Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” → Quakers → 20th–21st century Quakers → Frances Crowe

This weekend, war tax resisters in New England have been gathering at the Woolman Hill Conference Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The Greenfield Recorder is covering the conference.

The conference’s theme is “Taking Control of Change: Embracing Simplicity” and is emphasizing simple living both as a tax resistance technique and for its other benefits.

Yesterday’s article mentions Ruthy Woodring, Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner, Aaron Falbel, Frances Crowe, Daniel Staub, Juanita Nelson, Erik Schickendanz, and Daniel Sicken.

A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter — More Than a Paycheck — is out featuring an article I wrote about how to craft a persuasive and motivating tax resistance message. (It’s a distillation of a Picket Line entry from back in November.)

Also in the newsletter are some notes about IRS policy and foibles, an update on the ongoing attempts by war tax resister Daniel Jenkins to find a legal forum that will rule that conscientious objection to military taxation is a human right, and the latest on All Saints Church’s struggle to maintain its freedom of speech and its tax-exempt status at the same time.

Daniel Sicken gives a report from the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters. And some of those who gathered there — Ruthy Woodring, Aaron Falbel, Frances Crowe, and Daniel Staub — are profiled briefly. Here’s Frances Crowe’s profile:

“I suddenly woke up about five years ago and made a big sign that said ‘Does Our Lifestyle Demand War?’ and hung it on my door.” Frances then proceeded to work at changing her lifestyle, starting by not using her car for two days a week. As she walked more, she found she could use her car less and less — and liked walking more and more. It became something of a meditation, with the added bonus of meeting people along the way. She changed from a Friends Meeting that was some miles away to one within walking distance, and dropped her YMCA membership where they use so much heat and air conditioning. She doesn’t want to fly anymore and takes the train instead. She’s still working on many things, like buying food that is grown locally. She’s really working to reduce her footprint on the planet, and at the same time redirecting taxes from war to funding real human needs like schools, peace and justice work, and rebuilding the new society in the shell of the old.

War tax resister Frances Crowe was profiled in the Valley Advocate last year, but it only came to my attention recently.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

War Tax Resistance

• Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
• Peg Morton writes of the opportunity she had to help the war tax resistance of John Lindsay-Poland through her participation in the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an interview with long-time anti-nuclear activist Frances Crowe. In that interview, she touches on her war tax resistance:

  I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent to my federal taxes to charity.

  So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my conscience.

• American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak explains how he came to take his stand, and how his Meeting supported him when he went to jail for it:

• Henry Braun, a poet and Vietnam-era war tax resister, died recently. “In the 1960s, he organized poetry readings against the Vietnam war and participated in the War Tax Resistance movement. He was convicted of tax evasion because he chose to give a portion of his taxes to the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital and to the city’s public schools.”
• War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.

Other Links of Interest

• Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
• The latest numbers suggest that a record number of people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in 2014.
• After a New York Times exposé about the IRS’s use of civil forfeiture to seize money from innocent people, the agency released a statement announcing that it would be reforming its use of the practice.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• A multi-day business strike in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is protesting the government’s attempt to extend and hike a tax.
• It’s very rare for a major U.S. political party to call for tax refusal, but that’s what the Republican Party in Seattle has done after that city passed a questionably-legal municipal income tax. “This law is unconstitutional, illegal, and against the voter’s [sic] will expressed nine (9) times at the ballot box and it deserves nothing less than civil disobedience — that is, refusal to comply, file or pay,”
• Stephen Ruth discovered that Suffolk County officials had unsafely manipulated the timing of traffic lights to trick drivers into running red lights and increase the revenue from the ticket-issuing red-light cameras. He was so furious that he not only blew the whistle, but he cut the wires to the cameras to foil the scheme.
• Save Lagos Group has called for tax resistance against the government of that Nigerian state.
• American war tax resister Frances Crowe is 98 years old. That didn’t stop her from getting arrested in a civil disobedience action against a planned natural gas pipeline. She was convicted, and is now refusing to pay the fine.
• Welt wonders where Thoreau would find himself in today’s political landscape, and concludes: “He belongs to nobody; he cannot be monopolized by any party. ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume,’ said Thoreau, ‘is to do at any time what I think right.’ Ideologies, even progressive ones, bothered him.”
• The Den Plirono movement is still sending out its Harry Tuttle-like engineers to reconnect the power to families who have lost electricity for failure to keep up with the tax hikes the government has added to utility bills.

