The folks at the New Hampshire Underground, returned to the Keene, New Hampshire IRS office — to the scene of the crime where Dave Ridley had been arrested for leafleting.
Ridley was serving a four-day sentence for contempt of court after refusing to pay a $125 fine for illegal “distribution of handbills.”
(See The Picket Line .)
Undergrounder Kat Kanning announced that she’d be engaging in civil disobedience:
After seeing my friend Dave Ridley put behind bars for the “crime” of Distributing Handbills, I decided that I must stand up to this oppressive government, even if only a small way.
So tomorrow I will sit in the Keene IRS office with a sign saying, “Taxes pay for torture” until I’m hauled away.
I first realized the federal government was completely evil when I watched as church people in Waco were burned alive by federal agents.
Since then, this government has engaged in a war of aggression against Iraq, killing perhaps 700,000 Iraqi civilians.
It has become the open policy of the US to torture prisoners and hold them without charges or trial.
Somehow, good people in this country have been able to justify in their minds that this is necessary for our protection.
I want to make a stand so people will rethink these kinds of justifications.
How can our freedoms come from torturing others, who have not even been shown to have committed any crimes?
I don’t want this kind of freedom.
I want the kind of freedom where initiation of force against others is the exception, rather than public policy.
In times such as these, it is incumbent upon each individual to look at his own actions and decide, “Am I aiding this atrocity or resisting it?
Am I giving them money? Am I working for them?”
I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren why I didn’t stand up against the murder and torture — and at least attempt to put a stop to it, no matter if the attempt seems like “tilting at windmills.”
While protesters held signs outside the office pointing out the connection between federal taxes and the U.S. torture policy, two of the protesters — Kanning and Lauren Canario — went inside with signs and a stack of leaflets.
They were arrested, processed, given citations for “disorderly conduct and loitering, failure to obey a lawful order,” and released.
They, too, have no intention of paying their $125 fines.
Writes Kanning:
When asked if I had any dangerous items on me, I answered that I had two very dangerous flyers in my pocket.
The guy gave me this blank stare then said “Oh: sarcasm.”
Free Talk Life covered the protest and civil disobedience action:
Some short bits from recent days:
The site My War Tax purports to calculate how much you, personally, are paying for the Iraq War.
You type in your taxable income for , and the site calculates your bill for you (and lets you know how it made the calculation so you can see if it makes sense to you).
Kat Kanning wrote up the story of the civil disobedience actions that she, her husband Russell, Dave Ridley, and Lauren Canario have been doing at the IRS offices in Keene, New Hampshire, for the Keene Free Press.
NH Insider also did a story on the Dave Ridley case.
And if you’re tired of reading, you can watch an action-in-progress on YouTube.
As Kat Kanning’s article noted, this action was organized and enacted in less than twenty-four hours, and ten local activists attended on short notice.
The U.S. Congress is toying with the idea of shutting down the recently-adopted IRS practice of using private debt collection agencies to hunt down people who don’t pay taxes.
At a hearing, one Representative played a tape of one such private debt collection agency harassing its prey over the phone (here’s a PDF transcript).
The IRS is still having a hell of a time bringing its database into the 21st century. The latest TIGTA audit of the project found that the “pattern of deferring Project requirements to later releases and missing release deployment dates has continued” with yet another over-budget missed deadline and with requirements radically scaled-back at the last minute (some of these requirements have been deferred for over five years now).
One way a tax resistance campaign can get a leg up is through the acts of
sympathizers within the tax collection bureaucracy itself. After all, they’re
taxpayers too, and may feel more loyalty to their fellow-subjects than to the
government they’re subjected to.
To this end, some tax resistance campaigns have made strides by encouraging
resignations, defections, and goldbricking among those responsible for
carrying out the tax laws.
In this, they’re following the lead of Thoreau, who wrote:
Today I’ll give some examples of tax resistance campaigns that tried to
persuade the tax collector to switch teams.
Free Keene
A group of activists in Keene, New Hampshire, ranging from Christian
anarchists to “Free State Project” ballot-box libertarians, has been
experimenting with a number of creative civil disobedience projects.
In , Russell Kanning went to the Keene
branch of the Internal Revenue Service and tried to hand out leaflets to the
employees there. The leaflets quoted from the tribunal that presided over
war crimes trials in Japan after World War Ⅱ to the effect that people are
obligated personally to disengage from the crimes of their governments, and
then provided a sample letter these employees could send to resign from their
jobs.
Kanning was arrested by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and
charged with distributing materials in a federal building and failure to obey
a lawful order. After he was booked and released, he immediately returned to
the IRS
office to try again (without the leaflets, which had been confiscated). He was
arrested again and charged with disorderly conduct.
A few months later, Dave Ridley followed-up on Kanning’s action, at the
Nashua
IRS
office. He silently held up a sign that read “Is it right to work for the
IRS?”
and passed a leaflet through the window that read in part:
I have the right to remain silent.
IRS
agents have the right to quit their jobs. If that is not possible, they have
a responsibility to work as inefficiently as possible when taking our money,
and as quickly as possible when returning it.
The police were summoned and hustled him out of the building. They later cited
him for “distribution of handbills.”
Kat Kanning and Lauren Canario were the next activists in line, going to the
Keene IRS
office with a “Taxes pay for torture” sign and a stack of leaflets. They were
charged with “disorderly conduct and loitering, failure to obey a lawful
order.”
At every stage in the process, they tried to directly but non-aggressively
confront not only the
IRS
employees, but also the Homeland Security officers, court bailiffs, judges,
and other government collaborators: asking them why they were interfering
with American citizens “petitioning their government for redress of
grievances,” and asking them to consider taking up a more honorable line of
work.
The first intifada
At the launching of the first “intifada” resisting Israeli rule over
Palestinians, Palestinians who worked for the tax department under the Israeli
occupation resigned their posts. As a result of this and of organized tax
resistance, only about 20% of Palestinians subject to Israeli taxes in the West
Bank paid their taxes in 1993, the last year before Israel relinquished taxing
authority there to the Palestinian Authority.
Greek tax and customs officials
Complicating the Greek government’s campaign to bring in more tax revenue
during the recent Euro-region financial brouhaha, bureaucrats in the Greek tax
and customs office periodically went on strike
to protest the
accompanying austerity measures that cut funding for state employees.
British nonconformists
British members of nonconforming Christian sects who did not want to see their
tax money going towards schools that taught children the official, government
supported faith, resisted their taxes. The newspapers reported:
In Lincolnshire, the sitting magistrate recently refused to try cases of
resistance, and left the bench. Difficulty is experienced everywhere in
getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.
Whiskey Rebellion
As I mentioned earlier this month,
part of the problem the fledgeling United States government had when trying to
enforce its excise tax against the Whiskey Rebels was that it had a devil of a
time convincing anyone to serve as a prosecutor or exciseman.
From the beginning, the Whiskey Rebels counted on being able to convince their
neighbors not to help the federal government enforce the tax. George
Washington’s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton complained to him:
The opposition first manifested itself in the milder shape of the circulation
of opinions unfavorable to the law, and calculated by the influence of public
disesteem to discourage the accepting or holding of offices under it…
Annuity Tax resisters
During the resistance against the Annuity Tax in Edinburgh, Scotland, a number
of members of the town council who were members of churches other than the
tax-supported establishment church resigned rather than be party to
administering the act that enacted the tax.
Auctioneers whom the government usually could call upon to preside at tax
auctions refused to take the contracts, and carters whom ordinarily could be
contracted to cart the goods refused, and so the town had to hire someone new
at a higher rate, and purchase new vehicles to haul seized property about.
