus finds itself having to choose between disobeying its own strictures and locking up for ever-increasing periods of time people expecting/demanding to be permitted to live less violent lives.
State police and courts are apparently learning to accept the sincerity of this dogged new kind of tax “criminal” in Colrain; there are no fire hoses or Mace attacks.
It’s impossible to predict, but maybe some real gains are being made here in Western Massachusetts to bring authority back home, shifting toward personal and away from delegated risk, toward the inner and away from the institutional… toward a more complete society of more completely functioning (and deeply non-violent) people like my friend Steve Broll.
Money, even in tiny amounts, talks. If money — money from a growing number of tax rebels — refuses to go where the government is trying to put it, then together we can make a difference.
That’s why I’m appealing to other self-employed writers to join me in this tax resistance.
Rogers is part of “The Earth Tax Strike” group, which is holding its withheld taxes in an escrow account which they say they’ll pay when the government meets their demands.
[“We have no need to stockpile nuclear weapons and threaten our planet Earth under the guise of ‘security.’ We cannot find a reason to help finance the death squads of right-wing governments in Central America.” This is part of a statement by Bob Bady and Patricia Morse, war tax resisters from Western Massachusetts.
The house which they built with their own hands over a ten-years period was put on the auction block by the IRS, for taxes owed the federal government.
A bid was made by two unknown persons and the property sold to them.
Bob and Pat have been given a 180 day period in which to “redeem” their place and then apply the repurchase price against the still due taxes.
The couple say they will not do this, and will also resist any attempt to remove them from their house by means of a nonviolent occupation.
By the time this issue is put in the mail, the fate of another house, that belonging to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, may have been decided.
They and their nine-year-old daughter, Lillian, are neighbors of Bob, Pat, and her seventeen-year-old son.
Randy and Betsy’s house was auctioned on , but in that case the IRS ended up as the owner of the house, after “bids” in the form of Nicaraguan currency, canned goods for the poor, and offers of community service, were turned down by the IRS.
They, too, will prepare for a Gandhian nonviolent occupation if the IRS attempts to remove them.
Acts of civil disobedience against war taxations take many forms.
Karl Meyer sees the value of tactical efforts to avoid a date with the IRS; Randy, Betsy, Bob, Pat and many in the Catholic Worker movement find it imperative to inform the IRS directly of any such actions, and welcome others to write for more information on the possible Satyagraha campaign, American style, which may occur if the IRS attempts to evict them from their homes.
Please contact: War Tax Refusers Support Committee, c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
Karl Meyer is always happy to discuss questions and problems concerning war tax resistance.
He may be reached at: 1460 W. Carmen, Chicago, IL 60640, (312) 784‒8065.
―Eds. Note]
By Karl Meyer
In , when Mohandas Gandhi searched for a tactic of civil disobedience that would galvanize India in the struggle for self-rule, he recognized that the use of salt was a necessity at the heart of Indian village life, yet salt production was a monopoly controlled by the British rulers.
Every time Indians bought salt they paid a burdensome tax to the British.
He began a campaign for self-rule with a march to the sea, to take untaxed salt from it, in violation of British rule.
His campaign was rooted in resistance to taxes on an elemental commodity of everyday life, just as our own American Revolution began around resistance to a British tax on tea.
Striking at these basic taxes struck at the heart of British rule.
In , in Gandhi’s India, jail was the ordinary ultimate sanction for enforcing government control.
Death was the extraordinary ultimate sanction.
During the salt campaign, hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten with clubs when they tried to enter a saltworks.
In two months of , more than 32,000 Indians were convicted of political offenses and jailed.
Gandhi once said, “Rivers of blood may have to flow before India gains her freedom, but it must be our own blood.”
In North America [today], the system of control seems far more benign than this.
The front line agencies of government coercion, which are Selective Service and the IRS, believe that they can control U.S. dissenters adequately by compiling computerized data about them, their whereabouts, their means of education, their livelihood and their financial assets.
