Although WTR
was never really really strong in other countries, I did sense at this
meeting that there were fewer resisters from countries other than the
U.S. and Britain
than my first meeting way back 20 years ago, which most attendees attributed
to the quickness to collect/seize in many countries. (Or are people being
drawn into peace tax fund efforts as a safer alternative?) However, although
the German groups seem to be all about peace tax fund efforts, they also told
about holding a vigil for a resister who was taken to court recently. And I
didn’t write about War Resisters’ International in Britain, which is a case
of an organization choosing to refuse to send on withheld taxes voluntarily
because that is the only way the staff can resist. Their board had to make
that decision. They await Inland Revenue’s showing up to sticker their
equipment for seizure now, but they are also trying to figure out how to make
their resistance more public and convince other orgs that they can do this
(even though Inland Revenue usually collects, it is at a point of forced
payment).
Still, while I can see these good examples, I do find it discouraging that in
the times we are in there are not masses turning to this form of resistance
(or even to the peace movement in general for heaven’s sake!) in the
U.S., if not
elsewhere.…
War tax resisters and peace tax fund advocates have some similarities in the
sort of goals they’re aiming for: they think that their governments overspend
on the military and they’d like their own money spent in better ways. But
tactically, they’re miles apart: peace tax funds are about the polar opposite
of conscientious tax resistance, and in fact are most likely to be enacted as
a weapon in the government arsenal to fight against war tax
resistance should it ever become sufficiently popular to be troublesome.
A lot of peace tax fund promoters don’t see it this way. They think of peace
tax fund schemes as being a natural extension of the same impulses that cause
people adopt war tax resistance, and they support the former for the same
reasons that other people support the latter. So, to that extent there’s some
harmony between the groups: peace tax fund promoters typically have their
hearts in the right place and just need to appropriately reposition their
heads to match.
But, since peace tax fund schemes are really inimical to conscientious war tax
resistance, there is necessarily some tension here.
I think it might be useful to rethink the “big tent” that brings war tax
resisters and peace tax fund advocates together in conferences like this one.
Not that I think there should be a formal divorce, but maybe instead we should
consider making the tent even bigger, to include tax resisters who resist from
different motives than antimilitarism. The invitation of George Rishmawi was a
good example of this (he was one of the organizers of tax resistance during
the intifada in Palestine) — too bad he couldn’t make it.
Here’s another example: what appears to have been a sophisticated campaign of
tax resistance from Mexico, where the motives of the resisters were to protest
that the government simply wasn’t providing the minimum of service in return
for the taxes. (From the Saltillo Palabra
a couple of years ago; the translation is mine, which is why it’s clunky):
TIJUANA — The executive council of the
National Chamber of Commerce [Canaco] in Tijuana decided to hold back
taxes from the three levels of Government since they do not provide security
to the city, said César Cázares, president of the organization.
“There is a group of tax lawyers who are advising us. We are going to stop
paying taxes. Already we have had agreements, meetings, plans. It’s a
method of civil disobedience," he said.
So far this month, 24 people have been assassinated in Tijuana, among these
was the assistant chief of security who was ambushed Thursday.
Cázares asserted that tax resistance is being tried because the retailers of
Tijuana are very worried about the constant crime wave, and they do not see a
response from the authorities.
He explained that since Thursday Canaco
is consulting with the College of Accountants of Tijuana to find a way to
redirect the taxes to some government entity and for the retailers not to be
sanctioned as tax delinquents.
“The possibility exists that the taxes will be redirected to an account in
the Federal Court for them to hold in escrow so long as the government fails
to return security to us,” he emphasized in the press conference.
About 35 presidents of skilled groups from Canaco
entreated Cázares to ask the state authorities for the intervention of the
Army.
In addition, they will initiate a campaign to urge the rest of the population
to stop paying taxes: property, vehicle, and others.
Cázares indicated that there are commercial sales losses of 30–50% due to the
insecurity that Tijuana suffers.
Canaco Tijuana
includes 2,300 companies in packaging, pharmacy, hardware, used car sales,
junkyards, and repair shops, among others.
