Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
France →
bonnets rouges, 2013–14
A tax resistance movement in France has led to riots and has forced the government to back down on some of its new tax plans.
Today I’ll share some clips from news articles I’ve been reading to try to keep up with the emerging campaign.
bonnets rouges and Breton flags in the recent anti-tax demonstrations in Brittany
According to information published by the newspaper Le Monde, 72% of French people consider the amount of taxes excessive, and 43% believe that paying the tax is not a “civic responsibility.”… Should we expect a large tax revolt movement in France, and if so, under what conditions could it actually happen?
Atlantico consulted Manon Sieraczek-Laporte, a lawyer who has written about French taxpatriates.
She mentioned the group Les Tondus (The Fleeced), a group of businesses that is resisting employment taxes.
She concluded that this was “apparently a phenomenon of organized corporations (entrepreneurs, artisans, merchangs), which suggests that the ‘May ’68 of taxes’ is still a ways off.
It would require a movement of hundreds of thousands of people to become of a scale sufficient to force changes.”
Right-wing politician Claude Reichman put it this way: “The movement has already started, but it is still unsure about which means to employ.”
Pirate Party activist Eric Verhaeghe noted that the tax resistance was not likely to be launched or encouraged by means of preexisting groups like Medef (Movement of French Enterprises) or CGPME (General Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises) because these groups have been coopted by government financial support: “[they] are largely financed by public funds; some of their leaders are dependent on government contracts.”
However, groups like “les patrons militants,” “les pigeons,” and “les tondus” “are quasi-spontaneous unions of employers or entrepreneurs unhappy with public policy who intend to influence the debate.
To achieve this, they avoid large official union machines and prefer to act virally and through flash mobs… For governments, this method is a challenge because it is difficult to predict and counter.
This explains why the movements funded by public authorities have the mission of channeling these ‘pirates’ and then breaking them.”
Reichman turned up the rhetoric a notch: “For twenty years I have been fighting for social liberty.
Today, tens of thousands of French people are choosing to abandon Social Security.
I call them the army of the Free French.
They are fighting against the bureaucrats and the welfare-dependent.
The Free French must win for the life of France.”
William Genieys, an author who has written on the history of French politics, then gave a run-down of some prior French tax rebellions — like The Fronde (), the Poujadism of , and a variety of tax discontent movements in .
He concludes: “Here we see that the limit of state power is precisely its ability to collect taxes with consent.”
The interviewer asked next what legal steps the current crop of protesters might take.
Sieraczek-Laporte made some speculations in that direction, but then Reichman declared:
There will be no legal organization.
You don’t really believe that in the current pre-revolutionary climate, the protesters will organize themselves into an club, elect a president, a general secretary, a treasurer, as an angler’s club might?
This is something quite different: to overthrow a confiscatory system that ruins France and to replace it with a true democracy where the State concerns itself with core functions and lets the French undertake and enjoy the fruits of their labor — the opposite of what is actually happening!
Why Brittany — a politically left-leaning region that might be thought to be sympathetic to the Socialist president and what he billed as an “eco tax” on fuel-hungry big trucks?
Partially this is because Brittany is dependent on agriculture, and agriculture is dependent on those big trucks.
But there’s more to it than that: Pierre Vermeren looked into the history of Brittany and its complicated relationship with the rest of France. He detects a revival of Breton nationalism at the root of the revolt.
This article from France 24, has some good video footage of the first round of protests.
Then, , demonstrators who were not mollified by Hollande’s temporary suspension of his fuel tax and his eager (desperate) call for “dialog” struck again:
Protesters threw rocks near the barricaded offices of the prefect in Quimper, capital of the Finistere department of Brittany.
Police responded with tear gas.
Outside Quimper, demonstrators set tyres on fire to light the bridge.
Taking a page from the Rebeccaite toolbook, tax resisters in Brittany have taken to destroying tollbooths.
Here’s a great example (video):
Back in Rebecca’s time, toll gates were real wooden gates that barred the roads to drivers until they paid their tolls, and the resisters’ tools were bonnets and axes.
Now, toll gates are automated portals that scan the license plates of passing trucks, and the resisters’ tools are red liberty caps and burning tires full of petrol.
someone snapped this picture of a road tax camera burning in Jugon
The government is billing this as an “ecotax” designed less as a revenue-raiser and more as a way of trying to wean French shipping away from the highways and towards less-polluting transportation options.
But a new group, the “bonnets verts” (green caps) are asking: if the government cares about the environment so much, why has it doubled the tax on people who use public transit?
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Earlier this year I went through all the back issues of Friends Journal to review how the practice of Quaker war tax resistance underwent a revival and then retreated again in the last half century or so.
We’re at the bottom of the retreat trough today.
There has been almost nothing about war tax resistance in the Journal this year.
The latest issue does have some mentions, but they’re pretty much all in the obituaries:
The obituary notice for Mary Caroline Mendenhall notes that she was part of the Fairhope single-tax corporation — a “cooperative community that hoped to address the challenges to conscience that came through the payment of taxes” — and that she was one of those Quakers who emigrated to the Monteverde settlement in Costa Rica after she “became uncomfortable with the draft and with paying taxes that contributed to militarism.”
