Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → calls to action! → by other folks

The following is a passionate call for tax resistance by Gina Lunori that I’m reproducing here:

It’s Revolution Time Again

by Gina Lunori

I’ve heard Republicans talk about getting the government off our backs often enough now that I think it’s sunk in. If I ever see a Republican who actually means it, I think I may dust off my voting suit and try to find my way to the polling place.

I’d like the government off our backs, and off our toes, and out of our pocketbooks and the rest of us, too. I’d like the government to keep its hands to itself and go back to where it belongs, if the more pessimistic theologians are right after all and there is such a place.

They say we have a government to protect us from criminals, and every year politicians pass new laws that grease the wheels for bigger and more outrageous crimes. Could Enron have happened without the help of the politicians who helped out as surely as if they’d been driving the getaway car?

They say we have a government to keep the peace, but war-hungry people know that the best way to feed their bloodlust is by using the government. Case in point: the present Iraq war, which was not caused by the American people using their government as designed to protect them from threats, but was the result of a few individuals using the government as a tool for their own ends. Who believes that if actually argued on its merits, this war would have met with the approval of the American people?

Defenders of the government can’t sing its praises with a straight face, so they are reduced to sowing fear of what might happen if the government abandoned its post. Get government off our backs and what’s to keep the Ku Klux Klan from coming back and taking over the South? Get government off our backs and who will fix our roads? Get government off our backs and who will clean up the environment?

But the government has never done anything that couldn’t be done better if the government got the hell out of the way and let people do it on their own. The government didn’t free the slaves so much as it finally stopped enforcing their slavery. It doesn’t fix the roads so much as it fixes the bidding on the contracts to make the roads. It doesn’t clean up the environment — hell, it’s the worst polluter this country’s got! All of these things that people claim couldn’t be done without the government around to call the shots would have been done, probably better and with less waste of time and effort, if the government hadn’t been getting in the way.

The government runs off to Cancun to negotiate a “free trade” agreement and ends up spending all of its time trying to make excuses for the barriers to free trade it relies on. Imagine: a bunch of governments meeting to make rules governing free trade. That’s like a bunch of graffiti artists spray-painting an anti-vandalism message on an alley wall. That’s like a bunch of alcoholics getting together at happy hour to hold a drinkathon for sobriety. It’s nuts, but in Government Land, up is down, dry is wet, and free trade is a mountain of asterisks guarded by bureaucrats.

Your legislators all run for office on crime-fighting platforms, but if you look at the results of their legislation — which opens the door to new assaults and thefts with every bill that’s passed — you’d be in your right mind to want to move the Capitol to Alcatraz. They claim to be working for national defense, but when you see how vigorously they’re arming the world and angling for war you begin to understand that the biggest threat to the United States is its own government.

But I’m not asking you to join the Black Bloc or even the Libertarian Party; I won’t wish upon a star for the government to vanish into thin air. But could we at least have a better government? Not “one day” but tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after that and so on. Nobody can respect this government, but most people have some idea of what government they could respect, and I think if we each one of us pushed in that direction, as different as our opinions are, the direction would generally be up, and not just back-and-forth like it is today.

I’m not saying we should have crude majority rule. The majority doesn’t necessarily have any sense just because of its size. I mean: look at any bestseller list. If the government dreams, I believe it sometimes dreams that it will one day have the power to force everyone to read Chicken Soup for the Soul every day. It’s like that with the rest of its laws — let a majority, or even a sufficiently powerful minority, believe that something is good for everyone and — whammo! — a law is sure to follow making it mandatory.

The worst part is that there are many dopes out there who don’t trust their own opinions enough that this would bother them. “Well, the law says I should read Chicken Soup for the Soul — who am I to argue with the opinions of the majority? I’m only one person, after all.” Pity a nation that has a population whose consciences have atrophied so much that they’d let a majority make the decisions for them when it really counts. And pity a society that lived through the 20^th Century without putting safeguards in place to prevent this.

Don’t get me wrong — it only makes sense in an important matter to consult the people around you, to get a sense for what other people would do in a similar situation. But if, after getting this feedback, your conscience still tells you that to do what the majority would have you do means doing something wrong — are you going to go ahead and do wrong? Might as well just click off the ol’ brain entirely, then — you won’t be needing it.

It’s true that some people are better judges of right and wrong than others, but I’d bet that if you just set everybody free to do what they felt to be right the world would be a whole hell of a lot better than if you let some majority or influential minority of people decide what everybody ought to be doing. The law never made any right person righter than they already were, and although it may be true that fear of the law has made some wrong people think twice, it’s also true that the same fear regularly convinces otherwise sensible people do awful things.

And it takes these otherwise sensible people out-of-service, as people anyway. They can still push buttons and follow orders, I suppose, but their conscience is the part of them that’s most desperately needed in this world, and we, by allowing government to prohibit independent conscience, have allowed these necessary consciences to wither away.

I meet people all the time who have decided that the government is the best judge of how they should conduct their lives — I feel like laying a flower on them and saying something nice to the next-of-kin. I get the feeling that if the government decided it could get better use out of them by grinding their bones into glue, they wouldn’t get much further back along the path to humanity than cursing their bad luck on the way to the glue factory.

There are some people who really do serve their country — as people, complete, with their bodies and their minds and their consciences. They’re wonderfully dangerous men and women, and the government categorizes them that way if it recognizes them. After all, a person of conscience only follows the government’s dictates accidentally, when they happen not to prohibit good or mandate evil, and how often is that, really?

The revolutionaries who ripped this country away from its colonizers felt that they had to explain themselves. The monarchy they were ridding themselves of was different from the republic that suffocates us now, but the excuses people had for putting up with it were pretty much the same. The revolutionaries responded to these excuses by saying that as far as they could tell, the reason we put up with governments at all is that we use them to protect our rights — for instance to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — from those who would try to violate them. Furthermore, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

Ask yourself now: is your government protecting lives, or endangering them? Does it protect liberty, or threaten it? Does it facilitate the pursuit of happiness, or frustrate it?

If the government were merely inefficient and clumsy at doing its job I might grumble a little, but I’d probably let it slide. But when a government, like ours, has become a threat to life and liberty, I say it’s time for a change. We’d be better off without it. If we need a government at all, the government we need is a different one — not just this one with a sprinkling of new heads above its ties.

If the choice were between a bloody and awful revolution like our Civil War and keeping the government we have today, it would be argued — and I might argue myself — that the cost is too high, and it’s better to suffer under the government we have than pay such a price in blood for a new one.

But who says this is the choice we have to make? Is there no other choice than between a bloodbath and an embarrassing and savage parody of democracy? Are we like Hollywood — so sapped of creativity that we can’t find a path from where we are now to where we want to go that doesn’t involve a thrilling penultimate act with car chases, shootouts and explosions?

Right now, the cost of avoiding this bloodbath at home includes inflicting a bloodbath on Iraq and funding bloodbaths elsewhere. We’re not fooling anyone by puttering around and delaying and attributing our reluctance to pacifism.

What’s in the way of us taking this country back? It’s not 535 members of congress, or a few thousand rich, politically-connected people in the halls of power. The problem is the millions of Americans who are waiting, waiting, waiting, hoping that someone else is going to fix things for them, wishing that they lived in a make-believe world where they could continue to buy their toys and pay their taxes and some day a movie star hero will come and rescue them.

They plead every couple of years for their representatives to make some small sacrifice for their benefit — but, though they’re disappointed every year, they remain unwilling to make any sacrifice themselves to make a real change.

There are millions of people in this country who are of the opinion that the war in Iraq was a terrible adventure, dishonestly engaged in, and with terrible consequences — but these same millions of people do absolutely nothing effective to change their country’s actions. They mumble complaints, or forward emails, or put bumper stickers on their cars, and passionately wish that somebody else were doing something effective, and then they go back to work the next morning to wish again over coffee the way you might pray that your favorite team wins the Super Bowl.

Myself, I’m sick of arguing with the government. I don’t have any more argument with the government — I know what kind of beast it is, I know what kind of woman I am: We’ve come to a sort of an impasse. I’ve got a new bone to pick — it’s with people who know perfectly well that things have gone to hell in this country but who aren’t lifting a finger to do anything about it (or who flatter themselves into thinking that “voting” is the same as doing something about it).

Voting is kind of like gambling on sports, but slightly more sacred (maybe you remember the outrage when John Poindexter’s crew at DARPA started a program to encourage gambling on world events as a way of enhancing intelligence estimates). You’ve got to play to win, and playing with only a vote is hardly playing at all. The people who place big bets, in large denominations, are the ones who get the big pay-outs. The rest of us are just paying the house.

When I was a kid, even before I could vote, I’d look over the voter’s pamphlet and weigh the arguments carefully and imagine that I was making grave decisions of right and wrong. Only later did I realize that voting for the right thing isn’t the same as doing the right thing. It’s only sort of a feeble “I wish” followed by an agreement to leave it up to the majority, or to the skillful manipulation of that majority, or to some other mechanism that bears no resemblance at all to an assertion of conscience on my part.

There’s an election coming up, and there are a bunch of candidates holding debates and raising money, and a lot of people who really ought to know better holding their breath and anticipating how they’re going to whisper their “I wish.” I consider it a lucky day when I meet someone who cares as much as I do for the soul of my country and yet cares as little for who wins the Democratic presidential nomination as for who won the World Championships of Parcheesi.

But most people I meet who pretend to be anguished about the state of their country have got it backward — it’s their country that should be crying over them. While I want to put a flower on the corpses of these prematurely dead citizens, the country wants to build a monument over the mass of them and inscribe on it: “remember these dead and never let this happen again.”

You may have something you’d rather be doing with your time than going up against the government. That’s fine. It’s not for everybody. But the least you can do is to stop supporting the government. If you’re going to decide that you’ve got other things to be bothered with, at least get out of our way. Don’t think that you can pay your taxes every month and then hide the pay stub behind your back and declare yourself neutral.

I heard someone praise a conscientious objector who refused to fight in Iraq, and I asked him if he was still paying taxes. He told me that the government hadn’t created a “conscientious objector” category for taxpayers, so he was sorry to say he wasn’t able to stop paying. As if you only have a conscience when the government issues you a permit for one!

I told him I know people who’ve stopped paying their taxes without waiting for permission, just by lowering their income and living below the tax threshold. He told me that he wasn’t prepared to make that kind of sacrifice. If I had a pocket calculator I could have told you the maximum price of his conscience. If I had a quality postal scale I probably still couldn’t discern its weight.

Like Walter Mitty these armchair peaceniks burn their draft cards in their daydreams, meanwhile the people who serve in the military in their place are equipped, and shipped, and paid for by Walter Mitty’s tax dollar.

The biggest obstacles to change aren’t the few who are abusing the government, but the many who are submitting to it and facilitating the abuse.

A government that loved liberty would be trying at every opportunity to expand and protect that liberty. Our government tries everything it can to evade the few protections that have survived since its founding. Look at how shamelessly it has whisked people off to Cuba — Cuba! — in order to sweep them out from under the protection of the Constitution.

A person who loves liberty would not shovel coal into a tyrant’s engine just to earn a higher salary. Why does a person in the United States who claims to love freedom, and who is intelligent enough to understand that the government is freedom’s enemy, still feel that it’s worthy of respect to be a taxpayer, and the more salary — and therefore the more taxes — the more respect?

If you love liberty, if you hate war, you should at once withdraw your support from the government. Withdrawing your moral support isn’t enough — it’s your practical support that the government feeds on — it doesn’t give a damn what your opinions are.

This is something you must do because you know the difference between right and wrong and you know, when you look the facts straight in the face, that when you willingly give practical support to the government you participate in its wrongs. But this is more than a matter of personal integrity.

Imagine the power of this statement. What if every person who felt that the government had lost their moral support also withdrew their practical support? What if only one in ten did? It would be the beginning of the end. It would be that nonviolent revolution we’re praying for.

How is that going to happen? Better you should ask yourself: How is that going to happen if even I do not help make it happen? Cast your vote — don’t just punch out the chad but vote your whole person: body, mind and conscience.

Put a price on your conscience and determine for yourself if the cost of continuing to give practical support to the government is higher than the cost of withdrawing that support.

There’s a myth that “death and taxes” are inevitable. Taxes, at least, are avoidable — although to those with cheap consciences, only at comparatively expensive rates. I know people who are living what in most parts of the world would be considered wealthy lives, without doing anything to put them in fear of IRS auditors, and who are still living tax-free. And their consciences, which to them are quite valuable commodities, remain intact and unmortgaged.

It’s easy to come up with excuses for not acting. And it’s easy not to recognize them for excuses. For instance: “Isn’t the U.S. government much better than, say, China’s or Saudi Arabia’s, or so many others?” But that only works if you think the course of nations is the sort of course that should be graded on the curve.

What a sad concession it would be to believe that our republic, the first one out of the gates after the age of monarchies, was the finish line for this country and the best sort of government anyone could aspire toward. A bunch of powdered-wigged slaveholders somehow miraculously scribbling out the best scheme for protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness anyone could hope for.

Imagine instead that maybe we’ve learned something in the last two and some centuries — that we can do much better than we’re doing now, because what we’re doing now stinks. But don’t imagine for a minute that it’s going to change on its own, or that you can continue to prop it up without sharing responsibility for what it’s doing.

I’ve been participating in meetings of a group discussing “direct action,” and I’ve been reflecting on how that phrase means different things to different people. For some, it’s a synonym for illegal protest techniques or violent opposition. I was reminded of this essay which came out shortly after the WTO protests in Seattle a few years back and which made a good case for one definition of “direct action.”

Direct Action

by Gina Lunori

Demonstrators in Seattle who hoped to practice peaceful protest found themselves banned from even non-violent protests in a 50-block area. Is there any hope for peaceful protest?

If you see clearly that the path to a better world happens to go through a minefield of obstacles set up by those who are made wealthy and powerful by the current system, and if you want to encourage people to start on this path despite these obstacles, frustration is inevitable.

On the one hand, people see that, as in Seattle recently, peaceful protest — the right to “petition… for redress of grievances” that our government was supposedly designed to encourage and defend — can be declared illegal and crushed by the police the moment it threatens to amount to anything.

On the other hand, any attempt to go beyond holding signs and chanting slogans and submitting gracefully to arrest and prosecution is considered counter-productive, and otherwise thoughtful activists accept hook-line-and-sinker the government’s line that “violent” and “anarchist” protesters are to blame for its crackdown on everyone else.

“Direct Action” is advocated by frustrated radicals, and feared by the activist groups who hope (probably with good reason) that the least objectionable groups of protesters will be the first to be placated with some token reform when it finally comes time for the ritual show of benevolence on the part of the rule-makers.

What is this “Direct Action” and why is it so feared by liberal activist groups? Chances are that you practice direct action all the time. If you use your conscience, and test yourself by it without cheating, and act on what your conscience tells you — you’re practicing “Direct Action.”

If you come up with a plan to do something and then do it, or convince others that you have a good plan and cooperate with them to carry it out, without going to some government or external authority to ask them to do it for you or to give you permission — you are practicing “Direct Action.”

If you have a disagreement with someone, or feel like someone did you wrong or cheated you, and you go directly to that person to try to resolve the problem before trying to appeal to some judge, law, attorney or external enforcer — you’re practicing “Direct Action.”

