Susan Pace Hamill, a law professor at the University of Alabama, has spent a lot of time trying to persuade people that Jesus (yes, the Jesus) had a strong opinion about tax policy that just happens to coincide for the most part with the sentiments of liberal Democrats.
Seriously.
Check this out:
I… provide a complete theological framework that can be applied to any tax policy structure.… I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential.
Among other things, reasonable opportunity requires adequate education, healthcare, job training and housing.… I also establish that flat and consumption tax regimes which shift a large part of the burden to the middle classes are immoral.
Consequently, Judeo-Christian based tax policy requires the tax burden to be allocated under a moderately progressive regime.
I discuss the difficulties of defining that precisely and also conclude that confiscatory tax policy approaching a socialistic framework are also immoral.
Inspired perhaps by the mighty guffaw that Hamill’s scholarship gave me, I decided to take another look at what Jesus actually said about tax policy.
I wasn’t able to find the verse where he says “give unto Cæsar what Cæsar needs to provide job training and housing to those of his subjects in Judaea who need an opportunity to reach their potential” but I’m no biblical scholar.
In in Bolivia, a Jehovah’s Witness named Alfredo Díaz Bustos was drafted into the military and attempted to avoid military service as a conscientious objector.
The authorities, recognizing no conscientious objector exemption, granted him an exemption certificate that classified him as unqualified for service, but demanded a special “military tax required of persons declared exempt from military service.”
He asked to be released from this requirement for the same reasons of conscience that did not allow him to serve the military directly.
This was denied.
Bustos then appealed to international law, in this case the American Convention on Human Rights.
Incredibly, it worked! The government of Bolivia backed down and released Bustos from any obligation either to serve in the military or to pay the exemption tax.
Furthermore, the government agreed to formally recognize the right to conscientious objection to military service.
With that in mind, I noted a handful of confrontational real-world protests that seem to be reaching for new tactics and new targets, and which seem worth keeping an eye on:
A while back I posted a few links to examples of some of the new directions anti-war protest is taking these days.
Among these were protests targeting the homes of such figures as Donald Rumsfeld and John Negroponte (who is also being well-hounded at his public appearances).
Ron Jacobs reports on The Showdown at Port Tacoma where anti-war activists are using direct action techniques to try to impede the shipment of war materiel to U.S. forces in the Middle East.
WhatDoIDoWithThis.com looks like it’s trying to be an industrial-grade recycled goods swap meet with an emphasis on construction supplies — might be worth checking out if you’re building or refurbishing.
The Tax Foundation points out a study that seems to support the hypothesis that as a tax system becomes more efficient, the savings don’t get passed on to the taxpayer, but to the government. In other words, if the government can reduce the difficulty and annoyance involved in taxpaying, it can compensate by raising the tax rate!
The Senate Budget Committee has approved a federal budget that increases the IRS enforcement budget to $7.2 billion, well above the already-increased $4.93 billion Dubya requested. The budget would also change the rules about how that enforcement budget is accounted. The IRS has complained that increases to its enforcement budget are unfairly categorized as government expenditures even though they result in a positive “return on investment” to the government. Under the newly-proposed rules, the government could break its discretionary spending limit to provide more money for enforcement.
There’s a new war tax resistance blogger on-line. Welcome to the web, Paul Sheldon of Peaceful Ways.
Steven Landsburg, in Slate reports on the increase in leisure time among Americans over — particularly among people at the poorer end of the economic scale.
I’m back!
We had a great time in Mexico, and now I’m unpacking and reassuring our cat that we still love him and trying to get caught up on what I missed while we were away.
Here are some of the things I would have been covering at The Picket Line had I not been off-the-grid:
The War Resisters League is promoting a blockade of the IRS headquarters in Washington on .
“Just as military recruiters supply the bodies for the war, the IRS supplies the funding.
Just as some soldiers have the courage to resist the war, we — as tax payers — should have the courage to resist paying the taxes that send soldiers to war.
We call on all war opponents to help dramatize our opposition and to disrupt business as usual by joining this nonviolent blockade.”
The store is part of an anti-Mafia groundswell that started four years ago when activists plastered Palermo with bill stickers stating: “An entire population that pays the pizzo is a population without dignity.”
That spawned “Addiopizzo,” an organisation promoting stores and suppliers that publicly vowed to pay no more.
Today, 9,000 Palermitans are registered customers and the list contains 241 businesses, 30 of which have their products on Messina’s shelves.
Punto Pizzofree also stocks produce from farms seized from jailed Mafia bosses including Salvatore “The Beast” Riina.
The Sicilian Mafia, on the back foot since the arrest in of fugitive godfather Bernardo Provenzano, was hurt again when powerful industrial association Confindustria said it would expel any members paying protection money.
A paper by Odd-Helge Fjeldstad and Joseph Semboja — “Why people pay taxes: The case of the development levy in Tanzania” — is now available on-line and provides a few more clues for those of us who like to investigate the factors that promote tax compliance or tax resistance.
War tax resisters in Farmington, Maine held a workshop recently.
Resisters including Eileen Kreutz, Eileen Liddy, Henry Braun, and Larry Dansinger shared their experiences.