The obituary notice for Edward Webster says that he and his wife Susan “stopped paying war taxes for a period [in ], started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund as a place for war tax resisters to redirect a portion of their taxes to, and counter-recruited at high schools.”
Spanish war tax resister Paco Ortega has joined up with the Stop Evictions group from Granada’s 15M assembly and has expanded his war tax resistance so that now he also refuses to pay the portion of his taxes devoted to the state police and national guard, legislature, monarchy, prison, election and party financing, and interest on the debt — a bit over 31% of his tax bill.
He’s redirecting the resisted portion of his taxes to the Stop Evictions project.
The government of Thailand was contemplating a law that would have granted amnesty to politicians who had perpetrated a variety of crimes over the past decade.
The opposition called for general strikes and tax resistance, and the government abandoned the amnesty plan.
In Greece, the toll resisters depended less on destruction and more on mass action — mobbing the toll booths, lifting the gates, and waving the drivers through.
Some of these activists are being prosecuted now (with mixed success).
But yet more infuriating?
The country’s legislature has voted itself a new benefits package, and among those benefits: legislators don’t have to pay highway tolls!
Breton protesters against the Ecotax, nicknamed the “lorry tax,” aimed at making heavy goods vehicles pay for polluting the environment through additional road levies, have destroyed more than 46 traffic radars.
The damage is estimated at more than €6m (£5m), according to TV channel France 3.
A new demonstration today, in Carhaix, drew perhaps twice as many people.
It is being accompanied by dozens of blockades of trucks along highways throughout France, with the stated goal of letting cars through but halting commercial transport (this is snarling traffic to the extent that some demonstrators were having difficulty getting to the Carhaix rally).
The language barrier makes it difficult for me to interpret much of the news coming out of the area, but I’m trying to keep up (on the Twitter, it seems that #BonnetsRouges, #RevolteFiscale, and #ReveilCitoyen are the tags to watch today).
The so-called “ecotax” remains a focus of the demonstrations, but there is also a focus on demanding more regional autonomy, and calls for the resignation of the overwhelmingly unpopular French president.
Other opposition groups with their own specific grievances have tried to latch on and put their messages on the agenda (notorious far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen put on a red cap at one point), but so far the bonnets rouges seem to be maintaining an ecumenical inclusiveness: protesters of the left and right, believing that Bretagne is being misgoverned and exploited by Paris, are keeping a united front and overlooking their differences.
Here’s a bit more about the bonnets rouges, who held a big anti-tax demonstration across France :
Philippe Euzen has a backgrounder at Le Monde — “Ces patrons à l’origine des ‘bonnets rouges’ ” (the bosses behind the bonnets rouges) — in which he describes how business and entrepreneurial groups with a deregulation/low-tax agenda united with leftish Breton nationalists and decentralization activists to gel this unusual movement.
Another backgrounder at France Info looks at an odd variety of angry birds in the French political scene: activist coalitions with names like “Pigeons,” “Chicks,” “Turkeys,” “Dodos,” and “Storks” that are fighting for a variety of causes.
Some are trying to crack open an over-regulated and cartelized economy and enable more small-scale entrepreneurialism by overturning laws banning innovations like Airbnb and Lyft — and this is causing the establishment unions, who are invested in the status quo, to turn their backs on the movement.
In the report, the prefects said that roadside cameras installed across France to monitor traffic for the new tax had become symbols of fiscal oppression, and demanded that they be “removed before they are all destroyed”.
The government has tried to defuse the protest by “suspending” the new “ecotax” which was originally supposed to go into effect .
It is now scheduled for at the earliest.
Some international tax resistance news:
France
There was an amusing scene last week when a hundred employees of Ecomouv, the quasi-private company responsible for collecting a new road tax in France, held a holiday party in Metz.
Posing for a group photo in front of the company offices in their santa hats, they were mistaken for a demonstration of the anti-tax bonnets rouges (red caps) by local police, who quickly intervened.
A bonnets rouges subgroup calling itself the “cash cows” showed up at the intermunicipal council of Saint-Brieuc to try to get some answers about their property taxes.
Not getting the answers they were looking for, they shut down the council meeting.
Another group of bonnets rouges blockaded a Swiss-French border crossing
to protest a new obligation on those who live in France but work in Switzerland to contribute to the French public health system (before, such workers could choose to join either the French or Swiss programs).
Joseph Graziani, head of an industrial union, threatened to lead a partial tax strike
in January in which people would refuse to pay more than a certain “reasonable” tax threshold if the government refuses to meet certain demands, which include reducing taxes, replacing the quasi-private tax collection company Equitalia, and reducing the cost of government bureaucracy.
There’s a new web site Tax Rebellion that is trying to push the case that citizens of countries like the U.K. or U.S. that habitually engage in war crimes and aggressive warfare have a legal obligation to withdraw their support (particularly their taxes) from their governments.
By the playbook of the great “privatization” swindle that has been so popular among governments in recent years, when the government of France designed its new tax on freight trucks, it contracted with an Italian company to implement the program. But then the bonnets rouges came along and burned down all the truck-scanning portals and forced the government to suspend the tax. The Italian company that won the contract, Ecomouv, was however smart enough to anticipate such an outcome in their contract, and they’re guaranteed an €18 million payment from the government every month whether they’re collecting any tax or not.
