The conference, a regularly-scheduled business & strategy meeting of NWTRCC, brought together about 20 dedicated members from across the country — some of whom have decades of experience with tax resistance — and also drew some curious locals who are just getting their feet wet.
Our hosts did an incredible job of organizing beds, meals, and transportation, and making us feel comfortable and at home, so that we could keep our minds on a challenging agenda throughout .
, at the national gathering in Santa Rosa, I was the curious local getting my feet wet.
, I was appointed to a term as an alternate on the national administrative committee.
I’d been reluctant to consider taking on a responsibility like this in the past, for one reason because we already had an AdCom member from Northern California, and for another because I thought I might not be sufficiently on-the-same-page with the group as a whole (for instance, not being much of a “progressive” and thinking the “Peace Tax Fund Act” is worse than worthless).
But then the AdCom member from our area resigned, and the more I thought about NWTRCC the more I realized that we’re a wildly diverse lot ideologically and we manage to comfortably fit on the “same page” anyway.
For the most part, we’re pretty good at concentrating on the stuff we agree on and treating the diversity of perspectives on other issues as a strength rather than a nuisance.
During the conference, we heard reports of Tax Day actions and general status reports from local groups around the country.
These varied a lot in tone, with some groups reporting a surge of interest and enthusiasm, while others were discouraged at diminishing membership and activity.
We spent a lot of time reviewing the War Tax Boycott — what worked, what didn’t work, and whether we should continue it in some form or change tactics.
I have mixed feelings about the Boycott.
On the plus side, I think that it provided a good project for us to focus our energies on, and it was a good wedge for publicity and outreach.
I think that it’s very likely that our project inspired, perhaps subliminally, the parallel war tax resistance projects that sprung up last year — Code Pink’s “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” campaign and Christian Peace Witness for Iraq’s “Pledge for Peace.”
Bill Ramsey at the War Tax Boycott press conference
However, these are largely side-effects.
In terms of the goals we explicitly set for the Boycott — which seemed to me to involve creating and maintaining a large-scale mass resistance and redirection campaign — I think the Boycott was mostly a flop.
It was unable to even reach a large percentage of current NWTRCC members to convince them to sign on.
My feeling is that we could use our resources, time, and energy more productively in the future by pursuing more realistic goals or by partnering with other organizations that have the resources to lead the sort of campaign we have in mind.
However, mine was very much a minority position.
And I heard enough about how useful the Boycott campaign had been to people in their local outreach that I became convinced that the campaign should continue in some form.
At the meeting, we agreed to spend some time reassessing and restructuring it, but to commit to continue it for at least.
On , Bill Ramsey, who has been the main organizer behind the Boycott effort, organized a press conference to announce that $325,000 had been redirected by boycotters from the Pentagon to humanitarian projects.
Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of Common Ground Health Clinic, accepts redirected taxes
Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of the Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, was on-hand to accept a check representing donations from tax boycotters and to talk about what the clinic has done and is doing to help people in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Najlaa al-Nashi of Direct Aid Iraq joined the press conference by an audio/video link to talk about how that organization will use the redirected funds to help provide medical care for refugees from the Iraq War.
Tax resister Joffre Stewart speaks with representatives of the Direct Aid Initiative on a videoconference from Jordan
The Birmingham News also had a reporter on site, who fired off a quick note afternoon, and then filed a more complete story for the edition, featuring local resister David Waters:
David Waters’ protest started .
The Vietnam veteran couldn’t support the United States’ first Gulf War, what he calls a “slaughter in the desert.”
So he stopped paying his federal taxes.
“It just went against my conscience,” said Waters, a 61-year-old carpenter who lives in the Avondale community of Birmingham.
Today, he is one of more than 520 U.S. citizens from 44 states who refused to pay some or all of their federal taxes and pledged to redirect the money — more than $325,000 — to humanitarian causes.
On , a New Orleans health care clinic and an Iraqi refugee aid group accepted about $95,000 in gifts and pledges through the anti-war tax boycott.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, the organization that led the boycott, met in Birmingham to award some of the monetary gifts.
The Common Ground Health Clinic, a free clinic in New Orleans, received more than $50,000 in pledges.