“Since Congress continues to fund the war despite all our letter writing, demonstrations, and protests, I am joining others to try to affect the war funding directly by not paying all of my taxes,” Liddy said.
“This is more than just symbolism.
Legislators need to know that people are ready to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in order to get them to do the job they are elected to do.”
Pente Player, in the comments here at The Picket Line, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what effect this year’s economic stimulus package will have on those of us who are trying to stay under the federal income tax line.
San Francisco area artist Doug Minkler has created another war tax resistance-themed poster featuring a paraphrase of William Reich: “People tend to ascribe the responsibility for war to those who wield power.
But the responsibility for wars falls directly upon the citizenry, for they possess all the necessary means to avert war.
To place guilt on ordinary people — to hold them solely responsible — means to take them seriously, whereas, to view them as victims means to treat them as small, helpless children.”
The essay Tax Resistance: The Moral and Legal Defense from redpill8 has been bouncing around blogland since it was posted late last month.
It asserts that you have a legal obligation to stop paying taxes to the U.S. government in order to keep from being considered an accomplice in its criminal behavior.
Raleigh Booze at Sword of Peace shares his conscientious objector statement and discusses how tax resistance fits in to a Christian conscientious objection position.
More than thirty protesters were arrested while trying to storm the barricades surrounding the front entrance to the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“Just as military recruiters supply bodies for the war, the IRS supplies the funding,” stated New York City WRL organizer Ed Hedemann.
“So, I’m doing my part in disrupting that relentless flow of money by standing in front of the IRS entrance and by refusing to send my taxes to the IRS.”
Among the organizations sponsoring this part of the protests commemorating were NWTRCC, War Resisters League, United for Peace & Justice, and Code Pink.
And speaking of Code Pink, they continue to draw new tax resisters to sign up for their Don’t Buy Bush’s War campaign.
Some of the latest signers gave the following “signing statements:”
Thank you Code Pink for organizing this media communication. Our politicians don’t have to listen to our votes when we keep paying our taxes. Bravo!
anonymous, Burlington, Vermont
If the idiot Republicans and their minions want this war, they can pay for it. And no soldiers ‘died for me’; they died because they volunteered to enter an immoral war.
John Bisceglia, Bellingham, Washington
I’ve refused to pay taxes for over 20 years now, and I doubt our inept government and the IRS will ever be able to find all of us tax resisters. There are simply too many ways to make money and keep it out of banks, and many ways to live without personally owning any property.
Scott Johnston, Cincinnati, Ohio
War. Murder. Destruction. Illegal occupation of a sovereign nation. Extraordinary rendition. Secret Prisons. Torture. Illegal wiretapping. More spending on military than all other countries combined. And I’m helping to pay for it. Not any more!
Patrick West, Boulder, Colorado
I am a Conscientious Objector to all war, and I have been openly refusing federal war taxes every year since ! IRS never succeeded in collecting a dime from me until I began receiving Social Security checks in ! Now they take 15% from each check, but I continue each year to refuse to pay for war and weapons.
Robin Harper, Wallingford, Pennsylvania
I’m going to withhold $100 anyway; get enough signatures and I’m in for the full whatever-godawful-number-it-is percent of my taxes.
Friend Reynolds, Chicago, Illinois
Thank you. Every penny I have ever given to support the things that are meaningful and positive in the world is utterly negated — and then some — every time I pay my taxes.
We had a great action on !
The War Resisters League march from McPherson Square to the IRS got off to a late start.
But the Rude Mechanical Orchestra was worth the wait.
The Bread and Puppet banners were held high above the street and (when they were not getting tangled in Washington’s trees) were beautiful. WRLers handed out probably one thousand pie charts along the route.
The media was out in force, literally waiting for activists to get to the IRS.
A forest of TV antennas.
The police were waiting at the main entrance.
They had done our work for us, blocking the entrance there.
But they had left the side entrance completely open.
So people blocked both sides.
For about an hour, the group (maybe 100 people) chanted and sang along with Rude Mechanical as the IRS headquarters was surrounded by “war crime scene tape.”
We made war tax resistance part of the fifth “anniversary” story.
We were serious and committed and our message was easy to understand.
Some bits and pieces from around the web:
Siân Cwper, a member of the Peace Tax Seven group that is trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation legalized in some pan-European legal forum, ran into some strangely passive-aggressive government opposition to her tax resistance:
They told her that she actually overpaid her taxes by mistake and is due a refund.
William Perez gives us the low-down on tax provisions in the recent bailout legislation.
None of this much mattered to me, but if you think you’ll have mortgage debt canceled, or install energy efficient or alternative energy related equipment or an electric car, or if you commute to your employer by bike, or paid tuition, or spent money on classroom supplies as a teacher, or paid property tax, or live in a disaster zone, there may be something of use to you there.
And you’ll need all the help you can get, once you see the bill.
I’ve admired the anti-war protesters in Olympia who periodically try to blockade the port there in an attempt to interfere with shipments of war materiel.
So far none of the people who have participated in these blockades have been successfully prosecuted.
But the port commission has decided to take the law into their own hands — they’re filing civil lawsuits against the blockaders.
I can’t imagine they see this as a cost-effective way of recovering the expenses the blockades have cost, but they may see it as a useful discouragement along the lines of a SLAPP suit.