Taxi drivers in Tunisia are posting signs in the windows of their cabs that read “I will not pay tax!” and are daring the police to try to enforce new taxes on motorists against them.
Meanwhile, some Greek motorists have adopted the strategy of paying only a single euro of their road tax, while submitting a protest, as a way of baffling the bureaucracy.
A couple of bits of international tax resistance news:
The destruction of automatic traffic monitors in Brittany and other parts of France as part of the anti-tax bonnets rouges movement is also being accompanied by less-destructive but almost as effective temporary disabling of these monitors by affixing stickers over their “eyes.”
…in the spirit of constitutional revolution — a role that I assume with responsibility — I hereby propose that we attack this nefarious regime at its most essential front, tax collection (#NoPagoImpuestos).
If we agree to stop paying taxes, as the Americans in Boston did with tea, we can force Congress to address the leadership vacuum the country finds itself in, and, with this, we can put an end to the imperial family and to its band of corrupt and genocidal criminals.
If we do not, if we continue to play the role of sheep willing to work as slaves so that the President and her lackeys continue to fill their gorged saddlebags, that they squander on houses, planes, vacations, Football for All, Argentine Airlines, etc., we will have no future as a nation and Argentina will cease to exist.
But instead, if we were to do like Gandhi in India, who peacefully managed to banish the British Empire and its local proconsuls, if we were to make real that civil resistance, the Government, underfunded, would be unable to continue its irrational policy of buying obedience and stealing the very plumbing out from under the nation, and, when the consequences of our joint conduct produces the final collapse of this sinister decade, all of those responsible, whether in government or private citizens, will end in paying the bill for this party with their liberty and their ill-gotten fortunes; something that is being proclaimed in this sense, by the permanent “escraches” that they are subjected to whenever they try to poke their heads out of their burrows, something that did not happen under previous governments.
I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my
screen in recent weeks:
Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they
can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their
conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment
with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the
dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War
tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs
about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.
If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the
U.S., you’re
supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though
you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself
as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary
out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on
that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J.
Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor”
though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid
SE/payroll
taxes entirely.”
NPR
looked into
Why More Americans Are Renouncing
U.S.
Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but
instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading
to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes,
and how the U.S.
tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.
Tax Resistance in Spain
Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes.
Excerpts:
Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David
Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes,
created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than
ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the
particracy of
lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of
tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political
and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt
assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume
this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.
It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that
contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements
of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the
exclusive benefit of the people.
I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to
support a business strike
in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.
Tax Resistance in Argentina
, twenty “productores,
industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly:
“manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in
Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads.
The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their
businesses impossible to operate.
It’s time for another international tax resistance news update:
Austria
The Hypo Alpe Adria bank bailout scandal has proven to be the last straw for some Austrian taxpayers.
I’ve mentioned before the case of tobacconist Gerhard Höller, who recently started to refuse to pay his taxes and who started a website to encourage others to join his strike.
This article introduced me to Wolfgang Reichl, who is paying his taxes into an escrow account to protest the Hypo bailout.
Small business owners in Italy are also rebelling against the taxes and fees that are pushing their businesses into bankruptcy.
Bed and breakfast owner Alessandra Marazzi laid off staff and started doing everything herself — working from six in the morning to eleven at night — and she still couldn’t keep above water.
Then she sat down with her books and discovered that fully 84% of what she was bringing in was going to pay taxes and state-monopolized utility fees.
She decided to stop paying taxes just so her business (and her family) could survive.
Her “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” (tax protest to the bitter end) movement is also gaining adherents.
Caterer Andrea Polese, for instance, stopped paying and put a sign on her door reading “I am a tax resister.”
Bar owner Mariano Pavanello posted a selfie with a sign saying “I decided to stop paying protection money to a state thief.”
Meanwhile, the planned tax strike of the Venetian secessionists continues to progress, despite the recent arrests of two dozen separatists.
Jordan
Well, I can’t make heads or tails of the dialog in this video, but apparently it shows residents of Bani Obeid explaining why they have decided to stop paying taxes to protest against governmental incompetence.
Spain
The “comprehensive disobedience” movement that began in Catalonia has a new website, that includes material in several languages (including English).
Its purpose: “to construct an international political and ideological space on the basis of the Integral Revolution.”
The newly-declared Venetian Republic issued its first decree — that Venetians are exempt from taxation until the Republic is able to set up a tax agency independent from Italy.
The government has responded with raids and arrests there as well.
Robert W. McGee continues his series of investigations into attitudes on the ethics of tax evasion, this time surveying philosophy professors about which circumstances, if any, they think may justify tax evasion.
He’s also done a meta-study of some of his earlier work to try to determine if there are gender differences in evaluating the ethics of tax evasion.
The folks behind the Spanish “comprehensive disobedience” project have launched a multi-lingual, international website:
IntegraRevolucio to coordinate the work of people around the world who are working on similar lines.
They also plan to launch a new media project — RADI.MS — soon.
An international tax resistance news round-up:
Samantha Prime
France
A trial of several bonnets rouges on charges of highway tax portal destruction has been put off until September, and the defendants are now all out on bail.
But meanwhile, the government has won its first conviction in another case:
Samantha Prime, a 19-year-old student, was recently convicted of burning a highway radar outpost .
