How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → issue bomb threats, send disturbing packages → see also

A garden of miscellany:

  • Christina Cowger of “North Carolina Stop Torture Now” talks about the various ways her group is fighting at the grass-roots level to expose and fight the domestic enablers of the “extraordinary rendition” program — from Air America-like front companies like “Aero Contractors” to subsidiaries of Boeing.
  • Reuters reports that the Democrats in the House of Representatives plan to see Dubya’s $93 billion supplemental request for war funding, and then raise him $5 billion in additional military spending. And then, they’ll get to put frosting on top.
  • Speaking of pork… where do you think all that “Homeland Security” spending has been going?
  • Thanks to MetaFilter: Some links on “Possum Living”: “How To Live Well Without a Job… building a $100 Log Cabin… a geodesic dome out of cardboard… handbook for cob building… cheap solar power system… stocking up on food…” and more.
  • A “white powdery substance” in an envelope shut down the IRS mail room in Fresno . And a Connecticut tax collector was run over by a vehicle he was trying to impound.
  • The Coalition to Get the Stop Funding the War Coalition to Stop Funding the War put out a press release: “We have had enough of waiting around for politicians to take action. If those of us in the peace movement use our own power instead of begging officials to use theirs, we might actually stop this war and prevent the next one too. It’s way past time for those of us who say we stand for peace to put our money where our mouths are. Don’t pretend you can oppose the war with your rhetoric while you’re paying for it with every paycheck. The power of the purse begins with us — let’s cut the war funding at the source.”
  • And, surprise, surprise, many of the people who don’t pay their taxes in the United States are the same people who get their paychecks from the federal government. “Nearly half a million current and former U.S. federal employees have not filed tax returns. Collectively, they owe almost $3 billion.”
  • The New York Times has seen the new BBC America series Robin Hood and declares it Tax Policy Decreed by Merry Men in Tights.

Your news in brief:

  • Alternative currency schemes have been slow in getting traction for a variety of reasons, but it may be that their time has arrived. But it probably won’t be something along the lines of the local “Ithica Hours” but a weird cross-over whereby an on-line game world currency flings itself into meat space, as the QQ has in China.
  • If you’re interested in exploring alternatives to government-backed media of exchange, you may want to visit ReinventingMoney.com which covers all the bases.
  • The race is on: will it be the peaceniks and greens in the Republic of Vermont or the libertarians next door in the Free State of New Hampshire who skip the Union first?
  • Is it just me, or do there seem to be more “mysterious powder in envelope frightens IRS employees”-type stories cropping up in the news ?

I got another letter from the IRS .

There’s not much new here. A tiny Notice 1212 and Publication 4127 that advertise their automated telephone service and electronic payment options, and a two page letter showing my current balance and explaining the interest and penalties. The beef of this is as follows:

IMPORTANT
Immediate action is required.

We previously wrote to you about your unpaid account, but you haven’t contacted us about it. Penalties and interest on the unpaid balance are continuing to increase. Please pay the amount you owe within ten days from the date of this notice. If you can’t pay now, call us at the number shown below. You may be qualified for an installment agreement or payroll deduction agreement. We want to help you resolve this bill. However, if we don’t hear from you, we will have no choice to proceed with steps required to collect the amount you owe. If you already paid your balance in full or arranged for an installment agreement, please disregard this notice.

My current balance due is listed as $4,222.07, which includes $19.61 in penalty and $32.11 in interest.

For previous installments in the nasty-letters-from-the-IRS series, see:

A few news briefs:

Tax resistance is a staple of nonviolent resistance, but not all tax resistance is nonviolent. There are also plenty of examples in which people have taken up arms against the taxing authority, have violently destroyed the apparatus of tax collecting, or have used threats of violence to intimidate or inhibit tax collectors.

For instance, lately in Chicago people upset at extortionate parking rates have been destroying parking meters.

“Mike The Parking Ticket Geek” … contacted us via Twitter and showed us his website, theexpiredmeter.com, which he used to give people advice on how to beat parking tickets. The site has become a lightning rod for peoples’ complaints about the new rates and operators.

Mike says the people who are writing to him have a sense of “anger, frustration, rage in some cases.”

To the point where some, it appears, are vandalizing the meters. Pictures on Mike’s website show meters deliberately smashed, taken apart, spray-painted, or deliberately jammed.

“People suggest taking a quarter, putting some super glue on it, and putting it in the coin slot,” Mike said.

Other tactics mentioned on the site are over-feeding the meters with pennies so as to make them too full to accept any other coins, spray-painting over their windows so their status cannot be seen by parking enforcers, filling the meters with expanding foam, or removing them entirely.

Speed cameras and other automated ticket-giving devices are also frequent targets. Here’s some video of folks in Phoenix, Arizona who dressed up in Santa suits and temporarily disabled red-light cameras there:

(Red-light cameras are ostensibly used to automatically ticket drivers who hazardously fail to heed traffic lights, and are promoted as a public safety measure — but governments end up seeing them as revenue-producing devices more than as traffic safety devices, and have been caught manipulating the timing of yellow lights in a way that increases the number of tickets while also increasing the danger of the intersection!)

Peter Hendrickson, one of the latest in a long line of constitutionalist tax protester amateur lawyers, got his original tax protester prison term after conspiring to mail a firebomb to the IRS.

And then there are the “suspicious powder” episodes that temporarily shut down IRS facilities from time-to-time. Though these suspicious powders are always found to be harmless, they’re clearly intended to resemble the anthrax-powder mailings that killed several people — and so are no less violent in practice than a bank robbery using an unloaded gun.

Here’s another example, reported on :

MEXICAN RIOTS OVER TAXES

NEW YORK,

Crowds in Oaxaca State, Mexico, in revolt over new taxes, stoned to death Diodoro Maldonado, the mayor of Tlacolula.

They attacked him near the gate of his home.

Eight others have been killed and at least 50 injured in riots.

Taxpayers of the city of Oaxaca, the State capital, are holding a general strike.

They are demanding the resignation of the State Governor, Manuel Heredia, because of his tax programme.

The Governor armed nearly 3,000 farmers with modern, carbines and marched them into Oaxaca’s main square to “protect State property” after the first outbreak of rioting.

The Governor blames Communists for the disorders.

Although the Governor has repealed his tax decree, which would have meant a sharply increased burden on the State’s poor as well as the rich, an Oaxaca “citizens’ committee” says that passive resistance will be continued until he resigns.

Yesterday General Augustin Mustieles said that army tanks and troops of Mexico’s only motorised brigade, rushed to Oaxaca after police had fired into a crowd of anti-tax demonstrators should have no trouble in preserving order.

“But if more trouble develops,” he said, “we will not hesitate to arm more peasants — 20,000 if necessary.”