I suppose we should expect more of this sort of thing — as more of the more execrable parts of government become quasi-privatized and generate profit for somebody, nonviolent resistance against these will cut into the profits of folks who can respond by filing suits to recover damages.
I’m keeping one eye on a tax protest going on in Iran.
For a week, a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the revolution, but this is the first time they’ve done it since.
The government has tried persuasion and token concessions with only some success, and analysts see the protest as part of more widespread anger about the government’s handling of economic issues, and an attempt to flex the muscles of the merchants’ union.
As it is right now, it’s mostly just a protest against a tax rather than conscientious objection or tactical nonviolent resistance.
But it could be the seed that grows into something bigger.
This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than
the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce
their support of the government in these areas.
Active Methods of Depleting Government Coffers
Description
Anti-war activists turn to war tax resistance for any of a number of related
reasons: to amplify their protest, as a form of conscientious objection, or as
an attempt to reduce the resources available to the government to carry out
its wars.
If you are motivated by the last of these motivations, you may also be
interested in more active ways of reducing government coffers that go beyond
refusal to consent to taxation.
Some of these methods go pretty far afield from war tax resistance, and so
this page only mentions them in passing as examples of ways some resisters at
some times have chosen to actively deplete government resources that might
otherwise be spent on war.
Examples
Filing Paper Returns
These days, more and more people are filing their income tax returns
electronically. This saves the
IRS
money, as it costs about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an
electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper
return. You can reduce the efficiency of the government’s tax system, and
thereby the amount of collected taxes available for the government to spend on
the military, by filing paper returns rather than filing electronically.
George Jakabcin, the
IRS
assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration,
said that if half of the people who currently file electronically switched
back to paper filing, “we would be in a world of hurt. We no longer have the
capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually. We no longer
have the facilities, we don’t have the
IT
infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some
would begin to argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
In addition, the
IRS is
less able to track the items on paper returns, which limits the amount of data
available to its enforcement arm. Until everyone (or almost everyone)
switches to electronic filing, much of the information on everyone’s tax
return is unavailable to the
IRS’s
automated compliance checking programs. By filing a paper return, you help
diminish the ability of the
IRS to
go after tax resisters and evaders.
Disabling Tax-Collection Equipment
During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists in the United States interfered
with military conscription by destroying the files at draft boards. War tax
resisters might respond to the financial conscription of war taxes in an
analogous way.
Many historical populist tax resistance movements have included actions
intended to disable or destroy the tax collecting apparatus. For example:
A group in Arizona upset at automated traffic ticket-dispensing cameras
dressed up in Santa suits and disabled the cameras by wrapping them in
gift boxes.
Jack-a-Lents and “Rebeccaites” in England and Wales destroyed toll
booths.
Harassing Tax Collectors
Another way of making the government’s tax collection process less-efficient
and thereby making less money available to the government for war is to make
the jobs of tax collectors more difficult.
In , when two war tax resisters in the
Basque region of Spain were assessed a fine for their resistance, they
paid the fine with 20,000 pennies.
American revolutionaries famously used “tar and feathers” to show tax
collectors they were not wanted.
Many people in the American TEA
Party movement sent tea bags in with their tax returns. This seems benign
enough, but the IRS has seen
so many dangerous-looking things come to its mailrooms (razor blades,
powder meant to look like poison) that they tend to overreact and shut
down their operations for a hazardous materials team to come inspect
whenever they find anything out-of-the-ordinary in an envelope.
Applying for Government Handouts
Some resisters reason that it is not ethical to apply for government benefits
and other handouts while at the same time trying to resist some or all federal
taxes. Other resisters think that there is no contradiction between refusing
to pay for war and taking advantage of other parts of the government. Still
others think that any act that takes money from the government that it might
otherwise spend on war is probably a good thing and they seek to maximize the
amount of money they extract from the government.
Applying for Additional Tax Refunds
One way to take money out of the government’s pocket is to apply for tax
“refunds” above and beyond any that you are legally entitled to.
During the Vietnam War, it was common for American war tax resisters to do
this by declaring extra dependents on their tax returns. Martha Tranquilli,
for instance, on her income tax return
declared the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the War
Resisters League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International League
for the Rights of Man, and the American Friends Service Committee as her
dependents. “By claiming these organizations,” she said, “this reduced my
taxable income by about 60 per cent, which would go to war. These groups were
entitled to my money. They were my dependents in as much as I support them.”
Now, with the expansion of the
IRS’s
use of the frivolous filing
penalty, this approach is more daunting.
Some people, including many who are imprisoned in the
U.S. prison system,
simply fabricate tax returns with numbers optimized to maximize the amount of
refundable tax credits and other refunds. For example, over a thousand
prisoners made implausible claims for the “first-time home-buyer tax credit” on
their returns and received over nine million dollars in refunds as a result.
“I’m through with the street crime,” said prisoner Shawn Clark, “I’m strictly
white collar from now on. I love the
IRS!”
Keeping Bureaucrats Busy with Worthless Paperwork / Overcompliance
The more time, effort, and money the government wastes on paperwork and
bureaucracy, the less time, effort, and money it has to devote to torturing
prisoners, bombing weddings, and launching invasions.