Essentially: if you search your heart with honesty and integrity for the right course of action, and then follow through unflinchingly on what you find without insisting on approval from politician or talk show host — you’re practicing “Direct Action” and thank heavens you are.

Most of the evil of our century has been practiced not by people disregarding the law and following their conscience, but by people surrendering their consciences to the law and getting approval from the state for murders and tortures so vicious that only pathological sadists or run-of-the-mill institutions could approve.

Let me be very clear: you cannot rent out your conscience to another person, army, government, corporation, majority or law-book. Anyone who tells you that you can is a lying coward. If you perform an action, you and you alone are responsible for justifying that action. This principle is the basis for what is known as “Direct Action.”

Direct action, then, isn’t necessarily a violent protest, or even a protest at all, but the spontaneous decision-making and living of people who know that letting institutions make their moral decisions for them is dishonest and dangerous. Direct Action is action taken with the conscious knowledge that you and you alone are responsible for guiding your own conduct.

But, of course, people conscientiously living their lives frequently come into conflict with governments and others who would like to do their thinking for them.

On our postage stamps and in our history textbooks we find many examples of people whose illegal direct action we are encouraged to admire, but never emulate. How many Americans who have memorized that slavery is evil would break the law and muddy their carpets to invite an escaped slave into the guest room, I wonder.

I’ve described direct action as personal and day-to-day, but it has a political dimension. People practicing direct action, sometimes peaceful and sometimes not, have aroused the human conscience to the need for political change.

Non-direct political action within the existing system is almost never “direct” action, but a series of tactical compromises. Perhaps this can help, but more often than not, the compromises only serve to compromise the integrity — and the more dirty your hands are, the harder it is to take real direct action. Most real progress in increasing human freedom and dignity has come after individual rebellion in the service of forthright integrity has inspired mass rebellion and has then forced the hand of the politicians. Direct action initiates the crisis that encourages people to assess their own lives and to join the call for change.

Is there any doubt that change is necessary? Not only in Seattle but everywhere in the world where the very mixed blessings of Civilization have taken hold. The parasites in suits who are busy trying to govern the metabolism of the global economy at the WTO are just a subset of the crooks who think that stealing someone else’s livelihood by devising a clever law is nothing to be ashamed of.

Which brings us to the much-maligned anarchists. Because the anarchists are so hated, they naturally attract the devotion of the same kids who aren’t going to settle for anything less revolting than Marilyn Manson to try and reach out in the classic adolescent manner to their difficult-to-offend parents. And because anarchism is such the popular fashion statement for the rebellious teen set, it’s pretty much guaranteed that nobody else is going to take it seriously. Should we?

The anarchists have made a couple of points we need to pay attention to.

First: government serves as a terrific excuse that people use to do things that they know are wrong. Murder is wrong, but if I’m a soldier or an executioner I can kill and pretend that the government will take the sin off my shoulders. Kidnapping and torture is wrong, but if I’m a prison guard, police officer, judge or prosecutor I can capture someone for holding a protest sign in a curfew zone, spray that person with pepper spray and hold them in a cell and pretend that I don’t have to think about whether it’s right or wrong. Theft is wrong, but if I’m a tax collector or government agent, there’s a law that makes it right when I do it.

Second: government everywhere and always has worked to give more power and wealth to those who already have more than their share. The only times this process has been temporarily reversed have been when people have directly and illegally attacked the government. Anarchists are right when they say that liberals who want to try to reform but preserve the system are living in a fantasy land.

I must confess that I don’t have much hope for the protests in Seattle. The many groups and individuals who are currently united against a common foe will be easily bought off, I think. They have limited agendas that have more to do with trying to influence the powerful to smile on their constituencies than in trying to reduce the illegitimate power of the powerful. They haven’t learned that there really is a single common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money and the machines.

How long will it be, do you suppose, before Al Gore will come forward with a plan that, by the time it gets through Congressional committees and gets interpreted by the courts, will be seen to have had the sole effect of dispersing the crowds of protesters and gaining Gore a percentage or two in the polls. And dozens of “leaders” of the protest, who ought to know better by now, will drop everything to plead that their own pet interest gets a paragraph in the impotent legislation.

These spokespeople and self-described leaders may be good for prime time news and political negotiation, but they don’t actually lead anyone whose life is based on uncompromising and responsible direct action. For us, our first leader is our own relentlessly self-criticized conscience. Any other leader we have doesn’t have to have a title or an office — those leaders will be leaders only because they have impressed followers with their integrity and leadership. They don’t demand allegiance by pointing to the top of a leadership pyramid or by winning an election, but command respect by appealing to the conscience and communicating an urgent plan for action.

What does direct action have to do with violence? People who advocate “Direct Action” often seem to be using the phrase as a code word for violent action, and people who are frightened by direct action are as likely to think that they are acting out of principled pacifism as they are to be genuinely afraid of acting on their own consciences.

I’ve tasted five flavors of thought about the recent violence in Seattle:

First, there’s the most mainstream, voiced by Bill Clinton and protest leaders of various stripes and copied in the concerned voice of television commentators and newspaper editorials: How sad that such a potentially noble protest was marred by a bunch of violent anarchists, and how nice it would be if we just had sit-ins and choruses of “We Shall Overcome.”

No mention of the violence on the part of the police, except perhaps to imply that the speaker is in principle opposed to draconian crackdowns on the freedom of expression but doesn’t want to actually do anything that might prevent them.

Second, there are the heads-in-the-clouds ninnies who look at the violence on both sides and say “oh, why can’t we just get along?” With enough visualization, pleasant thoughts, lullabies and prayers, they hope people will stop hitting and gassing each other.

Third, there’s the principled pacifist of the Gandhian school who may believe quite strongly in direct action, but whose own ethical scheme prohibits violence in any form either because the ethical price to pay for violent behavior is too high, or because violent means are seen as less practical. If there is going to be violence in Seattle, they say, it will be against them or without them and they will stand proudly as examples of non-violent action.

Similar to, but in loyal opposition to this view are those who see well-chosen, but illegal, destructive and violent opposition to the current evils as an appropriate and practical answer to the current crisis. This fourth group looks to the gains that have been won by violent opposition to evil and says, “now is the time.” If the machines of evil are grinding down human beings, there’s more to be said for destroying the machinery than for linking arms and bearing witness as you’re being crushed. If violence is going to be used, this group will not stand by and let the government monopolize it.

A fifth group consists of those who are frustrated and angry at the current system and want to vent that anger through violence. They are joined by people who get a thrill out of breaking glass and participating in mob-protected mayhem and want to think of themselves as romantic heroes of the barricades, but who accept no more ownership of the results of their own violent acts than do the thugs with badges. The relationship between this group and the violent police could also be described as “loyal opposition” — the two groups justify and require each other.

The first group I described consists partially of self-interested finger-waggers who are happy to encourage non-violent protest since it’s usually easy to ignore and otherwise easy to crush. The rest of this group are those who collect their opinions from politicians and other talking heads for the purpose of being able to regurgitate them on appropriate social occasions. This first group practices direct action of a sort, but really only a well-dressed version of the selfish acts of the looters.

The second group has lost sight of their consciences over the distant horizon and is hardly worth considering — they’re as dull and dangerous as a stormcloud, and just about as susceptible to reason.

The fifth group, the righteously furious and the common criminal, are useful to the protester and the state alike. To the state, they are the justification for escalating violence and repression; to the protester, they are the “bad cop” to the peaceful demonstrator’s “good cop” and help push the state to the negotiating table. The common criminal will always be with us, and sees large-scale demonstrations with the same joy that pickpockets see public executions or toy stores see Christmas. The righteously furious can be tamed into clarity and tactics, but likely not by this essay.

This essay is for people who wonder if it’s time to join in with the straightforward and alive direct actors — either of the Gandhian or non-pacifist camps.

If you are reading this, you’re probably curious about direct action and are trying to decide if you have it in you to be a direct actor. It’s my opinion that you can’t avoid it — direct action isn’t just a good idea, it’s the only life there is. Unless you’re a zombie or in a coma or the obligatory “free will” hypothesis turns out to be wrong after all, you’re practicing direct action with every decision you make.

The decision is not “should I be a direct actor?” but “what kind of direct actor should I be?”

Once you realize that it’s a cop-out to loan out your conscience to your employer, your neighbor, the majority, the Constitution, or the editorial page of Newsweek, you’re faced with the awesome responsibility of testing and developing your conscience against the demands of real life, and then living according to the standards that you reveal.

You are your own best and most qualified judge. If you ignore your own conscience you’re committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — killing off your soul, and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who swerves from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox.

Link-o-rama Saturday:

• After declining in the post-cold war era of the early 1990s, global military spending is on the rise again — threatening to break the one trillion dollar barrier this year, according to a group of U.N.-appointed military experts… ¶ “The United States now accounts for about half of world military spending, meaning that it is spending nearly as much as the rest of the world combined,” says Natalie J Goldring, executive director of the programme on global security and disarmament at the University of Maryland.
• Karen Button sums up the war tax resistance argument in her essay Against Hegemony: When Bush Comes to Shove, Resist, Don’t Pay for People’s Death. “I didn’t know what to do. One thing became clear though: No matter how much I might protest the war, my money was being used to finance it. I was paying for people’s death. At that moment I decided I would not give the US government any more of my consent.”
• I’m fairly certain nothing good can come of this: US wants to build network of friendly militias to combat terrorism. The visual that comes to mind when I read this headline are a bunch of troops running about wearing bright yellow smiley-face helmets — “look! it’s the Friendly Militia! we’re saved!” But I’d imagine the reality will be something like contras, mujahideen or janjaweed — some hybrid of insurgents and mercenaries who occasionally take orders and supplies from Americans in mirrored sunglasses and who can do our dirtiest work for us without making us take responsibility.
• I haven’t had much good to say about John Kerry on this blog, but I will say that when I read his smart, bold and sincere 1971 testimony (which right-wing blogs insist is show-stoppingly treasonous) I think to myself “why won’t this John Kerry run for president?” The latest phase in the attack on Kerry’s Vietnam record is shifting towards an attack on this anti-war activist phase, and I’m curious to see whether Kerry will be defending or backing away from these statements and actions.

Kathy Kelly reminds us of What We Can Control:

In the past year, several groups have asked me to facilitate retreats for people who want to further explore nonviolence. At the retreats, I ask volunteers to role-play situations likely to generate discussion about challenges people face when involved in peace activism. One of the most reliably difficult scenarios stages a spouse raising with his or her partner a decision to become a war tax refuser and stop paying federal income tax.

In one such scene, an anguished husband implored his wife to understand his reasons for stopping payment of federal income tax. “How could you do this to our children?” she asked. “And why didn’t you think of this before you became a father?” The husband responded, “Honey, I just want to do something for peace,” to which the wife blurted out, “At Christmas?!” The room filled with laughter. Cut! Point well taken.…

This is what we have power over.

We can appropriate money away from militarism to health care, housing and other needs by our resistance, by our nonpayment of taxes for war. As civilian and military casualties mount, as US foreign policy creates terrorists faster than we can kill them, progressives opposed to warmaking simply can’t deny a moral imperative: don’t turn your productivity over to the warmakers.…

Karl Meyer, a pacifist guide for numerous war tax refusers, a man who hasn’t paid his taxes since 1960, takes a harder line than I do, but without his perspective I never would have been drawn into allowing the IRS to become my spiritual director [sic]. Here are Karl’s words: “If progressives fail to resist militarism or refuse participation in it through the one form of participation that is demanded, that is to pay taxes, they should give up their pretensions to being in opposition.”

Greg Moses asks, and asks not:

So who made Falluja possible? Who enabled budgets to be filled with imperial plans? American taxpayers did. The moral tracer on this funding leads to me and you, the co-investors who backed this pre-holiday discount on the lives of Fallujans, thousands of lives, forever lost and unlived. To pay for this moral bankruptcy, we got up in the morning, worked all day, and sent money to the war machine. Ask not who bankrolled Falluja.

In this first of what he says will be a series of articles about war tax resistance, Moses briefly profiles resisters Shirley Smith, Andy McKenna, and Susan Van Haitsma and speculates as to whether the increased IRS enforcement activity targeting resisters in Austin, Texas is coincidental or part of a larger trend.

The group Austin Conscientious Objectors to Military Taxation sent out a press release yesterday about this increased enforcement activity. The release reads in part:

A state worker has had her bank account seized twice and recently received garnishment notices from the IRS. A non-profit employee was forced to reduce his income to the poverty level of $662.50 per month to avoid repeat levies. After 11 years of inaction by the IRS, an office worker had his wages garnished. An emergency room doctor, whose car was seized in 1991, was recently visited by an IRS agent and faces possible seizure of her wages and another car. A teacher, who is new to war tax resistance, has already begun receiving collection notices. Another group member, a housecleaner and artist, continues living intentionally below taxable level to legally avoid paying war taxes.

“Having your wages or car seized is not fun. But it is nothing compared to living in a war zone like Iraq and daily facing permanent disability or death,” says Dr. Paula Rogge.

Some views from Greg at viewsfromhome:

[T]he subject few people want to talk seriously about is this: that all American taxpayers share the responsibility for these atrocities and others, because we support them with our tax dollars. Every time we dutifully surrender our tax monies — that is, every time we’re paid and every time we fill out a tax return and send additional money — we fund exactly the things to which we morally object.…

These monies keep the wheels turning, the immoral agenda moving forward — and these monies come from us. If we hope to address and influence the process of American politics, we must consider forming a massive tax resistance movement, in which tens of thousands or millions of Americans band together to withhold the fiscal lubricant until serious changes are made. In short, we need a fiscal revolution!

I urge anyone who reads this blog to take action by withholding their federal taxes this April; by changing the number of exemptions they claim to eliminate the withholding of taxes by employers; and by urging groups such as MoveOn to push for a national movement in this direction.

Taking the money away is more than a symbolic gesture. It may well be our last hope.

An anonymous author over at BuzzFlash has jumped on the tax resistance bandwagon, and wants to tell the world about it, a sentiment with which I can sympathize:

Our Senators have now had the opportunity to say a very loud no to torture and to say it to a president who does not seem to know where the bounds of civilized behavior lie. But they blew it, big time. Oh sure, there were tough questions and a few righteous statements, but a tongue-lashing and a promotion just does not seem like appropriate treatment of a guy who wanted to see others tortured, I don’t care what they have done; not in my name!

It also makes everyone of us who voted for the Senators who voted for Gonzales, and all of us who pay taxes to pay their salaries, conspirators after the fact in war crimes. In paying these people we are enabling atrocities to be committed in our names and with our resources. This, in my mind, makes us all culpable.

