Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual war tax resisters →
Kathy Kelly
The Chicago Tribune printed a profile of activist and war tax resister Kathy Kelly — The Peace Warrior.
Kelly decided one way to do good was to lower her income below the taxable level of $3,000 per year [sic].
She didn’t want to contribute in any way to the military budget, what the citizens of her do-gooder’s ghetto called “the death machine.”
She was making $12,000 at the time and officials at St. Ignatius distributed the $9,000 difference among other programs and staff at the school.
“I was Lady Bountiful,” she jokes.
She says she has not paid a dime of federal income taxes since.
“It was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made, and one of the easiest decisions to maintain,” she says.
“I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”
Glen Milner, an electrician and father of three in Seattle, Washington, files his taxes every year.
His approach, however, is unusual.
On the top of his 1040 form he writes in large print: “Some taxes withheld in protest of funds appropriated for illegal military purposes.”
“What I’m doing,” says Milner, “is telling the IRS right up front that somewhere in the form I’m withholding funds.”
He doesn’t tell the agency where the missing funds are, but Milner has filed his taxes in this manner .
A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and an active proponent of US nuclear disarmament, Milner says he is putting his money “where his mouth is.”
He cannot resist militarization and war and pay for it at the same time, he says.…
In , [Eddie] Tews… began practicing war tax resistance by refusing to pay the IRS hundreds of dollars annually.
Every year, he says, the IRS demands payment by sending him a couple of letters, which he discards.
In subsequent years Tews has avoided paying federal taxes altogether by practicing what he calls “W-4 resistance” or adding more exemptions than he’s legally entitled to.
Nevertheless, Tews says the IRS has never audited him.
“If I consent to pay more taxes, then more bombs are dropped, more pollution is made and more lives are destroyed; and if I have to suffer some infinitesimal level of consequences as a result of my actions compared to the consequences suffered by other people as a result of [me] consenting to pay my taxes, well to me that’s — it’s not even worth talking about,” he said.…
“The one thing that the US government wants from most average, ordinary people in regards to this war is our money,” says Kathy Kelley, one of the founders of Voices in the Wilderness.
“From most of us, they don’t want our lives — we certainly think of those who are being enlisted — but the reality of what the government wants is people to pay for this war and not to ask a lot of questions about it.”
Kelley has been a war tax resister for most of her working life.
She says she began by lowering her salary below the taxable income when she taught religion at a Jesuit school in Chicago.
When she moved to one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods on the north side at the height of the arms race between the former Soviet Union and the US, Kelley says she could not talk religion and then turn around and pay for a weapons build-up that could destroy the planet.
“The contradiction was just too much,” she recalled.
“I certainly couldn’t take money that my neighbors desperately needed for food, for housing, for a drop-in center, for an alternative school — for so many needs in this impoverished area.
I couldn’t say well I don’t have funds because I’m going to put it into buying more weapons.”
She added, “I’m through with buying materials to kill people.
Once you make that decision — if you really believe it — you can make it for a lifetime and then it’s possible to withhold all federal income tax.”
Activist and war tax resister Kathy Kelly was interviewed by The 40-Year Plan.
Excerpt:
How long do you figure it will be before we will see the Bush administration charged with war crimes?
I don’t think about that too much.
I don’t want to take a route that says the responsibility should be pinned on this bad guy or this bad girl.
I think we need all of us to look in the mirror.
There is shared, joint responsibility for the cruelty and suffering that’s imposed on other people because of collaboration by the population of the United States.
They don’t go out and hold bake sales to raise the money for their weapons systems. The one thing they want from us is the one thing we can control, and that is money.
So we have that on our hands.
How many of us turn over our income, our wealth, and our productivity to people whom we know are using it to commit criminal acts, atrocious acts against other people?
If we can’t control our own government, can we at least stop actively helping it?
For most of us who have entered into adulthood, the U.S. government doesn’t want our bodies fighting in the war; they don’t even care very much about our consent.
They do want our labor, and our money.
What right do we have to keep giving it to them?
Often, if I’m invited to speak with a group in the U.S., either my host or I will mention that I haven’t paid federal income taxes .
Generally, audiences applaud.
Almost always, a questioner will ask: “How do you avoid paying taxes?”
I advise people to visit the National War Tax Refusal [sic] Coordinating Committee website, www.nwtrcc.org, and to order the fifteen dollar manual called “A Guide to War Tax Refusal.”
I urge them to study the manual and then download four pamphlets that offer a practical guide to war tax refusal.
I insist they must get in touch with the nearest war tax refusal counselor before embarking on what is, admittedly, a difficult route.
But I also hold that if we oppose the U.S. government by refusing to fund U.S. war making, the risks are not that high.
For several years now, the U.S. has stood on the precipice of all out devastation-of itself and of the world.
Throughout modern history people faced far more dire personal circumstances to resist injustices and calamities like those we are tacitly helping our leaders foment.
They faced dreadful risks to resist oppression in Nazi Germany, in apartheid South Africa, and in the Jim Crow South of the U.S. (and its horribly segregated Northern counterpart).
The risks we face for nonviolent resistance are comparatively trivial.
If we refuse to pay our taxes for imperial war, we won’t be disappeared by a death squad.
We won’t be lynched or shot.
Our families won’t be massacred.
People ruthlessly crushed by U.S. foreign policies, beyond our borders, faces such risks.
For us, the risk of continued collaboration with the reckless group of warmongers currently leading the U.S. is, however, extremely high.
All three [U.S. presidential] candidates share one bedrock conviction:
The war is not their fault, or ours.
It is Bush’s fault, “Bush’s war.”
Of course that’s a lie.
For five years we were embarrassed by looting, humiliated by greed and disgraced by torture, but we paid our taxes and most of us voted for the president in .
When we turned to the Democrats in we were depressed but hardly surprised when they failed to end what we had come to call “Bush’s war.”
Now, with 4,000 Americans and vast, unknown numbers of Iraqis dead, few of us are doing very much except following another campaign in which only two things are clear: the war is not our fault and, while this and our other wars are not going very well, we do not know what to do.
But that’s OK, because it’s not our fault, or our responsibility.
The problem of shared responsibility — these are our wars — cannot be named, for if it were we might have to do something.
On what that “something” is, O’Brien is a little timid and vague.
Less so, Kathy Kelly:
[W]hat of our own culpability? What about our options for nonviolent resistance?
We do have options.
We each can, at the very least, pressure our elected representative, through legal or extralegal lobbying, to vote against President Bush’s 102 billion dollar supplemental funding request which the U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote on the last week of and with the Senate following suit shortly thereafter.
Another option was pursued, this year, by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Campaign’s “War Tax Boycott.”
This project helped people eliminate at least a portion of war making from their personal budget.
Kelly concludes: “If you’re among those who are wearied and exasperated by the wrongfulness of this ongoing war, allow yourself some relief: don’t collaborate.”
One thing I like about the war tax resisters in the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) is that they’re more-or-less impervious to election hype.
And so it’s pretty much par-for-the-course that they’ve scheduled their next national meeting for — right after (and regardless of) the impending presidential election.
If you can afford to get to Eugene, Oregon, the cost of the event itself is minimal ($15) — and the fine folks at “Eugene Taxes for Peace Not War” will help put you up and feed you while you’re there.
It’s a great opportunity to meet people with a great variety and depth of experience in tax resistance and anti-militarist activism.
The life and work of Ammon Hennacy is the thread that runs through the documentary, but it does a good job of covering the breadth of 20th century American anarcho-pacifism.
It includes segments of interviews with several tax resisters including Karl Meyer, Juanita Nelson, and Kathy Kelly.
And here’s a bonus video from last year of Utah Phillips sharing a story of his encounters with Ammon Hennacy:
I’m in Eugene, Oregon at the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee conference.
Kathy Kelly looks on as Ruth Benn addresses the NWTRCC conference
So far it’s been a long administrative committee meeting (I’m an alternate on the administrative committee) talking budget and objectives and scheduling, and then meeting the people who have arrived for our regular sessions, which began after dinner tonight.
We have a pretty big crowd this time around, about fifty so far and there are more coming tomorrow morning.
And despite the numbers, we got through the “let’s go around and introduce ourselves” segment with time to spare.
This group gets points for staying on-point and not getting thrown off much.
In this way it bucks the trend of many grassroots activist groups, many of which can’t seem to run a meeting to save their lives.