The Direct Aid Initiative, or Direct Aid Iraq, got more than $44,400 of the would-be taxes.
Other “tax resisters” gave to local projects or humanitarian causes of their choosing, member Bill Ramsey said.
Najlaa al-Nashi, with the Iraqi refugee organization, said over teleconference afternoon from Jordan that her organization was grateful for the money.
Daniel Woodham put $300 on the table after al-Nashi spoke.
“I thank you so much for putting it to much better use than my government ever would,” said Woodham of Greensboro, N.C.
Woodham said he hasn’t paid his taxes , which he estimates amounts to about $15,000 before penalties.
The 43-year-old farmer and English language teacher files every year with a letter explaining where he is redirecting his money.
Woodham said he questions why his federal taxes should go “to kill people.”
“I don’t think it increases our safety.
I don’t think it increase our integrity around the world,” he said.
“I’m a conscientious objector.”
After the press conference, we returned to the Quaker Meeting house and I facilitated a workshop on how to talk to people about war tax resistance.
Mostly I was concerned with how we should respond when we’re promoting the tactic to activists who aren’t currently tax resisters, and then they throw up one of the dozen or so objections we’ve all heard before.
This was largely an extension of what I discussed here , with a focus on one-on-one communication as opposed to talking to and through the press.
After going on at some length about these theories of mine that I’m so proud of, I opened it up to the group by play-acting a potential resister who is raising excuses (in each of the needs / fears / values categories) as to why they don’t think tax resistance is right for them, and asking how the resisters present would answer the objections.
I thought it went well, provided a lot of food for thought, and could help to make us more persuasive as we go back home, away from the true believers, and have to respond to the old familiar objections again.
That evening we heard David Waters tell the gripping and fascinating story of the path he has taken in his life, from being an Army Special Forces volunteer in the Vietnam War, to being a “revenuer” for a liquor-law enforcement agency, to being a war tax resister.
I’ve left out a lot of nitty-gritty that occupied a lot of our time, but probably doesn’t have a whole lot of interest to those not already elbow-deep in the springs & gears of the organization.
I brought down six copies of We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader, figuring that if this wasn’t a good opportunity to find its audience nothing was.
Of the six, I gave away one to our hosts and sold seven (that is to say, I had to place quick orders for two more to keep up with demand).
I can’t convey, but should certainly mention, one of the most important parts of the meeting, which is just to be able to meet face-to-face and share stories and outlooks and be together in a group where tax resistance isn’t a frightening fringe idea but is the center of discussion.
Two things kept rattling around in my brain after I got back from the NWTRCC conference in Birmingham .
One was Joffre Stewart’s a capella “Oh-Ba-Ma!” song.
I don’t remember the lyrics, but only the general tone of blasphemy, in which Barack’s virgin birth was denied, and the miracles attributed to him were cast into doubt.
The other was something Clare Hanrahan said about redirection.
“Redirection,” in which war tax resisters take all or some portion of what the IRS claims they owe and send the money instead to charity, is a very popular war tax resistance tactic.
Some would say “tactic” is the wrong word — it’s not really the means to an end but is itself the end they’re aiming for: being able to use their money to support their own idea of community needs, rather than the Pentagon’s wasteful and immoral priorities.
But those of us who are doing tax resistance by reducing our incomes below the income tax line can sometimes feel left out when redirection is given a big priority, or when, as sometimes happens, those resisters who do redirect their tax money talk as though they assume that’s what all of us do or should do.
But we don’t have an amount to redirect because our strategy has been to reduce that amount to zero.
Furthermore, because we may have had to squeeze our budgets in order to do tax resistance this way, we may not have much left over with which to make a big donation in April.
Hanrahan said that as she sees it, there’s more to redirect than money:
For the most part my redirection of time and personal involvement has been possible by my choice to spend my hours in direct service and solidarity where my heart leads me, rather than in wagework geared to bring in cash.
Currently I do literacy volunteer work, stand in solidarity with Veterans for Peace, and with Women in Black, serve on boards and committees, and in years past, founded and managed a homeless advocacy center.
I believe that redirection of time and presence provides a personal and potent contribution to the common good, a gift of self that has more dimensions than money alone.
