Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Spain →
Catalonia in 2010–23
The former president of Catalonia, Pasqual Maragall i Mira, told an interviewer that he’s lost patience with legal efforts to improve the status of Catalonia and now advocates a mass tax resistance campaign.
Pasqual Maragall has made an appeal for tax resistance if Madrid does not
submit to the demands of Catalonia. In
an interview
with the magazine Selecciona’t, the
ex-president has indicated that to achieve the recognition of the Catalan
Selections and to improve the country, “all things that are legal, lawful,
are a waste of time.”
Maragall has opted for “the second way, as did the mayor of Barcelona, Doctor
Robert, when Madrid no daba lo que tocaba [I can’t figure
out how to translate that — “didn’t pay the piper?” maybe? —♇], is the closing
of the cashbox. If they don’t give, we don’t pay. I speak of carrying out a
tax resistance campaign. I know that it’s a little hard and risky. But if we
suppose that 10,000 people don’t pay — can they put 10,000 people behind
bars? They can’t put them behind bars! They will levy a fine. We won’t pay,
we won’t pay. If they won’t give, we won’t give.”
“Retallem la despesa militar, fem objecció
fiscal” (“Let’s cut military spending, let’s resist taxes.”)
Eight Antimilitarist Activists Acquitted of Vandalism in Tarragona
Tarragona, (EFE) — The eight
activists accused of antimilitarist graffiti in the New Avenue of Tarragona
have been acquitted in a criminal
trial held in Tarragona, as the judge ruled that the issue should have been
taken up as an administrative rather than a criminal case.
The eight activists had been charged by the Troopers and by the Tarragonian
consistory for having vandalized the street of the New Avenue
in order to incite tax resistance against military spending.
Appeal before the Superior Court ruling to redirect some income tax to non-military social ends
Valencia, (EFE). —
A man has brought an appeal in the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community against the conviction that sentenced him to pay 219 euros to the Treasury that he withheld from his income tax return for and redirected to social ends in protest against military spending.
As he explained to EFE, Jorge Güemes, who declares himself a “war tax resister,” in withheld “some” of the money that he had to pay to the tax agency and redirected it to “more just ends” than military ones.
“I took out the percentage destined for military spending in the Ministry of Defence, dedicated, among other things, to research and development of weapons, and this money of my taxes will go to the group Per L’Horta,” he said, and added that he sent to the Treasury a receipt of his payment to the group.
For Güemes, organizations such as the beneficiary of his gesture can “work better” with that money than, in his opinion, can the Spanish Army.
“The Treasury demanded the money from me and then began a legal back-and-forth of claims and administrative counter-claims up to the present day,” he said, and indicated that this — before the Superior Court of Justice — is the last administrative recourse.
“It seems to me fair and useful what I did.
I saw the injustice that my money was destined to prepare for war and to buy armaments.
I think that one must spend on other things,” he said, and stressed that he means to assert with this attitude a fundamental right.
“I’m not looking for people to be able to pay their taxes a la carte because some taxes seem just to me.
But I plead because the big money is not spent that is tied up in military spending,” he affirmed.
The action is branded in the campaign called “war tax resistance” that for thirty years has led Spanish pacifist and antimilitarist groups such as the Antimilitarist Alternative / Movement of Conscientious Objection (MOC), which pertains to the youth.
The appeal presented today against the last decision of the Regional Administrative Economic Tribunal (TEAR), which confirmed the ruling of the Treasury, maintains that the action of Güemes is an expression of fundamental rights such as the freedom of belief, “that — as defined — covers not only any manner of belief but also the action consistent with it.”
And so, he argues that conscientious objection to the maintenance of armies is an expression of freedom of belief and, therefore, its exercise “would not merely be limited to the now-defunct field of obligatory military service,” and the Constitution and international law consecrate this right.
Civil disobedience that supposes pacifist tax resistance is defended in this appeal as that which “would guarantee the collective political right to live in a peaceful world, against which the support of armies, military spending, and the policies of preparation for war would be an obstacle.”
Vincent Partal, the director and proprietor of “Vilaweb,” an influential Catalan online newspaper, has called for a tax strike against the Spanish government in the cause of Catalan nationalism.
The editorial in which he made this call, “Get angry. Organize. Don’t pay.” is written in Catalan, naturally, which I can only half-decipher with my shoddy Spanish and some help from Google Translate.
Here are some excerpts, or my best guesses anyway:
…we have two options: complain or do something.
Something? Like what? A tax strike.
hundreds of thousands were in the streets demanding respect for Catalonia…
[T]he vast majority of the population is aware of the choking of the economy of our society by the systematic plunder carried out by the Spanish government.
This profound mobilization of civil society that came to life in recent years is more than enough of a base to start an organization of indignation.
From there, deliberate widespread civil disobedience.
If an individual, outraged by the arrogance of the Spanish state, refuses to pay taxes in June, surely in September or in January, he will be a defendant in the tax office or in the courts.
It’s not worth it.
But what if you were talking tens of thousands of people, businesses, and institutions — also institutions — that are refusing to pay, and are organized?
Now, this won’t take off spontaneously.
But it is not difficult to get started and to move it along.
Suppose an organization, Òmnium for example, or its referendum organizers, were to formally declare a sort of tax “Robinson list.”
In such a case, those determined not to pay a personal, business, or institutional tax would only have to sign on, leaving the details to the organizers.
When the deadline came, the organizers could simply certify whether there are enough volunteers to carry out the action or not.
There aren’t enough? Well, nothing is done, we continue to lament.
There are tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? the number is considered sufficient?
In such a case it would suffice to say: Let the deadline pass without paying the tax.
And everything will change.
The little robots I’ve recruited to read the news for me have been hopping up and down and shouting in their little robot voices about something going on in Catalonia.
Much of the shouting is in Spanish and Catalan, though, so it’s taken me some time to figure out what it’s all about.
Òmnium Cultural is a group that promotes Catalan nationalism.
In a speech on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the group , Muriel Casals, its president, announced a four-year plan to make Catalonia fiscally independent from Spain, and said:
We cannot continue to be plundered. We will manage our resources, with the
freedom this implies and the high responsibility that it entails. To do this
we need political and social unity. … If Spain refuses to advance along these
lines, Òmnium Cultural has taken the decision to develop a deliberate and
viable plan to initiate a campaign of tax resistance. Our approach is to
redirect taxes to be administered in an account opened for this purpose. This
account will not be closed until the resolution of the tax grievance suffered
by Catalonia.
La Vanguardia, in its report on the speech, claimed at this point “the applause of the crowd was deafening.”
The scenario has parallels with the famous tancament de
caixes at the end of the 19th century. Take
a look at what is
recorded about that event in the encyclopedias: The call for
tancament de caixes [shutting the cashboxes] was a protest
of traders and industrialists in Barcelona in
against the law of the cabinet of Francisco
Silvela and the finance minister Raimundo Fernández Villaverde. It consisted
of a strike by the traders and industralists so as to stop paying the tax
without being illegal. The protest was led by doctor Bartomeu Robert i
Yarzábal, mayor of the city of Barcelona, and was begun on
. The action was the result
of the colonial crisis of , which led the
Spanish government to impose some restrictive budgets, accompanied by a rise
in taxes, to offset the deficit. The protest was against the earnings tax on
capital and labor and that of personal documents, with some types higher in
Barcelona than in Madrid. The board of the Industrial and Commercial Defense
League announced the protest. It created a standing committee, selected by
the representatives of more than fifty unions in Barcelona. The protest
extended through Sabadell, Mataró, Manresa, Vilafranca, and some traders were
imprisoned for not paying taxes.
Changing names and dates, only with some variations, the description could
apply to present reality, two centuries later, at the dawn of the
21st. Why, however, is tax resistance posed in
this case by Òmnium Cultural not yet possible? It is clear that motives are
not lacking, but perhaps the difference is that Catalonia is not politically
prepared to face the shocks that follow — which would be internal — its
ruling class seems to prefer beating around the bush with statements in order
to escape criticism rather than take the bull by the horns with a decisive
and committed roadmap. The first serves simply as a throw-away and the
second, without a doubt, involves risks, but one day or another you have to
take them if you really want to overcome the current suffocating situation.
Why bother now with a new tancament de caixes? Society is
more prepared than the political class wants to admit.
One such member of the political class is Joaquim Nadal i Farreras, head of the Catalan Socialist Party and minority leader in the Catalan parliament.
He rejected the idea of a tax resistance campaign,
saying, “the popular, attractive, demagogic thing would be to say that I am
siding with the proposal of Òmnium Cultural, but — beware! — because this
nation has many times encountered great explosions of protest or separatism
when finally, at the point of waving your hand, you find that the water seeps
between your toes.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that metaphor, but I
think I get the gist of it.
Joan Laporta, on the
other hand, a member of parliament from the small Catalan Solidarity for
Independence party, called on the president of
Catalonia to immediately launch a tax resistance campaign.
I have always applauded the social movements, but we know that these
initiatives have sometimes had to go over the heads of the political parties
in the defense of the rights and liberties of Catalan citizens. Without
political power, social initiatives can accomplish nothing. I understand
tax resistance as a more positive step. It is the only way to overcome the
economic crisis that the people are suffering.
A spokesperson for the government brushed this off, calling the Òmnium
Cultural proposal “an interesting contribution and consideration” but refusing
to endorse it in the midst of its economic negotiations with the Spanish
government.
A group of city councils will promote a campaign of tax resistance along the lines of Òmnium Cultural
The initiative has emerged from the mayor of San Pedro de Torelló and spokesperson for Decidim.cat, Jordi Fàbrega, who while acknowledging it as “a pressure tactic” that is allowed by the financial arrangement of the Generalitat of Catalonia, does not rule out carrying out a genuine “cierre de cajas” [shutting of the cashboxes] if the number of rebellious cities were to be very large.
The threat of tax resistance raised this week by Òmnium Cultural now has its echo at the municipal level.
Various Catalonian city councils governed by nationalist parties are preparing a campaign of tax resistance that will begin after Summer, under the umbrella of the secessionist platform of Decidim.cat, which groups more than 1,400 elected local officials.
The mayor of San Pedro de Torelló (Barcelona) and spokesperson for Decidim.cat, Jordi Fàbrega (Republican Left of Catalonia), has announced in El Punt that the city council has drafted a motion, that probably will be approved in September, and that can serve as the model for other cities that want to join.
“For some time we have had this idea in mind, and now with Òmnium we have seen clear,” he said.
The text will support the pressure tactic designed by Òmnium, along the lines
of announcing a process of “tax resistance” if there is no end to what the
nationalists call “fiscal plundering.” Fàbrega himself acknowledges that it
is “a pressure tactic,” a political threat, rather than a practical one,
since “you cannot risk the functioning of the city government.” However, if
the number of rebellious cities were to become large, he would not rule out
putting tax resistance into play.
Multiple secessionist initiatives at the local level
Fàbrega, who had been the delegate from the Generalitat in Cataluña Central
until the arrival of the Convergence and Union party in the autonomous
government, is known for his activism at the head of
Decidim.cat. In , the platform launched a campaign of municipal rebellion against
the Supreme Court rulings that required the Generalitat to restore bilingual
education.