She was given a six-month suspended sentence along with 175 hours of community service and an as-yet-undetermined fine for damages.
Rural Catalans, who are legally organized under a quasi-municipal government called the Decentralized Municipal Entity, approved a tax resistance motion that would have people in Catalonia redirect their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government.
The federal government took them to court for this, but the court ruled that the non-binding motion of advocacy was “political speech” and was within the Entity’s authority.
El Confidencial, however, has declared the campaign a failure, claiming that fewer than 1,500 people have begun redirecting their federal taxes in this way so far, a much lower figure than the movement had hoped for at this stage.
Sales tax refuseniks in Salzburg, motivated by disgust at bank bailouts, have won the applause of their neighbors, but have had a hard time making their resistance stick. The government froze Wolfgang Reichl’s bank account until he paid taxes and penalties, for instance, but he vowed to resist again.
NWTRCC has reprinted Melvin D. Schmidt’s paper on “Tax Refusal as Conscientious Objection to War” at its site.
The paper gives a brief historical overview of war tax resistance, describes the results of a survey of sixty-one war tax resisters, speculates about IRS policy motives, and looks at the theory of war tax resistance through a Mennonite-focused theological lens.
Carolyn Yoder brings us a more up-to-date look Mennonite war tax resistance, in a recent article for The Mennonite that includes interviews with fourteen people from the Community Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who are resisting war taxes in a variety of ways.
The TaxProf Blog recently reprinted some excerpts from Diane L. Fahey’s new paper “The Movement to Destroy the Income Tax and the IRS: Who Is Doing It and How They Are Succeeding”.
The paper, which takes a horrified-liberal perspective on this, asserts that Republicans and others of the right-wing are creating all of this outrage over “the IRS scandal” and other such things not just for short-term political gain but as part of a long-term plan to delegitimize the IRS and the nation’s tax system and erode the culture of tax compliance, at the service of “a small group of financial elites” who want to be able to stop paying.
“The article concludes that if this erosion in compliance attitudes continues, it will reach a level of magnitude that a tipping point will be reached and noncompliance will be an acceptable norm.”
Today I continue in my roughly-chronological arrangement of some of the newspaper coverage of the Rebeccaite campaign in Wales which peaked in .
I think this is a particularly fascinating example of organized, mass, grassroots tax resistance, and it is particularly worth a look today because of the strikingly similar bonnets rouges movement in Brittany that conquered the “écotaxe” there by methodically demolishing the highway portals that were to have attached the tax to passing trucks (here’s coverage of a recent example).
(The French government has recently decided to abandon the hated “écotaxe”… sort of: it has been replaced by a similar tax in a different form.
Instead of truck drivers being taxed by vulnerable portals along the highways, they will instead be required to install GPS units in their trucks, and will be charged a tax whenever they travel on certain highways — excluding almost the whole of Brittany, which remains free, for now.)
This account of the Rebeccaite movement comes from the Monmouthshire Merlin:
— Notwithstanding the sudden check given on.
to Rebecca and her deluded followers, in their attempt on the Carmarthen workhouse, each day brings its report of some fresh outrage in this or the adjoining county, and it would seem that the daring spirit of resistance to the laws by which these deluded men have hitherto been governed, has received no efficient stop by the proceedings of , nor are they as yet content to submit to the advice of friends or the dictates of reason.
No fresh attack has been made either upon the town or workhouse since , and with the exception of the continuance of the excitement necessarily following so daring an outrage, the town is comparatively tranquil and quiet.
, or at least during the , Rebecca and her daughters paid a visit to the two following gates, some distance from Llanbyther, in the county of Carmarthen, viz., Pencader gate, which they soon destroyed, both gate and toll-house.
Exulting in their lawless acts, they proceeded from thence to Llanfihangel-Yeroth gate, which, together with the toll-house, was also demolished.
The muster on this occasion is said to have been about seventy persons, who soon after the completion of their work dispersed, and retired to their respective homes.
On , another division of the family visited the village of St. Clears; they were disguised and armed, and although the party was on this occasion smaller than usual, they effected their purpose in the destruction of the gate in question, which is opposite the Blue Boar inn, and they then proceeded to another gate called Maeswholand gate, which was also very speedily destroyed.
While at St. Clears, an attempt was made by Mr. Powell, of Penycoed, and Mr. Thomas, currier, to apprehend one of the party, but without effect.
These gentlemen had the man in safe keeping until his party overtook them, and having beat them violently with the but end of their guns, they were reluctantly compelled to release their prisoners.
On a large mob of Rebeccaites assembled themselves together, and having made their arrangements for their purpose, proceeded en masse to Newcastle Emlyn turnpike-gate, which of course was soon demolished, amid the cheers and firing of this lawless gang.
Castell-y-rhingill gate, near Llandilo, has also been destroyed, as well as Llandilorwns gate, and a bar near Llanddarog gate.
A night or two ago, a gate or bar on the road near Pont-y-berem was destroyed, and every morning we have the history of gate destruction from one part of the country or the other, to an extent that must lead the most skeptical to admit at least that this state of things is really alarming.
We have had the mayor and magistrates sitting daily — meeting after meeting of county and borough justices, all impressed with the importance of maintaining the laws inviolate, and the necessity of peace being restored to this once loyal and rural district, and that without any wish to refuse to redress fair grievances.
