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.
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.
This issue had come up at our last meeting in Eugene because the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund had asked us to formally endorse this legislation.
We were unable to reach consensus on the endorsement at that meeting and didn’t allot enough time to really discuss the matter in detail, so we planned to readdress the issue and devote more time to discussion this time around.
One of the arguments in favor of us endorsing the bill was that in the NWTRCC “Statement of Purpose” is a section that many people interpreted as a built-in endorsement of the bill.
That section reads:
NWTRCC’s goal is to maintain and build a national movement of conscientious objectors to military taxes by supporting, coordinating and publicizing the WTR actions of groups and individuals.
These actions include: war tax resistance, protest, and refusal; the redirection of military taxes to meet human needs; support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill; and adjustment of lifestyle to avoid tax liability.
I’ve heard many perspectives about whether this section endorses the bill or merely indicates that support for it is one of many war tax resistance related activities that our affiliate groups engage in.
But in any case, the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill” doesn’t exist as an active piece of legislation anymore.
The currently-proposed legislation is substantially different in content and has a new name.
So this time around, in addition to debating the endorsement question, we were also trying to come up with a satisfactory way to remove or replace the anachronistic language from our statement of purpose.
On , we had a panel presentation on the bill followed by an open discussion.
Bethany Criss, the executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, presented the case for why we should endorse.
Ray Gingerich and I each gave statements opposing the endorsement.
Ruth Benn shared some of her insights from being exposed to the variety of international peace tax fund campaigns (some of which are promoting legislation that differs in important ways from the U.S. bill) and also recounted some of the history of the close working relationship of NWTRCC and NCPTF.
After these brief remarks from the panel, other attendees addressed the issue.
The following summary is based on notes I was taking at the time, so is only as good as my attention and note-taking were — caveat emptor:
Bethany Criss started out by noting the similarity between legalized conscientious objection to military service and conscientious objection to military taxation.
She also tried to assuage concerns that the “Religious Freedom” part of the bill’s title meant that the provisions of the bill would not be available to non-religious objectors.
She said that she felt confident that Congress would not raid the peace tax fund to pay for military expenses because the RFPTFA would represent a contract between us and Congress and that we could hold them accountable if they were to violate it.
She acknowledged that the bill was imperfect and would not accomplish as much as many people would like, but hoped that we would see it as an initial step in an incremental process.
I went next.
Here’s more-or-less the argument I gave against endorsement:
War Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Fund advocates agree that the belligerent militarism of the United States is a grave problem, that individuals must act to oppose it, and that our tax dollars are an important way in which we can move from complicity to opposition.
Because of this, we’re natural allies and have much in common.
The RFPTFA currently being pushed by the NCPTF has some significant problems. So much so that although our groups have much in common in our outlook and our interests, I think it would be a mistake for NWTRCC to endorse the RFPTFA.
Indeed, the problems with the bill are so significant that if the bill ever looked as though it might pass, we would be wiser to actively oppose the bill than to endorse it.
The main problems with the bill are two: 1) it’s no good, and 2) it’s bad.
That is, not only would it not deliver any meaningful benefits, but it would have harmful effects that would be damaging to the war tax resistance movement and dangerous to individual war tax resisters.
The reason why I say the bill is no good is this.
If the bill passes, it would give Congress more taxpayer money to spend and would allow Congress to spend as much money as it likes on war and armaments.
Every dollar paid into the “Peace Tax Fund” would increase taxpayer spending on the military.
This sounds like exactly the opposite of what the NCPTF intends, which may be true.
But sometimes good intentions lead to counterproductive laws and policies.
If you read the NCPTF literature, you’ll see that they admit that the bill would increase government revenue without decreasing how much Congress could spend on war:
So Congress would have more taxpayer money than before and could spend as much as it wants on war.
Why on earth would we want this?
Well, we’re supposed to want this because at least our money wouldn’t be spent on war.
But this is just an illusion.
The basic problem has to do with displacement.
If you pay into the Peace Tax Fund and Congress can only spend “your” money on something nice like the National Park Service, Congress can just take some other money that it had been planning to spend on the Park Service and divert it to the Pentagon.
So Congress spends just like it always has, with a little more taxpayer money than it would have had otherwise, but the people who pay into the Peace Tax Fund falsely believe that they aren’t responsible for the results of that increased spending.
It would be as though I were to pour a cup of sand into a mug full of hot coffee and then claim that I wasn’t responsible for the spillover since my sand sank to the bottom of the mug and it was only someone else’s coffee that spilled over the top.
So that’s why the RFPTFA isn’t any good.
Now here’s why it’s bad.
First: it constructs an illusion through which people can be induced to pay for war and militarism while believing that they are not.
The war tax resistance movement should be working hard to tear down illusions like this, not build up new ones.
Second: it would divide the war tax resistance movement between those people who maintain their testimony against paying for war and those who take advantage of the false moral cover of the RFPTFA.
This would also give the IRS fewer targets to pursue, and make the remaining war tax resisters more likely to be targeted by enforcement actions.
If the war tax resistance movement ever does become a powerful force for social change, you can bet that the government will consider passing such a bill — not as a concession to our movement but as a divide-and-conquer technique against it.
Third: it would give a persuasive rhetorical tool to people who oppose war tax resisters.
They would say that war tax resisters should just pay into the Peace Tax Fund like good, law-abiding, conscientious people.
Imagine what the IRS would say to resisters: “We gave you the ‘Peace Tax Fund’ you wanted — now you’ve got no more excuses not to pay up.”
Those three things are harmful effects the bill would have if it ever became law.
I don’t think this is likely, but there’s a fourth reason not to endorse the bill that doesn’t depend on whether or not it is successful in becoming law: advocacy of such a bill sends the message that the war tax resistance movement is naïve and that our conscientious scruples are superficial.
It tells people that war tax resisters:
are not particularly conscientious at all, but can be easily bought-off by symbolic concessions and simple sleight-of-hand
are conscientious enough to check a box on a form, but not conscientious enough to follow through on the ramifications of our actions
are willing enough to fund war if you can give us a way to deny that we’re doing it
would rather have a certificate from the government recognizing our officially certified conscientiousness than to actually be conscientious
These flaws have been pointed out before, and frequently PTF promoters have responded with an argument along these lines: Sure the RFPTFA won’t reduce military spending and it has at best an ambiguous effect on taxpayer complicity, but it has strong symbolic power: it’s a way to get conscientious objection to military taxation officially recognized, to get a foot in the door, to be able to take a census of conscientious objectors every April 15th, to propagandize for peace with every 1040 booklet, and so forth.
These benefits are not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons, but even if you were to acknowledge them — are they sufficient to justify putting any more energy into a 38-year-old campaign that has gone nowhere at all, currently in support of a piece of legislation that, even as watered down as it is, hasn’t had as much as a committee hearing in over a decade?
I feel strongly about this, and I have not pulled my punches.
Some of you may think I’m being uncharitable and unfair.
I’ll end on this note: I think the advocates of the RFPTFA have their hearts in the right place.
They are temperamentally our allies and I hope they continue to think of themselves that way.
I think that to the extent that we agree, we should continue to work closely and warmly together, and to the extent that we disagree we can agree to disagree.
After me, Ray Gingerich spoke, giving what I interpreted as a Thoreauvian argument against the peace tax fund idea: we shouldn’t wait to act conscientiously until the government gives us its permission to do so.
In addition, he feels from his work in trying to reintroduce war tax resistance into the Mennonite churches that the peace tax fund is an obstacle to this — it creates an excuse that people use: they say they’ll resist taxes but only when there’s a peace tax fund that allows them to do it legally.
After these prepared remarks from the panel, and Ruth’s discussion which I mentioned above, we heard from the other attendees.
Before Eugene, I thought of myself as a real outlier in my skepticism about the peace tax fund bill.
Most of what I heard about the bill in war tax resistance circles was positive, and the way people spoke about it made it seem like NWTRCC enthusiasm for the peace tax fund was a foregone conclusion if not a tautological one.
In Eugene I was pleasantly surprised to see that a few other people shared my misgivings about the bill, though I still felt like we were the minority.
In Harrisonburg last Saturday, though, it was clear that the tide had shifted dramatically.
Even with the executive director of the NCPTF there to pitch the bill, most people had little praise for it, and even the ones who were peace tax fund supporters in the abstract expressed that we probably shouldn’t endorse this version.
Gary Erb noted that most of those present probably wouldn’t qualify as conscientious objectors under the bill’s restrictive language, and so wouldn’t be able to legally avail themselves of the RFPTFA even if they cared to.
He also felt the bill would have a divide-and-conquer effect against the WTR movement, and recommended against endorsement.
Geov Parrish felt that the RFPTFA hadn’t a chance of becoming law, so it should be best seen as an educational vehicle.
That being the case, it was a poor idea to have watered it down so much in an attempt to make it palatable enough to pass through Congress.
Also, he noted that he feels excluded from the RFPTFA and its promotional materials because he is not a Christian.
Joffre Stewart said that as an anarchist resister, begging the state for exemptions and favors isn’t his style.
He thinks that conscientious objection to military service was mostly enacted for the state’s benefit, not for the benefit of the COs, and he thinks the same would be true of legalized conscientious objection to military taxation.
From this, he draws the conclusion that the reason we don’t have legal conscientious objection to military taxation is that war tax resisters have not yet become sufficiently inconvenient to the government.
Daniel Woodham thought that though the RFPTFA wasn’t perfect, it might make for a good first step, and once it was enacted we could work to amend it or correct its faults over time.
Bethany Criss said that in her view the “laundry list” of items in the section (§3b) of the bill that defines spending that falls under the “military purpose” category shouldn’t be seen as excluding other spending from that category, but only as examples of spending that fall under that category.
In her view, once the bill passes, a next step will be to ensure that the “military purpose” definition is interpreted inclusively so that it covers all the stuff we’re worried about.
Greg Reagle gave us some perspective on the reasoning behind watering down the bill to permit Congress to spend the money in the RFPTF on anything in the budget other than things in the military purpose category (previous incarnations of the bill had specified more precisely where that money would go).
He said that potential supporters in Congress had balked at having their spending decisions micromanaged by legislation, and so the changes had been made to mollify them.
Erica Weiland wanted to emphasize the positive working relationship between NWTRCC and NCPTF, though she too was opposed to endorsing the bill.
As an anarchist she doesn’t much favor trying to solve problems via legislation, but as an activist she tries to inspire well-intentioned people to be more active in ways that seem most appropriate to them, so she wants to encourage PTF promoters to keep doing their thing.
Robert Randall said he was impressed at the high plane on which the discussion was taking place.
He thought that the results of passing the RFPTFA might not be all that important, but that there might be some benefits to be had from the campaign to pass the bill anyway.
Pam Allee felt that the bill would help to emphasize that “we are the government” and so we can take control of the budget and change spending priorities so as to emphasize things like education, seat belt law enforcement, and other liberal priorities.
She was concerned that the RFPTFA seemed to lack grassroots support.
Larry Bassett paused to wonder whether it was really appropriate to the mission of a group like NWTRCC to be endorsing legislation or the individual projects of the affiliate groups.
Jim Stockwell felt that there might be a contradiction in that for many WTRs, the fact that tax resistance is illegal civil disobedience is an essential part of their WTR, and so legal conscientious objection would not be helpful to them.
He hoped our two groups would continue to work together.
Hiro (whose last name I didn’t catch, and whose first name I may be misspelling) encouraged us to patiently work at incremental approaches and not reject RFPTFA just because it wasn’t everything we wanted.
That said, she also worried that the government would spend the “peace” tax fund on things based on its warped definition of peacemaking work.
She envisioned Blackwater contractors doing their institution-building mopping-up exercises in Iraq (where she is from) and calling it “peacemaking” activities deserving of RFPTFA funding.
Tim Godshall tried to give us some perspective, noting that WTRs are one of the best arguments for the PTF (that is, the existence of WTRs demonstrates that many citizens have a strong conscientious objection that their government needs to accommodate), and also that although the RFPTFA might not have any effect on the military budget, the same could be said of WTRs. He believes that the RFPTFA is one part of a larger campaign to pressure the government to change its spending priorities.