Also, he participated actively in another campaign, launched in
, by the city cuncil of Puerto de
la Selva (Gerona), which brought more than a hundred assemblies to declare
themselves “morally excluded” from the Constitution — some of them, with the
help of the Socialists’ Party of Catalonia — in response to the
Constitutional Court ruling on the statute. Previously, there have been
campaigns to lower the Spanish flag from municipal buildings and to raise
estaladas
with total impunity.
More recently new secessionist movements have arisen at the local level. The
most prominent is the one involving the mayor of Vic, Josep Maria Vila
d’Abadal of Unió, known for his proposals to “require immigrants to become
Catalans,” or for dismissing the victims of
ETA
attacks in that region. Vila d’Abadal announced
his intention to create an association
of towns for independence, an initiative that has received the support of the
new mayor of Gerona, Carles Puigdemont (Convergence and Union party).
In other news, while activists on the American left seem most interested in getting corporations and rich people to pay more taxes, in Europe more such activists are asking “why are any of us still paying taxes to these crooks when we know we can put the money to better use than they can?”
I mentioned the tax resistance & redirection campaign launched under the ¡Rebelaos! banner and organized by Derecho de Rebelión.
I’m happy to report that the Spanish war tax resistance movement is lending support to this new movement.
Arcadi Oliveres spoke at a conference on economic resistance over the weekend “concerning military spending and resistance to militarism by means of tax resistance.”
They’re also working on a tax resisters’ handbook.
You can read a draft PDF on-line.
The 200-person town of Gallifa in Catalonia, Spain, has begun tax resistance as a municipality — by refusing to pay €1,662.62 income tax due on the salaries of the employees at the tax office.
The town government is controlled by the small separatist coalition party “Catalan Solidarity for Independence.”
There have been other rumblings of tax resistance lately in Catalan independence circles, and some people have made a symbolic gesture of trying to pay their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government.
A not particularly favorable Spanish-language news article about the Gallifa action gives a good overview of Catalan nationalist tax resistance in recent years (translation mine):
The group from local Barcelona-area government is considering conducting the same action with other taxes, such as the contributions for Social Security.
In , Òmnium Cultural, a radical separatist group that tops the list in terms of subsidies received, launched a new challenge against the present law — more than those it is accustomed to raise — that the federal government grant the Catalan regional government an economic treaty [like the ones that make the Basque region and Navarre more fiscally independent] in the next four years, or it will promote “tax resistance” against the Tax Agency.
This proposal was dismissed by the Catalan government — which considered it “interesting” — and by CiU, while the PSC called it “appealing” but “unrealistic.”
Gallifa is not the only municipality that has initiated an action of this sort.
The Consistory of San Vicente dels Horts (Barcelona) — chaired by the ERC leader Oriol Junqueras — or of Gerona — with Carles Puigdemont (CiU) in charge — also attempted to cheat the national Treasury, but eventually backed down.
I’ve had less luck trying to parse this article (in Italian), but the gist of it seems to be that Italy’s “Northern League” is threatening tax resistance (though it seems I’ve heard similar bluster from them in the past, without much to show for it).
The gist of the grievance is similar to that of Catalonia — that taxes paid by people that live in the region don’t go to provide services there but to prop up economically poorer regions of the country.
Northern League-allied mayors are threatening to kick out the agency that collects federal taxes, and to instead collect and spend these taxes themselves at the local level.
Laura McGonigle said: “I’ve always enjoyed being a public representative and taken the rough with the smooth but tonight was horrendous.
“While everyone is entitled to protest, I felt extremely intimidated and unsafe in our democratically-elected chamber.”
Bill Evans, a pensioner living near Hartlepool, England, is refusing to pay his council tax because the government services it pays for have become so shoddy.
“It has reached the stage where I feel the only thing I can do now is stop paying my council tax,” he says.
“The council is not fulfilling its commitment and I will have my day in court.”
The New York Times profiles American alternative currency martyr Bernard von NotHaus, who is facing serious prison time for minting a set of coins for people who were losing faith in the government’s official legal tender.
Some tax resistance campaigns have tried to partially or completely secede from the government that is taxing them, or to set up alternative parallel governmental or quasi-governmental institutions to compete with or crowd out those of the established government.
When white supremacists in Louisiana lost the gubernatorial election to a reconstructionist candidate in 1872, they formed their own parallel government led by the losing candidate, with their own separate legislature and their own separate militia (with which they briefly occupied the statehouse).
They insisted that they were the legitimate government of Louisiana and recommended that people pay taxes to them and not to the usurpers in the statehouse.
They asserted:
Public opinion throughout the Union is against the usurpation, and our only danger, if there be any, will come from ourselves.
If the people of Louisiana will sanction, by obedience and acquiescence, this Government, they will give it the only validity it can ever acquire.
It is only by our own submission that our cause can be defeated.
We recommend the people of the several parishes, for the purpose of most effectual resistance to this usurpation, and of mutual aid and defense, to join the People’s League of Louisiana by the formation of Parish councils in correspondence with the Central Council at New-Orleans.
We must remember that there can be no de facto government as against a de jure government in a State, and that the only way by which the [governor] Kellogg usurpation can become established as a government is by acquiescence of the people… The people of New-Orleans are not to pay taxes, can not, in fact, pay them, nor are they giving any recognition to the usurpers.
The existence of this shadow government was not only a direct threat to the Kellogg government, but also indirectly made it difficult for it to raise funds because of the uncertainty.
One editorialist explained:
[Kellogg] can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment.
If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title.
Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.
The Rebecca Rioters, confident from their success in destroying tollbooths, started to step in and adjudicate disputes in a quasi-governmental fashion.
For instance, they would visit the homes of fathers of illegitimate children and exact promises from them that they would provide support for the mothers.
During the tax strike that erupted in the French wine-growing region, local government officials resigned en masse and “local Separatist committees professed to take the Government’s place and set up a sort of provincial government.”
The decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela hinted at a tax resistance campaign in .
Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes were being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico established municipios autónomos (autonomous towns) in regions where they were active:
The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority.
In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.
The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state.
In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies.
They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries.
They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter.
In some townships they held trials and set up jails.
Some people in the present-day Catalan independence movement have started paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
An ongoing Spanish tax resistance movement is urging people to create a new, bottom-up, autonomous government of their own, and encourages them to redirect their taxes from the existing government into these new government-like projects:
[T]he construction of autonomy will require a lot of resources.
This process should be based on the ability to work and the generosity of many people, but needs to rely on these resources to make it possible.
By fiscal autonomy we mean all the pathways of redistribution that will make the tax system support initiatives that will really benefit people.
That is to say that the portion that each person is responsible of providing for the common good must be destined for new public services that really place the basic needs of people higher on the scale of priorities.
Therefore it becomes a priority, and all but essential, to generate dynamics of ever more massive civil disobedience against the pilfering of our resources on the part of the state, and to reclaim them for popular self-government.
In the Māori government in New Zealand instructed its subjects there to begin paying a dog tax directly to it, rather than to the New Zealand government-approved County Council.
When the Czar dissolved the Russian Duma in , the Duma refused to dissolve, meeting in Finland and declaring that they were the only government body with the authority to collect and spend taxes, and that therefore so long as they were abolished — so were taxes.
Something similar happened in Germany in , when the military and executive tried to break up the parliament.
The parliament then called on the people to refuse to pay any more taxes to the government.
When the government responded by trying to cut off funds for parliament, “the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition.”
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Another town in Catalonia, Alella, has begun refusing to forward its municipal taxes to the Spanish central government and is instead paying the money to the Taxation Agency of Catalonia, as part of a spreading Catalan nationalist tax resistance movement.
(Més)
If you missed the conference call with Cindy Sheehan, Ruth Benn, Ed Hedemann and three other war tax resisters talking shop, you can hear a recording here.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has an update on tax fraud perpetrated by U.S. prisoners, an industry that has been growing in recent years.
In , prisoners filed at least 91,434 tax returns that claimed $757,600,000 in refunds that they did not legally qualify for.
The IRS caught most of this in time, but still issued $35,200,000 in refunds they wish they hadn’t.
Say… what’s going on with the tax resisters in Spain these days?
There are two active tax resistance campaigns that I know about: one is a sort of expanded war tax resistance campaign that has grown to include a critique of centralization and of austerity budgets that favor international bankers over taxpayers and citizens; the other is part of a Catalan independence movement that is upset that the region is paying far more in taxes to the central government than it receives in government benefits and services.
The first of these groups is updating their “Right of Rebellion” manifesto for the coming tax year and is fine-tuning the way in which they encourage people to redirect their tax money from the central government to local, autonomous social welfare projects.
They are also continuing to staff “economic disobedience offices” to give face-to-face advice to resisters.
Something that’s new to me is that they’re promoting something they call “Desobediència Integral” (Comprehensive Disobedience):
Comprehensive disobedience involves breaking the social contract with the state of the territory where you live, in order to make a new social contract with a community in which the individual feels really connected.
This campaign has provoked a backlash from that portion of the left that sees the central government as an important part of its program and is threatened by proposals to weaken it.
An organization called the “Grupo de Trabajo Economía Sol” (Sun Economy Working Group) made the following criticisms:
If people withhold taxes from the government, the government will probably begin cutting the budgets of education, health, and social welfare programs before those of the more objectionable parts of the government.
The law now requires Spain to make debt payments a priority over social spending, so if you reduce tax revenue, you do nothing to fix the problem of illegitimate debt, but only hurt recipients of social spending.
Tax revenue should be managed by the people as a whole, and not by small groups on a local scale.
The projects proposed as recipients for tax redirection may be nice, but they are lacking in transparency and in democratic control.
Meanwhile, the Tortoise Antimilitarist Group is ramping up its more traditional war tax resistance campaign.
In the second of these campaigns, some 650 municipalities in Catalonia have decided not to forward the taxes they withhold from their employees (and certain other taxes they administer) to the central government in Madrid, but instead to give the money to the Catalan Tax Agency.
This is something of a symbolic measure as the Catalonian government itself sends this money along to Madrid, but the rebellious towns see this as an opening gambit in a series of measures it hopes will lead to increased Catalan independence.
Here’s a bit more about the tax resistance campaign that activists for
Catalan independence are engaged in:
mayors of several Catalan municipalities posing with their tax
documents in front of the Tax Agency of Catalonia
“Spain is robbing us,” a number of impatient Catalan municipalities are
saying, and in response several have begun depositing their taxes with the regional Catalan tax agency rather than forwarding them to the
federal government as the law demands. The tax resistance campaign is
being organized by Catalunya Diu Prou (“Catalonia Says ‘Enough’ ”),
which says that some freelancers and independent businesses, which are
responsible for their own tax withholding, will follow suit.
About twenty resisters gathered in the Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona to launch a symbolic tax resistance action in which they will withhold a token amount (such as €50) from
their tax payments in protest against government corruption. They plan
to pay this money into an escrow account and not turn it over to the
government until their demands are met, which demands include legal
changes that they hope would bring transparency to the actions of the
government and of politicians.
