A profile of J. Tony Serra, the radical defense lawyer and long-time tax resister who is “one of two war tax resisters to have been jailed for ‘willful failure to pay’ federal income taxes.”
A report from Bill Ramsey on his attempt to get the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice to add a one-time war tax resistance campaign to its upcoming nonviolent direct action plans.
Ramsey reports: “I rarely had to explain why we think the time is ripe for a one-time act of war tax refusal.
Instead, I was repeatedly asked, ‘Where do we sign up?’ ”
You can learn more about Ramsey’s one-time war tax resistance campaign proposal at http://www.nwtrcc.org/campaign_proposal_revised.htm: “On , thousands of war opponents publicly refuse to pay a portion of their federal income taxes in order to withhold funds for the war in Iraq and redirect those funds to reconstruction in Iraq and in communities destroyed by Katrina.”
The campaign needs volunteers to get things ready before the roll-out.
I’ve signed up to help, but the more the merrier!
I’m excited to be able to share the news that today the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is launching a new campaign:
The War Tax Boycott
1,500 American anti-war activists were surveyed recently, and they were asked, among other things:
“Would you consider participating in a one-year commitment to refuse a portion of your federal income taxes and redirect your taxes to a humanitarian cause if thousands joined you publicly?”
Of those who had never done any war tax resistance before, fully two-thirds said yes.
(Of those who had done war tax resistance in the past but were not currently resisting, more than three-quarters said yes.)
So over the last several months, members of NWTRCC have organized just such a campaign.
Early endorsers of the campaign include Voices for Creative Nonviolence, the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, and the Nonviolent Direct Action Working Group of United for Peace and Justice.
What You Can Do
If you’re already a war tax resister…
If you’re already a war tax resister, we need you to sign up so we can add you to our roster.
If you’re comfortable including your name and home town in promotional material related to the tax strike, check the box on the form to allow this.
The more people register, the bigger the campaign becomes, and the more persuasive our numbers are to people who are hesitating, just waiting for the bandwagon to get crowded enough.
If you’re not yet a war tax resister…
If you’re not yet a war tax resister, now’s the time to start.
Sign up for the campaign on-line (if you’re not sure whether you’re ready to resist or not yet, just check the box beside “I need more information before I can commit to resisting this year.”)
Then read the brief Getting Started in War Tax Resistance guide to learn what steps you need to take now so that you can join us in resisting some or all of your federal income tax , and to learn all about how the government is likely to react to your resistance.
Once you’ve registered with the campaign and decided how and how much you are going to resist, NWTRCC encourages you to take that money you’re refusing to give to the war funders in Congress, and redirect it instead to a more worthy cause.
(If you’re resisting taxes by lowering your income below the tax line, you may not have anything to redirect, but that’s okay too!)
The War Tax Boycott campaign is recommending two charities:
The Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, and Electronic Iraq’s Direct Aid Initiative for Iraqi refugees.
You can also join with others to redirect your taxes through a war tax resisters’ redirection fund, such as the People’s Life Fund run by Northern California War Tax Resistance.
Or, of course, you can always just write a check to your favorite cause.
Whatever you choose, please let NWTRCC know about it so we can keep a running tally of how much money resisters have diverted away from the war and toward worthwhile projects.
(If you donate to Common Ground or the Direct Aid Initiative, let them know that you’re donating redirected taxes and they’ll do the tallying for us.)
Spread the Word!
Once you’ve signed up, don’t be shy about it!
Let people know you’ve taken a stand.
And the next time somebody complains to you about the War or about the government, ask them if they’ve stopped paying for it yet and direct them to http://wartaxboycott.org/.
If you’re planning to sign on to the War Tax Boycott, or even if you’re thinking about it but aren’t sure yet — now’s the time to start preparing.
You can’t just wait until rolls around and then make up your mind.
Here’s why: most people who file their federal income tax returns in April are due to get a refund.
If you’ve overpaid during the year and the government owes you money, you can’t very well resist, can you?
The key is to adjust your withholding today.
This way the government takes less money from your paychecks now, so that you’ll owe something in April — then you’ll be able to decide whether or not you want to resist.
Adjusting your withholding is easy.
Most people can adjust their withholding by filing a new W-4 form with their employer.
You probably filled out one of these forms as one of the first things you did when you got hired.
People file new W-4 forms all the time — for instance when they get married, have children, begin to support their elderly parents, or for any number of other reasons.
All you have to do is to ask your boss or your Human Resources department for a new form, or you can download one from the IRS web site and print it out.
Then turn it back in to your company, and they’ll adjust your withholding for you.
The key to having less withheld from your paycheck is to declare more “allowances” on your W-4 (some people call these “dependents” or “exemptions,” but that isn’t really accurate).
NWTRCC has a good guide on how to do this correctly.
The more allowances you declare, the less money gets taken out of your paycheck each month and sent to Washington.
If you’re not employed by someone else, the process is different.
If you’re self-employed, you are responsible for paying your own taxes quarterly, and resisting is as easy as reducing the amount you pay or stopping entirely.
If you receive a pension or annuity and have income tax withheld from it, you change your withholding by filing a new form W-4P, which works pretty much the same way as the regular W-4.
But the important thing is: do it now!
There are only a few more pay periods left in the year, and if your withholding is too high, you’re out-of-luck.
Not only will you be unable to resist when you file your return in , but when the government finally writes you a refund check for all that extra money it took from you during the year, it won’t add any interest, and you’ll feel like a sucker.
The issue of NWTRCC’s More Than a Paycheck is out.
It includes articles on the following:
celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of NWTRCC
getting the perspectives of younger war tax resisters Lincoln Rice, Alice Liu, Sherill Crosby, R.J. Macani, and Lily Dalke
reporting on the New York City People’s Life Fund Gala
announcing the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in Newton, Kansas and the New England gathering
there were large anti-war parades & such in many American cities.
Alas, if parades of this sort were sufficient to stop wars, the Iraq War wouldn’t have started in the first place.
But war tax resisters were also out in force, to try to convince the paraders to turn things up a notch by joining the War Tax Boycott.
I helped out at the San Francisco parade and convergence.
We handed out hundreds of boycott flyers to the attendees and helped many people who stopped by our booth trying to figure out how they could fit war tax resistance into their lifestyles.
The event was in some ways a typical eye-rolling San Francisco freak show.
You know that frequently-heard factoid about how there are more Jews in Manhattan than in all of Israel?
I think there are more Communists in San Francisco than in all of Cuba.
And of course the “9/11 Truth” folks were swarming like mosquitos.