Peter Smith disagreed with the suggestion that if the RFPTFA were to pass it would divide the WTR movement.
He agreed that we should not endorse the legislation, but hoped we would continue to support the PTF campaigners.
Ray Gingerich responded to a comment from Joffre Stewart by insisting that he was not an anarchist and indeed believed that a strong, active government (for example, one capable of implementing single-payer universal health care) was not incompatible with pacifism.
He plugged nonviolent conflict resolution strategies of the The Unconquerable World / A Force More Powerful school.
He also suggested that Marian Franz (the long-time National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund executive director) had been used by people and institutions who wanted to delay their confrontation with taxpayer complicity by putting it off until some distant future in which conscientious objection to military taxation was a legalized option.
Joffre Stewart noted that the U.S. government had no qualms about raiding the Social Security “trust fund” to pay for its military spending, and that it had stacked its “U.S. Institute of Peace” with CIA folk committed to the government’s violent foreign policy.
He therefore sees no reason to trust the government to administer a “peace tax fund.”
Bethany Criss told us that not only is she committed to seeing the RFPTFA enacted into law, but that she is also a war tax resister and has been since .
She said that although there is an associated “Peace Tax Foundation” with an educational mission, there should be no doubt that the Campaign’s goal is to get the legislation passed into law.
She thinks that the bill will be beneficial to war tax resisters and the war tax resistance movement by making WTR more visible.
She says that if the bill were enacted, it would not take away the opportunity to resist or say no; that resisters could continue to resist as before if they wished.
The goal is to bring more people in to a war tax resistance mindset.
She notes that part of the reason the bill was watered down is that their campaign doesn’t yet have enough supporters to bring enough pressure to bear on the legislators; this is another reason why she’d like our support.
Finally, Bill Ramsey felt that we might be better off not concentrating on the (unlikely) endorsement and instead trying to work on ways the two groups can work better together.
was an open-ended discussion without any decisions to be made on either the endorsement or the statement of purpose wording; on , our “business meeting,” we addressed those decisions.
A number of people who could not come to the meeting sent along their opinions about the RFPTFA, and printouts of these were made available to attendees of the business meeting before we took up the issue.
These were on the whole much more positive about the Act and more in favor of endorsement than the attendees had been, with one person recommending endorsement, another recommending “NWTRCC continuing its endorsement” of the bill (though we had a hard time determining which if any version of the bill our group had originally endorsed), and another conveying the results of a discussion about the issue held by Sonoma County Taxes for Peace which led to that group deciding to strongly support NWTRCC endorsing the bill.
Predictably, we did not reach consensus at the business meeting on to endorse the RFPTFA.
I counted about a half-dozen people in favor of endorsement, maybe half again as many against it.
Unfortunately, although a non-endorsement was pretty clearly the inevitable conclusion, it took a while to get there, and we weren’t able to devote as much time as we needed to the stickier question of the Statement of Purpose and its anachronistic reference to the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
The upshot of that discussion was that there were two replacement phrases with a large amount of support:
“…support of peace tax fund legislation…”
“…support of legislation that would legalize conscientious objection to military taxation…”
While there was broad support for both, neither was able to rally a consensus around it.
My proposal to simply scrap the old anachronistic wording for now and perhaps come up with a replacement at a later date also failed to attract consensus support — with many people feeling that by rejecting the endorsement and also eliminating mention of the PTF from our Statement of Purpose it would look too much like we’d conducted a wholesale purge of PTF sympathy from the group.
So when it came down to it, the Statement of Purpose ended up the same way it began in this area: it continues to pledge our support for supporters of the long-gone “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
This is a little ridiculous, but seems mostly harmless.
was .
NWTRCC regulars were joined by curious locals like Tom Quinn of EcoWatch and Michael Patterson from Dennis Kucinich’s office (our meeting place is in Kucinich’s House district and he was curious enough to send an aide to take notes).
A few things jumped out at me during the opening introductory go-’round:
Jim Stockwell of North Carolina mentioned that after some initial mutual
suspicion there was surprising synergy between the traditional Tax Day
protest his war tax resistance group held
and the Tea Party protests going on
at .
Many of the local groups reported diminishing numbers and less-frequent
activity in the past months, mirroring a general doldrums in the peace
movement.
Bill Ramsey noted that it has become harder to set up alternative funds
in the post-9/11 financial paperwork era.
Ramsey also reported on an interesting and creative tax day protest in his
neck of the woods. A group grabbed hundreds of 1040 forms from public
places where such things are found (libraries, post offices, and the
like), then printed ghostly images of coffins and of children wounded in
war over the forms, and then replaced them where they had originally found
them.
Ginny Sсhnеider noted that in New Hampshire, the notoriety
of the Ed
and Elaine Brown tax protester stand-off fiasco has made it difficult
for her to do outreach in the progressive community. People hear “tax
resistance” and immediately their minds conjure up images of nuts holing
up with their arsenals and their conspiracy theories until the government
locks them up for life.
We watched a near-final cut of a film
NWTRCC is producing about war tax resistance and resisters:
Death and Taxes. It met with great acclaim (and
plenty of suggestions for last-minute edits). Last I heard, it’s due for
release .
Attendees watch a cut of Death and Taxes, an introductory war tax resistance film due to be released next month
Later, Phil Althouse, an election observer in El Salvador, updated us on conditions there, and Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace talked about how to move from activism to organizing and build bonds between disparate parts of the broader anti-war coalition.
Mike Ferner and Phil Althouse address the gathering
While coalition building always sounds great in the abstract, when it comes
down to actually doing it, it runs into the practical difficulty of finding a
common ground and deciding where to compromise and where no compromise is
possible. Ferner thought that organizing around the larger vision of
real democracy was the way to go. Other folks were skeptical. It can
be difficult to find anything approaching an ideological common ground even in
a small group like
NWTRCC
with an inherently common, specialized and political interest.
In members of
NWTRCC
there’s often a tension between avowed nonviolent principles and promotion of
progressive projects (like universal health care and publicly-financed
elections for instance) that fundamentally rely on a coercive, violent state
to carry them out. The avowedly nonviolent progressives either don’t see the
violent ramifications inherent in such projects or I have failed to understand
the ingenious way they have squared this circle. I usually avoid the
temptation to press the point, but sometimes give in.
Anyway, after this we split up into two groups: a War Tax Resistance 101
discussion group that I moderated, and a larger group that discussed issues of
interest to more experienced resisters. There were other groups that met over
the course of the afternoon as well, but by then I found it hard to be in even
one place at once.
In the evening we heard more in-depth stories of the tax resistance from our hosts, Maria Smith and Charlie Hurst, and from Juanita Nelson and Erica Weiland.
Juanita Nelson told the story of her arrest-in-a-Sears-bathrobe that she also tells in A Matter of Freedom.
Erica described her transformation from a young Dean Democrat to a tax resisting anarchist (a salvation narrative in which, to my delight, The Picket Line plays a role).
Juanita Nelson tells her story
The Spring 2010 national NWTRCC
gathering in Tucson, Arizona has been, as usual, a fruitful mix of experienced
war tax resistance veterans and enthusiastic, curious, and somewhat uncertain
newbies.
The agenda was less heavy this time than in the recent past — no contentious
issues like the Peace Tax Fund Bill to worry us, and an improving budget
situation. This left us plenty of time both to talk shop and to learn from
local activists about their areas of expertise.
night
night we viewed the new war tax resistance film Death & Taxes and heard from Steev Hise, who directed the lion’s share of the filming and gave us some insight into the process, and from a couple of us who were in the film.
Film sales have exceeded our yearly projections already, half-way through the year, and everyone seems to report that the film is effective in spurring enthusiasm for and curiosity about war tax resistance.
morning
The meeting began, as such meetings often do, with a go-around-the-circle
round of introductions. This also included updates about what local war tax
resistance and other activists have been up to in recent months.
Erica Weiland addresses the meeting
Clare Hanrahan and Coleman Smith reported on their successful south-east
regional war tax resistance gathering that was held at the beginning of the
year. The opening of a new regional gathering (there’s a well-established one
in New England already) was a priority for
NWTRCC
and so we were pleased to hear both that this meeting went well and that the
organizers plan to make it an ongoing thing.
A number of people reported that their local groups were smaller and
less-active this year than in the recent past. Most attributed this to the
general dip in progressive activism during the Obama-sedation period, with
some saying that they’ve noticed progressive activists so eager to distinguish
themselves from
TEA Party
activists that they don’t want to associate themselves with a group whose
focus is on tax resistance and they meet our message with more than the usual
reluctance and defensiveness.
Still, there were the usual penny polls, literature tables, redirection
granting ceremonies, and rallies on Tax Day this year, competing with
dwindling but still sizable
TEA Party
crowds (that sometimes dilute our message and other times provide a media
springboard for it).
The Nuclear Resister
Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit The Nuclear Resister, were our hosts and local organizers in Tucson.
Their newsletter covers and organizes support for imprisoned anti-war / anti-nuke civil disobedients, including the occasional war tax resister.
They spoke about their work and about anti-nuclear activism in general, such
as the actions coordinated by an international coalition to focus on the
40th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty. Opposition to nuclear power has been on the wane, both because few
new nuclear power plants have started in the United States recently, and
because nuclear power has been greenwashed as a potential solution for global
warming and other consequences of hydrocarbon fuel. Jack thinks the
greenwashing is hooey, that nuclear power — seen over its whole lifecycle — is
neither energy efficient nor emissions-friendly, and that the nuclear power
industry is tightly linked with nuclear weapons and that the real reason we
have a nuclear power industry has much less to do with electricity than with
maintaining an infrastructure, knowledge-base, and the raw materials for a
perpetual nuclear arsenal.
There was also some discussion of the campaign to divest from Israel, modeled
on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign directed against South Africa.
Border activism
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll know that government
harassment of immigrants is a big issue in Arizona right now, as the state
government just enacted legislation that it promises will usher in a more
draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants. There have been calls to boycott
the state, and so there was some embarrassment that our group had decided to
go through with its meeting here.
On the other hand, we met in part, and many of us stayed the night during our
stay, at BorderLinks, a group that
specializes in ameliorating the effects of government policy in this area. So
we helped to support this work, a bit anyway, by our housing fees.
BorderLinks, at least, was glad we didn’t cancel our conference.
Reviewing a map of recent deaths of immigrants in the desert near the Arizona/Mexico border
This also gave us an opportunity to learn from local border-issues activists,
who had no difficulty pointing out both the close relation between our groups
(a number of border-issues activists are also war tax resisters), and that
because of the increasing militarization of border enforcement, war tax
resistance is directly applicable to their struggle.
The repulsive border wall, and increased border patrol enforcement in general,
have not stopped people from crossing the border, but have merely forced the
immigrant trails to be more arduous. Crossing the border has become more
deadly as the safer routes become more difficult to pass. Humanitarian groups
have responded to the crisis by trying to put bottled-water and first aid
stations along the newer routes, actively patrolling to come to the aid of
people who are lost, injured, or dehydrated, and setting up desert camps where
people can stop along the way. Such efforts are, naturally, subject to
sporadic government harassment.
What of the TEA Party?
afternoon I ran a War Tax
Resistance 101 workshop for people who were just getting their feet wet or who
were preparing to take the plunge. This group was eager and enthusiastic going
in, and, I think, came out of the workshop even more so, and with some more
practical pointers on how to take the next step, whichever step that is for
them.
The afternoon session ended with a group brainstorm about the relationship
between organized war tax resistance groups like ours and the
TEA Party
movement.
Ruth Benn addresses the gathering
Some of us see the
TEA Party as
an embarrassing distraction on Tax Day, and think it is important that we
clearly distinguish our message from theirs so that war tax resistance doesn’t
get confused in the public eye as some sort of
TEA Party
variant.
Others felt that there is enough common ground between war tax resisters and
some portion of the
TEA Partiers
that we might be well-served by trying to do some outreach, which might hold
the hope of introducing the tactic of war tax resistance to antimilitarist
libertarians, isolationist paleoconservatives, and the other radical
government skeptics who make up one tendency in the
TEA Party.
