How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
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Fall 2011 NWTRCC national in Kansas City
I’ve taken the plunge and have converted The Picket Line from my old standby dialect of XHTML-Strict to the newfangled HTML5.
With any luck this transition will go smoothly and will allow me to gradually add more useful features to The Picket Line.
The biggest drawback thus far is that the new site doesn’t play nicely with users of Internet Explorer 8 (the latest version of that ugly browser available to us remaining Windows XP holdouts).
If you notice any other annoying quirks, please drop me a line.
It was e.e. cummings, I used to love this when I was an early teenager about a conscientious objector [“i sing of Olaf glad and big”].
There was one line, “there is some shit I will not eat,” that reverberated in my social conscience since probably age 12.
There comes a point when there is something out there that we have to reject ultimately, and we have to throw ourselves on the wheel to stop it — even if the wheel devours us.
The boycott of taxes is so strong, so potentially powerful, that I guess I am urging other people to go forward without fear.
We are right.
War is wrong.
We are approaching the totalitarian state.
Take from them their finances, and we take their strength.
Eliminate the nexus between corporate wealth and industry and politics.
In this era there is so much to protest against, and tax is a very salient part of that.
A note about “frivolous filing” notices.
The IRS has gotten in the habit of responding to taxpayer protests with $5,000 frivolous filing penalties — even if the protests accompany a tax return that has been filled out correctly and legally.
What’s worse is that by the IRS’s rules, in order to appeal such a fine, you have to first pay it.
Peace activists have a resource of financial support when they accrue penalties for resisting taxes, participating in civil disobedience or in nonviolent direct action.
Through the PSC, the cost of a person’s or family’s penalty can be defrayed by almost 100%.
This is possible because a community of almost one hundred people have come together and committed to help each other with their fines.
War tax resistance in Australia is difficult not only because few people have the required level of commitment but also because of the government’s high level of control over tax payments (employers are required to deduct tax from income before the employee gets it and this is done in such a way that most employees get a refund after submitting their annual tax return).
…the ATO has already used most of its powers against me: seizing my bank account (), garnisheeing wages (twice), bankruptcy (, effectively for life because I will not cooperate), a contempt of court conviction for refusing to cooperate with the bankruptcy trustee () and seizure of my passport ().
NWTRCC has released a brief outreach flier about Anarchists and War Tax Resistance that tries to show how war tax resistance as a tactic fits in to anarchist activism.
June Farrow, a 72-year-old from England, is resisting her council tax — or most of it anyway — on the grounds that she simply can’t afford it.
“It didn’t bother me going to court because I feel that somebody’s got to speak up for all pensioners who often cannot speak up for themselves.
They’ll probably send the bailiffs in, but I haven’t got anything in this house that’s worth anything.
I’ve sold everything off to help me stay in my home, unless they’d like to take the dog — she’s the only valuable thing I’ve got.…
They’ve told me that if I spend my savings — another £3,000 — I will get benefits.
I don’t want benefits.
I’m an independent person and I like to try and look after myself.
Hundreds of pensioners are in the same position as me and the law has got to be changed.” Here’s another, more detailed article about the Farrow case.
Speaking of council tax resisters, here’s another one, from :
Courier refused to pay council tax while travellers camped at layby
A north-east man who staged a council-tax protest against travellers camped illegally near his home has been told his bank account could be frozen and his property seized.
Billy Thomson told Aberdeenshire Council he would not pay his council tax while travellers were camped in a layby at Garlogie.
Now, the authority has called in sheriff officers, who have threatened to freeze the self-employed courier’s bank account and seize property from his home in an attempt to force him to pay the £700 bill.
The 59-year-old first took a stand against the authority when caravans were parked in the layby on the B9119 Aberdeen to Echt road for nearly a year in .
When the travellers left he began paying his council tax again, but stopped in when travellers camped there for about four months.
The layby has since been shut to prevent travellers from returning.
Mr Thomson, of Garlogie Cottages, said he respected travellers’ rights, but criticised the council for “persecuting me, but not them”.
He said: “While the travellers were parked there no one could use the layby, and it had been a well-used service.