I redirect each time I give my time and energy in support of good work within my community.
It is a way to share in the work of change, my liberation bound up in that of those I stand with, rather than perpetuating the hierarchy of charitable giving.
The debate about whether or not NWTRCC should endorse the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill was interesting.
Supporters of the bill tend to project their hopes for what they think such a bill ought to accomplish onto the actual bill that’s being proposed.
In doing so, they make claims for what the bill would do that are not supported by the bill’s actual substance.
But there was actually much less of this in the current debate than usual.
With one exception, even the supporters of the bill recognized that it is flawed and that it would not accomplish much of substance.
More remarkable to me were the number of people in the debate who said that they don’t support the bill or the “peace tax fund” idea in general, but who think that NWTRCC should go ahead and endorse it anyway so as to better preserve our good ties with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
This issue had come up at our last meeting in Eugene because the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund had asked us to formally endorse this legislation.
We were unable to reach consensus on the endorsement at that meeting and didn’t allot enough time to really discuss the matter in detail, so we planned to readdress the issue and devote more time to discussion this time around.
One of the arguments in favor of us endorsing the bill was that in the NWTRCC “Statement of Purpose” is a section that many people interpreted as a built-in endorsement of the bill.
That section reads:
NWTRCC’s goal is to maintain and build a national movement of conscientious objectors to military taxes by supporting, coordinating and publicizing the WTR actions of groups and individuals.
These actions include: war tax resistance, protest, and refusal; the redirection of military taxes to meet human needs; support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill; and adjustment of lifestyle to avoid tax liability.
I’ve heard many perspectives about whether this section endorses the bill or merely indicates that support for it is one of many war tax resistance related activities that our affiliate groups engage in.
But in any case, the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill” doesn’t exist as an active piece of legislation anymore.
The currently-proposed legislation is substantially different in content and has a new name.
So this time around, in addition to debating the endorsement question, we were also trying to come up with a satisfactory way to remove or replace the anachronistic language from our statement of purpose.
On , we had a panel presentation on the bill followed by an open discussion.
Bethany Criss, the executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, presented the case for why we should endorse.
Ray Gingerich and I each gave statements opposing the endorsement.
Ruth Benn shared some of her insights from being exposed to the variety of international peace tax fund campaigns (some of which are promoting legislation that differs in important ways from the U.S. bill) and also recounted some of the history of the close working relationship of NWTRCC and NCPTF.
After these brief remarks from the panel, other attendees addressed the issue.
The following summary is based on notes I was taking at the time, so is only as good as my attention and note-taking were — caveat emptor:
Bethany Criss started out by noting the similarity between legalized conscientious objection to military service and conscientious objection to military taxation.
She also tried to assuage concerns that the “Religious Freedom” part of the bill’s title meant that the provisions of the bill would not be available to non-religious objectors.
She said that she felt confident that Congress would not raid the peace tax fund to pay for military expenses because the RFPTFA would represent a contract between us and Congress and that we could hold them accountable if they were to violate it.
She acknowledged that the bill was imperfect and would not accomplish as much as many people would like, but hoped that we would see it as an initial step in an incremental process.
I went next.
Here’s more-or-less the argument I gave against endorsement:
War Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Fund advocates agree that the belligerent militarism of the United States is a grave problem, that individuals must act to oppose it, and that our tax dollars are an important way in which we can move from complicity to opposition.
Because of this, we’re natural allies and have much in common.
The RFPTFA currently being pushed by the NCPTF has some significant problems. So much so that although our groups have much in common in our outlook and our interests, I think it would be a mistake for NWTRCC to endorse the RFPTFA.
Indeed, the problems with the bill are so significant that if the bill ever looked as though it might pass, we would be wiser to actively oppose the bill than to endorse it.
The main problems with the bill are two: 1) it’s no good, and 2) it’s bad.
That is, not only would it not deliver any meaningful benefits, but it would have harmful effects that would be damaging to the war tax resistance movement and dangerous to individual war tax resisters.
The reason why I say the bill is no good is this.
If the bill passes, it would give Congress more taxpayer money to spend and would allow Congress to spend as much money as it likes on war and armaments.
Every dollar paid into the “Peace Tax Fund” would increase taxpayer spending on the military.
This sounds like exactly the opposite of what the NCPTF intends, which may be true.
But sometimes good intentions lead to counterproductive laws and policies.
If you read the NCPTF literature, you’ll see that they admit that the bill would increase government revenue without decreasing how much Congress could spend on war:
So Congress would have more taxpayer money than before and could spend as much as it wants on war.
Why on earth would we want this?
Well, we’re supposed to want this because at least our money wouldn’t be spent on war.
But this is just an illusion.
The basic problem has to do with displacement.
If you pay into the Peace Tax Fund and Congress can only spend “your” money on something nice like the National Park Service, Congress can just take some other money that it had been planning to spend on the Park Service and divert it to the Pentagon.
So Congress spends just like it always has, with a little more taxpayer money than it would have had otherwise, but the people who pay into the Peace Tax Fund falsely believe that they aren’t responsible for the results of that increased spending.
It would be as though I were to pour a cup of sand into a mug full of hot coffee and then claim that I wasn’t responsible for the spillover since my sand sank to the bottom of the mug and it was only someone else’s coffee that spilled over the top.
So that’s why the RFPTFA isn’t any good.
Now here’s why it’s bad.
First: it constructs an illusion through which people can be induced to pay for war and militarism while believing that they are not.
The war tax resistance movement should be working hard to tear down illusions like this, not build up new ones.
Second: it would divide the war tax resistance movement between those people who maintain their testimony against paying for war and those who take advantage of the false moral cover of the RFPTFA.
This would also give the IRS fewer targets to pursue, and make the remaining war tax resisters more likely to be targeted by enforcement actions.
If the war tax resistance movement ever does become a powerful force for social change, you can bet that the government will consider passing such a bill — not as a concession to our movement but as a divide-and-conquer technique against it.
Third: it would give a persuasive rhetorical tool to people who oppose war tax resisters.
They would say that war tax resisters should just pay into the Peace Tax Fund like good, law-abiding, conscientious people.
Imagine what the IRS would say to resisters: “We gave you the ‘Peace Tax Fund’ you wanted — now you’ve got no more excuses not to pay up.”
Those three things are harmful effects the bill would have if it ever became law.
I don’t think this is likely, but there’s a fourth reason not to endorse the bill that doesn’t depend on whether or not it is successful in becoming law: advocacy of such a bill sends the message that the war tax resistance movement is naïve and that our conscientious scruples are superficial.
It tells people that war tax resisters:
are not particularly conscientious at all, but can be easily bought-off by symbolic concessions and simple sleight-of-hand
are conscientious enough to check a box on a form, but not conscientious enough to follow through on the ramifications of our actions
are willing enough to fund war if you can give us a way to deny that we’re doing it
would rather have a certificate from the government recognizing our officially certified conscientiousness than to actually be conscientious
These flaws have been pointed out before, and frequently PTF promoters have responded with an argument along these lines: Sure the RFPTFA won’t reduce military spending and it has at best an ambiguous effect on taxpayer complicity, but it has strong symbolic power: it’s a way to get conscientious objection to military taxation officially recognized, to get a foot in the door, to be able to take a census of conscientious objectors every April 15th, to propagandize for peace with every 1040 booklet, and so forth.
These benefits are not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons, but even if you were to acknowledge them — are they sufficient to justify putting any more energy into a 38-year-old campaign that has gone nowhere at all, currently in support of a piece of legislation that, even as watered down as it is, hasn’t had as much as a committee hearing in over a decade?
I feel strongly about this, and I have not pulled my punches.
Some of you may think I’m being uncharitable and unfair.
I’ll end on this note: I think the advocates of the RFPTFA have their hearts in the right place.
They are temperamentally our allies and I hope they continue to think of themselves that way.
I think that to the extent that we agree, we should continue to work closely and warmly together, and to the extent that we disagree we can agree to disagree.
After me, Ray Gingerich spoke, giving what I interpreted as a Thoreauvian argument against the peace tax fund idea: we shouldn’t wait to act conscientiously until the government gives us its permission to do so.
In addition, he feels from his work in trying to reintroduce war tax resistance into the Mennonite churches that the peace tax fund is an obstacle to this — it creates an excuse that people use: they say they’ll resist taxes but only when there’s a peace tax fund that allows them to do it legally.
After these prepared remarks from the panel, and Ruth’s discussion which I mentioned above, we heard from the other attendees.
Before Eugene, I thought of myself as a real outlier in my skepticism about the peace tax fund bill.
Most of what I heard about the bill in war tax resistance circles was positive, and the way people spoke about it made it seem like NWTRCC enthusiasm for the peace tax fund was a foregone conclusion if not a tautological one.
In Eugene I was pleasantly surprised to see that a few other people shared my misgivings about the bill, though I still felt like we were the minority.
In Harrisonburg last Saturday, though, it was clear that the tide had shifted dramatically.
Even with the executive director of the NCPTF there to pitch the bill, most people had little praise for it, and even the ones who were peace tax fund supporters in the abstract expressed that we probably shouldn’t endorse this version.
Gary Erb noted that most of those present probably wouldn’t qualify as conscientious objectors under the bill’s restrictive language, and so wouldn’t be able to legally avail themselves of the RFPTFA even if they cared to.
He also felt the bill would have a divide-and-conquer effect against the WTR movement, and recommended against endorsement.
Geov Parrish felt that the RFPTFA hadn’t a chance of becoming law, so it should be best seen as an educational vehicle.
That being the case, it was a poor idea to have watered it down so much in an attempt to make it palatable enough to pass through Congress.
Also, he noted that he feels excluded from the RFPTFA and its promotional materials because he is not a Christian.
Joffre Stewart said that as an anarchist resister, begging the state for exemptions and favors isn’t his style.
He thinks that conscientious objection to military service was mostly enacted for the state’s benefit, not for the benefit of the COs, and he thinks the same would be true of legalized conscientious objection to military taxation.
From this, he draws the conclusion that the reason we don’t have legal conscientious objection to military taxation is that war tax resisters have not yet become sufficiently inconvenient to the government.
Daniel Woodham thought that though the RFPTFA wasn’t perfect, it might make for a good first step, and once it was enacted we could work to amend it or correct its faults over time.
Bethany Criss said that in her view the “laundry list” of items in the section (§3b) of the bill that defines spending that falls under the “military purpose” category shouldn’t be seen as excluding other spending from that category, but only as examples of spending that fall under that category.
In her view, once the bill passes, a next step will be to ensure that the “military purpose” definition is interpreted inclusively so that it covers all the stuff we’re worried about.
Greg Reagle gave us some perspective on the reasoning behind watering down the bill to permit Congress to spend the money in the RFPTF on anything in the budget other than things in the military purpose category (previous incarnations of the bill had specified more precisely where that money would go).
He said that potential supporters in Congress had balked at having their spending decisions micromanaged by legislation, and so the changes had been made to mollify them.
Erica Weiland wanted to emphasize the positive working relationship between NWTRCC and NCPTF, though she too was opposed to endorsing the bill.
As an anarchist she doesn’t much favor trying to solve problems via legislation, but as an activist she tries to inspire well-intentioned people to be more active in ways that seem most appropriate to them, so she wants to encourage PTF promoters to keep doing their thing.
Robert Randall said he was impressed at the high plane on which the discussion was taking place.
He thought that the results of passing the RFPTFA might not be all that important, but that there might be some benefits to be had from the campaign to pass the bill anyway.
Pam Allee felt that the bill would help to emphasize that “we are the government” and so we can take control of the budget and change spending priorities so as to emphasize things like education, seat belt law enforcement, and other liberal priorities.
She was concerned that the RFPTFA seemed to lack grassroots support.
Larry Bassett paused to wonder whether it was really appropriate to the mission of a group like NWTRCC to be endorsing legislation or the individual projects of the affiliate groups.
Jim Stockwell felt that there might be a contradiction in that for many WTRs, the fact that tax resistance is illegal civil disobedience is an essential part of their WTR, and so legal conscientious objection would not be helpful to them.
He hoped our two groups would continue to work together.
Hiro (whose last name I didn’t catch, and whose first name I may be misspelling) encouraged us to patiently work at incremental approaches and not reject RFPTFA just because it wasn’t everything we wanted.
That said, she also worried that the government would spend the “peace” tax fund on things based on its warped definition of peacemaking work.
She envisioned Blackwater contractors doing their institution-building mopping-up exercises in Iraq (where she is from) and calling it “peacemaking” activities deserving of RFPTFA funding.
Tim Godshall tried to give us some perspective, noting that WTRs are one of the best arguments for the PTF (that is, the existence of WTRs demonstrates that many citizens have a strong conscientious objection that their government needs to accommodate), and also that although the RFPTFA might not have any effect on the military budget, the same could be said of WTRs. He believes that the RFPTFA is one part of a larger campaign to pressure the government to change its spending priorities.
Peter Smith disagreed with the suggestion that if the RFPTFA were to pass it would divide the WTR movement.
He agreed that we should not endorse the legislation, but hoped we would continue to support the PTF campaigners.
Ray Gingerich responded to a comment from Joffre Stewart by insisting that he was not an anarchist and indeed believed that a strong, active government (for example, one capable of implementing single-payer universal health care) was not incompatible with pacifism.
He plugged nonviolent conflict resolution strategies of the The Unconquerable World / A Force More Powerful school.
He also suggested that Marian Franz (the long-time National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund executive director) had been used by people and institutions who wanted to delay their confrontation with taxpayer complicity by putting it off until some distant future in which conscientious objection to military taxation was a legalized option.
Joffre Stewart noted that the U.S. government had no qualms about raiding the Social Security “trust fund” to pay for its military spending, and that it had stacked its “U.S. Institute of Peace” with CIA folk committed to the government’s violent foreign policy.
He therefore sees no reason to trust the government to administer a “peace tax fund.”
Bethany Criss told us that not only is she committed to seeing the RFPTFA enacted into law, but that she is also a war tax resister and has been since .
She said that although there is an associated “Peace Tax Foundation” with an educational mission, there should be no doubt that the Campaign’s goal is to get the legislation passed into law.
She thinks that the bill will be beneficial to war tax resisters and the war tax resistance movement by making WTR more visible.
She says that if the bill were enacted, it would not take away the opportunity to resist or say no; that resisters could continue to resist as before if they wished.
The goal is to bring more people in to a war tax resistance mindset.
She notes that part of the reason the bill was watered down is that their campaign doesn’t yet have enough supporters to bring enough pressure to bear on the legislators; this is another reason why she’d like our support.
Finally, Bill Ramsey felt that we might be better off not concentrating on the (unlikely) endorsement and instead trying to work on ways the two groups can work better together.
was an open-ended discussion without any decisions to be made on either the endorsement or the statement of purpose wording; on , our “business meeting,” we addressed those decisions.
A number of people who could not come to the meeting sent along their opinions about the RFPTFA, and printouts of these were made available to attendees of the business meeting before we took up the issue.
These were on the whole much more positive about the Act and more in favor of endorsement than the attendees had been, with one person recommending endorsement, another recommending “NWTRCC continuing its endorsement” of the bill (though we had a hard time determining which if any version of the bill our group had originally endorsed), and another conveying the results of a discussion about the issue held by Sonoma County Taxes for Peace which led to that group deciding to strongly support NWTRCC endorsing the bill.
Predictably, we did not reach consensus at the business meeting on to endorse the RFPTFA.
I counted about a half-dozen people in favor of endorsement, maybe half again as many against it.
Unfortunately, although a non-endorsement was pretty clearly the inevitable conclusion, it took a while to get there, and we weren’t able to devote as much time as we needed to the stickier question of the Statement of Purpose and its anachronistic reference to the “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
The upshot of that discussion was that there were two replacement phrases with a large amount of support:
“…support of peace tax fund legislation…”
“…support of legislation that would legalize conscientious objection to military taxation…”
While there was broad support for both, neither was able to rally a consensus around it.
My proposal to simply scrap the old anachronistic wording for now and perhaps come up with a replacement at a later date also failed to attract consensus support — with many people feeling that by rejecting the endorsement and also eliminating mention of the PTF from our Statement of Purpose it would look too much like we’d conducted a wholesale purge of PTF sympathy from the group.
So when it came down to it, the Statement of Purpose ended up the same way it began in this area: it continues to pledge our support for supporters of the long-gone “US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
This is a little ridiculous, but seems mostly harmless.
The Spring 2010 national NWTRCC
gathering in Tucson, Arizona has been, as usual, a fruitful mix of experienced
war tax resistance veterans and enthusiastic, curious, and somewhat uncertain
newbies.
The agenda was less heavy this time than in the recent past — no contentious
issues like the Peace Tax Fund Bill to worry us, and an improving budget
situation. This left us plenty of time both to talk shop and to learn from
local activists about their areas of expertise.
night
night we viewed the new war tax resistance film Death & Taxes and heard from Steev Hise, who directed the lion’s share of the filming and gave us some insight into the process, and from a couple of us who were in the film.
Film sales have exceeded our yearly projections already, half-way through the year, and everyone seems to report that the film is effective in spurring enthusiasm for and curiosity about war tax resistance.
morning
The meeting began, as such meetings often do, with a go-around-the-circle
round of introductions. This also included updates about what local war tax
resistance and other activists have been up to in recent months.
Erica Weiland addresses the meeting
Clare Hanrahan and Coleman Smith reported on their successful south-east
regional war tax resistance gathering that was held at the beginning of the
year. The opening of a new regional gathering (there’s a well-established one
in New England already) was a priority for
NWTRCC
and so we were pleased to hear both that this meeting went well and that the
organizers plan to make it an ongoing thing.
A number of people reported that their local groups were smaller and
less-active this year than in the recent past. Most attributed this to the
general dip in progressive activism during the Obama-sedation period, with
some saying that they’ve noticed progressive activists so eager to distinguish
themselves from
TEA Party
activists that they don’t want to associate themselves with a group whose
focus is on tax resistance and they meet our message with more than the usual
reluctance and defensiveness.
Still, there were the usual penny polls, literature tables, redirection
granting ceremonies, and rallies on Tax Day this year, competing with
dwindling but still sizable
TEA Party
crowds (that sometimes dilute our message and other times provide a media
springboard for it).
The Nuclear Resister
Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit The Nuclear Resister, were our hosts and local organizers in Tucson.
Their newsletter covers and organizes support for imprisoned anti-war / anti-nuke civil disobedients, including the occasional war tax resister.
They spoke about their work and about anti-nuclear activism in general, such
as the actions coordinated by an international coalition to focus on the
40th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty. Opposition to nuclear power has been on the wane, both because few
new nuclear power plants have started in the United States recently, and
because nuclear power has been greenwashed as a potential solution for global
warming and other consequences of hydrocarbon fuel. Jack thinks the
greenwashing is hooey, that nuclear power — seen over its whole lifecycle — is
neither energy efficient nor emissions-friendly, and that the nuclear power
industry is tightly linked with nuclear weapons and that the real reason we
have a nuclear power industry has much less to do with electricity than with
maintaining an infrastructure, knowledge-base, and the raw materials for a
perpetual nuclear arsenal.
There was also some discussion of the campaign to divest from Israel, modeled
on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign directed against South Africa.
Border activism
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll know that government
harassment of immigrants is a big issue in Arizona right now, as the state
government just enacted legislation that it promises will usher in a more
draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants. There have been calls to boycott
the state, and so there was some embarrassment that our group had decided to
go through with its meeting here.
On the other hand, we met in part, and many of us stayed the night during our
stay, at BorderLinks, a group that
specializes in ameliorating the effects of government policy in this area. So
we helped to support this work, a bit anyway, by our housing fees.
BorderLinks, at least, was glad we didn’t cancel our conference.
Reviewing a map of recent deaths of immigrants in the desert near the Arizona/Mexico border
This also gave us an opportunity to learn from local border-issues activists,
who had no difficulty pointing out both the close relation between our groups
(a number of border-issues activists are also war tax resisters), and that
because of the increasing militarization of border enforcement, war tax
resistance is directly applicable to their struggle.
The repulsive border wall, and increased border patrol enforcement in general,
have not stopped people from crossing the border, but have merely forced the
immigrant trails to be more arduous. Crossing the border has become more
deadly as the safer routes become more difficult to pass. Humanitarian groups
have responded to the crisis by trying to put bottled-water and first aid
stations along the newer routes, actively patrolling to come to the aid of
people who are lost, injured, or dehydrated, and setting up desert camps where
people can stop along the way. Such efforts are, naturally, subject to
sporadic government harassment.
What of the TEA Party?
afternoon I ran a War Tax
Resistance 101 workshop for people who were just getting their feet wet or who
were preparing to take the plunge. This group was eager and enthusiastic going
in, and, I think, came out of the workshop even more so, and with some more
practical pointers on how to take the next step, whichever step that is for
them.
The afternoon session ended with a group brainstorm about the relationship
between organized war tax resistance groups like ours and the
TEA Party
movement.
Ruth Benn addresses the gathering
Some of us see the
TEA Party as
an embarrassing distraction on Tax Day, and think it is important that we
clearly distinguish our message from theirs so that war tax resistance doesn’t
get confused in the public eye as some sort of
TEA Party
variant.
Others felt that there is enough common ground between war tax resisters and
some portion of the
TEA Partiers
that we might be well-served by trying to do some outreach, which might hold
the hope of introducing the tactic of war tax resistance to antimilitarist
libertarians, isolationist paleoconservatives, and the other radical
government skeptics who make up one tendency in the
TEA Party.
For instance, Joffre Stewart reported having recruited a new phone tax
resister from within the
TEA Party
ranks at one of their rallies.
Stewart’s war tax resistance went all the way back to the Peacemakers movement in the 1950s.
He was a thorough anarcho-pacifist and an eager political debater (“anti-political” he would say, to correct me) with little patience for half-way measures.
During World War Ⅱ, he was imprisoned for being AWOL, and subsequently was jailed repeatedly for refusing to cooperate with draft registration or with racial segregation, and once for turning up at a poetry reading at a Barnes & Noble bookstore and being thrown out as an undesirable.
He is among “the best minds of my generation” immortalized in Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, in which Stewart is depicted as having…
…reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets…
Fifty years later he would turn up in much the same way at NWTRCC national gatherings — usually having gotten there by Greyhound bus from Chicago, however long that took — with leaflets as incomprehensible as ever.
These photocopied poems, manifestos, and newsprint collages were difficult to interpret.
Their frequent, strong, and unartful denunciations of Israel, which often featured stars-of-David enclosing swastikas and epithets like “Zionazis”, seemed often to veer towards crude anti-Semitism, only to be rescued by a style that was so obscure as to make their ideology impenetrable.
The House Joint Committee on Taxation prepared a report on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” that went into effect .
The report was designed to to address how the act affects taxpayers at different income levels, but I was mostly interested in the bottom-line, which showed that the law is expected to result in the government bringing in $259,454,000,000 less in federal taxes than it otherwise would have .
Some notes about the new Qualified Business Income deduction, the IRS budget request, tax evasion of “gig economy” workers, the ongoing fake-IRS phone scam, and the difficulty of resisting tariffs.
Some ideas and resources to help you with your outreach.
Announcements on the death of Joffre Stewart, a memorial service for Tom Wilson, the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in D.C., and stats about NWTRCC’s social media presence.
A new initiative launched with a splash in Catalonia under the name Ni 1 euro x a la repressió (“Not one euro for repression”).
Modeled on the Spanish war tax resistance movement, it is urging people to redirect the taxes that would otherwise go to pay for the Spanish monarchy, the judiciary and state prosecutor, and the internal security services.
The aim is to stop financial support for the Spanish suppression of Catalan independence.
The website is splashy, and its interactive how-to-resist page in particular seems worth emulating by other similar resistance campaigns.
The epidemic of destruction of automated traffic ticket machines along the roadways of France continues. According to the latest figures, government revenue from these cameras has dropped dramatically.
The government believes it has lost €660 million in expected ticket revenue so far, and that’s in addition to the costs to repair or replace the damaged machines.