It is commonly reported that Rebecca has sent threatening letters to most of the workhouses in this and the adjoining counties, intimating her intention of paying them a visit, razing the workhouse to the ground, and of ejecting the paupers therefrom.
This is but a report, the truth of which we cannot vouch for.
On , a report reached the ears of the powers that be, that Rebecca’s children had commenced demolishing Glangwilly gate, about a mile and a half from this town.
Colonel Love, Major Parlby, and his well-disciplined troop were speedily mounted, and went off at a slashing pace to the supposed scene of destruction, when it happily turned out that there was no real grounds of alarm; but the town became at once seriously excited, and scores of persons about to retire to rest were seen anxiously following the dragoons to the place of supposed danger and mischief.
On a company of the 73rd regiment of foot arrived in town, under the command of Major Dawson, and are quartered in the union workhouse.
the town was again excited, it being currently reported that the dragoons were ordered off immediately to another part of the country.
On enquiry, we found the troops were under orders, and the fact that Col. Powell, M.P., and Lord Lieutenant of Cardiganshire, had arrived in town , led to the conjecture that they were to be stationed at Newcastle Emlyn, or in the immediate neighbourhood of Cardigan.
They left town about , as we are informed for Newcastle.
Earl Cawdor arrived by mail, express from London.
Colonel Rice Trevor, M.P. for this county, arrived in town some few days since, to act on his noble father’s behalf as lord lieutenant of the county.
He presided at Newcastle Emlyn, at a large meeting of the magistrates and free-holders, on , which was very fully attended.
A very large meeting of magistrates, county and borough, was again held on , at Carmarthen, but the business was of a private nature, and although we have three reporters from the London press in town they with ourselves were shut out, not being of the privileged class, and publicity perhaps not being required as to the matters under discussion.
The names of the persons committed last week to the Borough Gaol are David Thomas, of Rhydymarchog, in the parish of Newchurch, David Thomas, of Pantwrgwm, Treleach, weaver; Job Evans, of Treleach, labourer; for riot and assault.
County-Gaol.
— Jonathan Jones, Howell Lewis, Jonathan Lewis, David Evans, David Davies, and John Jones; for riot in the Tallog affair.
On John Harris of Tallog mill, was brought up before a full bench of magistrates, charged with a riot at the Carmarthen workhouse on , and held to bail in the sum of £400. to answer the charge at the next assizes.
Most of the many gate attacks mentioned in this article are not to be found in Henry Tobit Evans’s chronology (though some are noted in a Welsh poem he includes as an appendix).
This suggests that the attacks were much more widespread than his already impressive account gives credit for.
Some international tax resistance news:
Italy
It came as news to me, but I think it may have been established last year: Sciopero Fiscale (Tax Strike), a project of Democracy in Action.
They believe that the Italian government is taxing excessively and performing dismally, and that the time has come to stop buying it.
“Paying taxes is a duty, but it should be the right of every citizen not to pay them if they are used for evil or immoral purposes.”
Bray Water Meter Watch activists pose with captured junction boxes
Ireland
Activists with Bray Water Meter Watch captured two junction boxes that workers intended to install to facilitate the metering and taxing of residential water service.
They held the boxes hostage until the workers reinstalled the old, unmetered stopcocks and repaired the torn-up sidewalk.
Spain
War tax resister Pepa Pretel, under threat of having her home seized and sold by the government, gave in and paid the amount due.
She says, however, that “the important thing is that people know that there is this disobedience.”
Pretel was one of several hundred people in Spain who redirected a percentage of their tax bill, equivalent to the military percentage of the Spanish government budget, to charitable causes.
“These resources wasted in the preparation for war, could be redirected to satisfy the basic necessities of the people and to promote egalitarian and nonviolent values that surpass the values of fear and aggression promoted by the military system we suffer from.”
She says that despite the setback, she plans to continue resisting.
, farmers in Brittany invaded the city of Morlaix, dumped their produce in big piles in the streets, set fire to the tax office, and blockaded the area to keep fire trucks from responding.
According to Économie Matin, four French tax offices have been put to the torch .
“Hardly a week goes by without farmers dumping manure in front of some public building… or locks are vandalized.
Every day, tax officials are attacked by outraged taxpayers who are tired of getting stonewalled when they ask why their taxes have increased so much.”
Le Figaro also reports that French tax officials are getting nervous.
“Now our agents, who are only the executors of a policy implemented by the government, have become indirect victims of the wrath of taxpayers,” said a tax employee union representative.
“Our colleagues are all the more concerned in that they feel the attacks against the tax centers remain unpunished.”
One tax official whose job puts him in direct contact with angry taxpayers said, “I never leave a stapler lying on my desk, or any other object that might serve as a projectile when I meet with a taxpayer.
My colleagues do the same.”
Catalonia, banned from holding a formal vote on independence, held a more informal plebiscite on the question recently.
The voters overwhelmingly approved of an independent Catalan state.
This will probably revitalize a long-simmering tax resistance campaign in which Catalan municipalities and taxpayers were paying their taxes to the regional government rather than the federal government.
There are also more traditional pacifist war tax resisters in Spain, such as Antonio Martín Canaves, who explained his stand in a recent letter-to-the-editor.