“I decided that from then on, when these people are parked there without paying council tax, neither would I.
“I know a lot of travellers — they are decent people and I respect their choice of lifestyle, but Aberdeenshire Council has shown double standards.”
Mr Thomson said he first received notice that Aberdeenshire Council was seeking the unpaid tax when he received a letter from the authority earlier .
He said he took the letter to the council’s Inverurie office seeking an explanation as to why the authority was seeking payment from him but not the travellers, but “never got a straight answer”.
“I cannot see any difference between me not paying my council tax and the travellers not paying it,” he said.
A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council said: “We take the recovery of council tax very seriously and we continue to make efforts to collect tax which has not been paid.”
For those of you who don’t speak English as the English do, “travellers” I think refers to either vagrants, gypsies, or Irish Travellers; while a “lay-by” is something like a highway rest stop.
A former landlady who claims her life is being made a “misery” by unfinished speed bumps is making a council tax protest.
June Robinson has canceled her council tax direct debit in a bid to make council bosses listen to her pleas for help.
The 62-year-old is kept awake by traffic bumping over four unfinished speed ramps at the junction of Beach Road and Beach Avenue in Cleveleys.
She said: “It’s made my life a misery. It’s been going on 10 weeks — bang, bump everyday. I wake up at 5am with the bangs.
I’ve got a crack in my bedroom because of the vibrations.…”
These all have in common a mode of tax resistance that’s relatively rare in the United States — refusing to pay a tax because the government is charging too much or providing too little in return, as though the government were a subscription you could cancel when you decided it wasn’t worth the cost (would that it were).
I pointed out some discussion that was taking place on the wtr-s email discussion group about the possibility of turning the loose affiliation of American war tax resisters into something more like a war tax resistance movement.
To summarize: Larry is trying to describe a war tax resistance movement that would be able to exert political power and act as a “counter-friction” (in Thoreau’s sense of the word) against the war machine.
He thinks in order to do this, resisters need to narrow down the large variety of techniques they use to a subset that has the following characteristics:
It is illegal (that is, actual civil disobedience)
It is public (not just trying to avoid taxes and stay under the radar)
It is accompanied by a common set of clear and specific demands for change on the part of government
He is critical of the sort of war tax resistance that is primarily conscientious objection rather than protest.
If a resister is satisfied merely to wash his or her hands of militarism by personally not paying for it, without making his or her resistance confrontational, Larry thinks, the resister is missing an opportunity to make the resistance make a difference and to make a noble individual stand stronger by making it part of an effective collective movement.
That at least is my understanding of what he means.
I have some doubt about whether such a movement would be practical to organize or would be politically effective at this stage of the game.
I also think that the variety of methods of war tax resistance is one of the strengths of the movement, such as it is, today — it gives people more options and is respectful of people with a variety of lifestyles, risk tolerances, and goals.
I worry that trying to narrow down these options to a subset of “real” war tax resistance varieties might weaken the movement rather than strengthen it, by making it seem less possible or attractive to some potential resisters.
(For some other perspectives on the proposal, see the responses by Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Karl Meyer, and Bill Glassmire in the latest issue of More Than a Paycheck.)
For us, tax resistance is, among other things, a struggle.
And as we struggle against militarism, this struggle must be nonviolent.
It contains within itself a model of the society that we are aiming for.
Here we express some of the characteristics of our struggle:
Collective
Because we want to transcend the very noble and respectable personal and
individual choices in order to constitute a group of disobedient activists.
Public
Because in the face of institutions we must make very clear our
intentions for what we are putting into practice.
And in the face of public opinion we must act in the streets, write in the press, demonstrate, bicycle from Vitori to Nanclares, etc.…
Active
In this way, through tax resistance, we also reclaim the right of all
people to participate in democratic life in a profound and responsible way, without losing track of the serious problems that affect humanity, in the neighborhood around us [“el barrio de al lado,” probably an idiom I’m unfamiliar with —♇], in social services.
Because in tax resistance we are required to go beyond opinion, that we stop to take a stand against military spending, the manufacture and trade in armaments, against the military.
A topic so grave cannot be left in the hands of the professional chatterboxes that join the legislature.