In , after the
IRS hit
war tax resister Karl Meyer with a “frivolous filing penalty,” he responded
with what he called “Cabbage Patch Resistance” — filing a new and different
tax return every day to flood the
IRS with
paperwork.
Destroying or Sabotaging Government Property
By destroying or sabotaging government property, you make it more expensive
for the government to do business, and thereby reduce the amount of money it
can spend on the activities, like war, it prefers to replacing damaged
equipment. Property with a direct link to the military is a favorite target.
Anti-war activists around Shannon Airport in Ireland on a number of occasions
disabled U.S.
military aircraft that were using that airport to ferry troops and supplies to
the Iraq War. For instance, Mary Kelly took an axe to a
U.S. Navy 737,
doing $1.5 million in damage, and Ulla Roder disabled a
RAF Tornado
fighter jet. Such activists have won surprising victories in court by
convincing juries that they were acting on the basis of necessity.
Another group disabled 35 refueling trucks at the Fairford military base in
England around the same time.
More recently, anti-war activists broke in to the
ITT/EDO-MGM arms factory in Brighton,
England to destroy equipment involved in the manufacture of parts for fighter
jets and guided missiles and bombs. Operating under cover of night, the
half-dozen decommissioners did about £250,000 in damage. A police inspector
said that “machinery and equipment were so targeted that it could have been
done with a view of bringing business to a standstill. The damage is
significant and the value substantial.” They were acquitted. One reacted to
the verdict by saying: “It’s a real victory for the anti-war movement, The
jury were presented with the facts and they supported our motivations. If
people in Britain knew the truth away from media manipulations they would all
support our actions.”
In a similar action, another set of activists did £350,000 of damage at a
Raytheon plant in Derry, Northern Ireland, and then were acquitted of all
charges by a unanimous jury after they argued that they were acting to prevent
war crimes. Raytheon’s
U.S.-side managers
concluded that “the legal system in Northern Ireland does not offer the degree
of protection to their business that could be expected in other parts of the
world,” and the company decided to abandon their Derry plant.
Encouraging Soldiers to Desert
Encouraging soldiers to desert or defy orders, supporting conscientious objectors, and counter-recruitment, are all ways of (among other things) making it more difficult and expensive for the government to maintain its ability to conduct wars.
Groups like Courage to Resist and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors do great work in this area.
War tax resisters can be particularly credible messengers in trying to
persuade military personnel to resist since we, too, are taking risks in our
noncompliance. Conversely, we can help to influence those who promote
conscientious objection in soldiers to practice it as taxpayers. As Thoreau
complained: “The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by
those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.”
Resigning Government Jobs
By resigning your government job, even one which is itself fairly benign, you
deprive the government of additional resources and force it to spend more on
replacing you. You also signal your disgust with the government’s activities
and your unwillingness to be associated with it. Gandhi and Tolstoy were
among the theorists of nonviolent resistance who made resignation of
government posts an important part of their strategic thinking.
Blockading Government Facilities
If you can prevent a government facility or that of a military contractor
from operating, to that extent you can cost the war machine time, money, and
other resources.
The ports in Tacoma, Washington, Oakland, California, and Olympia, Washington
have been successfully blockaded on occasion by anti-war protesters to prevent
the loading of ships destined for battlefields around the globe.
On the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in
, members of the War Resisters League were
arrested blockading the
IRS
building in Washington. “Just as military recruiters supply bodies for the
war, the
IRS
supplies the funding,” said war tax resister Ed Hedemann. “So, I’m doing my
part in disrupting that relentless flow of money by standing in front of the
IRS
entrance and by refusing to send my taxes to the
IRS.”
Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down with it.
Background
Margaret Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor, privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate.
You may recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played with in this same time period (), and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and ideologues.
The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on a local, council-by-council basis.
Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils, and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters).
Using an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general.
To fix this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody alike.
And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.
And so the poll tax was born.
It faced immediate opposition, but at first it was unclear how this opposition would take form.
The Labour party wanted people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage.
In addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.
To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going to be enough.
For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a necessity.
Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.
The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately successful.
In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.
Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign successful.
Propaganda and spin
The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition.
The government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck.
Poll taxes are never popular, and resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous popular struggles.
The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners, the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to its advantage.
Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing resistance campaign.
A community arts group created a travelling performance about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various communities.
Take pride in resistance
Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors.
Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.
Myth and legend
The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more respectable and part of a patriotic lineage.
There were references to the women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of .
The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax resistance of , in which people placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.
(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)
Surveys
On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense to spread the resistance idea.
One result of the surveys was that between the people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them.
On seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.”
Another clever variety of survey was this:
[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting…
Drown them with paperwork
Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom, and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another.
The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those being taxed.
Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem, and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:
[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back” campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask awkward questions of the council officers.
Its aim was to delay the system and to make “a legitimate protest.”
Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that could later be used against resisters.
Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic, particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:
…councils were inundated with correspondence.
Many people genuinely didn’t understand what the Poll Tax was about.
Others mounted campaigns to delay registration by endlessly asking questions about the form.
All of these had to be answered.
Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work.
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will also produce more people who will refuse to register.
―Poll Tax Legal Group
Make enforcement expensive
Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their court appearance.
Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves, the courts would be unable to handle the load.
Local Anti-Poll Tax unions trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up for their rights in court.
There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.
Warn people enforcers are coming
In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships, neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.
Try to win over tax collectors and collaborators
The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according to the poll tax law.
They also failed to convince the labor union representing the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to implement the tax.
The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters.
Being used to unorganized, ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of collection.
For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay poll tax.
Social boycott of tax collectors and collaborators
The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people from cooperating with the poll tax.
The government tried to recruit newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient supplements for government-run depots like post offices.
But when the resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.
Intimidate tax collectors and collaborators
In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning to vandalism and violence:
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window… [another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door locks jammed with superglue.
Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch mob justice were not uncommon:
One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!”
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.”
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.”
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed their “crimes.”
Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats, and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and threatened” by those he encountered.
On one occasion, molotov cocktails were thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.
A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head of a bailiff company.
Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they held a mock auction of his property.
Destroy or disable collection apparatus
There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the system.
On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed.
On another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home instead as the tax had been rescinded.
Blockades, occupations, and barricades
Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s home and preventing access.
Sometimes this would extend to barricading the streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.
There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as to make business there come to a halt.
Publish and distribute how-to guides
A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process the law was likely to take in their cases.
This gave them the confidence to pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the techniques to make their resistance most effective.
Census resistance
Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was still advising people to register but be angry about it.
When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck).
Although it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who received such questionnaires returned them.
Engender and maintain activism and solidarity
Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance.
People who did not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks.
Even children served as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.
The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of resisters.
This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist elite.
Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:
An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
…[V]irtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.
Support and assist arrested & imprisoned resisters
When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an information package in the mail.
These numbers were posted on walls and utility poles all over.
Volunteers were given legal training so that they could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.
Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside his cell.
The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths, intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless” and “respectable” factions.
This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced themselves from those arrested for “rioting.”
But an independent group formed and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations, and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the defendants (not of any other organization).
Volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.
…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign.
Those who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of prisoners.
The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial support for visits…
Conclusion
The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from.
Danny Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and of the dynamics of how they were applied.
Tax resistance is a time-honored tactic of nonviolent resistance, but it has
also been used by movements or individuals that had little interest in holding
to nonviolence. History gives us plenty of examples of people violently
resisting taxation.
Today I’ll give some examples of attacks on tax offices, many of which were
violent or included intimidation by threats of violence.
Bomb threats and “mysterious white powder”-type incidents
Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve kept half an eye on the news for examples
of IRS
offices being evacuated by explicit bomb threats or suspicious packages. Here
are some examples:
: “The
FBI
is investigating after a mysterious white powder was sent to the
IRS
mail room in Fresno. The discovery forced the mail room to shut down for
about three-and-a-half-hours
afternoon.”
: “A hazardous materials
scare forced a huge evacuation Tuesday of the
IRS
center in southeast Fresno. A mailroom employee thought he was opening a
regular letter from a taxpayer. But when he opened it, a white powder
spilled all over him.”
: “A letter containing a white
powder and a note mentioning anthrax forced federal authorities to shut
down the mailroom of the Kansas City IRS headquarters.… ‘We do not think
this is going to be anthrax or any other biological agent, but we have to
treat this to the Nth degree,’ Herndon said, adding that a field test
found the substance likely to be talcum powder.”
: “Officials have given the
‘all clear’ after a letter containing a suspicious powder was received in
the mailroom at the
IRS
office in the John Duncan Federal Office Building in Knoxville.”
: “Someone apparently trying
to make a political statement caused a brief stir Tuesday at the Boulder
office of U.S.
Rep. Jared Polis. …
The Boulder Fire Department Hazardous Materials Team responded and opened
the envelope. They found a tea bag inside, with a note reading, ‘We the
People, .’ ”
: “A package of foot powder
mailed from a prison ZIP code caused
250 workers to be evacuated Thursday from [the building containing the
IRS
offices] in the Flair Park area of El Monte.”
: “Michelle Lowry… 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.’ … She’s been through
evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder.
(It turned out to be packing material.)”
: “A suspicious substance
discovered Monday at an Internal Revenue Service building is not
hazardous, a
U.S. Postal
Inspection Service official said. A portion of an office building that
houses an Internal Revenue Service mail processing center was evacuated
after an unknown substance was found about
11:15 a.m.” “ ‘There was an envelope
that appeared to have seeds inside,’ Buttars said. ‘What it was is not
known yet.’ ”
: “Hundreds of people had to
evacuate, and dozens of downtown businesses were disrupted, all because of
a suspicious package found near the
IRS
building — the contents of which were soon found to be harmless.”
: “Fox 4 reported that this was
the second day in a row that workers had found a suspicious package. On
Sunday, a powdery substance was found in an envelope (it wasn’t anything
threatening).”
: “The FBI
is now investigating a discovery at Ogden’s James V. Hansen Federal
Building that caused a scare, and the evacuation of more than 200
employees.”
