How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → subversion from within

A few mentions in the blogworld:

  • First off, thanks to Dave’s Picks for introducing his readers to The Picket Line.
  • Claire Wolfe gave The Picket Line a plug a while back that was full of praise for my project. “I wish that the anarcho-theorists who know exactly how life ‘ought’ to be conducted in Libertopia — but whose own daily lives are filled with tax-paying and other forms of going-along-to-get-along with the state — would take more of a lesson from Dave Gross,” she wrote.

    In a subsequent post, she added some nuance to that position: “I do go on about the virtues of dropping out and not paying the effing state to commit foul deeds. And I have no use whatsoever for people who talk the ivory-tower theoretical talk of freedom but don’t walk the right-down-here-on-the-gritty-ground walk of freedom. But that’s not to say I imagine that everybody out there with a good job and a hefty tax bill ought to be cringing in guilt. Every subversive, underground movement (which freedom is, and must be, these days) needs its moles, too.…

    “I do believe that dropping out and refusing to fund the growing police state is the most moral individual choice. But it’s not necessarily the most practical choice. And if we’re really to have a freedom movement and not just a bunch of ragged individuals, we need our ‘mole’ brothers just as much as we need any other sort of freedom partisans. The only deep sin against freedom is the sin of hypocrisy — of talking the talk when you don’t even make an effort to walk the walk. But the walk can be walked down a lot of different paths.”
  • Thanks also to Rob of biscoRADIO for starting a discussion about The Picket Line on that site.
  • John Venlet at Improved Clinch has started a heated discussion about The Picket Line. One writer insists that “there’s nothing wrong with paying ransom to the state when it advances your pursuit of your values.… If Gross is happy with his choice that’s great, but I often detect more than a whiff of pride in self-sacrifice from folks advocating similar paths and I find nothing admirable in self-sacrifice.”

    A similarly-themed discussion is ongoing over at The Claire Files Board. One commentator takes issue with my feeling complicit with the government by paying taxes. “If a petty thief or mugger manages to steal $20 from you, then buys a knife with the money and slits fifty throats with the knife will that be your fault too?” he asks.

Doing the rounds in all the best circles these past several days has been an ongoing series of articles at Once Upon a Time… inspired by the recent WikiLeaks releases, the work of Bradley Manning in getting the information out at great risk, and the resulting media chit-chat.

The author, Arthur Silber, takes the opportunity for some meditation on responsibility, consent, obedience, support, and other such subjects, and caught my eye by dropping in some of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the subject.

I have to confess that between being out-of-the-country for a month and then a variety of things eating up my time in the days since I got back, I haven’t followed the Wikileaks/Manning saga at all closely, and I haven’t even had time to do much more than glance at this particular series of articles. I read enough to convince me to donate some money to Bradley Manning’s defense fund though.

That said, here’s Claire Wolfe’s take on it, and here’s Dana Visalli’s note on the wtr-s war tax resistance mailing list.

Reading about another IRS office evacuation caused by a “suspicious package” received in the mail, I mused a bit on how formidable authoritarian bureaucracies can be successfully damaged by small acts that induce large, costly, and crippling reactions. Like in an autoimmune disorder, the body’s own protective mechanisms are hijacked to attack the body itself.

Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society found a quote to this effect from Julian Assange, the current spokesman and editor-in-chief for Wikileaks, which has been doing a bang-up job of freelance declassification of U.S. classified war documents:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

So when you hear people discussing the value of the leaks, remember that the value may not only be in what specifically was leaked, but in the leakage itself, and in subsequent efforts to plug the leaks.

If you’re enjoying the sight of Hillary Clinton whining and the various Sheikhs and diplomats of the world cringing and spinning in the face of the ongoing Wikileaks disclosures, you can show your appreciation by contributing financially to the people who took great risks to help make it possible:

  • The Bradley Manning Defense Fund is a project of Courage to Resist, which helps refuseniks of all stripes. Bradley Manning is the number one suspect in the leaks and is currently a prisoner of the United States government.
  • Wikileaks is supervising the release of the documents and trying to maintain a safe haven for people who want to bring other such secrets to light.

