Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Jay Sordean

A new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is out. The contents include:

• “Bringing Light into Darkness” — Marcus Page and Mike Butler discuss their civil disobedience action at Los Alamos National Laboratory in support of the 2008 War Tax Boycott
• Some brief notes on the “economic stimulus” checks, frivolous filing warnings from the IRS that some war tax resisters have been receiving, the IRS’s expanded snitch payment program, limits on the IRS’s ability to seize pensions before they come due, and increasing IRS interest in offshore bank accounts
• Some news about the status of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and about Joshua Goldberg’s war tax resistance in Canada
• Notes from resisters, including Greg Reagle responding to critics who say that war tax resistance isn’t effective, Melissa Jameson relating stories about how her resistance relates to those around her, and a summary of the story of resister Charles Merrill
• A plug for my book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader
• Some committee business including an announcement of the upcoming national meeting in Eugene, Oregon in November and an invitation to readers to help shape the future direction of the 2008 War Tax Boycott project
• Jay Sordean’s review of Smedley Butler’s 1935 book War Is a Racket
• A profile by and of A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, who takes a zen approach to ethical living and tax resistance

NWTRCC has added some Readings on Money to their website.

At the NWTRCC national gathering in Fall, 2006, we held a discussion about money. The seed for this discussion was an article by Karen Marysdaughter about The Influence of Money on Decisions to Engage in War Tax Resistance.

Some notes from this discussion are included on the new NWTRCC page, along with the following:

• George Salzman’s “Inheritance and Social Responsibility” — about how he creatively used an inheritance in socially productive ways while keeping the IRS’s hands off of it.
• A debate on interest between Juanita Nelson and Bob Irwin. Nelson sees interest on loans and bank deposits and such as inherently unethical, Irwin disagrees.
• Jay Sordean takes a look at the Federal Reserve and how money comes into being in his essay on War, the National Debt, Taxes, and the Creation of Money.
• Another collection of writings looks at various issues associated with Nonprofits and Tax-Exempt Status. While becoming tax-exempt and then defending your tax-exempt status may seem like it should be a no-brainer for folks who are tax resisters, tax exempt status comes with strings attached and may be more trouble than it is worth.
• Finally: one of the traditionally most successful outreach tools of war tax resistance groups is the “penny poll.” This page shows you how different groups have gone about making government budget priorities visible and visceral.

Lots of tax resistance news sliding by my browser in recent days as the federal income tax filing deadline approaches in the U.S.:

• A syndicated feature about American tax resisters — featuring Rod Nippert, Jay Sordean, Ruth Benn, Peter Smith, Cindy Sheehan, Ann Barron, and Joseph Olejak — appeared in newsweeklies around the country this week, including the Colorado Springs Independent, Salt Lake City Weekly, Athens, Georgia Flagpole, and Baltimore City Paper
• The author of that piece, Mary Finn, was interviewed on Democracy in Crisis.
• The Independent also ran a second article — The new tax resistance? — about a Baltimore woman named Kesh, who has stopped paying her taxes:

  This year she isn’t paying because she began thinking more about where her tax money goes and she feels like she can’t keep paying the government. “It’s not going to anything that I can see personally that is going to benefit me,” Kesh, who asked that only her first name be used, says. “But me paying it is definitely going to hit me. Not having that money that needs to go towards other things that I have to pay — that affects me immediately. That’s a loss for me.”

  The inauguration of President Donald Trump only worsened her feeling about the situation. First, because she has her doubts about whether Trump has bothered to pay his fair share of taxes, and second, because his administration seems to be waging a war against people like her. “I’m all the groups that are hated. I’ve decided to come to earth in this body and be black, be a woman, gay, so you know, I get hit on every side of it,” she says. “I was a teenaged mother, I’m a single mom — I’m all the things [Trump and Republicans] hate.”

  Living in Baltimore, where Freddie Gray died in police custody in April 2015 and where just last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to hamper police reform, taxes funding the police are an issue for her as well. (Police are primarily funded through local and state governments, but Kesh isn’t paying state taxes either.)

  “I know that my tax money is going to the police and I can walk down the street and get shot,” she says. “I can get shot by my own money and get killed by my own money and there’s no one that’s gonna do shit about it. So basically I’m giving you money to kill me and people that look like me.”

  Unlike long-time tax resisters, Kesh is new to this. She doesn’t know where it will lead her yet — hence her decision not to use her name. The Internal Revenue Service may target her, but not paying feels right.

  “I’m basically saying, ‘Fuck you.’ ” she says. “I’m keeping my money.”

• There are lots of war tax resistance-related actions going on around the country in the tax-filing season this year.
• The Alaska Dispatch looks back at the Alaska photo [that] did for the IRS what that passenger video did for United Airlines. (In this case, IRS agents who broke the windows of a car to drag out the passengers so they could seize it in 1979. This was photographed, and the outrage led to IRS policy changes on using violence during collection.)
• The Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies is continuing its series on tax resistance with A Call for Tax Resistance — “a joint appeal from leading nonviolent activists and organizations, urging US taxpayers to nonviolently express their opposition to the policies of the Trump administration by refusing to pay a symbolic amount of their US federal income tax, and instead donate that amount to a deserving charity or institution.”
• War tax resisters’ letters-to-the-editor and op-eds are starting to appear, too, including ones from:
  • Daniel Sicken, and
  • Sue Barnhart