The big surprise for me was the huge Ron Paul for President contingent.
I saw more of them than Kucinich for President and Cindy Sheehan for Congress people combined.
And they were particularly receptive to the “tax strike” idea.
I mentioned figures like these to a local war tax resister when he asked me about how the boycott was coming along and he said, “and what are the national numbers,” thinking that I’d quoted him just the figures for our area.
Fact is, the campaign has had a hard time getting much momentum.
It has little-to-no funding for publicity, and so has to rely mostly on the energetic efforts of campaign volunteers to spread the word.
We’re much too easy to ignore at this stage — disappearing into the same hole as so many frequently-forwarded emails about “what everybody should do.”
What would really get things moving would be if some big name folks — celebs or well-known anti-war movement movers-and-shakers — were to sign on, or if some of the more well-known anti-war action groups were to adopt the campaign.
NWTRCC is a great resource for war tax resisters, and is full of the kind of experience that a tax resistance campaign needs, but it seems to lack the power — in terms of personnel, resources, energy, and influence — to actually launch a big campaign.
When the preliminary tax resistance survey results were first being discussed, at ’s NWTRCC national meeting in Las Vegas, they showed that there was a lot of potential support for a large-scale tax resistance campaign among anti-war activists.
I remarked :
[E]ven if we find a potential for this sort of tax resistance avalanche, NWTRCC alone doesn’t really have the resources to organize and launch it.
My hope is that we can package these persuasive survey results along with offers of our own specialized expertise and sell the idea of such a campaign to one of the larger national anti-war groups who could launch a campaign like this in a heartbeat if they cared to.
My own feeling is that this sort of thing is exactly the sort of sustained nationwide civil disobedience campaign the peace movement has been looking for; they just don’t know it yet.
For reasons that will become clear to Picket Line readers soon, I have had reason in recent days to revisit these reflections.
And that, y’all, is a good tease. Stay tuned.
Time to check in on this year’s three big war tax resistance campaigns.
The first is NWTRCC’s “ War Tax Boycott”.
The original idea behind this project was to have thousands of anti-war activists publicly pledge to redirect all or a portion of the federal income taxes due on to charity.
As of today, about 375 people have signed on to the pledge, with about 290 “public” signers willing to put their names out.
The second is the “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” campaign, which aimed to get 100,000 taxpayers to pledge to resist their taxes (if 99,999 others would) by .
They haven’t updated their counter in a while, but it currently reads 2,092 pledgers.
The third is “Pledge For Peace.”
They didn’t have a target number of signers or a deadline, but wanted “self-identified leaders and opinion shapers in our congregations” to, by signing, “commit to action and to personal sacrifice” including war tax resistance.
Last I looked, 134 people had signed.
The conference, a regularly-scheduled business & strategy meeting of NWTRCC, brought together about 20 dedicated members from across the country — some of whom have decades of experience with tax resistance — and also drew some curious locals who are just getting their feet wet.
Our hosts did an incredible job of organizing beds, meals, and transportation, and making us feel comfortable and at home, so that we could keep our minds on a challenging agenda throughout .
, at the national gathering in Santa Rosa, I was the curious local getting my feet wet.
, I was appointed to a term as an alternate on the national administrative committee.
I’d been reluctant to consider taking on a responsibility like this in the past, for one reason because we already had an AdCom member from Northern California, and for another because I thought I might not be sufficiently on-the-same-page with the group as a whole (for instance, not being much of a “progressive” and thinking the “Peace Tax Fund Act” is worse than worthless).
But then the AdCom member from our area resigned, and the more I thought about NWTRCC the more I realized that we’re a wildly diverse lot ideologically and we manage to comfortably fit on the “same page” anyway.
For the most part, we’re pretty good at concentrating on the stuff we agree on and treating the diversity of perspectives on other issues as a strength rather than a nuisance.
During the conference, we heard reports of Tax Day actions and general status reports from local groups around the country.
These varied a lot in tone, with some groups reporting a surge of interest and enthusiasm, while others were discouraged at diminishing membership and activity.
We spent a lot of time reviewing the War Tax Boycott — what worked, what didn’t work, and whether we should continue it in some form or change tactics.
I have mixed feelings about the Boycott.
On the plus side, I think that it provided a good project for us to focus our energies on, and it was a good wedge for publicity and outreach.
I think that it’s very likely that our project inspired, perhaps subliminally, the parallel war tax resistance projects that sprung up last year — Code Pink’s “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” campaign and Christian Peace Witness for Iraq’s “Pledge for Peace.”
Bill Ramsey at the War Tax Boycott press conference
However, these are largely side-effects.
In terms of the goals we explicitly set for the Boycott — which seemed to me to involve creating and maintaining a large-scale mass resistance and redirection campaign — I think the Boycott was mostly a flop.
It was unable to even reach a large percentage of current NWTRCC members to convince them to sign on.
My feeling is that we could use our resources, time, and energy more productively in the future by pursuing more realistic goals or by partnering with other organizations that have the resources to lead the sort of campaign we have in mind.
However, mine was very much a minority position.
And I heard enough about how useful the Boycott campaign had been to people in their local outreach that I became convinced that the campaign should continue in some form.
At the meeting, we agreed to spend some time reassessing and restructuring it, but to commit to continue it for at least.
On , Bill Ramsey, who has been the main organizer behind the Boycott effort, organized a press conference to announce that $325,000 had been redirected by boycotters from the Pentagon to humanitarian projects.
Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of Common Ground Health Clinic, accepts redirected taxes
Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of the Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, was on-hand to accept a check representing donations from tax boycotters and to talk about what the clinic has done and is doing to help people in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Najlaa al-Nashi of Direct Aid Iraq joined the press conference by an audio/video link to talk about how that organization will use the redirected funds to help provide medical care for refugees from the Iraq War.
Tax resister Joffre Stewart speaks with representatives of the Direct Aid Initiative on a videoconference from Jordan
The Birmingham News also had a reporter on site, who fired off a quick note afternoon, and then filed a more complete story for the edition, featuring local resister David Waters:
David Waters’ protest started .
The Vietnam veteran couldn’t support the United States’ first Gulf War, what he calls a “slaughter in the desert.”
So he stopped paying his federal taxes.
“It just went against my conscience,” said Waters, a 61-year-old carpenter who lives in the Avondale community of Birmingham.
Today, he is one of more than 520 U.S. citizens from 44 states who refused to pay some or all of their federal taxes and pledged to redirect the money — more than $325,000 — to humanitarian causes.