And it’s certainly not because we’re ideologically unified or lack talkative eccentrics!
Somehow when it comes down to brass tacks, we get down to brass tacks.
Robert Randall addressing some of the NWTRCC conference attendees
I’m fresh back from the NWTRCC national conference, which was held in Eugene, Oregon, and hosted by the enthusiastic and welcoming Eugene “Taxes for Peace Not War” group.
I’ve got a binder full of handouts and hastily-scratched notes that I took whenever I found a spare moment.
Today I’ll share some of my impressions of the gathering and of the current state of the war tax resistance movement.
Frivolity
Many of the attendees were concerned about the IRS being more aggressive in sending out notices of “frivolous filing” penalties to resisters who send letters of protest that explain their refusal to pay along with their tax returns.
One couple who were first-time resisters and had only refused to pay a token $50 last year were assessed “frivolous filing” penalties of $5,000 — each, even though they had filed a single return jointly — though they had filled out their return accurately and completely.
The IRS also insists that once they have assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty, you must pay that penalty before you can appeal it!
The law seems pretty clear that the “frivolous filing” penalty is only meant to apply if the tax return is incomplete or incorrect, but the IRS seems to be applying it haphazardly — not only to people who file complete and accurate returns but who refuse to pay some portion, but even to people who file and pay every cent but who merely inclose a letter registering their protest or disapproval!
Meanwhile, other resisters — including one who files a return every year with her social security number at the top but with none of the other required information, and with the 1040 form over-written with a protest message in red ink — have never been assessed a “frivolous filing” penalty or even received a “frivolous filing” warning letter.
The coordinating committee discusses the RFPTFA on morning
The “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act”
For a more in-depth examination of my misgivings about the RFPTFA, see:
One item on the agenda was a request by the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund that NWTRCC formally “recommit to the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and the efforts NCPTF is doing to get it passed in Congress.”
As I explained , I have serious misgivings about “peace tax fund” proposals in general, and think that the current incarnation of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act in particular would do more harm than good.
However, NWTRCC had endorsed a different version of this legislation years ago, and so many people expected this new call for an endorsement to be a no-brainer.
Much debate ensued.
Robert Randall pointed out that NWTRCC’s “Statement of Purpose” includes “support of the US Peace Tax Fund Bill.”
He interpreted this as being a built-in endorsement of the latest act which would make the current debate moot.
However, no act by that name has been introduced recently — I think since — and in many important ways the current legislation does not resemble the version that NWTRCC endorsed back in the day.
I was a little worried that I would be the only one objecting to the endorsement and that this would put me outside of the general consensus of the group, but as it turns out there were many people present who expressed misgivings about peace tax fund legislation and who weren’t enthusiastic about endorsing it, and I heard more than one person express that this was a long-overdue debate.
Many of the Act’s supporters seem to have ideas of what the Act would accomplish that go way beyond the actual text of the legislation.
One said, for instance, that if the Act passed, it would effectively allow citizens to annually vote yea or nay on war or on whatever wars the government was engaged in at the time.
Some participants in the discussion were concerned that NWTRCC remain on good terms with NCPTF, in part so that we may be more influential as they recraft their strategy in the coming years.
One person said that because the Act is a long-shot to ever become law, it is best judged not by what its effects would be if it were enacted, but by what it symbolizes as a proposal that approximates the hopes of people who want legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation.
(Myself, I’m not sure I buy this argument, but in any case I think that the symbolism of the Act is ambiguous at best and may very well communicate a message that is, on the whole, harmful to the cause.)
The result of our discussion was that we decided to hold off on making a decision of whether or not to endorse until our meeting, at which time we will have more time to discuss the question and more time to study the points that are in debate.
A book of writings by and about Marian Franz and her work with the peace tax fund campaign is forthcoming, and will include a piece by Ruth Benn about the war tax resistance movement and its relationship with the peace tax fund campaign.
Election aftermath
There was varied reaction to the recent presidential election.
Many people were skeptical of the promise for meaningful change, and distrustful towards the Democratic party, and saw the election mostly in terms of whether it would anaesthetize progressive activists or whether it might be possible to reactivate the hopeful coalitions that helped to propel Obama into office once Hope turns to disappointment.
Others were very enthusiastic about the change and hoped that progressives and peace activists might finally be able to influence government policy.
One person went as far as to say that we’d “won” and would have to get used to being winners on the inside of the power structure instead of ignored pleaders outside of it.
Another hopefully imagined getting a group of progressive religious leaders to sit down with Obama and confront his faith with a challenge to go further than his public statements have so far suggested.
To me this all sounds like stuff of the same sort as gingerbread houses, flying carpets, and fairy godmothers, but I mention it here to show that some of the Hope bubble has infected even a skeptical group like NWTRCC.
There was much mention of “Camp Hope” — a vigil that will be held near Obama’s home in Chicago in up to inauguration day.
The goals of this vigil will be to encourage Obama to follow-through boldly on some of his more progressive campaign themes.
The demands of the vigil are meant to harmonize with, rather than to protest, the goals of the Obama campaigners, and will concentrate on actions that the new administration can take immediately via executive orders.
This is said to be partially based on a similar vigil that took place in the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in that asked Carter to pardon Vietnam-era draft resisters and to cancel the B-1 bomber program, both of which Carter did.
A new war funding supplemental bill is expected to hit Congress in , and this will be an early test of what kind of Change we can expect from the new order, and what kind of power the current anti-war movement is capable of asserting.
The War Tax Boycott
’s war tax boycott campaign was well-received by some local war tax resistance groups, who found it a good focal point for their outreach efforts.
However, the number of people who participated in the boycott disappointed the hopes of those who initiated the campaign.
There was much discussion of whether we should continue the campaign into and if so in what fashion.
If we were to continue the campaign into — making the the climax of the campaign — this would give us little time to mount a serious outreach effort, and at the same time it would have to compete for attention with the actions of the opening months of the new Obama administration.
It might be hard to convince new resisters to join up if they’re still placing their hopes for peace with their rulers.
We eventually concluded that we would continue the campaign, but would concentrate this year on retrenching and consolidation rather than on a major outreach and publicity campaign, in preparation for a larger campaign when the inevitable Obama Disappointment sets in.
Meanwhile, local groups that find the campaign useful can continue to use it as before.
Rather than making April 15th the target date for beginning to resist, we may be better off doing what Code Pink did with its war tax resistance campaign and tell people that their resistance begins the moment they take their first affirmative step toward tax resistance, for instance by adjusting their W-4 withholding.
One person said that although she resisted taxes , she didn’t sign up for the boycott because she was only resisting a small amount and was redirecting that amount to local groups, and she had the impression that the boycott was mainly for people redirecting larger amounts to the two showcase charities highlighted by the boycott campaign.
Some people who did boycott outreach found that some folks were reluctant to sign on to the boycott for fear of the danger of being on some government list, and stressed that there should be a way for people to join the campaign anonymously.
Miscellany
Some local University of Oregon students dropped by the meeting and volunteered to create a redesigned mock-up of the nwtrcc.org web site that we could use if we’d like — a much-appreciated and spontaneous act of generosity.
NWTRCC will be trying to nurture a new regional gathering of war tax resisters — something along the lines of the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters that is coming up later .
To this end, it will be inviting groups that are interested in hosting such a gathering to submit proposals, and will select one of these proposals to support with some seed money and other assistance.
NWTRCC decided to commit to revitalize the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which seems to have run out of steam (appeals for funds go out very infrequently, and resisters are reimbursed only after long delay).
NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn is preparing a series of “Readings on Money.”
These include transcripts of some of the discussion on that subject at the Fall gathering in Las Vegas, Karen Marysdaughter’s essay on “The Influence of Money on Decisions to Engage in War Tax Resistance,” George Salzman’s “Inheritance and Social Responsibility,” a debate about the ethics of accepting interest on loans and bank deposits from Juanita Nelson and Bob Irwin, and a look at the intwined structure of government spending, national debt, the war machine, the federal reserve, and the income tax from Jay Sordean.
Kathy Kelly leads a workshop on “Honesty and Empathy: Questions for Collaborators”
Kathy Kelly led us through some role-playing exercises concerning collaboration and how to confront it, and shared some stories with us from her experiences with activism and humanitarian assistance.
Her public presentation at the University after the end of the NWTRCC conference session was well-appreciated by those who attended.
Kelly is an engaging speaker who relates interesting experiences vividly and well — with a great command of accents and the ability to invoke strong and varied emotions without making the audience feel like they’ve been strapped on a roller-coaster.
One of her themes: around the world, many people are forced to make great sacrifices because of the decisions our political leaders are making.
Meanwhile, what will raise us to make the sacrifices we need to make to make things right?
To those of us to whom much has been given, much will be expected in this regard.
We need to slow down and unflinchingly reassess our priorities.
“This is what grown-ups do.”
Mike Butler volunteered to bring NWTRCC into the MySpace / Facebook universe, so keep an eye out there.
Erica Weiland removes a pillar of militarism in Susan Quinlan’s workshop
Susan Quinlan demonstrated some of the techniques she uses in youth outreach to teach about the unbalanced government budget priorities and about how to build a better society by shifting your support from the pillars that support a system of injustice to the pillars that support the scaffolding of a better system.
I remember a couple of interesting stories of how people were introduced to war tax resistance.
One couple was working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Colombia and met some war tax resisters there and then took up war tax resistance on their return home.
Another new resister had been working for an alternative newspaper that received a grant from a war tax resisters’ tax-redirection alternative fund, and learned about war tax resistance that way.
Conference attendees review part of Steev Hise’s rough cut for Death and Taxes
Steev Hise’s war tax resistance video project continues, with a projected completion date around .
Conference attendees saw a preview of a portion of the film and seemed enthusiastic about it.
The next national meeting will be held this coming Spring (early ) somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. — details to be hashed out in the coming months.
The next national will be in Cleveland, Ohio around .
And with all that, I’m still leaving a lot out.
But for now, that’ll have to do.
Clare Hanrahan will be facilitating a workshop on “The Power of the Purse: Women and War Tax Resistance” at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking in Memphis, Tennessee.
Panel participants will include Judy Scheckel, Pam Beziat, and Kathy Kelly.
War tax resisters Pam Beziat, Kathy Kelly, Clare Hanrahan, and Judy Scheckel held a panel discussion about “The Power of the Purse: Women and War Tax Resistance” at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking .
Whenever Pam Beziat, Nashville peace activist, thinks about paying federal income taxes, she looks at pictures of children who have been maimed, bruised and broken by war.
“I would look at the pictures and decide I was never going to pay taxes again,” said Beziat, one of four female panelists who discussed war tax resistance at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking on Saturday.
Conference keynote speaker and panelist Kathy Kelly, who was sentenced to a
year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites in
, said she came to the personal conviction
that she would not support “bloody” government practices almost 30 years ago.
“There is no way, no how I would give my money to the Mafia, much less the
IRS,”
she said.
“We face a serious question about whether or not to continue to pour
resources and productivity into military projects while we cannot meet human
needs,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea to take that question seriously,
as a personal question.”
has come and gone, and with it the TEA Parties and protests.
Some items of note:
The National Priorities Project has long been maintaining a Cost of War counter that keeps track of the monetary cost of the major wars the United States is pursuing at the moment, and allows you to see how much your community has spent on these wars.
Recently, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, approved the installation of a large, digital “cost of war” counter in front of City Hall.
Pam Allee explains her war tax resistance at Portland Independent Media Center: “your vote on April 15th is the permission Congress needs to continue ‘business as usual.’ ”
She and other anti-war folks were also protesting taxes, only because tax dollars are used to support war.
Kathy lives at a subsistence level to avoid paying taxes.
“I can’t imagine changing my life so I can contribute to the devastation of war,” she told me.
In addition, she observed that because of her commitment to living at a subsistence level, she can’t own a car and she consumes very little fossil fuels, just helping to save the planet.
“The IRS is my spiritual director,” she argued.
Now that’s not something you hear every April 15.
Reliance on robotic warfare has escalated from the Bush to the Obama administrations, with very little significant public debate.
More than ever before, it is true that the U.S. doesn’t want our bodies to be part of warfare; there’s also not much interest in our consent.
All that is required is our money.
As I may have mentioned, a provision of the recently-enacted health care industry legislation — one that was little-noticed at the time but that has attracted some commentary since — requires businesses to file 1099s with the government for every other business from whom they purchase goods or services totalling at least $600. Some commentators have focused on the paperwork headache this involves, others on whether it is intending to lay the groundwork for a new value-added tax, but Gary North thinks it may be an opportunity for resistance-via-over-compliance:
The IRS will be buried in billions of new forms. I’m an older guy.
I think back to Carl Sagan’s memorable words in the PBS series, Cosmos: “billions and billions.”
These forms will have to be scanned into the system.
If businessmen want to protest this law in a legal but effective way, they will have their tax preparers write in the numbers by hand.
Then IRS will have to type in the data on each form by hand.
Billions and billions!
Business owners and managers will be outraged.
But what if word spreads?
“No electronic filing!”
What if the tax preparers fill in all the forms by hand.
It is legal.
It is not efficient, but it’s not all that much extra work.
Pay a few dollars more per filing.
At the other end, the IRS will get to process these forms by hand.
Think of what happens if businesses were to challenge every challenge by the IRS?
The business’s CPA simply asks in writing — I do mean writing (hand-written) — for the IRS to review the case.
Point out one mistake made by the IRS.
Automatically, every business should challenge every request for more tax money.
No exceptions.
Be polite.
Just ask the IRS to review its case in terms of this new information.
There are always gray areas.
Put them to use.
Pay a few bucks to your tax preparer.
Paperwork is the essence of every bureaucracy.
Let’s do it by the book: with paper.
There have been some interesting and thoughtful threads on the wtr-s email list recently.
Is it really war tax resistance if you’re pretty sure the IRS is just going to lift the money (with penalties & interest) from your bank account anyway?
Is the point of our resistance to register our disapproval strongly with the government, or to actually withhold funds from the war machine?
Carol Moore reacts to news of a recent IRS seizure of a resister’s bank account:
“The problem with doing [war tax resistance] when you make a lot of money is they get so much interest and fines, which almost defeats the purpose.
Better to do ‘token’ resistance of whatever feels right — be it for you $500 or $2000, or whatever — and make them go through the effort of collecting.”
Randy Belmont says: “I am very puzzled why WTRs use banks.
Most banks are members of the Federal Reserve Banking System and if they are not members they are tributaries, in that they must follow all regulations and are beholding to the Fed.
Why would anyone who refuses to voluntarily fund war do business with these people?
The funding of America’s empirical wars is brought about through the fiat money creation machine known as the Federal Reserve.
“Stealing ones money from a bank account is the simplest and easiest strategy for the IRS.
I read over and over the same scenario of funds being stolen from bank accounts.
Yet, people continue to patronize these institutions.
There is no law requiring one to use banks or keep money deposited in the bank.
Please stop using banks!”
Christopher Toussaint responds: “To use a war analogy, in this case for nonviolent resistance, one must sometimes go behind enemy lines, use their infrastructure to infect transformational memes into the dominant society, get a hold of their ‘ammunition’ and use it against them.
We are a minority, guerrillas who must be grounded in integrity and street smarts.
After all, if we are forced to live in poverty and/or keep our cash in our mattresses, haven’t we compromised ourselves beyond the point of sacrifice, where we become ineffective in changing the greater community toward peace?
“In my case, using the banks to keep small amounts of money to pay by check and debit card, makes my life easier and I am more productive in the work I do on behalf of creating a more just and sustainable society.
Its not hard to change banks periodically if you want to do that to keep the IRS from pilfering your accounts since they are often months and even years behind in their collection process.
Just make sure you have a good reason to change banks, other than evasion of IRS collections, like the bank service fees are too high or their percentages of interest are no longer high enough or you have moved, etc.
“I am aware of the Federal Reserve fiat money situation and yes, in an ideal world, ‘Stop Using Banks’ and trading in silver and gold coins might be preferred.
But this discussion needs to focus more on strategies for keeping our money out of the reaches of the IRS and not on just blanket statements that are not always practical to most WTRs.”
Heather Snow agrees: “Keeping small amounts in the bank is so much easier to pay bills… all the bills are connected to banks.
I mean, living without a bank, is like living without a car.
Almost impossible.
That’s how the feds want it.
I don’t keep all my money in the bank, and enjoy having cash on hand.”
Dana Visalli adds: “[I]t is possible with small banks that have no branches to have an account in somebody else’s name, or more meaningfully, someone else’s SS#.
There can be two signers on the account but they only take the SS# of the first person.
Apparently this option does not exist with banks with branches; only dog knows why this is the case.
“When the IRS seized my account some years ago, the bank president came up to the teller window and explained this technique to me!”
Randy Belmont responds: “Actually, not using banks is really not that hard.
Cash checks at the local corner store or bar.
You can pay many utility bills directly at local drug stores and purchase money orders for other bills.
You can also recycle checks because all checks are drafts for money.
Example: You have a bill for $100.00 owed to ABC Co. and a check made out to you for $75.00. Sign and write pay to the order of ABC Co. on the back of the check and purchase a money order for $25.00. Send both of these to ABC Co. and your bill is paid.
Additionally, if the check is bad the issuer of the check and not yourself is liable.
You can also purchase a pre-loaded debit card for internet purchases etc. at 100s of stores.
I understand that we all must use Federal Reserve Notes to survive, but it is not hard to ween yourself from the constant use of banks.
If you must keep an account keep very little in it and cash your checks for cash and use the methods I described above.
Additionally, you will never have an overdraft or bounced check fee again.”
Larry Rosenwald: “We keep our money in a local bank (two branches).
I love Dana’s story about the bank president!
But here’s a question.
As noted in an earlier exchange with Carol Moore, I think of war tax resistance as an act of civil disobedience, and in that context — and for other reasons — I am not trying not to be penalized; rather the being penalized is for me part of the civil disobedience.
I hate being levied, I should make clear!
But I understand being penalized as part of the process, and when I’m penalized, when we’re levied, I take that occasion to publicize what we’re doing.
I’m guessing from the responses to this thread, and from other threads, that other readers of this list don’t think of wtr as civil disobedience, or think of civil disobedience in a different way, and I’d be interested in understanding these other conceptual frameworks better, if readers would be willing to comment on them.”
Dana Visalli again: “Interesting note Larry, thanks. I’m sure it is the case that everyone interprets their ‘resistance’ (I like to think of it as ‘complete refusal’) to pay for the insanity of war.
“For one think it is quite important for me to keep my financial resources away from the IRS because they will use that money to kill people.
So, when they did seize my account and get $4000 some years ago, that was a sizable amount that went to war (I know we generally calculate about half goes in that direction).
It is a real, literal, tangible issue to me; I don’t want any of my resources to go to war (not to be too pure here, I do drive my car quite a bit… petroleum is quite a war-related problem…).
“It’s certainly an issue that if the IRS does seize a large sum then the mechanics of living become problematic.
I’m sure that’s what Diogenes was getting at when he said ‘People don’t own possessions, possessions own people.’
He apparently lived in a barrel in the town square for quite a while.
I’m passionate… but not that passionate.
“Also, if one can retain one’s resources, one can redistribute them.
Some years ago I gave $1000 to the town community center for their new roof; when I handed the cash to the manager I stipulated that I was going to point out in a letter to the editor why I could afford to give away a thousand dollars when I don’t have a lot of money.
I would like to get up to giving away ¼ of what I make (total taxes are about ¼ of income), but I’m not there.
It is however a real pleasure to give $100 here and $100 there; if the IRS got at my funds that would be impossible
“I’m 61 and I think I can get social security next year.
Surprisingly, they are offering me something like $600 a month (I’ve paid very little into the system in my life).
My favorite idea is to take the money and then donate it to groups working on the aftermath of American war-making, or the many exemplary groups I met in Afghanistan when there in March, trying to educate street children or take care of old people with almost zero resources (speaking of this there are two good essays at CommonDreams right now by Kathy Kelly and her co-workers, who are in Afghanistan as we speak).
I know not everyone could afford to do this, but in my case I think I can make some money until I’m at least 70 selling at farmer’s market and doing other work.
“So… I had no intention of ending up an anarchist, but the Politics of Obedience are too much for me.”
Ginny Sсhnеider adds: “Aside from the Federal Reserve tie, imagine how the banks are investing your money!
Likely these investments uphold the military-industrial complex — just what you are working to overcome.
Credit Unions and newer, socially-responsible bank like institutions might be better alternatives even while you wait for the IRS to seize your money from an account.”
Ed Agro says: “I think I’m somewhere else entirely.
This isn’t surprising; I think if 100 resisters-refusers-redirectors got together & beyond our standard slogans, there’d be 100 different reasons.
“I do know I’m not as attached to independence as Dana; but on the other hand I can’t quite see Larry’s putting up with seizure as civil disobedience.
“If we cannot point out a palpable relationship between making the collection of taxes difficult and a turn away from war, where is the salience of the disobedience?
Is it even civil if it’s an individual or a small-group action with no hope of provoking change?
We cannot show the salience theoretically, and worse, our experience over our years of refusal don’t show it empirically.
It’s not at all obvious that even were there a mass refusal of ‘war taxes’ (which would mean at the very most half of the population, as it has been shown over & over that at least half of our fellow citizens love the government’s wars) that the government would be less inclined or less able to wage war.
The draft resistance movement in the 1960s and ’80s were successful enough to worry the military-industrial complex; so now they buy their soldiers, and as we see there are plenty who will take them up on it.
This is just to say that consumer capitalism’s genius is its ability to absorb and commodify almost any dissent, particularly when that dissent expresses itself as dissatisfaction.
“I’m not saying that either Dana’s or Larry’s different conceptualizations of citizens and subjects are not worth following to their deedful conclusions, but only that perhaps neither of these are resistance.
It’s been interesting and very useful for me to note and remember that their different actions both result in a very good thing: conversation with neighbors, co-workers, officials… There, perhaps is the nub of what we’re doing.
It’s the most we can expect out of WTR, and it’s not a small thing in these timid times.
“Long ago I took a job precisely so that my WTR could be as ‘effective’ as possible in that the substantial risk of seizure at least would give the resistance a voice, and for years I enjoyed sticking it to the IRS with many an antic scheme.
(I particularly enjoyed taking as business losses the time I spent in antiwar work.)
In the end, though, the thing that I cam away with wasn’t the accounting of who was ahead, or the best way to protect my money.
(Though I have to agree with Dana: without a very good reason to let the IRS get much more than I refused, I could get really bummed out.)
Rather I finally came to see that this was indeed a species of tilting at windmills since except insofar as I wrote to various presidents & secretaries of state — and even then with no apparent effect — the IRS was if not a windmill, at least a coffee mill into which my resistance was soon ground up.
The occasional agent who looked with sympathy on my stance — really, I could’ve gotten more mileage for my ideas with less work by way of a letter to the editor.
“I don’t know how I’d feel about all this were I still in the labor market, though I like to believe I’d still be happily reckless.
But this feeling that WTR is less than cogent has had one good effect.
It’s led me to thinking over the years about why, exactly, civilization is so screwed up.
This in turn (and I have to admit, helped along by a good social-security situation) has led me to a preference for a frugal life.
“Yet… Maybe a disadvantage of a frugal life is that it turns not to include tax liability.
Though the relationship isn’t as ‘functional’ as we like to believe, ‘war’ taxes are associated with state violence; so I do miss (or think I miss) the occasion to refuse them.
For that reason I find myself inordinately attached to refusing the phone tax, the only one to which I’m liable and to which with a certain amount of mental gymnastics I can associate with war.
Why do I bother, after these long-winded arguments for ineffectiveness?
The only reason that makes sense to me is that I enjoy the ritual.
Like voting, which ritual I also enjoy even though in the large it apparently doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful either.”
Her experience hasn’t hardened her or made her cynical.
In fact, she expresses genuine sympathy for those who don’t have the luxury of living as she does.
“I’m fortunate that I’ve found a couple of important truths that I can declare with passion and that I have the freedom to act on them.
If I didn’t have this I think I’d be leading a life of quiet desperation.”
Kelly shares an apartment with Karl Meyer, a veteran war-tax resister who’s achieved considerable notoriety over the past 35 years by creating a series of "inventions of nonviolence" to arouse an apathetic public and drive the Internal Revenue Service crazy.
She and Meyer were married in the mid-1980s but obtained a divorce several years later, largely because Meyer was determined to separate himself from every institution approved by society and regulated by governmental entities.
The divorce has apparently had no influence on their relationship or their living arrangement.
Meyer remains Kelly’s mentor and emotional support, and the bond of affection between them is quite apparent.
“Karl is an amazing thinker,” says Kelly.
“He questions everything, makes you reconsider all assumptions.
The two of us have always had a marvelous coherence.”
One result is that she and Meyer refuse to pay taxes, since a hefty portion of every tax dollar goes to support the military.
This has created problems in the mostly part-time jobs Kelly has held as a teacher since resigning from Saint Ignatius.
Whenever the Internal Revenue Service gets on her case and starts garnishing wages, she quits and goes to work somewhere else.
She now teaches English as a second language several hours a week at a north-side factory.
She’s never made much money, but then she doesn’t spend much either.
JMR: Why did you decide to become a war-tax refuser?
KK: When it dawned on me that my neighbors didn’t have food, that the youngsters would be remarkable if they made it though their teenage years, and that people in my neighborhood were sleeping in abandoned buildings.
There’s no way I was going to go to a teaching job and spend much of my teaching day trying to teach youngsters about opposition, radical opposition to nuclear weaponry and then take a third of my income and then pay for nuclear weapons and the rest of it.
It wasn’t even a question once I realized, and I thought “Of course!
What a relief!
I don’t have to pay those taxes.”
I never will pay those taxes and since the day that I first made that determination, there hasn’t been a doubt in my mind.
I will never pay federal income tax.
“Too radical” is often the tag given to people like United States activist
Kathy Kelly, soon to begin a series of talks and workshops in Brisbane based
around her 35-year struggle to promote world peace.
It’s a crusade which put the former Catholic high school teacher in jail for
nearly a year for planting corn on Missouri nuclear missile sites.
Ms Kelly’s response to an observation put by The Catholic
Leader — that “the vast majority of the populace might find your ways
of protest too radical” — was instructive.
“It’s interesting many societies believe it is normal and acceptable to send
young people off to war zones,” she said.
“This is sometimes for years at a time, with the expectation that they will
loan themselves to possibly kill or possibly be killed.
“And yet, it’s considered oddly radical when people who object to war’s cruel
bloodshed, risk imprisonment for non-violently refusing to pay for or
co-operate with war-making.”
He was brought into the fold in under the influence of Kathy Kelly and Karl Meyer.
They recommended that Tverdek increase his withholding allowances until no federal income tax was withheld from his paycheck, and then refuse to pay the balance at tax filing time.
“This I tried,” Tverdek reports, “and it worked without a hitch for about three years.
No IRS agent came knocking, no threatening letters arrived in the mail; I simply stopped funding what I believed to be an illegitimate government and put the money saved toward causes of which I approved.”
So what happened?
Why did I return to paying my taxes after only a few years “sticking it to the man” and getting away with it?
I fabricated a story to tell friends; my position as an Illinois state employee made it easy for me to target even as a small fish, and I was advised to cease even my relatively inconsequential silent protest and pay back taxes to avoid being “made an example of.”
This was only a ruse, however, to avoid having to confess — and explain — an emerging ethical conundrum.
The real reason I decided to return to the ranks of taxpayers was more moral than prudential: while I still supported the notion that tax resistance might be a viable political strategy when the recipient government is violating human rights, waging unjust war, exploiting foreign (and domestic) populations, etc., I was unsettled by the prospect of bleeding dry the things I believed in along with the things I detested.
Yes, illegal, morally unjustified military excursions into El Salvador and Nicaragua would not be carried out on my nickel, but neither would projects subsidizing school lunches or Head Start programs. Evil was taken down an infinitesimally tiny notch by my political “statement,” but so was the good that our collective contributions make toward building a more equitable society, repairing the environment, and generally correcting the mess that free markets make.
I could no longer look upon the newly paved public road that carried emergency vehicles safely to the distressed or the increasingly smog-less Lake Michigan sunrise and say to myself, “Yeah, I helped with that.”
Sure, I had more cash in pocket to donate to social, politica, and charitable causes of my choosing, but I had withdrawn from the democratically accountable pool of funds that goes toward the projects of our choosing — you, me, and every other American who pays taxes and votes, indirectly at least, on how that pool will be divided.
This started to settle in my gut as the unmistakable feeling of hubris.
I find his “ruse” more believable, but I suppose I should take him at his word.
Did he believe that the federal budget was a “democratically accountable pool of funds” when he stopped contributing to it, and only later felt guilty about that; or did he only after starting war tax resistance come to believe that the federal budget was a “democratically accountable pool of funds” after all?
It’s kind of hard to tell.
I know that’s the bedtime story people tell about their tax dollars when they’re trying to convince other people to pay up, or when they’re trying not to feel so bad about how much their paycheck has shrunk, but it seems implausible to me that someone who had gone to the trouble of becoming a war tax resister would take the bedtime story very seriously.
But Tverdek is a liberal, and part of the ritual involved in being a liberal is to complain with righteous outrage at all of the watertight evidence that the federal budget is neither democratic or accountable, and then to insist that this undemocratic, unaccountable trough be filled ever higher — and if you ask why, you’ll be told that it’s so we can have accountable democratic control over the commonweal, even though we all know better.
In Tverdek’s case, either because he’s carelessly following what seemed like a useful justification to its logical conclusions or because he actually believes what he’s saying, liberalism is an explicit prioritizing of the collective over the actual flesh-and-blood human beings that make it up:
…society is a thing in and of itself — a reality sui generis as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim described it at the turn of the 19th century.
There are facts about individual persons, and there are social facts, and the two categories need not overlap.…
…we can no longer think of morality strictly in terms of the duties of individual moral agents and the things they are obligated or permitted to do or not to do to/with other moral agents, much less in strictly Aristotelian terms of what constitutes the "virtuous" person.
If we understand society as a reality sui generis, and if we thus accept the notion that there are goods that may be valued by that society that may not be valued in the same way by each of its constituent persons, morality can no longer speak solely of actions that are incumbent upon me, or even just the omission of actions that I should have taken for moral purposes.
In the fancy language of moral philosophers, morality must be, at least in some respects, agent-neutral and best described in the passive tense: we can’t reasonably say that any particular person X ought to provide ‘public health,’ but we can reasonably argue that ‘public health ought to be provided,’ as should environmental integrity, general literacy, etc. What this means for individuals in that population remains open to moral discussion.
And this is what makes liberalism so dangerous.
Because of course, when you design your public policy around such passive-voice freebies as “public health ought to be provided,” you find that you cannot actually implement them without turning them into active-voice “so-and-so ought to provide it”s. Which means either turning so-and-so into a slave, or taking enough resources from someone-else to make it worth so-and-so’s while (or, frequently, a little of both).
And meanwhile the liberal insists that he or she is not putting a gun to anyone’s head but is merely repeating the unobjectionable passive-voice mantra.
One question Fazillah cannot answer for her son is whether anyone asked the question at all of whether to kill his father.
Forbes reports that the Air Force has 65,000–70,000 analysts processing drone video surveillance; a Rand review states they actually need half again that number to properly handle the data.
Asked to point to the human who actually made the decision to kill her husband, she can only point to another machine.
So who does Fazillah blame?
Whom does one blame when confronted with the actions of a machine?
Our Pakistani friend asks, “What kind of a democracy is America where people do not ask these questions?”
Becoming an actual democracy, with an actual choice at election time between war and peace rather than between political machines vying for the chance to bring us war, seems to many Americans, if some of the less-reported polls are to be believed, a nearly unachievable goal.
The United States has become a process that churns out war — today Afghanistan and (in any real sense) Iraq; tomorrow Iran and Pakistan, with China securely, however distantly, on the horizon — and for those of us with any concern for peace, a principled opposition to war ultimately requires a determination to make the United States at long last into a democracy, striving as Dr. King enjoined us, in “molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.”
It must begin with compassion — powerless compassion perhaps, perhaps only the ghost of dissent, but compassion for people like Fazillah and Aymal — and with deciding to be human, maybe only the ghost of a human, but alive in some way and alive to what our assent and perhaps especially our silence are accomplishing in the world.
Humanity is the first thing to be won back — and then, if we have the strength, relentlessly defended — against indifference, complacency, and, above all, inaction.
If enough of us refuse to be machines, if enough of us refuse enough, can democracy, and even peace, not be at last achieved?
But first comes the refusal.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
A new millennium is upon us, full of hope and… whoops, there goes a terrorist
attack and suddenly the
U.S. adopts
psychosis guanorrhea as its national pastime. How did the
Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance
reflect this slide from hope to insanity in ?
An obituary notice for Marian Dockhorn in the
issue noted that among her many peace
and justice activities, “[d]uring
she was led to become a war tax refuser.”
The issue noted that “[t]he Internal
Revenue Service has placed a lien on the home of Jim Satterwhite and Olwen
Pritchard, at Bluffton College in Ohio, who have been withholding the military
portion of their federal taxes for the last few years. The Bluffton Worship
Group has agreed to act as an ad hoc committee to react if the
IRS
takes the extraordinary step of foreclosing on the house.”
An obituary notice for Mary Barclay Howarth in that issue described her this
way: “A lifelong tax resister, Mary believed in simple living as a tool to
promote world peace.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Kerttu Kay Barnett published in the
issue recommended fifteen things Friends
could do that might help them “to build a community and… integrate new
attenders into the life of the meeting” and suggested that readers try out a
few of them. Some of these were very simple and mundane (“Borrow a book from
the meeting library,” “Introduce yourself to somebody in the meeting you don’t
know well”) but #5 was “Declare yourself a conscientious objector to war
taxes, and mail that part of your taxes that go to support the military to an
escrow account.”
A report on the Britain Yearly Meeting, which was held
, included the vague note
that “[w]e renewed our commitment to further our corporate concern for the
right to conscientious objection to the payment of tax for military purposes
and for its diversion towards peaceful uses.”
The issue had a feature on Iraq and
on the sufferings of people there under the Hussein dictatorship and the
international sanctions against the country. The article mentioned the work of
Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness and mentioned her war tax resistance
in passing:
Kelly pays no taxes, not wanting to support weapons and prisons. She lives in
voluntary poverty, operating Voices in the Wilderness out of her elderly
father’s home in Chicago. She says the
IRS
agent who showed up to assess what could be seized in lieu of taxes, “looked
around and said, ‘You don’t really have anything, do you? I’m going to put
you down as uncollectible.’ ”
An obituary notice for William F. “Bill” Hayden in that issue said: “A
pacifist and antiwar activist, he vigorously protested the Vietnam War and
resisted certain taxes on the basis that they funded the military.”
An article by Chuck Hosking in the
issue challenged Quakers to radically reassess their lifestyles, as what
passes for normal in our culture is incredibly destructive.
And perhaps the most objectionable of all to Friends is the military role
that undergirds our privilege. There’s no need to acquiesce to the Pentagon’s
semantic ploy of defining its role as “service.” The only ones served by the
U.S. military are
the global elite and arms corporations. Once Friends are convinced that the
overriding purpose of
U.S. militarism is
to protect our privileged way of life, there will follow a strong impetus to
relinquish our wealth advantages, live on less than the taxable minimum (in
part, to avoid subsidizing the military in our name), and trust in the
peacemaking potential of global sharing.
In an article by Carol Urner in the
issue she recalled: “When [her husband Jack] retired he did not want to return
to the United States. he found the contrasts of unrestricted wealth and dire
poverty obscene, and he had never wanted to pay the taxes that supported the
U.S. military. We
agreed to stay in Lesotho and Southern Africa where both of us could continue
to be useful.”
An obituary notice for Mary Mikesell in that issue noted that “she became a
tax resister and in lieu of income tax, sent an equivalent amount, her own
alternative tax, to a private organization for relief work in Vietnam.”
That issue also noted that the Haverford, Pennsylvania, Meeting had decided
to rededicate itself to trying to get a Peace Tax Fund law passed:
“A Peace Tax Fund, which would allow people of conscience to pay the full
amount of their federal income taxes into a fund designated strictly for
nonmilitary purposes, would represent ‘alternative service’ for taxpayers and
their tax dollars,” the minute asserts. The meeting will work with other
faith-based communities and organizations to develop a stronger network
advocating for a Peace Tax Fund and work with legislators and other public
officials to cultivate their support for this initiative.
So in 2001 I count five references to recently-deceased Quaker war tax
resisters, two to living American Quaker war tax resisters, one to a Quaker
war tax resister outside the
U.S., and another
to an American war tax resister who isn’t a Quaker. Not a very encouraging
sign for the vigor of the practice in the American Society of Friends.
“Transformative Nonviolence” — Bob Bady wonders whether the war tax resistance movement is taking a wrong turn by trying “to make war tax resistance more attractive by making it less disruptive and risky.”
Instead, he thinks, “we need to find a way to harness risk rather than shy away from it.”
He concludes that if war tax resisters are going to be willing to take on such risk, “we need to develop a substructure that better supports, sustains, and nourishes the resister.”
Counseling Notes — including the new taxable income levels, a question about whether people who are not tax-compliant can sponsor non-citizens for permanent residency, and some notes about tax law changes and IRS struggles.
International News — from tax resistance campaigns in Hong Kong and Italy.
Ideas & Actions — some activity of local NWTRCC affiliates, news of the Satyagraha Institute’s upcoming summer training program, a note about the imprisonment of Kathy Kelly for her participation in a protest against the military drone assassin program, and a brief review of David Hartsough’s new autobiography, Waging Peace.
NWTRCC News — including announcements of the upcoming national and New England gatherings, a call for nominations for the Administrative Committee, and a note about the War Resisters League honoring NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn with its Ralph DiGia Award.
[T]he group is encouraging Catalans to use an arcane legal formula to pay their taxes to an escrow account controlled by the regional government.
That would potentially deny more than 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to the Spanish state, which is legally entitled to collect taxes directly in Catalonia and most of the rest of country
The technique allows taxpayers to meet their legal obligations to the state before the regional government transfers the money to Madrid.
If the dispute over Catalan sovereignty turns nasty, the regional government can then withhold revenue from Spain without exposing voters to legal or financial reprisals from the central government.
“One of the most important spiritual directors in my life has been the Internal Revenue Service.
Janis Joplin’s lyric, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ comes to mind.
War tax refusers learn ways to become impervious to collection, and that generally means finding ways to live without owning property, relying on savings, or growing attached to a job that one couldn’t leave in the event of an IRS notice about wage garnishment.
“Becoming a war tax refuser was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made and one of the easiest decisions to maintain.
I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”
The War Resisters League have come out with their annual U.S. Federal Budget Pie Chart, which purports to tell you “where your income tax money really goes.”
This is based on the Obama administration’s budget proposal for , which is more than usually an exercise in showmanship as the Republicans who control Congress will get the final say.
Still, the chart makes for a useful conversation starter in some contexts.
In Greece, too, the new government has moved to make things easier for those who practiced tax refusal in recent years.
Such resisters can, if they agree to begin paying something, have large hunks of their arrears written-off, and can make plans to pay the rest in up to 100 small installments without any interest of penalties.
As in the case of Scotland, critics are suggesting that these moves will encourage future tax resisters to be more bold in the hopes that they too might benefit from a future amnesty.
Some links that have graced my browser in recent days:
The Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy is “building a European network of companies which support a European tax disobedience movement.”
In short, they’re trying to use the same bag of tricks that multinational corporations use to evade taxes on their profits in order to build an alternative economic network of European dissidents.
Fair.coop also has some commentary on the campaign.
Italian pacifist Turi Vaccaro climbed up a satellite dish at a U.S. military base near Niscemi, Italy, and, over the course of about 34 hours, with manual hand tools, did about €800,000 in damage.
Did the U.S. government ever press charges against Voices in the Wilderness for violating the sanctions?
Kathy Kelly
They would bring us into court with some regularity. It was curious because at one point there was a $50,000 fine. I thought, “What are you going to take — my contact lenses?” I just had to laugh. I mean, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes to the U.S. government as a war tax-refuser since 1980. So there is nothing they could take from me. The people that would go over were in the same boat. So good luck collecting from them!
Spirit
But as it turned out, they did fine your group $20,000, didn’t they?
Kelly
Yeah, they finally took us into court. And I think Condoleezza Rice inadvertently might have saved us. This is speculation on my part, but this much is true. Chevron settled out of court, acknowledging that they had paid money under the table to Saddam Hussein in order to get very lucrative contracts for Iraqi oil.
Condoleezza Rice was the international liaison for Chevron while it was paying money under the table to get these lucrative contracts. So when we finally had our day in court, Sen. Carl Levin’s staffers were still digging up this information and it was beginning to become public evidence that Chevron, Odin Marine Inc., Mobil and Coastal Oil had all been paying money for these oil contracts under the table to Saddam Hussein.
So there were big fish in the pond that broke the sanctions and there were little fish in the pond that broke the sanctions. I think some of the big fish said, “That is one hot potato. You drop that hot potato as fast as you can, and don’t make a big deal because those people are little fish but they’re mouthy little fish.” So they never tried to collect a dime from us. The money was just sitting there.
Spirit
Well, what exactly did happen to you when the U.S. government took you to court for violating the sanctions?
Kelly
We were found guilty and were fined $20,000. Federal Judge John Bates wrote in his legal opinion that those who disobey an unjust law should accept the penalty willingly and lovingly.
Spirit
Unbelievable! A federal judge lectures you about lovingly accepting this unjust fine using the words of Martin Luther King?
Kelly
Yes. We said to Judge Bates, “If you want to send us to prison, we will go, willingly and lovingly. We’ve done that before already. But if you think we will pay a fine to the U.S. government, then we ask you to imagine that Martin Luther King would have ever said, ‘Coretta, get the checkbook.’ We are not going to pay one dime to the U.S. government which continues to wage warfare.” At that time, supplemental spending bills appeared every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and congressional representatives and senators continued to vote yes on those spending bills for the military. So we said, “No, we won’t pay a dime of that fine.”
Spirit
You have also been a war tax resister for a long time.
Kelly
I’m a war tax refuser. I don’t give them anything.
Spirit
Oh, you’re not a 50 percent withholder, like many war tax resisters. You’re a 100 percent withholder?
Kelly
Yes, I’m a 100 percent withholder. I think war tax resistance is important but I happen to be a refuser. They haven’t got one dime of federal income tax from me since 1980.
Spirit
Why did you begin refusing to pay federal taxes entirely?
Kelly
I won’t give them any money. I can’t and I won’t. I won’t pay for guns. I don’t believe in killing people. I also don’t want to pay for the CIA, the FBI, the corporate bail-outs or the prison system. But particularly, I began as a war tax refuser. I wouldn’t give money to the Mafia if they came to my door and said, “We’d like you to help pay for our operations.” I’m certainly not going to pay for wars when I’ve tried throughout my adult life to educate people to resist nonviolently.
Spirit
How have you gotten away with not paying federal taxes ? Do you keep your income low?
Kelly
Many years I have lived below the taxable income. But in , someone from the IRS came to my home. I had in some years claimed extra allowances on the W-4 form. And I just don’t file. I haven’t filed . Now, that’s a criminal offense and they could put me in jail for a long time for that. If I was earning over the taxable income, I would just calculate how many allowances I have to claim so that no money is taken out of my paycheck. It says in the small print on the W-2 form to put down the correct number of allowances so that the correct amount of tax is taken out. Well, that’s easy. The correct amount of tax to take from me is zero, so I just do the math.
Spirit
Why do you think they haven’t come after you?
Kelly
Well, they have come to collect taxes. But I don’t have a savings account, and I don’t own anything. The IRS is like my spiritual director [laughs]. I don’t know how to drive a car, and I’ve never owned any place that I’ve lived in. I just don’t have anything to take.
Spirit
So has the IRS given up on even trying to collect?
Kelly
Once they came out to collect in 1998 when I was taking care of my dear Dad, who was wheelchair-bound, and a bit slumped over in the chair. Dad liked to listen to opera and I had a really awful old record player playing a scratchy record. I had been in the back of the house and I didn’t know she was coming, so I ran down to answer the door while the record player was making such a horrible noise. The apartment was fine but it only had a few sticks of furniture.
The woman asked me if I was going to get a job, and I told her I couldn’t leave my father. Then she asked if I had a bank account, and I said no. She said, “And you don’t own a car?” And I told her I didn’t even know how to drive. Then she just kind of leaned toward me and said, “You know what? I’m just going to write you up as uncollectible.” And I said, “That’s a very good idea.” [laughs] They’ve never tried to collect since. There was just nothing to take! Zero. Nothing.
On your side, you state that those who set themselves against Western wars pay, nevertheless, taxes, which are used by the State for war and the oppression of the colored peoples.
That is quite true.
In fact our anti-militarist struggle also is as yet only something very relative, and it must go on extending.
But in any case, we have fixed clear and inflexible borders: we refuse absolutely all direct, personal participation in war and in its social and moral preparation.
But several of us employ still other means of fighting against it.… Moreover, a few of us have already decided individually to refuse to pay any taxes, whilst the organization of which I am a member has already several times been the propagandist of collective refusal of taxation.
But whereas refusal, even on a very restricted scale, to do military service has been morally and socially efficacious, the refusal to pay taxes by a restricted number of citizens only has so far had very little result, as the authorities, in confiscating property and inflicting fines, take possession of sums much larger than a direct payment of taxes would have brought them.
From this point of view, your compatriots have already given some impressive examples of collective refusal, although they also were not able to avoid regular unfair demands of the Government.
I think “the organization of which I am a member” may have been War Resisters International.
Gandhi’s response to this point is an interesting one:
A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system, which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice being left to him.
I belong to a world, which is partly based on violence.
If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistent with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades.
You can find more of Bart de Ligt’s thoughts on tax refusal, non-violent struggle, and Gandhi’s campaigns in the essay The Effectiveness of Non-Violent Struggle, also on the Satyagraha Foundation site.
And from the academic and related worlds:
A paper by Jay A. Soled and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas on Revisiting the Taxation of Fringe Benefits notes that many companies are compensating their employees with “a cornucopia of fringe benefits, including frequent-flier miles, hotel reward points, rental car preferred status, office supply dollar coupons, cellular telephone use, home Internet service, and, in some instances, even free lunches, massages, and dance lessons.”
Some of these are proving difficult for the government to effectively tax as income.
Gregg Polsky has come up with a potentially useful way of using Roth IRA conversions to keep money away from the tax collector.
Maciej Bartkowski looks at what causes people to break out of their apathy and join risky movements for social change, in Forming a Movement: Cognitive Liberation.
A story is buzzing around in red and blue circles that California is threatening to stop paying federal taxes in response to the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities.”
The only substance to the story, as far as I have been able to determine, is an off-the-cuff remark by Willie Brown, formerly mayor of San Francisco and formerly speaker of the California state Assembly, to this effect: “California could very well become an organized non-payer.
They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
But nonetheless, this quasi-story has been generating a lot of buzz, along with the predictable ignorant outrage in the dittosphere.
NWTRCC is urging war tax resisters to go public and sign their names to a pledge that will be used for publicity and advertising for the cause.
Here’s some follow-up on German war tax resister Gertrud Nehls:
NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience.
You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
[S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.
Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters.
That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes.
The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently.
It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction.
For example:
Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent.
People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time.
Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
Hey, what do you know?
Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu.
This strike, which is scheduled to start in , is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.
At age 77, the soft-spoken Kehler is still inspiring nonviolent anti-war activism.
Locally, he and his wife of 45 years, Betsy Corner, are possibly most remembered for their stand against the Internal Revenue Service, as “war tax-resisters” whose rural Colrain home was seized for non-payment of taxes in and sold by the IRS for $5,400.
Its customer service workforce has shrunk more than 40% since 2010, according to the most recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor shortage — handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates at little more than fast-food wages.
It’s so bad, that tax professionals can’t even reach the agency on the special back-channel line designed just for them.
One person’s hopeless bureaucratic dysfunction is another person’s opportunity:
A company has launched a $100/month service “that makes robocalls to the agency’s special practitioner line… waits on hold, and then, when it makes a connection, puts the client through to an IRS agent.”
The human war on traffic ticket camera robots continues. In France and Italy, fire and spray paint took out several cameras, while Santa Claus converted another one into a pose-with-Santa photo booth. Spray paint was also the weapon of choice in several attacks in France and Germany in recent weeks.
French provacateur Rémi Gaillard converts a traffic ticket camera radar gun into a pose-with-Santa photo booth
Although acts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection take varied forms in our country, few in recent memory have resulted not only in loss of freedom but of hearth and home as well.
It is perhaps the latter event which placed North Americans closest to those who lose homes through eviction, war and other forms of violence.
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner were arrested in , after the Colrain, Massachusetts home, where they lived with their daughter Lillian, was forcibly seized by the federal government for non-payment of taxes.