Some this-and-that, in brief:

  • I’ve added the section on “The Sufferings of many, for Refuſing to pay the wicked Exactions of the Ceſs, Locality, Fynes &c. Vindicated” from Alexander Shields’s book A Hind let looſe, or An Hiſtorical Repreſentation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Intereſt of Chriſt, vvith the true State thereof in all its Periods, &c as a stand-alone page. I dropped the long “s”es for readability’s sake, and did some reformatting and breaking up of the multi-page paragraphs, but otherwise kept it pretty much as-was. It’s tough reading, but represents an early and unusually methodical defense of tax resistance, and I hope to spend some time distilling its more interesting arguments into more modern English at some point.
  • Here are the details, the schedule, and a registration form for the upcoming NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland .
  • Part of the new CIA Inspector General’s report that jumped out at me was this excerpt, found in an appendix, from the CIA Office of Medical Services [sic] guide on how to torture captives by waterboarding without inadvertently killing them: “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks. Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excess filling of the airways and loss of consciousness. An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required.”
  • Here’s a more thorough article about Scott Byars and others like him who are beginning to grow their own tobacco as a way to beat the increasing taxes. The article also has links to seed companies and on-line instructions.
  • Lets say you send an envelope full of powdered sugar to the IRS with a cover letter saying its anthrax and they’re all gonna die. Furthermore lets say you’re none too bright, and you sent the envelope from “an automated postal center where [you] paid postage with [your] credit card” and they trace the envelope back to you and successfully prosecute you. What sentence will you face? A year and a day, apparently.

An envelope full of foot powder, sent to an IRS processing facility from a zip code that belongs to a prison prompted the evacuation of the building so a hazmat team could suit up, come in, and detoxify the place.

Last month’s kamikaze attack on the IRS building in Austin was a good excuse for reporters to go back through the archives and write up something about the recent history of attacks and threats against the IRS and its employees.

One of the better of the bunch was Andrea Ball’s, for the Austin American Statesman. Excerpts:

Threats, contempt come with job for IRS workers

Some Americans heckle or mail tea bags; others, such as Stack, act in more dangerous ways.

Michelle Lowry knows first-hand how much people hate the Internal Revenue Service.

The 37-year-old Leander woman, who processes forms for the IRS in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and pushpins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included — what else? — tea bags with their returns.

And then there’s the weird stuff.

“Sometimes you’ll see stuff that looks like blood on them,” said Lowry, who has worked as a seasonal employee for five years. “We wear gloves.”

Lowry is used to the presence of security guards at the IRS office in which she works. She’s been through evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder. (It turned out to be packing material.) And while she has always known the risks of her job, she wasn’t concerned about her safety until now.

“I’m a little worried, honestly,” she said. “Every time I walk into the building, I’m going to think about it.”

Austinite Jesse Pangelinan, 41, never felt threatened during his 13 years at the IRS. He said it wasn’t until after he left the agency in to become a stand-up comedian that he came face to face with true IRS rage. After he joked about his former job at a comedy club in Ardmore, Okla., one audience member heckled Pangelinan so badly that the heckler had to be removed from the building.

“I was escorted back to my car in case he followed me,” said Pangelinan, who also works at an insurance company in Austin. “The security guard followed me back to my hotel.”

And… right on cue: another “suspicious substance” sent to an IRS building led to an evacuation and the deployment of a hazmat team. The cause of the panic was “an envelope that appeared to have seeds inside” — showing that the level of paranoia has risen to the point where things that are out-of-the-ordinary, even if they appear completely benign, are considered threatening.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

From the Canadian Jewish Chronicle (excerpt):

Jerusalem Jewish Council says Jews will not Pay Taxes Unless Money will be Used For Jewish Projects

Jerusalem, (JTA). — The Jewish community council here declared this week that Jews would not pay taxes to the municipal government until they were satisfied that the money would be used for Jewish projects while Daniel Auster, former Jewish mayor of the city, said that the Jews would take care of their section of separate municipal councils were formed and each body was permitted to spend its funds on improvements for its own people.…

That was shortly before Israeli independence, but tax resistance in British-occupied Palestine went on for decades before then. Here’s an example from the Montreal Gazette:

Jews in Palestine Decree Tax Strike

Decision Is Taken in Protest Against New U.K. White Paper

By Joseph M. Levy.

(Wireless to The New York Times and The Gazette.)

Jerusalem, .— Lieut. Gen. Robert H. Haining, commander of the British forces in Palestine, invited the heads of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the National Council of Palestine Jewry and the Jewish Communal Council to his headquarters here this morning and warned them that he intended to enforce order and would make no exceptions. General Haining added that, while he appreciated the three years of restraint on the part of Jews, he would suppress violence unflinchingly.

The first move in the Jewish non-co-operation movement against the Government in protest at the new British policy was a decision of the Landlords Association, composed of rural and urban property owners, to refuse to pay taxes, beginning , until the White Paper had been repealed.

Despite all stringent measures taken to prevent illegal immigration into Palestine, 300 Jews succeeded in landing clandestinely near Ashkalon, Southern Palestine, but were apprehended by British troops and taken to Tel Aviv for detention.

In contrast with ’s turbulence in this Holy City, there was quiet , although considerable tension still exists. As a result of the violence , when a mob of Jews attempted to raid the district commissioner’s office, smashed windows of an English shop and a German restaurant and engaged in fighting in which a British constable was killed and more than 100 Jews were wounded, the military took far greater precautions to prevent further bloodshed.

All Government offices were heavily guarded, various parts of the city were barricaded, and soldiers manned machine guns for action. Only incident was when several Jewish youths penetrated a branch post office in the Jewish quarter of Mahne Yehuda here and broke window panes and furniture.

Three British police sergeants and two constables, who annoyed the Tel Aviv public, it is charged, by wearing helmets marked with swastikas and by shouting “Heil Hitler,” were relieved of duty today pending disciplinary proceedings.

The “White Paper” policy, which, among other things, prevented Jewish evacuation into Palestine during the Holocaust, was not repealed until Israel won its independence in .

Tax resistance was practiced both by Jews and by others in Palestine against the British occupation. In at least one case, in , there was a sympathy tax strike in England itself:

…a London Jew declined to pay his income tax as a form of protest.

In , Josiah Wedgewood counseled Jews to maintain a civil disobedience campaign in order to win Palestine: “Jews must find it respectable to go to prison; men and women must be prepared to die; to refuse to pay the property tax, see their goods sold; to occupy land and resist eviction…”

A report says that some Jews in Palestine were looking for inspiration to Gandhi’s campaign against British rule:

In the all-Jewish coastal city of Tel Aviv a high Jewish source who declined to be quoted by name said meetings were called throughout Palestine Sunday to consider a “passive resistance movement” similar to those undertaken by nationalists in India.

A decision would be taken “as to the best method by which Palestine’s Jewish community can demonstrate to the British they will have to arrest tens of thousands of us if the government thinks we are accepting quietly everything it wants to put on us,” he said.

Passive resistance would include nonpayment of taxes, a strike by Jews in government service and “in all ways complete non-cooperation with the British,” this source said.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Holy Land Bomb Damage — A patrol moves around ruins of the income tax office, Jerusalem, Palestine, after a bomb detonated by police wrecked the building.