With this information the enforcement agencies can apply adequate pressure with civil penalties, by withholding benefits or by seizing a punitive share of income or assets.
They think they can pin us down while they extract our teeth, and then allow us to gum our verbal protests as much as we please.
In , at the height of the Vietnam War, we started a tax refusal campaign to beat the withholding system by claiming extra allowances on W-4 Withholding Exemption certificates.
It worked. Hundreds of refusers began to do it.
At first in , the IRS tried to squash that movement by putting a handful of resisters in jail.
But that didn’t work well.
Putting conscientious war tax refusers in jail created martyrs, martyrs created publicity and publicity created more resisters.
So the IRS stopped putting us in jail and began to search around for better control tactics.
I think they understood the potential of classic jail-going civil disobedience better than we do.
Today, the U.S. government basically declines to imprison war refusers for their ordinary crimes.
Hundreds of thousands refuse to register for the draft — none is in jail today.
Thousands openly refuse taxes for war — none is in jail today.
The Warfare State
In America today, the internal systems of control by the warfare state have evolved to more benign forms.
For many people this apparent benignity masks the horror of reality.
The U.S. administration and Congress have repeatedly said: “Rivers of blood may have to flow before we suppress the struggle for self-rule in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, but that will be all right because it will be their blood.
North Americans will not care because we will see to it that none of their own blood will flow.
We will control them with media manipulation and with electronic information gathering and processing systems.” They believe that they will control adequately the society of the future by gathering information efficiently and processing it instantaneously.
They will have information about the flow of every dollar that represents our personal belongings and our personal productivity.
These streams of dollars will be the blood of the future.
Once the IRS has identified and located every vessel of human interchange through which they flow, the tax gatherers will tap those vessels where they please and gather the blood of our productivity and our belongings, without a word of acquiescence or protest on our part.
The machine grinds on, impervious to picketing and ordinary letters of protest.
It ignores them because they have no numbers and produce no dollars.
Perhaps electronic information is not bad in itself; but if we allow these systems to divest us of our human work, and to use it to harm people in other countries, the end of this stream of dollars will flow red with human blood, as it does today in Salvador.
(Excerpted from a longer article, “Satyagraha in 1984: Gandhian Resistance to War Taxes in the Age of the Computer.”)
By Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler
The federal government’s policies regarding nuclear weaponry and military interventions contradict our deepest moral and spiritual values — values which, we believe, should apply as much to public as to private life.
We are not religious in a formal way, but we do struggle to accept and live by the proposition that we are all children of God.
We take this to mean, in a very real sense, that all people everywhere are our sisters and brothers whom we must try to love and, in any case, refrain from deliberately injuring.
For us, this applies especially to the poor, including our sisters and brothers in Central America who are suffering and dying as a result of U.S. policies and U.S. arms, and our sisters and brothers here in our own country who are hungry and homeless while our government pours billions of dollars into an insane nuclear arms race that threatens to kill us all.
How can we willingly give money to the federal government when we know that it will be used to cause, or threaten, so much harm to other members of our human family?
Our answer is that we can’t.
We are convinced that our government’s policies are not just immoral, but also illegal.
The United States is a signatory to international treaties that prohibit the manufacture of genocidal weapons of destruction and forbid the use of force to overthrow foreign governments.
According to the U.S. Constitution, these treaties have the same binding force as domestic law.
Yet we continue to produce more and more nuclear bombs capable of destroying all life on earth, and we persist in sending arms and material to groups attempting to topple governments deemed “unfriendly” to U.S. interests.
Who is the real lawbreaker — we who refuse to pay for these criminal activities, or the U.S. government, and their tax collectors, who carry them out?
The Nuremberg Principles that resulted from the trials of Nazi war criminals, and which were subsequently ratified by the U.S. government, hold that individual citizens who commit or collaborate with “crimes against humanity” must be held responsible for their actions even though they were “only following orders” or “only obeying the law.”
