Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → “Bushel” Bob Williams

Ohio farmer Bob Williams is fed up with the government making a profit on his hard work so that it can buy more “bombs and bullets.” He’d rather give his produce away than make a profit Washington can leech.

So that’s what he’s going to do.

A local farmer has taken anti-war protests in a new direction this summer and declared that he’s not selling anything until the United States stops fighting wars.

Bob Williams’ farm, on the corner of Route 20 and Quarry Road, is “closed for peace.”

Williams, who calls himself “Bushel Bob,” decided to suspend his farm stand because it was indirectly supporting activities he didn’t like.

“I was filling out my Schedule C and I realized this farm money was buying bombs and bullets,” Williams said. “It’s bad enough they get money out of me at the gas pump.”

His realization posed a problem.

“I thought, ‘This is terrible, I don’t want to open,’ ” Williams said. “Why should I make this extra money?”

But he couldn’t just stop growing food; he needed another way to resolve his dilemma. His solution was to donate the food to a charity, the Santa Elena Project of Accompaniment (SEPA), a coalition of churches, organizations and individuals.

“This year, rather than have it open, I’m just growing for SEPA,” Williams said. “They come on Friday, pick everything and sell it.”

Williams met the members of SEPA at Oberlin Farmers Market, where they were fellow vendors. He chose the organization because of its work with human rights in Guatemala and for an important financial reason — the group is nonprofit.

“They can sell (the produce), and they don’t pay taxes,” Williams said.

This is not Williams’ first foray into peace projects.

An Air Force veteran, Williams helped to organize the Veterans for Peace post at the Oberlin Public Library.

Closing his stand, which he opened in 2003, was the right choice for Williams, but it was still a difficult one to make.

“I kind of miss it,” Williams said. “I miss the people.”

But he stands fast to his decision, looking forward to the day when he can open again.

“I don’t want to support war and killing. I want to grow things,” Williams said.

The October issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is out. It includes:

• The reports from the 12^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns from Ruth Benn and Ed Hedemann that I linked to last month.
• Clare Hanrahan’s review of We Won’t Pay: A Tax Resistance Reader:

  “both daunting and encouraging and well worth the considerable reading time… captures in one indexed volume many individual acts and campaigns of conscientious objection to war and of revenue refusal to tyrannical governments… sincere voices and challenging arguments.”

• Elizabeth Boardman’s review of American Quaker War Tax Resistance:

  “167 intelligent and intense writings on the challenging question of whether people of conscience should pay for war… People struggling with this moral issue today will be guided by the writings in this book and may find some wonderful language to use in their own statements of conscience… a straightforward and compelling book.”

• Some notes on frivolous filing warnings, new tax laws, and IRS enforcement techniques.
• Notes about tax resisters Bob Williams, Mike Palecek, and David Schenck, about the trial of two Los Alamos National Laboratory protesters, and about the upcoming New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters.
• A story about long-time resister Thomas Wilson. The state of Massachusetts suspended his dental license 21 years ago when he stopped cooperating with state tax laws because the state, in turn, was acting as a collection agency for the IRS. Wilson kept practicing dentistry without a license, and was able to keep doing so until this year when he was forced to shut down after a competing dentist ratted him out to the state board of registration.

  At 75 Tom is philosophical about closing the door on his professional life and has no regrets about his choices. “In this present economy we’re getting a payback for what the government has been doing and what I haven’t been paying for and resisting all this time. People ask if war tax resistance changes anything. I can’t say that, but it’s helped me put up with what we have to put up with in this country.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Adam Kokesh had a Tax Day show that featured an interview with war tax resister Greg Reagle:

• Wendy McElroy writes about conscientious tax resistance in the light given off by the flames of recent Congressional debates about taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that the number of tax returns the IRS believes to be claiming fraudulent refunds has skyrocketed this year. It’s a little unclear to me from the report how much of this is a real trend in taxpayer behavior and how much is an artifact of new IRS procedures or the fact that more people are e-filing, thus making their returns available for automated analysis quicker.
• “Bushel Bob” has a website where he explains why he shut down his produce market so as to avoid earning money on which he’d have to pay war taxes. Now he donates his produce to charity and thereby avoids the tax.
• NWTRCC is posting reports of Tax Day actions as they trickle in.
• Goldishack Guerrillas gives us “10 Reasons Not to Pay U.S. Taxes This Season.”
• Radley Balko, in Reason magazine, has an interesting interview with Stewart Rhodes about the “Oath Keepers,” a group of American military and police personnel who have taken a vow not to carry out unconstitutional orders. In revolutions worldwide and throughout history, the turning point has often been when the folks in uniform have started questioning their orders and refusing to attack the citizenry on behalf of the politicians.

Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities. In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made. Here are several examples:

Labor strikes

• In Germany, in 1920, “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days. The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
• A tax strike in 2003 aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
• Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in 2010, refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
• In Savannah, Georgia, in 1867, the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay. The city then locked them out of the wharves.

  This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3. This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.

• During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
• Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in 1923. The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
• In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1901:

  The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax. Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down. … The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional. The citizens all side with the strikers.

Hartals and business strikes

• When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in 2009, farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
• American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in 2008 to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
• For a week in 2008, a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business. They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them. Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the 1979 Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
• 20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in 2009, “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
• In 1810 in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax. The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed. Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
• Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids. During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions. Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in 1913 that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.” That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.



• When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes: “The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
• During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…” The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
• In 1981, in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
• In 2010, Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
• In the Dutch West Indies in 1921, “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
• In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in 2006, people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
• In 2011, cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike: “We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
• In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in 1906, there were often business strikes:

  …all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…

  …merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…

  Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…

• In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of 1923, businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:

  The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French… The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke. They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.

  This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.

Consumer strikes

• In Cairo in 1947, a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay. This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
• In Melbourne, Australia, in 1917 “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer. They were patrons of the lower-priced seats. The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
• In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.” One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.

(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)