On , a New Orleans health care clinic and an Iraqi refugee aid group accepted about $95,000 in gifts and pledges through the anti-war tax boycott.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, the organization that led the boycott, met in Birmingham to award some of the monetary gifts.
The Common Ground Health Clinic, a free clinic in New Orleans, received more than $50,000 in pledges.
The Direct Aid Initiative, or Direct Aid Iraq, got more than $44,400 of the would-be taxes.
Other “tax resisters” gave to local projects or humanitarian causes of their choosing, member Bill Ramsey said.
Najlaa al-Nashi, with the Iraqi refugee organization, said over teleconference afternoon from Jordan that her organization was grateful for the money.
Daniel Woodham put $300 on the table after al-Nashi spoke.
“I thank you so much for putting it to much better use than my government ever would,” said Woodham of Greensboro, N.C.
Woodham said he hasn’t paid his taxes , which he estimates amounts to about $15,000 before penalties.
The 43-year-old farmer and English language teacher files every year with a letter explaining where he is redirecting his money.
Woodham said he questions why his federal taxes should go “to kill people.”
“I don’t think it increases our safety.
I don’t think it increase our integrity around the world,” he said.
“I’m a conscientious objector.”
After the press conference, we returned to the Quaker Meeting house and I facilitated a workshop on how to talk to people about war tax resistance.
Mostly I was concerned with how we should respond when we’re promoting the tactic to activists who aren’t currently tax resisters, and then they throw up one of the dozen or so objections we’ve all heard before.
This was largely an extension of what I discussed here , with a focus on one-on-one communication as opposed to talking to and through the press.
After going on at some length about these theories of mine that I’m so proud of, I opened it up to the group by play-acting a potential resister who is raising excuses (in each of the needs / fears / values categories) as to why they don’t think tax resistance is right for them, and asking how the resisters present would answer the objections.
I thought it went well, provided a lot of food for thought, and could help to make us more persuasive as we go back home, away from the true believers, and have to respond to the old familiar objections again.
That evening we heard David Waters tell the gripping and fascinating story of the path he has taken in his life, from being an Army Special Forces volunteer in the Vietnam War, to being a “revenuer” for a liquor-law enforcement agency, to being a war tax resister.
I’ve left out a lot of nitty-gritty that occupied a lot of our time, but probably doesn’t have a whole lot of interest to those not already elbow-deep in the springs & gears of the organization.
I brought down six copies of We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader, figuring that if this wasn’t a good opportunity to find its audience nothing was.
Of the six, I gave away one to our hosts and sold seven (that is to say, I had to place quick orders for two more to keep up with demand).
I can’t convey, but should certainly mention, one of the most important parts of the meeting, which is just to be able to meet face-to-face and share stories and outlooks and be together in a group where tax resistance isn’t a frightening fringe idea but is the center of discussion.
I’m fresh back from the NWTRCC national conference, which was held in Eugene, Oregon, and hosted by the enthusiastic and welcoming Eugene “Taxes for Peace Not War” group.
I’ve got a binder full of handouts and hastily-scratched notes that I took whenever I found a spare moment.
Today I’ll share some of my impressions of the gathering and of the current state of the war tax resistance movement.
Frivolity
Many of the attendees were concerned about the IRS being more aggressive in sending out notices of “frivolous filing” penalties to resisters who send letters of protest that explain their refusal to pay along with their tax returns.
One couple who were first-time resisters and had only refused to pay a token $50 last year were assessed “frivolous filing” penalties of $5,000 — each, even though they had filed a single return jointly — though they had filled out their return accurately and completely.
The IRS also insists that once they have assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty, you must pay that penalty before you can appeal it!
The law seems pretty clear that the “frivolous filing” penalty is only meant to apply if the tax return is incomplete or incorrect, but the IRS seems to be applying it haphazardly — not only to people who file complete and accurate returns but who refuse to pay some portion, but even to people who file and pay every cent but who merely inclose a letter registering their protest or disapproval!
Meanwhile, other resisters — including one who files a return every year with her social security number at the top but with none of the other required information, and with the 1040 form over-written with a protest message in red ink — have never been assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty or even received a “frivolous filing” warning letter.
The coordinating committee discusses the RFPTFA on morning
The “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act”
For a more in-depth examination of my misgivings about the RFPTFA, see:
One item on the agenda was a request by the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund that NWTRCC formally “recommit to the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and the efforts NCPTF is doing to get it passed in Congress.”
As I explained , I have serious misgivings about “peace tax fund” proposals in general, and think that the current incarnation of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act in particular would do more harm than good.
However, NWTRCC had endorsed a different version of this legislation years ago, and so many people expected this new call for an endorsement to be a no-brainer.
Much debate ensued.
Robert Randall pointed out that NWTRCC’s “Statement of Purpose” includes “support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
He interpreted this as being a built-in endorsement of the latest act which would make the current debate moot.
However, no act by that name has been introduced recently — I think since — and in many important ways the current legislation does not resemble the version that NWTRCC endorsed back in the day.
I was a little worried that I would be the only one objecting to the endorsement and that this would put me outside of the general consensus of the group, but as it turns out there were many people present who expressed misgivings about peace tax fund legislation and who weren’t enthusiastic about endorsing it, and I heard more than one person express that this was a long-overdue debate.
Many of the Act’s supporters seem to have ideas of what the Act would accomplish that go way beyond the actual text of the legislation.
One said, for instance, that if the Act passed, it would effectively allow citizens to annually vote yea or nay on war or on whatever wars the government was engaged in at the time.
Some participants in the discussion were concerned that NWTRCC remain on good terms with NCPTF, in part so that we may be more influential as they recraft their strategy in the coming years.
One person said that because the Act is a long-shot to ever become law, it is best judged not by what its effects would be if it were enacted, but by what it symbolizes as a proposal that approximates the hopes of people who want legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation.
(Myself, I’m not sure I buy this argument, but in any case I think that the symbolism of the Act is ambiguous at best and may very well communicate a message that is, on the whole, harmful to the cause.)
The result of our discussion was that we decided to hold off on making a decision of whether or not to endorse until our meeting, at which time we will have more time to discuss the question and more time to study the points that are in debate.
A book of writings by and about Marian Franz and her work with the peace tax fund campaign is forthcoming, and will include a piece by Ruth Benn about the war tax resistance movement and its relationship with the peace tax fund campaign.
Election aftermath
There was varied reaction to the recent presidential election.
Many people were skeptical of the promise for meaningful change, and distrustful towards the Democratic party, and saw the election mostly in terms of whether it would anaesthetize progressive activists or whether it might be possible to reactivate the hopeful coalitions that helped to propel Obama into office once Hope turns to disappointment.