Palestine Tax Office Bombed

Building Leveled By Terrific Blast

Jerusalem,  — (AP) — The Palestine Income Tax Building was leveled this afternoon by a terrific explosion from a bomb-laden cart which Palestine police said was placed by Jews.

One person, a Jewish constable, was killed. Five persons — a British Army captain and lance corporal, a British police sergeant and an Arab policeman — were injured. Windows were shattered within a radius of three blocks.

All employes had been evacuated from the building following a telephone warning 10 minutes before the blast.

Police said three Jews, one dressed as an Arab, pushed a bomb-laden, Arab-type delivery cart into the building and fled, after clubbing a Jewish policeman and snatching a rifle from an Arab guard.

Police tried to drag the cart from the building, but the rope parted. They said they then detonated the bomb with rifle fire, but “miscalculated the charge.”

Only the best and brightest in the Palestine police force, I see. Another tax office was bombed in Mount Carmel in .

Another dispatch includes this report:

Tel Aviv police reported… that a young Jew and Jewish girl claiming to represent the Stern Gang, a small Jewish underground unit, had delivered an ultimatum personally to 18 Jewish officials of the Palestine Income Tax Department to resign within 96 hours or face drastic consequences. Special guards were assigned immediately to the 18 officials.

The attempt to bring about the large-scale resignations was viewed by authorities as another step in the Stern Gang’s announced policy of sponsoring non-payment of taxes by Palestine’s Jews.

Another report on the same incident clarifies that the two Jews, “described as Yemenites, visited the homes of the tax officials Thursday night to deliver the warnings.”

Another dispatch:

Jews Ask Boycott Against British

Underground Group Protests Refugee Order

Jerusalem,  — (AP) — Irgun Zvai Leumi, militant Jewish underground group, exhorted Jews throughout the world today to “hit Britain economically without mercy” in protest against the trans-shipment of 4,400 Jewish refugees to Germany.

In a broadcast denouncing British treatment of the refugees, who were intercepted in mid-July while trying to enter Palestine illegally aboard the Exodus of , a former Chesapeake Bay steamer, Irgun declared:

“You can stop the cruel British machine forever. Do not pay your tax money, do not obey their orders. Do not obey their laws. Boycott, boycott, boycott until the end.

“Jews of the whole world can bring great harm to our enemy. Britain is in economic trouble. They can be hit economically without mercy.”

The Irgun broadcaster also urged Jews to ignore appeals for a hunger strike today to protest treatment accorded the refugees.

“This is no time for fasting,” the broadcast said. “It is now time for war.”

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Every year, on tax day, Steve Magin comes into town and visits the IRS offices, offering to pay his taxes in full if they’ll assure him that none of the money will go to pay for war and armaments. The agency representatives, of course, offer no such assurances, and so Magin keeps his checkbook in his pocket and sends the tax money to charity instead. Here’s some more about Steve and his protest.
  • Another “suspicious powder” incident shuts down the IRS office in Ogden, Utah. The powder turned out to be nontoxic, but kept the building shut down for a long time during the Hazmat team and FBI crime scene investigation.
  • I’m sure nobody saw this coming: as states have been piling cigarette taxes higher and higher, tobacco smuggling has skyrocketed — to the point where about half of the smokers in Arizona and New York are smoking cigarettes smuggled in from elsewhere. The smuggling trade has naturally proven a boon to the underground economy and to the organized crime groups who try to monopolize it.

, General Edward Otho Cresap Ord, who at the time was commander of U.S. forces in Texas, appeared before the Committee on Military Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives. He had this interesting exchange with the chairman of the committee in the course of his testimony:

General Ord. In El Paso County in Texas, there has been some local trouble. The Mexican population have taken possession of the county, and the governor of the State sent up a small detachment of his troops, and at the same time requested me to aid him with regular troops. The Mexicans there have ousted the American officers and refused to pay taxes.

The Chairman. Do you say that Mexicans have come over and taken possession of an American town?

General Ord. It is partly the population of the county, the people who live on both sides, but they have been commanded, so the governor tells me, by prominent men from the other side. I had a long letter from the governor in which he gave the names of the Mexican leaders who have taken possession of the county, and two or three of them are Mexicans. They refuse to pay taxes, and claim that they are Mexicans. This shows that in case of serious difficulty between the two countries their sympathies will be with Mexico.

I think this has something to do with the “Salt Wars” in Texas at the time.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • There’s “something fishy” in the latest economic statistics. Paychecks are down (thanks to a boost in the payroll tax), incomes haven’t been rising in other ways to make up for it, bank account savings aren’t rising, and people aren’t charging more on their credit cards or taking out more loans… and yet, consumer spending is doing just fine, as if somehow the money was materializing anyway. What’s the trick? Bernard Baumohl of the Economic Outlook Group thinks it’s the underground economy:

    Severe recessions have historically driven jobless Americans into the shadow economy, We suspect the destructive nature of the last downturn and the prolonged weak recovery pushed a record number of people into that murky world of cash transactions.

  • While the IRS tries in vain to convince Congress not to cut its budget (after all, they whine, we’re the part of the government that brings in money for y’all to spend!), members of Congress are enjoying one of their favorite sports: pretending they’re on the side of the little guy against the wasteful government bureaucrats in the tax office. Lately this has taken the form of House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany, Jr., demanding that the IRS turn over for the subcommittee’s investigation copies of training videos the agency produced in its own presumably extravagant production studio — “a Star Trek parody and a skit based on the television sitcom Gilligan’s Island.”
  • Hostility towards the IRS can provoke auto-immune complications that are as disruptive as overt threats. Case in point: In Bloomington, Illinois, an IRS distribution center was cordoned off while a bomb squad of state and Department of Homeland Security specialists navigated a robot through the parking lot to retrieve and inspect two suspicious packages. The process took five hours, and eventually revealed that the suspicious packages contained… tax forms.
  • You may have heard that the island nation of Cyprus is the latest nation whose government has resorted to drastic measures to try to raise money from a reluctant population to pay off international creditors. That government took the odd step of proposing the simple and arbitrary step of shaving a percentage off of every bank account in the nation and using that money to pay for the bailout. Cypriots reacted by storming the ATMs to try to withdraw their money.

While I was busy going through Friends Journal back issues, I didn’t attend much to American tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the interesting items that caught my notice:

Cursing the IRS

Internal Revenue Service agents found an unwelcome surprise — and a possible witchcraft curse — on when unknown individuals left a trio of charred, headless chickens outside the agency’s McAllen offices.

War tax protest

Some Christian war tax resisters in Michigan held a small “Independence from War Tax Day” demo that included symbolic burnings of tax forms. “The common citizen is not being listened to,” wrote participant Michael J. McCarthy. “We must learn to vote with our money, as the powerful do. April 15th becomes the new second Tuesday in November. This tax redirection is one of a number of lifestyle changes that people can make to better participate in a real community-responsible democracy.”

