Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Indonesia → anti-austerity in 2012

Some bits and pieces from faraway lands:

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement continues to brag about its success in reconnecting the power, Archibald Tuttle-style, to people who have had it cut off for failure to pay the additional taxes added on to the rates.
• A tax resistance movement has begun in Indonesia in protest of the government’s prioritizing of payments to bankers and other large bondholders. (more)
• Josep Maria Yago, a war tax resister who had been an antimilitarist activist in Spain since the years of the Franco dictatorship, died this month.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was the guest on David Swanson’s “Talk Nation Radio” to discuss war tax resistance a few days back:
  
• In Palmer Park, Maryland, locals have been vandalizing and destroying the speed and red-light cameras that the government has set up to extract money from drivers by means of automatically-generated traffic tickets. This has led to the amusing spectacle of the police there setting up surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their cameras.

  One man literally pulled out a pistol and used the camera for target practice. Police found another speed camera flipped over—leading police to believe a gang of people committed the crime, considering the weight of the camera. Then there was the camera set up on a stand, near FedEx Field. A man walked up to it, cut off one of the legs, and walked away. … [O]ne of the cameras incinerated.

• In another case, a man recently paid his $137 traffic ticket by folding 137 dollar bills into origami pigs, carefully arranging them in Dunkin’ Donuts boxes, and taking them to the police cashier.
• U.K. Council Tax resister June Farrow has been threatened with prison by the powers-that-be.
• The Greek “won’t pay” movement has launched a new phase of its constructive program — reacting to the closure of hospitals and other austerity-prompted decay of the public health system by creating its own “Social Solidarity Clinic.” The clinic launched a week ago with a blood drive.
• Tax resistance is on the agenda in Indonesia, though not in a language I know how to parse…
• Not only does the United States itself possess the world’s most threatening and fearful arsenal of weapons by a significant margin, but it also is by far the largest dealer of weapons worldwide.

  [T]he U.S. [sold] $66.3 billion in weapons abroad [in 2011], a record itself, but also by far the largest single year increase ever, over the $21.4 billion in 2010.

  The sales amounted to about 78 percent of all foreign arms sales on the entire planet. The second place arms dealer nation is Russia, which sold less than $5 billion themselves.