Others were very enthusiastic about the change and hoped that progressives and peace activists might finally be able to influence government policy.
One person went as far as to say that we’d “won” and would have to get used to being winners on the inside of the power structure instead of ignored pleaders outside of it.
Another hopefully imagined getting a group of progressive religious leaders to sit down with Obama and confront his faith with a challenge to go further than his public statements have so far suggested.
To me this all sounds like stuff of the same sort as gingerbread houses, flying carpets, and fairy godmothers, but I mention it here to show that some of the Hope bubble has infected even a skeptical group like NWTRCC.
There was much mention of “Camp Hope” — a vigil that will be held near Obama’s home in Chicago in up to inauguration day.
The goals of this vigil will be to encourage Obama to follow-through boldly on some of his more progressive campaign themes.
The demands of the vigil are meant to harmonize with, rather than to protest, the goals of the Obama campaigners, and will concentrate on actions that the new administration can take immediately via executive orders.
This is said to be partially based on a similar vigil that took place in the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in that asked Carter to pardon Vietnam-era draft resisters and to cancel the B-1 bomber program, both of which Carter did.
A new war funding supplemental bill is expected to hit Congress in , and this will be an early test of what kind of Change we can expect from the new order, and what kind of power the current anti-war movement is capable of asserting.
The War Tax Boycott
’s war tax boycott campaign was well-received by some local war tax resistance groups, who found it a good focal point for their outreach efforts.
However, the number of people who participated in the boycott disappointed the hopes of those who initiated the campaign.
There was much discussion of whether we should continue the campaign into and if so in what fashion.
If we were to continue the campaign into — making the the climax of the campaign — this would give us little time to mount a serious outreach effort, and at the same time it would have to compete for attention with the actions of the opening months of the new Obama administration.
It might be hard to convince new resisters to join up if they’re still placing their hopes for peace with their rulers.
We eventually concluded that we would continue the campaign, but would concentrate this year on retrenching and consolidation rather than on a major outreach and publicity campaign, in preparation for a larger campaign when the inevitable Obama Disappointment sets in.
Meanwhile, local groups that find the campaign useful can continue to use it as before.
Rather than making April 15th the target date for beginning to resist, we may be better off doing what Code Pink did with its war tax resistance campaign and tell people that their resistance begins the moment they take their first affirmative step toward tax resistance, for instance by adjusting their W-4 withholding.
One person said that although she resisted taxes , she didn’t sign up for the boycott because she was only resisting a small amount and was redirecting that amount to local groups, and she had the impression that the boycott was mainly for people redirecting larger amounts to the two showcase charities highlighted by the boycott campaign.
Some people who did boycott outreach found that some folks were reluctant to sign on to the boycott for fear of the danger of being on some government list, and stressed that there should be a way for people to join the campaign anonymously.
Miscellany
Some local University of Oregon students dropped by the meeting and volunteered to create a redesigned mock-up of the nwtrcc.org web site that we could use if we’d like — a much-appreciated and spontaneous act of generosity.
NWTRCC will be trying to nurture a new regional gathering of war tax resisters — something along the lines of the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters that is coming up later .
To this end, it will be inviting groups that are interested in hosting such a gathering to submit proposals, and will select one of these proposals to support with some seed money and other assistance.
NWTRCC decided to commit to revitalize the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which seems to have run out of steam (appeals for funds go out very infrequently, and resisters are reimbursed only after long delay).
NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn is preparing a series of “Readings on Money.”
These include transcripts of some of the discussion on that subject at the Fall gathering in Las Vegas, Karen Marysdaughter’s essay on “The Influence of Money on Decisions to Engage in War Tax Resistance,” George Salzman’s “Inheritance and Social Responsibility,” a debate about the ethics of accepting interest on loans and bank deposits from Juanita Nelson and Bob Irwin, and a look at the intwined structure of government spending, national debt, the war machine, the federal reserve, and the income tax from Jay Sordean.
Kathy Kelly leads a workshop on “Honesty and Empathy: Questions for Collaborators”
Kathy Kelly led us through some role-playing exercises concerning collaboration and how to confront it, and shared some stories with us from her experiences with activism and humanitarian assistance.
Her public presentation at the University after the end of the NWTRCC conference session was well-appreciated by those who attended.
Kelly is an engaging speaker who relates interesting experiences vividly and well — with a great command of accents and the ability to invoke strong and varied emotions without making the audience feel like they’ve been strapped on a roller-coaster.
One of her themes: around the world, many people are forced to make great sacrifices because of the decisions our political leaders are making.
Meanwhile, what will raise us to make the sacrifices we need to make to make things right?
To those of us to whom much has been given, much will be expected in this regard.
We need to slow down and unflinchingly reassess our priorities.
“This is what grown-ups do.”
Mike Butler volunteered to bring NWTRCC into the MySpace / Facebook universe, so keep an eye out there.
Erica Weiland removes a pillar of militarism in Susan Quinlan’s workshop
Susan Quinlan demonstrated some of the techniques she uses in youth outreach to teach about the unbalanced government budget priorities and about how to build a better society by shifting your support from the pillars that support a system of injustice to the pillars that support the scaffolding of a better system.
I remember a couple of interesting stories of how people were introduced to war tax resistance.
One couple was working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Colombia and met some war tax resisters there and then took up war tax resistance on their return home.
Another new resister had been working for an alternative newspaper that received a grant from a war tax resisters’ tax-redirection alternative fund, and learned about war tax resistance that way.
Conference attendees review part of Steev Hise’s rough cut for Death and Taxes
Steev Hise’s war tax resistance video project continues, with a projected completion date around .
Conference attendees saw a preview of a portion of the film and seemed enthusiastic about it.
The next national meeting will be held this coming Spring (early ) somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. — details to be hashed out in the coming months.
The next national will be in Cleveland, Ohio around .
And with all that, I’m still leaving a lot out.
But for now, that’ll have to do.
NWTRCC is encouraging people who signed up for the War Tax Boycott to sign up again for ’s boycott.
While there is reason to celebrate the end of the Bush presidency and a White House occupied by the Obama family, the kind of change that we want to see won’t come without continued commitment of all kinds of grassroots organizing and pressure.
Obama’s plan to end the war in Iraq does not offer the immediacy that that is so necessary to save lives, and with Robert Gates staying on at the “war department,” it’s less clear that “ending the war” means removing all troops and foreign contractors from Iraq.