The “Google” brand has earned a lot of warm fuzzy associations in my
heart, with all of the generous contributions the company has made to the
project of expanding the availability of knowledge and information. But
those who find its size, ubiquitousness, and growing intrusiveness
somewhat ominous have a point, and that point got a lot more pointed to me
recently when someone pointed me to a page touting a new book, due to be
released tomorrow I think, by Google executive chairman (and former
CEO
Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen (“a former adviser to
secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton”).
The description of the book’s content isn’t what caught my attention
(it was pretty vague anyway). What grabbed me was the list of people who have provided blurbs, which includes:
Tony Blair
Bill Clinton
Henry Kissinger
Michael Hayden (former CIA director)
Madeleine Albright (former U.S. Secretary of State)
Robert Zoellick (former World Bank president and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State)
Michael Bloomberg (notoriously nanny-stateish New York City mayor)
Brent Scowcroft (former U.S. National Security Advisor and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board chairman)
This, apparently, is the audience Schmidt & Cohen feel like enthusing when they are talking about “the new digital age” to come, and that gives me a bit of a chill.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
The campaign to get people and institutions in Catalonia to redirect their Spanish federal taxes to the Catalan regional government continues to pick up steam.
About a dozen companies and a dozen more municipalities are participating in the redirection campaign, and they were recently joined by three members of congress: Alfred Bosch, Joan Tardà, and Teresa Jordà.
The campaign seems to be largely symbolic, as the current policy of the Catalan tax office is just to re-redirect such taxes back to the federal treasury.
This also means that the federal government has not felt any urgent need to take reprisals against the redirectors.
I get the feeling the redirecters hope to change this policy, and hope that when they do, people will already be in the habit of sending their taxes to the regional agency.
If you’d like to catch up on the interesting autonomist tax resistance
movement in Spain, and its “Offices of Economic Disobedience”, and you’re up on your español, you might take a listen to Barrio Canino’s Radio Ágora Sol show.
“Already there is an embrionic tax agency that we would like to have,
and we think that it should be the first great structure of State and
that we will have to have it as soon as possible.” [Quim] Arrufat [of
Candidatura d’Unitat Popular] defended symbolic
actions as a path for changing things: “Symbolism is a great weapon for
all those who want to change reality. The sum of small individual
actions is that which triggers grand political events.”
According to the article, 100 municipalities have passed resolutions to
pay their taxes in this way (twelve have already done so), and 500
individuals have also done this.
The text of the motion says that “day by day Catalonia appears more
afflicted by a financial strangulation derived from the politicization
of economic decisions taken by the Government of Madrid,” that involves
a “grave obstacle” for towns to be able to offer services that have been
entrusted. “The serious looting keeps us from getting back on our feet,”
it adds.
The IRS scandals
The piranha continue to churn the waters around the increasingly meatless corpse of the IRS Scandals of . Things that in normal times would become just-another-minor-government-scandal are now getting the high melodrama treatment. Case in point: an IRS information technology contractor who had a cozy relationship with an influential insider at the agency, and who manipulated government programs that give preferential treatment to contractors who are in certain economically-troubled areas or are owned by disabled veterans (in this case, the owner broke his foot, decades ago, while in a military prep school).
The IRS gives “purchase cards” to its employees in lieu of expense accounts. A recent audit found that employees had used these cards to purchase $140 meals, diet pills, romance novels, online porn, a “world’s largest crossword puzzle,” and… I’m trying to picture this… “kazoos, toy boats, and Thomas the Tank Engine rubber wristbands for managers’ meetings.”
While I was busy going through Friends Journal back
issues, I didn’t attend much to tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so
I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the news about international tax
resisters that caught my notice:
Since the fall into hell of the American financial giant Lehman Brothers in
, international banks have
received injections of public money coming from various governments to the
tune of $4.6 trillion, an amount sufficient to eradicate world hunger 92
times over. This embarrassing data forms part of an investigation from Arcadi
Oliveres, professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona and president of the organization Justícia i Pau
(“Justice and Peace”). Oliveres was, 30 years ago, one of the originators of
the first tax resistance initiative organized in our country. He decided, in
defiance of the Law, but favoring his conscience, not to contribute to the
government’s military spending. He became a tax resister. Today, for reasons
like the data cited above, many citizens have begun processes of resistance
that involve new ways to use their money.
Those first war tax resisters of
opened a new path for the honorable citizen. It was not meant to trick the
Treasury so as to keep the money. The taxpayer challenged the collector, and
questioned the legitimacy of the spending they considered immoral. In the
absence of ethical behavior from the state, the good citizen, they argued,
did not have to obey it. “The people are afraid to disobey, but if nobody had
done so before there would still be slaves on the streets and blacks would be
standing in the back of the bus,” Oliveres told Números
Rojos. The professor took as model conscientious objectors who refused
to do compulsory military service in : “For not wanting to do their military year and a half they were
sent to prison for three years, even to penal colonies in the Sahara. They
had no fear; for this reason they were so important.” That struggle is
won — compulsory military service was abolished in Spain on
— though war tax
resistance, which began to be practiced in
continues to be considered illegal evasion.
Calculating the Deduction
The process of becoming a tax resister is very simple, although there is no
fixed rule. It amounts to adding to your tax return a new deduction of
x euros, corresponding to your personal contribution to government
military spending. But the calculation of this option can have a variety of
sources: some people estimate military spending in the total federal budget
each year and apply this percentage directly as a deduction on their return
(between 6–15%, depending on which items are considered military spending).
Others take as their reference the data suggested each year by antimilitarist
platforms (last year military spending of €666.14 per person was calculated).
And others redirect a fixed amount each year from the taxes owed on their
return (traditionally €84). Then, depending on how the final result changes,
the objector may have to pay less to the Treasury than is owed — if it is
positive — or may recover more money from the Treasury than it has to
pay — if it is negative.
In either case, before filing, the objector has already redirected the amount
he or she does not accept as legitimate government spending to an institution
for social good — whichever the objector wants, although there are lists of
groups to contribute to. Of course, the reasons for resisting are specified
on the return itself, and also communicated to the tax agency at the time of
filing. But what happens next? “if it comes out negative, you will claim an
amount from the Treasury, which is not returned to you, and generally that’s
that. But when it is positive, you neglect to pay a part. In this case, it
may be that nothing happens — according to Ecologists in Action, in 90% of
cases the incident goes undetected — but the tax agency may come after you
and end up levying not only the amount you refused to pay but also an
administrative penalty,” Oliveres said.
With exceptions, like in when the Supreme
Court of Catalonia found in favor of the former Catalonia Parliament deputy
Joan Surroca, who in deducted from the
amount that he had to pay in taxes a percentage corresponding to military
spending and gave the money to an
NGO
that assists African women. The treasury then fined him 54,896 pesetas (€329),
a penalty that Surroca appealed. Finally the court ruled in his favor by
understanding that the offender, by sending his resisted taxes to an
NGO,
did not have the intent to profit from his action. A landmark judgment, but
precise.
But how many pacifist tax resisters are there in Spain? It is difficult to
calculate — not everyone who does it talks about it — but according to the
associations and platforms associated with this movement there may be between
1,000 and 2,000 people each year: “the number is very stable, although there
are sharp peaks in times of armed conflict when Spain is involved, as with
the Iraq war,” explains Arcadi Oliveres. So in the fiscal
campaign, it is estimated that at least
5,000 people became tax resisters. Today, the economic crisis has not
produced a significant increase in antimilitarist objectors, “even allowing
for awful data, like the fact that in the
state spent €1,300 million to construct a combat aircraft, the same amount of
money that it saved by freezing pensions.”
From pacifism to rebellion
In , the Right of Rebellion movement
(www.derechoderebelion.net),
with the help of more than €8,000 raised through a crowdfunding initiative,
printed 5,000 copies of the “Manual of Economic Disobedience” (the edition is available on the web), a
document intended, in its own words, “to all of those people who would like
to take steps to make their lives exemplars of their thought and feeling.” So
the group intended to “initiate and extend a campaign of tax resistance aimed
at the Spanish state and at those who control it… to show that we will not
pay their debts, because we do not recognize the existing Constitution or the
existing puppet government of global financial capitalism…”
As the most important step of disobedience, the manual teaches the option of
making a partial income tax resistance, similar to that of the war tax
resisters, but including also deductions for such items as the amortization
of public debt, the interest on the debt, payments for the monarchy, the
Senate, the prisons, the police, or the church, until the total comes to
almost 30% of the federal budget. The authors of the manual make it clear that
the decision about what parts to deduct must be decided by the taxpayer, but
suggest a standard 25% of what is on the return.
Offices of Disobedience
The goal of resistance is to divert money that doesn’t go to the Treasury to
“autonomous projects that will be useful to meet the needs of the people.”
After publishing its manual, and without much time to prepare, Right of
Rebellion began organizing a series of Offices of Economic Disobedience in
various cities around the nation, which learned about and advised anyone who
was interested in becoming a tax resister in the tax resistance campaign of
. Although it is difficult to know the exact
number of people who joined this campaign, the figures tossed about by
different offices were very modest, not reaching even a hundred or so
resisters. In spite of this, the constituents of the Office of Economic
Disobedience in Lavapiés (Embajadores, 49; Madrid), considered the
accounting “very positive”: “not so much with the economic level of project
supported — just over €18,000 in total — but by, above all, the number of
people, from all classes, who were interested in this issue.”
Meanwhile, as the tax season numbers are coming in, Right of Rebellion
continues to promote other forms of disobedience, such as certain techniques
of resistance to the
VAT (in the
declarations of independent companies or cooperatives), rent for people who
have been evicted (preventing or indefinitely delaying the eviction), or
bankruptcy (as freedom to carry out different actions). The ultimate goal
would be an actual departure from the “official” economic system and the
creation of new, alternative forms of living.
Integrated Cooperatives
The “Manual of Economic Disobedience” relies on a call for comprehensive
cooperatives, “a legal form that allows construction of an arena of
autonomous economic relations among the participants that is protected from
public or private liability, and quite legally minimizes tax and social
insurance liability, shielding as much as possible from the acts of the banks
or government.” Furthermore, this new way of life permits “bankrupt or
unemployed beings as people, according to the system and the existing legal
framework, but at the same time to be able to live completely normally,
working and consuming in an autonomous manner, without worrying about
seizures of prior debts.” In short, a permanent economic disobedience, a
collective evasion of the system clinging to a self-sufficient,
multisectorial structure, where the members, involved to a lesser or greater
extent, coexist and cooperate at the margin of the system. Indeed, the
cooperatives possess a system of communal services, using alternative
currencies and relying on self-financing social cooperatives to obtain credit
without interest.
The Solidarity Scam
One of the major promoters of the Catalan Comprehensive Cooperative is Enric
Durán. This activist burst into the limelight in
when he announced himself, in
an article in the self-published Crisi, which had
“stolen” €492,000 from the banks. Step by step, he described how he had taken
out 68 different loans from 39 banks on various pretenses: to buy a car,
renovate his house,
etc. And how he
had created a shell company and falsified documents to justify nonexistent
income, in order that the credit control system would not detect its growing
debt.