Italy
Governments seem to be increasingly using public utility monopolies as ways
of increasing government extractions of money from citizens without raising
“taxes.” New fees, increased rates, and complex bureaucratic reorganizations
that leave the government richer and the citizens poorer, are among the tools
in this chest.
The VAT is very
similar to what is being promoted as the “Fair Tax” idea in the United States.
“Fair Tax” promoters ought to take heed from this warning from victims of the
German VAT:
People are realizing that they have been living a fairy tale. The politicians
swore that VAT taxes
would reduce income taxes. They did not. They were more repressive and have
reduced the long-term economic growth throughout Europe. The administrative
burden upon business is outrageous with each layer having to account up the
chain rather than a sales tax that only the seller need collects.
The government had contracted with a private company to administer and collect
the tax. That contract guaranteed that company a certain amount of money,
whether or not the tax was collected. The government suspended the tax, but it
is still on the hook for about €1 billion in payments to this company.
Although the French government gave up on its plans to impose a new highway shipping tax some time ago, in the face of sustained protests and the destruction of tax portals by the bonnets rouges movement, only now has the quasi-private government contractor Ecomouv laid off the workers who were to have administered the tax.
Predictably, I suppose, the economically-challenged French left is up in arms about this and is accusing the bonnets rouges of contributing to French unemployment!
We’re coming up on of “The Christmas Truce” — an informal truce and mutual hobnobbing organized by those in the trenches on both sides during World War Ⅰ.
Adam Hochschild wonders why we mostly neglect to commemmorate peacemakers.
Some international tax resistance news briefs:
The Socialist Worker covers the anti-water charge movement in Ireland.
Included in a sidebar is a link to this video in which Nicky Coules explains how people can uninstall and bypass a water tax meter installed at their homes:
Tax resistance, or the act of consciously not paying tax, would enable
residents from all walks of life to directly throw a wrench into the gears
without having to risk life and limb.
Symbolically, tax resisters would be sending a loud and clear message to
the administration that it does not have the mandate to govern. And since
tax records are properly kept, this form of civil disobedience would also
produce an indisputable number of participants and, by extension, act as a
de facto referendum.
Tax resistance also satisfies the Occupy movement’s principle of
non-violence. No participants can escape the legal ramifications of their
action, either, avoiding the problem of “free riders”.
Some might argue that tax resistance would hurt innocent citizens such as
those who rely on government assistance and social services. My response
is that pro-democracy activists can perhaps learn from Julia “Butterfly”
Hill, an American activist, who took US$150,000 of tax money and donated
it to civic organisations to help various causes. To paraphrase Hill, the
act of tax resistance is not refusing to pay tax, but paying the money
where it belongs because the government has failed to do so.
I am self-employed, and first and foremost a single mom of a beautiful
baby girl, and I declare openly that I am unable to pay, with my income,
all of the taxes that the state demands from me. I appeal to the principle
of necessity and to the capacity to pay in proportion to income,
respectively, as established by articles 54 of the criminal code and 53
of the Italian Constitution to justify my categorical refusal to continue
to contribute, by means of taxes, to the expenses for the maintenance of
the privileges of the political class that governs us: the real villain
of this economic crisis.
She explains: “This is not a new idea. To pay to able to work, to pay to be
able to survive, this is called extortion. This is called mafia. This is
called usury.… I’d rather die fighting than suffocate in silence.”
The Association of Catalan Municipalities and the Association of Municipalities for Independence are launching a campaign to get local government bodies in Catalonia to pay their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government rather than to the federal government.
This is currently mostly a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan government is forwarding such payments along to the central tax administration, but the groups see this as a way of laying the groundwork for independence and as giving the regional government financial leverage in its fight.
They also hope that by convincing local governments to do this they will also encourage people and businesses to follow suit.
The Knowckers.org site has tried to tally up how much the Bonnets Rouges movement cost the French government during its successful campaign against the highway tax, and to explain the cross-ideological appeal of the movement.
The government of France has given up on the despised ecotaxe that was opposed by the bold direct action tactics of the bonnets rouges.
The government had put the highway tax on indefinite suspension, in the wake of the many destructions of automated toll portals and other tax-collecting machinery, mostly in Brittany.
A recent vote of the French Assembly has gone further, formally taking the tax off the books.
Sam Koplinka-Loehr, the recently-hired outreach coordinator for NWTRCC, recently held an on-line seminar on “Refusing to Pay for Oppression”, a recording of which is available on-line.
Koplinka-Loehr also testified at the People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War, and spoke about this on the Clearing the Fog show.
The “Won’t Pay” movement in Greece is still engaging guerrilla electricians to reconnect the power to families who have been cut off for being unable (or unwilling) to pay the price hikes of the state power monopoly.
Some activists who are infuriated by the incoming Trump administration have started a “Stop Trump Tax Protest” on Facebook.
The latest tax resistance news:
Workers in the Codevi (Free Trade Zone) in Ouanaminthe, Haiti have gone on strike to protest a new 10% tax on their wages.
It’s a zone where the multinational clothing companies enjoy access to cheap labor (the minimum wage is something like $5.15 per day) and almost entire exemption from corporate taxes and customs charge.
Labor apparently doesn’t get to take advantage of a similar boon in economic freedom.
The Catalan independence movement continues to lay the groundwork for what it anticipates will be a mass tax strike leading to the political separation of Catalonia from Spain.