If you follow this blog at all, you know I’m not one for enthusing about new activist campaigns and certainly not one to go around exhorting folks to donate to some cause or other. I tend to err on the side of (perhaps overly-cynical) aloofness: preferring to let campaigns and groups put some proof in the pudding before I serve it to my friends. And these past several years, the pudding served up by the organizations and actions opposing the warfare state has been pretty thin.

But WikiLeaks is the real thing, folks. It is taking bold, dangerous, big, deliberate steps to strike at the root of the problem. The best evidence of how they’re succeeding where so many have failed is in the frothing-at-the-mouth of the warfare states’ biggest offenders. (They ignored and ridiculed Cindy Sheehan and hoped she’d go away; they’re openly plotting the murder of Julian Assange.)

And Wikileaks could certainly use our help. As you may be aware, government authorities, throwing their weight around outside of ordinary legal channels, have been successfully pressuring companies providing internet service for WikiLeaks to cut them off. Because of this, for example, the wikileaks.org domain no longer works (you can still reach the site at other addresses, like wikileaks.de, and at the numerical IP address 213.251.145.96).

Amazon web services, a “cloud” service and storage provider, shamefully bowed to U.S. government pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks data, and the U.S. has even forbidden many of its employees to view or link to the WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables — to the extent of blocking the site to public web browsers at the Library of Congress. WikiLeaks computers are under a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack from enraged private and government entities. The Washington Times and others have publicly called for the assassination of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, and he is being sought on criminal charges that have all the fingerprints of a dirty trick.

While none of these things are going to be able to stop WikiLeaks from continuing to release the U.S. diplomatic cables that sparked all this retaliation (they’re too crafty for that), it gives you some idea of the strength and fury of the forces arrayed against them — forces that are determined to degrade the ability of WikiLeaks (or anyone else encouraged by their success) to pull off any similar feats in the future.

So I encourage you to put some skin in the game. There are several ways to donate money. You can also follow @wikileaks on Twitter, which can be a good way to stay informed about things you can do to help, which may include downloading data to your home computer so that WikiLeaks data is duplicated and widely-distrubuted so that it is less-vulnerable to attack. If you have the time and interest, you can also spend some time reading through some of the released cables, summarizing them and contrasting them with official government statements from the period.

But don’t sit this one out. Finally citizens and refuseniks have struck a major blow against the empire. You’re going to want to look back at this moment and remember being on the right side.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • You can read more (en español) about Spanish war tax resister Jorge Güemes (see ♇ ) at Utopia Contagiosa and Insumissia.
  • You’d think there would be nothing easier for the government than preventing people they’ve already put behind bars from taking money from the government by filing fraudulent tax returns. Apparently not. Despite this being a problem that has attracted news stories and congressional hearings and such for as long as I remember, the amount of money the IRS gives to prisoners for lying on their tax returns continues to rise.
  • It has been illuminating and disturbing how the world’s governments and large corporations have obsequiously bowed to the bleatings of the American hatriarchy and joined in the attack on WikiLeaks. But WikiLeaks has already won this round, and Clinton’s state department are just punch-drunkedly swinging their gloves in the air after the bell.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Prisoners in at least six Georgia state prisons have gone on strike, refusing to leave their cells to work in government-run prison slave labor industries. The unusual strike is being organized by the prisoners via contraband cell phones.
  • I’ve been working on a series of pages for NWTRCC under the tentative title of “Where Else Does the Government Get money to Make War, and What Can We Do About It?” These pages are meant to supplement the current NWTRCC site focus on the federal personal income tax and telephone excise tax, and to talk about other government funding sources and the resistance strategies appropriate to them. It is slow going, and surprisingly controversial (there is debate about to what extent taxes like the payroll tax are really dedicated to non-military trust fund spending and to what extent this is an illusion).

    Prison labor is one way governments extract value from people at gunpoint (and, seeing as how the Department of Defense is a big user of prison labor-produced products, I suppose it counts as a “war tax” also). Another tactic governments have often turned to is seigniorage — simply printing up money and spending it and implicitly taxing people by making their money-denominated savings less valuable. But according to a recent article in Forbes, seigniorage doesn’t work as well as it used to, as investors now have more tools to evade or counteract its effects.