We believe that preparing for nuclear war, and waging actual war against people in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, are both crimes against humanity — and that helping to pay for them is a form of collaboration.
We view our war-tax resistance not only as serving our country’s best interests, but also as highly consistent with the rich American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience — a tradition that includes the Boston Tea Party, the early colonists’ refusal to pay British stamp taxes, Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes during the Mexican-American War, and the refusal by black Americans to obey racially discriminatory laws during the Civil Rights Movement of .
Nonviolent acts of protest and noncooperation have always been crucial to the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Are we nervous about the possibility of losing our house? Sure we are to some degree.
We don’t want to lose our house any more than anyone else does.
It has been our home for ten years and it represents the only material security we have.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by U.S.-sponsored bombing in El Salvador or by U.S.-sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash if the nuclear arms race is not halted and reversed?
If, by risking the loss of our home, we can raise one more voice in protest against all this needless destruction, then it will be worth it.
When we grow anxious about the consequences of our war-tax resistance, it also helps to remember the good that comes from redistributing our federal tax money.
Last year Don Mosley, who coordinates a project called “Walk In Peace,” which raises money for people who have lost arms and legs in Nicaragua, wrote to us:
“Your contribution all by itself is nearly enough to finance the complete rehabilitation (including the making of artificial limbs) of five people.
I hope you can grasp that in human terms…”
For us, that’s what it all comes down to: human terms.
And that’s what keeps us going. At this point in our lives, we can’t not resist the federal government’s taxes.
The issue of The Catholic Worker reported on the inspiring tax resistance campaign of the mostly-Christian Palestinian village of Beit Sahour against the taxes collected by the Israeli occupation:
Peaceful Tax Resistance in Beit Sahour
By Terry Rogers
The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, founded in East Jerusalem in by Mubarak Awad and others, offers a wide range of educational programs and research in the history, theory, and methodology of nonviolence for Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general.
In , the PCSNV published an analysis of the 22 most recent leaflets of the Unified Command of the Intifada.
These leaflets, printed anonymously every two weeks, give specific instructions to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Center’s study, which counted the frequency with which various actions were urged, found that only 9.6% of the leaflets’ instructions proposed violent acts.
The rest included such nonviolent actions as strikes; boycotts of Israeli jobs, goods, and services; tax resistance; participation in popular committees; cancellation of celebrations; surrounding and protecting children who are beaten by soldiers; and others.
The authors of the study conclude: “It has not been proven that the Intifada is a nonviolent struggle, only that violence is not necessary for the intifada to continue.”
The tax resistance of the village of Beit Sahour in the West Bank is a recent example of one of these nonviolent tactics and has attracted widespread international attention.
A small middle-class village of 12,000 near Bethlehem, Beit Sahour is a close-knit community of extended families, most of whom have lived there for generations.
The population is eighty percent Christian, and its economic base consists of several hundred small family enterprises.
Residents of Beit Sahour have the highest percentage of university graduates of any village in the occupied territories.
Since the occupation, they have a history of strong political organization, and many cooperatives and neighborhood committees have been established there.
Recently, the village has been known for welcoming Israeli peace activists into its homes and churches, organizing dialogues and joint peace demonstrations.
The commitment to tax resistance in Beit Sahour began in and intensified in .
The rationale for tax resistance in the occupied territories has several bases.
The sales tax, or VAT, was imposed by Israel after the occupation; its legality is disputed by Palestinians because, according to international law, an occupying power has no right to impose new taxes.
Also, Palestinians under occupation maintain that only a small portion of their taxes pays for the limited public services in the occupied territories, and Israel cannot prove otherwise as it does not publish a budget of its income and expenses there.
Finally, since Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip cannot vote, they have no control over taxes or public expenditures.