McCarthy also wrote up his thoughts for USCatholic.org. Excerpts:

In , facing the probability that the Iraq War was unjust, a group of Catholics in my community in Port Huron, Michigan, openly informed IRS that we would redirect hundreds of dollars from our federal taxes, donating this “Iraq Peace Bond” instead to our local library. Our donation was merely a drop in the bucket of the trillions wasted in this war, but a small step in a new direction. Most of the money was eventually recovered by IRS, but the donation still helps the community and serve as an inspiration to find further methods to invest in the works of peace, not war.

The problem for us in the United States is non-cooperation with evil — a difficult feat when so much of our tax money (more than 50 percent of all federal income tax, or 25 percent of total income tax) is spent on war. There are, however, alternative ways to turn away from it towards peacemaking. It is possible to take some of the money you would have offered to the troubled war economy and homeland security and spend it instead on the works of mercy, from feed the hungry to investing in creative work opportunities for our young people to donating to your local Christian pregnancy care centers.

You must inform the IRS of your intentions, and your wish to be a responsible citizen while also divesting from this war economy. The dialogue that follows with them can be kept cordial. For the practical measures, contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. My wife and I have tried war tax resistance/redirection for 17 of the 35 years of our marriage, with varied results — some trial and tribulation, a lot of good done within our faith and larger communities.

Arthur Silber

Arthur Silber, of the blog Once Upon a Time…, shared the story of an IRS levy on his PayPal account. Excerpts:

For years now, because I knew the IRS was out to get me at some point, I’ve kept the balance in my PayPal account very, very low. Whenever I made pitches for donations, I withdrew the funds almost immediately. But because my health has now gotten so much worse, I wasn’t able to make as many trips as I wanted to the closest ATM. It’s only a block and a half away, but given my enormous difficulties in getting around, it might as well be a couple of miles. The heat in L.A. didn’t help, either. That’s the reason there were still funds left for the IRS to get. My apologies and regrets again, both for all the kind donors and for my sorry ass.

However, I’m not content to let the matter stand there. That is, I’m not ready to lie down and die, which is what I’m certain they’d prefer. I obviously have no money to pay an attorney or tax specialist, but if there is anyone out there who would consider volunteering their expertise, I would like to find out if there are any options with the IRS at this point. I should tell you that I don’t want to pay them a single damned cent — I don’t choose to give funds to murderers and torturers, thank you (which is why the IRS was after me in the first place) — and I’d also like to get back at least some of the funds they’ve taken.

As I say, I suspected this might happen at some point, especially after PayPal began filing tax forms starting with . I had thought about providing a warning to donors that the IRS might suddenly swoop down, so that you kind people would be forewarned. I’m terribly sorry I didn’t do that. But since the IRS and I hadn’t communicated at all for years now, I thought (hoped) they might have forgotten about me. I mean, Jesus Christ, I have almost no money at all. And I didn’t receive any warning at all before this levy was imposed.

And that’s another aspect of this that absolutely enrages me. I know, we all know, that there are multibillion dollar companies (and individuals) who, with the aid of their fleet of top line attorneys and financial experts, pay next to no taxes at all — and in many cases, none, period. And yet these bastards come after me.

Well, to hell with them. This has made me so angry that I feel I have a new lease on life. With your help, I hope we can figure out a way around these difficulties. And just to show them, I’ll live for another ten goddamned years, and write another ten books’ worth of essays.

During the day, I tried to remember the last time I had any communication from the IRS. I’m almost certain it was close to ten years ago. Ten years, during which I had heard nothing at all. So I had thought that perhaps, mercifully, I’d fallen off their radar. I guess that’s a lesson for all of us: they never forget. If there is any way at all, they’ll get you in the end.

Sequester? Why, I hardly know her!

A Washington Post article about the terrible sequester begins:

Before “sequestration” took effect, the Obama administration issued specific — and alarming — predictions about what it would bring. There would be one-hour waits at airport security. Four-hour waits at border crossings. Prison guards would be furloughed for 12 days. FBI agents, up to 14.

At the Pentagon, the military health program would be unable to pay its bills for service members. The mayhem would extend even into the pantries of the neediest Americans: Around the country, 600,000 low-income women and children would be denied federal food aid.

But none of those things happened.

Partially this is because Congress quietly made exceptions to the sequester in some cases, but a lot of it is because all of the alarm was bluff, and when agencies finally did have to cut their budgets, they found that there was plenty of stuff they could cut fairly painlessly.

The act of screaming bloody murder while engaging in mostly-symbolic belt-tightening seems to be a global phenomenon. In an article for Negocios.com, Jorge Valín says, of the Spanish version of budget cuts, “ ‘austerity’ doesn’t work (because it doesn’t exist).” Excerpts (my translation):

There is much debate on the issue of Government austerity. Those with a leftist mindset accuse it of generating poverty, reducing welfare, and even killing people when it comes to health. The rightists insist that government spending has to be checked, and in this sense austerity is good.

, the government has created three new bodies per month, whether commissions, committees, councils, centers, or agencies of some type. The government propaganda agencies receive more than a billion euros in additional subsidies to what they had at the beginning of the economic crisis. In fact, government spending grows year after year even without mentioning the exponential growth of the debt. Austerity doesn’t work because it does not exist.

…It simply does not happen; it’s propaganda and a stalling measure. And the big problem with austerity is that it is just another government program.… The government, any government, is simply incapable of reducing its drag on the economy or to eliminate its debt.

Unfortunately, the politicians are incapable of doing anything. They would lose their power. So the other option is to force austerity on the state. The politicians live on our work and there’s no moral or technical reason why they have to plunder us with taxes this way. Tax resistance is not only a moral position, it’s a necessity before a corrupt status quo in which criminals prosper.

Tax reform

Some of our feckless legislators are trying to come up with some sort of radical tax reform plan. Of course it’s unlikely that this Congress will ever agree on much of anything, but some future Congress is likely to try to pass something that they’ll call radical tax reform, so it’s worth at least keeping an eye on things like this.

Of course, whatever they come up with will be awful. And the motivations of the politicians will have a lot less to do with trying to make the tax system better or more efficient (even by government standards), and more to do with the fact that radical tax reform is an incredible shakedown opportunity, where every deep-pocketed son of a bitch with a stake in tax subsidies will have to pony up if they want to keep their cash cow alive.

But keep in mind that tax simplification, even when it’s accomplished in such an ugly way, and even if it doesn’t shrink the budget by a nickel, can still shrink government somewhat. So there may yet be reasons to smile.

Taxpatriates

I didn’t make much noise about it last quarter, when the Treasury Department announced its highest quarterly total number of people who had renounced their U.S. citizenship (679), as there was some indication that this had been an accounting fluke caused by names being shifted from one quarter to another.

But the latest report broke the record again — substantially — with 1,130 Americans saying “goodbye and good riddance.”

The educated guesses about why this recent surge of citizenship renunciations has taken place say that it has less to do with people becoming increasingly ashamed at having to call themselves Americans, or with eagerness to avoid U.S. taxes, and more to do with the onerous paperwork requirements that the U.S. government requires from its citizens — even of those who live overseas and who conduct little activity back in the “land of the free.”