And by means of tax resistance, together we contribute to the citizenry a small seed for growing a deep democracy, one that is participatory and as direct as it is possible for us to imagine.
Non-violent
We struggle against an unjust order of militarist violence, but always
we do so without using violence, preferring the strength of our reason.
We strike out against the state of affairs, while valuing people.
Constructive
Our objective is to transform state policy, the use made of public
funds, in order to employ them effectively in the regulation of social conflicts.
If we do not advance toward this goal, we do not find our work useful.
We intend to convert the military power into the popular power of civil society.
Illegal
Tax resistance is a form of struggle that consists of disobedience to an
unjust law that promotes violence as a way of resolving conflicts.
There are many historical examples of disobedience to unjust laws.
Must we ask for a law that would legalize the right to conscientious tax resistance?
Here there are not many who ask for this.
If such a law were made, military spending would not go away, but would be further legalized.
The total revenue from the state would not diminish military spending.
They will not make the law that we want.
So meanwhile we will publicize the justification for disobeying unjust laws.
Educational
The tax resistance campaign will be more effective if the relationship
between the ends and the means used are consistent; if we perform all actions such that we clearly demonstrate what we hope will follow and explain our reasoning; if we will open real and possible paths to social transformation even for people who are less committed.
We will continually reflect on what we do and on alternatives we propose.
Erica Weiland protesting at the new National Nuclear Security Administration plant in Kansas City (photo by Robyn Haas).
The first new nuclear weapons manufacturing facility in the United States in decades is under construction in Kansas City in .
So, when NWTRCC held its Fall, 2011 national gathering in Kansas City , they also took a little time out to protest.
Some — Erica Weiland, Jim Hannah, Jason Rawn, Kima Garrison, and Charles Carney — were arrested in a symbolic civil disobedience action.
It looks like the gathering will be in Chicago, in the hopes of coordinating with the protests that will be taking place there in when NATO and the G-8 hold their meetings there.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
If you haven’t seen it yet, treat yourself to this video of U.C. Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walking to her car down a path lined by silent sitting students, in the wake of yet another act of standard-procedure police brutality against protesting students on that campus.
Roy Prockter has taken his legal battle for conscientious objection to military taxation as far as it will go in the English court system, without success, and is now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
A group of residents of Andino, Argentina met and decided to suspend their payment of property taxes after rate increases they felt to be unreasonable.
The government of Argentina has been taking drastic steps — including prosecuting economists who have the nerve to contradict optimistic government figures, and sharply restricting the legality of people and companies to hedge by keeping their assets in foreign currency — to wish away inflation and prop up the peso, while introducing its own version of an austerity plan.
The resistance movement targeting the new tax on electric bills in Greece continues. Some recent actions have included sit-down blockades of the utility company offices and YouTube videos showing how resisters can reconnect their own power if the utility shuts them off for non-payment.
Helen Yeoman’s “How to reduce tax payments legally — for peace” in which the tax accountant incorrectly insists that “you have only two choices — reduce your income below the taxable level or have enough deductions to do this. Either way causes you to live at the poverty level.”
Susan Miller & Jane Stoever’s “Civil resistance caps war resisters’ meeting” and “War tax resisters meet, link taxes to KC nuke-parts plant.”
Notes on the new minimum income tax-free income levels, techniques for avoiding bank account levies, and how much of your money you can legally give away without IRS complications
International news including an article by the late Spanish war tax resister Pedro Otaduy
Action ideas including an outreach letter to community radio, a new blog, another war tax resistance legal appeal, and an election day penny poll
NWTRCC news including an announcement of the next national gathering (Chicago ), the new home of our email discussion list, a hunt for nominees to join the Administrative Committee, and a follow-up on those arrested in the civil disobedience action during the last national gathering in Kansas City
Beth Seberger tells how she became a war tax resister and why
The new blog mentioned above is MathewCh5v9, featuring writing by war tax resister Vickie Aldrich, largely reviewing letters from her father from when he was in a Civilian Public Service camp for drafted conscientious objectors during World War Ⅱ.
She has also addressed her own conscientious objection — war tax resistance — in some posts:
