Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Vietnam War, ~1965–75 → Alan Barnett

A UPI dispatch from :

700 Refuse to Pay Tax on Telephones As Protest to Viet

San Francisco (UPI) — A local political group says 700 persons are refusing to pay their federal excise tax on telephone bills in protest of the Vietnam War.

Alan Barnett, an organizer of Marin Associates, says the group’s purpose is to “test the legality of the tax, not to disobey it.”

San Francisco attorney Lloyd McMurray said he is coordinating the hundreds of suits aimed at the federal government.

“We’re not asking the court to enjoin the prosecution of the war,” said McMurray. “We’re asking it to determine whether this taxing power is legal in an undeclared war.”

Tax resistance news from hither and yon:

  • Mark your calendars, as NWTRCC will be hosting a webinar on Defunding Militarism: The Basics of War Tax Resistance at the “Peace Week 2020” events of Campaign Nonviolence. The webinar will be held on . “This session will be an introduction to the why and how of war tax resistance, with discussion of potential consequences and resource referral. This session is for people new to war tax resistance or just getting started.” Register for the webinar at the NWTRCC site.
  • I’ve covered the case of anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman a few times before. He managed to get a hung jury in his previous trial, but then the judge decided he’d prefer a conviction and so refused to allow Bowman to present key parts of his defense during the retrial. That strikes me as a significant thumb on the scales of justice, but such is how things go in the United States these days. In any case, at his retrial without benefit of a jury Bowman was convicted and was recently sentenced to probation and $138,026 in restitution. He says also that the court case has financially ruined him. He plans to appeal.
  • Suzanne and Brayton Shanley, war tax resisters who helped found Agape Community, a Christian intentional community in Massachusetts, have written a book about that project. An article in the National Catholic Reporter gives some background and also clued me in that Agape Community now has a website.
  • War tax resister Alan Barnett has died. Barnett organized a phone tax resistance group in California during the Vietnam War that included hundreds of resisters.
  • Murmurs of tax resistance have been growing in South Africa as taxpayers have become fed up with corruption in the ruling African National Congress, and with the government’s poor response to the CoViD epidemic.
  • Spray paint seems to be the tool of choice in the latest human attacks on traffic ticket robots. People blinded the cameras with paint in the United States, Germany, and France, while other methods were used elsewhere in France.