A more do-it-yourself approach to taxpatriatism was tried by the Gastonguay family, who fled the United States in part because they were upset at being “forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don’t agree with.” They boarded a small boat and sailed for Kiribati, a remote set of islands with a total population of a little over a hundred thousand people, where they hoped their religious practices and beliefs would be better-tolerated. But they never made it there, instead getting storm-tossed and lost at sea for three months before getting rescued and taken instead to Chile, from which, they said, they planned to return to the United States, at least for now.

Peace Tax Fund

Peter J. Reilly, at his Forbes blog, takes a look at the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.

Jerry Kirk

Jerry Kirk of Searcy County, Arkansas, one of that odd crop of American tax protesters who adhere to incredibly baroque legal systems of their own devising, refused to pay his county taxes whereupon the government seized and sold some of his property.

He responded by doing something I haven’t seen a tax protester of that ilk do before: he redirected his unpaid taxes by handing out envelopes of money to people in front of the county courthouse. Here’s a video of the event:

What “sales tax holidays” reveal

Some American states that use a sales tax to raise revenue also periodically have “sales tax holidays” as a fiscally silly cheap ploy for the sympathies of the chamber of commerce set — often holding these holidays in late Summer when parents are doing their back-to-school shopping. Michael Graham looked at the psychology behind these holidays, and suspects they reveal a simmering resentment of government:

Let’s face it: As a marketing strategy, a 6.25 percent sale is embarrassing. What car dealer has ever run ads saying “Today Only — Save Just Over A Nickel On The Dollar!” When does Macy’s ever post “6.25 Percent Off!” over their junior miss selection?

And yet, the sales tax holiday weekend is huge. The stores are packed. It’s like a mini-Christmas in the dog days of August.

, when you see Massachusetts shoppers waiting in long lines to buy stuff they could have bought two days earlier without any hassles, they’re showing you just how hard they will work to stick it to the state.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • In , you can attend an on-line “google hangout” on the subject of “War Resistance: Beyond the Rally,” sponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, the Center on Conscience and War, and the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
  • Boris Yakubchik, an activist in the “effective altruism” movement has published some of his recommendations on frugal living — things he puts into practice so that he’ll have more money to be able to give away to good causes.
  • In the U.S., a person who pays alimony can take it as a tax deduction; a person who receives alimony must declare it as income; and to take the deduction, the payer must include the taxpayer identification number of the recipient on their tax return. You’d think this would make it easy for the IRS to make sure that the numbers match up, and that people aren’t taking phony deductions for fictitious alimony, or failing to report alimony received as income. But according to a new TIGTA report, fully 47% of the alimony deductions do not have corresponding alimony income shown on the recipients return — amounting to “more than $2.3 billion in deductions claimed without corresponding income reported”. Peter J. Reilly dug a little deeper and found that the IRS only bothered to audit 4% of the pairs of returns showing discrepancies — that is to say, “you and your ex collectively have a 96% chance of getting away with something that is in your face blatantly wrong even though you are, in effect, ratting yourselves out.” He calls this “a scandal of epic proportions” and suggests that it’s going to encourage divorcing couples and tax advisors to game the system.
  • How can the current U.S. tax system cope with bitcoins and other aspects of the emerging virtual economy? That’s the subject of a new paper: A Whole New World: Income Tax Considerations of the Bitcoin Economy. Excerpt:

    Because these bitcoins can, in some circumstances, be used to purchase goods or services with a monetary value or where they can be converted to legal tender, the proper income tax treatment of bitcoin transactions presents both compliance and substantive questions for the IRS. …This article explores the current state of the law as it relates to bitcoins as well as proposed methods for applying existing federal income tax laws to the virtual economy.

  • Hey, look: another IRS building temporarily evacuated when a worker opens a package containing a suspicious substance.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Two Irish legislators who were convicted of participating in a direct action against U.S. armaments passing through the Shannon airport have refused to pay their fines. One of them, Clare Daly, told reporters: “We have no intention of paying a financial contribution to a State which allows this behaviour [the arms shipments] to continue.”
  • Seacoast Peace Response got some press for their annual tax day “penny poll.”
  • A man who calls himself “Squirrel” was arrested in Florida for phoning in a threat to destroy the IRS building in Miami.

Today, a pile of tax resistance links from hither and yon:

International Tax Resistance News

  • There seems to be something of a tax insurrection in Denmark including the torching of a tax office and ten tax administration vehicles.
  • Dave Ridley, on The Ridley Report podcast, ponders whether or not it is ethical to try to drain resources from the government in order to weaken it (for example, by filing lawsuits against it, or forcing its bureaucracy to waste time) or whether this is just adding insult to the original injury the government performed by taking the wasted funds from the taxpayer.
  • Protesters in Detroit, Michigan, blocked the street in front of the county treasury building to protest the fact that despite plunging property values in Detroit, many homes have not been reassessed in years (in spite of a law mandating annual reassessments), and so the owners are on the hook for artificially inflated property taxes, which is pushing some of them into tax foreclosures.
  • A brothel in Salzburg, Austria, has launched a free drinks and free sex promotion to protest high taxes on its receipts. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the protest has been wildly popular with the brothel’s clientele as well as with clickbait “news” sites.
  • Residents of Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have launched a tax strike to protest against the government’s failure to provide them with adequate security against atrocities committed by the Allied Democratic Forces rebels. The tax resistance comes on the heels of a week-long general strike, and is being organized by “civil society” groups. The taxes being resisted are largely business taxes, both those on larger businesses and stall-fees paid by market vendors. Some of the organizers have reported being subjected to death threats.
  • Palmerstown (Ireland) Residents against Water Charges held a mass burning of their water bills a little while back. Meanwhile, petitions signed by 15,000 anti-water charge protesters were given the cold shoulder in Cork.
  • Market vendors in Githurai, Kenya have started withholding taxes from the county government to protest the government’s unwillingness or inability to provide basic services to the market.
  • As Greece prepares to bid a national “δεν πληρώνω” (“won’t pay”) to their international creditors, the domestic δεν πληρώνω movement continues to innovate — lately with a new smartphone app that tells public transit users where they can expect ticket auditors and which stations are free-and-clear. Fines are down by ¼ to ⅓ from their numbers last year. In addition, overall tax revenue is in a tailspin in Greece. The government hoped to bring in €3.728 billion in May, for example, and only managed to scrape up €2.722 billion.

War Tax Resistance News

  • Pioneering American war tax resister Juanita Nelson, who helped found the first modern American group devoted to war tax resistance (Peacemakers) in , and who died , was honored with a festive parade in her hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
  • War tax resister Don Schrader explains his stand in the New Mexico Daily Lobo: “How much good is it to pray, hope, and march for peace if we pay for war?”
  • The group Conscience, which had been an important voice for war tax resisters in the U.K., has been undertaking an image makeover lately, in which it has deemphasized tax resistance in favor of lobbying and, alas, lately is lobbying for a particularly pathetic “taxes for peace” bill that is a somewhat new formulation of the “peace tax”-style legislation but that has at least as many flaws as such bills usually have.