And Obama has made it clear that thousands of U.S. troops will be moved to Afghanistan where civilian deaths are climbing and there’s growing anger at the presence of foreign troops and endless war.
Refusing to be complicit with war is as important as ever.
Refusing to pay some or all of federal taxes is a powerful way to say no to war and yes to redirecting those dollars to human needs programs.
We’ve updated the website, http://wartaxboycott.org/ and we’re sticking with redirection projects from last spring — Direct Aid Iraq in Jordan and Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans.
The online form is at http://wartaxboycott.org/regform.php, or you can print out a form on the “Tools” page and send it in.
An update on the legal taxable income baseline for and on how much income is exempt from IRS levies, a note about how some banks are charging exorbitant processing fees when they submit to a levy, and some other news about tax policy and enforcement changes.
News about a celebration of the Wally Nelson Centenary to be held in Massachusetts, brief notices of a few books that have been published recently by war tax resisters, some information on the activities of War Resisters International, and another call to order some fundraising message scarves while the weather cooperates.
Information about resources available to people promoting war tax resistance and/or the war tax boycott.
News, including an update about Steev Hise’s tax resistance film project, the new NWTRCC “Speaker’s Bureau”, a request for nominations for people to fill two seats on the NWTRCC administrative committee that will open in , and a call to begin a discussion on whether or not it would be a good idea for NWTRCC to endorse the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.
An update from a new war tax resister, John Parrish who, along with his wife Kate, dipped their toes into the tax resistance pool with a token $50 resistance.
They were surprised and alarmed when the IRS shark came for the toes and took the whole leg — assessing a $5,000 “frivolous filing” penalty on John and then another one on Kate!
With the help of the folks at NWTRCC, their Congressman, and “the IRS Legislative Advocates” they managed to get the fines removed.
John tells the story.
I’m back from the NWTRCC National Gathering in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
I’ll share some of my impressions and go into more detail in the coming days.
I flew into Charlottesville and was picked up by one of our hosts — who’d be shuttling incoming conferencers all weekend and who did a fantastic job of making sure we all got collected, assembled, fed, and then given a comfortable place to lay our heads at the end of the day.
We passed the new America tombstone on the way back to Harrisonburg where we were holding the sessions of our meeting at the Community Mennonite Church.
After the administrative committee met on morning and afternoon to grease the wheels for the larger coordinating committee meetings, night was devoted to introductions, a viewing of a video on corrupt and insufficiently-monitored government spending on the Afghanistan War, and reports from local groups about how their Tax Day actions went and what they’ve been up to.
Clare Hanrahan shared some stories from the tour she and Coleman Smith have been conducting through Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to meet with peace & justice activists in that area, forge alliances between them, and learn about the state of the regional movement.
They’ve been blogging their adventures on the War Resisters League Asheville site.
Lots of people reported that their tax day protests had been upstaged by the Tea Party demonstrations this year, though a few groups took the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and partied along with the rest of them.
One person noted that with more people e-filing their tax returns, the phenomenon of the last-minute post office rush has diminished, and there’s less media attention and less of an audience for leafletting and such.
Ruth Benn reported on how in New York they held a viewing of tax resistance related excerpts from Boston Legal and Stranger Than Fiction as a discussion-prompter.
Robert Randall reported that an attempt to focus messaging around the single issue of opposition to the Iraq War had seemed promising at first, as the war became more unpopular even in his red state of Georgia, but that it hadn’t seemed to lead to any noticeable uptick in interest in war tax resistance or in new resisters.
Many people noted the increasing challenge of developing interest in our message in a time when the anti-war movement is suffering from a post-election tranquilization.
Ray Gingerich reflected on the difficulty he is having in trying to reinvigorate the war tax resistance tradition in the Mennonite church.
On tax day, he sends his letter of protest to his church.
He also recalled for us that their local war tax resistance group used to be much more active and at one time they had a mutual aid fund that they used to defray the costs of penalties, interest, and frivolous filing fines incurred by individual members.
morning
After breakfast morning, we discussed what we thought of a rough cut of an upcoming war tax resistance film project, and talked about what we thought would be the best use of the available footage.
Then Bill Ramsey gave us an update on the War Tax Boycott project, and we discussed options for modifying the campaign going forward.
Here are some of the comments from my notes (these are all paraphrased and on-the-fly, so may not represent what these folks actually said or meant to say):
David Waters
I love the palm cards.
Pam Allee
It would be good to keep the campaign going on a low simmer during the sleepy times so that we would be ready to jump in with a flashier campaign when the moment is right.
Bill Ramsey
I recommend a scaled-down campaign in which we keep the website updated but reduce the budget.
Robert Randall
How can we hold on to the new resisters whom we learn about for the first time when they sign up for the boycott?
Ray Gingerich
I’m confused as to whether the boycott is meant only for first-timers or if it’s for everyone; to me it seemed gimmicky and not particularly appealing.
Susan Balzer
Some people might not want to sign on to the boycott because they don’t want to be “on a list” and they might be more comfortable if there’s a way to remain anonymous.
Jim Stockwell
I think maybe “boycott” is a threatening or discouraging word to some people.
Clare Hanrahan
The hard copy boycott sign-on sheets weren’t at all popular when we were tabling.
Daniel Woodham
We should make the palm cards less likely to go stale by removing the year and references to specific wars/issues.
Geov Parrish
The value of the campaign is mainly as a vehicle for publicizing war tax resistance as an option, not so much in getting people to sign on.
Erica Weiland
I wonder if by framing the campaign as a one-year thing we prompt people to make their resistance temporary.
Clare Hanrahan
I do low-income resistance and I redirect unwaged labor, not money.
I think the war tax resistance movement should honor that and recognize that option for boycott participants (not assume everyone has a dollar amount to redirect).
Tim Godshall (and others)
We need to have better follow-up with the people who sign on — by phone is better than by email.
Robert Randall
Maybe we could parcel out some of the following-up to people in our network list.
Next came a discussion of our finances and a report from the fundraising committee, and then we broke for lunch.
afternoon
First thing on afternoon we had a panel presentation and group discussion about the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and about NWTRCC’s relationship with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
This was the most contentious item on the agenda, and I’m going to leave you all in suspense about it by writing it up in a future blog post all its own rather than putting it here.
After this, we broke up into smaller group sessions.
In mine, a group of maybe twenty resisters just shared some of their recent experiences with resistance and with the IRS.
Sharing our war stories like this is one of the best parts of these meetings, and is also a great way of keeping our fingers on the pulse of how IRS enforcement trends are changing.
I didn’t take notes during that session since it seemed to be a more-intimate sharing of personal information than the general meeting.