    The Initial Public Offering of stock from the formerly-public, then government-owned General Motors is another odd source of government revenue. According to a Treasury Department press release, the government brought in $13.5 billion in by selling GM stock. (Actually, according to the press release, “Taxpayers” received the money, but that’s only true in government fantasy-land.) Did you buy any? Did the mutual funds in your 401k or IRA? If so, you helped the federal government get a return on its investment.
  • The PandaLabs blog has been keeping track of a “cyberwar” of sorts in which angry WikiLeaks supporters have tried to take reprisals against the politicians and corporations who have been conducting a distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks. It’s interesting stuff, to be sure, and not least interesting is the indication that the rebels have decided to take a turn to the moral high road and abandon their own denial of service attacks for Operation: Leakspin in which they vow to more closely investigate and expose the leaks whose sheer quantity is bewildering the world of journalism.
  • The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration publishes a list of management priorities for the IRS every year. This year they’ve got a new top priority: keeping their employees safe from “a surge of hostility towards the federal government” from irate taxpayers.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Claire Wolfe has written a good meditation on the dangers of lifestyle purity perfectionism. I have a lot of admiration for folks who go to eccentric extremes to root out even the tiniest vestages of collaboration from their lives. I also think that keeping our faces turned in the direction of always becoming a little better in this regard is good exercise in staying conscious and conscientious (at least that way if you decide to compromise, you won’t do it unconsciously or with self-deception). That said, I think it’s probably true that there are diminishing returns after a while from this approach and it can become a sort of self-indulgent ethical yoga.
  • , Alassane Ouattara apparently won the presidential election in Ivory Coast over incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo disagrees and refuses to leave office. Ouattara called on the citizens of Ivory Coast to discontinue paying taxes to the Gbagbo government.
  • The website Financial Integrity is holding a writing competition. “Around the world people are aligning their spending with their values. They’re trusting their own choices more than what the advertisers put forth. People are emphasizing financial integrity. Stories are being made, as real people make real choices and experience the bumps and bruises and triumphs of transforming their relationship with money.” Perhaps the story of your conscientious tax resistance is the winner they’re looking for.
  • Fred Reed on the American Monkey Trap.
  • Kevin Zeese on the courageous stand of Bradley Manning.

You may remember , when a NATO helicopter crew in Afghanistan attacked ten children, ages 9 to 15, who were out collecting firewood, and successfully killed all but one of them.

Or you may not have heard of it. It made the Times, but from my friends and relations I heard nothing about it but plenty of allusions to something or other that Charlie Sheen said.

The gunners mistook the children for Taliban belligerents, which was easy for them to do while following the modern superpower modus operandi of killing people from as far away as possible — continents away if need be — so that you don’t have to take any unnecessary risks yourself, but you instead can pass the unnecessary risks on to children collecting firewood and other such unimportant people. This is the sort of courageous warrior virtue we have in mind when we “support the troops.”

The incident didn’t much put a dent into the public chatter in the United States, though it did interfere a bit with General Petraeus’s attempt in Afghanistan to downplay the many other examples of butchery of the innocent by those under his command (, he’d dismissed one such report by saying “that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties.”)

Not all NATO troops are bad. One of them, Bradley Manning, reformed and took a serious turn for the good. He thought that maybe it was because the American public was unaware of the repulsive acts of its government’s military that they permit it to continue. So he leaked the Collateral Murder video, which was taken from an Apache helicopter while its crew were killing children and journalists, and, if reports are true, also leaked many diplomatic cables detailing shenanigans of the U.S. government and various foreign officials it has rented.

Manning may have been too optimistic about the possibility that sunlight would prove a potent disinfectant of the American soul, but his heart was in the right place, and he showed admirable courage and initiative — no drone pilot he.

The powers that be are furious, and they have decided to hit him with the full force of American justice, which, if you have been paying attention these last several years, you will know means taking someone captive and tormenting them heartlessly and ruthlessly in the hopes of utterly breaking them, while saving anything like a “trial” in the formal sense for some far off future when the damage has already been done.

Certainly some of this is just from a sadistic desire to hurt Manning, and to break him and turn him against those who helped him get the word out. But much of it is also a tactic designed to discourage other whistleblowers and dissenters: Screw with us and we’ll make your life a living hell and no law or lawyer or code of honor or sense of decency will stand between you and our wrath.

Fortunately, there are some people who have Manning’s back and are able to let him know of the thousands of people who know he’s a hero and want to encourage others to follow his example. You can help.