How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → Constitutionalist tax protest stuff (“show me the law!”) → America: From Freedom to Fascism

Some links you might find interesting:

• Per Bylund promotes counter-economics in his essay Creating a Calculated Revolution — In Your Neighborhood.
• War tax resister and Gandhian Jeff Knaebel writes that We Must Build Our Own Dawn.
• Here’s a little peek at how America’s war profiteers crow to their stockholders about their recent fortunes.
• And The New Yorker notes that much of these fortunes are made by shovelling tax dollars at useless pork projects: “Not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine.”
• Huck Gutman notices that the government is Lying about the Ruinous Cost of the War in Iraq: “In 1951, at the start of the Korean War, supplemental appropriations comprised almost three quarters of all appropriations. By the next year, supplementals were under 3 percent. By the third year of the Korean War, supplementals were down to zero. ¶ In 1966, the first year of the escalation in Vietnam, supplemental appropriations were seven times as high as regular appropriations. The next year, they were roughly equal. In 1968 supplementals were less than a fifth of regular appropriations, and by 1970 they were down to zero.” In contrast, 90% of the cost of today’s wars are being paid for off-budget.
• Ned Netterville, an “unlicensed disciple of Jesus,” thinks he’s figured out that Jesus’s foes were right when they accused him of promoting tax resistance.
• Aaron Russo’s constitutionalist tax protester propaganda film “America: Freedom to Fascism” has picked up a couple of critical reviews from news.com and The New York Times.
• You can listen to audio versions of Thoreau’s Walden, Cecile Andrews’s The Circle of Simplicity, and other works from the voluntary simplicity movement at SimpleRadio on simpleliving.net.

NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn was interviewed on “The American Activist” this afternoon for KSKQ in Ashland, Oregon.

The host, Lora Chamberlain, had herself quit her job when the bombing of Iraq began, in order “to get off the rolls completely and not pay any taxes.” Benn had a chance to introduce her listeners to W-4 resistance and alternative funds, and to discuss the IRS collection process, asset-concealment strategies, and other ins-and-outs of tax resistance.

Alas, Benn repeated the canard about the tax line being $8,750 (or, as she later corrected herself: $18–20,000 if you take advantage of deductions and credits)! I know she knows better, because she’s been taking an active role in helping to finalize the editing of the upcoming NWTRCC pamphlet on low-income tax resistance — which is full of information on how even single people with no children or other dependents can earn more than that and stay under the line. Sigh. Clearly I’ve got more work to do.

The host of the show wanted to mix war tax resisters in with what she called the “tax honesty movement” (that is, Constitutionalist tax protesters) and the recent movie America: From Freedom to Fascism which has popularized tax protester arguments in many circles. In her mind, we’re all basically on the same side, working in favor of “true, participatory democracy” and against “the corporate fascist state” which serves the parasitical oligarchs of the “tapeworm economy.” Well… horray for low-power community radio; sure beats the crap out of the big stations.