Already some people and municipalities are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax office instead of to the federal government.
Currently, this is a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan tax office forwards these payments to Madrid.
But when a critical mass of taxpayers make their payments this way (€7 billion total, they estimate), the separatists plan to cut off the flow.
The French Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors) has released a report on the écotaxe fiasco.
France introduced a new tax on trucking that met a bold and sustained resistance campaign in Brittany which eventually forced the government to abandon the tax.
The Auditors determined that the government lost over €1 billion directly from its abandonment of the tax, and gave up an additional €10 billion in anticipated revenue.
ROAR Magazine looks at The Irish water insurgency.
The government of Ireland has long been trying to extract more money from its subjects via increasing rates at the public utility monopolies, rather than through more above-board taxation.
And the people of Ireland have long been using a variety of tactics to try to stymie these moves.
There’s an interesting trend suddenly emerging in which consumer brands are trying to get a public relations boost by taking action against the government or stepping in to replace it.
In these cases: Country Time Lemonade offering to provide free legal assistance to children who are fined or otherwise harassed by The Man for setting up lemonade stands, and Domino’s Pizza filling potholes that have gone unfilled by the ostensibly responsible governments.
Under the Jacob Zuma regime in South Africa, the tax agency became so corrupt and unwilling to confront tax evasion by political elites, that a country with high “tax morale” (relative willingness by citizens to pay taxes voluntarily) has now become one in which “more and more South Africans have simply stopped paying their taxes…
In the eyes of many experts, the government’s — and the country’s — ability to right itself is at stake.”
Breizh-Info reports on the craze of destroying traffic ticket issuing bots in France.
While the Bonnets Rouges of Brittany probably deserve some credit for getting the ball rolling on this, the acts have spread to other regions of France.
And “with rare exceptions,” says the reporter, “the culprits are never found or denounced.”
A peace activist convicted for his role in a demonstration against the Navy base being constructed on Jeju Island has refused to pay his fine, opting to serve 46 days in prison instead.
Links have been piling up in my bookmarks as I spent
poring through
back issues of The Mennonite.
International Tax Resistance News
A new law in Samoa requires previously untaxed church
ministers to pay income tax. Many, including those from the country’s
largest church,
are refusing to pay.
The United States government has begun
denying passports to people with large tax debts.
If you’re one of the 362,000 or so Americans who owe more than $51,000 and
you haven’t entered into an installment payment plan (I’m one of those),
you will likely soon find that you cannot successfully apply for or renew
your passport. While the government also has the legal authority to revoke
existing passports from such people, it is not yet exercising that
power.
Guerrilla electricians in Greece continue to
reestablish electric power
to households who have had their power cut off for inability or
unwillingness to pay the state utility monopoly’s bills which have been
inflated to support the state’s austerity budget policies.
Veterans of the successful campaign to abolish the
“écotaxe” in Brittany held
a celebratory picnic
on the anniversary of the destruction of one of the highway portals that
would have enforced the hated tax. In part the picnic was meant to show
solidarity with those who had been convicted of criminal charges for the
parts they played in destroying such portals, and in part it was meant as a
show of strength to let the government know they would not tolerate any
attempts to reestablish the tax.
The increasing use of traffic-ticket-issuing cameras worldwide as a
government revenue booster has led to a rash of direct action by the victim
population. This usually takes the form of destroying, disabling, or
blocking the cameras. Here are several recent examples:
Launched on as another variety of civic struggle against the dictatorship, the proposal to carry the thesis of civil disobedience to the extreme of applying a “tax strike” is still in force, but has not yet switched on, except in the Mercado Oriental.
On that date, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Legal and Political Sciences, called for “civil disobedience as a national imperative to be put into operation immediately,” inviting employers, workers, students, and taxpayers to immediately suspend the payment of taxes to DGI, DGA, and city hall, in particular “withholding of Income Tax from salaries.”
Although the call for tax resistance enters the popular imagination as a civil form — and for that reason a legitimate one — of resisting the regime of Daniel Ortega, neither businesses nor individuals have responded with determination to the proposal, from fear or from caution.
Caution as demonstrated by the sources consulted for this article, who requested anonymity as they explained that people, business-owners and managers in particular, are afraid that the tax administration will fine them or, worse yet, temporarily take over operation of their companies or shutter their business.
Not all of the sanctions are catastrophic.
There are cases in which the fine applied is equivalent to 2.5% of the amount not paid in the case of the monthly advance payment of the business income tax, or 5% in the case of the value-added tax or of income tax withheld from the salaries of employees.
“Technically, it’s an invalid appropriation of withholdings, and can be criminally sanctioned,” in addition to being shut down, fined, or temporarily put under government management, explained a source with extensive experience in tax matters.
That said, this source sees a variety of reasons to doubt that they would decide to take such extreme measures, beginning with “as far as I know, they have never applied them to anyone.”
Another is that to close a business means sending its workers into unemployment, which implies that they will not receive taxes from the business or from those consumers.
But beyond believing in the mercy that any of these reasons implicitly assumes, the source points out fact that is easier to accept:
“If the resolution is massive, the tax administration simply does not have the capacity to audit and penalize everyone at once.”
