Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual war tax resisters →
Ethan & Rima Vesely-Flad
It’s in the United States — the deadline for filing our personal federal income tax returns.
In a few minutes, I’m going to head across the bay to meet up with Berkeley’s notorious squadron of Code Pink protesters at the Marine Corps recruiting center.
From there, the crew will march to the main Oakland post office to remind the last-minute filers what they’re paying for.
War tax resisters nationwide are having deductions taken from their fifteen minutes of fame , as the news media take advantage of the Tax Day angle to swing the lens their way.
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now show is broadcasting from Portland, Oregon , and it features war tax resisters Pat & John Schwiebert, Portland locals who have been resisting taxes for .
(You can hear the show on-line — the Schwiebert segment starts at about 12:49.)
LoHud.com out of New York takes a look at war tax resisters there, including Ethan & Rima Vesely-Flad, Chad Murdock, Frederick Dettmer, Rosa Packard, Daniel Taylor Jenkins, and Hugh & Sirkka Barbour.
Tax resistance is the most direct way U.S. citizens can avoid being complicit in this war and other illegal activities and actions by government employees and agencies.
If all of us who have written our Congresspersons or taken to the streets also refuse to financially back the war and other illegal activities and actions of the government, the decision-makers in Washington have a much harder time ignoring our resistance.
More from the swarm of tax resisters who came out to play on :
“All I kept thinking about was just how many people oppose the war, wish the war wasn’t happening and don’t really see a clear way of doing anything about it.
On tax day, everybody’s scrambling to pay the government and feeling like their hard earned dollars are being sopped up and wishing that that money went to roads and to schools and to healthcare.
We were able to interject some information about where that money really goes — and to offer some alternatives… about how people can withdraw their own complicity.”
The Makingpeace blog has been covering war tax resistance actions in Austin, Texas and elsewhere.
As best we can figure, we gave out about 2200 flyers on at the Brunswick and St. Simons Island P.O.s.
Amazing!
We started at with 500 War Resisters League pie chart flyers at each P.O.
We ran out of those at in Brunswick and on St. Simons at , just as I arrived to give Bill Jerome a stack of about 400 “Economic Costs of the War” flyers with info from the American Friends Service Committee.
Milly Hastings reported later that when she & Steve Stevens finished their leafletting at , they had only 16 flyers left!
Although our youth were ready to provide someone to take over on St. Simons, there weren’t flyers for them!
On the Brunswick side, Cathy Browning brought us a couple of hundred of the flyers addressed to Georgia taxpayers, giving figures from the National Priorities Project on how much the war is costing us locally and what else the money could have purchased in services and meeting community needs.
Those weren’t going to be enough, so she went back and printed 600 more.
These were all gone by , a half-hour before the P.O. closed.
Paul Sheldon reports on his many tax day (more like tax week) actions at Paul’s Perambulations.
It will be difficult to keep up this witness — my wages at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, as of yesterday, are now being levied by the IRS — but we are going to try.
The most encouraging thing is the powerfully supportive response that we have received from so many people.
Clearly, our small action has struck a chord with others who similarly oppose this war, and are unsure about what they can do to help stop it.
Eric Muller: “The paper tiger casts a shadow, but it’s a shadow of paper and of enforcement.
What can they take from us? They can take our money.
And that’s a very small damage compared to the damage we’re creating throughout the world and particularly in Iraq right now, as we speak, you know much more damage is being inflicted than will be on the tax resisters who are working here today.”
Muller and others in the community have donated six thousand dollars to local charities instead of paying their full taxes to the federal government.
The money will go to Food for Lane County, Shelter-care, [and] peace groups, among others.
Ethan and Rima Vesely-Flad share their experience of war tax resistance with readers of LoHud.com.
Excerpts:
Ethan Vesely-Flad and his wife stopped paying a portion of their taxes as a protest against the U.S. participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Internal Revenue Service collected the missing funds from their taxes, along with about $500 in penalties and interest, by withholding money from Ethan Vesely-Flad’s paycheck for six months this year.
In a sense, it was a moral victory, Vesely-Flad told members of the Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice during the organization’s operating committee meeting at the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s headquarters.
“It was about trying to do something that would deal with our conscience,” Vesely-Flad said to the 14 people at the meeting.
“It’s a very minor thing and may not have done much, but we are educating ourselves.
If others are inspired to do likewise, it could help to clog up” the system.
, the couple put nearly $5,000 in an escrow account held by Quakers, who maintain similar accounts on behalf of tax protesters.
They took out a portion of that money to recoup what the government took from them, but are getting help from friends and groups to pay the penalties and fees.
The IRS already is sending them letters asking for taxes.