IRS Woes

Some links of interest:

  • Waging Nonviolence interviews Alycee Lane, author of Nonviolence Now! Living the 1963 Birmingham Campaign’s Promise of Peace on the subject of why Martin Luther King’s pledge of nonviolence matters today. Excerpts:

    The Birmingham campaign pledge was a commitment card that, according to Martin Luther King, all volunteers were “required” to sign in order to participate in the movement. I came across the pledge in King’s work, “Why We Can’t Wait,” a book in which he talks about the Birmingham campaign. The card consisted of ten commandments, including: “1) meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. 2) remember always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory. 3) walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love. 4) pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. 5) sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. 6) observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy. 7) seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. 8) refrain from the violence of fist, tongue or heart. 9) strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health. 10) follow the directions of the movement and of the captain of a demonstration.”

    With its emphasis on the importance of taking up a daily practice of (for example) courtesy, love, service, meditation and prayer, the pledge really offered to volunteers an opportunity to embrace nonviolence as a way of life. The commandments in effect constitute a daily practice of nonviolence, and as such, it conveys that nonviolent direct action is not merely or solely public protest and organizing. It is also (and perhaps more importantly) speaking, thinking, acting and engaging the world — even at the most mundane level — from an ethic of nonviolence, so that we actually become nonviolence.

    It is strategic, I think, for those who are activated to choose not to emulate the very people whom we hope to disarm, to refuse to exchange tit for tat, to withdraw our cooperation with and complicity in creating our culture of violence. It is strategic to demonstrate by word and deed that there is another way to walk in this world and to engage others. It is strategic, in other words, to disarm ourselves and one another just as surely as it is to disarm the state.

    It saddens me when folk who are doing righteous work to confront, say, police brutality or economic inequality or environmental exploitation, express the kind of venom they themselves receive because of the work that they do. It saddens me when I say belittling and dehumanizing things about folks with whom I disagree. In those moments, we become allies in nurturing an atmosphere of conflict, hate and violence. We also reveal the extent to which our emotional and spiritual lives have been colonized.

  • Increasingly in the U.S., traffic enforcement is not about safety but about generating revenue for the government. This makes our roads less safe, our fiscal processes less transparent, our law enforcement more corrupt, and contributes to the criminalization of poverty.
  • Americans spend more money on taxes than on food, housing, and clothing combined.
  • Another example of a “suspicious package” causing an evacuation of an IRS office.
  • The IRS has been defeated in another case in which they stole money from someone on the pretext that they had been depositing the money in the bank in periodic small amounts in order to avoid the bank’s requirement to report large deposits to the agency. A judge further ordered the agency to pay interest to the victim based on how long they held on to his money. Another triumph of the Institute for Justice, which has been doing some great work helping the little guy stand up to government.

In other news:

General Strike!

what’s being billed as a “general strike” to protest against Trumpism is scheduled for today

Some links that have graced my browser tabs in recent days:

  • The New York Times, in a sidebar to an article about the private debt collection agencies that have been recently deputized by the IRS to go after tax debts, linked to some of the scripts those debt collectors will be using when they call people up to try to get them to fork over money.
  • The IRS has launched a “view your tax account” service. If you’re a resister and want to keep an eye on how much money they’re after you for, this is a convenient way to do it. This service supplements the agency’s “Get Transcript” service, with which you can get more detailed information about your account, your past filings, IRS actions taken with regards to your account, and what it knows about your income sources.
  • William Howarth writes about Reading Thoreau at 200 in The American Scholar.
  • A look back at the women’s suffrage movement in Essex includes this note about the Women’s Tax Resistance League:

    In , a “Sale of Suffragette’s Goods at Southend” made the headlines when the first public auction of goods seized by bailiffs in default of payment of the ‘king’s taxes’ by a local suffragette took place.

    The suffragette in question was a Mrs Rosina Sky. A member of the Southend and Westcliff branch of the WSPU and of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, Mrs Sky had refused to pay £5 tax, as required by law. As a result a “quantity of silver goods” were taken from her home in Cliff Town Road and sold at a public auction.

    The Southend Standard intimated how this form of passive resistance was beginning to work. The article described how the auction chairman was happy to allow a pro suffragette representative, a ‘Mrs Kineton-Parkes’, to take to the stage to speak in Mrs Sky’s favour, saying “taxation and representation must go together.”

    “Mrs Sky has paid her taxes for over 20 years and fulfilled loyally every duty of a citizen,” the auction was told. Half a dozen silver dessert spoons and some other silverware were sold off to a member of the public sympathetic to Mrs Sky’s cause, meaning the entire lot did not need to go under the hammer and could be returned to her.

    Following the auction, according to the newspaper, a crowd — made up of members of the public who had attended the auction as well as representatives of the WSPU and the WTRL — marched along Southchurch Road to Southend Technical Colleges where more speeches were held. The article reported how “a lot of chaff being indulged the while” as the protesters made their way through the streets.

    Rosina Sky

    Rosina Sky

  • Here’s another example of a suspicious package shutting down an IRS building, this time in Austin. Sounds like it was a false positive triggered by an overcautious dog on bomb-sniffing duty. In a separate incident in Philadelphia, several employees “suffer[ed] eye irritation” when they “came in contact with a wet envelope that had a sweet smell” — so that sounds more serious.
  • The IRS told tax preparers they would have to get identification numbers — PTINs — so the agency could keep track of them. Then it told them they would have to buy these numbers from the agency at $64 a pop. Some preparers sued, saying this amounted to the IRS inventing its own tax to fund itself, without going through Congress for legally-authorized funding. The judge hearing the suit agreed and said that not only were the fees illegal, but that the agency would have to fully refund the estimated $175–300 million it has collected from selling the numbers so far. That’s about 1½–2½% of the agency’s annual budget.

Some recent links of interest:

In other news…

Recently-discovered links of interest:

Links have been piling up in my bookmarks as I spent poring through back issues of The Mennonite.

International Tax Resistance News

The Crisis in Nicaragua

Protests against the Ortega/Murillo regime in Nicaragua have been brutally repressed by murderous government and paramilitary forces. Some parts of the protest movement have been engaging in tax resistance, but they have so far been unable to convince COSEP, a Nicaraguan business confederation that nominally supports the protests, to take such a strong action. In addition, an organizer of tax resistance in the Mercado Oriental was arrested and swiftly sentenced to a prison term.

  • Tax attorney Theo Báez has been advising businesses of their legal right to delay paying taxes to the government until it comes into compliance with its legal duties.
  • La Prensa reports that while tax collections in Managua plummeted in , they have begun to recover.
  • Iván Olivares, at Confidencial, examines the prospects for a tax resistance campaign and concludes: “A tax strike would be effective only if it is total.” (translation mine):

    Launched on as another variety of civic struggle against the dictatorship, the proposal to carry the thesis of civil disobedience to the extreme of applying a “tax strike” is still in force, but has not yet switched on, except in the Mercado Oriental.