I did write down one quote though that was too good to miss, from Clare Hanrahan:
“I used to say that they could boil me in oil before I’d pay any war taxes, but now that I know that they could actually do that…”
One idea I came away with was that it would be nice to have some tips from war tax resistance veterans about how to deal with “mixed marriages” in which one partner is a resister and the other one is not.
There are some tricky questions, especially when finances get tangled up together.
I’m hoping, next time I have some free time, to put some time into collecting some of these stories and tips.
The next full-group session was about “organizing strategies and outreach ideas in the Obama era.”
I didn’t take notes here either as I was facilitating and had to devote all of my attention to that.
What I mostly recall from the discussion is that people were less interested in talking about strategies, techniques, and outreach ideas and more interested in talking about what sort of messaging we should and shouldn’t use.
Before dinner was another set of small-group breakout sessions.
I joined the web team, discussing the nitty-gritty of web site maintenance and design, none of which is really worth relating here.
was our business meeting, in which decisions that require consensus approval of the coordinating committee are made, folks are rotated onto and off of the administrative committee (Erica Weiland is joining us this time), we review the budget and priorities and how the coordinator is doing, check in on the progress of ongoing projects, and plan for the next gathering.
The first half of the meeting was largely taken up by Peace Tax Fund-related discussion, which I’m holding off reporting on until a future post.
For the second half, I was the facilitator and so took no notes.
So you’ll just have to wait until Ruth Benn posts her meeting minutes for a full picture of what took place.
http://www.unz.org/ has some scans of old magazines of interest.
Naturally, I went hunting for tax-resistance related bits and pieces.
Today, a hodge-podge of ads that gives a sort of impressionistic picture of the state of the American war tax resistance movement during .
The first one comes from the DC Gazette from :
The next comes from the back cover of New Politics, also from :
The next comes from the DC Gazette from :
The next comes from the DC Gazette:
A similar effort is underway today, with the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee collecting names of signers to its War Tax Boycott in the hopes of assembling an impressive public list of resisters.
The last ad in today’s flashback comes from the DC Gazette:
Not long ago the news was full of interest about Facebook gazillionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to launch a new enterprise dedicated to making the world a better place, and his decision to fund it with 99% of the Facebook shares he owns: about $45 billion worth. Cynics were quick to see this as a tax dodge.
It’s not obvious to me that the tax advantages are quite as enormous as some are making them out to be, but even so, as Simon Black points out, if Zuckerberg managed to avoid taxes on any of that $45 billion, that alone would contribute to making the world a better place!
Jason Rawn, at NWTRCC’s blog, urges climate change activists to divest from the Pentagon to fight the single biggest contributor to fossil fuel consumption.
NWTRCC is again collecting names for its War Tax Boycott.
If you’ve signed on in the past and you’d still like to be considered part of the boycott, sign on again as they’ve started with a clean slate.
Today, a few final notes from the Friends Bulletin
archives, as we reach .
The issue was haunted by the
U.S. attack on Iraq
that would begin that month.
The Meeting urges all of its members to find direct expression of their
opposition to this escalation of violence — including war-tax resistance,
public demonstration and public civil disobedience, [and so forth]…
I missed my chance to be a conscientious objector when my number didn’t come
up in the last year of the draft. It was .
During high school I got the opportunity to think through whether I could kill
other people in a war. I couldn’t see how I could possibly allow myself to be
trained to shoot or bayonet another human being.
Well. It’s and my wife
Kathy and I’ve been well trained in killing. Not the kind of face-to-face
killing that kept me awake in my high school years. Like a bomber pilot, we
never see our victims unless they show up on the news. Maybe we can’t even be
directly implicated. We don’t look dangerous, but we are accomplices.
Over the years we’ve been trained to look the other way as our federal taxes
paid for others to kill, or threaten to kill, in our places. From Vietnam to
Afghanistan and beyond, we’ve had a hand in financing the deaths of millions
of human beings. With the nuclear weapons and delivery systems we’ve helped
pay for, billions of others are threatened.
Well, we didn’t have a choice did we?
We didn’t think we had a choice. If we didn’t pay our taxes we’d go to jail.
That simple, right? The idea of resistance never even occurred to either of us
until . Since that
time Kathy and I have wrestled with the idea of conscientious objection to the
draft in high school. The two ideas are closely related.
Our family’s bodies and minds are useless to the military at this point. Our
tax dollars are valuable. They are being drafted and have been drafted since
we started working and making a living wage. In today’s high-tech military,
warm bodies are of secondary importance. Cold cash is key.
Military spending makes up between 40 to 50% of the federal budget, depending
on whose statistics one uses.* In order to resist
conscription of my family’s share of this money, I submitted a new W-4 to my
employer and adjusted dependent allowances to reduce my withholding. Now only
about half as much is removed. At the end of the year we will correctly fill
out and file our federal income tax return as usual, but we will only pay 50
to 60% of the balance due. The remainder, the military portion, we will
redirect to worthy causes. With our tax forms we’ll enclose a letter that will
explain the reasons for our action.
What will happen to my family and me? Lord knows, but if past events are good
predictors of the future, then this is the likely scenario. First, the
IRS will
send us letters. These will go from brusque to threatening. There might be a
personal visit. At some point, maybe in a few months, maybe in a few years,
they will come after the money. This they will easily find in our family bank
accounts or by garnishing my pay. They will take interest and penalties beyond
our unpaid balance. They will almost certainly not put Kathy or me in jail (as
I said, the Federal Government has little use for our bodies, and no one is
known to have been jailed for war tax resistance in the
U.S.A.
for over a decade, though there are thousands of resisters).
So what’s the point? If they’re going to take the money anyway, why go through
all of this?
The point is that we have a choice about whether to look the other way while
my money is used for murder. In our way of thinking, we have an obligation to
object when we see evil, to avoid participating in it willingly or tacitly,
and to try to do what we can to stop it. The military will likely get our tax
money, but we will not have handed it to them. They will have to take it.
We don’t look so dangerous. But maybe we are. Instead of being a threat to
world peace, we’ve taken a step toward being a threat to world war.
* Good sources for this information are the
American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, and the Center for
Defense Information.
That issue also reprinted an article from the San Francisco
Chronicle about Elizabeth Boardman’s trip to Baghdad shortly before
the war. That article mentioned in passing her war tax resistance.
The issue included an article
by Vickie Aldrich on “A History of War Tax Resistance in the United States.”
Another note in that issue mentioned that her Meeting, the Las Cruses, New
Mexico, Monthly Meeting had adopted a minute “in support of war tax
resisters.”