: “An inspector at the Fresno
IRS
noticed a package in the mail room with a suspicious odor. … The Fresno
PD Bomb
squad was called in and the contents inside the package were an unknown
type of feces.”
: “Workers at a downtown
Oklahoma City
IRS
building and people inside the Colcord Hotel were allowed to return after
police investigated a suspicious package that was found Monday
morning.”
Note that in many of these cases, there was no deliberate threat involved, but
merely an over-cautious reaction based on previous threats. For example: The
tactic of including a tea bag with your tax paperwork as a form of protest
alluding to the Boston Tea Party has been a periodic American craze for over
sixty years, but nowadays any tea-bag-sized lumps in envelopes are an occasion
for a very disruptive evacuation and visit from the
hazmat team.
And then there’s this:
: “Angry New Zealand farmers are
reportedly sending parcels of cattle manure to cabinet ministers in a
campaign against a so-called “flatulence tax” on their animals. New
Zealand Post said it was treating the campaign “as seriously as
cyanide”…”
Actual bombings and other attacks
In addition to these mailed threats and suspicious packages, most of which
turn out to be bluffs, there have been cases of indisputably real attacks on
tax offices. For example:
In , a letter bomb exploded
in the hands of the director general of Equitalia, a quasi-private
company that handles taxes in Italy. The following month, three bombs
went off outside Equitalia’s offices in Naples. In
another branch was
struck with molotov cocktails. “The phrases ‘Thieves’ and ‘Death to
Equitalia’ were sprayed onto outside walls.”
A couple of years back, a fellow named Joe Stack loaded up his small plane
with fuel and flew it into the offices of the
IRS,
torching the building and killing an
IRS
employee (in addition to himself). National Treasury Employees Union
president Colleen Kelley said that after Joe Stack’s kamikaze attack,
“there were calls where taxpayers said they were thinking of ‘taking
flying lessons’ in the context of an audit or a collection. There are 70
that have been reported.”
During the Poll Tax rebellion, “In Cambridgeshire two petrol bombs were
thrown at the Poll Tax Headquarters and Anti-Poll Tax slogans were sprayed
on the side of the building…”
A patrol moves around ruins of the income tax office in Jerusalem after a
bomb wrecked the building.
, Jewish independence fighters
bombed an income tax office in Palestine, killing a constable, and
injuring five others. “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.’ ”
In , the Railway Protection Movement in
Sichuan destroyed tax offices there.
In St. Claire county,
Missouri, in , “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records. … The gang destroyed the tax records, and that meant that the county had no way of taxing anyone.” A year and a half later: “Around midnight on , an armed gang forced Deputy Treasurer K.B. Wooncott to take its members to the county offices. The gang seized the railroad tax book and escaped into the night.”
During the rioting that followed the British parliament’s failure to pass
the Reform Bill in , the mob burned the
Custom-house and Excise-office, along with many other government
buildings.
In Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution, he includes many
examples of attacks on tax offices:
“the crowd, rushing off to the barriers, to the gates of Sainte-Claire
and Perrache, and to the Guillotière bridge, burn or demolish the
bureaux, destroy the registers, sack the lodgings of the clerks, carry
off the money and pillage the wine on hand in the depôt.”
“At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the
houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their
registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of
their clerks.”
“at Aupt and at Luc nothing remains of the weighing-house but the four
walls; at Marseilles the house of the slaughter-house contractor, at
Brignolles that of the director of the leather excise, are sacked: the
determination is ‘to purge the land of excise-men.’ ”
“…the windows of the excise office are smashed, and the public notices
are torn down…”
“During the months of , the tax offices are burnt in almost every town in the
kingdom.”
“Without waiting, however, for any legal measures, they take the
authority on themselves, rush to the toll-houses and drive out the
clerks…”
“…the pillagers who, on the
, set fire to the tax offices…”
Taine also notes that “in Issoudun after , against the combined imposts[, s]even or
eight thousand vine-dressers burnt the archives and tax-offices and dragged
an employé through the streets, shouting out at each street-lamp, ‘Let him be
hung!’ ”
In Naples in , a tax revolt expressed
itself with attacks on tax offices: “On one beautiful summer night the custom-house in the great market-place flew up into the air. A quantity of powder had been conveyed into it by unknown hands, and in the morning nothing remained but the blackened ruins.” “the populace proceeded from fruit to stones, put to flight the tax-gatherers and sbirri, crowded into the custom-house, destroyed the table and chairs, set fire to the ruins as well as the account-books, so that soon a bright flame rose up amidst the loud rejoicings of the bystanders.” The archbishop, under pressure from the crowd, “ordered them aloud, and in the presence of all, to pull down the custom-houses”
Nonviolent blockades and occupations
Nonviolent tactics have also been directed at disrupting tax offices.
I mentioned
the “Free Keene”
activists in New Hampshire who were arrested for entering an
IRS
office and trying to convince the employees there to resign their positions.
Here are some other examples:
Anti-war demonstrators used handcuffs to lock the doors of an
IRS
building in Rochester, New York, for about a half hour in
.