While the mainstream media were trumpeting his “exploit,” Enric fled to South
America with €8,000 in his wallet. The rest had been given, as was explained
in the manifesto, to autonomous social project. This action, whether described
as financial disobedience or a solidarity con, sounded around the world and
the press named its actor the “Robin Hood of banks.” Enric returned to take
credit for the legitimacy of his action, and was imprisoned
. He was finally
released, though with a pending criminal trial that was to have been held
. Enric failed to attend “because
he doesn’t believe that the judicial system has standing to judge,” so the
Provincial Court put out a bench warrant for him on
. The prosecutor asked for an
eight-year sentence, six for an ongoing offense of falsifying a commercial
document, and two for criminal bankruptcy.
While eluding justice, Durán continues to vindicate resistance: “any act of
insubordination is a welcome step, and although at first it may seem like an
isolated action, it is from such small actions that we build a strategy with
a long-term goal,” although clearly these processes are initially marginal,
“historically risky actions, if they involve individual responsibility, are
taken only by the minorities involved. The key is that these minorities are
able to organize to better influence the majorities.”
Disobedience of the system
Other citizens who dissent from the economic relations imposed by the system,
like the lawyer, writer, and expert on disobedience José Luis Carretero, do
not understand the processes of economic disobedience as an “exit”: “you have
to take a step toward disobedience, but not as an alternative to
confrontation. You can’t get anything without an effective, mass
confrontation.” Carratero has reservations about measures like tax
resistance, “it has a very limited and token run. I get these dynamics if
they are done with other actions, like the occupation of vacant housing for
instance. In the short run, I think we should try to find an alliance with
various sectors that are confronting austerity. In the long run, turn back
the social segmentation processes that have taken place in recent decades.
But from the grassroots, not from outside of the system.” For Carretero, since
the 15-M outbreak,
as the topic of disobedience is no longer taboo, “those who talk about these
things were once marginal — I felt like a Martian. Most saw capitalism as a
good thing that allowed you to have a house or a car. That has changed
somewhat, but the problem remains that they see no alternative.”
With less theory and more concrete actions, the campaigns of economic
disobedience of the “I won’t pay” movement have taken root in many sectors
through social networking, where they already have some 30,000 followers.
They called a rebellion against toll roads in Catalonia and managed to get
some 60,000 people, according to Abertis, the collecting company, to refuse
to pay to use the road. They managed to mobilize,
, hundreds of people in several
demonstrations in Madrid against the so-called “rate hikes” for public
transit, which upped the price of tickets for members of the community some
11%. Another action called “I won’t repay” inspired citizens not to pay the
euro-per-prescription in the communities where it was imposed — Catalonia and
Madrid — before it was suspended by the Constitutional Court. According to
the founder of “I won’t pay,” Álex Corrones: “Not only do we believe that it
is right to disobey laws that are unjust, but that it is our obligation as
responsible citizens.” For Corrones, it is not enough to demonstrate:
“demonstrations have been controlled. And if they get out of hand, there are
200 cops to fire on command.”
war tax resisters in Asturias
A report on
the war tax resistance campaign in Asturias this year said that it had
“led workshops in all parts of Asturias, conducted five street actions, and
has delivered thousands of information packets, which have been supplemented
by the educational conference with Tica Font and Pere Ortega of the
Centro Delás research center, and
the contributions of Arcadi Oliveres in another conference.”
The group is pushing for a referendum on Catalan independence, and is meanwhile trying to create a new state within the shell of the old, by creating new Catalan institutions and trying to vest in them the authority currently held by federal ones.
One of these is a Catalan tax agency, and some resisters have adopted the tactic of paying their federal taxes there instead of to the federal agency.
Italy’s is the latest government to try to slip new taxes into utility bills as a way of trying to sneak tax hikes past its subjects — the latest is something called “tares” which is ostensibly part of the garbage bill.
A “No Tares Steering Committee” is preparing a tax strike in protest.
Peggy Thomas, a retired teacher who lives in Hebden Bridge, is refusing to
pay the Inland Revenue some of her income tax. She is a conscientious
objector and against taxes being used for warfare.
Peggy told the HebWeb that the nature of conscientious objection had
completely changed. Today, it is not about young people refusing to fight; it
is about money. Today’s wars can be fought with just a few men but the
weapons are much far more expensive and deadly. That’s why she’s withholding
a proportion of her tax, a proportion which would otherwise be spent on war
and weapons.
Peggy told the HebWeb, “At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, the then
Chancellor Gordon Brown, told the House of Commons not to worry about how our
participation in the ‘coalition of the willing’ would be financed. He assured
MPs and the country that all the
money needed would be available. Of course it was; 10% of the Government
budget is set aside for warfare.”
Peggy is not alone in withholding taxes.
An organisation called “Conscience” is campaigning to end compulsory contributions to warfare.
Conscience believes that those who object in principle to warfare should be able to divert 10% of their taxes to peaceful pursuits.
For example, some people donate their 10% withheld tax to charities such as Oxfam.
When Peggy first started withholding her tax, the Inland Revenue ignored her,
and just took the tax she owed out of any refund she was due. If she sent a
letter explaining, they’d reply that they couldn’t enter into correspondence
about the matter.
But this year the Inland Revenue started to get a little more serious with
Peggy and started to talk about debt collection agencies. Conscience were
able to reassure Peggy that in the first instance the debt collection agency
would not be allowed to take anything from her. And that what she should do
is write to the debt collection agency explaining the situation.
In her letter, Peggy wrote, “The right of conscientious objection, which was
won, not without a struggle, during the First World war, protected people who
did not want to kill other people from having to take part in warfare. Once
conscription was abolished, this right was taken from us. Now our money is
conscripted and used to finance killing.”
“The poorest are footing the bill for those in multiple occupancy. The burden
is put on the very poor,” she said.
“I am doing this for many of us, not just myself. Everyone I speak to says
‘we support you, our mother or our father is like you, they are struggling
too.’
“The only weapon we have got is not to pay council tax.”
She said she has been paying some of her council tax but she could not afford
to pay all of it.
“I have been paying £25 a month and that is all I can afford,” she said.
Your international tax resistance news round-up:
In northern Italy, a group of small businesses have united under the banner “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” (tax protest to the bitter end) to begin to refuse paying taxes.
We can no longer pay protection money to a phantom state.
Join this group of people who have decided to lift our heads, a group of businesspeople who have had enough of this extortion practiced by a corrupt and criminal class with their legal scam of extorting money from businesspeople, from companies, from Italian households to expend revenues on their own interests, while starving citizens who cannot pay more under threats and victimization from the tormenters of the state.
(Caveat: I pieced this translation together from Google Translate and some educated guesses based on Spanish grammar.)
some of the participants in “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” declaring that they won’t pay any more protection money to the government
[I decided to begin resisting] in December, when I got the bill from INPS [for the social security tax] — about three thousand Euros!
When they asked me for that money, I felt like an ATM with breast cancer.
So after having paid the INPS contribution every year , I decided not to pay it.
In Italy, Giovanni Paolo Ramonda, general manager of the Community of Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, spoke at a conference on the theme of “peace is the best defense.”
He called on the government to create a “Ministry of Peace” and to allow taxpayers to choose to direct their taxes there instead of to military spending, and, “in the absence of this… we call on everyone to perform war tax resistance.”
Mr Lester told the court that domestic and international laws stipulate that when war is illegal, the collection and payment of council tax to the government is a war crime.
Mr Lester argued that the money going to Havant council went into a central pot of government cash.
He told magistrates: “International law applicable to the U.K. as well as our own domestic legislation forbids me from becoming party to criminal acts being committed on an ongoing basis by the U.K. government.
“It overrides any otherwise lawful requirement placed upon me by U.K. government.
I submit it is beyond the scope of the powers of any public body, in this case Havant Borough Council, to require anyone to commit a crime.”
He added: “I am not trying to achieve national chaos.
I am trying to achieve the end of this country’s illegal and immoral use of war.”
Lester lost his court case and is appealing.
In Malakasa, Greece, the mayor, deputy mayor, and aldermen were among those arrested at a toll gate protest at which the protesters raised the gates and waved cars through, and later destroyed some of the tollbooths.
In another action in , the mayor of Pelasgias took a city-owned bulldozer and knocked down the railings along the roadside leading up to a tollbooth, creating a bypass around it.
A movement that is resisting increased fares on government-run monopoly public transit, which I first noticed in Mexico under the name “Pos Me Salto” has gone thoroughly international.
In Rio de Janiero, Brazil, protesters of the passe livre movement occupied the central station:
After marching peacefully from the Candelaria area dozens of activists from the Black Block group sprinted off and entered the station before police could close the gates.
They smashed turnstiles, waved flags and entreated commuters to enter the train system without paying.
Riot police and station security temporarily regained territory with pepper spray and percussion grenades, but after a brief hiatus the demonstrators regained control of the concourse and started drumming, dancing and singing as passengers — many clutching handkerchiefs to their faces because of the pungent police gas in the terminal — passed by without paying.
“I totally support this protest,” said Fabiana Aragon, a red-faced, teary-eyed health worker who was heading home after work.
The 43-year-old said she spent almost a third of her 1,000 reals income on transport fares but still had to endure long delays, dirty trains and hot, crowded carriages without air conditioning.
“The situation now is absurd.”
Meanwhile, in London, England, a mini fare strike was launched to support the unions of transit employees.
The government is hoping to cut back on ticket booth workers in favor of vending machines; the union, naturally, disapproves.
As part of the union’s pressure tactics, they have decided on periodic “revenue actions:”
This means that station staff will refuse to carry out “revenue duties”, including selling and checking tickets.
Ticket office windows will be closed and ticket machines will be powered down.
Revenue Inspectors will not conduct checks and issue penalty fares, and, except in cases where crowd control means it’s unsafe to do so, ticket gates will be kept open.
In other words… free travel!
Resources are being organized with sample letters, flyers, and volunteer counselors who will inform and assist anyone who wants to stop paying a tax we consider illegitimate.
“We expect a lot of participation, with tens of thousands of people participating and sending a strong warning to those responsible.”
In Catalonia, the nationalist movement is pressing for a referendum on independence from Spain, though one which the Spanish government has already said it has no intentions of honoring (or even permitting).
The movement has long been engaging in sporadic, and mostly symbolic, tax resistance actions.
Recently the Catalan National Assembly considered launching a fresh tax resistance campaign.
With this campaign (“From disobedience to sovereignty”) the ANC proposes that rather than paying taxes to the national Treasury to pay them into the Catalan Government, to initiate a “progressive disengagement from the State.”
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.
A trial of several bonnets rouges on charges of highway tax portal destruction has been put off until September, and the defendants are now all out on bail.
But meanwhile, the government has won its first conviction in another case:
Samantha Prime, a 19-year-old student, was recently convicted of burning a highway radar outpost .
She was given a six-month suspended sentence along with 175 hours of community service and an as-yet-undetermined fine for damages.
Rural Catalans, who are legally organized under a quasi-municipal government called the Decentralized Municipal Entity, approved a tax resistance motion that would have people in Catalonia redirect their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government.
The federal government took them to court for this, but the court ruled that the non-binding motion of advocacy was “political speech” and was within the Entity’s authority.
El Confidencial, however, has declared the campaign a failure, claiming that fewer than 1,500 people have begun redirecting their federal taxes in this way so far, a much lower figure than the movement had hoped for at this stage.