Another article in that issue included the following minute, approved by the
Intermountain Yearly Meeting:
Our religious convictions lead us to take a stand against war. There are many
ways to do this, one of which is war tax resistance. We support those in our
Yearly Meeting who feel called to war tax resistance.
The issue featured a query from Peg
Morton of the Eugene Friends Meeting:
“Are We Ready to Refuse to Pay for War and Accept the Consequences?”
She asked Quakers to remember their history of war tax refusal, and invited
them to take part in the “War Tax Boycott” that
NWTRCC
had organized that year.
This is the forty-fifth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today
we finish off the first decade of the new millennium.
What belongs to God and what to Caesar? It’s a riddle that has to be puzzled
over again and again by Mennonites in the context of war tax resistance. In the
edition,
Titus Peachey took a swing
at the pitch: Given all that belongs to God, he asked, “can we who follow Jesus
willingly give our tax dollars for war and killing?”
In the edition,
Scott Key
answered Everett J. Thomas’s editorial statement — “There seems to be nothing
we can do but write letters and pray that [the war in Iraq] will stop.” — with
some more practical ideas, including boycotts of and divestment from military
contractors, and war tax resistance.
Susan Miller Balzer wrote in to applaud and supplement this:
Scott Key… lists some important ways to work against war and for peace. In
mentioning war tax resistance, he expresses a common misconception that
employees cannot prevent their employers from withholding federal taxes from
their paychecks.
However, it is possible to limit or stop withholding by increasing withholding allowances on the W-4 Form (or legally writing “Exempt” on the form if you did not owe federal income taxes last year and do not expect to owe in the coming year).
See the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s “practical” publications on the Web site nwtrcc.org on controlling federal tax withholding and on low income or simple living for helpful information on ways to keep from paying for war.
On the same Web site, click on the War Tax Boycott, Withhold from War/Pay for Peace to find ways to participate in this national effort to defund war.
The “draft” of federal tax money to pay for present, past and future wars is a
fundamental issue that our church should address as it works to replace
suffering, destruction and injustice with healing and hope. The military draft
affected only young men. The current “economic draft” affects young men and
women who enter the military to try to get out of poverty. The draft of tax
money affects people of all ages as long as they have a taxable income.
If everyone in just one congregation refused to pay for war and redirected
their refused taxes to an underfunded social service, imagine the
opportunities for witness and change that could occur.
Don
Kaufman was back in the
letters to the editor column:
If enough of us withhold from war and pay for peace, we can stop the harm.
War-tax resistance is not a passive or unethical tax avoidance but an act of
conscience that everyone can do. The cross of Jesus as nonviolence and
compassion is our model for hope and change.
Individuals shoulder great responsibility for warfare and for peace. At times
the most effective way to take responsibility is refusal to collaborate, as
Franz
Jaggerstatter did in Hitler’s Austria in
. How can we take a stand against a
government that leads its citizens into committing murder? The task is to be
reform-minded, to live in an ethical way, and progressively to make
unthinkable the coercion of conscience by the majority who put their faith in
military or violent solutions.
Like Jeremiah, let us
unmask the illusions of power by being servants of hope among the vulnerable
and wounded.
Stanley Bohn
encouraged people to engage in at least a small symbolic act of war tax
redirection, in the edition,
claiming important benefits from the gesture that go beyond its likely
practical results:
Will this action make Congress and the Bush administration change their funding priorities?
Unlikely, even if millions took part in this effort.
After all, war fuels our economy, is useful in getting national unity and political support, and it focuses on the evil of others, allowing us to raise our self-esteem.
As Chris Hedges wrote in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, war provides us with purpose and a civil religion.
What happens to us: For some Christians, the motive for participating
in tax redirection may start as a protest against refugee making, the
slaughter of people as collateral damage, torture of prisoners, creating
mentally damaged veterans, ballooning war debt, ruined international
relations, and other disastrous consequences. But when we take a stand for our
Christian convictions, something else may happen.
We gain an understanding of Jesus’ way of being lumped with criminals when
choosing the community-building, caring, enemy-loving life at the heart of the
universe. We realize that Jesus did not live or teach a religion guided by
what is respectable, safe, stress-free, or that waits for a consensus. Jesus
calls us to a life that is unpredictable and vulnerable.
Tax redirection is not a criterion of who is a “real Christian” but is more
accepting life as a gift, being what we are here for, living what we see in
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. When the
IRS
makes us pay a small percentage more than our lawful tax, we can experience
what we believe is more important than money, and the hold money has on us is
reduced.
Living this kind of trust in the Jesus way helps keep serious Christians from
attempting to be pure and withdraw from life’s realities. It keeps us engaged
in current issues and with those proposing different goals. We are engaged,
however, in the kind of peace Christians should expect when choosing an
alternative way to conquer evil.
The risk of taking a stand regardless of consequences brings an unexpected
peace. It is not a peace that makes us feel protected, free of fears, or
satisfied with ourselves. It is a peace from knowing one is on a venture of
trusting in the universe-guiding reality we see in Christ. It is an empowering
peace given us when we offer ourselves to the one who gave us this life,
trusting God for the outcome. It is an empowerment that keeps us open rather
than defensive and having to shut out the desperate cries of others. It is an
alternative to a consumer-oriented Christianity that brings an unintended
transformation that makes us vulnerable and powerful at the same time.
Possibilities after April 15: There is no telling if or how God might
use the April 15 tax-redirection event. Consequences may occur that we never
thought of, including what powers or gifts might be released in ourselves.
We should not expect the government to inform us how many participated. The
media may not be free to report it, even if it knew. If the amount we withheld
and diverted is seen by the
IRS as
worth taking action against us, we will likely receive threatening letters and
finally have those funds confiscated along with a penalty.
Yet significant tax redirection can mean some humanitarian agencies will get
more financial support, and starving people will be fed. Maybe some
legislators will hear the conscience dilemma of many taxpayers and join other
co-sponsors of
HR 1921, the
Freedom of Religion Peace Tax Fund, which would make legal the redirection of
taxes by conscientious objectors to war. And maybe a few thousand redirectors
will discover we are less bound by the expectations of others and are freer
than we thought we could be.
Most important, we may learn that choosing risky ways of living for others,
even civil disobedience, can bring spiritual healing. We won’t defund the war,
but we can be more confident of the Power that overcomes our fears and by
God’s grace enables us to be the humans God intended us to be.
One such redirection idea was announced in the edition:
“Turning toward peace.”