Betsy was later released, while Randy remains in jail as we go to press, to serve a six-month sentence for contempt of court.
Their home was put on the auction block in , with the federal government ending up as the only bidder and subsequent “owner” of Randy and Betsy’s place, but it has taken two-and-a-half years of other legal maneuvers before they have finally been removed and charged with contempt, despite strong local support and publicity.
Betsy and Randy lease the land on which their home is situated through the Valley Community Land Trust, a non-profit corporation using land for conservation, garden and agricultural purposes, and for affordable housing.
Like many resisters who pay local and state taxes, Randy and Betsy are in disagreement with federal levies used for nuclear weapons production, military intervention and other acts deemed criminal by international law.
Despite all talk of arms reduction carried out in saw Congress giving its approval to $270 billion dollars for the military budget.
The court ruling in favor of ownership by the United States further stated that the government had the right to padlock the house since it “had proper title to, and was entitled to possession of” the home in which Randy, Betsy and Lillian have lived for the last twelve years.
When asked in their court appearance if they planned to reenter their home, Betsy agreed not to when released, and Randy added, “It is my intention neither to occupy or not occupy my house.
It is my intention to oppose the use of my tax dollars for killing and preparations for war.”
But friends, neighbors and other sympathetic supporters have, since the time of the seizure, occupied the house.
On the following morning, for instance, a group of fourteen resisters, including the indefatigable 84-year-old Wally Nelson, who has been “just saying no” to federal war taxes , removed the government’s padlocks and remained in the house for several days, risking arrest in doing so.
As of this date, these occupations continue.
The eloquent response of Betsy Corner to those who have asked if they were “nervous” about the loss of their home, illumines one method of solidarity for these hard times:
“Sure we are. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, and our twelve-year-old daughter Lillian was born here.
We love this place, and the land, and our neighbors too.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by our brutal bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Panama and Iraq or by the US-sponsored bombing that’s going on at this very moment in El Salvador?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash or irradiated forever, if we don’t stop building nuclear weapons and generating more and more nuclear waste?”
For further information on Betsy and Randy’s current status and ways of assisting their efforts, please contact:
War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR), c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Rd., Deerfield, MA 01342, (413) 774‒2710 or (413) 773‒7427.
―Jane Sammon
The same issue had an additional article about war tax resistance:
War And Taxes
The CW listed some boycotts suggested as one route to follow “the little Way" of peace.
Now, as the income-tax-returns season is in full swing, is the time to urge a further boycott — of the Internal Revenue Service.
Once we know about the military pursuits in the Persian Gulf over the past year…, surely we must say “No!" to the government as clearly and as concretely as possible.
Nor can the Persian Gulf War be seen as an isolated incident, a regrettable aberration from national policy.
The very existence, for instance, of a “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, shows how deep-seated is the pursuit of violence in the practices of the US government.
The fact of the matter is that more than half the money collected by the IRS goes to pay for war or to prepare for war.
According to the old adage, “Death and taxes are inevitable” but, according to our faith, murder is not allowed.
True, our Lord did say, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6 and Mark 13:7);
He did not add though, that we should take an active part to promote them.
And, on the mundane level of financial considerations, modern warfare would be rendered well nigh impossible if nobody would foot the bill.
During the war in Vietnam, someone who promoted tax resistance was once asked what to do about the money to be withheld.
He answered, “Better to flush it down the toilet as waste-paper than to pay for the war.”
In reality, though, practicalities about the dollars and cents demanded for taxes cannot be quite so simply swept aside, nor considered only at the moment of the due date.
Peter Maurin taught a full life of voluntary poverty when he interpreted Jesus’ enigmatic reply about taxes with “The less you have of Caesar’s, the less you have to render unto him.”
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner are now paying the price, in prison, and through the loss of their home to the IRS.
The War Resisters League has proposed the Alternative Revenue Service as a means to hold and channel monies not handed over to the government.
These are all “hard" suggestions which reveal the iron grip of taxes.
Even if success for the tax resistance movement is not imminent, any withholding of federal income taxes marks a break in the deadly power of the economic system in which we are all complicit.
It is a system whose principal “product” is war, whose motive is profit, whose organizing principle is usury.
Usury (charging interest on a loan to make money from money) is the word Peter Maurin emphasized in his discussions on economics, one we seldom hear anymore.
It is the basis for all our financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund and the world debt to the Savings and Loan frauds (which have been described as “pure capitalism,” that is, effectively unfettered from constraints of either human labor or natural resources) to the stock market to insurance plans, right down to your local bank account.
But the guarantor of usury is the Federal Reserve System, through our taxes.
Barry Peters’ study on the ban on usury in the Hebrew Scriptures, makes it clear how this practice is violent robbery and oppression.
January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, his memorial was eclipsed by the formal outbreak of hostilities against Iraq.
This year, let us rekindle the light of his life and martyrdom by a dedication to his ways of active nonviolence, by a refusal to render unto Caesar the ways of violence.
Instead, let us find alternative ways to render the fruits of our labor unto God, and to His children, to whom they belong.
―Katharine Temple
An Alternative Revenue Service
The Alternative Revenue Service (ARS) is a project of the War Resisters League (cosponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign) designed to educate public opinion about the realities of military spending in the federal budget, and to give people a chance to redirect $1 or more of their money “owed” in federal taxes to an established alternative fund.
Last year, people who wished to practice tax resistance, to put that money towards peaceful purposes, put $12,000 into the ARS.
For further information or advice, please write to Lisa Harper, Alternative Revenue Service, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, or telephone their “hot-line” 1‒800‒955‒7322.
Attention New York City CW Readers!
Are you interested in finding ways to channel the grief and anger felt in the aftermath of the Gulf War, while discovering alternatives to war in general?
New York City War Tax Resistance (WTR) offers support and information meetings the first Monday of each month — , , etc. — at 6:30 pm.
The meetings are held at 339 Lafayette St. (IRT Number 6, Bleeker St. station).
For more information, please contact Sallie Marx at: (212) 929‒4833.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included an article by Karl Meyer about a road-trip taken by him and Kathy Kelly.
Here are some excerpts that touch on tax resistance:
After we went on to Salina, Kansas and Newton, Kansas, where we visited with Mennonite friends in the war tax refusal movement.
Everywhere we stopped we found the peace movement vibrant, active and numerous, contradicting the falsehoods that President Bush and much of the press tell about the demise of our efforts.
In New Mexico
The same energy was evident in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we visited friends in the war-tax refusal movement.
Don Schrader in Albuquerque had arranged two television news interviews, two newspaper interviews, eight radio talk show appearances, and a lively public meeting.
We renewed acquaintances that showed us how the web of peace action stretches its stands all over North America and Central America.
Perhaps these were the very fields and ditches where Ammon Hennacy worked when he came to Phoenix in , with only a penny in his pocket.
He worked as a farm laborer in order to avoid the withholding of taxes for war.
, he picketed the IRS to let them know why he refused to pay any taxes for war.
In , he began to fast and picket one day for each year that had elapsed since Hiroshima.
(A few copies of his autobiography, The Book of Ammon, are still available from his widow, Joan Thomas, P.O. Box 25, Phoenix, AZ 85001, for $20.)
I am eager to picket with the Peace House this spring at the IRS office in Phoenix, to remind them of Ammon Hennacy, who made a radical and a tax resister out of me thirty-five years ago:
We have come back to bother you again.
This society, and each one of us personally, must put our income into servicing human needs, not into the works of war.
Only then can we rise from the economic ashes of the arms race, the Vietnam War, and our brutal indifference to the needs of the poor in the years since then.
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Besty Corner house seizure:
War Tax Refusers Update
Although Randy Kehler, Colrain, Massachusetts war tax resister (CW ), was released from jail after a little more than two months, the occupation of his family’s home by friends and supporters continues.
The federal government seized the house for non-payment, and later arrested Randy and his wife, Betsy Corner (briefly held) for contempt after their refusal to surrender it.
Their home has been auctioned off, and is now owned by someone from a nearby town.
At press time, the new “owner” has yet to move in, while groups sympathetic to the cause of tax resistance are taking turns at occupying the home, despite threats of arrest.
For more information, please call the War Tax Refusers Support Committee at: (413) 774‒2710, or write: c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
There were also a handful of brief passing references to tax resistance in other issues of The Catholic Worker in .