Being a survivor of the Vietnam era, I knew where this was all headed when, as Andy Card said, the Bush administration in Sept 2002, rolled out its brand new product, better known as Bush’s Iraq Quagmire. It was then that I had to make my decision. I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and that is not with this government and what has become, as I expected, its criminal policies. I became a war tax resister. Since then there have been more and more reasons for my action.…

It is now time for massive Civil Disobedience, on a scale not seen in this country since the Revolution and the ousting of that other King George. Tax Resistance is a very good place to start. Look carefully at the Budget and you will understand why.…

Civil Disobedience should, in my mind, never be a first choice, under most administrations and Congresses, but this administration has shown time and time again that it does not wish to hear from people who do not share its view. As a matter of fact, it has shown nothing but contempt for the opposition. Congress has shown time and time again that it is unwilling or unable to confront, in any meaningful way, and hold this administration accountable for its many astoundingly disastrous policies and criminal behavior on the world stage. We have spent the last two years marching, demonstrating, raising money, working ourselves into a coma on the election, blogging our fingers off, etc, etc, and if anything, we are worse off than we were. We might as well have spent the last year in Amsterdam, high as a kite, for all the good it has done.

These people only understand violence and money. I am not into violence, though I will damn sure defend myself and mine, so I say take their money away. Do you you really want to pay for top class healthcare for these people in Washington who cannot figure a way to make even minimal healthcare available to all Americans? I don’t. The very idea of it makes me furious, but I cannot afford to have a stroke, because I would lose everything, which ain’t much to begin with.

We have to find ways of depriving them of their drug of choice: Money, which, of course is the same thing as power. Tax resistance, Buying Blue, targeted boycotts of War profiteers and Bush-backers (is there any difference?), where possible, and costing them money, where possible, is only the first step in bringing these bastards to their knees.…

The fight to take our country back is ours to fight. We are not going to get much, if any, leadership from Washington. They are all too invested in the Status Quo. They will change only when the status quo becomes painful enough for them. It is up to us to make it very painful! This war, unlike Bush’s “war on terra” is going to require sacrifice from all of us. We are going to have to hurt to make them hurt, but the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

I’m not one of those “support the troops” types. I think “the troops” made an abominable choice when they volunteered to let a bunch of politicians tell them who to kill and maim, and I certainly don’t plan to support them.

That said, I know there are otherwise honorable people who have made this rotten decision in youthful folly and are trying to make the best of the situation they’ve thrown themselves into. And I know there are people who, having come to regret the decision they’ve made, are unmaking it and making amends. I’m with Wolfram Kastner: I support the deserters.

Some of the strongest and most compelling voices in the anti-war movement today are coming from military veterans. There’s Iraq War vet Jim Talib who sounded like Thoreau reincarnated when he told the anti-war movement: “I think that there are many people in this country who ‘disagree’ with the war in Iraq, but seem to me to be far too comfortable, and who appear to be doing little if anything to stop it… Every day that you do nothing is another day you have given them your consent to continue the occupation.”

And there’s Camilo Mejia, who turned his back on the war in Iraq and went to prison for it: “I say without any pride that I did my job as a soldier. I commanded an infantry squad in combat and we never failed to accomplish our mission. But those who called me a coward, without knowing it, are also right. I was a coward not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. Refusing and resisting this war was my moral duty, a moral duty that called me to take a principled action. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier.”

Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace told an anti-war rally last weekend:

The times call upon us to do more than we’ve already done; more than we think we can do. We can no longer afford to limit our protests to what Good Americans are allowed in these terrible days. And we must stop funding this administration’s crimes against humanity. We must delegitimate, disobey and disrupt this war and this system.

When the next soldier decides he or she cannot go to Iraq, we must already know which local church will provide sanctuary and not stop there. We need to surround that church with thousands of disciplined, nonviolent citizens for as long as it takes, daring federal marshals to return that soldier to slavery. Can we do less than those citizens of Ukraine who stayed in the streets for weeks to get a legitimate government? Can we do less than people in Iraq who are losing their lives and limbs under this criminal occupation?

Americans and Iraqis, young and old, soldier and civilian are slaughtered daily for Empire. What can we do that is commensurate with what the times demand? Some of our more heroic friends refuse to pay a penny in taxes; some refuse to pay the war machine’s portion. Others purposely limit their incomes so they owe nothing to the IRS.

But here’s something that every one of us can do right now that is not particularly heroic; that carries little or no risk. Withhold a token amount from what the IRS says you owe. You will eventually get a series of letters trying to collect your 25 or 100 dollars. They will expend much time, effort, and stationery to no avail. Millions of us doing this will send the message that we will delegitimate, disobey and disrupt this war and this system.…

If we are well organized; if we are there for young soldiers who leave the military; if we refuse to be silenced and frightened by an immoral law; if we refuse to be “Good Americans;” if we do what history demands in this critical hour we can grind this war machine to a halt. We can put an end to the suffering and the war crimes. We can absolve our complicity. Will we do this together?

The venerable peace group The Fellowship of Reconciliation has signed on to A Call to Resist the War in Iraq. (I covered the Call in more detail back in January.)

Eddie Tews (see also 13 April 2005) spells it out for the armchair conscientious-objector crowd:

Suppose the Bush Administration were to re-introduce the Draft? And suppose you were eligible (and given that the Army has recently raised the maximum recruiting age for the Reserves and the National Guard to 39, you may be more eligible than you think)? Would you participate? Would you consent to killing (let’s be honest: slaughtering) for the State?

If your answer is, “Yes,” and you’ve not yet enlisted, perhaps you should do so at this time. If your answer is, “No,” or, “No, even if it means being locked up,” then another question follows:

Would you consent to paying your Federal Income Taxes, even knowing that roughly 50% is allocated to the military? That is, would you consent to financing mass murder for the State, even though you were willing to spend time in jail in order to avoid physically participating?

If so, why?

If not, and you’re not already a War Tax Resister, then, there’s no time like the present!

Well put. The hawks who love love love war as long as someone else is taking the risks are called “chickenhawks” — anyone have a good idea for what to call peaceniks who applaud deserters and conscientious objectors but who keep shoveling money into the treasury month after month?

Eddie Tews blows his top over Halliburton’s war profiteering. “[T]his might be the biggest story of the war: the fucking Vice President’s former company (from whom he still receives compensation) is sluicing billions — billions — of taxpayer dollars straight into said former company’s coffers…”

What you can do: Tax Resistance, people! This blogger has urged War Tax Resistance many, many times over. And he will now do so again.

Consequences? Yes, potentially. But they’re minuscule compared with the certain consequences of consenting to pay one’s taxes…

By taking control of our paychecks, we not only tell the warmongers/Fascists where to stick it, we also take a concrete step in withholding from them the means to conduct their madness. What could be more important?

I just discovered this link — an MP3 recording of a talk that Sasha Vodnik gave about war tax resistance to the National Conference on Organized Resistance in Washington DC in 2003.

In this presentation he gives an overview of the history of war tax resistance, both in its global roots and in its recent manifestations in the United States. Using audience participation, the session looks at the place of war tax resistance as a tool within larger struggles, looks at a variety of resistance strategies, and explores common myths. Vodnick also looks at war tax resistance from an anarchist perspective. This workshop is aimed at bringing some of the wisdom and experience of the war tax resistance movement to those of us involved in struggles such as the anti-corporate-globalization movement.

The British group Action Against War is calling for a national tax strike to stop the Iraq war.

The time has come for taxpayers to take control of the nation’s destiny by stopping the money that funds the killing.

Almost the only effective action open to individuals to control the actions of governments between elections is to withdraw financial co-operation. Taxpayers are entirely within their rights to withhold all taxes from a government that uses them for illegal purposes. As the invasion and occupation of Iraq is unquestionably illegal in domestic and international law, taxpayers are legally obliged to withhold all funds from the Government until the war is stopped, armed forces are withdrawn and those responsible for war crimes are prosecuted.

The campaign is using a creative interpretation of the letter and spirit of the law to justify the tax strike as not only a legally justified one, but a legally mandated one:

Ever since September 1^st 2001 when Parliament enacted the International Criminal Court Act, Britain’s toughest ever criminal war law, it has been a crime to “provide the financial means to facilitate the commission of the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes”. Anyone who pays tax to the government knowing that it is contributing to a crime could be treated as an accessory and charged with “conduct ancillary to genocide” by the International Criminal Court.

Today is the 100^th anniversary of what Gandhi called “The Advent of Satyagraha” — a campaign he helped lead in South Africa against one of the repulsive and racist laws that were perennially fashionable there.

He compared the campaign he was to help lead to the ongoing Russian Revolution:

It is interesting to compare the reactions of the Russian people to tyranny with our own reaction to it. Under British rule, we draft petitions, carry on a struggle through the Press, and seek justice from the King. All this is perfectly proper. It is necessary, and it also brings us some relief. But is there anything else that we should do? And, can we do it? We shall think of these questions later. For the present, let us see what Russia is doing. The people there, both rich and poor, do not send petitions and stop there. The oppression there is such that it has given rise to a number of anarchists. They believe that all rulers are oppressive, and the State should therefore be done away with. To achieve this end, people in Russia kill the officials openly as well as secretly. In this, however, they are making a mistake. Such thoughtless adventures only serve to keep the minds of both the rulers and the ruled in a state of constant tension. All the same, it is admitted on all hands that men taking such risks must be brave and patriotic.

Even young girls set out on such adventures and court risks. A book was recently published about the lives of young women who have thus made themselves immortal. Knowing that death is certain, these fearless girls, actuated by patriotism and a spirit of self-sacrifice, take the lives of those whom they believe to be the enemies of the country, and themselves meet an agonising death at the hands of officials. Facing such risks, they serve their country selflessly. It will be no wonder if such a country succeeds in achieving freedom from tyranny. The only reason why it has not become free immediately is that such patriotism is misdirected, as we have pointed out before, and results in bloodshed. In consequence, these people cannot, according to divine law, obtain any immediate benefit.

Do our people display patriotism of this order? We have regretfully to say “No”. No one can be blamed, for we have not yet been trained for this. We are children in political matters. We do not understand the principle that the public good is also one’s own good. But the time has now come for us to outgrow this state of mind. We need not, however, resort to violence. Neither need we set out on adventures, risking our lives. We must, however, submit our bodies to pain, and the new Transvaal Ordinance offers an excellent opportunity. The Ordinance represents the limit of oppression.… [I]f, disregarding our attempts at gentle persuasion, the Government enforces the Ordinance, Indians will not abide by it; they will not [re-]register themselves, nor will they pay fines; they will rather go to gaol.…

Gandhi’s writings about tax resistance can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

A mass meeting was held on 11 September 1906 at which this resistance campaign was launched. Gandhi’s speech on that day, which he said later was delivered unprepared in response to the surprise proposal by one attendee that everyone present take a solemn oath to oppose the hated Ordinance, is a stirring bit of rhetoric that compares favorably in this American’s eyes with our “Declaration of Independence”:

I wish to explain to this meeting that there is a vast difference between this resolution and every other resolution we have passed up to date and that there is a wide divergence also in the manner of making it. It is a very grave resolution we are making, as our existence in South Africa depends upon our fully observing it. The manner of making the resolution suggested by our friend is as much of a novelty as of a solemnity. I did not come to the meeting with a view to getting the resolution passed in that manner, which redounds to the credit of Sheth Haji Habib as well as it lays a burden of responsibility upon him. I tender my congratulations to him. I deeply appreciate his suggestion, but if you adopt it you too will share his responsibility. You must understand what is this responsibility, and as an adviser and servant of the community, it is my duty fully to explain it to you.

We all believe in one and the same God, the differences of nomenclature in Hinduism and Islam notwithstanding. To pledge ourselves or to take an oath in the name of that God or with Him as witness is not something to be trifled with. If having taken such an oath we violate our pledge we are guilty before God and man. Personally I hold that a man, who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, forfeits his manhood. And just as a copper coin treated with mercury not only becomes valueless when found out but also makes its owner liable to punishment, in the same way a man who lightly pledges his word and then breaks it becomes a man of straw and fits himself for punishment here as well as hereafter. Sheth Haji Habib is proposing to administer an oath of such a serious character. There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding. You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure. No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.

I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions. A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble. But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now. There is wisdom in taking serious steps with great caution and hesitation. But caution and hesitation have their limits, which we have now passed. The Government has taken leave of all sense of decency. We would only be betraying our unworthiness and cowardice, if we cannot stake our all in the face of the conflagration which envelopes us and sit watching it with folded hands. There is no doubt, therefore, that the present is a proper occasion for taking pledges. But every one of us must think out for himself if he has the will and the ability to pledge himself. Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote. Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it. This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders. No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India. Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.

A few words now as to the consequences. Hoping for the best, we may say that, if a majority of the Indians pledge themselves to resistance and if all who take the pledge prove true to themselves, the Ordinance may not even be passed and, if passed, may be soon repealed. It may be that we may not be called upon to suffer at all. But if on the one hand one who takes a pledge must be a robust optimist, on the other hand he must be prepared for the worst. It is therefore that I would give you an idea of the worst that might happen to us in the present struggle. Imagine that all of us present here numbering 3,000 at the most pledge ourselves. Imagine again that the remaining 10,000 Indians take no such pledge. We will only provoke ridicule in the beginning. Again, it is quite possible that in spite of the present warning some or many of those who pledge themselves might weaken at the very first trial. We might have to go to gaol, where we might be insulted. We might have to go hungry and suffer extreme heat or cold. Hard labour might be imposed upon us. We might be flogged by rude warders. We might be fined heavily and our property might be attached and held up to auction if there are only a few resisters left. Opulent today, we might be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow. We might be deported. Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in gaol, some of us might fall ill and even die. In short, therefore, it is not at all impossible that we might have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse. If someone asks me when and how the struggle may end, I may say that, if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near. If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged. But I can boldly declare, and with certainty, that so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory.

A word about my personal responsibility. If I am warning you of the risks attendant upon the pledge, I am at the same time inviting you to pledge yourselves, and I am fully conscious of my responsibility in the matter. It is possible that a majority of those present here might take the pledge in a fit of enthusiasm or indignation but might weaken under the ordeal, and only a handful might be left to face the final test. Even then there is only one course open to the like of me, to die but not to submit to the law. It is quite unlikely but even if every one else flinched leaving me alone to face the music, I am confident that I would never violate my pledge. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying this out of vanity, but I wish to put you, especially the leaders upon the platform, on your guard. I wish respectfully to suggest it to you that, if you have not the will or the ability to stand firm even when you are perfectly isolated, you must not only not take the pledge yourselves, but you must declare your opposition before the resolution is put to the meeting and before its members begin to take pledges and you must not make yourselves parties to the resolution. Although we are going to take the pledge in a body, no one should imagine that default on the part of one or many can absolve the rest from their obligation. Every one should fully realize his responsibility, then only pledge himself independently of others and understand that he himself must be true to his pledge even unto death, no matter what others do.

A great article from the “Taxes for Peace, Not War” group from Eugene, Oregon suggests itself as a template that other local war tax resistance groups could follow.

It starts by summarizing the ongoing Iraq war atrocity and noting that the American peace movement has largely been caught napping:

A number of years ago, Father Daniel Berrigan wrote a short statement that comes as a deep challenge to the nonviolent peace movement. In it he points out that we yearn for peace, but we are unwilling to make any significant sacrifices to obtain it. The United States public takes for granted that, for a war effort, families will be torn apart, young men and women’s careers and education disrupted, and young soldiers will die. But we in the peace movement want to set our own schedules, fit our peace activities safely into the rest of our lives.