This Mennonite Central Committee
(U.S.) initiative
allowed Americans to “redirect[] war tax dollars to help children in
Afghanistan through
MCC’s
Global Family education sponsorship program.” Titus Peachey, director of peace
education for
MCC
(U.S.) was quoted:
According to Peachey, most who have chosen to withhold believe, “If we cannot
conscientiously participate in war with our bodies, we cannot pay for it
either. We need to give our money to causes that build up rather than destroy
the presence of God in each person,” he says.
Most inform their governments of their actions. “Given the presence of Western
military action in Afghanistan today, the opportunity to contribute to
peacemaking there is timely,” says Peachey. “Equally important is the way in
which withholding war taxes challenges our own systemic militarism.”
A joint letter from Susan Balzer, Deb & Wes Bergen, Anita & Stan Bohn, Ron Faust, Don Kaufman, H.A. Penner, Steve Ratzlaff, Mary Swartley, Willard Swartley, and Dan Leatherman appeared in the edition.
They were responding to an editorial that suggested the Mennonite Church had surrendered as a peace church and had come to be “at peace with war.”
There is a traditional, positive witness opportunity for conscientious
objectors to war of all ages. It may seem scary, but many find it almost
routine. It involves redirection of income-tax assessments used for killing
and refugee-making to ministries meeting human need.…
Our descendants and overseas Christians will wonder how Christians in a
superpower, with over 700 military bases around the world, fighting two wars
and considering a third with Iran, supporting covert wars in places such as
Colombia and Israel, could be so at peace with war.
“The church should consist of communities of loving defiance. Instead, it
consists largely of comfortable clubs of conformity,” writes Ron Sider in
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. If we teach it is wrong, why
do we support it financially?
Shame is the negative motivation. The positive is that Jesus promised his
spirit of truth would abide in us and enable us to live differently from the
world’s ways. If we love him, we are empowered to keep his commandments
(John 14:15–17).
War tax redirection is “alternative service” for dollars we earn, service that
provides hope and new possibilities for suffering people instead of endless
war.
The issue covered
John
Stoner’s “$10.40 for Peace” campaign.
This was another attempt to get timid people to take baby steps into war tax
resistance by resisting a small, token amount of their taxes. The campaign is
still going on today but has yet to
catch fire.
The article seemed to me to exaggerate the scariness of such resistance even as
it tried to assuage the fears of potential resisters. Excerpts:
Stoner says the group hears some concern from individuals about the possible
penalties and “heavy hand of the
IRS
coming down.”
Stoner’s response is threefold. First, “As disciples of Jesus, we shouldn’t
have so much fear,” he says. Second, the past experiences of individuals who
have withheld taxes for similar reasons have been minimal. Third, the tax
withholder can decide later to pay the full amount.
“The most important thing is to make that statement that calls for democratic
conversation about how federal money is spent,” Stoner said.
Others say this movement should take more risks and that
U.S. war spending
remains too large. However, if enough people join, the risks and penalties
would increase, Stoner said.
The article noted that Shane Claiborne had signed on as an endorser and would
be speaking at an upcoming public meeting on the campaign.
Last month the statute of limitations erased another year of my taxes.
For the tax year, my 1040 form showed that I owed $1,203 in federal taxes.
I didn’t pay, of course, and the IRS has been nagging me about that ever since.
But now it’s too late for them, as ten years have expired as they failed to collect.
I celebrated by sending a check for $1,203 to our local food bank program.
(Coincidentally, on the same day I sent the check, I got my $1,200 stimulus check from the U.S. Treasury.
I’m not sure how to interpret that, cosmically-like, except that it seemed to rhyme like poetry.)
Governments spend a lot of time and energy—and enlist a host of political scientists and pundits and other such clergy—to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and even charitable, while failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.
Governments and other critics of tax resistance are quick to deploy this already-available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. They criticize tax resisters as freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them—as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.
One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging giveaways of their resisted taxes. This makes it clear that the resisters do not have merely selfish motives for resisting, and also demonstrates that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).
This sort of tax redirection also can forge or strengthen ties between the resisters and the recipients, and can make more people aware of tax resistance as an option.
War tax resisters
This tactic is put to particularly good use by the contemporary war tax resistance movement. Here are some examples:
When Julia “Butterfly” Hill refused to pay more than $150,000 in taxes to the U.S. government in , she made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:
I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.
NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in . It encouraged war tax resisters across the country to coordinate by redirecting their refused taxes to either of two groups: one that provided healthcare in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and one that helped Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference to give oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 to spokespeople for these campaigns.
The People’s Life Fund is associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and holds redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from a resister, that resister can reclaim his or her deposits to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually these grants are modest—$500 or $1,000 each—but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and helps the word about war tax resistance spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups in the United States.
A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from its redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been banned from applying for government financial aid because of their refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial. These actions helped to forge or sustain ties between the war tax resistance movement and anti-conscription activists and gave war tax resistance a higher profile in the larger anti-war movement.
One family figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: In they redirected their refused federal taxes to a charitable program called “Childreach.” That year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal government agency, had promised to match private donations to Childreach two-to-one from its budget, so the family’s $211.69 in redirected taxes had the effect of pulling an additional $423.38 from the U.S. government for a good cause.
war tax resister Bill Ramsey redirects $1,000 to charity in a granting ceremony
In , war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: They redirected their taxes by handing out five-dollar bills to people standing in line at the unemployment office. Along with the bills, they handed out letters in which they explained their redirection action. To amplify the public relations impact, they notified the media of their plans ahead of time. “Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR,” according to one report, “and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
In a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”
Arthur Evans felt that if redirecting your war taxes to charity was a good idea, redirecting twice your war taxes to charity must be twice as good. In he wrote to the IRS to tell them “I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.”
In the early 1970s, farmers who were resisting the expansion of a military base onto their land in Larzac, France, found common cause with war tax resisters. Thousands of war tax resisters there redirected their war taxes to help fund the Larzac struggle.
And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here: When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in , she threw a fund-raising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money—but not in order to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”
British women’s suffrage movement
The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, signing her letter “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote to the editor of a suffragist paper to suggest that women should redirect their taxes from the government to a privately-run war relief charity “and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Suffrage activist Charlotte Despard reported that “she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
Social Security foe
In , Howard Pennington, unwilling to pay an $81 social security tax “for waste by socialistic dreamers,” instead sent that money directly to George Robinett. Robinett was a 72-year-old retiree whose social security had been abruptly cut off for three months, costing him $210, because during one month he had earned 62 cents above the $50 maximum monthly earnings for a social security recipient.
