How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
physical intervention →
sabotage/destruction of equipment
Mary Kelly cast her vote early — on .
She went to Shannon Airport in Ireland, which the U.S. was using to ferry troops and supplies to where they would begin the invasion of Iraq, and she took an axe to a U.S. Navy 737, doing, in the Navy’s opinion, 1.5 million dollars worth of damage to the aircraft.
Arrested and taken to court, her first trial ended in a hung jury.
The judge then changed the rules so she could not present evidence about the war in Iraq to support her claim to be acting to prevent worse crimes there.
She was convicted on a 10-2 jury verdict .
— longtime peace activist Ulla Roder single-handedly rips an RAF Tornado fighter jet into little bits!
— the Fairford Five peace activists disable 35 trucks for refueling B-52 bombers at Fairford US military airbase in England
— the Alliant 28 peace activists protested at DU weapons manufacturing plant in USA, declared not guilty by a jury on basis of the Nuremberg Principles
The Trident Ploughshares aim carefully to chop the nukes out of Britain — they have notched-up some truly amazing legal victories, as well as deep notches on the subs themselves
I wrote admiringly of a number of anti-war activists in Ireland who had, in a series of actions, damaged U.S. military equipment at Shannon Airport.
Mary Kelly took an axe to a U.S. Navy military transport, grounding the plane and doing one and a half million dollars in damage.
Eoin Dubsky stopped a Hercules transport for a week simply by spray-painting anti-war slogans on it.
And a group called “Pitstop Ploughshares” went after a Navy C40 with an axe, knocking it out of action for three months.
Ingmar Lee notes in Alternative Press Review that “when the Italian Christian Peacenik, Turi Salvatore Vaccarro recently destroyed two US Navy F-16s with a sledgehammer, not a single headline turned up on my Google search of the incident.
Vaccaro simply climbed over a fence into a US/NATO air base in the Netherlands where about 20 nuclear bombs and some F-16s were stationed and managed to completely destroy the cockpits of the jets.”
Lee goes on to list what to me seems a remarkable number of recent incidents of effective freelance decommissioning of military machinery:
On , Ciaron O’Reilly and three others entered Griffiss Air Force Base in New York and began hammering on a KC-135 (a refueling plane for B52s).
They then proceeded to smash the engine of a nearby cruise-missile-armed B52 bomber that was to be used in the strikes against Iraq.
They also destroyed some of the runway, chipping at two sections, one being nearly five feet in diameter.
In , Andrea Needham, Joanna Wilson, Lotta Kronlid and Angie Zeltner broke into the high security hangar owned by British Aerospace in Lancashire to disarm a newly built Hawk jet.
The jet was slated for delivery to the Indonesian Government to use against villagers of East Timor.
They broke into the hangar and set about destroying the war machine.
They developed a steady rhythm, once they realised that the security was not coming.
Over a period of about an hour the women methodically destroyed the plane’s weapons system with their hammers.
On , Rosie James and Rachel Wenham swam 300 metres in wetsuits into the Vickers dock yard at Barrow in Furness to reach HMS Vengeance.
They swam in freezing conditions in the dark with their disarmament equipment of hammers, chisels, crowbars, screwdrivers and paint.
The women then climbed around the submarine and dismantled radio equipment used to launch weapons of mass destruction.
They hung a banner on the conning tower which read “Women Want Peace”, painted the words ILLEGAL DEATH MACHINE and peace / women’s symbols on the hull and smashed testing equipment on the conning tower.
On , Sylvia Boyes and Anne Scholz entered the water in the dark to the south of the perimeter of the Faslane nuclear submarine base.
They swam round the perimeter fence and after two hours in the water were intercepted while swimming under the jetties where the Polaris submarines were formerly berthed.
Anne said: “My plan was to get onto a Trident sub and lock myself to it.
Sylvia had a hammer to use on the exterior and spray paint to use on computer monitors inside the boat.”
¶ A Trident SSBN (Ship Submersible Ballistic Nuclear) has 16 missile tubes.
Each missile can carry eight warheads, and each 100 kiloton warhead is eight times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
A Trident submarine is on patrol 24 hours a day, every day of the year, on reduced alert but able to fire missiles within days.
On , Bonnie Urfer and Michael Sprong used hand-held Swede saws to cut down three poles supporting transmission lines for a controversial U.S. submarine communication system located near Clam Lake Wisconsin.
After performing their “act of nonviolent direct disarmament and crime prevention,” the two waited over an hour for the arrival of Ashland County Sheriff’s Deputies who took them into custody.
This was the fifth time that the transmitter — known as Project ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) — was shut down by activists who simply walked up to poles supporting the 28-mile-long transmitter antennae and cut them down with hand saws.
On , Eoin Dubsky and Tim Hourigan were arrested at Shannon Airport for “Defacing an Aircraft.”
Mr Dubsky took a can of fluorescent orange paint to a USAF Hercules plane, and afterwards, wishing to be accountable, he phoned airport police himself to inform them of his actions.
On , the Sisters Jackie Hudson, Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert broke into a Minuteman Ⅲ nuclear missile silo.
They pounded on the silo with hammers and smeared it with their own blood.
The nuns said they were compelled to act as war with Iraq moved closer and because the United States had never promised not to use nuclear weapons.
On , anti-war activists breached the security at RAF Leuchars in Fife twice in twenty-four hours.
The so-called “Citizens’ Inspections” were made all the more embarrassing for military chiefs by the fact that one of the activists is a wheelchair user.
At 4.30am wheelchair user Roz Bullen and Petter Joelson entered via holes they had cut in the boundary fence at the base.
They were able to paint the slogans “A flower in your gun” and “Peace and Responsibility” in blood red paint on part of a hangar and military vehicles.
On , Ulla Roder destroyed a Tornado jet at Leuchars airbase.
She went into a hangar at the Fife airbase and discovered the plane completely unguarded.
She said: “I took my hammer to the nose-cone, the cockpit, the fuselage, the wings, the tailplane and other parts of the plane which were safe to damage.
I don’t see it flying again.
I then sat down and waited for the security people to arrive.
I am pleased that this particular aircraft will not be dropping bombs on innocent people in Iraq.”
On , Mark Colville, Sister Susan Clarkson, Joan Gregory, and Brian Buckley went aboard for a tour of the USS Philippine Sea during the 16th Annual Fleet Week in New York City.
The USS Philippine Sea was the first warship to attack Afghanistan after .
Once on the ship, they poured their blood and hammered on the missile hatches that hold Tomahawk Cruise Missiles.
They held up pictures of Iraqi children who had been injured and maimed by US weapons.
On , Mary Kelly caused extensive damage to a US Navy C 40 Boeing 737 aircraft at Shannon Airport by smashing it with a hatchet-type hammer.
She caused more than 500,000 euros worth of damage to the nose cone, the nose wheel, the hydraulics and electrics of the plane.
A week later, at the same airport on Ciarron O’Reilly smashed the same plane which was being repaired after Mary Kelly’s disarmament action the previous week.
They spray-painted the hangar with “PITSTOP FOR DEATH” and “THE WAR STOPS HERE!
PHIL BERRIGAN R.I.P.” and constructed a shrine with photos of Iraqi children.
Human blood was poured on the runway and a mattock was used to begin to take the runway up.
Mr. O’Reilly said “that it was an emphasis on taking responsibility to help others”.
He said that after 5–6 minutes of beating on the aircraft, the group knew it would definitely have to be grounded.
I’ve mentioned some of these incidents before, particularly on , and I reported on how difficult it was proving to be to prosecute Mary Kelly later that month.
As a follow-up to my note about a raid on an Oakland military recruitment office by members of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, I’m happy to report that a number of clowns sledge-hammered their way into and vandalized a Minuteman missile silo in North Dakota.
The “Pitstop Ploughshares” — a group of five peace activists from the Catholic Worker movement who broke into Shannon airport in Ireland and disabled a U.S. Navy supply plane with hammers and a pickaxe — have been found not guilty by a Dublin jury.
This follows two mistrials.
One of the defense attorneys challenged the jurors, in closing arguments:
If a child’s plastic ball rolled into the street and the child ran after it, would you leave it to the Garda to go after the child?
Or if a child’s beach ball went into the water, and the child went into the water and risked drowning, would you leave it to the life guards?
If a child has both knees cut, would you leave it to the parents to bring the child to the Out Patient’s?
If a woman’s handbag is snatched, would you help her or just leave it to the Garda?
If it happened on a bus, would you intervene or leave it to the bus driver?
What would drive you to action?
George Monbiot has summarized for Guardian readers the many cases in Europe of activists who vandalized U.S. military equipment but who have been set free by juries who decline to convict because the war itself is a crime and therefore citizens were justified in breaking the law in trying to prevent it.
In , three Dominican nuns were convicted of “damaging government property and obstructing the national defense”.
They had broken in to a Colorado Minuteman Ⅲ nuclear missile silo, which they beat with hammers and covered with blood.
They were sentenced to between 30 and 41 months in prison and ordered to pay $3,080.04 in restitution to fix the fence they had cut with bolt cutters in order to reach the silo area.
So instead the nuns organized a food drive, and tried to deliver the food first to the prosecutor’s office and then to two Air Force bases, indicating that the food was intended for the children of military families.
They were rebuffed, and the prosecutor insists that their restitution still must be paid.
I’ll take a break today from the ongoing Evil and Human Agency-a-thon and cover some things I’ve been pushing to the side to make room for that increasingly bloated book review.
Next: Michael McCarthy, a leader of Blue Water Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization from Port Huron, Michigan, shares some post-tax-day thoughts about war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
The Gospel calls on us to defeat evil with good.…
[A] growing group — 10 to 15 members of five to six local churches — is taking its federal income tax dollars (in $100 amounts we name “Iraq Peace Bonds”) from supporting this war, and redirecting some of the money to local needs for public education — in this case, our county library.
We gave checks totaling $1,360, and are now in ongoing, collective, open civil disobedience to an unjust war tax.
Most taxpayers have withholding from their paychecks.
They overpay during a tax year and receive refunds.
This leaves no way to stop paying some portion for this unjust war.
So we have been fine-tuning our finances and W-4 allowances now, so that something will be owed at the end of this tax year .
The process is to withhold less now, so that each will pay $100 less for war .
Some of us already have done this for the tax year.
We file our 1040s, and pay the balance due, minus $100.
We notify the Internal Revenue Service and Congress, of what is owed, but hold it instead in a peace escrow account, or donate the money — to the library, for example.
We know the IRS still would bill us for that amount.
There are risks to this witness. Participants in this act of civil disobedience violate federal law.
We do this as a community, discussing details with friends, family, and tax preparers.
The IRS likely will respond with form letters within months requesting payment with penalty and interest that accrue at 1–2% monthly.
Therefore, an initial $100 Iraq Peace Bond could cost about $125 with IRS penalties and interest by the end of a year.…
And Eric Stoner and Bryan Farrell ask the readers of ZNet “Why Pay for War?”
Excerpts:
For those whose conscience demands action now, there is another option, carved out by a long history of war tax resisters.
According to the War Resister’s League, tens of thousands of Americans — including Dorothy Day, Joan Baez, and Noam Chomsky — have at some point resorted to civil disobedience by not paying their taxes .
Some resisters have deliberately chosen to live below the poverty line to avoid paying taxes, while others simply do not pay part or all of what the government demands for its addiction to war.
These actions no doubt come with risk and sacrifice, but it’s often not as bad as people think.
Only rarely has anyone lost their house or car or faced jail time, while many have resisted for decades without significant consequences.
The War Resisters League and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee offer numerous resources on their websites concerning every facet of this form of resistance, as well as contact information for local support groups.
While the U.S. government has been spendthrift when it comes to building its arsenal, Americans, by and large, have been the misers, refusing to pay any significant price for their convictions.
As Father Daniel Berrigan, no stranger to personal sacrifice, once remarked, “Because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course continues, because the waging of war, by its nature is total — but the waging of peace, by our cowardice is partial.”
Finally: this sort of news always brings a smile to my face.
Excerpts:
Two anti-war campaigners who broke into an airbase to sabotage US bombers at the outbreak of the Iraq war have been cleared of all charges.
Protesters Toby Olditch, 38, and Philip Pritchard, 36, used bolt cutters to enter RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
They had intended to clog the planes’ engines with nuts and bolts when they were arrested by Ministry of Defence police.
The men pleaded not guilty at Bristol crown court to conspiring to cause criminal damage, claiming the B52s would have been used to commit war crimes in Iraq.
Speaking outside court, Mr Pritchard said: “I am delighted.
It is a great relief — and a huge vote of confidence for anti-war protesters — that a jury were convinced that our actions were lawful.”
This is only the latest in a series of cases in which protesters seeking to disable American military equipment have been acquitted after raising the defense that they had been acting to prevent acts of criminal war.
I do love a good story about people demolishing the apparatus of state.
And here are a couple:
Anti-war activists in Derry, Northern Ireland, have been harassing a local plant of the U.S. arms manufacturer Raytheon for several years.
In one action, nine people from the Derry Anti-War Coalition occupied the offices and destroyed over £350,000 of equipment.
The saboteurs were charged with burglary and criminal damage, but the court permitted them to argue that they were acting to prevent war crimes, and after presenting evidence to support this argument, the defendants were acquitted of all charges by a unanimous jury.
Raytheon’s U.S.-side managers concluded that “the legal system in Northern Ireland does not offer the degree of protection to their business that could be expected in other parts of the world,” and the company has decided to abandon their Derry plant!
Congratulations to the Raytheon 9 and to the Derry Anti-War Coalition.
I mentioned the story of several activists who broke in to the ITT/EDO-MGM arms factory in Brighton, England earlier that year to destroy equipment involved in the manufacture of parts for fighter jets, guided missiles and bombs.
The activists were arrested and brought to trial and charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage.
They made a “necessity” defense based on the fact that the company was supplying military equipment to Israel that it was using in its assault on Gaza, which was taking place at the time of the activists’ action.
One of the activists said before his assault on the factory, “I don’t feel I’m going to do anything illegal tonight, but I’m going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually produce munitions and these very dirty bombs that have been provided to the Israeli army so that they can kill children.”
Last month, all of the activists were acquitted.
One of the “decommissioners” reacted to the verdict by saying:
“It’s a real victory for the anti-war movement.
The jury were presented with the facts and they supported our motivations.
If people in Britain knew the truth away from media manipulations they would all support our actions.”
This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than
the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce
their support of the government in these areas.
Active Methods of Depleting Government Coffers
Description
Anti-war activists turn to war tax resistance for any of a number of related
reasons: to amplify their protest, as a form of conscientious objection, or as
an attempt to reduce the resources available to the government to carry out
its wars.
If you are motivated by the last of these motivations, you may also be
interested in more active ways of reducing government coffers that go beyond
refusal to consent to taxation.
Some of these methods go pretty far afield from war tax resistance, and so
this page only mentions them in passing as examples of ways some resisters at
some times have chosen to actively deplete government resources that might
otherwise be spent on war.
Examples
Filing Paper Returns
These days, more and more people are filing their income tax returns
electronically. This saves the
IRS
money, as it costs about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an
electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper
return. You can reduce the efficiency of the government’s tax system, and
thereby the amount of collected taxes available for the government to spend on
the military, by filing paper returns rather than filing electronically.
George Jakabcin, the
IRS
assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration,
said that if half of the people who currently file electronically switched
back to paper filing, “we would be in a world of hurt. We no longer have the
capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually. We no longer
have the facilities, we don’t have the
IT
infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some
would begin to argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
In addition, the
IRS is
less able to track the items on paper returns, which limits the amount of data
available to its enforcement arm. Until everyone (or almost everyone)
switches to electronic filing, much of the information on everyone’s tax
return is unavailable to the
IRS’s
automated compliance checking programs. By filing a paper return, you help
diminish the ability of the
IRS to
go after tax resisters and evaders.
Disabling Tax-Collection Equipment
During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists in the United States interfered
with military conscription by destroying the files at draft boards. War tax
resisters might respond to the financial conscription of war taxes in an
analogous way.
Many historical populist tax resistance movements have included actions
intended to disable or destroy the tax collecting apparatus. For example:
A group in Arizona upset at automated traffic ticket-dispensing cameras
dressed up in Santa suits and disabled the cameras by wrapping them in
gift boxes.
Jack-a-Lents and “Rebeccaites” in England and Wales destroyed toll
booths.
Harassing Tax Collectors
Another way of making the government’s tax collection process less-efficient
and thereby making less money available to the government for war is to make
the jobs of tax collectors more difficult.
In , when two war tax resisters in the
Basque region of Spain were assessed a fine for their resistance, they
paid the fine with 20,000 pennies.
American revolutionaries famously used “tar and feathers” to show tax
collectors they were not wanted.
Many people in the American TEA
Party movement sent tea bags in with their tax returns. This seems benign
enough, but the IRS has seen
so many dangerous-looking things come to its mailrooms (razor blades,
powder meant to look like poison) that they tend to overreact and shut
down their operations for a hazardous materials team to come inspect
whenever they find anything out-of-the-ordinary in an envelope.
Applying for Government Handouts
Some resisters reason that it is not ethical to apply for government benefits
and other handouts while at the same time trying to resist some or all federal
taxes. Other resisters think that there is no contradiction between refusing
to pay for war and taking advantage of other parts of the government. Still
others think that any act that takes money from the government that it might
otherwise spend on war is probably a good thing and they seek to maximize the
amount of money they extract from the government.
Applying for Additional Tax Refunds
One way to take money out of the government’s pocket is to apply for tax
“refunds” above and beyond any that you are legally entitled to.
During the Vietnam War, it was common for American war tax resisters to do
this by declaring extra dependents on their tax returns. Martha Tranquilli,
for instance, on her income tax return
declared the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the War
Resisters League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International League
for the Rights of Man, and the American Friends Service Committee as her
dependents. “By claiming these organizations,” she said, “this reduced my
taxable income by about 60 per cent, which would go to war. These groups were
entitled to my money. They were my dependents in as much as I support them.”
Now, with the expansion of the
IRS’s
use of the frivolous filing
penalty, this approach is more daunting.
Some people, including many who are imprisoned in the
U.S. prison system,
simply fabricate tax returns with numbers optimized to maximize the amount of
refundable tax credits and other refunds. For example, over a thousand
prisoners made implausible claims for the “first-time home-buyer tax credit” on
their returns and received over nine million dollars in refunds as a result.
“I’m through with the street crime,” said prisoner Shawn Clark, “I’m strictly
white collar from now on. I love the
IRS!”
Keeping Bureaucrats Busy with Worthless Paperwork / Overcompliance
The more time, effort, and money the government wastes on paperwork and
bureaucracy, the less time, effort, and money it has to devote to torturing
prisoners, bombing weddings, and launching invasions.
In , after the
IRS hit
war tax resister Karl Meyer with a “frivolous filing penalty,” he responded
with what he called “Cabbage Patch Resistance” — filing a new and different
tax return every day to flood the
IRS with
paperwork.
Destroying or Sabotaging Government Property
By destroying or sabotaging government property, you make it more expensive
for the government to do business, and thereby reduce the amount of money it
can spend on the activities, like war, it prefers to replacing damaged
equipment. Property with a direct link to the military is a favorite target.
Anti-war activists around Shannon Airport in Ireland on a number of occasions
disabled U.S.
military aircraft that were using that airport to ferry troops and supplies to
the Iraq War. For instance, Mary Kelly took an axe to a
U.S. Navy 737,
doing $1.5 million in damage, and Ulla Roder disabled a
RAF Tornado
fighter jet. Such activists have won surprising victories in court by
convincing juries that they were acting on the basis of necessity.
Another group disabled 35 refueling trucks at the Fairford military base in
England around the same time.
More recently, anti-war activists broke in to the
ITT/EDO-MGM arms factory in Brighton,
England to destroy equipment involved in the manufacture of parts for fighter
jets and guided missiles and bombs. Operating under cover of night, the
half-dozen decommissioners did about £250,000 in damage. A police inspector
said that “machinery and equipment were so targeted that it could have been
done with a view of bringing business to a standstill. The damage is
significant and the value substantial.” They were acquitted. One reacted to
the verdict by saying: “It’s a real victory for the anti-war movement, The
jury were presented with the facts and they supported our motivations. If
people in Britain knew the truth away from media manipulations they would all
support our actions.”
In a similar action, another set of activists did £350,000 of damage at a
Raytheon plant in Derry, Northern Ireland, and then were acquitted of all
charges by a unanimous jury after they argued that they were acting to prevent
war crimes. Raytheon’s
U.S.-side managers
concluded that “the legal system in Northern Ireland does not offer the degree
of protection to their business that could be expected in other parts of the
world,” and the company decided to abandon their Derry plant.
Encouraging Soldiers to Desert
Encouraging soldiers to desert or defy orders, supporting conscientious objectors, and counter-recruitment, are all ways of (among other things) making it more difficult and expensive for the government to maintain its ability to conduct wars.
Groups like Courage to Resist and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors do great work in this area.
War tax resisters can be particularly credible messengers in trying to
persuade military personnel to resist since we, too, are taking risks in our
noncompliance. Conversely, we can help to influence those who promote
conscientious objection in soldiers to practice it as taxpayers. As Thoreau
complained: “The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by
those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.”
Resigning Government Jobs
By resigning your government job, even one which is itself fairly benign, you
deprive the government of additional resources and force it to spend more on
replacing you. You also signal your disgust with the government’s activities
and your unwillingness to be associated with it. Gandhi and Tolstoy were
among the theorists of nonviolent resistance who made resignation of
government posts an important part of their strategic thinking.
Blockading Government Facilities
If you can prevent a government facility or that of a military contractor
from operating, to that extent you can cost the war machine time, money, and
other resources.
The ports in Tacoma, Washington, Oakland, California, and Olympia, Washington
have been successfully blockaded on occasion by anti-war protesters to prevent
the loading of ships destined for battlefields around the globe.
On the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in
, members of the War Resisters League were
arrested blockading the
IRS
building in Washington. “Just as military recruiters supply bodies for the
war, the
IRS
supplies the funding,” said war tax resister Ed Hedemann. “So, I’m doing my
part in disrupting that relentless flow of money by standing in front of the
IRS
entrance and by refusing to send my taxes to the
IRS.”
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Carl Kabat celebrated Independence Day by sneaking on to the site where a new nuclear weapons factory is being built in Kansas City, Missouri, and damaging the construction cranes.
Kansas City is the site of the upcoming Autumn NWTRCC national gathering, and I hear tell there will be opportunities for further disruption there.
Someone has started a tax resistance campaign to protest U.S. support of the government of Bahrain.
They have written the IRS with the reasoning behind their conscientious objection and so far have gotten nothing but the familiar “your argument is frivolous” form letter, but they hope to pursue the matter further through legal channels.
Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down with it.
Background
Margaret Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor, privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate.
You may recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played with in this same time period (), and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and ideologues.
The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on a local, council-by-council basis.
Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils, and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters).
Using an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general.
To fix this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody alike.
And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.
And so the poll tax was born.
It faced immediate opposition, but at first it was unclear how this opposition would take form.
The Labour party wanted people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage.
In addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.
To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going to be enough.
For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a necessity.
Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.
The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately successful.
In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.
Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign successful.
Propaganda and spin
The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition.
The government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck.
Poll taxes are never popular, and resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous popular struggles.
The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners, the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to its advantage.
Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing resistance campaign.
A community arts group created a travelling performance about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various communities.
Take pride in resistance
Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors.
Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.
Myth and legend
The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more respectable and part of a patriotic lineage.
There were references to the women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of .
The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax resistance of , in which people placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.
(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)
Surveys
On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense to spread the resistance idea.
One result of the surveys was that between the people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them.
On seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.”
Another clever variety of survey was this:
[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting…
Drown them with paperwork
Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom, and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another.
The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those being taxed.
Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem, and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:
[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back” campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask awkward questions of the council officers.
Its aim was to delay the system and to make “a legitimate protest.”
Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that could later be used against resisters.
Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic, particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:
…councils were inundated with correspondence.
Many people genuinely didn’t understand what the Poll Tax was about.
Others mounted campaigns to delay registration by endlessly asking questions about the form.
All of these had to be answered.
Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work.
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will also produce more people who will refuse to register.
―Poll Tax Legal Group
Make enforcement expensive
Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their court appearance.
Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves, the courts would be unable to handle the load.
Local Anti-Poll Tax unions trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up for their rights in court.
There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.
Warn people enforcers are coming
In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships, neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.
Try to win over tax collectors and collaborators
The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according to the poll tax law.
They also failed to convince the labor union representing the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to implement the tax.
The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters.
Being used to unorganized, ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of collection.
For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay poll tax.
Social boycott of tax collectors and collaborators
The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people from cooperating with the poll tax.
The government tried to recruit newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient supplements for government-run depots like post offices.
But when the resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.
Intimidate tax collectors and collaborators
In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning to vandalism and violence:
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window… [another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door locks jammed with superglue.
Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch mob justice were not uncommon:
One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!”
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.”
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.”
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed their “crimes.”
Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats, and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and threatened” by those he encountered.
On one occasion, molotov cocktails were thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.
A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head of a bailiff company.
Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they held a mock auction of his property.
Destroy or disable collection apparatus
There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the system.
On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed.
On another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home instead as the tax had been rescinded.
Blockades, occupations, and barricades
Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s home and preventing access.
Sometimes this would extend to barricading the streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.
There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as to make business there come to a halt.
Publish and distribute how-to guides
A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process the law was likely to take in their cases.
This gave them the confidence to pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the techniques to make their resistance most effective.
Census resistance
Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was still advising people to register but be angry about it.
When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck).
Although it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who received such questionnaires returned them.
Engender and maintain activism and solidarity
Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance.
People who did not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks.
Even children served as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.
The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of resisters.
This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist elite.
Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:
An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
…[V]irtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.
Support and assist arrested & imprisoned resisters
When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an information package in the mail.
These numbers were posted on walls and utility poles all over.
Volunteers were given legal training so that they could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.
Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside his cell.
The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths, intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless” and “respectable” factions.
This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced themselves from those arrested for “rioting.”
But an independent group formed and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations, and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the defendants (not of any other organization).
Volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.
…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign.
Those who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of prisoners.
The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial support for visits…
Conclusion
The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from.
Danny Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and of the dynamics of how they were applied.
The creative activists of the Free Keene movement are at it again.
This time they’ve formed a group called “Robin Hood of Keene” that shadows parking enforcement officers on their rounds and quickly fills expired meters before they can reach them to write out tickets.
Members of the group place cards under windshield wipers that read,
“Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs, Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
Please consider paying it forward,” and includes an address where donations can be sent.
Alleging that the Robin Hooders have “repeatedly and intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed, and intimidated” the meter officers, the city has filed for a restraining order (the activists insist that this has nothing to do with any intimidation or harassment on their part, but with the city’s loss of revenue from the thousands of parking tickets they have prevented).
In the filing, parking enforcement officer Linda Desruisseaux said,
“Besides following me, crowding around me, making video recordings of my activities, and placing coins in expired meters to prevent me from writing tickets, these individuals repeatedly taunt and harass me, asking why I am stealing peoples’ money and telling me to get another job…
In particular, Graham Colson likes to taunt me by saying,
‘Linda, guess what you’re not going to do today — write tickets.’…
The taunting and harassment tends to get worse when there is a group, as they try to one-up each other at my expense.”
The IRS scandal that all the frogs are croaking about is largely a steaming pile of political bullshit… but the winds are blowing the smell directly into the offices of the IRS, which which is making it an unpleasant place to do business:
A former Internal Revenue Service official who ran the unit now at the center of scandal says the agency is about to be hit by a wave of resignations that he fears will hobble its operations.
“I think there’s going to be a significant number of departures from the agency,” said Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who served as director of the exempt-organizations’ office .
The same post is now occupied by Lois Lerner, who has come under fire for her agency’s treatment of conservative groups.
“That’s going to have an impact on tax collections and tax administration,” said Mr. Owens, who said he thinks the controversy has been overblown.
Mr. Owens, who worked for the IRS for 25 years, said a number of IRS officials have talked to him about their plans to leave.
He said the investigations underway have crushed morale, while some IRS officials are starting to get threatening anonymous calls at home.
In the other IRS scandal, the one that to me seems more actually scandalous, the agency has backed down from its repulsive legal opinion that Americans have no legitimate privacy expectations in their email communications, so agency investigators should feel free to rifle through them without bothering to get a warrant.
The new policy says the agency won’t aim to read your email at all if it is only pursuing a civil action against you, and will “in all cases” obtain a warrant when trying to get your email from whichever Internet service provider is storing it, when pursuing criminal cases.
Fran Quigley at Counterpunch takes another look at the Transform Now Plowshares case, and in particular how the government progressively ratcheted up a misdemeanor trespassing charge against the three pacifists until now they stand convicted of federal terrorism felonies, awaiting sentencing from jail as they’ve been deemed violent criminals too dangerous to release.
The fabled Greek crackdown on tax evasion seems mostly for show: “of the estimated 13 billion euros that government officials say is owed by Greece’s 1,500 biggest tax debtors, only about 19 million euros [≈0.1%] has been collected in .”
A quarter of a century has passed since Ciaron O’Reilly, with a sledgehammer and a bottle of his own blood, took his first tilt at the U.S. war machine.
The Brisbane-born man served what is believed to be the longest jail stint for a civilian protester on U.S. soil during the first Gulf war, over a New Year’s Day sortie by a band of Catholic peace activists into Griffiss air force base in New York in .
He poured blood on a runway from a bottle bearing pictures of Iraqi children and smashed up the tarmac till his hands were blistered, while his cohorts did the same to the engine of a B-52 bomber on standby for raids in the Gulf.
O’Reilly regards an absence of solidarity with the imprisoned U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning — as well as Assange, Snowden and hundreds of conscientious objectors — as the signal failure of a long-hobbled peace movement.
He says a protest leadership that is “increasingly NGO-ish and [based on] left-wing kind of cults” has failed to translate mass demonstrations into support for individuals whose acts have proven much more troublesome to the establishment.
O’Reilly has also been instrumental in fundraising campaigns for “simple things” he says the mainstream anti-war movement has neglected.
These included raising funds to help Manning’s family visit her in Fort Leavenworth prison, where she is serving 35 years for disclosing classified U.S. information, including the “collateral murder” video of Reuters journalists being gunned down by U.S. troops in Iraq.
O’Reilly also helped raise the rent for the partner of the British navy medic Michael Lyons.
She had faced eviction from her apartment after Lyons was sent to Colchester military prison for refusing to go to Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t difficult,” he says.
“And that’s what the anti-war movement should be doing.
If you’re not in jail, you should be supporting people who are for non-violent anti-war resistance.”
He still gets the occasional visit from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, whose main concerns seem to be the Pine Gap U.S. base and the Amberley air force base, west of Brisbane.
The spooks see in O’Reilly a war opponent not content to simply join conventional demonstrations, which he calls “a dead end really, marching up and down empty streets like a strange dance”.
“You should actually go to places like Amberley and Gallipoli barracks [in Brisbane],” he says.
“You’d be more effective with 100 people at the gates there than with 10,000 in the city of Brisbane.
“You can’t have a peace movement with a gentlemen’s agreement where they have a war, and they say, ‘you can have your protest as long as we can have our war’.
“That’s the gentlemen’s agreement that we didn’t stick to.”
Some links that have graced my browser in recent days:
The Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy is “building a European network of companies which support a European tax disobedience movement.”
In short, they’re trying to use the same bag of tricks that multinational corporations use to evade taxes on their profits in order to build an alternative economic network of European dissidents.
Fair.coop also has some commentary on the campaign.
Italian pacifist Turi Vaccaro climbed up a satellite dish at a U.S. military base near Niscemi, Italy, and, over the course of about 34 hours, with manual hand tools, did about €800,000 in damage.
Did the U.S. government ever press charges against Voices in the Wilderness for violating the sanctions?
Kathy Kelly
They would bring us into court with some regularity. It was curious because at one point there was a $50,000 fine. I thought, “What are you going to take — my contact lenses?” I just had to laugh. I mean, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes to the U.S. government as a war tax-refuser since 1980. So there is nothing they could take from me. The people that would go over were in the same boat. So good luck collecting from them!
Spirit
But as it turned out, they did fine your group $20,000, didn’t they?
Kelly
Yeah, they finally took us into court. And I think Condoleezza Rice inadvertently might have saved us. This is speculation on my part, but this much is true. Chevron settled out of court, acknowledging that they had paid money under the table to Saddam Hussein in order to get very lucrative contracts for Iraqi oil.
Condoleezza Rice was the international liaison for Chevron while it was paying money under the table to get these lucrative contracts. So when we finally had our day in court, Sen. Carl Levin’s staffers were still digging up this information and it was beginning to become public evidence that Chevron, Odin Marine Inc., Mobil and Coastal Oil had all been paying money for these oil contracts under the table to Saddam Hussein.
So there were big fish in the pond that broke the sanctions and there were little fish in the pond that broke the sanctions. I think some of the big fish said, “That is one hot potato. You drop that hot potato as fast as you can, and don’t make a big deal because those people are little fish but they’re mouthy little fish.” So they never tried to collect a dime from us. The money was just sitting there.
Spirit
Well, what exactly did happen to you when the U.S. government took you to court for violating the sanctions?
Kelly
We were found guilty and were fined $20,000. Federal Judge John Bates wrote in his legal opinion that those who disobey an unjust law should accept the penalty willingly and lovingly.
Spirit
Unbelievable! A federal judge lectures you about lovingly accepting this unjust fine using the words of Martin Luther King?
Kelly
Yes. We said to Judge Bates, “If you want to send us to prison, we will go, willingly and lovingly. We’ve done that before already. But if you think we will pay a fine to the U.S. government, then we ask you to imagine that Martin Luther King would have ever said, ‘Coretta, get the checkbook.’ We are not going to pay one dime to the U.S. government which continues to wage warfare.” At that time, supplemental spending bills appeared every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and congressional representatives and senators continued to vote yes on those spending bills for the military. So we said, “No, we won’t pay a dime of that fine.”
Spirit
You have also been a war tax resister for a long time.
Kelly
I’m a war tax refuser. I don’t give them anything.
Spirit
Oh, you’re not a 50 percent withholder, like many war tax resisters. You’re a 100 percent withholder?
Kelly
Yes, I’m a 100 percent withholder. I think war tax resistance is important but I happen to be a refuser. They haven’t got one dime of federal income tax from me since 1980.
Spirit
Why did you begin refusing to pay federal taxes entirely?
Kelly
I won’t give them any money. I can’t and I won’t. I won’t pay for guns. I don’t believe in killing people. I also don’t want to pay for the CIA, the FBI, the corporate bail-outs or the prison system. But particularly, I began as a war tax refuser. I wouldn’t give money to the Mafia if they came to my door and said, “We’d like you to help pay for our operations.” I’m certainly not going to pay for wars when I’ve tried throughout my adult life to educate people to resist nonviolently.
Spirit
How have you gotten away with not paying federal taxes ? Do you keep your income low?
Kelly
Many years I have lived below the taxable income. But in , someone from the IRS came to my home. I had in some years claimed extra allowances on the W-4 form. And I just don’t file. I haven’t filed . Now, that’s a criminal offense and they could put me in jail for a long time for that. If I was earning over the taxable income, I would just calculate how many allowances I have to claim so that no money is taken out of my paycheck. It says in the small print on the W-2 form to put down the correct number of allowances so that the correct amount of tax is taken out. Well, that’s easy. The correct amount of tax to take from me is zero, so I just do the math.
Spirit
Why do you think they haven’t come after you?
Kelly
Well, they have come to collect taxes. But I don’t have a savings account, and I don’t own anything. The IRS is like my spiritual director [laughs]. I don’t know how to drive a car, and I’ve never owned any place that I’ve lived in. I just don’t have anything to take.
Spirit
So has the IRS given up on even trying to collect?
Kelly
Once they came out to collect in 1998 when I was taking care of my dear Dad, who was wheelchair-bound, and a bit slumped over in the chair. Dad liked to listen to opera and I had a really awful old record player playing a scratchy record. I had been in the back of the house and I didn’t know she was coming, so I ran down to answer the door while the record player was making such a horrible noise. The apartment was fine but it only had a few sticks of furniture.
The woman asked me if I was going to get a job, and I told her I couldn’t leave my father. Then she asked if I had a bank account, and I said no. She said, “And you don’t own a car?” And I told her I didn’t even know how to drive. Then she just kind of leaned toward me and said, “You know what? I’m just going to write you up as uncollectible.” And I said, “That’s a very good idea.” [laughs] They’ve never tried to collect since. There was just nothing to take! Zero. Nothing.
On your side, you state that those who set themselves against Western wars pay, nevertheless, taxes, which are used by the State for war and the oppression of the colored peoples.
That is quite true.
In fact our anti-militarist struggle also is as yet only something very relative, and it must go on extending.
But in any case, we have fixed clear and inflexible borders: we refuse absolutely all direct, personal participation in war and in its social and moral preparation.
But several of us employ still other means of fighting against it.… Moreover, a few of us have already decided individually to refuse to pay any taxes, whilst the organization of which I am a member has already several times been the propagandist of collective refusal of taxation.
But whereas refusal, even on a very restricted scale, to do military service has been morally and socially efficacious, the refusal to pay taxes by a restricted number of citizens only has so far had very little result, as the authorities, in confiscating property and inflicting fines, take possession of sums much larger than a direct payment of taxes would have brought them.
From this point of view, your compatriots have already given some impressive examples of collective refusal, although they also were not able to avoid regular unfair demands of the Government.
I think “the organization of which I am a member” may have been War Resisters International.
Gandhi’s response to this point is an interesting one:
A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system, which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice being left to him.
I belong to a world, which is partly based on violence.
If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistent with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades.
You can find more of Bart de Ligt’s thoughts on tax refusal, non-violent struggle, and Gandhi’s campaigns in the essay The Effectiveness of Non-Violent Struggle, also on the Satyagraha Foundation site.
And from the academic and related worlds:
A paper by Jay A. Soled and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas on Revisiting the Taxation of Fringe Benefits notes that many companies are compensating their employees with “a cornucopia of fringe benefits, including frequent-flier miles, hotel reward points, rental car preferred status, office supply dollar coupons, cellular telephone use, home Internet service, and, in some instances, even free lunches, massages, and dance lessons.”
Some of these are proving difficult for the government to effectively tax as income.
Gregg Polsky has come up with a potentially useful way of using Roth IRA conversions to keep money away from the tax collector.
Maciej Bartkowski looks at what causes people to break out of their apathy and join risky movements for social change, in Forming a Movement: Cognitive Liberation.
Ruth Benn, at NWTRCC’s blog, takes aim at the “All or Nothing Syndrome” in which some people give up on doing war tax resistance at all because they don’t feel capable of going all-in and resisting everything.
Peace activists in Ireland who broke into Shannon Airport to decommission U.S. military aircraft stationed there have been found not guilty by a jury, who apparently agreed with the defense argument that they were lawfully justified in their actions.
Some recent links of interest:
Merchants in San Francisco’s famed Castro district have gotten fed up with the city’s ineffective response to mentally-ill and/or addicted people wreaking havoc while living outdoors on city streets.
So fed up that the Castro Merchants Association sent a letter to city officials demanding that the city take more effective action and threatening to “stop paying taxes and stop paying the fees for licenses because the city is not providing the services that are supposed to be guaranteed based on what we’re paying to the city.”
Long-time Catholic Worker activist Tom Cornell died .
Joel Schlosberg summarized some of his work, including his war tax resistance, for Antiwar.com: “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War”