War tax resisters in many ways have a lot more in common with tax resisters
like these shopkeepers in Tijuana — for instance how we organize, what legal
complications we have to deal with, what sort of mutual support we provide,
and so forth — than we have with peace tax fund promoters. I think we’d
probably have a lot more to talk about, too.
Governments spend a lot of time and energy, and hire a host of political scientists and other such clergy, to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and charitable, and that conversely, failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.
So governments and other critics of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns are quick to deploy this available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks.
This can have the effect of putting the resisters on the defensive, message-wise.
One way some resisters and resistance campaigns have tried to defuse this is through the use of escrow accounts.
The idea here is that instead of paying taxes to the government, the resister or resisters will pay their taxes into a special account that they will relinquish to the government at a future date if the government meets their demands.
The message conveyed by this is that “we are willing to pay our share of money for the government’s upkeep — we’re not just keeping the money for ourselves — but we’re not going to do so until the government shapes up.”
Here are some examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique:
In , Samoan chiefs met and decided to pay their taxes not to the German imperialist government, but to officers who were authorized to hand the money over to the Germans only if “a satisfactory settlement has been arrived at.”
In , a group of Catholic war veterans in Queens, New York began paying their property taxes into an escrow fund that they said they would refuse to turn over to the local government until it fired a Communist Party member from his post as a government advisor.
In New Guinea, in , natives in the Mataungan Association, upset at their political control being diluted in a local government that included immigrant representatives, set up its own tax agency and collected $29,000 “which, it says, it is holding in trust until the council reverts to its old native-only status.”
In the Friends Meeting at Cambridge established a “Peace Tax Fund” that worked partially as a redirection fund, but which also anticipated that some contributors would want to release the funds to the government if the government provided a way to do so that would not make them complicit in military spending.
Ed Guinan resisted his small business’s taxes by sending the checks to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
In , the Nashua Area War-Tax Resistance Support Group decided to keep the withheld taxes of its members in escrow “to be given to the government when policies change and when the money will be used for purposes other than war.” Resisters could reclaim their money from the fund if the IRS seized money from them individually, and meanwhile the interest earned in the account would be given to charitable causes.
New England War Tax Resistance set up three funds — a mutual insurance “penalty fund,” a “Direct Giving Fund” for resisters who wanted to immediately redirect their taxes, and an escrow fund which would hold on to resisters’ money in case they at some future point decided they wanted to settle with the IRS.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting of Quakers set up something called the “Peace Tax Escrow Account” to which resisters could deposit their refused taxes and which the Meeting said it would turn over to the government if the government gave taxpayers a mechanism to pay such taxes without paying for the military functions of government.
In , District of Columbia politician Walter Fauntroy, upset at the District’s lack of political representation at the federal level, “asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called ‘Taxation Without Representation Committee.’ ”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers lost a court battle in which the IRS hoped to force them to withhold taxes from a war tax resisting employee. They began withholding the taxes as ordered, but rather than submitting them to the IRS, they put the withheld money into an escrow account and told the agency they’d have to seize it themselves.
In , the Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, Mexico decided to withhold taxes in protest against inadequate security during a crime wave there. The group brought in accounting consultants to help them establish an escrow account, in the hopes that the gesture would discourage the government from classifying the member businesses as tax delinquents.
In , New York state assemblyman Greg Ball encouraged his constituents not to pay their Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax but to instead deposit the amount due into an escrow account which would not be relinquished until the Metropolitan Transit Authority were audited and reformed.
In , shopkeepers in San Juan, Argentina, protesting against competition from untaxed and unregulated street vendors, began paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on the street vendors.
In , Markus Zwicklbauer, a 58-year-old tax consultant from Fürstenzell, Germany, began paying his taxes instead into an escrow account which he says he will release to the government if the government can show him to his satisfaction that it will be spent for the benefit of German citizens and not wasted on bailouts of other Eurozone nations.
A bar owner in Michigan in , struggling in the wake of an indoor smoking ban that discouraged her customers, organized a tax protest of similarly-situated businesses that involved paying taxes into escrow.