Poll Tax resisters in Glasgow occupied a tax office, and, as the staff
retreated, took their places at the walk-up windows. One of the occupiers,
John Cooper, remembers: “I just sat down at the desk and said through the
glass, ‘Can I help you?’ I says, ‘It’s okay; you don’t need to pay any
more, it’s abolished!’ and the guy says, ‘Are you sure?’ I says, ‘I’m
positive. You know what I’d do with this money: go and spend it, have a
good time.’ He says, ‘You’re having me on.’ I could see the guy was still
uncertain, so there was a bunch of pads for phone messages — I ripped one
of them off and said, ‘If there’s any bother just send that in to
us.’ ”
Another group of anti-war activists, including representatives from the
War Resisters League and NWTRCC,
performed a sit-down blockade at
IRS
headquarters for about an hour in .
The issue of The Spectator covered a strike aimed at an unpopular fuel tax in Britain that, if you believe the coverage, led to “the kind of panic-buying associated with a dearth of soap powder in Cold War eastern Europe” and “in the space of 24 hours… [brought] Britain to the brink of collapse.”
The opening article
is full of rhetorical exclamations of this sort, from which I’ll try to tease out a few facts about what actually took place in this protest, and what the grievances were all about.
The article calls the protesters “a gang of largely peaceable farmers, truckers, and taxi-drivers” and mentions “a few tractors” blockading Ellesmere Port.
“There has certainly been play-acting by the oil companies, which have not conspicuously urged their drivers to beat the blockades.
The police have been mystifyingly lethargic in ensuring that the Queen’s highway is clear.”
“[T]he revolting truckers and their supporters have provided the nation with a unbeatable excuse for staying away from the office.… But the main explanation for public sangfroid is that 95 per cent, according to some polls, support the protest, at least in the sense that they believe fuel taxes are high, and should come down.”
A second article, by Ross Clark, describes the protests in similar language: “Ellesmere Port is reduced to chaos by ferocious truckers armed with traffic cones.
Motorists on the All are slowed to crawling pace as a procession of angry farmers on tractors converges on Norwich.
The police shrug their shoulders and stand aside as an embattled Prime Minister issues a rather pathetic demand for them to act.”
“[T]he petrol ‘shortages’ have been hugely exacerbated by panic-buying: a week’s worth of petrol was sold in 48 hours, a change in buying habits so rapid that petrol stations which have had regular deliveries have run dry.”
Behind the protests is a perfectly legitimate argument: that fuel duty, relative to other taxes, has reached the point at which it is disproportionate and unfair to those who rely particularly heavily on petrol, such as those who live in remote areas.
Even so, you wouldn’t pick out truckers and farmers as having the most reason to be aggrieved.
Clark points out that agricultural vehicles run on “red diesel” which has an extremely low tax attached to it; while truckers enjoy lots of subsidies and have had their vehicle taxes reduced in recent years while at the same time their weight allowances have risen, necessitating more bridge and road maintenance, which is provided by the state.
Phil, a Kent woodcutter with many a fanciful beast depicted on his meaty forearms, told me, “I can’t afford to juice my vehicles any more, can I?
Or my saws.”
Can’t afford to do what?
“Juice my chainsaws,” he said, “I’m a tree surgeon.”
And with an outstretched hand he made a scrotum-tightening gesture.
“Good to have them like that for a change.
Instead of the other way round.”
The protesters’ anger seemed quite reasonable, given that fuel taxes are putting them out of business.
When I mentioned the threat of troops being sent in, they howled with laughter.
I asked if they minded bringing the country to a halt.
They said they were patriots, standing up for the little man, the oppressed motorist.
As proof, one spread his arm towards eight cans of Heineken and a jumbo sack of salty fried nibbles.
“Gifts from well-wishers,” he said.
“Drove by this morning to show their support.”
As I left, a snack-van crept into a lay-by and eased gently to a halt.
A queue formed immediately.
The owner was either a gifted entrepreneur or he’d run out of petrol.
At a second entrance “tranquility reigned” and the blockaders, though present, didn’t seem to actually be blockading the road… the refinery had just decided not to try to use it.
A scene of lawful calm, so welcome to the police, is of course a calamity for a reporter.
Recalling vaguely that in extreme cases it may be good practice to incite trouble, I approached a trucker whose lorry was filled with timber.
“Why don’t you,” I suggested mildly, “dump that lot in the road?
Block the highway.
Go on.”
He wasn’t having any of it.
He told me he didn’t want violence.
“Why not?”
I goaded.
“Because it hurts,” he said, “I mean, do you want trouble?
Do you want a smack in the mouth?
You don’t, do you?”
I backed down, meekly nodding my assent.
Then a bizarre, surreal spectacle emerged from between the trucks.
Four young men, identically attired, strolled up carrying cans of Coke and fun-size Mars Bars for the protesters.
They were orthodox Jews wearing a dress-down-Friday version of the full Hasidic outfit: white shirts and crisp black trousers, skull-caps clinging to their hair, little ringlets brushing their ears, and jowls bursting with untamed fluff.
They joined the demonstrators who stood about in clusters discussing the crisis.
The mood was of defiant expectation.
Every demonstrator I spoke to swore he would stand firm “for as long as it takes.”
There was a followup by Leanda de Lisle in the issue that’s a little more meaty about the tactics used by both sides in the struggle.