Sales tax refuseniks in Salzburg, motivated by disgust at bank bailouts, have won the applause of their neighbors, but have had a hard time making their resistance stick. The government froze Wolfgang Reichl’s bank account until he paid taxes and penalties, for instance, but he vowed to resist again.
It’s time for another brief international tax resistance round-up:
Catalan businesses and local governments are cooperating to figure out ways to redirect federal business taxes into the local Catalan treasury.
Currently, the Catalan authorities simply forward such taxes along to the central government, so this is a symbolic gesture, but, as one of the resisters put it, “if we all did this, the Catalan government would suddenly have the power to decide not to pay taxes to Madrid.
That’s one of our goals.”
While home-brewing is legal in the United States, home distilling is not.
Distillation of drinkable alcohol is highly regulated (and taxed).
But nonetheless, home distilling has become a popular hobby, and the federales have been largely looking the other way and not harassing hobbyist-level distillers (as opposed to commercial moonshiners).
That sadly appears to be changing.
The Other Eye, a Catalan journal, recently published Carles Valentí’s essay on tax resistance, which is another example of the Spanish tax resistance movement expanding beyond war tax resistance to a broader critique of corrupt, wasteful, and harmful government spending.
Italy’s “Northern League” likes to talk about tax resistance a whole bunch, but I don’t see as much evidence of them moving from talk to action as I’d like.
The latest example of this big talk comes from party Secretary Matteo Salvini, who called for a tax strike to begin on . We shall see.
Some tax resistance news from Europe:
Spain / Catalonia
Catalonia, banned from holding a formal vote on independence, held a more informal plebiscite on the question recently.
The voters overwhelmingly approved of an independent Catalan state.
This will probably revitalize a long-simmering tax resistance campaign in which Catalan municipalities and taxpayers were paying their taxes to the regional government rather than the federal government.
There are also more traditional pacifist war tax resisters in Spain, such as Antonio Martín Canaves, who explained his stand in a recent letter-to-the-editor.
Italy
Governments seem to be increasingly using public utility monopolies as ways
of increasing government extractions of money from citizens without raising
“taxes.” New fees, increased rates, and complex bureaucratic reorganizations
that leave the government richer and the citizens poorer, are among the tools
in this chest.
The VAT is very
similar to what is being promoted as the “Fair Tax” idea in the United States.
“Fair Tax” promoters ought to take heed from this warning from victims of the
German VAT:
People are realizing that they have been living a fairy tale. The politicians
swore that VAT taxes
would reduce income taxes. They did not. They were more repressive and have
reduced the long-term economic growth throughout Europe. The administrative
burden upon business is outrageous with each layer having to account up the
chain rather than a sales tax that only the seller need collects.
The government had contracted with a private company to administer and collect
the tax. That contract guaranteed that company a certain amount of money,
whether or not the tax was collected. The government suspended the tax, but it
is still on the hook for about €1 billion in payments to this company.
[T]he group is encouraging Catalans to use an arcane legal formula to pay their taxes to an escrow account controlled by the regional government.
That would potentially deny more than 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to the Spanish state, which is legally entitled to collect taxes directly in Catalonia and most of the rest of country
The technique allows taxpayers to meet their legal obligations to the state before the regional government transfers the money to Madrid.
If the dispute over Catalan sovereignty turns nasty, the regional government can then withhold revenue from Spain without exposing voters to legal or financial reprisals from the central government.
“One of the most important spiritual directors in my life has been the Internal Revenue Service.
Janis Joplin’s lyric, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ comes to mind.
War tax refusers learn ways to become impervious to collection, and that generally means finding ways to live without owning property, relying on savings, or growing attached to a job that one couldn’t leave in the event of an IRS notice about wage garnishment.
“Becoming a war tax refuser was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made and one of the easiest decisions to maintain.
I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”
The War Resisters League have come out with their annual U.S. Federal Budget Pie Chart, which purports to tell you “where your income tax money really goes.”
This is based on the Obama administration’s budget proposal for , which is more than usually an exercise in showmanship as the Republicans who control Congress will get the final say.
Still, the chart makes for a useful conversation starter in some contexts.
In Greece, too, the new government has moved to make things easier for those who practiced tax refusal in recent years.
Such resisters can, if they agree to begin paying something, have large hunks of their arrears written-off, and can make plans to pay the rest in up to 100 small installments without any interest of penalties.
As in the case of Scotland, critics are suggesting that these moves will encourage future tax resisters to be more bold in the hopes that they too might benefit from a future amnesty.
“Disobey!” reads the protest banner on an altered €5 note
Some tax resistance news out of Spain:
The Nueva Tribuna of Spain reminds its readers that “war is funded with your taxes,” and describes the latest war tax resistance campaign launched by pacifist and antimilitarist groups like Ecologists in Action.
The Association of Catalan Municipalities and the Association of Municipalities for Independence are launching a campaign to get local government bodies in Catalonia to pay their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government rather than to the federal government.
This is currently mostly a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan government is forwarding such payments along to the central tax administration, but the groups see this as a way of laying the groundwork for independence and as giving the regional government financial leverage in its fight.
They also hope that by convincing local governments to do this they will also encourage people and businesses to follow suit.
The Knowckers.org site has tried to tally up how much the Bonnets Rouges movement cost the French government during its successful campaign against the highway tax, and to explain the cross-ideological appeal of the movement.
The Pope came to visit, and gave a shout-out to Catholic Worker activist and war tax resister Dorothy Day in his address to Congress.
It’s been amusing watching politicians and activists from just about every ideological niche try to claim the Pope as one of their own… it reminds me of the old saw about the blind men and the elephant.
Or maybe it’s similar to how so many different ideologies, practices, and beliefs all claim to be interpretations of the real teachings of Jesus — nowadays we all get to interpret the Pope in our own way too…
Is the Pope Catholic? Perhaps with a lower-case “c”.
A coalition of nationalist parties won the recent Catalan election, which
they were billing as a referendum on independence. They have vowed to begin
to separate from Spain within the next couple of years. Part of this
independence campaign has already begun, with a number of municipalities,
businesses, and individuals paying their federal taxes to the state
government of Catalonia. “The key element that will permit us to exercise and maintain our independence will be the collection of all of the taxes by the government of Catalonia,”
according to planning documents of the coalition. The state currently
forwards those taxes on to the central government, so this form of tax
resistance is largely a symbolic gesture. But the new government hopes to
make this currently somewhat-illicit process official and then, eventually,
to cut off the central government. In case of conflict with the central
government over how taxes are to be paid, they may launch a blockade of the
federal tax offices so as to encourage people to file with the Catalan tax
authorities instead.
Merchants across Pakistan have been conducting strikes to protest a new withholding tax on bank transactions.
“If the government does not accept our demands,” said Naeem Mir, one of the strike leaders, “we will
observe a series of shutter-down strikes… in the four provinces and in each
and every small and big city in protest against the cruel taxation measures
of the so-called business-friendly government.” The new taxes are being
blamed on IMF-required
austerity and on the expenses of Pakistan’s version of the “war on
terror.”
Greece
The economic crisis in Greece has crushed what was already a pretty weak
state of “taxpayer morale” — the “won’t pay” movement that practiced
noncompliance with taxes and road tolls helped bring down the government
and sweep a left-wing coalition into power. One of this new government’s
officials, deputy finance minister Alexis Haritsis, was a “won’t pay” activist.
Greeks are turning away in disgust from the official economy in general, increasingly turning to barter to get their needs met.
Italy
Fifty condominium owners in Prino, Italy, have organized to stop paying
the “IMU”
municipal property tax in response to the city’s neglect of public spaces,
including a filthy public square with a broken fountain that’s become a
rubbish heap, poor upkeep of drainage that leads to flooding, and bad
traffic management. A letter announcing the strike, signed by all fifty,
was sent to the mayor and other city officials.
Some international tax resistance news that has flashed over my screen in recent days:
Catalonia
A report in Negocios.com suggests that the campaign to get Catalan municipalities to send their taxes to the Catalan government rather than to Spain has flopped.
According to the report, only 70 to 80 of the 941 municipalities signed on to the largely-symbolic tax resistance plan, even though in 248 of them, Catalan separatists have a governing majority.
On the other hand, this report says that Catalonia is well on its way to creating an independent tax agency and that mass tax resistance is only a matter of time.
The U.K.
Low-income workers in Britain are becoming subject to council taxes from which they were previously exempt.
The councils are expecting mass tax refusal and some are comparing it to Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
The Diputació de Barcelona, which governs the largest province in Catalonia, voted to stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead forwarding the money to the Catalan Tax Agency.
The left-wing separatist party Candidatura d’Unitat Popular proposed the measure, which managed to also win support of the center-left Entesa bloc.
The Catalan Tax Agency currently forwards such taxes to the Spanish government, so the practical effect of this is currently minimal, but it sets the stage for an eventual Catalan independence bid in which its government will stop relinquishing such funds.
Meanwhile the Spanish Constitutional Court declared Catalonia’s attempts to strengthen the independence of its own tax agency “unconstitutional and nullified.”
France
I recently became aware of the French Revolution Digital Archive, on which I discovered the following propaganda images or political cartoons from that struggle:
In many parts of Honduras, crime syndicates / protogovernments rule the streets, often extorting more money from their subjects than does the internationally-recognized Honduran government.
Some people resist these taxes, known locally as “impuesto de guerra” or “war tax,” but the consequences of refusal can be, and frequently are, deadly.
The latest victims included eight bus company employees in Choloma, who were gunned down in broad daylight, a block away from a police station and by attackers in police uniforms, in retaliation against drivers who did not pay the tax.
In bus drivers there took collective action, going on strike to demand better security.
Ireland
Right 2 Water Galway claims that it has learned via a Freedom of Information disclosure “that 71% of those expected to pay a water charges bill hadn’t done so by .”
They are urging people to continue to hold out, noting that there are no penalties for nonpayment until four quarters have passed without paying, and collection action cannot take place until much later still.
Spain
The Spanish war tax resistance movement has recently released its tallies of war tax resistance and redirection for this tax season.
According to the group, some €92,514 was resisted by the 647 people whom they were able to find in their census.
The complete report breaks this down by region and municipality and lists the 162 destinations to which these resisted taxes were redirected.
Wales
The town of Crickhowell has decided it’s no use complaining about the strategies big multinationals use to avoid paying taxes — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!
They’re pairing up with a television show to try to come up with similar “offshoring” tax strategies to those the big guys use:
By mimicking the methods multinational companies use to pay less tax in Britain, business owners in Crickhowell hope to protest against those who do not pay their fair share of tax.
Advised by experts and followed by a BBC camera crew, family-run shops in the Brecon Beacons town have submitted their own DIY tax plan to HMRC.
Residents want to share their tax avoidance plan with other towns, in a bid to force the treasury into legislation to close loopholes which allowed companies such as Amazon to pay just £11.9m in tax last year on £5.3bn of U.K. internet sales.
They’ve created a website, Fair Tax Town, and hope, if they’re successful in their scheme, to share their techniques, open-source-style, with other towns, in hopes of getting the government to close the loopholes that allow the multinationals to outcompete them by avoiding their taxes more successfully.
The movement is using tax resistance in service of a pro-tax agenda, which they acknowledge may seem ironic:
Robert McGee, whose scholarship on the attitudes of people concerning tax evasion and resistance in different cultures has been a topic here before, has published a new paper, this one on The Ethics of Tax Evasion in Islam.