    On that date, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Legal and Political Sciences, called for “civil disobedience as a national imperative to be put into operation immediately,” inviting employers, workers, students, and taxpayers to immediately suspend the payment of taxes to DGI, DGA, and city hall, in particular “withholding of Income Tax from salaries.”

    Although the call for tax resistance enters the popular imagination as a civil form — and for that reason a legitimate one — of resisting the regime of Daniel Ortega, neither businesses nor individuals have responded with determination to the proposal, from fear or from caution.

    Caution as demonstrated by the sources consulted for this article, who requested anonymity as they explained that people, business-owners and managers in particular, are afraid that the tax administration will fine them or, worse yet, temporarily take over operation of their companies or shutter their business.

    Not all of the sanctions are catastrophic. There are cases in which the fine applied is equivalent to 2.5% of the amount not paid in the case of the monthly advance payment of the business income tax, or 5% in the case of the value-added tax or of income tax withheld from the salaries of employees.

    “Technically, it’s an invalid appropriation of withholdings, and can be criminally sanctioned,” in addition to being shut down, fined, or temporarily put under government management, explained a source with extensive experience in tax matters.

    That said, this source sees a variety of reasons to doubt that they would decide to take such extreme measures, beginning with “as far as I know, they have never applied them to anyone.” Another is that to close a business means sending its workers into unemployment, which implies that they will not receive taxes from the business or from those consumers.

    But beyond believing in the mercy that any of these reasons implicitly assumes, the source points out fact that is easier to accept: “If the resolution is massive, the tax administration simply does not have the capacity to audit and penalize everyone at once.”

    Larger Companies Have More Fear

    If it is decided to penalize only some in order to set a precedent that strikes fear into the others, surely one of the larger ones will be chosen, which not only has more ability to defend itself in the courts, but also to negotiate, precisely because of its size.

    Another source asserts that “although it may seem obvious, the businesses that take the least risk are the most powerful ones, for the simple reason that they are not big taxpayers but big tax collectors.

    “The DGI, does not want to be bothered with them, because if they weaken them, this affects tax revenues, principally value-added tax withholding.” When the big companies that could take such measures don’t apply them, despite their intrinsic power, they are demonstrating “the cowardly face of big capital. If they would decide, the blow to DGI would be immense,” s/he says.

    Róger Arteaga, former director general of Revenue, agrees, saying that “big capital has not wanted to go all-in. It is true that it gave its approval to the strike, but did so with fear and only temporarily.”

    There is at least one group that risks more in a tax strike: import and export companies, which require clearances that can only be obtained once they have paid the corresponding taxes.

    “If one of these business doesn’t make its monthly statement, or makes it but doesn’t pay, it falls into insolvency, and can neither import nor export. The only importers who could afford that ‘luxury’ would be those that have sufficient product already on hand, especially at times like these, when there is little movement of inventory,” explained one of our sources.

    Small- and medium-sized businesses — both fixed-quota and general regime — can stop paying taxes as long as the situation does not normalize, and while this makes them vulnerable to penalties, it is not likely that this will occur, especially, again, if a critical mass applies this measure of fiscal chastisement.

    How long can the government last without taxes?

    Our sources note that before making tax payments, the employer must guarantee the salary of its employees, and that the decision not to pay taxes is “protected by the higher legal concept, legally enshrined in the national legislation, as the Act of God and the Force Majeure. Nobody is obligated to do the impossible, and the reason for this impossibility lies outside the control of the employer or employee.”

    Citizens, on their part, could put pressure on big and medium-sized business, offering to act together if the Treasury moves against them.

    “In this context, big capital must play a consistent role, acting firmly in the face of a Treasury that has granted them such special privileges. It would be their most authentic repentance for the eleven years of tax advantages they have taken in the shadow of power. That stain should be washed out right away,” they say.

    As an expert, Arteaga proposes “that the businesses do not charge value-added tax, and the citizens not pay it. Income tax also. There are penalties, but the penalties and decisions of this government must be ignored, as they have no legitimacy. How long can the government last without taxes?” he asked.

    “Tax resistance aims to respond to Ortega’s claim that he will stay on through : we must find a solution, and one of these is for the private sector finally to decide on civil disobedience of a monetary and tax nature,” he explained.

  • Pedro Muñoz Fonseca, president of the executive committee of Costa Rica’s Social Christian Unity Party, urged Nicaraguans to use tax resistance against their government:

Social Media Tax Protest in Uganda

the familiar social media thumbs-up / thumbs-down icons, in handcuffs, superimposed on the black, yellow, and red stripes of the Ugandan flag

The government of Uganda has imposed a 5¢-per-day tax on using social media and other services. This was designed as both a revenue measure and a way of reducing what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls lugambo (“fake news”). Amnesty International has been among those to see through the government’s rhetoric and cast the tax as “a clear attempt to undermine the right to freedom of expression.”

protest marchers in Uganda, with their elbows hooked together, dressed in red shirts featuring a smart phone screen that reads “This Tax Must Go”

Ugandan protest marchers wearing shirts featuring a smart phone screen that reads “This Tax Must Go”

War Tax Resistance Around the World

Obituaries

  • Raymond Hunthausen has died. As Catholic archbishop of Seattle, he took a remarkably strong stand on nuclear weapons — famously calling the Trident nuclear submarine program being developed nearby “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — and began practicing war tax resistance in response. This earned him enemies in Washington and in the Catholic hierarchy. Here are some of the obits and remembrances: A biography of Hunthausen, A Disarming Spirit, will be released soon.
  • David McReynolds has died. He was a long-time War Resisters League and Socialist Party activist and was also on the staff of the Committee for Nonviolent Action which helped to spearhead war tax resistance as a tactic during the campaigns opposing the American war in Vietnam. He was among the signers of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in and of a similar public pledge .
  • David Paul Irish has died. He was active with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Peace Brigades International, and Witness for Peace. He was an advocate for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, drafting a minute in favor of of war tax resistance that the Twin Cities and Minneapolis Meetings approved in .

While I’ve been studying my Aristotle, links have been piling up in my bookmarks. Here are some of them:

In other news…

In other news…

In other news…

  • Protesters in South Kivu were denied a permit to march and were stopped by a line of police when they tried. So they did as they do in Kivu, and announced a tax strike.
  • Attacks on traffic-ticket-issuing robot cameras continue around Europe, with machines destroyed or disabled in Italy and France in recent weeks. Meanwhile in New York City, protesters held up signs warning drivers about speed camera placements.
  • An IRS mail room employee in Alabama “became sick today after being exposed to a package containing an unknown, potentially hazardous liquid” that spilled from “an international letter”.
  • A homeowner in Cornwall stopped paying council tax when her property was made worthless by damage from a leaking water pipe the council refuses to fix. The council relented and wrote off some of the back taxes but she keeps resisting, and they’re fighting her again.
  • Crispin Sartwell reminds progressives that increasing taxation is a poor method to fight economic inequality. Excerpt:

    Taxing rich people redistributes their wealth to defense contractors, which are owned and run by rich people. About 40 percent of discretionary spending goes to federal contractors; a primary result of a wealth tax or a much higher tax rate on the wealthy will be a recirculation among corporate titans.

