Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Jack Payden-Travers

In other news…

  • The IRS is among the agencies being hit by the budget “sequester” everyone’s been gabbing about. If Congress doesn’t pass yet another piece of misguided legislation further on down the road (big if, that), the agency will need to lop about $600 million out of its budget. They’re hoping to make some of these cuts not to their operational budget but to the payouts it makes to people in the form of refundable tax credits and informer payoffs (which at least one commentator thinks the agency has no authority to do).
  • The Obama administration and the various government agencies and government-funded programs that are facing sequester-related budget cuts are making shameless use of “The Washington Monument Ploy” in which they claim the cuts will necessitate threats to the most popular, picturesque, and sentimental parts of their spending.
  • The military-industrial complex has been particularly shameful about this ploy, with Obama as its spokesman. “Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf,” he claimed, which would be delightful if it weren’t bullshit. Turns out, though, that it actually is easier for the Pentagon to make abrupt cuts to mission-critical operations (things the military just happens to do for historical reasons, like fight wars) than to cut corporate welfare political pork projects (the real meat & potatoes).
  • Julian Nick of Party of the Uncertain reflects on a tax resistance seminar led by Jack Payden-Travers at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker earlier this month. Nick considers the value of symbolic protest, and finds similarities between the tax resisters and direct action activists like the Plowshares movement.

The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:

  • Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn. Excerpt:

    “They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance. Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime. And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem. Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”

    Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned). She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government. If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined. “I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.

  • NWTRCC put out its annual press release about “Tax Day” protests going on nationwide.
  • The Independent Video Archive published a couple of excerpts from television shows first broadcast in concerning the war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner, and Wally Nelson.
  • William Ruhaak published his thoughts on “What would Jesus do about paying taxes for war?” on the Pax Christi blog.
  • Jack Payden-Travers has commentaries on war tax payment up at WVTF Public Radio and at the Las Vegas Informer.
  • The Sonoma Press Democrat covered war tax resister Ruth Paine.
  • Engaging Peace published Erica Weiland’s thoughts on war tax resistance.
  • SeacoastOnline plugged Seacoast Peace Response’s annual “penny poll” demonstration.