The article then tells the stories of four local activists who decided on a little disruption instead:

For some of us in the peace movement, it is not only Congress who holds the power of the purse. We believe it is each individual’s right to say, “Not in my name, and not with my money!” Some of us are willing to sacrifice security and comfort by refusing to pay for the war through our federal income tax. We are war tax resisters and here are some of our stories.

There’s going to be a “Stop Funding the War in Iraq” protest rally down at San Francisco’s Federal Building on March 19^th. Naturally, the rally is not one at which the peace activists are going to declare their own unwillingness to continue to fund the war, but instead one in which they will plead with the façade of the building containing Nancy Pelosi’s local office that she stop funding the war.

I’m thinking of picketing the protest as a way of pointing out this disconnect. What do you think would make a good picket sign? I’m considering

The Power of the Purse Begins With You
Stop Paying War Taxes

and

If Congress Won’t Stop Funding War
You Can Stop Funding Congress

but I’m open to suggestions.

Yesterday I got an email from “Peace Action West” announcing a “historic call” that will “mobilize the majority of Americans who are opposed to this war.”

It’s something called the Iraq Moratorium and it’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The theory of the Iraq Moratorium is that you will “[j]oin with actors, celebrities, writers, trade union leaders, Iraq veterans, Gold Star Families, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans” who want U.S. troops out of Iraq — “on September 21^st, and every third Friday thereafter” to do “something to stop the war.”

What something, exactly? “What you do is up to you or to the group of people you are working with. Labor unions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere have called on their members to wear armbands and hold lunch hour rallies.” The Iraq Moratorium web site recommends the following actions:

• Wear and distribute black ribbons and armbands
• Buy no gas on Moratorium days
• Pressure politicians and the media
• Hold vigils, pickets, rallies, and teach-ins
• Hold special religious services
• Coordinate events in music, art, and culture
• Host film showings, talks, and educational events
• Organize student actions: Teach-ins, school closings, etc.

(This isn’t radical enough for some of the participants, who have advocated something they call “Non-Violent Action,” — “proposed in the spirit of Ghandi [sic]” — to wit: “On the third Friday of each month, designated as Moratorium Day, organize all Peace supporters across the country to drive exactly 10 miles below the posted speed limit on whatever road they are driving, whenever they drive, for the entire day.”)

In this way, because “the political process is moving glacially at best,” we can finally “force the media and the politicians to recognize just how angry and how massive anti-war sentiment in this country has grown.”

The Iraq Moratorium crowd is the political activism equivalent of the people who recommend prayer and crystals to patients with malignant tumors. Shun them, run from them, do not turn around until they are far from sight.

I hadn’t heard much about tax resistance from Cindy Sheehan since she first announced that she’d stopped paying her federal income taxes as a protest against government policy (and the Iraq War in particular). Since then, she’s gotten on the ballot in my Congressional district, and is running as an independent candidate against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I was a little worried that Sheehan had decided to downplay or even abandon her tax resistance in part of a campaign-related effort to seem more mainstream.

I shouldn’t have worried. She’s recently released a new call for others to join her in her tax revolt. Excerpts:

Before my son, Casey, was killed in Iraq, I… dutifully obeyed stupid laws and paid my taxes like a good, properly propagandized American.

As I wrote the checks, I never considered what my money was financing. After Casey was killed, I became deeply ashamed that I had in some small part funded the very thing that killed him: greedy and rampant U.S. imperialism. I have not paid my taxes since. I won’t pay my taxes until our money is used for positive projects: health insurance, affordable housing, credits for green development, jobs programs to rebuild our compromised infrastructure, education, etc. I can hold my head up and say that I feel that I have taken a principled stand against this U.S. Corporate Empire.

This out of control system needs to be overthrown and even though we still retain a modicum of the 2^nd Amendment, we do not have the firepower it would take to militarily overthrow our Mad King George and his Jesters. More importantly, I fear armed revolutions for the very reason that they always install violent regimes, so I am proposing another solution: a tax revolt.

Over the past 7+ years, our taxes have gone to pay for: killing innocent people, torturing and detaining without due process other people (innocent or guilty is no matter), increasing Police State America, bailing out other finance companies, paying for private mercenary soldiers in New Orleans, Iraq and Afghanistan and the very ephemeral notion of a “War on Terror.” Most of us have continued to pay for these crimes against humanity. Some haven’t and some have done so with a nagging feeling in the back of the place that is called a “conscience.”

It is time to with hold your support from this criminally insane institution of Government/Wall Street. Do not allow your money to be used to bail out the fat cats. I propose:

• If employed, change your withholding to M-9, (married with 9 dependents) so no taxes are withheld from your paycheck, and do not file next April 15^th.
• If possible, limit your income to so you do not have to file.
• Or this is the best scenario: file your taxes and deduct $2300.00 for each member of your family and request a refund from Uncle Sam (and still change your withholding).
• Withhold a partial amount of your taxes to make a statement.

There are many ways that this government finances its schemes, but a massive tax revolt will send reverberations throughout the rotten system.

Before Congress approves this Crime of the Century bail out, call your House Representative and Senators (toll free: 1-877-851-6437) and tell them that if they collude with the Bush Regime to do this, you won’t be paying your 2008 income taxes.

Tax protest is a time honored and very courageous form of protest (i.e.: Boston Tea Party, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi). I am not calling for a “protest” though… we have had many of those. I am calling for you to have the courage and integrity to join me in nothing less than a Revolution. It won’t be easy, but neither will the resultant collapse of our economic system if this “trickle down” plan goes through. I am tired of being trickled on… it is time for action, not complaints or whining.

This is the only way we can stand up to power in this country and if we stand together, they cannot divide and conquer us. Let’s reverse the trend and have thousands “striking at the root.”

Christopher Ketcham, a writer whose work has managed to grace both The Nation and American Conservative, fantasizes about letting the streets run red with the blood of the criminal oligarchy and then comes back down to earth:

What I would suggest is a kinder, gentler solution, based not on lunatic force — which after all is the purview and privilege of the brutes now running the country — but on the common sense notion that comes with being part of a rational polity: Someone has to pay for government, especially a government that routinely loots its own treasury in support of anti-capitalist, anti-American, corporate-socialist wealth transfers. “Let them march all they want to,” former Secretary of State and known motherfucker Alexander Haig once said, “as long as they continue to pay their taxes.” Or, as Thoreau put it during the Mexican War of 1846 — Thoreau who is among the fathers of American tax resistance — “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” The Algonquin Indians, long before there was a Constitution or Bill of Rights or the rallying cry of aggrieved colonists, did it in 1637: They refused to pay a Dutch tax on the refurbishment of the same military fort that was the arbiter and symbol of their lost autonomy. We pay for the blood and mess on the hands of this foul fortressed government, we can, like the Algonquins, stop paying for it too. Let us, chers citoyens, not pay our tax bills this coming year. It was a mass tax revolt that started this country, and by god a tax revolt could end it. Cut off the funding that keeps the bullets pointed, that fills the coffers for Wall Street welfare; watch you, the bastards in Congress, throw a fit like a bitch in heat.

How would this tax revolt work? I have no idea. But short of tyrannicide, the heads on sticks and the dogs chewing innards — and it could happen here, it’s happened pretty much everywhere republics collapse into the darkness of fallen empire — we need an answer to the corruption of our system that is mature enough to form something new and better and more humane. Right now, all we are seeing is organized chaos — most recently and obscenely in the Big Bailout — that sails as the freebooter under the black flag of the U.S. government.

Francois Tremblay offers his thoughts on Eight Ways You Can Personally Help to Smash the State.

Number six is our flavor-of-the-site:

Okay, enough with the hard work, here’s an easy one: don’t pay taxes. There are many different ways to do that. You can simply not file, which is not actually as risky as people think (considering that even plain cheating on your returns is not that bad, as only 7% of returns get reviewed over a 7 year period). If you are risk-averse, you can minimize your taxable income and get rid of taxes entirely “legally.” Take any opportunity you have to work for yourself or work “under the table.” Sometimes buying online or on the black market can also help avoid sales taxes. Become an income tax assistance volunteer.

Tax resistance is one small but effective centuries-old way to help starve the State and its gargantuan war machine. When done by a single individual, it’s a way to protest coercion and act in accordance with your moral principles. When done by the masses, it’s the most powerful anti-State messages there is.

Follow the link to see the other seven.

Much of the U.S. peace movement has been anesthetized by the one-two punch of Hope and Change, but Cindy Sheehan stayed alert and noticed that the war, militarism, and torture policies are just as worthy of disgust and revolt now as they were before the last election.

She recently tried to rally what remains of the active anti-war movement at Martha’s Vinyard, where Obama was taking a Summer break (Obama was no more interested in meeting with her than was Dubya back in the day). Those in attendance have composed something they call an International People’s Declaration of Peace. (This link may be to a draft, not the final declaration; I’m not sure.)

I could quibble with some of the details, I suppose, but I like the look of it. It’s fairly tightly-focused on war & militarism, without trying to throw in a horn-of-plenty’s worth of concerns, which I think is a good thing. Most crucially, it represents a commitment by the signers themselves to certain actions — it’s not just a set of demands they’re making of the powers-that-be, which is where many such declarations flounder.

Although it’s an “International” declaration, its focus is on the United States. This is for the very sensible reason, the Declaration says, “that the United States of America is still, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’ and the biggest arms dealer and war profiteer; citizens of the USA should acknowledge the special role that must be played and the sacrifices that must be made to help lead this planet on the path to peace and worldwide reconciliation, as the US has allowed its leaders to lead this planet in aggressive behavior.”

The signatories of the declaration pledge, among other things, that “We will not allow the fruits of our labor to be used by our governments to finance wars.”

This is the sort of thing I’ve been hoping to see for years now. However, the peace movement is at an ebb, and the influence that Sheehan and the other signatories (I haven’t seen a list of drafters or signers yet) over what remains of this movement is uncertain. It may be that with the collapse of the fair-weather, luke-warm liberal support of the anti-war movement, a more dedicated core remains who may be more willing to rise to the challenge of such a declaration than the more dilute movement ever was.

Hard news about this Declaration has been difficult to come by, but I think the folks putting it together are hoping to roll it out in a final form at the October 5^th White House protest action being organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (formerly, Iraq Pledge of Resistance). I was happy to see that that group has prominently linked “War Tax Resistance” on its web site.

I’ll keep you posted as I learn more.

In a back issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December 1985), I found a letter-to-the-editor about tax resistance that harmonizes well with a lot of the approaches I take to the subject here (link). Excerpts:

In issue after issue of the Bulletin, we read wonderfully prescriptive articles and letters on the logic and necessity of various disarmament steps. Many exploratory steps that might be taken unilaterally by the United States with no military risk are described in detail and with passionate conviction. The writers often end with the proviso: “We must now find the political will to take this step.”

“We must,” “we can,” “we should” — who is this ubiquitous “we” the writers always place in the active role? Congress is cowardly, the press obsequious, and Ronald Reagan will agree to a test ban when, as Khrushchev put it, “shrimp learn to whistle.”

If we are truly serious about challenging the dangers described monthly in this magazine, serious about pushing back the hands of the Bulletin clock, and not just indulging in righteous chit-chat, we must be willing to consider new methods of changing national policy. What might be considered extreme today may soon be seen as “too little, too late,” given the danger we face and the desperation to which others may soon be driven in their frustration with current goals and tactics.

Our views about goals and tactics do change with time: Women could not have achieved voting rights without some suffragettes going to jail. Unions were once illegal and persecuted; they could not have gotten justice for workers without the power of the strike. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have gotten civil rights legislation without a bus boycott and lunch counter sit-ins.

To think that saving our world from nuclear annihilation will require less of us is ostrich-like foolishness! To think that we can protest effectively while continuing to pay the government whose policies we know are so viciously destructive is a tragic and costly self-deception.

In his essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau mentions only one form of noncooperation with illegitimate government activity: refusal to pay taxes. I suggests that all readers refresh their acquaintance with that essay and ask themselves whether it does not exactly describe the imperative of our times.

The author of this letter was Joel Taunton from something called “Citizens’ Tax Moratorium.”

Last weekend I stopped in at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and ran into the fellow who decided to publish my how-to guide as a hard copy pamphlet. (He’s also made it available for free as a PDF.)

I was delighted to see that he’s also published Gina Lunori’s “It’s Revolution Time Again” (as “If You Work for Peace, Stop Paying for War”), which first appeared here at The Picket Line.

War tax resister Steve L. sends me this report from the Occupy Freedom Plaza protest in Washington, D.C., the Thursday before last:

It was an experience I will not soon forget, bordering on spiritual. Although I have not heard an official number, I’m guessing there were close to two thousand people there. I arrived at around noon, just before Kevin Zeese, one of the organizers, got up and spoke to the crowd. His talk was informative and depressing; but empowering as well. He spoke about how our democracy has been hijacked by one percent of the population who because of their obscene wealth, have a disproportionately powerful influence in the forming of public policy. Our leaders marginalize the 99% and instead do the bidding of the 1%. He reported that the wealthiest 400 Americans have the wealth of 154 million people and that their tax rate is half that of the middle class.

Soon after Kevin spoke, we all organized and marched toward the White House, then to the Chamber of Commerce where a huge banner hung from the building that said “JOBS” in individual letters.^* We held a rally there and many spoke including Medea Benjamin from Code Pink. She gathered résumés from many in the crowd as we chanted “We want jobs!” Since the doors to the Chamber remained closed and our calls for jobs unanswered, Medea slid the résumés under the front door.

Upon leaving the Chamber of Commerce, we proceeded to march down K Street which is headquarters for many lobbying firms. What was remarkable and encouraging was the feeling of solidarity among all of us. And also heartening to me was the support we received from passersby as we marched. Whether it was friendly honks from car horns, thumbs up, or peace signs, all who took notice of us seemed to share a sense of camaraderie. And why wouldn’t they? They too are part of the 99%. The major media, due to their lack of integrity and talent for honest journalism, have downplayed and/or misrepresented this movement which is spreading across the nation. They say there is no unifying message and that we are a leaderless movement. Well, to answer the latter sentiment, we may be leaderless and in my opinion, that is the beauty and one of the greatest strengths of the movement. We are a grassroots movement of many voices. The media, like the State in their weakness only understands the paradigm of authority and hierarchy. As to our message, it is simply this: We want an end to wars and we want the government to provide for human needs not corporate greed.

I have every intention of going back to Freedom Plaza and also to go and stand with my brothers and sisters on Wall Street as well. I encourage every person who loves freedom and justice to support this Occupy Movement. There are currently around 900 cities being occupied across the nation. More than likely there is a city or town near you that has an Occupy Movement. If not, perhaps you may consider starting one in your community.

Thanks for allowing me the opportunity to share with your readers on The Picket Line.

---

^* This banner was put up by the Chamber; the complete message is “JOBS: Brought to you by American free enterprise.” The Chamber likes to rhetorically champion free enterprise, but it is mostly a lobby group trying to win political favors and money for businesses, and it supported such examples of “American free enterprise” as the bailout of Detroit automakers and the Troubled Asset Relief Program. —♇

In D.C., the spontaneous spread of the Occupy movement coincided with and overshadowed the earlier-planned October 2011 “Freedom Plaza” occupation there. Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was there for parts of that action, and sent a report to the wtr-s email list.