Excerpts:
At 11:30 on the night the fuel protest was to end I telephoned David Handley, chairman of Farmers for Action.
I read him the headlines of the following day’s newspapers.
The Mail and the Mirror were supportive, but said “enough is enough.”
There was a pause from David.
I said that I too thought it was time for a tactical retreat.
But I was pushing at an open door.
David had faced a lot of lies about intimidated tanker drivers and disrupted hospitals.
Alan Pugh, a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly, went so far as to tell him on BBC breakfast television that a man had died because of his actions.
Such propaganda was having an effect on public opinion.
Furthermore, things really were getting nasty on the picket-lines.
At our local fuel depot near Tamworth, a very rough crew from Birmingham had joined the good-natured pickets.
Nobody knew who they were, but they brought with them an atmosphere of violence.
By the morning most farmers felt that enough was, indeed, enough.
But calling off the pickets was a difficult decision and hard on its heels came bad news.
The oil companies announced that they would be putting up fuel prices.
Gordon Brown said that he would not be cutting fuel taxes.
And farmers noticed that in the newspapers they were suddenly being written out of the story.
A fuel protest — which began in a cattle market in North Wales, led for the most part by farmers and brought to a halt by farmers — has been analysed as a “taxpayers’ revolt” or a “hauliers’ revolution”, with farmers mentioned as mere bit-part players.
From the Lockport, New York Union-Sun and Journal, :
Massena, N.Y. (UPI) — About 300 Mohawks blocked traffic at Cornwall Island, midpoint of the Massena-Cornwall international bridge, in their continuing protest against imposition of Canadian customs duties on Indians.
The blockade at the island, owned by the Mohawks, lasted 10 minutes.
There were no arrests.
Mohawks claim terms of the Jay Treaty exempt them from duty.
Also, a right of way for the bridge across the island was granted Canada by some Mohawk leaders in in a contract that stipulated Indians would have the right to travel over the bridge “without any charge, tax or tolls whatsoever” on either themselves or their goods.
Despite this contract, customs officers stopped a panel truck, which the Indians loaded with groceries and clothing, and demanded a $5 duty.
When the Mohawks refuse to pay, trucks and goods were impounded.
Shortly after the truck was impounded, the Indians massed at the Canadian end of the bridge and would not let automobile traffic pass.
They carried signs saying “Enforce the Jay Treaty” and “This is Indian territory.”
Some beat on drums while others danced and chanted in the Mohaw[k l]anguage.
After one car bearing Canadian plates rammed through the crowd, Mohawk leaders broke up the demonstration and held a mass meeting at the long-house on St. Regis Reservation.
Another meeting was planned on Cornwall Island with officials of the Canadian Office of Indian Affairs.
Several persons were knocked aside but not injured when the car drove into the crowd.
Canadian officials began collecting customs duties from the Indians in , honoring the contract until that time.
Mohawk officials, backed by leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy of Indian Nations in New York State and Canada, were unable to arrange meetings to discuss the situation with Canadian leaders, despite several trips to Ottawa.
Forty-eight Indians had been arrested, and twenty-five cars towed, after a blockade of the bridge .
A few more recent links of note about war tax resistance:
The Peace Pledge Union’s “learn peace” site includes a section on poetry and war, including “The Responsibility” by Peter Appleton which touches on taxpayer responsibility for what takes place in war.
As a Christian, I cannot in good conscience look the other way and
blindly pay for the death and destruction that military spending buys,
especially not when it is so out of proportion to life-giving spending.
The US armed forces can get along with even fewer soldiers but not
without the people’s money, so it is my tax dollars that actually mean
something. Given the options, I feel compelled to do my utmost to avoid
paying federal income tax. The simplest legal way to do that is to keep
our income below the taxable level, which so far, as a small-scale
farmer, has not been very hard to do. Unfortunately, this means that we
cannot help pay for the many laudable federal programs we would support.
In other news: activists who were arrested for blockading the Defence & Security Equipment International trade fair in London were acquitted by a judge who ruled that the prosecutor had not successfully rebutted the defendants’ assertion that they were justified in acting to stop illegal arms sales.
A grassroots anti-tax movement calling itself gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) is blockading roads, highways, and rail transit throughout France in a planned, one-day demonstration.
Demonstrators began massing in the pre-dawn hours.
In Paris, the ring road is completely blocked, and the police are trying to reopen the Champs-Elysées to vehicle traffic as demonstrators try to push towards the presidential palace.
Police used tear gas against demonstrators in some locations.
One protester died and several more have been seriously injured, largely it seems by angry drivers trying to push through the blockades.
At one, a driver burst from his car with a machete and had to be subdued by the police, one of dozens of arrests.
The movement has broad popular support, with about three quarters of those polled in France backing the demonstrators and urging a repeal of increased fuel taxes.
The gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) continue to demonstrate throughout France, extending what had been planned as a one-day traffic-stopping action to protest fuel tax hikes.
On the French island of Réunion, near Madagascar, schools and government buildings are closed today, and the airport is shut down, as yellow vests blockade the highways.
The government has announced a night-time curfew through the week.
Commerce in general has slowed, with many consumer-oriented businesses reporting 20–40% drops in business.
Frequent updates on the demonstrations can be found at BFM TV.