In contrast to his more typical work, this one is more speculative than empirical, and summarizes the opinions of Muslim authorities about the proper limits of the government’s authority to tax, and of the subject’s obligation to submit to such taxation.
Some tabs I’ve had open in recent days…
International
The regional government of Catalonia continues to lay down the groundwork for independence from Spain.
Recently, the Diputación de Barcelona, which governs multiple municipalities in the Barcelona area, has decided to pay the taxes withheld from its nearly 5,000 employees to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
A number of smaller local government bodies in Catalonia had already taken this step.
Currently, the Catalan regional tax agency is forwarding such payments to the Spanish government, so this is mostly symbolic, but it is meant also to allow the Catalan regional government to withhold these payments at a later date when the time seems ripe for full independence.
In a proposal similar to the “comprehensive disobedience” movement that was pioneered by Spanish activists, a group in the United Kingdom has inaugurated a “Golden Rule Tax Disobedience” campaign.
In their words:
The latest tax scandal is bringing the erosion of our democracy into ever
sharper focus. Britain suffers under an enormous democratic deficit due to
state capture by “free”-market neoliberal fundamentalism and its associated
corporate and financial interests, in aggressive ascendancy
. Notwithstanding the
financial crisis, this capture of the state
has remained unaddressed, with successive governments shamefully complicit in
it. Despite copious corroborative research and endless petitioning and
protesting, all we’ve seen is disingenuous hand-wringing and political
evasion.
Our collusion with this apology for a “democracy” must stop. We, the
citizenry, are therefore taking matters into our own hands — with a “Golden
Rule Tax Disobedience” whose intention is grassroots mobilisation against
systemic injustice, favouring far greater equality, shared and stable
prosperity, enhanced quality of life and, most importantly, an environmentally
sustainable future.
The evidential rationale for this action is overwhelming. Not least, £93bn of
“corporate welfare” is given as handouts annually to businesses operating in
our allegedly “free” market; and the government spends £26bn subsidising
harmful fossil fuels, yet a mere £3.5bn subsidising renewables. “Free”-market
fundamentalism has been an astonishing failure for the vast majority.
Our Golden Rule Tax Disobedience initiative asks citizens to withhold a small
amount of tax (through
VAT or their tax
return — everyone can join in), and then donate it to conducive campaigning
groups. This principled modelling of a redistributive ethos intends to shame
our politicians into taking effective action.
Principled tax activism has a long and distinguished history in circumstances
where the state has shown itself incapable of defending the public interest.
With no serious attempt by government to correct Britain’s massive democratic
deficit, our initiative is an idea whose time has come. We ask you to join
with us in taking back power in order to create a fairer and more sustainable
society.
Dr Gail Bradbrook — Director, Compassionate Revolution
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett — Co-authors of The Spirit Level
George Barda — Social justice and Occupy campaigner, Compassionate Revolution
Leon Rosselson — Writer/musician
David Drew — Former Labour MP for Stroud
Polly Higgins — Lawyer advocating for Ecocide Law
Joel Benjamin — Debt Resistance UK and People vs PFI
Professor Andrew Samuels — Analytical psychology, University of Essex
Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein — Critical theorist
Rev Paul Nicolson — Taxpayers Against Poverty
Dr Richard House — Chartered psychologist, education campaigner, Stroud
Liam Barrington-Bush — Co-founder, More Like People
Max Graef — Broadcast engineer, company director
Andrea Halewood — Chartered psychologist
Ben Jarlett — Digital media consultant
Martin Large — Publisher and author
Jojo Mehta — Environmental campaigner
Beatrice Millar — Steering group, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR)
Gabriel Millar — Teacher, Stroud
Alice Murray — Political activist and campaigner, Stroud
Aliyah Norrish — Digital content associate
Mark Nurse — NHS paramedic, Stroud
Councillor Brian Oosthuysen — Gloucestershire
Maja Passchier — Cellist and cello teacher
Hazel Raee — Mobile digital champion, Isle of Skye
Aline Sitoe Diatta was, says Wikipedia, “a Senegalese heroine of the opposition to French colonialism, often called the Joan of Arc or the Marianne of Senegal.”
When the French colonial administrators of the region where the Diola people lived began conscripting locals to fight in European wars and to engage in confiscatory taxation of rice and cattle, the Diola resisted.
Aline Sitoe Diatta was one of the leaders of this resistance, and also a martyr: she was arrested and tortured, and died while imprisoned in exile.
Emitai is a film about these uprisings from the Senegalese point of view.
Sieglinde Baumert has spent two months in prison for her refusal to pay a €17½ monthly television tax to support the government-run station.
The tax, which formerly was based on the number of televisions in a household, is now assessed on everyone in Germany whether or not they have a television.
Taxi drivers in Quebec, upset at being outcompeted by upstarts like Uber, are threatening to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t act to protect their industry against competition.
Have you caught the tax evasion bug?
The recent leaks of the “Panama Papers,” with their details of how the 1% stash their money in shell companies in tax havens, have increased perceptions that the tax system is gamed by the rich and powerful — and have decreased the willingness of the average joe to continue getting fleeced.
[IRS chief] Koskinen
says the main factor that drives ordinary Americans to stop paying their
taxes, or to try to cheat on their taxes, is the perception that others
are doing the same. If you think that your neighbors are not paying their
fair share, you’re just a little less likely to pay your own tax bill in
full or in part.
Workers in the Codevi (Free Trade Zone) in Ouanaminthe, Haiti have gone on strike to protest a new 10% tax on their wages.
It’s a zone where the multinational clothing companies enjoy access to cheap labor (the minimum wage is something like $5.15 per day) and almost entire exemption from corporate taxes and customs charge.
Labor apparently doesn’t get to take advantage of a similar boon in economic freedom.
The Catalan independence movement continues to lay the groundwork for what it anticipates will be a mass tax strike leading to the political separation of Catalonia from Spain.
Already some people and municipalities are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax office instead of to the federal government.
Currently, this is a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan tax office forwards these payments to Madrid.
But when a critical mass of taxpayers make their payments this way (€7 billion total, they estimate), the separatists plan to cut off the flow.
The French Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors) has released a report on the écotaxe fiasco.
France introduced a new tax on trucking that met a bold and sustained resistance campaign in Brittany which eventually forced the government to abandon the tax.
The Auditors determined that the government lost over €1 billion directly from its abandonment of the tax, and gave up an additional €10 billion in anticipated revenue.
ROAR Magazine looks at The Irish water insurgency.
The government of Ireland has long been trying to extract more money from its subjects via increasing rates at the public utility monopolies, rather than through more above-board taxation.
And the people of Ireland have long been using a variety of tactics to try to stymie these moves.
The latest on the tax resistance front:
Catalonia went to the polls to vote on whether to become an independent republic.
Spain sent in armed, masked troops to violently impede the voters.
This reminds me of what I wrote about political authority:
[B]y challenging the authority of the government, you call its bluff and force it to reveal its hand.
If it has a strong, persuasive hand, well, there you go, and maybe you’re even persuaded.
If it has a strong, coercive hand, suddenly people begin to feel its grip on their shoulders.
If the hand is weak on either count, suddenly this too is exposed, and the power-behind-the-throne is revealed to be not so powerful after all.
The point is that it may be important and useful to force the government to retrench from authority to its more concrete basis in coercion and persuasion, even if you do not have the power to overcome it once it has retrenched.
The Greek government is increasingly desperate for tax revenue, as the citizenry are reluctant to cough up anything they expect, with good reason, will only go into the pockets of greedy speculators rather than towards the needs of Greeks.
Among other things, the government has begun to add a large (50%) tax to coffee imports.
The “Fair Trade Is Not For Sale” campaign aims to resist this tax by smuggling fair-trade coffee from Latin America into Greece, while using FairCoin (imagine Bitcoin if the face of Che Guevara were stamped on every coin) to fund the transactions.
While I have income taxes due today, I have a bigger burden than taxes, something I owe more to than to you.
That is what I owe to democracy and my nation and my fellow citizens.
…paying income tax in the U.S.A. has now become a paycheck made out to “evil.”
I therefore respectfully decline to pay income taxes at this time.
I have this money in the bank, and I’ll pay it once this situation is taken care of which, I fear because of the cowardice of this Congress, might be a couple or more years.
The American activist group CODEPINK is launching a “divest from the war machine” campaign, aiming to get various institutions to stop investing in arms manufacturers and the like.
So far, not much about war tax resistance can be seen in the campaign’s preliminary material, but perhaps this will change as it gets closer to launch date.
Some tax resistance links that have scrolled by in recent days:
I noted that a chapter of one of the largest political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had called for a tax strike against the Kabila autocracy.
That call has now been joined by organization Lucha, based in North Kivu, which is asking citizens to stop paying taxes, utility bills, fees, royalties, and licenses until Kabila steps down.
Departing IRS chief John Koskinen, in his final news conference, warned that continuous budget cuts have pushed the agency to the breaking-point.
A catastrophic malfunction of the agency’s decrepit information technology “is not a question of whether, simply a question of when,” he said.
In addition, budget cuts and personnel losses have reduced the agency’s ability to credibly deter tax evasion.
“If people think that many others are not paying their fair share or that they’re not going to get caught if they cheat… our voluntary compliance system will be put at risk,” Koskinen said.
“A 1% drop in the compliance rate translates into a revenue loss of over $30 billion every year.”
Howard Waitzkin, in Monthly Review looks at some of the prospects for would-be revolutionaries in “the Global North,” including the potential for tax resistance as a revolutionary activity.
Excerpt:
Besides direct action, revolutionaries can change what we do with our money,
especially in the realms of taxes, investments, and local economic activities.
Such changes can disrupt, undermine, and create space for further
revolutionary actions. We in the 99 percent persist as the main funders of the
capitalist state, which passes our money on to corporations that exploit
workers, destroy nature, raise the earth’s temperature, and keep us in
permanent war and perpetual inequality. We need to change our habits of giving
up our money, and if enough of us do so, the capitalist state no longer will
be able to prop up the capitalist economy for the benefit of the ultra-rich.
Tax resistance can take several forms. For more than a century, pacifists in
the United States have resisted taxes that pay for war, some eventually going
to prison but the vast majority, like me, suffering no substantial harm as a
result. As a card-carrying conscientious objector, I openly resisted half of
my income taxes for more than a decade during and after the Vietnam War. If
one honestly declares one’s income, there is nothing illegal about claiming a
war deduction of 50 percent, which is the approximate percentage of the
federal budget that pays for past, present, and future wars. Later, with a
young daughter, I was starting to feel inconvenienced and a little bored by
appeal procedures inside and outside the Internal Revenue Service because of
open tax resistance. So I reluctantly made the same decision that Trump and
his ilk make, to avoid taxes through loopholes rather than resistance of
conscience.
The problem with either explicit or implicit tax resistance is that we number
in the thousands rather than millions. “Death and taxes,” the two
inevitabilities, as we are taught, seem hard to resist, but corporations and
rich individuals understand very well that at least taxes actually are not
inevitable. In Latin America, tax resistance usually proceeds according to the
Trump model for corporations and the rich, but ordinary people can succeed in
massive tax resistance through non-reporting or under-reporting of income.
During the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, the autocratic governments had
trouble raising sufficient tax revenues, despite extensive attempts through
bureaucratic and police surveillance, and tax resistance became one of many
tactics to bring down those regimes. Ironically, a major motivation in Cuba
for allowing expansion of private small businesses involves a perception that
private-sector business activities were expanding anyway, along with rampant
tax evasion; if permitted officially, small businesses could generate
substantial taxes for social programs. Even in Cuba, tax resistance has
interacted with political organizing in Poder Popular and community-based
organizations to enhance popular participation. As a revolutionary strategy in
the United States, tax resistance must flourish, so millions of us stop
functioning as the main financiers for the capitalist state.
John Stoner, at Mennonite World Review, invites Mennonite taxpayers to find the courage to be a conscientious objector.
Excerpt: “In the United States, conscription has ended and we as persons are not conscripted for war.
But war goes on unobstructed, because our money is conscripted.
We could be conscientious objectors to war by being conscientious objectors to taxation for war.
So, why aren’t we conscientious objectors to taxation for war?”
Businesses in Tunisia have responded to surprise tax hikes by vowing not to pay.
I’m going to try to wait to comment on the tax bill oozing through Congress until something actually becomes law, but Calvin H. Johnson couldn’t wait.
He says that the proposed tax cuts will push the U.S. federal debt past the point where it threatens the stability of the fisc.
And not a moment too soon.
Using smartphone-tracking data and precinct-level voting, we show that
politically divided families shortened Thanksgiving dinners by 20–30 minutes
following the divisive 2016 election. This decline survives comparisons with
2015 and extensive demographic and spatial controls, and more than doubles in
media markets with heavy political advertising. These effects appear
asymmetric: while Democratic voters traveled less in 2016, political
differences shortened Thanksgiving dinners more among Republican voters,
especially where political advertising was heaviest. Partisan polarization may
degrade close family ties with large aggregate implications; we estimate 27
million person-hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving discourse were lost in
2016 to ad-fueled partisan effects.
Some notes about the new Qualified Business Income deduction, the IRS budget request, tax evasion of “gig economy” workers, the ongoing fake-IRS phone scam, and the difficulty of resisting tariffs.
Some ideas and resources to help you with your outreach.
Announcements on the death of Joffre Stewart, a memorial service for Tom Wilson, the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in D.C., and stats about NWTRCC’s social media presence.
A new initiative launched with a splash in Catalonia under the name Ni 1 euro x a la repressió (“Not one euro for repression”).
Modeled on the Spanish war tax resistance movement, it is urging people to redirect the taxes that would otherwise go to pay for the Spanish monarchy, the judiciary and state prosecutor, and the internal security services.
The aim is to stop financial support for the Spanish suppression of Catalan independence.
The website is splashy, and its interactive how-to-resist page in particular seems worth emulating by other similar resistance campaigns.
The epidemic of destruction of automated traffic ticket machines along the roadways of France continues. According to the latest figures, government revenue from these cameras has dropped dramatically.
The government believes it has lost €660 million in expected ticket revenue so far, and that’s in addition to the costs to repair or replace the damaged machines.
Meanwhile, the Spanish war tax resistance movement is also gearing up for tax season.
El Salto reports,
“Tax resistance is designed as a tool of civil disobedience that allows us
to overcome the role of mere spectators or victims of these policies, and
become active agents in the denunciation of military spending in particular
and militarism in general.” Apparently, the government is responding more
forcefully with fines against war tax resisters
this year, and the campaign is ramping up its legal support and counseling to counter this.
Property owners in Denton County, Texas have been taking advantage of a law
that permits them to challenge their property tax appraisal, and have been
overwhelming the system with such protests.
War tax resister Tom Shea has died. Fellow resister Robert Burrowes penned
an obituary notice here.
Some 17,000 taxpayers in Catalonia also are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than the Spanish one, in acts of civil disobedience.
There’s a tax strike underway in Beni, North Kivu to protest the failure of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to provide security in the region.
More roadside traffic ticket generating speed cameras have been attacked in recent weeks, in South Arica and France.
Spain has moved on to using drones instead.
There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here, but Andrew Leahey connects the dots and shows how Trump’s contempt for paying his own taxes and his undermining of the prestige of government are likely to undermine “tax morale” in the United States with long-term consequences for how willing traditionally sheepish American taxpayers are to cough up their tribute.
Of the furloughed workers surveyed, more than 35% missed a rent or mortgage payment, 30% went to a food pantry, 72% experienced mental health issues, 42% wanted to make a career change and 65% were very or somewhat concerned about their finances post-shutdown.
In the open-ended response portion of the survey, an employee wrote, “We are U.S.A. citizens that have families to support.
Often we hear we deserve it, because we work for IRS.
We are doing a job that is dictated by Congress.
It is surprising how people seem to want others to hurt.
It is sort of sickening.”
Another employee described going back to work during tax season:
“With a month of catch up at my busiest season, it is so stressful.
This is the first time in 15 years I am exhausted after work and do not want to go in the mornings.
That was never the case before.”
As I mentioned a month ago, the IRS and some California county governments have been at loggerheads over the fees counties charge to entities that want to file liens.
The counties have been tacking on extra filing fees to pay for tangentially-related government expenses, and the IRS has said it doesn’t intend to pay such extra charges when it files its federal tax liens.
This led to a standoff in which some of the counties started to refuse to process IRS paperwork.
It looks like the IRS was the first to blink.
Human attacks on the traffic-ticket generating robot camera hordes continue
to keep hope alive in the hearts of the rebellion, lately in
In , some Catalan separatists started paying
their federal taxes into the Catalan state treasury rather than to the Spanish
government. This was a mostly-symbolic action, as the Catalan treasury just
forwarded the money to their Spanish counterparts, but it was designed to
prepare for the day when a Catalan separatist government would cut off Madrid
for good.
The separatists had success at the ballot box and the Catalan parliament voted
to declare independence, but Spain then dissolved the state government, and
imprisoned its leaders and/or forced them into exile. As a protest movement,
the independence campaign is still active, but the independence of the state
government appears to have been successfully suppressed by Spain at this point.
And now, one of the early adopters of tax resistance — a restaurant in Siurana
which had been paying its taxes to Catalonia — has been forced to close
after the tax agency rescinded its tax identification number and froze its
accounts.
The owners of the restaurant (Andreu Bartolomé and Maria Casademunt) had moved
on to a more extreme form of tax resistance than paying symbolically to the
Catalan treasury. Rather than pay taxes there, only to see the money eventually
go to Spain after all, they began to redirect their taxes directly to schools,
hospitals, and other social programs in Catalonia, and then filed the
receipts for these donations with the tax agency in lieu of their taxes.
protest marchers in South Kivu
In other news…
Tax resisters in South Kivu have supplemented their campaign, which started , with a shutdown of the airport and with protest marches.
Fire, spray paint, stickers, a burning tire, projectiles, and saws are among the tools drivers have been using in recent attacks on speed radar ticketing machines in Italy, The Netherlands, and France.
A new (I think) site — ProuMonarquia.cat (with associated hashtag #ProuMonarquia) — is coordinating nationalist tax resistance in Catalonia.
The site recommends that people redirect the amount of their federal taxes that would go to the support of the Spanish monarchy and to the state security apparatus that represses Catalan independence, giving that amount instead to the separatist Council for the Catalan Republic.
A similar movement is sweeping Argentina. A viral video, featuring small business-owners complaining that they cannot survive if 60% of their earnings are swept up by the government and their businesses are locked down, has touched a nerve, and the #RebeliónFiscal has spread like wildfire.
The Catalan independence movement has relaunched a federal tax resistance campaign. Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has asked Catalonians to redirect the portion of their federal taxes that would otherwise go to support the Spanish monarchy, giving that money instead to the “Republican Fund for Solidarity Action” which will devote the funds to CoViD-19 relief efforts. The campaign is organized via the #ProuMonarquia site.
I’m used to seeing on-again/off-again tax strikes in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now the tactic seems to have spread to Ituri. Though a local government committee denounced the idea, a more grassroots group has insisted on withholding taxes until the government takes steps to improve security in the region.
In the wake of the enormous explosion at the Port of Beirut, protests by enraged citizens have led to the collapse of the Lebanese government.
the announcement from Em Sherif that it would be refusing to pay its taxes and instead redirecting the money to worthy charities
Dany Chakour, owner of the Em Sherif restaurants, has gone a step further.
He says his restaurants will no longer pay taxes to the corrupt and inept government of Lebanon, but will instead pay that money directly to non-governmental organizations that are actually helping people.
“We decided to help the NGOs who are the only ones helping on the ground,” Chakour said.
“We won’t pay the government, that’s for sure.”
And he says other business owners are thinking of following his lead.
Chakour says he intends to file his value-added tax returns as usual, but without including the demanded 11% payment.
Instead he will indicate the charities he funded with the money.
The National Front of Catalonia is skeptical about the calls to tax resistance coming out of the Council for the Republic, noting that it had failed to stand behind tax resisters in the past who had responded to such calls.
Essentially: Catalan patriots took the tax resistance seriously, but their politicians only meant it rhetorically.
In addition, the call for resistance seems to have been an eleventh-hour afterthought, being issued just as tax returns were coming due, and too late for most taxpayers to prepare the groundwork for effective resistance.
The number of people renouncing their U.S. citizenship is shooting up again.
Each of the first two quarters of 2020 have had more official expatriates than any other quarter since record-keeping began (however there were unusually low numbers in the last two quarters of 2019, so this may be an artifact of some glitch in the bureaucracy).
This in spite of the fact that the U.S. now charges thousands of dollars to people who want to relinquish their citizenship.
Some recent links of note:
Earn less money so you owe less taxes and fund less of the government’s bad deeds, or earn more money so you can donate more to good causes and offset the damage done by your taxes? Such a decision becomes even more complex when your finances are entwined with those of a partner. Lindsey Britt thinks over her options at NWTRCC’s blog.
The Congressional Budget Office recently released its projections for what the U.S. federal government budget is likely to look like in the future based on current law and economic conditions.
It is an eye-opener.
Last year when they issued their report, they thought the U.S. government debt would be about 79½% of the nation’s gross domestic product, a number that raised eyebrows at the time.
But that was before the coronavirus.
Now they say the number will be upwards of 98% — a level the country has not seen since the all-out mobilization for World War Ⅱ.
And it just keeps climbing from there.
By 2050 it is projected to nearly double to 195%.
This is because government spending as a percentage of GDP is expected to rise, from “rising interest costs and the costs associated with an aging population and excess health-care cost growth”.
The federal budget deficit this year is projected to be $3.3 trillion, which is just freaking unprecedented.
“It is hard to overestimate what a dismal fiscal future the Congressional Budget Office foresees.”
Catalan separatists, on the other hand, seem to be turning up the heat.
They have identified a set of basic infrastructure companies that are in favor of Catalan secession and that are working to disentangle their Catalan operations from the Spanish state: companies in the telecom, energy, petrol, insurance, and banking sectors for example.
They are encouraging people in Catalonia to shift their consumption to those companies, and also to pay their federal taxes through the Catalan tax agency, as a way of easing the eventual transition to independence.