Larger Companies Have More Fear
If it is decided to penalize only some in order to set a precedent that strikes fear into the others, surely one of the larger ones will be chosen, which not only has more ability to defend itself in the courts, but also to negotiate, precisely because of its size.
Another source asserts that “although it may seem obvious, the businesses that take the least risk are the most powerful ones, for the simple reason that they are not big taxpayers but big tax collectors.
“The DGI, does not want to be bothered with them, because if they weaken them, this affects tax revenues, principally value-added tax withholding.”
When the big companies that could take such measures don’t apply them, despite their intrinsic power, they are demonstrating “the cowardly face of big capital.
If they would decide, the blow to DGI would be immense,” s/he says.
Róger Arteaga, former director general of Revenue, agrees, saying that “big capital has not wanted to go all-in.
It is true that it gave its approval to the strike, but did so with fear and only temporarily.”
There is at least one group that risks more in a tax strike: import and export companies, which require clearances that can only be obtained once they have paid the corresponding taxes.
“If one of these business doesn’t make its monthly statement, or makes it but doesn’t pay, it falls into insolvency, and can neither import nor export.
The only importers who could afford that ‘luxury’ would be those that have sufficient product already on hand, especially at times like these, when there is little movement of inventory,” explained one of our sources.
Small- and medium-sized businesses — both fixed-quota and general regime — can stop paying taxes as long as the situation does not normalize, and while this makes them vulnerable to penalties, it is not likely that this will occur, especially, again, if a critical mass applies this measure of fiscal chastisement.
How long can the government last without taxes?
Our sources note that before making tax payments, the employer must guarantee the salary of its employees, and that the decision not to pay taxes is “protected by the higher legal concept, legally enshrined in the national legislation, as the Act of God and the Force Majeure.
Nobody is obligated to do the impossible, and the reason for this impossibility lies outside the control of the employer or employee.”
Citizens, on their part, could put pressure on big and medium-sized business, offering to act together if the Treasury moves against them.
“In this context, big capital must play a consistent role, acting firmly in the face of a Treasury that has granted them such special privileges.
It would be their most authentic repentance for the eleven years of tax advantages they have taken in the shadow of power.
That stain should be washed out right away,” they say.
As an expert, Arteaga proposes “that the businesses do not charge value-added tax, and the citizens not pay it.
Income tax also.
There are penalties, but the penalties and decisions of this government must be ignored, as they have no legitimacy.
How long can the government last without taxes?” he asked.
“Tax resistance aims to respond to Ortega’s claim that he will stay on through : we must find a solution, and one of these is for the private sector finally to decide on civil disobedience of a monetary and tax nature,” he explained.
Pedro Muñoz Fonseca, president of the executive committee of Costa Rica’s Social Christian Unity Party, urged Nicaraguans to use tax resistance against their government:
Social Media Tax Protest in Uganda
The government of Uganda has imposed a 5¢-per-day tax on using social media and
other services. This was designed as both a revenue measure and a way of
reducing what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls lugambo
(“fake news”). Amnesty International has been among those to see through the
government’s rhetoric and cast the tax as
“a
clear attempt to undermine the right to freedom of expression.”
Robert Kyagulanyi, a Member of Parliament better known by his musician
stage name Bobi Wine, whose election is in part credited to his success on
social media, has been at the forefront of protests against the tax.
He was arrested, along with
three reporters when a march protesting the tax was attacked by police
with tear gas and rubber projectiles, but they managed to escape.
Ugandan protest marchers wearing shirts featuring a smart phone screen that
reads “This Tax Must Go”
War Tax Resistance Around the World
ABC reports on war tax resisters in Valencia — “the new refuseniks”.
War tax resisters there typically refuse to pay some percentage of their taxes, often basing this on the percentage of the federal budget that is spent on the military and similar items, and redirect this money to more worthy charities.
They declare this deduction on their tax forms in such a way that the tax agency typically does not treat it as illegal tax evasion but as an error or mistake.
The Global Day of Action on Military Spending Final Report has been released.
It gives a summary of the various events that took place around the world, including several by war tax resisters and groups promoting war tax resistance.
There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
Ideas & Actions concerning weapons-free investing, responding to arguments against war tax resistance, a fast for nuclear disarmament, and more
You can now listen to audio excerpts from the upcoming documentary The Pacifist, about war tax resister Larry Bassett, on Spotify.
Erica Leigh pores through back issues of Conscience, the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, an American war tax redirection group that slightly predates the founding of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Raymond Hunthausen has died.
As Catholic archbishop of Seattle, he took a remarkably strong stand on nuclear weapons — famously calling the Trident nuclear submarine program being developed nearby “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — and began practicing war tax resistance in response.
This earned him enemies in Washington and in the Catholic hierarchy. Here are some of the obits and remembrances:
A biography of Hunthausen, A Disarming Spirit, will be released soon.
David McReynolds has died.
He was a long-time War Resisters League and Socialist Party activist and was also on the staff of the Committee for Nonviolent Action which helped to spearhead war tax resistance as a tactic during the campaigns opposing the American war in Vietnam.
He was among the signers of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in and of a similar public pledge .
David Paul Irish has died.
He was active with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peace Brigades International, and Witness for Peace.
He was an advocate for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, drafting a minute in favor of of war tax resistance that the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Meetings approved in .
