Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → John Lindsay-Poland

The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund is a mutual aid/insurance program for war tax resisters. People who participate in the fund help to reimburse resisters for any penalties & interest that the IRS successfully seizes from them.

If you would like to participate in this mutual aid program, I encourage you to follow the link above, or to view their recently-released Spring 2014 Appeal in which they are raising $10,410 to help pay the interest & penalties seized from three resisters: Larry Bassett, John Lindsay-Poland, and John Marley. To reach this total, they are asking all of the participants in the fund to contribute $30.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

War Tax Resistance

Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
Peg Morton writes of the opportunity she had to help the war tax resistance of John Lindsay-Poland through her participation in the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an interview with long-time anti-nuclear activist Frances Crowe. In that interview, she touches on her war tax resistance:

I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent to my federal taxes to charity.
So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my conscience.
American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak explains how he came to take his stand, and how his Meeting supported him when he went to jail for it:

Henry Braun, a poet and Vietnam-era war tax resister, died recently. “In the 1960s, he organized poetry readings against the Vietnam war and participated in the War Tax Resistance movement. He was convicted of tax evasion because he chose to give a portion of his taxes to the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital and to the city’s public schools.”
War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.

Other Links of Interest

Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
The latest numbers suggest that a record number of people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in 2014.
After a New York Times exposé about the IRS’s use of civil forfeiture to seize money from innocent people, the agency released a statement announcing that it would be reforming its use of the practice.

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

a report on the Fall 2014 NWTRCC national gathering from Ruth Benn
some notes on practical issues of interest to war tax resisters including the possibility of reducing taxes through charitable giving, how to react to letters from the IRS, and the use of no-interest community investment loans to keep assets secure from collection
a summary of Erica Weiland’s interview with Spanish activist Enric Duran
a report from the New England war tax resister gathering and some notes about other events at which war tax resisters have done outreach recently
some notes about internal NWTRCC business matters of concern to the membership
Peg Morton profiles war tax resister John Lindsay-Poland

I’ve also seen some new interest in the tactic of tax resistance popping up here and there on-line. Twitter is full of people threatening to stop paying taxes with 140-character bravado over everything from police impunity to Obama’s immigration policy tweaks. That’s nothing to get too excited about, except that I haven’t seen so many people hit on tax resistance as a possible activist response to political issues all at once before.

Tax resister Gary Flomenhoft posted a couple of meditations recently at ClubOrlov:

The Only Way to Stop the Empire: “The only action that can possibly stop the empire in its tracks is cutting off its food supply — the tax money on which it lives. We have to starve the beast through divestment, capital expatriation, tax resistance, tax refusal and tax revolt. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig told us this flat out in the 1980s when, being confronted with huge protests over U.S. Central American policy, he said: ‘Let them protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes.’ Truer words were never uttered by a U.S. official. Is there any evidence to contradict his statement? Has any other measure had any impact on the war machine? The honest answer is no. Millions of people around the world protested before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These protests were ignored. No amount of protest or other efforts can stop it, because it doesn’t cut off the empire’s food supply of money and fear. Only by cutting off its funds by not paying taxes can we stop the empire.”
Tax Revolt Methods: Describes some of the methods readers might adopt in order to reduce or nearly-eliminate their federal taxes.

Also, The Moon Magazine recently reprinted my meditations on the “one-man revolution” of Ammon Hennacy, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Robert Frost.