Some recent links of interest:
War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:
Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death.
But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.
The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity.
This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich.
And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government.
In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign.
Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign.
But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.
Some recent tax resistance links of note:
Long-time war tax resisters Arcadi Oliveres and David Zarembka have died.
Oliveres was one of the founders of the modern war tax resistance movement in Spain, while Zarembka was one of those who helped NWTRCC get off the ground in the United States, serving as its first treasurer.
More info:
Chuck Faber’s tribute to David Zarembka on A Friendly Letter, including autobiographical writings from Zarembka himself that go into his five decades of war tax resistance in detail
In my last update I noted that the city government of Vic had decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead sending those taxes to the independence-minded Catalan government.
Vic has now been joined by Girona, capital of Girona province, as well as some other medium-sized towns.
The U.S. State Department can refuse to give you a passport or can revoke your existing passport if the IRS tells them you’re way behind on your taxes and aren’t doing anything about it.
And the IRS can make this happen just by notifying the State Department.
Is that unconstitutional? To take away your fundamental right to travel without due process of law?
Paul L. Caron, at TaxProf Blog, investigates the issue and a recent test case that did a poor job of trying to test it in Tax Court.
Caron doesn’t think the constitutionality argument will work, even if it is raised more competently in a more receptive legal forum.
For one thing, the right of an American citizen to travel internationally is not very well protected by American law: the courts do not consider it to be all that important.
For that reason, the courts’ threshold for what they consider sufficient “due process” to deprive you of such a right is pretty low.
President Biden has now come out and said explicitly what had been suspected: that he hopes to help fund his spending spree by increasing IRS enforcement spending, as part of a sock-it-to-big-business plan that also includes increasing corporate tax rates, broadening the corporate tax base, and eliminating big business loopholes.
We’ll have to keep an eye on this as it burbles through the legislative tract.
Our movement has only scratched the surface of what non-violent civil disobedience can achieve.
While they deceive and seek to oppress us further, we can take a stand against their ecocidal leadership — by simply withholding council tax then telling the world why we’ve done it.
The campaign is asking local groups in the U.K. to demand that their local councils declare a climate emergency and suspend projects that are ecologically irresponsible.
Another detail of the Biden administration’s plan to beef up IRS tax enforcement has come out.
They hope to force banks to report information about everyone’s bank accounts: how much came into and out of each account over the year.
This would help them identify income sources that people and businesses fail to report on their tax returns.
But it would also put more bank accounts on the agency’s radar.
Currently, they only seem to be very aware of interest-earning bank accounts, via the reporting of this interest on annual 1099 filings.
This has allowed some tax resisters to have bank accounts that are relatively invisible to the IRS (and thereby less-vulnerable to seizure) by having non-interest-bearing accounts.
The proposed reporting changes might remove this protection.
Catalan separatists have amplified their tax resistance campaign.
For some time now the Catalan National Assembly has been promoting a campaign in which individuals, businesses, and (an increasing number of) municipalities would redirect their national taxes from Spain to the Catalan regional government.
That government would forward those taxes along to Spain, so the effect of this (and its risk) was minor, but in theory if the Catalan regional government decided to pull the trigger on political independence, this would establish the groundwork for fiscal independence as well.
But now, the separatist “Council for the Republic” is trying to push things further: asking resisters to redirect €300 of their taxes from the government to the Republican Fund for Solidarity Action.
That money will not be forwarded to Madrid, and so this is a more confrontational act of civil disobedience.
Attorney Peter Goldberger will discuss the prospects for people who might try to assert that people have a legal right of conscientious objection to military taxation in U.S. courts.
The discussion will be held online, on Zoom .
In South Kivu, the government is striking back at the three-month-old tax strike, announcing that it will call in police to enforce the tax law.
Strikers are protesting the lack of road maintenance in the region, and the spokesperson for the strike says it will continue until the main road is repaired.
Chrissy Kirchhoefer, over at NWTRCC’s blog, recaps some of the Tax Day actions war tax resisters have engaged in this extended tax season.
Do citizens of the United States have a presumptive right to travel elsewhere, or is that a privilege that the government may withhold at its whim?
This has become a live question thanks to the newish law by which the State Department can revoke passports from (or deny passports to) people the IRS reports have significant unpaid taxes.
Papers, Please! reviews the state of the law and the tenuous right to travel.
Catalan restaurateurs, who protested for independence by redirecting their taxes from Spain to essential services in Catalonia for seven years, have been hit by a €300,000 fine by the Treasury agency in Madrid.
They responded with receipts and an accounting of where the money went — including to local schools and hospitals — but the tax agency was unmoved.
They plan to continue their fight and have started an on-line fundraiser to help pay their legal bills.
The IRS is “pleading for patience” as it deals with the backlog of last year’s tax returns it hasn’t processed yet.
I filed my return back in April or thereabouts and the IRS hasn’t processed it yet.
I always file my tax returns on paper by hand so I’m not too surprised that mine ended up on the procrastination shelf.
Myanmar’s shadow Opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity.
In , it said that 97 percent of people in Mandalay and 98 percent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime $1 billion by that point.
For a while now, U.S. taxpayers have been able to access some of their tax records held by the IRS via the agency’s on-line portal.
This required a somewhat onerous process of signing up for an account — a process that’s a bit more invasive and difficult than signing up for a similar account at your bank.
I’ve tried to talk a few war tax resisters through the process because it can be useful to have better visibility into what information the IRS is assembling about you.
But often, they throw up their hands at some point and say it’s not worth it, because it really does seem like more trouble than it ought to be.
The agency says that by , the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.
[C]ompleting the process requires submitting at least two secondary identification documents, such as as a Social Security card, a birth certificate, health insurance card, W-2 form, electric bill, or financial institution statement.
After re-uploading all of this information, ID.me’s system prompted me to “Please stay on this screen to join video call.”
However, the estimated wait time when that message first popped up said “3 hours and 27 minutes.”
The income of “closely-held businesses” (Schedule C / pass-through / non-corporately structured) in the United States is taxed at special rates and with special rules, but on the owners’ individual tax returns.
A new report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center says that these special rules, combined with some clever gaming of the rules and some outright noncompliance, mean that about half of that income goes completely untaxed.
One theory is that youngsters can fall into denial-of-service attacks by firstly playing online games, and then falling into installing mods, hacks, and even remote access trojans to get the upperhand on their gaming rivals.
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
At the NWTRCC blog, tax resister William E. Ruhaak shared his experience trying to get the government to acknowledge his carefully-drafted, personal “statement of conscience.”
He fought a determined pro se legal battle to get the U.S. Tax Court to admit his statement of conscience as evidence in his tax appeal.
He believes such a struggle is important in order to defend “The fundamental human right to publicly express an opinion or belief.
And also the right to have a written expression of that belief included in government documentation for future reference.”
The Court eventually gave in and added his statement as a piece of evidence, but seemingly only to humor him.
The ruling in his case reads in part:
We nevertheless admonish petitioner that instituting future proceedings before the Tax Court for the purpose of advancing frivolous arguments relating to his conscientious objection to the payment of Federal taxes is likely to result in the imposition of a significant section 6673 penalty against him.
We recognized four decades ago that “there has been a long and undeviating parade of cases in this and other courts” rejecting the arguments of conscientious objectors who sought to avoid paying “the part of their taxes which they estimated to be attributable to military expenditures and to which they objected because of their religious, moral, and ethical objections to war and because of their claimed ‘rights’ under various constitutional provisions, the Nuremberg Principles, international law, and numerous international agreements and treaties.”
Greenberg v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 806, 810 ().
At this late date, the Court will not condone the continued assertion of similar frivolous positions in meritless litigation that wastes both its own limited resources and those of the IRS.
The War Resisters League has released its annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart fliers, based on the Biden Administration’s proposed budget for .
As Pentagon spending continues to rise, and yet more millions are being spent to arm Ukraine, pie chart aficionados may be surprised to see that the military-spending slice of the pie chart seems to have noticibly shrunk this year.
Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn, who do the research and composition for the pie chart, explain why.
In part, the reason is that they are operating on the proposed budget, not whatever budget (and supplementary appropriations) Congress will eventually, tardily enact.
The Biden Administration’s proposed budget is chockablock with a wish list of non-military spending that Congress will probably not enact.
The absolute amount of military spending has risen substantially, but relatively it looks smaller because of all that extra wish list spending.
The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with a preview of the upcoming tax filing season and other news from the American war tax resistance scene.
The only thing that comes close to the problems we’re seeing now at the Internal Revenue Service was in 1985, when the agency was rolling out some new technology—technology it’s still using today.
Back then, the processing centers got so behind on their work that employees started hiding tax returns in closets and putting them in bags in the trash.
Now it’s way worse, with the IRS, for the second year in a row, entering the filing season with a backlog of millions of not yet processed returns and pieces of correspondence.
The current National Taxpayer Advocate released an amusing blog post about how pathetic and outdated the IRS processes for handling tax returns are. Excerpts:
When I released my annual report in , I said that paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite and the IRS is buried in it.
The reason paper returns are so challenging is that the IRS still has not implemented technology to machine read them, so each digit on every paper return must be manually keystroked into IRS systems by an employee.
The IRS has announced that it plans to hire thousands of new workers to try to deal with its paperwork backlog.
But, in a tight labor market, and unable to offer competitive pay rates to compensate for the soul-crushing tedium ($15.61/hour anyone?), they’re finding it a challenge to turn those plans into personnel.
The Washington Post took a look at a recent job fair the agency held.
IRS employees don’t follow the rules on paid time-off, with a suspicious pattern of sick leave days allowing employees to make their own three-day weekends and extended holidays.
Catalan separatist group / government-in-exile Council for the Republic is promoting a tax redirection campaign in which Catalan citizens withhold the portion of their taxes that would go to the Spanish monarchy or to its repression apparatus, and give that money instead to Front Republicà d’Acció Solidària or some such group working for Catalan independence.
Doomed, quixotic, gonzo tax resister John McAfee is trying to get in the last word by means of a set of interviews he gave when he was on the run from the law.
In them, he explains why he stopped paying. Excerpts:
I’d just had enough.
I’d paid $50 million in income tax over the years.
I thought that was plenty.
I hadn’t paid tax since I went to Belize, but technically, as an American citizen, even if you’re not living in the country, using the services and driving on the roads, you still have to file and pay 30% of your income to the United States.
The only two countries in the world that enforce that rule are the United States and Eritrea!
How [frigging] bizarre is that?
Anyway, I just said, “I’m sorry.
This is insane.
I’m not doing this anymore.”
[I]n America, income tax is in fact unconstitutional anyway.
It was only ever created to fund the war effort in , but that edict, like many others, was never extinguished after the need for it ceased to exist.
I was telling people that I thought taxes were illegal, and if they also felt that they were illegal and/or unjust they should just stop paying, too.
Not just that, I was showing them how to do it without getting caught.
I stumbled somehow on the No Obligation Challenge website.
It looks like a U.K. version of the familiar U.S. tax protester song-and-dance (“Did you know there is no law obligating you to pay council tax?”) but I was impressed by the quality of the graphic design and layout of the website, which is head and shoulders above what I usually see from that segment of the fringe.