Some links from here and there:

• YouTuber Alexis Buschmann has started to offer spoken-word interpretations of some of NWTRCC’s introductory war tax resistance material on her video blog. This could be a useful resource for people who prefer to get their information in the podcast/audiobook style rather than through text. Here’s a sample:
  
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman continues his streak of courtroom luck. This time, a hung jury foiled the government’s attempt to convict him of misdemeanor charges of failure to file. (In an earlier victory, the court threw out an additional charge of felony tax evasion.) The government may decide to refile the misdemeanor charges and try again. “They put me on the stand,” said Bowman, “they know what kind of witness I am. And round two, they haven’t seen anything yet; I’ve learned.”
  • Bowman’s attorney tried at one point to advance the argument that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to accommodate Bowman’s sincere religious objection to paying for abortion with his taxes. Although the courts have rejected such arguments in the past with reference to war tax resisters, the Supreme Court’s subsequent Hobby Lobby ruling seemed to possibly open the door to reconsidering this. The trial court disagreed.
  • War tax resisters have also considered using Hobby Lobby as a foot-in-the-door in this way.
• American war tax resister and tireless activist Frances Crowe has died at age 100:
  • Frances Crowe, Peace Activist and War Resister, Dies at 100 (New York Times)
  • Frances Crowe, WTR and Anti-War Activist Extraordinaire (NWTRCC blog)
  • Remembering Legendary Peace Activist Frances Crowe, Who Died at 100 After Decades of Resisting War (Democracy Now)
• Tax resisters in Beni (Democratic Republic of the Congo), who are protesting the government’s inability to provide security to residents of the war-torn region, are more formally organizing under the banner Nipe Amani Nami nilipe Ushuru na Kodi (Give Me Peace and I’ll Give You Taxes).
• Automated traffic ticket camera resistance continues around the world, with recent attacks on the machines in France, Italy, and Germany.

Some links from here and there:

• Rutgers International Institute for Peace has begun releasing a Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance with items from their archives. Among these is Organizing Tax Resistance, co-written by a team from Nonviolence International and Karen Marysdaughter from NWTRCC.
• Humans of Earth continue their valiant war against the traffic ticket emitting robot hordes. With fire, spray paint, and gunfire, burning tires, and toppling, radar cameras across Europe have been disabled in recent weeks.
• John Dangelo profiles American Quaker war tax resister Joan H. Nicholson, and Ralph J. Dolan looks back on the life of recently-passed American war tax resister Frances Crowe.
• The Delta Amacuro (Venezuela) state Chamber of Commerce has launched a tax strike to protest what they say are extralegal and “confiscatory” municipal taxes.
• The Nkafu branch of La Société Civile has signed on to the latest tax resistance campaign in the east Congo to protest the government’s inability or unwillingness to provide security in the region.

In other news, the group ADNic is promoting a Nicaraguan tax resistance / consumer strike campaign with a series of graphics. Here are some examples (translations mine):

A new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, with content including:

• A cover story on the newish U.S. government policy of refusing passports to people with large tax debts.
• Samantha Leuschner on Constructing Positive Pillars for Peace.
• Some notes on recent trends in tax enforcement, including frivolous fines, wage garnishment, audit rates of the poor, state-and-local tax deduction limits, and cooperation between tax enforcers in the U.S. and Canada.
• Reports from local NWTRCC affiliates across the country.
• A profile of recently-passed war tax resister Frances Crowe.
• Confessions of an Anonymous War Tax Refuser.

Here are some more details on the passport-revocation front, as found in a recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report.

According to the details of the newish law concerning passports and tax scofflaws, when the amount of someone’s overdue taxes rises above a certain threshold ($52,000 last I checked), the IRS must notify the State Department, whereupon the State Department must not issue a new passport to that scofflaw or renew their existing passport (unless the scofflaw is taking certain specified steps to pay up or contest the tax debt), and may revoke any existing passport that person has.

That’s all the law allows for. It does not specify under what circumstances the State Department should revoke existing passports, or even mandate that they do so at all. It is merely an option. Now it emerges that the IRS hopes to put more teeth into that provision on its own initiative. It plans to send requests to the State Department, on a case-by-case basis, asking State to revoke the passports from people the IRS believes might thereby be prodded into paying what they owe.

This process is not something that was explicitly authorized by the law, but TIGTA didn’t seem to think that was a problem. “There is no law or regulation that directly authorizes the IRS to prioritize taxpayers to be referred to the State Department for revocation; however, we believe it is reasonable for the IRS to provide the State Department with taxpayers for possible revocation to comply with the law.”