For instance, Joffre Stewart reported having recruited a new phone tax
resister from within the
TEA Party
ranks at one of their rallies.
In a spirited, harmonious opening session of the joint National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Fall gathering / 25th annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters, more than fifty war tax resisters from across the country (and a few WTR-curious from the Boston area and elsewhere) gathered at the Cambridge Friends Meeting house .
The rare joint gathering started with a panel session.
I took some notes along the way, but got carried away by the back-and-forth and the ideas and sometimes forgot to jot things down.
Local resister Mike Prokosch started things off by emphasizing what military spending costs us in terms of opportunity costs — that is, what things of common benefit we could be funding but are neglecting because of our pathologically bloated military spending.
He suggests that the future of an organized war tax resistance movement means “organizing on the basis of interest, not ideology.”
We need to find out whose ox is being gored when money is siphoned out of communities and into the Pentagon and appeal to them to join us based on, if not common objectives exactly, at least a common enemy.
Mike Prokosch addresses the gathering
Long-time war tax resisters Juanita Nelson and Bob Bady spoke next, giving an overview of the birth and growth of the modern American war tax resistance movement, from Ernest Bromley’s refusal to buy a tax stamp for his car during World War Ⅱ, to the founding of the Peacemakers in , through such highlights as the IRS siege of the Kehler/Corner house, to the present day.
Nelson told the story of being hauled off to jail in her bathrobe back in the day.
She says that in all of the decades she’s been resisting, the IRS has only gotten $4 out of her, when part of her pay as a model was withheld.
She also expressed that the war tax resistance community in her neck of the woods “has dwindled… now we’re half a dozen people meeting every other month.”
Bady suggested that a key to becoming a more effective and powerful movement is to speak up more.
Too many war tax resisters, he says, are satisfied with feeling that they have a clean conscience and are content to stay safely quiet, under the radar.
We need to make more noise and be more of a friction to wear down the mechanism of the war machine, which will also help us to get the attention and support of other activists.
Ruth Benn explained what the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is, how it operates, and the range of philosophies and methods used by its members.
This was old hat to me, so I didn’t take many notes, but it was an eye-opener I’m sure to some of the newbies or to those who are locally- or regionally-focused and don’t give much thought to the national organization.
Erica Weiland spoke of how she came into war tax resistance after a frustrating time trying to work within a peace movement that seemed to be counterproductive when it was productive of anything at all.
Hers is one of my favorite “salvation narratives” because she always mentions The Picket Line as one of the things that helped her take the plunge into being a war tax resister.
Katherine Fisher spoke next of how her decision to become a war tax resister grew out of her joining and working within the Society of Friends.
She says that when she was still in school, she heard some people from the New York Yearly Meeting (I think it was) talk about war tax resistance and she filed it away as something she’d need to consider.
Since she was still a dependent on her parents’ tax returns, the concern wasn’t urgent for her, but when she got out of school and got a full-time job she had to confront her choice.
She decided that she would refuse to pay her taxes to the government but would instead put the money in a war tax resisters’ escrow account and would write to the IRS to explain her position.
First, though, she took this tentative decision with her to a “clearness committee” in her Quaker meeting that she had asked to help challenge and clarify her decision.
She spoke of this process, and of the support she got (and continues to get) from her meeting throughout.
It was an inspiring, interesting, and well-told story, and a helpful contrast to the many go-it-alone stories of tax resistance that one commonly hears.
Earlier in , a handful of us who are on the administrative committee of NWTRCC got together to do business.
I’d love to share with you some insider tidbits of what goes on in our chamber of sedition, but… you’d be bored to tears.
One of these days we’ll have to put some sinister plot on the agenda, but as it is we mostly were talking budget, fundraising, schedules, objectives, who is going to be moderating what part of what discussion, and so forth — like just about any other small organization.
Useful stuff, certainly, for making the more interesting parts of the larger meeting flow smoothly, but not in itself the sort of stuff to get your blood racing.
was the business meeting of the NWTRCC national gathering.
The way NWTRCC is organized, most of the group decisions are made using a version of the consensus model of decision-making, in which everyone present is part of the “coordinating committee” which advises and consents on the various agenda items.
The business meeting usually has a tight agenda, and this one was no exception, but we have a good track record at setting and keeping to a good schedule.
Erica Weiland facilitates part of the business meeting
Most of the meeting was uneventful: adjustments to and ratifications of our budget, objectives for the year, and so forth.
The big news for me, and for other folks in my area, is that the San Francisco bay area has “been volunteered” to host the next national gathering in .
After the business meeting, we had an informative counselors’ training session, featuring Peter Goldberger, a legal advisor for conscientious objectors and war tax resisters, who shared his insights into the legal ins-and-outs of war tax resistance counseling.
The coordinating committee of NWTRCC poses for a group photo
NWTRCC announces ’s crop of “tax day” actions:
Tax Day — Antiwar Protests, Public Demonstrations, and Individual Refusal to Pay for War
On thousands of people across the
United States will be refusing to pay some or all of their federal income tax
to protest U.S.
wars and escalating military spending. These tax refusers, who see themselves
as responsible citizens, want their money used for peaceful purposes and
often give taxes to social programs instead.
, is the final day to file
tax returns, and “war tax resisters” will be among those participating in
events around the country to protest what they see as the skewed priorities
of the U.S.
government.
Many hand out the pie chart produced by the War Resisters League, which calculates nearly 50% of federal income taxes pay for current or past wars.
Erica Weiland in Seattle, Washington, decided to refuse to pay for war in
response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Our money and time are much
better spent addressing the issues in the
U.S. and around
the world that cause wars in the first place,” she says. Groups in Seattle
are organizing leafleting with federal budget information at area post
offices.
John K. Stoner, a retired Mennonite minister in Akron, Pennsylvania, says, “I keep wondering why people who say they oppose war continue to pay for it without a whimper of protest.”
He and others in his community have launched a campaign of symbolic protest called 1040 for Peace, to encourage U.S. taxpayers to express their opposition to U.S. military spending by refusing $10.40 of any taxes due, telling the government why, and giving that money to projects that promote peace or fund human needs.
War tax resistance has a long history in the
U.S. and
worldwide. The most famous case was Henry David Thoreau’s refusal of $1 for
the Mexican-American War. He spent a night in jail for this act of
resistance. Today’s resisters refuse to pay anything from $1 to thousands of
dollars of federal income taxes, while risking collection from the Internal
Revenue Service for their stand.
Patricia Tompkins, a farmer in Bakersville, North Carolina, speaks for many
as she accepts the risks of confronting the
IRS to
stand up for her beliefs. “I made the decision to become a war tax resister
in protest to our government’s policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
For me, the essence of life is connection to the land and to each other,
because without the first we cannot live and without the second we cannot be
fully human.”
In St. Louis activists are
taking their message to cut the military budget and fund human needs to
Senator Roy Blunt’s office and announcing grants to humanitarian groups. In
Milwaukee, the protest will be in front of the Federal Courthouse. Lincoln
Rice, a Milwaukee organizer, says, “My war tax resistance is grounded in my
Catholic Christian spirituality. I cannot in good conscience pay my federal
income taxes and contribute to the harming my Muslim brothers and sisters in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.”
Individual resisters are available for interviews. Please contact
NWTRCC
if you need contacts in your area.
Quinlan: The People’s Life Fund is the escrow account that was established so that people who are refusing to pay all or part of their taxes can put that money in escrow, and the interest from that is granted each year to groups that are doing the kind of work that we feel the government should be doing.
The kind of work that’s being cut right now.
While the military is allowed to grow, our schools and social services are being cut.
Erica Weiland is on the administrative committee for the [NWTRCC] national office.
She says redirecting even a small part of what she considers a “military tax” has rewards that outweigh any fines or possible prison time.
Weiland: De-funding the military opens up a huge amount of money, resources, and time that could be used building up our communities and supporting communities around the world — who need that so much more than they need to be bombed and shot at.
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.
Redirection: Our “Constructive Program” — Bill Ramsey compares redirection (the common practice in war tax resistance circles of giving your due taxes to charity rather than to the government) to the “constructive program” part of Gandhi’s campaigns.
Like us! — Erica Weiland points out the various facets of NWTRCC’s social media presence.
Counseling Notes — how credit rating worries and student debt may discourage war tax resisters; suspicions of an uptick in the underground economy; lots of bad news for the IRS; and war tax resistance counselor training notes
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — a recap of some of the creative outreach and protest actions of the nationwide war tax resistance community
How We Want Our Tax Dollars Used — a look at the granting decisions of a handful of war tax resistance alternative funds, which coordinate the redirection of many war tax resisters
NWTRCC News — a recap of the NWTRCC national gathering in Asheville earlier this month
The only surprise to me in the disastrous roll-out of the new government-run health insurance exchange websites was that it was a surprise to those in charge that it would be a disaster.
The government just isn’t very good at developing and deploying big, modern computer applications like these.
There is a lot of graft and red tape and politically-generated inefficiencies, and they don’t have access to the most talented workforce or the best technology or techniques.
The IRS, for example, is still struggling to get CADE up and running.
This project, which was designed to replace their CoBOL, batch-processed, tax account dinosaur, has had more delays and cost overruns than I can count.
The latest audit of phase two of the project, which was supposed to go live in , then was delayed to , and then again to , with the cost doubling along the way, will not meet its new deadline either: “The CADE 2 database’s lack of accuracy, completeness, and availability prevents it from serving as the trusted source for the downstream systems… [and] the solution architecture of the CADE 2 database interfaces does not meet the IRS’s business needs because it does not meet performance expectations and creates resource contention situations between servicing online transactions and query operations.
In addition, the lack of security systems integration prevents transaction-level tracking of employee access…”
Meanwhile, in Congress passed a law that required the IRS to permit people to access their IRS account on-line… like people do with their banks or other such things.
The law set a deadline of .
That is to say, they had eight years to come up with it.
In , the project was declared a failure and abandoned “due to a lack of an effective enterprise-wide eAuthentication strategy” and, though the legal mandate is still in effect, the project still has not been completed, fifteen years after the passage of the law.
Furthermore: “No overall cost estimate exists, and there are not enough details on goals, deliverables, future online services, and time frames to be able to assess progress.”
There’s a new web site Tax Rebellion that is trying to push the case that citizens of countries like the U.K. or U.S. that habitually engage in war crimes and aggressive warfare have a legal obligation to withdraw their support (particularly their taxes) from their governments.
By the playbook of the great “privatization” swindle that has been so popular among governments in recent years, when the government of France designed its new tax on freight trucks, it contracted with an Italian company to implement the program. But then the bonnets rouges came along and burned down all the truck-scanning portals and forced the government to suspend the tax. The Italian company that won the contract, Ecomouv, was however smart enough to anticipate such an outcome in their contract, and they’re guaranteed an €18 million payment from the government every month whether they’re collecting any tax or not.
Taxi drivers in Tunisia are posting signs in the windows of their cabs that read “I will not pay tax!” and are daring the police to try to enforce new taxes on motorists against them.
Meanwhile, some Greek motorists have adopted the strategy of paying only a single euro of their road tax, while submitting a protest, as a way of baffling the bureaucracy.
Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they
can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their
conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment
with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the
dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War
tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs
about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.
If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the
U.S., you’re
supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though
you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself
as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary
out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on
that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J.
Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor”
though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid
SE/payroll
taxes entirely.”
NPR
looked into
Why More Americans Are Renouncing
U.S.
Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but
instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading
to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes,
and how the U.S.
tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.
Tax Resistance in Spain
Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes.
Excerpts:
Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David
Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes,
created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than
ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the
particracy of
lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of
tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political
and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt
assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume
this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.
It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that
contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements
of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the
exclusive benefit of the people.
I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to
support a business strike
in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.
Tax Resistance in Argentina
, twenty “productores,
industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly:
“manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in
Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads.
The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their
businesses impossible to operate.
I unfortunately released the book during a lull in the magazine’s interest in the topic of war tax resistance (which may correspond to a similar lull in the Society of Friends generally), and it looked for a long while as though they weren’t going to consider the book worthy of mention at all, so I’m pleased to know their readers will learn about it after all.
In other war tax resistance news:
War tax resisters Susan Cundiff and Peg Morton were on Jefferson Public Radio in Oregon to explain how and why people refuse to pay taxes for war.
You can hear a recording at this link.
When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering.
It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle.
When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience.
The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.
And here’s some more information about the Spanish movement that is the inspiration for this work: an interview with Enric Duran on the Shareable site and the video Come Back: A Story We Wrote Together (subtitled in English) which tells the story of Duran’s bank heists and how a coalition of pioneers used the funds to build a parallel solidarity economy.
The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:
Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn.
Excerpt:
“They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance.
Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime.
And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem.
Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”
Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned).
She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government.
If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined.
“I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.
There was a focus at this gathering on exploring the connections between war tax resistance and other struggles in the peace-and-justice milieu: the back-room antidemocratic negotiations for the TransPacific Partnership, the criminalization of immigration, the war on drugs, the militarization of schools, and so forth.
We heard from several local activists who are concentrating on various of these facets.
We also discussed our own experiences as war tax resisters and various challenges we were encountering.
One woman talked of being targeted by an unusually zealous IRS agent who succeeded in attaching 50% of her social security (it is more typical for the IRS to seize 15% from recipients who have tax debts).
There was concern that some obscure language slipped into a recent farm bill might have eliminated the statute of limitations that has prevented the IRS from going after the tax debt of many war tax resisters when it has remained uncollected for ten years (the bill’s language is difficult to interpret, but in any case we haven’t seen evidence of any IRS policy change in this regard yet).
NWTRCC’s social media consultant Erica Weiland shows us how to spread the word about tax resistance using social media tools
We talked about the new challenges associated with Obamacare.
For example, those resisters who have been refusing to file tax returns as part of their resistance are thereby locked out of the insurance premium subsidy program and find it harder to participate in the insurance marketplace.
Also, those resisters who are married filing separately as a way of partially shielding their non-resisting spouses from the consequences of their resistance, are also finding that this locks out both spouses from the program.
One resister spoke of the difficulties he was having in finding an accountant or tax advisor who was capable of understanding the particular concerns and goals of a tax resisting client.
Peter Smith gave us an update on the newly-revitalized War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which just completed its first appeal, which achieved a 79% reimbursement of penalties and interest for three resisters in one month.
The new policy of the Fund puts a one-month deadline on appeal responses, but carries over any unreimbursed amount to the following appeal, so resisters who apply to the fund for reimbursement of penalties and interest can expect to eventually have the full amount reimbursed.
We also talked about a number of NWTRCC-internal projects: a report from our strategy and message retooling subcommittees, a look at a new crowdfunding project that the fundraising team will be pursuing shortly, and a new initiative to make sure our group is better-represented at conferences and gatherings of allied organizations and movements.
The “Comprehensive Disobedience” movement in Spain has developed international ambitions, and as part of this project it has launched a new media platform — RADI.MS — that aims to spread news about allied projects around the world.
The site content is currently translated into English, Castillian (Spanish), and Catalan.
In mid-April, people across the United States struggle to fill out their federal income tax returns.
This shared calamity has created something of an inverted holiday season — with grumbling about paperwork and frustration towards government bureaucracy replacing the “peace on earth, goodwill to men” of the Yuletide.
The money came from a war tax resisters’ “alternative fund” called the “People’s Life Fund” — one of more than a dozen such funds in the United States.
The Fund’s annual mid-April “granting ceremony” brought together representatives from each of the recipient groups, who accepted their checks and briefly summarized their work for the benefit of the other attendees.
The People’s Life Fund (like most other such funds) accepts deposits from war tax resisters of the money they are refusing to pay to the government.
The fund holds the money in alternative financial institutions like credit unions and socially-responsible investments.
If the government manages to seize the resisted taxes from the resister, he or she can reclaim the money from the Fund.
Meanwhile, any investment returns from the deposits are distributed to local groups in these annual granting ceremonies.
“Redirection” has a long history in American war tax resistance. American war tax resister Bill Ramsey says it reminds him of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” with which the commander of the Indian resistance movement worked to strengthen grassroots Indian institutions at the same time he was trying to weaken British imperialist ones:
The spinning wheel was the center of Gandhi’s constructive program.
Redirection is the war tax resistance movement’s spinning wheel.
The “constructive program” is positive action that builds structures, systems, and processes alongside the obstructive program of direct confrontation to or noncooperation with oppression.
When we redirect our war taxes, we invest in imaginative and positive projects in our communities and around the world.
At first, redirection was largely practiced by individuals, and in an ad hoc manner.
For example, in 1968, 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.”
But today redirection is frequently coordinated by local or national war tax resistance groups.
Some have used redirection to strengthen the anti-war movement.
One group used its alternative fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been barred from government financial aid because they refused to register for the military draft.
Another made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of military draft resisters who were on trial.
Traditional charity and relief organizations have also been recipients of redirected taxes.
In 2008, a national effort called the “War Tax Boycott” redirected $325,000 (approximately €235,000) in federal taxes from the U.S. Treasury to two organizations: a health clinic in New Orleans struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Direct Aid Iraq, which provided medical care to refugees from the American war.
War tax resisters aren’t just redirecting their money.
Many American war tax resisters resist by deliberately lowering their income below the level where the federal income tax applies.
They do this by working fewer hours of paid employment and by simplifying their lives so that they can live on less money.
Such resisters no longer have an amount of income tax to redirect, but they can redirect their time instead.
One low-income resister, Clare Hanrahan, wrote: “I believe that redirection of time and presence provides a personal and potent contribution to the common good, a gift of self that has more dimensions than money alone.
I redirect each time I give my time and energy in support of good work within my community.”
When Erica Weiland of NWTRCC delivered the keynote address at a recent “economic disobedience” conference in Eugene, Oregon, she said:
When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering.
It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle.
When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience.
The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.
American war tax resisters are withdrawing from the warfare state and the economic model it enforces and are committing themselves with all of their strength and all of their resources to the creation of a more just system in which we can live with dignity.
In doing so, they are blazing the trail that leads to this better world we all yearn for.
Outreach notes as war tax resisters represent at the Veterans for Peace Conference in North Carolina, the Southern Movement Assembly in Georgia, and the Climate March in New York
News for resisters about IRS “frivolous filing penalty” threats, difficulties appealing the IRS’s “dummy returns,” a new income reporting loophole resisters may be able to take advantage of, and guidance about how many W-4 allowances to claim
Ideas and Actions including a variant on the traditional “penny poll,” a list of some upcoming events of note, and an invitation to give NWTRCC feedback on its website
We have reached the end of the NWTRCC national gathering, held this time at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.
The bulk of ’s portion of the conference was largely a series of workshops on subjects like:
basic war tax resistance (what we call informally “WTR101”)
the peace tax fund campaign
military counter-recruitment and support for conscientious objectors
advanced war tax resistance
the history of Quaker war tax resistance
“economic disobedience”
the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and its alternatives: a case study in East Africa
war tax resistance questions & answers
conscientious objection to the military and taxes for the military
Some of these sessions ran at the same time, and for a couple of them (the WTR101 and history of Quaker war tax resistance) I was one of the presenters, so I only was able to take notes on one of the two “economic disobedience” sessions.
In that session, Erica Weiland began by summarizing my report on the Spanish “desobediencia integral” movement and then she brought us up to date with new developments.
These include the fair.coop “Earth cooperative for a fair economy” and its alternative currency, the “FairCoin,” which is somewhat Bitcoin-like but is explicitly designed to promote a certain sort of economic model.
(I’ve looked at some of the FairCoin outreach material, but whether from translation difficulties or my amateur economics knowledge, I can’t quite figure out what makes it tick.)
The war tax resistance movement in the United States has made some contact with this Spanish movement and we’ve started to explore situating our work in the terminology and framework of this “comprehensive disobedience” movement, which helps to connect our work with the emerging sharing economy movement, Occupy, the modern environmentalist movement, and things of that sort.
Erica was joined by Jim Stockwell, who gave us a more historical perspective of how this sort of thinking weaves into a long thread connecting decentralism, Georgism, cooperative villages, the thought of Ralph Borsodi, and other related ideas.
Erica added some insight from her research into the cooperative movement among African-Americans in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods.
Erica then introduced us to some of what the Strike Debt group have been doing lately.
This group grew out of Occupy and the Rolling Jubilee project.
One of the actions associated with this group was the purchase and retirement of a large amount of medical debt.
They then purchased and retired some student debt in the same way.
Debts like these are packaged into groups based on how likely the debts are to be recovered.
Those debts that are very unlikely to be recovered, often because the debtor is too poor to pay, can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.
By retiring these debts, the project can reduce the stress of collection agency harassment on such people.
They are also trying to unionize students who have debt to particularly exploitative colleges to encourage them to strike collectively for debt relief.
The Strike Debt Operations Manual was republished a while back with a new chapter on tax resistance, which was largely based on NWTRCC literature.
We brainstormed some ideas for trying to connect the U.S. war tax resistance movement with a movement for a larger grassroots economic transformation.
Some ideas we tossed around included:
the use of community development loan funds (such as Equity Trust) as investments for our alternative funds or as ways of shielding assets from the IRS in less-visible zero-interest loans
encouraging the various regional alternative funds to coordinate their grants so as to support projects that build new economic models in a more systematic and well-publicized way
creating an alternative fund that uses a different granting model — rather than giving grants annually at a particular time, give grants at irregular intervals in reaction to acute needs.
War tax resistance legal advisor Peter Goldberger
Yesterday, attorney Peter Goldberger, who has worked closely with the war tax resistance community for many years, brought us up to date on how the climate for pressing for the legal recognition of conscientious objection to military taxation in the courts has changed in recent years, particularly in the wake of the recent “Hobby Lobby” case.
When I read the “Hobby Lobby” ruling, I didn’t see much that seemed encouraging.
There were some hopeful-sounding parts of it, like this bit from the majority opinion’s summary:
The belief of the Hahns and Greens implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is immoral for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.
It is not for this Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable.
But the justices were careful to remind war tax resisters that we’re out of luck if we think we can use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to assert the legal validity of our beliefs:
United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, which upheld the payment of Social Security taxes despite an employer’s religious objection, is not analogous.
It turned primarily on the special problems associated with a national system of taxation; and if Lee were a RFRA case, the fundamental point would still be that there is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
The “Hobby Lobby” opinion itself expands on this a bit:
Lee was a free-exercise, not a RFRA, case, but if the issue in Lee were analyzed under the RFRA framework, the fundamental point would be that there simply is no less restrictive alternative to the categorical requirement to pay taxes.
Because of the enormous variety of government expenditures funded by tax dollars, allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious ground would lead to chaos.
Recognizing exemptions from the contraceptive mandate is very different…
The “Hobby Lobby” dissent goes so far as to describe the opinion as one that grants new powers of legal conscientious objection to just about everybody except tax resisters:
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
If you hoped the dissenters might be more sympathetic to the use of the RFRA in war tax resistance cases, you won’t find much support for your hopes here.
The dissenters for the most part seemed inclined to generally weaken the reach of the RFRA.
But again, this was all just my first impression, and I’m not a lawyer.
Peter Goldberger is, and he’s worked in the area of conscientious objection and the free exercise clause for a long time, and he gave the “Hobby Lobby” decision a lot of thought and found some interesting angles.
For one thing, when the Supreme Court used conscientious objection to military taxation as a reductio in Lee and Hobby Lobby, it did so in cases that themselves did not concern conscientious objection to military taxation.
They assumed that the government could not accommodate the beliefs of such resisters without “chaos” breaking out — that it would be too onerous for the government to accommodate such objectors.
But there was nobody there to argue the objectors’ side and to present evidence that this was not necessarily true.
Perhaps in a more direct case, objectors might be able to present evidence that would convince the court to revise its point of view.
The Hobby Lobby case also seems like it might usefully expand the right of conscientious objectors to military service.
Previously the court had ruled that there was no constitutional right to conscientious objection, and so objectors enjoyed only those rights that Congress had chosen to grant them by statute.
The language of Hobby Lobby seems to suggest that now, the government will have to prove a fairly strictly-defined compelling government interest if it wants to restrict the rights of draftees or military personnel who are or who become conscientious objectors for religious reasons.
For example, Goldberger suggests, Congress has defined legal conscientious objection to military service so that it only applies to pacifists — that is, to people who object to all war.
It does not apply to religious objectors, for instance Catholics, who belong to a “just war” tradition which asks them to evaluate war by certain criteria and conscientiously object only to a subset of them.
Goldberger suggests that the new RFRA standard, as elaborated in Hobby Lobby, could invalidate this and force the government to accommodate more varieties of religious conscientious objection.
Goldberger thinks this might also be a good time for a challenge from someone of the variety of war tax resisters who resists by putting the amount of the tax into an escrow account and telling the IRS that it may seize the money if it wants to, but that the resister is unwilling to pay it voluntarily.
Since the IRS could accommodate the resister’s religiously-based conscientious objection, without undue difficulty for the government and without unleashing “chaos,” by simply seizing the money, perhaps the objector has a legal right not to be further penalized or subject to legal sanctions of other sorts for such a stand.
Finally, since Hobby Lobby (somewhat notoriously) decided that corporations can, under some circumstances, have some rights of their own under the RFRA, this may be a way to ask the Court to revisit a case similar to the Priscilla Adams case that it turned down on procedural grounds back in the day.
Adams was a Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (a Quaker corporation) employee and a war tax resister.
Her employer went to court to try to gain the right not to have to withhold taxes from her salary as this would force them to participate in violating her conscience.
Myself, I don’t see a lot of use in looking to the legal system for help, but I think this sort of thing is interesting and kind of fun to explore.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
War Tax Resistance
Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put
everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government
does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent
to my federal taxes to charity.
So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of
war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a
thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like
that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace
centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my
conscience.
War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have
traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something
like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get
conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected
right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University
of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.
Other Links of Interest
Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
some notes on practical issues of interest to war tax resisters including the possibility of reducing taxes through charitable giving, how to react to letters from the IRS, and the use of no-interest community investment loans to keep assets secure from collection
I’ve also seen some new interest in the tactic of tax resistance popping up here and there on-line.
Twitter is full of people threatening to stop paying taxes with 140-character bravado over everything from police impunity to Obama’s immigration policy tweaks.
That’s nothing to get too excited about, except that I haven’t seen so many people hit on tax resistance as a possible activist response to political issues all at once before.
Tax resister Gary Flomenhoft posted a couple of meditations recently at ClubOrlov:
“The only action that can possibly stop the empire in its tracks is cutting off its food supply — the tax money on which it lives.
We have to starve the beast through divestment, capital expatriation, tax resistance, tax refusal and tax revolt.
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig told us this flat out in the 1980s when, being confronted with huge protests over U.S. Central American policy, he said: ‘Let them protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes.’
Truer words were never uttered by a U.S. official.
Is there any evidence to contradict his statement?
Has any other measure had any impact on the war machine?
The honest answer is no.
Millions of people around the world protested before the invasion of Iraq.
These protests were ignored.
No amount of protest or other efforts can stop it, because it doesn’t cut off the empire’s food supply of money and fear.
Only by cutting off its funds by not paying taxes can we stop the empire.”
Although the French government gave up on its plans to impose a new highway shipping tax some time ago, in the face of sustained protests and the destruction of tax portals by the bonnets rouges movement, only now has the quasi-private government contractor Ecomouv laid off the workers who were to have administered the tax.
Predictably, I suppose, the economically-challenged French left is up in arms about this and is accusing the bonnets rouges of contributing to French unemployment!
We’re coming up on of “The Christmas Truce” — an informal truce and mutual hobnobbing organized by those in the trenches on both sides during World War Ⅰ.
Adam Hochschild wonders why we mostly neglect to commemmorate peacemakers.
A man who read philosophy and politics, Herman despised all war and refused to contribute to its financing.
Finally a local “third degree committee” came to his farm west of town.
His wife watched while holding their infant in her arms as the men strung a rope over the limb of an apple tree.
When Herman continued to refuse to buy Liberty Bonds, the committee ran him into town and grilled him until early morning in the hall of a local fraternal organization.
A local lawyer sat on the arm of his chair and threatened to punch him in the face unless he agreed to buy bonds.
What Herman said in defense of his actions was used to prosecute him for sedition, The Billings Gazette editorialized that “he should be prosecuted to the extreme limit of the law.”
He was convicted in a 1½-day jury trial and served 28 months.
He was released .
Ruth Benn, coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, discusses how because war tax resisters are a largely individualist, idiosyncratic breed, they have difficulty congealing into a unified movement, in Individual Choices and Movement Building: Shall the Twain Meet?
The folks at Crimethinc have put together a well-designed and inviting anarchist appeal: “To Change Everything”
Remember that Litopia After Dark podcast I was on a few days back?
Co-host Peter Cox tried to spark some controversy by calling war tax resistance an “elitist” stand.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was going on about, but I think he was implying that it’s elitist to prioritize your own ethical limits on how you want your money spent over the government’s determination of where it thinks people’s money should be spent (particularly, perhaps, when the government has some degree of democratic legitimacy).
Erica Weiland responds at War Tax Talk to the question: “Is War Tax Resistance Elitist?” …and wonders if some people are afraid of becoming better people because they don’t want others to think of them as “holier than thou.”
Have you got any protest plans ?
If so, NWTRCC wants to know about it.
They compile a list of such actions for their annual Tax Day press release, which can help you get a little more buzz.
In a fairly repulsive bit of political theater, Congress is raking the IRS over the coals for its use of civil forfeiture to seize money from people without convicting them — or even charging them — with a crime.
What makes this repulsive is that it’s Congress that designed the civil forfeiture authorization, fully intending that it be abused in this way.
It’s entirely in their power to pass a less-unjust law, but they chose to pass a more-unjust one instead… and now they pretend to be champions of civil liberties, pontificating about how unfair the IRS is being by using the law as it was designed.
About a third of the country’s households have simply refused to register
with the newly created state authority that is to run the country’s water
service, though the deadline for doing so has now been extended three
times. In some neighborhoods, workers trying to install meters have been
met with angry mobs and forced to flee.
On the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor gave a nod to war tax resistance in the course of a segment telling the story of the history of the Mennonites and another comic dramatization of a whimsical tax resister.
Check out the “Garrison Keillor talks about the history of Mennonites” and “Catchup” segments in the archives.
IRS Woes
The Treasury Department’s inspector-general issued a report stating that over , 1580 IRS employees “were found to have willfully evaded taxes.” Most (75%) were not fired, and some later received promotions, raises, and bonuses.
The number of people who renounced their U.S. citizenship is aiming toward another record high this year.
The first quarter of the year saw 1,335 people tell Sam “you’re not my uncle” — a new record.
Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican vicar, took his local council government to court, saying the £125 in fees it had added to the council tax that he had refused to pay in protest were excessive.
He won his case.
Ruth Benn reflects on “The Mysterious Ways of the IRS” — the agency seems arbitrary and unpredictable at times in the ways it responds to war tax resisters.
The three activists who boldly broke through security at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in have had their sabotage convictions reversed on appeal and are no longer being imprisoned.
One article about their successful appeal concluded:
“They are still obligated to pay the government a fine of $52,953 for the break-in at Y-12.
But they took vows of poverty decades ago, don’t have bank accounts, and have neither the means nor the intention of paying it.”
The War Tax Talk blog has reprinted an op-ed debate that was published in the Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts back in .
It features Juanita Nelson dueling with a U.S. Air Force Reserve Lieutenant-Colonel over the question: “Is it ever right to refuse, on principle, to pay taxes?”
The report counts 3,300 people who have been fooled by phony IRS agents who call them up to threaten them about a tax debt and get them to send money to the scammers.
The scam has netted something like $16.8 million.
These figures may be understating the problem, as some people who got fooled probably haven’t spoken up about it.
The IRS rehired 141 former employees who had had “prior substantiated conduct or performance issues” “including [such issues as] willfully failed to file their tax returns… unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct.”
And nearly 20 percent of these also had such issues filed against them after having been rehired.
Most curious to me is that when the IRS had this pointed out to them, their response was to say that they see no reason to change their hiring practices.
I still think the whole IRS scandal involving the screening of Tea Party groups that were trying to game the nonprofit system to engage in electioneering was largely bullshit.
But whether from arrogance or incompetence or from more conniving motives, the agency is sure acting like it’s covering up something.
Bullshit or not, the agency is doing as much as its enemies to keep the scandal alive.
Some war tax resistance news that has scrolled by on my screen in recent days:
Erica Weiland, at the War Tax Talk blog, has
uncovered a case of successful war tax resistance from the archives of
NWTRCC’s
newsletter. The anonymous resister in question filed income tax returns,
refused to pay the amount “owed,” and then began to watch those unpaid
amounts disappear behind the statute-of-limitations curtain and beyond the
reach of the
IRS.
The resister made some attempts to make collection more difficult — not
owning big-ticket property, setting up a “gift annuity” and outright giving
money away to make current assets less-collectible, moving accounts from
bank to bank — but in part it seems to be
IRS
negligence or laziness that gets the credit. Good enough for government
work!
Canada’s Globe and Mail published
an obituary for Eldon Comfort,
a World War Ⅱ vet who became an anti-war activist. It quotes from a letter
he sent to the minister of revenue in :
Today, modern technology has introduced weapons of mass destruction. Their
cost is staggering. … So, in a very real sense when I pay my income tax, I
am complicit in the deployment of such armaments.
I am, therefore, claiming conscientious objection to the conscription of
my tax for military purposes. The percentage of the federal budget
designated for
DND
is deemed to be 8.1 per cent, so I have reduced my income tax by that
amount. This portion is being directed to
Conscience Canada’s peace
tax fund.
When the Canadian military operations were restricted to peacekeeping (in
its restricted sense), to search and rescue, and to succour during
national natural disasters, I had no quarrel with paying my taxes in full.
When the priority for the resolution of conflict, once again, becomes a
peaceful and diplomatic enterprise, I shall resume full payment.
Greg Slepak recognizes that by paying his taxes he becomes complicit in
what the government does with his tax money, but he has chosen a different
approach to that of conscientious war tax resisters. Instead of no longer
paying for the government’s misdeeds, he has identified one of the victims
of these misdeeds and
attempted to compensate him in proportion to how much he’d victimized him.
“To such a person, I have a sense of… indebtedness, as though I
owe him something. After thinking on it, I realized there might be some
truth to that.”
I recently became aware that a biography of Maurice McCrackin has been put on-line, including a chapter that covers his introduction war tax resistance and the early days of the Peacemakers group.
His tax resistance began, according to the book, when Wally Nelson noticed the pacifist minister removing toy guns and other war toys from those in a donation pile, and told him: “Do you ever think that next March 15 [then the income tax filing deadline] you’ll be paying for real guns?”
The next chapter covers his imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons.
Another chapter concerns his removal as a minister by officials of his Presbytery who were upset about his war tax resistance.
Matt Hisrich at the Quaker Libertarians blog takes issue with Quaker organizations who frame their opposition to government military spending in terms of reallocating that spending to other government priorities.
Excerpts:
This approach puts forth the false notion that national governments sit
atop vast reserves of wealth that should be spent on nonviolent rather
than violent ends.…
National governments cannot spend new wealth without either issuing new
debt (that will have to be repaid) or extracting it directly from
taxpayers through the implicit or explicit threat of violence. If Quakers
(or anyone else for that matter) want to be known as “Champions of Peace,”
it would be better to strive toward a reduction in the war spending that
seeks to keep funds in the hands of individuals to peacefully pursue their
own ends instead of merely shifting line items in national budgets. The
former focuses on individual and local empowerment, and the latter focuses
on somehow “winning” in the national political game.
Nuclear weapons really keep the war economy going since their very
presence requires a constant readiness for war, not to mention
maintenance and supervision. Over the next ten years, the
U.S. is
estimated to spend about $348 billion on nuclear weapons. Why work for a
nuclear-free world but pay for those weapons yourself?
Members of the
U.S. Agape
community were at Walden Pond to commemorate the anniversary.
Suzanne Shanley remarked:
We join with peacemakers throughout the world in mourning and repentance
for this unspeakable act of deliberate slaughter of a civilian
population, our sisters and brothers in Japan.
, Agape members walked with
friends from the Buddhist Peace Pagoda through Walden Pond, commemorating
the Anniversary among the crowd on the beach as the spirit of Thoreau’s
refusal to pay a poll tax for war, inspired and sustained us.
But its chairman, Stephen Hadley, is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for
greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests
of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a
member of its board of directors.
Hadley, formerly George W. Bush’s national security advisor, was appointed
to the Institute of Peace by President Obama, recipient of the similarly
ironic Nobel Peace Prize. “Peace Tax” payers may one day be able to pool
their funds with Lockheed Martin, which made a $1 million grant to the
Institute in .
Some news of interest to tax resisters in the U.S.:
The on-again/off-again boondoggle of the federal government contracting out to private debt collection agencies to pursue people behind on their taxes is apparently back on again.
By including the program in a new transportation bill, its proponents could use the income they hope to see from the program to offset other spending.
It would probably be more efficient for the government just to hire more IRS agents to go after the money, but there are few things a Republican Congress would be less likely to do than give the IRS more money to increase the ranks of the National Treasury Employees Union.
My guess is that these private debt collectors are going to have a hell of a time.
Since the last time this sort of plan was floated, a massive, years-long, ongoing, coast-to-coast scam has been in progress in which callers impersonating tax collectors have been getting victims to pony up money.
News reports follow in the wake of the heists, all saying that if someone calls you up about a supposed tax debt, it’s a scam.
The private agencies are gonna have a hell of a time distinguishing themselves from the scammers.
If the program is like the last one (and I haven’t seen the details yet, so I’m not sure), the agencies will be able to keep 25% of what they collect for themselves.
It’s small consolation, but some consolation, to know that at least some of the money won’t be going directly to the government.
In more troubling news, another part of the same Transportation bill would revoke passports from people who are behind on their taxes by more than $50,000.
I’ll probably hit the $50k mark in a couple of years, so I take this very personally.
The bill hasn’t become law just yet.
They’re still ironing out the differences between the House and Senate versions.
But both houses’ versions had both of these proposals, so they seem likely to survive (though it’s not unheard of for parts of legislation that are passed by each house to wind up on the cutting room floor regardless, whatever you may have heard on Schoolhouse Rock).
Obama is expected to sign the bill into law either way.
When the final bill is passed and signed I’ll take another look and investigate what the process of passport denial/revocation might actually look like in practice.
And I’ll of course post something here if my own passport gets yanked.
I may even accept that as a challenge and see if I can row a boat to Cuba or wade across the Rio Grande.
The Boston Review takes a closer look at the Boston Tea Party, and how American perspectives on who did it and what it meant have changed over time.
James Ferguson looks at the new ability of the government to revoke passports from people with tax debts in the light of the long-standing international legal norm concerning freedom to travel.
Bucking recent downward trends, the IRS actually picked up a budget increase from a hostile Congress.
The increase restores part of what was cut from the agency budget last year and reportedly earmarks it for taxpayer service, fraud detection, and cybersecurity.
Along with the money came a set of new restrictions on the agency and its employees, most of which seem to be in the category of “appearing to put the screws to the IRS for the benefit of any constituents in the Tea Party who may be watching.”
With Congressional hostility and budget-slashing added to the mix, the jobs of IRS workers are even more miserable than usual lately.
It doesn’t help recruitment when your facilities are infested with bedbugs.
The bed bugs were so bad at her new job with the Covington IRS office that some people covered their seats with plastic bags, Kelly Anderson said.
After two days, she quit.
“It’s important to have a second income in our home, but it’s not worth the risk of bringing those home.
So, I will not be returning back.”
And that’s not the only kind of bug the IRS is plagued with.
A computer glitch caused the agency to emit tens of millions of dollars in refunds that its software had identified as likely to be fraudulent and that should have been held up.
Another IRS office closed abruptly recently, posting a sign in its window reading “This office is closed due to local weather conditions.”
This on a sunny day in California’s central valley, leaving frustrated taxpayers, who had driven in from as far as three hours away, fuming.
Some new links of interest to war tax resisters in particular:
The next national gathering of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee will be held in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia).
Check this page for details.
Clearly from My Heart — devoted to the life and ideas of Albuquerque war tax resister Don Schrader.
is the deadline for filing
U.S. federal income
tax returns — “Tax Day” — which is also a traditional day of action and
publicity for American war tax resisters. Here is an overview of some from this
year:
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund sent out its Spring Report.
The fund distributed $9,988 to war tax resisters last year to reimburse them for any penalties and interest the IRS had managed to seize from them.
Some Tax Day Reflections from Bryan Caplan, from back when he was a grad student (he’s now a professor of economics at George Mason University).
Excerpt:
It isn’t a model regulated by the Treasury, but a campaign of civil
disobedience that has been practiced for more than thirty years in
countries like Spain, the
U.S.,
Canada, Holland, Germany, France, or Italy. Simply, it is the use of
the tax return as a tool for redirecting to socially useful purposes
the portion of military spending from each citizen. Antimilitarist
Alternative coordinates a state-wide campaign to help the maximum
number of people to participate. We collect data from various peace
research centers and we compose a study that adds the Defense
Ministry budget to the spending on other armed forces and also other
items that are dispersed by other ministries, such as credits to arms
companies for so-called research & development of a military
character. These credits, in reality, have ended up financing the
arms industry, generating along the way €27,000 million in debt. We
also include spending that, in our view, tends to a more militarized
society: for example, a large part of the prison population is there
because the system does not facilitate social integration. So, with
all of the global military spending and spending on state repression
and social control, we calculate that the military spending per
person is greater than €700 this year. In any case, we make it clear
that the objective is not to object to a particular amount, but that
people take this step of disobedience and demonstrate that we are not
going along with this. From conscience, acting collectively, it is an
organized political campaign of disobedience. We also make it clear
that this is not a campaign for paying less to the Treasury: the tax
resister pays exactly the same tax the Treasury asks for, but a part
of this money is not allocated to military spending, but to a social
project.
Have any cases of war tax resistance reached the court system?
We don’t put much stock in the legal process; recognition of the
right to tax resistance has already been rejected on two or three
occasions in various instances. The philosophy of the vast majority
of campaign groups is not to search for a legal body to give us a
legal right; it is fundamentally a protest campaign. That said, there
is one unusual judgment from the Supreme Court of Catalonia
concerning the tax resistance of representative Joan Surroca of the
PSC:
although the Court rejected the right to tax resistance, it also
declared it illegal for the Treasury to fine Surroca for something
where he could not be considered to have committed fraud, that is,
the intent to conceal money. We consider this a small victory that
the Court recognizes that it is not simply an individual matter or a
scheme to pay less. There is a space for someone who does not do what
the Treasury orders, but who does so in a public way, without
concealment.
“Divest from Pentagon, invest in people,” headlines the People’s World in their article about a war tax resistance demonstration in San Diego.
The resisters there redirected $6,000 in federal taxes from the Pentagon, including a donation to an organization that is trying to build tiny, affordable homes for the homeless.
One of these homes was wheeled to the outdoor redirection ceremony to give it some extra splash.
Raul Perez is going to try to figure out some new angle to get the U.S. courts to recognize a right to conscientious objection to military taxation.
He also wants to make a documentary film about the process.
“Is it
immoral to evade taxes?” asks a columnist for Tiempo
Digital of Honduras. He reviews some of the historical tax
resistance campaigns in the service of justice, and then asks: “Can we in
Honduras feel morally comfortable and have clear consciences while paying
taxes?” Citing corruption, the bulk of government spending compared to
national gross domestic product, and the abysmal lack of security and legal
protection for citizens, he concludes that Honduran citizens do not owe
allegiance or tax to the government.
Announcements about the upcoming New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters and of Campaign Nonviolence’s Action Week, along with commentary on tax day actions and the recent Shut Down Creech camp.
The New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters is going to be held in Hardwick, Massachusetts.
Details will be posted to the NWTRCC website eventually.
From a tax-evasion point of view, they are particularly attractive.
Cryptocurrencies possess the two most important characteristics of a traditional tax haven.
First, because there is no jurisdiction in which they operate (they are “held” in cyberspace accounts known as online “wallets”), they are not subject to taxation at source.
Second, cryptocurrency accounts are anonymous.
Users can start as many online “wallets” as they want to buy or mine Bitcoins and trade them without ever providing any identifying information.
Significantly, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) offer one additional major advantage to tax-evaders that traditional tax havens do not: the operation of Bitcoin is not dependent on the existence of financial intermediaries such as banks.
Bitcoin is exchangeable peer-to-peer by definition.
Bitcoin thus seems immune to the developing international anti-evasion regime [in which] financial institutions [are] the emerging agents of tax collection…
Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential to become super tax havens.
Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous by default.
Indeed, there is a permanent record of every bitcoin transaction that is fully available to law enforcement.
If you want to use bitcoin anonymously you have to take careful steps to do so.
There’s a bit of interesting background in this IRS research paper about the process the agency goes through when it detects that someone has failed to file a tax return.
While movement folks talk about the intersectionality of racism, sexism,
classism, homophobia, war, climate change, and economic exploitation, too
often we do not go beyond the rhetoric. We are inviting people involved in
resisting these serious problems to make time to engage in dialog with
those involved in other issues and movements. We need to explore how we can
work together.
There have been some interesting posts on the NWTRCC blog in recent weeks:
Tax Collection Phone Call Cons — international grifter call centers are siphoning money from gullible Americans by impersonating the IRS. War tax resisters may be particularly vulnerable as an angry call from the IRS is almost expected. Here’s what you need to know to keep from getting scammed.
Understanding common IRS collection letters — the IRS doesn’t tend to call you. They prefer to send you letters. Here’s a field guide to some of the variety of letters war tax resisters tend to see.
Join NWTRCC at the SOAW border convergence! — NWTRCC will be among the groups represented at a protest of U.S. border militarization and its treatment of new immigrants, migrant workers, and refugees .
Reasons to Celebrate — NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn celebrates another year of refused taxes sliding off of the statute-of-limitations 10-year limit and forever out of the IRS’s reach.
Ammon Hennacy and other early modern war tax resisters — Erica Weiland discusses some of the personalities and actions of the war tax resistance movement that began to coalesce in the United States around the end of World War Ⅱ, as found in Ammon Hennacy’s writings.
The Wealthy Accountant lists 10 ways to legally stop paying taxes — basically a list of varieties of income that are not taxed. You may find this useful food for thought.
The Keene, New Hampshire government has thrown all sorts of resources into trying to get a restraining order against the “Robin Hoods” who follow their parking enforcement officers around time, feeding the meters ahead of them and preventing them from writing lucrative tickets. So far, no luck, but they’re making one more desperate appeal to the state supreme court.
The tactic of paying your taxes in wagonloads of pennies or other small-denomination money, as a way of protesting and of obstructing the tax bureaucracy, is usually the one-off protest of a single fed-up person. But lately in Illinois, it’s become an organized and ongoing tactic:
Residents have to stick around if they pay property taxes in dollar bills — “Treasurer Glenda Miller announced a policy requiring people who pay their tax installments in large sums of cash to be physically present while the money is being counted. Miller said in a news release that the policy is for the protection of both the taxpayer and her staff.… ‘The five hours that it took for my staff to count the cash prevented her from continuing her regular office duties,’ Miller said.”
Tax protest group rallies, pays McHenry County property taxes in $1 bills — “Because Illinois has more units of government than any other state — property tax bills easily can have 10 or more bodies on them — attending all or most of their meetings to ask for tax relief is a huge undertaking for a taxpayer.”
Google Translate is only giving me a hint of what’s going on here but it included what sounds like an hours-long sit-in to block a tollgate, followed by arrests, in India.
Some movement news including a report from the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters & Supporters, and Erica Weiland’s report back from the School of the Americas Watch Border Convergence at Nogales.
I’m sure seeing a lot of Americans expressing their desire to stop paying taxes, now that Trump is going to be the one to spend them.
Most of this is just blowing-off-steam, I expect, but some is in earnest. One example is this post from Rachel Murphy Azzara: Tax Resistance Is Our Last Recourse.
The (U.S.) National Taxpayer Advocate issued its annual report recently.
The report includes a useful appendix summarizing the literature on Behavioral Science Lessons for Taxpayer Compliance.
Most of this literature is written from the point of view of learning how to make subjects into more compliant taxpayers, but there are usually good lessons for those of us who are trying to do the opposite.
Beware though of the social science replication crisis which may make many of these findings worthless.
Mexico is also aflame with tax resistance sentiment, following the gasolinazo in which the process of somewhat privatizing the state-run gasoline monopoly led to a recent hike in gas prices.
Here’s an example of coverage from Uruapan.
“White Powder Scare Causes Evacuation of Philadelphia IRS Building” — this one doesn’t even look like it was a mailed-in hoax, just a case where “someone discovered a powder in some cubicles on the third floor.” Seems like a great way for IRS employees to extend their lunch breaks.
what’s being billed as a “general strike” to protest against Trumpism is scheduled for today
How are you going to take him on? It’s not only Donald Trump. There is a
majority-Republican House and Senate. They’re vowing to take down Planned
Parenthood, to defund it, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. How are you
going to do this?
Gloria Steinem
Well, one day at a time. For instance, if they defund Planned Parenthood
and defund NPR, we can take that money out of our income tax, put a note
with our return saying, “Sorry, I’ve sent it where it should go. Come and
get me.” If enough people do that, it’s very difficult to do anything
about it. We did it in the Vietnam era. And then, we just — it was more
difficult, in a way, because we were just keeping the money. This is more
positive, because we’re actually giving the money where it should go.
Gloria Steinem
You know, Planned Parenthood is, of course, necessary to women’s health in
this country. A very—what? One percent of it goes toward abortion. It does
everything, we know—breast exams and everything else. So it would be
incredibly expensive to every emergency room in the nation, if they were
not able to serve women and men in the way that they do. Therefore, if
they defund it, we’ll take money out of our income tax and send it
direct.
It’s rare in the United States for people who engage in civil disobedience
for reasons of moral necessity to be able to make such an argument in court,
and it’s even rarer for such an argument to succeed. But
four anti-drone protesters were found innocent by a jury
of charges of obstruction of government administration, disorderly conduct,
and trespass earlier this month.
Today’s link dump:
My local newsweekly, the New Times, covered my
tax resistance today: Snubbing Uncle Sam: Local resident touts tax resistance as protest.
They also did one of those we-ask-a-man-on-the-street sidebars where they
asked four people: “What
is your opinion on people who don’t pay taxes as a form of protest?”
and got surprisingly positive answers. I expect the typical
man-on-the-street to reach for the old familiar clichés about “who will fix
the roads if we don’t pay our taxes” and so forth, but three out of four
people who were asked supported tax resistance.
Steve Ballmer, ex-Microsoft CEO, has launched a new project — USA Facts — that is meant to be a thorough, non-partisan, unbiased source of information about government spending.
By non-partisan they mean “credulous and non-judgmental” and by unbiased they mean “exclusively relying on government sources,” so keep that in mind.
It’s naively cheery about the federal government, by design:
We soon discovered that dealing with something as big and complex as
government — with its more than 90,000 jurisdictions and 23 million
employees — required an organizing framework. What better place to
look than the Constitution, and, more specifically, the preamble to the
Constitution? It lays out four missions: “Establish justice, ensure domestic
tranquility; provide for the common defense; promote the general welfare;
and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” While
we don’t make judgments about policy, we all agree on the broad purposes of
government as laid out in the preamble to the Constitution.
That said, it may end up being a useful source for some information about taxes and spending.
NWTRCC has some follow-up on this year’s tax season:
Here’s a new item in the pay-under-protest file: Scott Dion paid his property taxes with a check that said “sexual favors” in the “Memo” field. The government has been refusing to cash it.
brief notes about issues of interest to tax resisters, including: the private debt collection companies that the IRS has deputized to collect taxes, and how to do war tax resistance counseling in a “nondirective” way
updates from the NWTRCC field organizer, and a note from new anti-Trump tax resister Andrew Newman
I got a new (for me) kind of letter from the IRS today.
It was headlined as follows:
Your account has been assigned for enforcement action
Please call us about your unpaid taxes
It was sent by regular mail (not certified mail, like the IRS occasionally uses).
It consolidated all of my unpaid tax years (often the IRS will send a different letter for each tax year).
There was a lot of boilerplate, but the important text seemed to be:
We’re trying to collect unpaid taxes from you for the year(s) shown in the billing details below.
We have assigned your account for enforcement action.
Enforcement action may include seizing your wages or property.
It’s important that we hear from you within 10 days.
The letter leaves it ambiguous to whom they have assigned my account.
I looked for some indication of whether they might have assigned it to one of the semi-private debt collection agencies the IRS is now required to send some accounts to.
I didn’t find anything to indicate this.
But the text about “Enforcement action may include seizing your wages or property” — things the semi-private companies cannot do — suggests that maybe they’re keeping my account in-house.
I’ve heard (but not verified) that the semi-private companies are only being assigned accounts totaling less than $50,000. Mine, according to the letter, currently stands at $51,707.53, so I may have missed the cut-off.
Too bad.
I was hoping to document that process for you.
So given that the last time I got one of these notices, it was quickly followed by seizure attempts, and that I haven’t gotten one of these letters or been bothered by any seizure attempts since 2009, I should probably brace for trouble.
I used the IRS’s “Get Transcript” service to check my latest “Wage & Income Transcript” to see what assets and revenue sources the agency knows about for certain.
I was a bit surprised to find that they apparently don’t have anything about my most significant source of income for last year.
I’m guessing they just lost or mishandled the paperwork.
Lucky me.
What do they know about?
a small Roth IRA
that I transferred $5,000 from my regular IRA into my Roth IRA at a brokerage different from the one that holds that small Roth
my Health Savings Account
a Lending Club account that by now has less than $100 in it
the royalties I get from Amazon for the sales of my books
The IRS tends not to go after IRAs and HSAs until they get desperate.
As the clock is ticking on the statute of limitations for the oldest year in my account, though, they may be getting to that stage.
If they go after my Lending Club account and my book royalties, they’ll be pretty disappointed by how little they end up with.
I can partially stymie them in that case by putting all of my books on sale and stopping the royalties.
If they clean out my retirement accounts there’s not much I can do about it.
The worst thing would be if they hit my HSA.
Not only would they take my money but I’d get hit with a penalty for using my HSA for non-health-related spending (I’m not sure if I could ameliorate this by quickly making a deposit to the account to make up for it).
Manufacturers of hand-woven textiles in India have started a “tax denial satyagraha” — refusing to collect the Goods and Services Tax which is newly being applied to such goods.
The government has responded by closing its yarn monopoly to manufacturers who have refused to register to pay the tax.
The Kasai-Oriental province chapter of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, one of the largest political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, declared a tax strike this month.
Taxes and duties contribute to the development and welfare of the general citizenry.
This is not the case in the DRC, where taxes and duties go essentially to the enrichment of a clique, to the detriment of the national community which is subject to miseries of all kinds.… So I ask the Congolese people in general, and those of Kasai in particular, not to pay taxes from until the departure of the current administration.
The call to disobedience is for us a means to defeat the power of [Congo president Joseph] Kabila.
Kabila’s official term as president ended last year, but he refused to step down and the government has refused to hold new elections.
Opposition groups vowed to begin a tax strike , among other actions, if the government refused to begin to implement an election by then.
The consumer credit reporting agency Equifax leaked identifying data about hundreds of millions of Americans to unknown cybercriminals.
The intentions of the data-thieves are unknown, but such data would make it very easy to file phony tax returns for people in order to leach refunds from the IRS.
One tax resistance tactic is to increase the salience of taxation: that is, to make people more aware of how much taxes are costing them as a way of increasing opposition to those taxes.
The John Fielding pub in Cwmbran, Wales, is cutting its prices across the board by 7.5% for a month to show how much consumers would save if the value-added tax applied to food and drink at pubs were equal to that applied to food retailers like supermarkets.
The pub is joining Wetherspoon’s, a chain of pubs across Britain, which is doing a similar one-day action: National Tax Equality Day.
There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
Sam Walton and Daniel Woodhouse broke into a BAE Systems factory, intending to damage and thereby disable Typhoon fighter jets which were destined to be delivered to Saudi Arabia to assist in its brutal war in Yemen.
The two were unfortunately detained by security before they could reach the aircraft, and then arrested and put on trial for “criminal damage.”
It has proven much harder to present a necessity defense in American courts, and so you rarely hear stories like this in the U.S.
However, there are some signs that juries are becoming willing to push back against the American legal system’s persistent attempts to turn them into a panel of twelve rubber stamps.
Links have been piling up in my bookmarks as I spent
poring through
back issues of The Mennonite.
International Tax Resistance News
A new law in Samoa requires previously untaxed church
ministers to pay income tax. Many, including those from the country’s
largest church,
are refusing to pay.
The United States government has begun
denying passports to people with large tax debts.
If you’re one of the 362,000 or so Americans who owe more than $51,000 and
you haven’t entered into an installment payment plan (I’m one of those),
you will likely soon find that you cannot successfully apply for or renew
your passport. While the government also has the legal authority to revoke
existing passports from such people, it is not yet exercising that
power.
Guerrilla electricians in Greece continue to
reestablish electric power
to households who have had their power cut off for inability or
unwillingness to pay the state utility monopoly’s bills which have been
inflated to support the state’s austerity budget policies.
Veterans of the successful campaign to abolish the
“écotaxe” in Brittany held
a celebratory picnic
on the anniversary of the destruction of one of the highway portals that
would have enforced the hated tax. In part the picnic was meant to show
solidarity with those who had been convicted of criminal charges for the
parts they played in destroying such portals, and in part it was meant as a
show of strength to let the government know they would not tolerate any
attempts to reestablish the tax.
The increasing use of traffic-ticket-issuing cameras worldwide as a
government revenue booster has led to a rash of direct action by the victim
population. This usually takes the form of destroying, disabling, or
blocking the cameras. Here are several recent examples:
Launched on as another variety of civic struggle against the dictatorship, the proposal to carry the thesis of civil disobedience to the extreme of applying a “tax strike” is still in force, but has not yet switched on, except in the Mercado Oriental.
On that date, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Legal and Political Sciences, called for “civil disobedience as a national imperative to be put into operation immediately,” inviting employers, workers, students, and taxpayers to immediately suspend the payment of taxes to DGI, DGA, and city hall, in particular “withholding of Income Tax from salaries.”
Although the call for tax resistance enters the popular imagination as a civil form — and for that reason a legitimate one — of resisting the regime of Daniel Ortega, neither businesses nor individuals have responded with determination to the proposal, from fear or from caution.
Caution as demonstrated by the sources consulted for this article, who requested anonymity as they explained that people, business-owners and managers in particular, are afraid that the tax administration will fine them or, worse yet, temporarily take over operation of their companies or shutter their business.
Not all of the sanctions are catastrophic.
There are cases in which the fine applied is equivalent to 2.5% of the amount not paid in the case of the monthly advance payment of the business income tax, or 5% in the case of the value-added tax or of income tax withheld from the salaries of employees.
“Technically, it’s an invalid appropriation of withholdings, and can be criminally sanctioned,” in addition to being shut down, fined, or temporarily put under government management, explained a source with extensive experience in tax matters.
That said, this source sees a variety of reasons to doubt that they would decide to take such extreme measures, beginning with “as far as I know, they have never applied them to anyone.”
Another is that to close a business means sending its workers into unemployment, which implies that they will not receive taxes from the business or from those consumers.
But beyond believing in the mercy that any of these reasons implicitly assumes, the source points out fact that is easier to accept:
“If the resolution is massive, the tax administration simply does not have the capacity to audit and penalize everyone at once.”
Larger Companies Have More Fear
If it is decided to penalize only some in order to set a precedent that strikes fear into the others, surely one of the larger ones will be chosen, which not only has more ability to defend itself in the courts, but also to negotiate, precisely because of its size.
Another source asserts that “although it may seem obvious, the businesses that take the least risk are the most powerful ones, for the simple reason that they are not big taxpayers but big tax collectors.
“The DGI, does not want to be bothered with them, because if they weaken them, this affects tax revenues, principally value-added tax withholding.”
When the big companies that could take such measures don’t apply them, despite their intrinsic power, they are demonstrating “the cowardly face of big capital.
If they would decide, the blow to DGI would be immense,” s/he says.
Róger Arteaga, former director general of Revenue, agrees, saying that “big capital has not wanted to go all-in.
It is true that it gave its approval to the strike, but did so with fear and only temporarily.”
There is at least one group that risks more in a tax strike: import and export companies, which require clearances that can only be obtained once they have paid the corresponding taxes.
“If one of these business doesn’t make its monthly statement, or makes it but doesn’t pay, it falls into insolvency, and can neither import nor export.
The only importers who could afford that ‘luxury’ would be those that have sufficient product already on hand, especially at times like these, when there is little movement of inventory,” explained one of our sources.
Small- and medium-sized businesses — both fixed-quota and general regime — can stop paying taxes as long as the situation does not normalize, and while this makes them vulnerable to penalties, it is not likely that this will occur, especially, again, if a critical mass applies this measure of fiscal chastisement.
How long can the government last without taxes?
Our sources note that before making tax payments, the employer must guarantee the salary of its employees, and that the decision not to pay taxes is “protected by the higher legal concept, legally enshrined in the national legislation, as the Act of God and the Force Majeure.
Nobody is obligated to do the impossible, and the reason for this impossibility lies outside the control of the employer or employee.”
Citizens, on their part, could put pressure on big and medium-sized business, offering to act together if the Treasury moves against them.
“In this context, big capital must play a consistent role, acting firmly in the face of a Treasury that has granted them such special privileges.
It would be their most authentic repentance for the eleven years of tax advantages they have taken in the shadow of power.
That stain should be washed out right away,” they say.
As an expert, Arteaga proposes “that the businesses do not charge value-added tax, and the citizens not pay it.
Income tax also.
There are penalties, but the penalties and decisions of this government must be ignored, as they have no legitimacy.
How long can the government last without taxes?” he asked.
“Tax resistance aims to respond to Ortega’s claim that he will stay on through : we must find a solution, and one of these is for the private sector finally to decide on civil disobedience of a monetary and tax nature,” he explained.
Pedro Muñoz Fonseca, president of the executive committee of Costa Rica’s Social Christian Unity Party, urged Nicaraguans to use tax resistance against their government:
Social Media Tax Protest in Uganda
The government of Uganda has imposed a 5¢-per-day tax on using social media and
other services. This was designed as both a revenue measure and a way of
reducing what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls lugambo
(“fake news”). Amnesty International has been among those to see through the
government’s rhetoric and cast the tax as
“a
clear attempt to undermine the right to freedom of expression.”
Robert Kyagulanyi, a Member of Parliament better known by his musician
stage name Bobi Wine, whose election is in part credited to his success on
social media, has been at the forefront of protests against the tax.
He was arrested, along with
three reporters when a march protesting the tax was attacked by police
with tear gas and rubber projectiles, but they managed to escape.
Ugandan protest marchers wearing shirts featuring a smart phone screen that
reads “This Tax Must Go”
War Tax Resistance Around the World
ABC reports on war tax resisters in Valencia — “the new refuseniks”.
War tax resisters there typically refuse to pay some percentage of their taxes, often basing this on the percentage of the federal budget that is spent on the military and similar items, and redirect this money to more worthy charities.
They declare this deduction on their tax forms in such a way that the tax agency typically does not treat it as illegal tax evasion but as an error or mistake.
The Global Day of Action on Military Spending Final Report has been released.
It gives a summary of the various events that took place around the world, including several by war tax resisters and groups promoting war tax resistance.
There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
Ideas & Actions concerning weapons-free investing, responding to arguments against war tax resistance, a fast for nuclear disarmament, and more
You can now listen to audio excerpts from the upcoming documentary The Pacifist, about war tax resister Larry Bassett, on Spotify.
Erica Leigh pores through back issues of Conscience, the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, an American war tax redirection group that slightly predates the founding of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
Raymond Hunthausen has died.
As Catholic archbishop of Seattle, he took a remarkably strong stand on nuclear weapons — famously calling the Trident nuclear submarine program being developed nearby “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — and began practicing war tax resistance in response.
This earned him enemies in Washington and in the Catholic hierarchy. Here are some of the obits and remembrances:
A biography of Hunthausen, A Disarming Spirit, will be released soon.
David McReynolds has died.
He was a long-time War Resisters League and Socialist Party activist and was also on the staff of the Committee for Nonviolent Action which helped to spearhead war tax resistance as a tactic during the campaigns opposing the American war in Vietnam.
He was among the signers of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in and of a similar public pledge .
David Paul Irish has died.
He was active with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peace Brigades International, and Witness for Peace.
He was an advocate for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, drafting a minute in favor of of war tax resistance that the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Meetings approved in .
While I’ve been delving through the archives of Gospel Herald, links have been backing up in my bookmarks.
Here are some that concern war tax resistance in the here-and-now:
The Trump administration has decided it enjoys provoking trade wars, which perhaps have the blessing of distracting them from getting their jollies by provoking real wars.
But the prime mechanism — tariffs — is also a revenue source for the government.
Which leads war tax resisters like Lincoln Rice to ask, are these tariffs for war? and if so, what can war tax resisters do about it?
Thirty-Eight Years of Refusal — Erica Leigh, Georgia Pearson, Larry Bassett, and Bill Ramsey review the history of the recently-closed Conscience and Military Campaign Escrow Account, which was responsible for coordinating tens of thousands of dollars in war tax redirection.
Counseling Notes — News about government policies towards war tax resisters, including the use of private debt collectors, IRS summonses, passport revocations, and a sharp decline in levies.
Colrain After 25 Years — A 25th Anniversary celebration of the actions surrounding the Corner/Kehler house seizure, coinciding with the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters.
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — Including the Maine War Tax Resistance Gathering, and obituary notices for war tax resisters Ray Gingerich and Naomi Paz Greenberg.
NWTRCC News — Including an announcement of the NWTRCC national gathering in Cleveland.
Adrienne Maree Brown writes about her war tax resistance in the wake of a wage levy, and reflects on the disadvantages of going it alone as opposed to resisting as part of a supportive group. Excerpt:
i still deeply agree with the politics that led to this action, but i know now that i didn’t do it the right way.
i acted as an individual, as if my singular act of rage should be respected, as if it could have meaningful impact on the systems of oppression that lead to the military spending i want to divest from.
it helped me sleep well at night, but it wasn’t tied into a collective strategy, a system of accountability around whether it was effective.
someday i hope to be part of larger direct action efforts around debt and taxes, but from this struggle i have learned in a most personal way the importance of the collective.
Is there a war tax resistance movement?
According to a pseudonymous author in a back issue of Conscience (the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign), “War tax resistance is real, but the war tax resistance movement is fiction.”
War tax resistance is a tactic, says the author, whereas movements coalesce around goals, so there will never be a war tax resistance movement, though there may be movements that incorporate war tax resistance.
Erica Leigh looks back at the Beit Sahour tax strike as it was covered at the time, in a two-part series of excerpts from Conscience (part 1 and part 2).
Leigh writes: “The tax resistance in Beit Sahour was due to a high level of community cohesion, organization, education, and solidarity, something that’s missing from our scattered war tax resistance organizing around the United States.
Most of our finest moments in US war tax resistance arose from such concentrated and dedicated efforts in a small geographic region, even when the total number of resisters was small.
Food for thought!”
War Tax Resistance
Some war tax resisters are very public with their resistance, and consider protest and confrontation with the powers that be to be crucial parts of how they make their stand.
Others are more private and understated, refusing to pay but not making a lot of hullabaloo about it. On the NWTRCC blog, Erica Leigh examines public vs. quiet resistance.
War tax resister Larry Bassett looks at “the power of war tax resistance in 2018” — trying to measure the effects of his own resistance and that of the war tax resistance movement.
(As found on Facebook and at Citizen Truth.)
A flash from the past in the Lewis Center, Ohio, ThisWeek Community News gives us a glimpse of a war tax resistance tactic used in the United States during World War Ⅰ.
The government had put a war tax on rail travel, but apparently the tax only applied on tickets above a certain threshold value.
So some travelers split tickets, buying tickets from point A to point B and then point B to point C to avoid paying the war tax that would have applied on a ticket from point A to point C.
Tax Resistance Internationally
Nicaragua’s Blue & White National Unity group has called for a consumer strike and energy strike.
The consumer strike is meant to last three days and aims particularly at those consumer goods like fuel, alcoholic beverages, sodas, and tobacco that are most taxed.
People are also encouraged to not use any utility power from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., indefinitely.
The group seeks the release of 400 political prisoners.
The Zimbabwe Congress for Trade Union went ahead with an anti-tax demonstration, which the government had banned under the pretense that public gatherings would contribute to a cholera outbreak.
The government of Zimbabwe is trying to impose a 2% tax on all electronic funds transfers and is attempting to force citizens who hold their savings in foreign currency to convert that money into the notoriously hyperinflating Zimbabwean currency.
Police raided the headquarters of the group and arrested 35 of its leaders in advance of the protests.
A report on
migrants from Central America reminds us that fleeing ruinous and
immoral taxation is among the motives causing people to flee. The case
of Guillermo, who as a Central American teenager became the head of his
family, is one example:
Criminal organizations targeted and killed Guillermo’s cousin. The
relative had failed to pay a gang’s “war tax” — money the gang extorts
from people through threats of violence.
They then turned their attention to Guillermo for payment.
In , he was kidnapped and beaten by two
uniformed police officers carrying out the gang’s orders. Their message
was clear: Pay the war tax or face the murder and rape of his siblings.
He realized that as long as they stayed in the region, they would never
be free from gang violence — or the gangs’ attempts to pull them into a
life of crime.
Instead, he fled with his siblings on a 1,500-mile journey to the United
States where he crossed the border, legally, as an asylum-seeker. But here
he faces the threats of yet more criminal government gangs, this time in
Trump’s ICE,
the farcical court system set up to deny refuge in asylum cases, and the
for-profit prison systems that exploit and abuse immigrant detainees.
Drivers’ war on speed cameras and other traffic-ticket-generating robots
continues:
The economy has been chugging along pretty well for a while now, the job
market is tight, and individual income tax receipts are up in the United
States. So why has the budget deficit jumped up 17%?
Two reasons, mainly: the recently passed tax law has led to a sharp
reduction in receipts from corporate income tax, and Congress has been
spending up a storm. Also, interest on the national debt continues to balloon, rising 24% just .
NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience.
You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
[S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.
Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters.
That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes.
The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently.
It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction.
For example:
Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent.
People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time.
Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
Hey, what do you know?
Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu.
This strike, which is scheduled to start in , is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.
![American Quaker War Tax Resistance (Second Edition) [Edited by David M. Gross. Picket Line Press, 2011. 574 pages. $25/paperback; $7.99/eBook] Gross has made a serious business of investigating and writing about not only the history of war tax resistance, but also tactics that can be used today. In American Quaker War Tax Resistance, Gross uses historical documents to trace the development of war tax resistance among Quakers, and how it was viewed by their contemporaries outside the Society of Friends. He includes writing by famous Friends such as William Penn and John Woolman, as well as individuals less known such as Moses Brown. In a subsequent book, 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance, Gross lays out past campaigns to help war tax resisters of our own time choose from tactics that have already been used.](fjreview.png)