Myself, I haven’t had much to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spin-offs. I biked by the Berkeley incarnation of it on the way back from the university library where I had been hunting through the microfilm, but didn’t see anything there worth reporting: a handful of people huddled under a tarp in front of a Bank of America branch (what passes for the “financial district” in Berkeley), some protest signs. So most of what I know about how the movement is progressing I’m getting from blogs and the news media, and I haven’t felt like this has given me much original to contribute on the subject.

Most of the coverage I have read has been very disappointing. The Occupiers seem to be such a loose coalition of interests and grievances that most commentators take advantage of this to make their commentaries all about themselves — most of what I have read is variations on “what the Occupy movement really stands for is [insert my pet concern here] and the way they will succeed is by following my unsolicited advice, as herein composed from back in my office.” Witness, for instance, the abominable bloviator Tom Friedman’s revealing reaction: “When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining” [emphasis mine —♇].

(But here’s a good exception to the rule; and this is one of the better non-exceptions.)

Sadly, the vulgar libertarians have been at their vulgarest when covering the protest — reacting to a bunch of left-leaning protesters running loose on Wall Street as though Obama had seized Galt’s Gulch under eminent domain in order to have a nice place to hold a Phish concert. So my usually more-or-less reliable sources of insightful though often snarky comment that cuts through partisan posturing on important issues of the day have been less helpful than usual (I’m looking at you, Reason… though keep trying).

The one “official” statement from Occupy Wall Street that I’ve seen violates my cardinal rule for such statements — it talks almost entirely about “they” and “them” without committing “us” to any particular course of action (the closest it gets is to “urge you” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone”). This is understandable, as it must have been difficult enough to get a group of people with such varying concerns, ideas, and commitments to agree on what they’re outraged about, without then trying to get them to agree on a specific and suitably-strong response to commit to.

And maybe at this point, the occupations, and their momentum, is the action, and not merely the seed from which the action is supposed to grow. It is bringing together people who were feeling angry and voiceless and

• letting them hear a whole bunch of other people talk about their perspectives their ideas for change — likely a more raw, more radical, and more diverse set than they encounter on the boob tube or their favorite web sites
• experimenting with a new set of modes of organizing and political decision-making
• demonstrating the potential power of coordinated mass non-violent action, and learning the dynamics (and perhaps creative techniques) of that power, for instance in how the occupiers of Zucotti Park in New York City forced the mayor to back down from his plans to remove them

That’s not so bad just by itself, and already makes it more than just the left-wing equivalent of the TEA parties.

If the United States applies increased sanctions, invades, bombs, sends combat troops or drones, or otherwise significantly escalates its intervention in Iran or the region directly or through support of its allies, I pledge to join with others to engage in acts of legal protest and/or nonviolent civil disobedience to prevent or halt the death and destruction which U.S. military actions would cause to the people of Iran, the Middle East, our communities at home, and the planet itself.

There is something of a bipartisan consensus in Washington that war with Iran would be a delightful thing, and the usual suspects are busy stacking dominoes in such a way as to guarantee a bloody outcome.

Iran Pledge of Resistance is trying to gum up the works of this machinery by enlisting ordinary people like you and me to promise that if the U.S. were to begin to launch a war that we would do our best to prevent it or halt it.

It is important to note that this pledge is not merely a show of support for anti-war attitudes, or a petition indicating your point of view, but is a signed commitment to take effective direct action when the time comes.

If you take the pledge, organizers will be able to connect you with other pledgers in your area who will be organizing various avenues of direct action emergency response.

Around this date in 1872, white residents of Louisiana, angered by the continuing rule of the black/carpetbagger state government that had been suppressing white supremacist rule since the end of the American Civil War, met to organize a tax strike.

These documents, though they seem to have been collected from multiple sources, come from Louisiana Affairs, the 1875 report of a House of Representatives select committee on “the condition of The South.”

The Mass-Meeting for Resistance to Tax-Collections, 1872.

The meeting, called by a large number of citizens, to resist the collection of local taxes, filled Odd-Fellow’s Hall last night to its utmost capacity, and the reporter is assured by those who were near the entrance that thousands were unable to obtain admission. The meeting contained representatives from every respectable class — industrial, commercial, and professional — but was composed chiefly of those who, being the owners of property, are the immediate tax-payers.

It was nearly eight o’clock when the meeting proceeded to business, and it was full eleven when it adjourned. The assemblage was called to order by Mr. Benjamin F. Florence, who briefly stated the object of the demonstration, and the following officers were chosen:

The officers listed included Dr. Daniel Warren Brickell, president, Edward Booth, secretary, and dozens of “vice-presidents.”

Dr. Brickell, upon taking the chair, after some prefatory remarks, in the course of which he observed that he had been twenty-four years in New Orleans, working for a livelihood, as he presumed most of his hearers had, and paying his dues to the government, as no doubt all his audience had done, and now he was selected for the chairmanship of the association, because he was opposed to the payment of any taxes whatever. [Applause.] In taking this responsible position, he wished it to be clearly known that he did it with the understanding that those he was addressing would stand by him in refusing to pay taxes, and would refuse to the bitter end. [Applause.]

They were told by the veteran office-holder who fills the post of administrator of finance for the city, that the man who refused to pay taxes was not a good citizen. The Times said they were dogs if they paid taxes, and they were fools if they didn’t. While they saw public officers growing rich in a very short time, and the people becoming poor as the officers grew rich, was it not time to put a stop to such a system of government? They had a newspaper that was everything to-day, another thing to-morrow — another thing to-day and everything to-morrow — a newspaper, the man who owns which, whatever his hired writers may be, “is not one of us, has no sympathies with us, is against us, for the burdens that afflict us do not bear upon him.” This newspaper told the people that it was a costly experiment to resist tax-paying — that an effort of the kind which failed had cost $67,000. Dr. Brickell, for his part, would pay his share of a million of dollars to get rid of the carpet-baggers and villains who were consuming the substance of the people, and he would consider it very cheap if the thing would be thoroughly done at that price. The Times said wait until the fall, honest men would be elected to the legislature, and then all would be right. Dr. Brickell commenting upon this, said he would prefer to keep his money until honest men were elected rather than put it in that fiscal agency on Camp street. [Great applause.]

Mr. Booth, chairman of the committee on resolutions, consisting of, besides himself, Messrs. Benj. Florence, E. Conery, L. Schneider, Hugh McCloskey, Archibald Mitchell, John G. Fleming, W.C. Black, A. Carriere, and W. Freret, submitted the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted and enthusiastically applauded from time to time as they were being read. The meeting was addressed successively by Messrs. Booth and Wm. M. Randolph, Judge J.B. Cotton, and Julien Michel, and J.Q.A. Fellows. The meeting adjourned at so late an hour that the abstracts of the speeches of these gentlemen, which we had prepared, cannot be printed before the paper goes to press, and are, therefore, laid over.

Besides the resolutions appended one was adopted requesting the people of the rural parishes to join in the movement against tax-paying.

Preamble and Resolutions.

Whereas, as citizens of a free country, assembled in our primary capacity, irrespective of party, and exercising our inalienable right of remonstrance against the oppression of excessive taxation, and the imposition upon us of grievous and unnecessary burdens, destroying our peace of mind, sapping the foundations of our prosperity, and depriving us of the advantages necessary to sustain the active competition of our sister cities and States; and further, staunchly disavowing for ourselves, and those who think with us, all those charges or suggestions which would attribute to us a desire to avoid, hinder, or delay the just, reasonable, or necessary operations of a representative government, by refusing or resisting the prompt payment of lawful taxes; and further, claiming to be acting the part of good citizens by resisting to the last the payment of such taxes as are equally unnecessary and unlawful, imposed without authority from us by persons whom we refuse to recognize as having the right to levy taxes, in that said parties were never elected by the people as representatives, and therefore by their affecting to levy taxes they violate the first principles of American liberty, baptized in blood in 1776, and hallowed by the memories of ages, which teach us that taxation, to be legal, must be accompanied by representation, without which it is robbery, and should be resisted by good citizens under the motto of “millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute;” and further, noticing with no longer concealed indignation that the taxes paid in are not disbursed in the general interests, with economy, or a view to their diminution, but seem to be considered as a species of plunder to be managed in the interests of the distributors, as against the contributors; this being especially the case in the instances of the large sum annually wasted upon the military body known as the metropolitan police force, as well as the immense amounts thrown away upon persons, pretending to hold offices as park commissioners, police commissioners, levee commissioners, drainage commissioners, assessors, tax-collectors, inspectors, registrars, or permanent committee men, with numerous sinecurists, pluralists, and “handy men” generally — expensive, useless and dangerous vampires, corrupted and corrupting;

And whereas, further, we feel that we can no longer sustain the taxation which has taken the form of a speedy confiscation of our property, for the support of officials, contractors, and partisans; who under the alleged forms of law turn the results of public industry to their private emolument, and grow rich, insolent, and threatening, while the hard-working citizen grows poor and is admonished to be humble and good;

And further, that not only a pretended legislature, very many of whose members were the creatures of the most corrupt practices of ballot-box stuffing, quadrupled registration and voting by “repeaters,” and false counting of votes, have imposed upon us their conception of taxes, but they have passed the tax-levies and appropriation-bills through their body by notorious bribery, thus vitiating, as we believe, all powers they might have ever had to pass the tax-bills or make money-requisitions upon, or bargains binding the people, and earning for themselves the infamous notoriety of being, according to the language of the governor, who ought to know them, the most disgraceful legislature ever assembled in Louisiana;

And further, seeing that such a pretended legislature, on its own motion, and affecting to empower an appointed non-representative body calling itself the city administration, have together, through assessors who have an unlawful private interest in exaggerating and multiplying assessments, and who have done so beyond all reasonable or former bounds, sought to extort from an impoverished people an annual taxation upon these stimulated assessments of nearly five per cent., the exact figures being 2⅔ per cent., for the city and 21-⅟₂₀ per cent. [sic] for the State;

And further, existing impositions, large as they are, do not form our only anxiety. They have for the past few years increased with such unexampled rapidity as to startle the most stolid and apathetic mind, and to rouse to positive resistance the most worthy and law abiding citizens, for it is well known that still greater burdens are being prepared for us. “Bad goes before, but worse remains behind.”

We are informed by James Graham, auditor, that the legislative appropriations for 1872 will demand an increase of eight mills on the dollar in addition to the enormous amount now wrung from the tax-payers of the State, being 2.05 per cent. net on an assessment of $250,000,000, reaching the incredible sum of nearly $6,000,000, gone for nothing, which additional percentage on a pretended assessment, which it is endeavored to raise to $300,000,000, will make next year’s confiscations amount on State account alone to over $7,000,000;

And whereas, further, our duty seems plain, whatever may be the final result of our movement, and if we decline, neglect, or refuse to do our duty, without fear or favor, as free citizens of a free country; if apathy, irresolution, a want of public spirit, or a selfish indifference to the misfortunes of others, should induce us to be laggards in this struggle for our homes and properties, then we shall have only ourselves to blame; but if, taking counsel from honor and courage, we nerve ourselves to the encounter, we unite our resistance under such forms and delays as laws yet afford us, until we can from an honest legislature and a representative municipality obtain some relief, then we shall have the proud satisfaction of knowing that “we, who would be free ourselves, have struck the blow:” Therefore, be it

1. Resolved, That we who are here assembled, and as many others who shall hereafter associate themselves with us, form ourselves into an association whose object shall be to resist by legal means the present exorbitant, illegal, and unconstitutional taxes now attempted to be extorted from us as citizens of the State and city.
2. Resolved, That the style of the association shall be “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation.”
3. Resolved, That the president of this mass meeting is requested to act as president of this association, and at his prudent convenience to summon to his aid counsel from the general membership, a vice-president from each district of the city, and a board of directors, consisting of one from each ward of the city, who together shall constitute the first board of directors, who shall be charged with the organization of the association in its necessary details, and the board may report progress through the press, or otherwise, as they may deem best for the interest of the members of the association.
4. Resolved, That we pledge ourselves to give a cordial and prompt support to the association, to patronize its assemblies, and procure and encourage as many of our fellow-citizens as possible to join its membership.
5. Resolved, That while we recognize cheerfully the right of every citizen to resist on his own account any illegal tax, we cannot see the force of the argument which would forbid us to combine together for the accomplishment of the same end.
6. Resolved, That we cordially and earnestly invite the co-operation of every citizen, inasmuch as none are too high and none too low to feel the pressure of this practical confiscation. Every mechanic, merchant, drayman, banker, storekeeper, butcher, shoemaker, produce-dealer, commission-merchant, press-owner, insurance-agent, shipping-agent, property-owner, clerk, laborer, founderyman, carpenter, or whatever else, are all deeply interested in this movement for the legal resistance to unconstitutional taxation, and therefore will be warmly welcomed to the roll of the association whether they have already paid the whole or part of their taxes or not.
7. Resolved, That in the mean time we will pay no more taxes to State or city, being supported in this view by the opinion of able counsel learned in law; but will, through our association, invoke the protection of the courts of the State and of the United States to test our right of resistance to exorbitant and confiscating taxation imposed by a pretended legislature, self-nominated, corruptly bought and sold by written contract, and sitting in defiance and contravention of the constitution of 1868, which declares that a representative basis shall be established, and the representation distributed in accordance therewith, as well as our right to resist exorbitant taxation imposed by an appointed non-representative body of persons styling themselves the mayor and administrators of the city of New Orleans.
8. Resolved, That when this meeting adjourns, it will be so to meet again at the call of the president of the association.

Non-Payment of Taxes

Rooms Democratic Parish Executive Committee of Orleans, April 9, 1872.

This committee, composed of representatives of the democratic party of the city and parish of Orleans, although partisan in its character, is not insensible to the fact that parties exist but for the public good, and are only intended to promote the public welfare to which all partisanship should be subordinate. Influenced by these considerations, a committee was appointed from this body to take into consideration the subject of taxes, now become so excessive as to be really confiscation, as they exceed the revenue of property. This subcommittee reports to us in the following language, which we adopt as our own, and address to the public at large, so that all persona and parties may profit by our labors:

To pay taxes legally imposed by a legislature elected by the people is a duty which every good citizen owes, even though the taxes are somewhat onerous and excessive; but when the taxes are so cruelly excessive as to leave the citizen in the position of a mere tenant of the lands and buildings which may belong to him, and when the taxes are illegally imposed by so-called representatives of the people, who had been fraudulently foisted upon them for the avowed purpose of enriching an unprincipled executive and a corrupt ring of legislators and other public plunderers, the people should rise in their might and refuse to place money in the hands of the spoiler to complete their ruin and degradation.

Believing that this government is revolutionary, and as such has no legal claim upon the people for support; that the sham legislature was not elected by the people, but virtually appointed by the executive, and that no taxation can be lawful unless imposed by the legally-chosen representative of the tax-payer, we consulted eminent counsel upon this subject, the majority of whom confirmed our views, viz., that all taxes imposed by and under the revolutionary government are clearly illegal, and can be contested as such.

The members of the bar, so far as we have consulted them, were unanimous in opinion that the following city taxes were manifestly illegal: The school-tax, the park-tax, and the metropolitan-police tax. A number of gentlemen, whose names are subjoined [but omitted here], signed the following engagement. Such is the public spirit of the legal profession and the conviction of the illegality of the above taxes, that it is our opinion that almost every member of the bar would have attached his signature had he been approached by us for that purpose.

We spread these facts before the people, and earnestly counsel and advise them to unite and take every lawful means to resist the payment of all taxes.

I[saac] W. Patton, Chairman.
W. Woelper, Secretary.

Patton would become mayor of New Orleans after the United States dropped its support for the reconstruction government.

The statement, signed by several attorneys, read that they “engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the ‘school-tax,’ the ‘park-tax,’ and the ‘metropolitan-police tax,’ and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.”

Determined Meeting of Citizens — All Further Payments of State and City Taxes to be Resisted — Armed Organizations in Progress Throughout the City — The Voice of the People — Indignation and Enthusiasm

Pursuant to the call of two hundred and fifty citizens of the Second ward, for the meeting in favor of armed organization and to resist the further collection of taxes, a large body of determined men filled the hall of the Iron House, on Tchoupitoulas street, last evening, and there gave emphatic evidence that no longer would the people submit to the remorseless and unprincipled rule of a few adventurers, who by their acts thus compelled peaceful citizens to rise in their might, to protest, refuse, and, if need be, resist by force of arms, all further encroachments upon their rights.

The meeting was called to order at half past 7 o’clock, by Col. S.J.N. Smith, who moved that Mr. Archibald Mitchell be elected chairman pro tempore.

On taking the chair, Mr. Mitchell addressed those present in the following words:

Gentlemen: Before stating the purpose of this meeting, I will premise that we are not assembled here in the interest of any political party. Whatever may be our predilections as individuals, we are as an organized body neither democrats, reformers, nor republicans, but merely citizens endeavoring to secure our inherent and constitutional rights, and to preserve the remnant of property left to us by the tax-collector. We are not opposed to the present State government because it is nominally republican, but because it is organized and administered for no purpose whatever.

Our intention is to inaugurate a movement, which we hope will become general, having for its object the non-payment of all taxes until we have a government which legally represents the people and is administered to promote their material welfare. Our principal and primary object is to take measures to secure to all citizens, of all colors and conditions, the right of the elective franchise, by which all abuses may be corrected.

We justify our right to refuse to pay taxes on the following grounds:

They are greatly in excess of the legitimate expense of the government. They are in excess of the natural increase of property, and as such should be resisted, being actual confiscation. These taxes were not levied by the legally-elected representatives of the people, and they are not applied to promote the public interests. Besides, the whole State government is anti-republican and revolutionary, and as such has no legal claim on the citizens for support. In these views the ablest legal minds in this State concur.

The past history of this State leaves us in no doubt as to the course he will pursue in the coming election. Governor Warmoth has never failed in any instance to use force and fraud to accomplish his ends.

Therefore, having a positive moral assurance we will only be permitted to have the forms of an election, unless we forcibly maintain our rights, we propose to form ourselves into a military organization for that purpose, but we do not contemplate the employment of force, even in defense of our well-recognized rights, until all other means shall have failed.

Our object in meeting to-night is to discuss the expediency of the foregoing measures and the best mode of carrying them into effect.

Col. Eugene Waggaman, having been called upon to address the meeting, depicted in eloquent terms the present and the past history of this State. The alarming condition of political degradation under which the people are now and have been suffering for the past four years was described in all its corrupting and evil effects.

There was a necessity — a life and death necessity — of organizing a military association to meet force with force and protect what yet remained to the people of this degraded State. “Warmoth and his minions must be put down in their schemes of robbery and plunder. The means were in the hands of the people; stop the supplies; refuse to pay the taxes. There were other ways of defeating an army than by a conquering in battle. A general that cuts off the enemy’s supplies, and forces a surrender, is more to be honored than one who slaughters thousands.”

After the conclusion of Colonel Waggaman’s remarks, the following document was read and adopted, as expressing the views of those present:

To pay taxes legally imposed by a legislature elected by the people is a duty which every good citizen owes, even though the taxes are somewhat onerous and excessive: but when the taxes are so cruelly excessive as to leave the citizen in the position of a mere tenant of the lands and buildings which may belong to him, and when the taxes are illegally imposed by so-called representatives of the people, who have been fraudulently foisted upon them for the avowed purpose of enriching an unprincipled executive and a corrupt ring of legislators and other public plunderers, the people should rise in their might and refuse to place money in the hands of the spoiler, to complete their ruin and degradation.

In our present situation, with taxes so enormous, the payment of which will in a very, very few years bankrupt the citizens and force them either to revolution or exile, with an executive who openly boasts that his official patronage exceeds that of the President of the United States.

The document then inquired whether the people are willing to continue to pay taxes for the purpose of continuing the present corrupt rulers in power, “which has so long disgraced Louisiana and impoverished her people.”

It then goes on to state that the best legal talent of the State has been consulted relative to the constitutionality or the unconstitutionally of the present outrageous and obnoxious tax-laws, and “the almost unanimous opinion was that a great portion if not all of these laws are unconstitutional.”

The people were therefore advised no longer to pay the taxes to the State or city authorities until the question of the legality of the imposition is settled by the courts of the State and of the United States.

The members of the bar were then appealed to for the purpose of trying the cases where such taxes were brought in the conns free of charge.

The bar nobly responded to the appeal by from forty to fifty signatures of the leading lawyers of this city and State, and gave as their opinion (which was unanimous) that the school, metropolitan, and park taxes were unconstitutional, and could be successfully resisted before the courts. The majority also agreed in the opinion that many other taxes other than those mentioned above were also unconstitutional.

On motion, the sentiments and expressions embodied in the above were adopted as the objects of the meeting, and the thanks of those present tendered the legal gentlemen who had so generously offered their services to the people free of charge, to represent them in the courts as the protectors of their just rights.

The following resolutions were then read and adopted:

Some boring organizational ones, and then:

Resolved, That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their refusal to pay taxes.

“Archibald Mitchell was then elected permanent president, and Hugh McClosky vicepresident of the association by acclamation. ¶ The latter gentleman accepted the honor conferred upon him, although he was not a resident of the ward. Mr. McClosky said that if he had to resist the further payment of taxes singly and alone, he had determined upon doing so. [Cheers.]”

There is also some testimony given in the same volume about terrorists from the White League, or perhaps some allied groups, intimidating tax collectors into resigning their posts, or interfering with tax auctions. In one case:

There was a mob of fifty or sixty armed men came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all. Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector. The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices. I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed. I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.

Another person said, of (I think) the same incident:

…Mr. [Valsin A.?] Fournet came with eight or ten. When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him. The deputy then shoved him down. As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.

…very few people attended tax-sales [typically], because the white people were organized to prevent tax-collection, and pledged themselves not to buy any property at tax-sales, and the property was generally bought by the State.

The government reprisals against tax resisters included the following, according to one account:

Every delinquent tax-payer, however small the amount, was compelled to pay $2 auditor’s fee, $1.50 advertising fee, $1.50 recorder’s fee, and $5 surveyor’s fee, for useless paper survey, and 25 cents for notice; all of which went into the pockets of officials, and in no respect increased the revenue of the State. In addition to this, the legislature organized under Governor Kellogg passed a law rendering any delinquent incompetent as a witness in any civil suit, and preventing him from bringing any suit. No injunction, it is believed, could be taken against the action of the tax-collector, however much he might deviate from law.

Some of that was later ruled to be unconstitutional.

Tax resistance was only one part of a campaign that included terrorism, the establishment of parallel government structures, and a variety of other techniques. It was eventually successful at ending Union control of the heart of formerly Confederate territory, and allowing the white supremacists to return to power, though never as the independent nation they’d aimed at.

Here is another section from the Handbook of Economic Disobedience which represents some of the thinking in the hybrid war tax resistance / anti-capitalist movement in Spain today. (I translated another excerpt a couple of days back.)

My Spanish is pretty poor, so I may be missing some nuance, but the tone of the handbook strikes me as a little off-putting in the way a lot of leftist manifestos can be. I get the feeling of being spoken to from on high by someone with an encyclopedia of theoretical edifices at his disposal.

It is interesting to me how much of its historical underpinning of the justification for civil disobedience draws on non-Spanish sources: Henry David Thoreau, the American civil rights movement, and the Indian independence movement. (The theoretical underpinning, too: Gandhi, Ronald Dworkin, Hannah Arendt.) Is there a lack of good examples of civil disobedience in Spain?

Introduction to Civil Disobedience,
Economic Disobedience,
and Comprehensive Disobedience

“When injustice has become the law, rebellion becomes a duty.”

“As soon as one realizes that to obey unjust laws is contrary to one’s dignity as a person, no tyranny can overpower one.” — Gandhi

“…we have asserted that civil disobedience is a special sort of denial of certain contents of the law by some citizen of groups of citizens. By this we mean that although all civil disobedience is an act of disobedience to the law, not every act of disobedience to the law is an act of civil disobedience.” — Ronald Dworkin

What is Civil Disobedience?

By civil disobedience we mean a public, nonviolent, conscientious, political activity, contrary to a law or order of authority that is considered unjust or illegitimate, that civil society undertakes with the objective of nullifying said law or order and inaugurating a new legal order in which those social and civil rights that the law denies in practice are recognized. When, as in the Spanish State, the ways of political expression are limited to the institutional channels and a vote every four years, without any existing direct mechanisms of participation and consultation, civil disobedience becomes an indispensable tool for denouncing and voicing rejection of an unjust policy or law.

Some characteristics:

1. In general, it is practiced by people who are conscientious and engaged with society. These are what Hannah Arendt called qualitatively significant minorities, which leads them to be so active as critics of certain political decisions that have become law. The activity displayed by those who practice civil disobedience is so intense and of such a character that overflows the usual channels of forming and executing the political will. Citizens who practice civil disobedience are able to imagine a better social order and in its construction civil disobedience becomes a useful and necessary method.
2. It is understood that the behavior of these citizens is not motivated by selfishness but by the desire to universalize proposals that objectively improve life in society. This requirement does not deny that, on occasion, personal or corporate interests may coincide with interests of a general nature. It simply demonstrates that it would be impossible to build a civil disobedience movement that was solely limited to defending special interests.
3. Consequently, citizens who practice it feel integrity in the way they think and behave. For them, civil disobedience is more of a civic duty. It is a demand that proceeds from certain convictions to which it is possible to attribute an objective and constructive value.
4. So it is easy to guess that the exercise of civil disobedience must be public, which also contributes to the aim of those who practice it to convince the rest of the citizenry of the justice of their demands.

The consideration of civil disobedience in a political system like democracy must necessarily begin from the fact that this is an illegal activity because it violates valid and enforceable legal norms — though they may be morally and legally reprehensible — that is committed in order to produce a change. In this sense, civil disobedience does not only violate legal norms, but bypasses those ordinary channels, both legal and political, that in a democratic system exist for the purpose of changing governmental laws or policies — that is to say, it is located outside of the rules of the game that sustain this political system.

Before any act or process of opposition to a law or policy adopted by an established government, the actor must be aware that their acts are illegal or of questionable legality, and that they will be performed and sustained in order to obtain particular social ends.

Historical precedents for Civil Disobedience

Between 1846 and 1848 there was a war between the United States and Mexico. In 1846, at the beginning of the conflict, Thoreau announced his refusal to pay taxes for two specific reasons: he opposed financing the military conflict, and was not inclined to contribute financially to the maintenance of a government that continued to regard slavery as legal in the United States.

“It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.… Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil.” — H.D. Thoreau

Civil disobedience consists of thinking differently

“If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” — H.D. Thoreau

Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience were a form of protest that consisted of refusing obedience to certain laws; that is, they refused compliance with them when they were considered unjust or illegitimate. This form of nonviolent struggle had the goal of publicly demonstrating the injustice of British colonial laws.

Their struggle for the independence of India was based on the right of resistance, which took on a collective, public, and peaceful form. When members of the Congress Party were arrested, they did not recognize the authority of the English courts to judge them. The noncooperation movement against the British authorities included the resignation from their posts of Indian officials. Other historical examples of actions of disobedience or resistance to the law may include refusal to comply with mandatory military service, desertion in exceptional circumstances (as occurred with young Americans during the Vietnam War), or, in the case of blacks in the United States, sitting in a public place barred to people of color.

Right of Rebellion. The initiative to generate a strategy of mass civil disobedience

As a people, if we organize, we will be able to create and defend spaces free from control and submission to power. When we achieve this, the power will not be blocked immediately, but will try to overthrow our people power in order to entrench itself as the only legitimate power in the area. So we are entering a time in which the strategies of action will have to be very well defined to become solid options that include a significant portion of society.

In this context we suggest civil disobedience to state decisions that affect us. As individuals, as free beings, we have in civil disobedience and in self-management, two essential tools of political action. As people organized on a mass-scale we have the responsibility to make the world in which we live and act what we want it to be.

We understand by civil disobedience an illegal action performed conscientiously and performed publicly in order to achieve a partial or complete transformation of society. The commitment to civil disobedience is a commitment to education through action, to the generation of a constructive way of visualizing the struggle, to communication by example and by personal and collective engagement. It is a course of action that empowers the grassroots and has had important precedents in the history of the last century.

One of the current strategies in the context of disobedience is the “We Will Exercise the Right of Rebellion” initiative, started in September 2011, declaring the lack of legitimacy of the management institutions of the State by means of the Manifesto that led to this initiative.

We are millions of people willing to act. We must free ourselves from our fears and insecurities in order to publicly acknowledge our commitment and share with those around us the experience of dignity, facilitating the liberation of each of us to live consistently with our deepest values.

Economic disobedience for self-management

The proposal of the Right of Rebellion is not only a proposal for coordinated civil disobedience, but also a strategy of action that wants to develop a worldview committed to self-management.

This is why we put special emphasis on economic disobedience, which would be all those modes of civil disobedience focused on freeing ourselves from the private or state economic power, so as to direct our resources to the construction of alternatives to the present economic system.

So economic disobedience includes all of those forms of civil or social disobedience that have as their objective empowering ourselves as free people, breaking the chains that enslave us to the current capitalist system.

This Handbook is meant for all those who want to take steps to make their lives an example of the way they think and feel. Specifically, for those who want to quit acting under coercion from economic pressure and who want to dedicate their time to an activity that is genuinely creative.

Also, for those who want their money, as the fruit of their labor, to go only for what they believe and not to the banks, or the salaries of politicians, or armaments, or grand infrastructures… among other misuses that come to mind.

Therefore, we call for complete tax resistance to the State in order to redirect our taxes to self-managed budgets from self-managed, local collectives that are much more deserving of sovereignty than the governmental institutions that the people are subject to.

derechoderebelion.net has coordinated the creation of the first and this second edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience. Also, in parallel, proceeds the creation of offices of economic disobedience, which are tools to support initiatives like tax resistance, unionizing of debtors, and bankruptcy as a form of action. You will find more information about all of these items in the following chapters.

Here’s another section from the latest edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience, as I’ve tried to translate it from the Spanish original. I’ve translated previous sections of the handbook for the 18 September and 20 September Picket Line entries.

Exercise the Right of Rebellion

Join the Manifesto of a New Rebel Dignity

“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” — Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793

The current Spanish Constitution, dictated by international capital and approved behind the backs of the people, not only does not represent us, but we do not recognize it as binding upon us. In article 135.3 it says: “Loans to meet the interest and principle of the public debt of the Administration shall always be included in the statement of expenses in the budgets and their payment shall have absolute priority.”

With the approval without referendum of this constitutional change it has been demonstrated definitively that popular sovereignty does not control the State, which has been hijacked by financial power. A government that acts for the benefit of a few is illegitimate. According to the Spanish Penal Code: “Those are guilty of the crime of rebellion who rise up violently and publicly for any of the following purposes: to abrogate, suspend, or modify all or part of the Constitution.”

Therefore, and given the hasty, biased, and undemocratic character of this recent constitutional reform, we can determine that criminals are in the government and the structures that go along with it.

The right of rebellion has been recognized for more than two centuries by international law, through, for example, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” of 1793. Its function is to assert the right to rebel for the common good in situations like the one in which we live. Faced with the rebel putsch from those above, the right of rebellion from those below.

We are committed to the common good and so, following our legitimate right as citizens, we declare ourselves rebels against the constitution, unsubmissive to the State, and disobedient to all authority that it represents. For this reason we declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and of the assemblies of postcapitalist projects in which we participate. This is the way we exercise our sovereignty.

We promise to do everything we can to construct a new popular power that will enable a new society where decisions are really made for the people. We understand that after the avalanche of indignation we have lived through, the best way to regain dignity is by means of rebellion. We understand as dignity our capacity to disobey unjust laws and/or those that are contrary to the welfare of the people.

Therefore, we commit ourselves to a call to initiate and extend an action of complete tax resistance to the Spanish State and to those who control it, and to consistent action, in order to demonstrate that we will not pay “their debts,” because we do not recognize this Constitution. Tax resistance serves to feed the grassroots assemblies and, from there, to give “absolute priority” to participatory financing of the resources we really consider public.

Since the situation we are living through in the Spanish State is similar to many countries in the world, and since the financial powers that rule are global, we encourage human beings around the world to assert their right of rebellion, by means of manifestos like this.

Tax resistance was one of the strategies of civil disobedience that led India to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for us all to gain independence from global capitalism.

We have already passed the stage of indignation, now we are a new rebel dignity!

More information at www.derechoderebelion.net.

You can join this Manifesto and these distinct forms of civil disobedience.

From this manifesto, we envision complete tax resistance to the State in order to redirect our taxes towards self-financed popular local assemblies, arising in many villages following the 15-M Movement, and in some cases connected at the present day into an integrated cooperative.

The local assemblies and integrated cooperatives that are continually being built are some of the examples of self-managed alternatives to the current system, these examples are much more worthy of the investment of popular sovereignty from people who participate daily in politics since the popular assembly movements than are the institutions of the Spanish State.

Some of the best ways to work together can be to organize into a collective, to participate in local assemblies, to create an office of economic disobedience, or to join with people form your area to participate in an integrated cooperative.

And now the Disobedience Becomes Comprehensive

While we live out this new world we are constructing we must take account of the attempted interference of coercion and assimilation this provokes from the states without thereby losing sight of our main goal. It might be the most revolutionary act to dismiss all of them and ignore the masters without slaves, but since those in power cannot do without us, we have no recourse but to disobey; we are attacked by the normality at which we flout authority, whether it be judicial, health, intellectual, cultural, economic, or political.

This is why we chose Comprehensive Disobedience as a necessary condition for construction. To facilitate the understanding of this term, we will introduce the concept of “social contract.” The social contract is a philosophical and political concept that justifies the foundations that link an individual to society.

Comprehensive Disobedience involves breaking the social contract with the State of a territory where one lives, in order to bring into being a new social contract with a community with which the individual is really linked.

As the Comprehensive Revolution progresses, new model communities are going to arise where people will go to be welcomed and we can actively participate in the process of defining the rights and obligations inherent in this social contract that makes it possible to live in society. A self-managed rural community, an autonomous zone, or an integral cooperative would be three examples of these new institutions with which we choose to make this new social contract. In place of delegating our sovereignty to a supposedly democratic parliament, we participate directly in the decisions through genuinely democratic assemblies. By passing from an implicit contract that in reality we never signed to an explicit contract, we are making a leap of empowerment in order that to live in society will also be to live in freedom. In this process, we can at the same time choose to be part of multiple communities among which we divide our participation and commitment; from the more spontaneous and small, to the more structured and extensive, many of which can complement each other because none is totalitarian as though it were the State, and therefore none pretend to control all aspects of the individual but only to cover those areas in which each person decides to join.

The local assemblies, which try always to be more constructive assemblies, self-managed spaces for meeting community needs and integrated cooperatives that are coming into being every day, are some of the exponents of the Comprehensive Revolution, examples much more worthy of the investment of popular sovereignty from people who participate daily in politics since the popular assembly movements than are the supposedly democratic institutions of the State. When we conduct Comprehensive disobedience, we are dismantling the legitimacy of the system of State capitalism, and offering our legitimating participation to a new system.

Now or Never

Martin Luther King said more than 40 years ago: “We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

We cannot let history repeat itself with our generation. A gang of financial criminals has kidnapped what little there may be of democracy in the states and is carrying out a premeditated plot to cut our social rights, just to increase their profits. This situation aggravates the serious ecological, energy, health, social, and values crises that accompany the decline of the capitalist system.

We are lucky to be the most-informed generation in history. We have learned that there are millions of people willing to act. Now there are no excuses.

Indignation is not enough. And only the commitment that is accompanied by an attitude of refusal in the face of the political-financial power can lead us to achieve our objectives. There is no short-term safety that can serve as an excuse to put off our social commitment for later. With mutual aid we can help each other through challenges; with self-management we can solve the problems of our neighbors much better than the State is doing.

To go out in the street and exhaust ourselves is not enough; we must stop obeying, stop doing what we’re told, stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes to the State so you can pay them directly to the people, stop buying from multinationals, stop accepting discrimination of any kind. Whatever your chains are, break them.

There is a lot of ambition and vision here, and some zig-zagging between exhortation and theory, and no small amount of repetition, but I’m becoming a little impatient to see what is happening in practice when the manifesto-writers step away from their keyboards and try to put this vision into practice. How are these mosaics of overlapping autonomous zones to create and arbitrate these explicit social contracts? Can I see some examples?

In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience (see 18 September, 20 September, and 21 September).

I was starting to attempt to translate another section, but it looked familiar, and it turns out I already translated an earlier version of it as it appeared in a booklet called ¡Rebelaos! last year.

This seems to be an expansion of the original, however, so I’ll work my way through it again:

Tax resistance as a strategy of rebellion

As has been explained earlier, civil disobedience is a fundamental tool for raising popular empowerment on the path to self-management.

The General State Budget for 2013 poses another attack on the needs of the people. It cuts among others 14.% from the education budget, 19.6% from culture, 3.1% from health (added to 6.9% from last year), while increasing by 33% the payment of interest on the debt.

While a progressive privatization of all that is public takes place, while blaming the crisis for causing a lack of resources, while pilfering public money in the interest of those on high, the genuinely public projects on which we are working below generally suffer from a lack of such resources which would enable them to develop. To reverse this situation, it is necessary to derive a significant amount of these resources by direct means through tax resistance.

For this reason, with this publication, we share in the call to begin and extend an action of tax resistance against the Spanish State and towards those who control it, with consequent action to demonstrate that we will not pay their debts, because we do not recognize the present Constitution. Tax resistance that serves to fund the self-management of assemblies and collectives, and from them, to give absolute priority to the participatory funding of resources that we consider genuinely public.

Practical guide to income tax resistance

This is a suggestion for people who make their tax return for 2013 and subsequent years.

It is a manageable option for people who want to (or need to) remain part of the official economy, and therefore cannot afford fines or similar penalties.

This is a proposal inspired by war tax resistance, which for years has worked successfully in the Spanish State, performing this action concerning the 6% of the tax return that corresponds to military spending. But in this case, added to this percentage would be other items that we consider unjust.

You can choose these items according to your own criteria, or join in the proposed campaign of tax resistance launched by Right of Rebellion, which will be more than 25% of each participant’s income tax, and consists of the following parts of the State budget, from a total of €408,033 million, which is the budget for 2013.

In these budgets for 2013, the % of items that we have chosen as the most repulsive, rose up to 31.39% while in 2012 they remained about 29%.

Similarly, and because the main thing is to reach more and more people, we have fixed on this 25%, that is ¼ of the State budget, which is already a major challenge.

Item	2013 Budget	Percentage
Total Tax Resistance	€128,083,979,200	31.39%
Total State Budget	€408,033,918,210	100%
Public debt redemption	€62,319,842,350	15.27%
Public debt interest	€38,589,550,000	9.46%
Military defense	€13,708,330,000	3.36%
Security police	€1,209,238,886	0.30%
Prison system	€1,129,743,730	0.28%
Monarchy	€7,933,710	0.01%
Senate	€51,900,640	0.01%
Elections and political parties	€67,439,960	0.02%
Church	€110,000,000	0.03%

The filer, as a tax resister, must file the tax return; it won’t work not to. If you work as an employee, your company already pays your taxes directly to the State for you, so your tax resistance can only be applied as an application for a refund.

With your tax return, you can declare as tax resistance all of those items that you don’t agree to pay taxes for, and reclaim the money.

You can then distribute this money in a manner that you consider more consistent with your notions. To do this, at the time of filing, you must follow these steps:

1. Always make out your tax return.
2. Do not simply assent to the estimates filled in by the Treasury. It could be that the Treasury had some error in the data. It is difficult to have considered all of our possible deductions, or if it has, on more than one occasion there have been errors (and often not in its favor).
3. In the case of not reaching the established minimum it is not advisable to stop filling out your tax return.

Anyone can do this. You do not have to be an employed worker or to have formal income. You can object as a retired person, a student, or an unemployed person, since the state grabs taxes from everyone with both hands and this is the only real opportunity to recover some of this exaction.

If you do not reach the minimum established by law for making a tax return, it is still important that you do (or at least that you do the calculations), since you will probably come out with a refusal (they have to refund money). If you determine that you come out with a payment, it does not follow that it is necessary to submit it.

How to make an income tax return for individuals practicing tax resistance

1. The first thing you have to do is to fill in the forms for your income tax return. This can be done by hand or with the PADRE program. The other methods (confirmation of the statement by telephone or Internet) do not allow for tax resistance.
   
   At this point your return is filled out up to the point of the tax liability (box 741) with the amounts withheld by your employer and by banks. Next, in box 752, you must specify a percentage of tax resistance, depending on one or many budget items you have chosen to resist (see the image below) and fill it in. If box 752 is already filled in, you can use one of the other free boxes between 742 and 751. From here, we end the tax statement by calculating the resulting tax.
2. To complete the statement you must pay the calculated amount of resisted tax to the usual account of the entity, collective, etc. you have chosen. Specify on the accounting: “Income derived from the 2013 tax resistance” and keep the statement that the bank provides. It is important that you allocate this money to projects near you, so you can directly verify how you yourself, with your taxes, are nourishing a nearby project, while at the same time your money is not going towards purposes you do not believe in.
3. Then all that remains is to send a letter from the resister to the Treasury Department, which will be attached to the return, along with a receipt of payment to the chosen entity, collective, or project. You can take as a model the letter in the appendix; download it from the website of Right of Rebellion: www.derechoderebelion.net/modelo-de-carta-para-hacienda/ or else go to the nearest office of disobedience.
   
   It is very important that in the letter you specify the budget items to which you are declaring your tax resistance, and that the amount calculated is the sum of the percentage of these chosen items.
4. The next step is to deliver the return to whichever tax office or else to the bank branch where you have an account. In doing this, whether in one place or the other, they will certainly tell you that they want only the tax return and not your other statements. You have to explain to them that we are doing tax resistance (and we can seize this opportunity to explain to that person what this consists of), that the responsibility is ours, and that we want to put into the tax return envelope the three documents: the tax return, the letter of resistance, and the bank receipt.
5. Finally, it is important that you provide the information about your resistance to the Office of Economic Disobedience, so that it does not remain an individual act between you and the Treasury. It is critical to know the number of people who have used their right of tax resistance, so we urge you to fill out the tax resistance census sheet. You can also ask for a paper version. This census is purely statistical.

Some reflections on the experience of tax resistance last year

• It appears to be the case that if the tax return is filled in by hand, it is more expensive for the Treasury to examine it and therefore it is more difficult for them to detect the resistance.
• There have been some cases in which the Treasury has sent a request asking for the amount resisted, ignoring the declaration of resistance. These cases have always been of large quantities. It appears that in general, they don’t examine quantities less than 150 euros.
• Based on the previous points, it is especially important to strengthen the tax resistance budget so that it can respond in a collective form to the needs for help from resisters. You can make this helpful resistance with your resistance budget. Also to be attempted will be a crowdfunding campaign on the internet to help this resistance budget throughout the year.

Auditing the national debt, a tool to defend the refusal to pay an odious debt

As you have read on previous pages, the principal item toward which tax resistance is directed is the external debt (23%). So we added information specific to the motivation of tax resistance against this item.

As has happened in other countries, and in the light of 15-M, in Spain a campaign to audit the external debt has been generated. The reform of the Spanish Constitution that made the payment of interest and principal on the debt the top priority of the general budget, gave more force, if anything, to the need for this audit. As auditoriaciudadana.net says: “A debt that we were never aware of and that we were unable to review or assent to. A debt that is essentially of private banks. A debt that, now, they point out to us as the worst of the problems and that they make us directly responsible with a constitutional obligation to repair it. A debt that forces us to cut our investment in our social services and that condemns us to the worst of the social distresses.”

We do not want to pay your debt!

Consequently, the Spanish people are put with the debt under the blackmail of the financial markets. It is illegitimate debt which is newly contracted to pay old debt and to implement policies that harm the social and economic rights of the citizenry.

A large part of the debt is illegitimate because it stems from a policy that has favored a tiny minority of the population at the expense of the overwhelming majority of citizens.

The State has guaranteed the private debt of private companies and financial institutions to enable them to borrow at an adequate rate of interest. This implies that, subsequently, the ratings agencies issued a poor assessment of the capability to repay the debt and that the risk premium of the State soars. Therefore, the fact of endorsing private businesses or financial institutions make the State (and therefore the citizens) have to pay higher interest on the debt.

To guarantee private entities entails that creditors require an increasing ability to pay on the part of the State which stops concerning itself about other essential functions which, itself, it has to take on.

Can a government legally decide not to pay its debt because its population is in danger? Yes, because the legal argument from necessity of the State fully justifies it. The State of necessity corresponds to a situation of danger to to the existence of the State, for its political or economic survival. The economic survival relates directly to the resources that a State can provide to continue to satisfy the needs of the population, in matters of health, education, etc.

Mechanisms for resistance to the VAT

There are a variety of techniques available to a self-managed company or cooperative to stop paying the VAT to the State and to dedicate that payment to a self-managed project.

Some of them are:

• Declaring, if the VAT is yours to pay, an amount smaller than that which would apply, and with this, financing an assembly or project of your choice.
• To justify this lower payment you must gather various invoices in your name. These invoices can be made in various ways without endangering the legal cover of the action.
• If you are certain that your company will not continue and is going to close, in place of paying the State you can begin to send the VAT amounts, or the part of them that you assume, to the assemblies in your zone or to self-managed projects, whichever you most prefer.
• If you want to continue as a company and need a way to make this process sustaining, you can open and close a business every 3 or 4 years. In this way, when the Treasury goes after you to pay your VAT, the company would be bankrupt and you would generate another.
• If you are a member of a cooperative or nonprofit entity that declares VAT, you can ask for a receipt for your personal expenses with the VAT identification number of this entity and donate these receipts to have them deducted from your income and not to have to pay VAT.
• If, after all of these receipts, your self-managed cooperative has to pay VAT, you can make receipts with your personal ID number; simply after receiving the money billed, donate it back to the same cooperative.

To put these options in context, we have to take into account that the inquiries the Treasury makes to people or businesses who send receipts, in order to monitor the payment of taxes, are limited and easy to foresee. By model 347 of VAT, by 30 April, you must present a list of clients and suppliers with whom you have had more than €3,000 in annual business. Therefore, nothing prevents us from making receipts, as an individual and in a completely anonymous form, to a cooperative for less than €3,000 and not to make a VAT declaration. Even though the cooperative does make one. That is, while the cooperative accounted for it in order to deduct it from the VAT to pay, the individuals who billed do not declare it as income.

Since the cooperative is not obligated to declare who are its suppliers, the Treasury will not have information about our irregularities. The only information with which it can count on is the global balance of VAT, from which they cannot identify this type of irregularities, since one cannot know that the VAT has passed between individuals and has also been interlinked between businesses.

Resistance to the quarterly personal income tax: usually the cooperative will pay the Treasury the quarterly personal income tax from the person who has invoiced it, but it is not required to do so if this is not specified on the bill, so also in this case if there is any irregularity, it is the individual who is responsible for it and not the cooperative.

In this sense, the current Individual Income Tax Law, Law 35/2006 of 28 November, established four tax brackets and a top marginal rate of 43%. Brackets:

• Up to €9,050 gross annually, the withholding is 0%.
• Between €9,051 and €17,460 gross annually applies a marginal rate of 24%.
• Between €17,361 and €32,360 gross annually applies a marginal rate of 28%.
• Between €32,361 and €52,360 gross annually applies a marginal rate of 37%.
• After €52,361 gross annually applies a marginal rate of 43%.

Therefore, it is reasonable to have receipts without quarterly personal income tax and that the cooperative does not have to withhold, because, when this happens, it can be understood that the party issuing the invoice is in the 0% personal income tax bracket, and for this reason does not pay said tax.

So, to sum up all that has been said, the only irregularity on the part of individuals corresponds to the action of not paying the VAT. To this end it is important to add that the people who enlist in self-managed projects that have a low billing rate are not so obligated, so in order to protect themselves legally, a person can bill the cooperative, and at the same time, pay another professional for certain services (or pay daily expenses) to balance their VAT. So, in a totally legal manner, he could declare each trimester a VAT near zero. It would be indeed a way of moving from an individual VAT payer to an individual who cancels out his VAT.

Another circumstance entirely would be that of bankrupt persons. You can issue bills for your work in a completely carefree way, because in the course of an inspection, the most that you could receive would be a fine, which they would have no way to make you pay. This way, bankrupt people have the easiest time of anyone in supporting these processes of reducing VAT payments in favor of cooperatives and entities who collaborate.

Note: There are some guidelines to follow so that you avoid the risk of criminal sanctions from actions of this sort:

• It is necessary to have a document that certifies the expense.
• Invoices must be sent by someone who really does engage in the activity being billed for, so that it can be demonstrated that the activity took place. And there must be economic transactions or billing declarations between the two parties (see the graph on the center pages)

Okay… with that I’m going to call it a day. There’s a lot more that follows, but there’s only so much translating I can do at a stretch.

Some nonviolence-oriented groups have come together to issue a joint call for activists to begin to refuse and redirect their taxes to protest the belligerent and xenophobic Trump agenda. Their letter follows.

Dear Friends,

We are writing to ask you to do something that you probably have never done in your life. This is a historical moment you can be an active part of shaping.

We all know the stories of people who committed atrocities and said, in their defense, that they were following orders.

Here is a snapshot of current events:

• A ban on Muslims
• A wall along the border we share with Mexico
• The dismantling of environmental protections
• Billions added to US defense spending and cutting almost everything else.

We know about slippery slopes, about things getting worse not all at once, about the frog that didn’t escape the heating water because it was being heated so gradually. When does what happens cross the line? We know the famous words of Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

We signed this letter because we want you to consider joining others this year to take a stand. We can non-cooperate with this government which is not of, by and for all the people. As a first step, we can refuse at least a token amount of our taxes to this government.

Specifically, we want to ask you to consider withholding and redirecting a small amount of your taxes. How much? We suggest a symbolic minimum of $10.40, and a maximum of whatever amount works for you. All of us signing this letter are redirecting some tax money, either for 2016 if we haven’t prepaid all our taxes, or through changing our allowance or reducing our estimated taxes for 2017. Will you join us?

Anxious? Thousands of people before you have done this. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee has an impressive array of resources to help: written materials, videos, webinars, and one-on-one support in some cases. Reach out to them here. Or talk to friends, and perhaps create a group of people who will support each other with the emotional and material risks involved. We ask that you re-direct these funds to the cause that matters most to you.

If tax resistance is not the right choice for you, consider other ways to pursue civil disobedience and noncooperation. There is no way this government, or any government, can continue without the funding and cooperation of its citizens.

Sincerely,
David Hartsough, Peaceworkers
Kit Miller, Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence
Michael Nagler, Metta Institute for Nonviolence Education
Miki Kashtan, Bay Area Nonviolent Communication
Ruth Benn, National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee

They’re still collecting signatories, so if you represent a group that is willing and able to sign on, contact Kit Miller and say so.

It’s nice to see this coordinated effort. There has long been an idea floating around war tax resistance circles that if we could create a campaign that has sufficiently low risk — a small, symbolic tax refusal that’s not going to bring the IRS hammer down on anyone — lots of people would be willing to sign on to it and tax resistance would stop seeming so scary. This campaign may end up being a good test of that hypothesis.

My own view is that minimizing risk isn’t enough. The reason more people don’t practice tax resistance involves more dimensions than just riskiness. People are also skeptical of tax resistance’s effectiveness, and of whether it is ethical. You have to find the sweet spot on all of those dimensions in order to bring more people into the fold, and there may be no one-size-fits-all solutions.

However, a good argument against my skeptical point of view is the rampant phone tax resistance in the U.S. during the Vietnam War. This was a small act of resistance, relatively risk-free; it did bother the government; and it did increase the visibility of tax resistance as a tactic in the anti-war movement and probably led to more people doing more significant tax resistance.

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

Today I stumbled on this commentary from El Libertario. It’s a good example of someone trying somewhat awkwardly to straddle the gap between individualist conscientious objection and collective action. Translation mine:

Chile Needs Tax Resisters

by Francisco Belmar

Tax Resistance: Populist and Libertarian Movement

Chile is a special country. Since we formed into a republic, we have had a polarized view on all topics. Shades of gray, as we know, are not our strong point. Even so, there are some amusing factors that we agree on. A good example of this is taxes, because in Chile almost everyone is fine with their existence. Only a few protest, but not enough. Our civil society is so weak, so manipulated, so constituted from polarization, that the existence of a few tax resisters has not helped to create a serious movement in this respect.

Today, when you speak against taxes, you are stigmatized. Usually such people are spoken of as being fascists (which is paradoxical) or, at best, as neoliberals. The truth is that historically, the anti-tax movement has always been populist. Even, in the case of the United States, part of the movement for civil liberties. This is based on a very simple fact: during the period when modern states were forming, the bulk of the tax burden fell on the workers and peasants. Even during the Middle Ages, strong revolts caused by tax increases broke out. At another time we will talk about them and their interpretation, also of interest, in the history of Chile.

Tax is Theft?

Critics of tax resistance, as we noted, usually come from those who defend some radical position. We are called neoliberals because, supposedly, we want the millionaires to be even richer and the poor to die in neglect. To others, we are utopian dreamers, hippies who dream of the impossible. In spite of all this, I do not blame them. In any case, in Chile there are no serious tax resisters. In general they do not reflect on principles, and, many times they fall into the classic utilitarian analysis. Others believe that it is enough to shout at the gates of the IRS, or, of course, to toss molotov cocktails. With representatives like these, how can we avoid ridicule?

Usually, in libertarian circles, there is talk of the theft of taxes. This, in reality, is quite pertinent. To reach that conclusion one must consider their legitimacy. Nobody has asked the question: under what conditions would taxes be legitimate? The truth is that they could not always be considered theft. When the citizens or members of a community can signal their willingness to pay them directly, there is no illegitimacy. If a group of people forms an agreement to pay some quantity to purchase something in common, the legitimacy is evident. The complication arises from extrapolating this argument to cover the current representative system. As we see, the problem is one of understanding and consent. In the modern state, tax originates as confiscation, but this does not imply that there exist no forms of taxation that could be adjusted to the principles of libertarianism.

Good Old Thoreau

There are people out there who say that if taxes were eliminated, everything would be fine. The truth is that they are a very big nuisance. Even so, as with any sudden change, the consequence of their elimination would be unpredictable. There is a clear tendency to mythology among the propagandists of libertarianism. Here we intend to put forward a different defense: to eliminate taxes may create changes with very harmful effects for us. The defense of their gradual elimination (yes, gradual, not immediate) is not utilitarian. Nobody can guarantee that prosperity will come from heaven when taxes are eradicated. The argument in favor of their disappearance is rather from principle.

The classic example is that of Henry David Thoreau. In 1846 he would have been imprisoned for refusing to pay the tax that financed the war of the United States against Mexico. The truth is that the story is a little more complicated and interesting (there will be an opportunity to narrate it in detail), but the issue is that while in jail he reflected on the deed. What is interesting is this: Thoreau refused to pay a tax to finance a war. For him, the problem was in helping to finance a conflict against other people. It was that the state was utilizing the citizens beyond the limits of consent. It was using the without their consent to finance a campaign of expansion that violated the selfhood of other people. Here we return to the theme of legitimacy: taxes can be legitimate when paying them forms part of the consent of the individual. In this case, there was an issue that went beyond efficiency. In a world where conscientious objection is accepted, refusing to pay a war tax should also be part of this right.

Taxes and War

Today the example seems absurd for our country, but it is not. In 1879, when Chile went to war with Peru and Bolivia, the National Congress approved the creation of a tax to finance the military campaigns. If our country in the future — hopefully not — should again enter a conflict of this type, such a tax would be expected. Would it be just if we could decide not to pick up a weapon, but not to be able to choose whether or not to finance a war? The truth is that there are serious doubts. The most obvious is that we are forced to pay. This is because states can afford to indulge symbolic gestures, but when it comes to stable incomes they believe that it is better not to take risks.

The case of war is, I know, extreme. Even so, it can happen and it’s good to think about it. In any case, you can derive a general consideration from that case. If we follow Thoreau, we will understand that the Lockean proviso is maintained: a government requires the consent of the citizenry to exist. As we say when we complain about our bosses, authority comes with responsibilities and not — as is sometimes thought — privileges. The rebellion of Thoreau tells us two things: First, that the citizens have a right to know what our taxes are spent on. Second, even if they are not eliminated, citizens must have the right to decide what things they do not want to fund. This does not have to imply the possibility of not paying any taxes at all. Today in Chile, our money goes into a black box and I see no champion of transparency and modernization to argue against this.

Concerning Processes

Consent and information are the two initial principles to begin this debate. Today we can see the defenders of impunity in the collection of taxes. Those who defend such obscurity are shown for what they are. Precisely the cases of irregularities in the armed forces speak to us of the importance of these principles. In addition, we can clearly see those who mindlessly advocate for the eradication of tax burdens. As a third group, very timid, appear those who defend voluntary taxation. In all of these cases we must recognize the weakness: Neither an improvement in the lack of transparency, nor the eradication of taxation can be immediately achieved, and, much less can a regime of voluntary taxation come to pass. Precisely because what is lacking is the will of those who have the resources.

On the contrary, to defend a tax system that response to principles as well as to efficiency is a good first step. To reach this, Chile needs real tax resisters. To advance in this respect, it is necessary to think and to reflect on useful strategies and sensible proposals. For this reason, I think the minimum is to start with the formation of a system that allows us to know what happens to our money. After that, it’s possible that thinking about choosing the taxes that we pay can be a little easier. To believe that this is possible is far from the utopianism that is so vilified today.

From the “Liberation News Service” wire service, dated 10 March 1971:

Resist War: Don’t Pay tax

New York (LNS) — For every dollar which the U.S. government expects to spend in Fiscal Year 1971, 64.8% will go to Defense expenditure — 48.4% of that will go for current military costs, including the war in Vietnam. 17% of the total budget will go to Health, Education, and Welfare; 18.2% for other expenditures.

The deadline for paying income taxes is April 15. On that day the War Tax Resisters will publicly submit 1040 forms to the IRS with all or part of their taxes deducted.

The WTR suggests these ways of withholding taxes:

• Refuse to pay the 10% telephone excise tax on telephone service. Deduct the tax from your phone bill and pay the remainder of the bill. Include a letter with your payment to the phone company explaining your actions.
• On the 1040 form, line #17, “Adjustments to income”, declare the percentage that went for war expenditures as an adjustment.
• On the 1040 form, line #22, “Total Credits”, declare the percentage that went for war as a war tax credit.
• Don’t file a return.
• If you claim a sufficient number of dependents on your W-4 form you can reduce the amount of taxes withheld from your salary to zero. This is an illegal act and five people have been arrested, two have been convicted but are appealing. They are charged with fraud but they are saying it is not fraud since they notified the IRS they were going to declare these extra exemptions.
• File the W-4E form with your employer which will enable you to have no federal taxes withheld.

Although there is a penalty for openly refusing to pay federal taxes (Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code — a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, plus the costs of prosecutions) no war tax resisters have been prosecuted under this law. The only war tax resisters arrested have been those who filed “fraudulent” W-4 forms, refused to file any income tax form, refused to present financial statements to the courts when ordered to do so. There have been prosecutions and convictions based on Section 7203 but none for openly refusing to pay for conscientious reasons, as far as we know.

For further information about the April actions or other forms of war tax resistance write to: War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., New York…

Some links from here and there:

Rebels removed a radar camera and replaced it with this rat d’art.

• The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues. In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
• If the Democrats running for President can agree on one thing, it’s more money and power for the IRS. The just-released Trump administration budget proposal aims for small budget increases for the agency as well.
• A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week. The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government. In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province. They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
• Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. It seems to mostly recycle recent blog posts, but also includes reports that the IRS may be over-zealously (and extra-legally) applying “frivolous filing” penalties again, news on how to use the revamped W-4 form to adjust your tax withholding so you can resist payment, and a brief note on the NWTRCC national gathering coming up in May in Chicago.