A statement from Beit Sahour on stated, in part:
“We will not finance the bullets that kill our children, the growing number of prisons, the expenses of the occupying army.
We want no more than what you have: freedom and our own representatives to pay taxes to.”
Tax resistance is risky, for without a certificate that all taxes have been paid one cannot, for example, register a car, renew a drivers’ license, travel out of the country, register the birth of a child, or receive permission to bury a family member.
Nevertheless, significant numbers of Palestinians under occupation have refused to pay taxes or file tax returns.
Beit Sahour was recently singled out for harsh collective punishment as an example to others in the territories.
, the village was declared a closed military zone.
For the first five days a 24-hour curfew was imposed, and the subsequent curfew was 5 pm to 5 am.
Many telephone lines were cut, soldiers were posted on rooftops throughout the town, and press, solidarity, and religious groups were denied entrance, including the consuls-general of six Western European countries.
Under military protection, tax authorities visited ten residents daily, confiscating and sometimes destroying business and personal property that was sometimes worth much more than the taxes owed.
At times property was taken from the members of the extended families of tax resisters.
Three hundred families had property confiscated and five hundred other families had their bank accounts frozen.
Much property was receipted, but not all receipts were signed and some were receipted only as boxes.
Forty Sahouries were jailed for nonpayment of taxes and forty-two placed in administrative detention.
To protect tax authorities during these raids, the soldiers forced drivers of passing cars to park their cars in a ring around the house being raided, and commanded passersby to stand in a ring outside the cars.
Residents of Beit Sahour described the tax raids as harsh and arbitrary.
Some who had paid taxes were mistakenly raided and some of the soldiers taunted and threatened family members and children during the raids.
On , the United Nations General Assembly, in a nearly unanimous resolution, condemned the Israeli government for the tax raids in the occupied territories.
By the end of the siege, much of the productive base of the village had been destroyed, yet the mood there was one of celebration.
On , with the soldiers gone, observers heard whistles, chants, and cheers echoing through the streets.
In their all but empty homes, residents who had been raided spoke proudly of the village’s steadfastness and the villagers’ mutual support.
In recognition of the devastating effect of the siege and confiscations, the Palestine Central Council, meeting in Baghdad, voted to ask contributions from PLO members and employees to help compensate the villagers.
Israeli peace activists, many of whom have made friends in Beit Sahour through the previous months of dialogue, have also shown solidarity.
After the siege, they were invited to a service for peace in the Beit Sahour Roman Catholic Church, and though sixty were turned back by soldiers at roadblocks outside the town, a dozen who had spent the night there were able to take part in the service.
Their spokesman, Hillel Bardin, told the two thousand Palestinians in the congregation,
“There is a group of Israelis here with me today who’ve known you for a long time; who’ve had the honor of meeting you, talking with you, learning about you in a way few Israelis have…
I admire the courageous people of Beit Sahour for coming together today to call for peace between our peoples.”
The Mufti of Jerusalem also attended the service, and the presence of a Muslim holy man in a Christian church was a sign of increased unity among Palestinians themselves.
Another expression of support for Beit Sahour was an Israeli gift of a truckload of tree and vegetable seedlings, delivered .
Some Israelis have held protest demonstrations during the selling of the confiscated goods at the Ben Gurion airport.
Israeli and Palestinian women are protesting the harsh exposure to cold at the Anata Detention Center where 35 tax resisters from Beit Sahour are being held.
Members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, were stopped by an army roadblock when they tried to make a solidarity visit on , but hundreds of Sahouris arrived by side paths to greet them outside the town.
The increasing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who are organizing against the occupation, both jointly and in their own communities, are drawing from, and making a significant contribution to, the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle.
Military authorities have told the villagers of Beit Sahour to expect another tax siege within six months, but there is no sign that the Sahouris will change their stand.
International pressure and expressions of concern are an essential part of the protection and encouragement desperately needed by Palestinians and Israelis working for a just and peaceful solution to this conflict.
