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”,
and police are threatening to prosecute farmers who vow they will not pay the
tax, which is designed to fund research into global warming.
Methane gas from cattle and sheep accounts for more than half of all New
Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the government says farmers should
help pay for research to reduce it.
Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton, a target of the manure missives, told
Radio New Zealand the guilty farmers were “clowns
who engage in this sort of stupidity” and said it would be unfair to make all
New Zealanders pay higher taxes to fund the research.
He also said it was “contemptible” of the farming newspaper
Rural News to encourage mailing manure to
politicians through its “Raise a Stink” campaign.
A farmers’ revolt could be looming over a radical plan to tax gas emission of their animals.
The farmers are threatening to block major roads and mount a campaign of civil disobedience after a meeting in Palmerston North.
About 150 farmers from the southern North Island attended the second of four meetings being organised by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to talk to farmers about the proposed levy.
Farmers at the Palmerston North meeting were adamant that they would not pay the levy.
They claim it is unfair that only farmers have to pay the tax while the whole country benefits from a reduction in greenhouse gases.
Bryan Hocken from Taranaki Federated Farmers said their intention was to inform the government that it has no right to impose such a levy and “we’re not going to pay it.”
The farmers plan to refuse to fill in statistics forms accurately on the number of livestock they have and they also intend to further pressure politicians to stop the proposed levy.
Ross Bolton from New Plymouth said farmers feel angry enough about the issue to take action and they are talking of marching on Parliament and driving tractors onto Wellington motorways.
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 .
Pickets and other such public demonstrations commonly accompany tax resistance
campaigns. Here are some examples that caught my eye:
During the Tithe War in Ireland, one parliamentarian noted with some panic
a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland, attended by 100,000
people “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins,
on which were inscribed ‘Tithes’ and ‘Rent’.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League used signs, banners, handbills,
chalked-slogans, and sandwich boards to help get their “No Vote — No Tax”
message across at their public demonstrations.
The Benares hartal of was in
part a strike, but in part a huge demonstration, the duration and peaceful
discipline of which pointed out the determination of the
demonstrators.
When the Rebecca Rioters came to Carmarthen, they came en masse and
during the daytime, almost as a parade. They were “preceded by a band of
musicians playing popular airs, and men bearing placards with the
following enscriptions in large printed letters:” “Justice and lovers of
Justice are we all.” “Freedom and better food.” “Free tolls and
Freedom.”
The tax strike in the French wine-growing region in
was preceded by huge demonstrations and
parades. Wrote one observer:
All observers were struck by the extraordinary perfection of the
organization. It was not necessary once for the troops or police to
interfere with the multitude which was variously estimated was made up
of from 400,000 to 600,000 persons. A feature of the parade was the
large proportion of women participating. Groups from various cities bore
banners with various inscriptions and carried coffins, guillotines,
&c.
Another wrote:
…all night long trains entered the station every quarter of an hour with
crowds, many of whom had been travelling fifteen and twenty hours.
Looking worn and dishevelled, they formed in serried battalions, and,
headed by bands and trumpets and drums, young and old, men, women, and
children, marched to their quarters…
This morning five huge columns, approaching from various quarters,
welded at the Arch Peyrou into one procession nine miles long, and the
march through the streets began at
. Placards threatened, “The
day of reckoning is at hand,” “We will take up arms,” “Down with the
deputies.” Here were 200 handsome Norbannese women in mourning, there
500 young girls robed in white muslin, with tricolor robes.
In in Turkey, mass tax refusal was
backed up by mass demonstrations of as many as 20,000 people, demanding
the repeal of the taxes.
In , anti-Chavez protesters launched a tax
strike by tearing up their income tax forms in a demonstration in which
thousands of demonstrators marched on the tax offices in Caracas.
Farmers in New Zealand threatened to drive their farm equipment onto the
highways to jam the roads in protest against a new greenhouse-gas-targeting
“flatulence tax” on livestock in .
When the authorities tried to impose a tax on dogs in Breslau, Germany,
in 5,000 dogs (and their owners)
descended on city hall to protest.
One of Gandhi’s first experiments with satyagraha was
a strike in South Africa to protest against a tax on Indian immigrants
there. The culmination of that campaign was a massive protest march of
striking workers that deliberately violated laws restricting the right of
travel of Indians.
Ammon Hennacy was fond of accompanying his solitary tax resistance with
periodic fasts and picketings at
IRS
headquarters, typically around the time of the anniversary of the
Hiroshima bombing. He would hand out to passers-by copies of the
Catholic Worker as well as leaflets that
described his own particular protest — while also carrying a sign and
wearing a sandwich-board that put things more concisely.
The previously-untaxed caste of Bhats in India responded to being subjected
to the income tax in dramatic fashion: “Two thousand men turned out to
remonstrate with the Superintendent of Police who appeared on the scene.
He remained firm, whereupon they cut themselves with knives, cursed the
Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would
rather die than surrender their birthright. When several were apprehended,
their wives began to hack their persons, and so severely that several have
since died. Up to the last intelligence the Bhats still gloried in their
refusal.”
American war tax resisters frequently hold rallies, pickets, street
theater, and other such actions around “Tax Day” (the date when federal
income tax returns are due). This among other things helps make sure that
their message is one of those represented in the obligatory tax day news
stories. Here is an example:
The group then left for the federal building, in which the
IRS
and a number of other offices are located, at which 75 people burned tax
forms and blockaded the street for a bit. There were no arrests. In
conjunction with the tax form burning, they used a banner with the
quote: “Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning
paper instead of babies,” sent from prison during the Vietnam War by
Daniel Berrigan… They offered their apologies for burning tax forms
instead of Colombian villages, Palestinian schools, Iraqi hospitals,
Filipinos’ mosques and Afghan homes.
In another case:
After a mock President Clinton bragged to onlookers about the many areas
in which the
U.S. was #1 -
military spending, arms sales, violent gun deaths,
etc. — he
drove home the point with an 8-foot Patriot missile tossed into a group
of students, parents, nurses and other ordinary people.
Mass dying ensued, followed by an appearance by the grim reaper himself. Ostensibly there to collect bodies, he assented to an interview with M.C. Daniel Woodham.
Death was the only one at the rally willing to even attempt an explanation of the maniacal logic of a still-bloated U.S. military budget.
Some war tax resisters in Wales brought their tax payment to the tax office in a bucket of blood. When the payment was refused, they poured the blood over the steps of the building.
In members of the Magdalene House Catholic Worker held a demonstration at the IRS office in which they “laid out a cloth altar with candles, flowers, and health care items to represent life, and tax forms with their blood poured on them to represent death.
They held a worship service and talked about why they were there.”
This was enough for several of them to get arrested.
During the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax, there were several demonstrations.
The Scottish Trade Union Conference organized a number of rallies,
including a 30,000-person march in Edinburgh, but then it put its weight
behind a strange 11-minute-long general strike at which people all over
Scotland were supposed to briefly stop working to engage in some short
anti-poll-tax activism. That protest didn’t go anywhere and the Union
Conference lost some credibility as a movement organizer.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demonstrations in England,
with some of these rallies and marches turning into riots (or being
attacked by police, depending on whose stories you believe). On such
occasions, the riots became the message of the demonstrations, whatever
the intentions of the organizers were. This had mixed consequences for
the movement.