    Service on the national debt totaled $325 billion, so a significant and ever-growing portion of the money obtained in the apparent pursuit of equality will be redistributed to bondholders, or recirculated through the world banking system. The governments of China and Japan each own over a trillion dollars in U.S. debt, for example, and so we’ll be taxing American rich people and redistributing their wealth to foreign governments, and to rich people elsewhere in the world.

In other news…

Some recent links of note:

  • The IRS has announced that not only will it issue stimulus payments and Paycheck Protection Program loans to people and businesses even if those people or businesses are behind on their taxes, but also that the agency will not levy bank accounts into which those payments are deposited — for 24 weeks in the case of PPP loans, or 8 weeks in the case of stimulus payments.

    Current IRS policy says that agents should contact taxpayers before issuing a levy to ask whether the account in question recently received such a payment. If so, they are supposed to refrain from levying until the proper number of weeks have passed.

    If the IRS tries to levy a bank account in which you have recently deposited such a check, you can protest this and the IRS is supposed to release the levy.

    In either case, this should give you plenty of time to empty out the account so that a future levy attempt will fail.

  • Tax blogger Peter J. Reilly concludes that IRS Collections Appears To Be Broken. Excerpt:

    I fear that waiting out the ten year statute of limitations on collections is becoming a reasonable strategy and that many “taxpayers” have caught on and that the IRS, when it comes to collection, is to a significant degree bluffing.

    My overall takeaway from the [recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] report is that the IRS has a lot of outstanding receivables that it does nothing about. That made me want to look more closely at the numbers.

    Working with the spreadsheets is a little frustrating. They don’t answer all the questions I would like answered, but it does give a pretty clear idea that the IRS is something of a shadow of its former self.

    At , the balance of assessed tax, penalties and interest (ATPI) was $114.2 billion spread among 10.4 million accounts. In that year IRS filed 1,096,376 notices of federal tax lien and requested 3,606,818 levies on third party. IRS wrote off $14.6 billion that had expired due to the ten year statute.

    At ATPI was $125.8 billion spread among 11.2 million accounts. There were 543,604 liens and 782,735 levies. $34.2 billion expired due to the ten year statute.

    It is important to remember that when we are talking about collections, we are talking about tax that has already been assessed. This has nothing to do with people who have not filed or who underreported income and have not gotten caught. That is an entirely different kettle of fish.

    Through my decades of tax practice, the notion of flat out not paying assessed tax was not something that was in my bag of tricks. It has slowly dawned on me that this is a thing.

  • There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • Poland’s government has put a new tax on media advertising in non-governmental media. It claims the tax is simply a revenue measure designed to shore up the public health system. The news media claim that this is an attempt to use the taxation power to bankrupt and destroy the free press. In protest, media outlets including television, radio, and newspapers across the country suspended news coverage for 24 hours, displaying protest messages on a stark black background instead.
  • A tax strike by restaurants and bars in Italy has begun. The strike is being organized by Movimento Imprese Ospitalità, which is a project of the tourist industry branch of the General Confederation of Italian Industry. It is protesting continued tax collection at a time of collapsing business during the Covid pandemic.
  • I’ve seen a few more articles that give some additional details about the latest tax strike in South Kivu: The campaigns have been organized and led by what are vaguely referred to as “la société civile” (civil society). This refers to some sort of preexisting groups, but I don’t really understand what they are. They seem to be non-governmental organizations that sometimes behave as parallel governments or service providers, other times as sorts of citizens’ unions or chambers of commerce.
  • Guillermo Incer Medina, in Confidencial, evaluates the tactics used by the protesters in Nicaragua who have been struggling with the Ortega regime. He concludes that the best high-impact, low-risk action would be tax resistance from a small number of large-scale taxpayers. Excerpt:

    In Nicaragua, 94% of the total tax collection comes from large taxpayers (a large taxpayer is a company that has large volumes of transactions and, therefore, that collects taxes such as VAT, IR — and others– in large amounts. Examples of these could be supermarket chains, large importers, large commercial establishments, or large agro-industrial consortia).

    In our country, the sectors with the largest taxpayers are industry, commerce, finance, transportation, and services. In these sectors, large taxpayers collect more than 90% of the total taxes of their respective sector (which is to say that of every 100 córdobas that is collected from taxes in each sector, 90 córdobas are contributed by large taxpayers and only 10 córdobas by mid-sized and small ones). Furthermore, in areas such as liquors, beers, soft drinks, and fuel, the large taxpayers collect 100% of the total taxes.

    Why is this important? Because the dictatorship needs taxes to maintain its repressive apparatus and its patronage politics. If you take the oxygen out of their horror machine and purchase of consciences, you take away their room for maneuver.

    “Let’s do a consumer strike!” said COSEP and AMCHAM representatives every time we demanded a national strike. This is a mistake for two reasons: 1) for a consumer strike to have a real and not symbolic effect, requires that millions of unorganized Nicaraguans, including pro-government people, decide to deprive themselves of consuming goods that are difficult for them to obtain due to the precarious living conditions in which we live, 2) it is useless for us to stop consuming (not paying VAT) if companies still pay the State taxes such as IR and others (one must keep in mind that those who directly “deliver” taxes to the State are not we the consumers, but they are the collectors — the companies).

    What can one do then? The action that could have the greatest impact at the lowest cost and in the shortest term is tax resistance from the large taxpayers, which is nothing more than the large companies stopping payment of taxes to the dictatorship for a period long enough to oblige them to make concessions for his departure.

    “They are going to close us down!”, the big businesses say immediately. But it is not likely that the government will close large companies due to how this would look to foreign investment, and due to the political cost of sending thousands of people into the streets. Furthermore, if they close large companies, this would in practice have the same effect as tax resistance, since they would stop receiving their taxes. “We are exposing thousands to unemployment!”, they also say… more jobs are being jeopardized by letting this political and humanitarian crisis drag on and by the coming interruption of CAFTA and ADA, if the dictatorship continues to do what it wants and stays five more years. “It’s too risky!” It is more risky to put your body on the line in a march or a roadblock, or to go on a hunger strike in a church and get shot, cut off your services, and imprison those who want to help you. There is no large, medium, or small company that is worth more than a human life.

    Tax resistance is more feasible than other actions of high-risk and low-impact (such as a chain of express pickets or coordinated sit-ins) because it does not require the coordination of thousands of unorganized people. To promote tax resistance, it is enough that a few of the largest companies, which are already organized in chambers, agree, stand firm, and coordinate among themselves.

  • Gig workers in Serbia used to be more or less income-tax free, apparently. Not any more. A new law not only makes them liable for income tax, but requires them to cough up taxes for the last five years. Marchers in Belgrade protested the new tax law.
  • Here’s another example of a a false-alarm “suspicious package” gumming up the works at an IRS processing center.

Some links of interest:

The latest tax resistance news to hit the web:

Tax resistance news from hither and yon: