Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Italy → Northern League in 2010–14

Mario Unnia of the Italian Business Ethics Network had an op-ed in il legno storto last week in which he recommended tax resistance to the Northern League. From Google’s machine translation, which, though clumsy, gets the point across:

…In the Northern League who pays taxes is an irreducible conflict between him and those who do not pay, especially if they live under in Florence, because the money collected through taxes the state delivers services in the beneficiary is also the evader.…

Yet, one wonders, there is some other solution that would alleviate this suffering?

Maybe. The League could be considered a form of protest called “mutiny tax.” The dictionary defines the mutiny “an offense under the military penal code which consists of a qualified and collective disobedience,” and then the mutiny tax may qualify as a crime.

But there is another way of understanding the mutiny tax, a milder form of protest, yet very significant, is the tradition and Anglo American. If the League of paying taxes, skeptical on the outcome of the fight against tax evasion, asked as compensation cutting wasteful spending, but the government, while being able to do, it does not, they might decide to pay due to an account bound to a bank run by men of the League, and to transfer the money to tax only in respect of the future reduction of costs in proportion to the actual cutting. Thus both the VAT, and employees, but would honor the obligation to require the Government. There are thousands of legal and political objections to this proposal, in relation to revenue from taxes on income, but there would be less if, for example, the tax protest concern special taxes, as the arena and had the local communities.

Of course the mutiny is the last fiscal response to an untenable situation, but desperate times desperate measures. This form of mutiny would certainly created a strong legal controversy, but has a high political significance. For the League would be a factor in renewed confidence with his people, and contains a warning to the government: tax have the knife in his hand citizens. But there is a question: since the mutiny tax those who do usually pay taxes, the League is confident that his people fall into this category worthy? If so, can seize the initiative.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• “Gov’t™” at in the howling waste of a wilderness writes about his past several years of a chosen life of “voluntary poverty” which was partially chosen “in protest of taxes used to fund militarism, imperialism, and war.”
• The IRS has a new version of its Publication 17 guide for individual income tax filers in the upcoming tax season, in case you need to update your spreadsheets or double-check which credits and deductions you qualify for.
• Italy’s “Northern League” is the latest european group to call for tax resistance against new taxes to pay foreign creditors and shore up austerity budgets.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• My Shareable article on “How to Not Pay Taxes” was the headline topic on the Porc Therapy Friday night podcast:
  
• A group of mayors who belong to Italy’s Northern League have announced a tax strike starting tomorrow and aimed at the unified municipal tax (called the IMU in Italy) as it applies to people’s homes.
• Jake, at A Mennonite Dreamed A Dream responds to the Mennonite World Review’s Lettermanesque “Top 10 reasons Mennonites no longer resist paying war taxes.”
• Lucy Steigerwald at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog brings us the news of a government-funded video game based on Thoreau’s Walden. Henry D.’s body lies a-spinning in its grave…
• Finally, here’s a photo from tax day, 1966:

Here’s a graphic from the recently-launched tax resistance campaign in northern Italy, from the right-wing “Forza Nuova” party:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The 200-person town of Gallifa in Catalonia, Spain, has begun tax resistance as a municipality — by refusing to pay €1,662.62 income tax due on the salaries of the employees at the tax office. The town government is controlled by the small separatist coalition party “Catalan Solidarity for Independence.” There have been other rumblings of tax resistance lately in Catalan independence circles, and some people have made a symbolic gesture of trying to pay their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government. A not particularly favorable Spanish-language news article about the Gallifa action gives a good overview of Catalan nationalist tax resistance in recent years (translation mine):

  The group from local Barcelona-area government is considering conducting the same action with other taxes, such as the contributions for Social Security.

  This action is in line with eight Catalan entrepreneurs and freelancers, grouped under the platform “Diem Prou” (“We Say Enough”), who in April of this year staged a tax evasion that came after months of protest against what they consider an unjust regional financing model that they believe qualifies as “looting.”

  In December of 2008, the then-secretary of General Policy of the ERC, Josep Ginesta, demanded “that not one new euro raised be sent beyond Fraga [the Westernmost town in Catalonia, which is the Easternmost province in Spain]” In October of 2009, former regional president Pasqual Maragall (PSC) proposed a “cierre de cajas [shutting of the cashboxes],” and eight months later he threatened “tax resistance.” A measure that was supported by the secretary-general of the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), Oriol Pujol, in August of 2010. In April of 2011, the then-leader of ERC, Joan Puigcercós, and the Member of European Parliament from CiU, Ramon Tremosa, also called for refusal to honor the demands of the Treasury.

  Also those media that survive thanks to public funds have taken sides in favor of these campaigns. In March of 2011, the chief political editor of La Vanguardia, Jordi Barbeta, hinted from the pages of the newspaper group Godó of the need to launch “collective tax resistance.” A month later, Vincent Partal, director and owner of Vilaweb, one of the most heavily subsidized journals in Catalonia, encouraged from its on-line edition the launch of a campaign of “planned and widespread civil disobedience” against the Spanish government finances. In fact, in this journal are given all sorts of details on how to carry out such evasion.

  In the Summer of 2011, Òmnium Cultural, a radical separatist group that tops the list in terms of subsidies received, launched a new challenge against the present law — more than those it is accustomed to raise — that the federal government grant the Catalan regional government an economic treaty [like the ones that make the Basque region and Navarre more fiscally independent] in the next four years, or it will promote “tax resistance” against the Tax Agency. This proposal was dismissed by the Catalan government — which considered it “interesting” — and by CiU, while the PSC called it “appealing” but “unrealistic.”

  Gallifa is not the only municipality that has initiated an action of this sort. The Consistory of San Vicente dels Horts (Barcelona) — chaired by the ERC leader Oriol Junqueras — or of Gerona — with Carles Puigdemont (CiU) in charge — also attempted to cheat the national Treasury, but eventually backed down.

• I’ve had less luck trying to parse this article (in Italian), but the gist of it seems to be that Italy’s “Northern League” is threatening tax resistance (though it seems I’ve heard similar bluster from them in the past, without much to show for it). The gist of the grievance is similar to that of Catalonia — that taxes paid by people that live in the region don’t go to provide services there but to prop up economically poorer regions of the country. Northern League-allied mayors are threatening to kick out the agency that collects federal taxes, and to instead collect and spend these taxes themselves at the local level.
• Household Tax resisters disrupted a Cork City Council meeting last week, where nearly 40% of households were still refusing to register for and pay the new charge.

  Laura McGonigle said: “I’ve always enjoyed being a public representative and taken the rough with the smooth but tonight was horrendous.

  “While everyone is entitled to protest, I felt extremely intimidated and unsafe in our democratically-elected chamber.”

• Bill Evans, a pensioner living near Hartlepool, England, is refusing to pay his council tax because the government services it pays for have become so shoddy. “It has reached the stage where I feel the only thing I can do now is stop paying my council tax,” he says. “The council is not fulfilling its commitment and I will have my day in court.”
• Mahadev Desai’s 1929 book The Story of Bardoli: Being a History of the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and its Sequel is available on-line.
• The U.S. government recently seized $269 from war tax resister Cindy Sheehan’s bank account, leading her to reflect on “Stealing Rent Money from a Gold Star Mother.”
• The New York Times profiles American alternative currency martyr Bernard von NotHaus, who is facing serious prison time for minting a set of coins for people who were losing faith in the government’s official legal tender.
• IRS employees “are closing delinquent taxpayer accounts [categorizing them as ‘currently not collectible’] without following the proper procedures and without managerial approval” according to a new TIGTA report.

Some international tax resistance news:

France

• There was an amusing scene last week when a hundred employees of Ecomouv, the quasi-private company responsible for collecting a new road tax in France, held a holiday party in Metz. Posing for a group photo in front of the company offices in their santa hats, they were mistaken for a demonstration of the anti-tax bonnets rouges (red caps) by local police, who quickly intervened.
• A bonnets rouges subgroup calling itself the “cash cows” showed up at the intermunicipal council of Saint-Brieuc to try to get some answers about their property taxes. Not getting the answers they were looking for, they shut down the council meeting.
• Another group of bonnets rouges blockaded a Swiss-French border crossing to protest a new obligation on those who live in France but work in Switzerland to contribute to the French public health system (before, such workers could choose to join either the French or Swiss programs).
• The destruction of traffic-ticket radar machines by the bonnets rouges seems to have had an effect. For the first year since these machines were installed, the machines issued fewer tickets than the year before. A hundred such machines were vandalized last month, including about half of those in Brittany.

Italy

• Stefano Valdegamberi, one of the founders of the Futuro Popolare party, is calling on Italians to join him in a no-risk form of tax resistance: the boycott of state-run lotteries and gambling facilities. “There is only one form of effective tax resistance where no risk is involved: the boycott of all paid games authorized by the State Monopoly.”
• Some regional councilors from the Northern League announced that they plan to redirect part of the municipal services taxes known as “tares” from the national government to regional bodies
• Joseph Graziani, head of an industrial union, threatened to lead a partial tax strike in January in which people would refuse to pay more than a certain “reasonable” tax threshold if the government refuses to meet certain demands, which include reducing taxes, replacing the quasi-private tax collection company Equitalia, and reducing the cost of government bureaucracy.

Greece

• Bloomberg published a good English-language introduction to the guerrilla electricians who are reconnecting the power to households that have been cut off for not paying new taxes attached to their utility bills.
• Meanwhile, the Δεν Πληρώνω (Won’t Pay) movement continues to storm highway tollgates and wave drivers through.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Irish protesters are continuing their campaign to block the installation of water meters, including recently at the Ardmore Estate neighborhood in Cork.
• While home-brewing is legal in the United States, home distilling is not. Distillation of drinkable alcohol is highly regulated (and taxed). But nonetheless, home distilling has become a popular hobby, and the federales have been largely looking the other way and not harassing hobbyist-level distillers (as opposed to commercial moonshiners). That sadly appears to be changing.
• The Other Eye, a Catalan journal, recently published Carles Valentí’s essay on tax resistance, which is another example of the Spanish tax resistance movement expanding beyond war tax resistance to a broader critique of corrupt, wasteful, and harmful government spending.
• Italy’s “Northern League” likes to talk about tax resistance a whole bunch, but I don’t see as much evidence of them moving from talk to action as I’d like. The latest example of this big talk comes from party Secretary Matteo Salvini, who called for a tax strike to begin on 14 November. We shall see.

I’d previously noted that Italy’s Northern League had threatened to launch a tax strike in November. It’s been difficult for me to learn details, largely because of the language barrier, and I’ve been a little skeptical since the Northern League has a history of big talk about tax resistance and I haven’t seen much come of it in the past.

That said, in the latest episode party leader Matteo Salvini announced that the strike would begin on November 14 and would include businesses of resisters making their sales off the books and sympathetic customers cooperating by frequenting such businesses and paying in cash.

Some bits and pieces from here and there…

• Italy’s “Northern League” says it plans to lauch a tax strike later this year, but it seems to me they’ve made similar threats in the past and nothing has come of it. Sure enough: Next Quotidiano gives us a run-down of every time the League has threatened a tax strike since 1992.
• If you decide to resist the federal income tax, you have to decide whether to file a tax return or not. One of the disadvantages of non-filing is that if the IRS notices, they’ll file a sort of dummy return for you: and usually one that considerably overstates the income tax you would have owed if you filed yourself. Tony Nitti at his Forbes blog, describes how this screwed over tax resister Thomas Salzer, who went to tax court to try to get them to accept a more accurate, less expensive, but tardily-filed tax return, but lost his case.
• American war tax resister Joseph Olejak, one of the few such resisters to have served time on criminal charges for his resistance, shares some of his thoughts about activism, resistance, and how he can continue to resist when being tax-compliant is a condition of his probation at The Nuclear Resister.
• The state secretary of one of India’s Communist Parties — CPI(M) — has called on residents of Kerala to refuse to pay new taxes announced by the state government.

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• Kathleen DeLaney Thomas thinks the key to the government collecting more tax money is to devise new ways to make people feel guilty about evading their taxes. She calls this technique raising “The Psychic Cost of Tax Evasion” in order to reduce the expected gains of evasion. Papers like these can sometimes be read between-the-lines or at a bit of an angle to hint at techniques that dissidents can use to encourage tax resistance, either by reducing the psychic cost of tax evasion, or by increasing the psychic cost of tax compliance.
• The president of Veneto, Luca Zaia, and Roberto Maroni, president of Lombardy, both prominent Italian Northern League politicians, have continued that party’s tradition of big talk about tax resistance with a vow to resist taxes if the national government cuts health-care spending in the regions. The presidents claim that their regions have slimmer, more efficient governments and have reined in health-care costs more than those in the south of Italy, and that they shouldn’t be punished for this by having their health care subsidies reduced.
• Patrick Howley, a “political reporter” with a conservative bent, has reacted to the “IRS Scandal” that the American right-wing is all excited about by going on a one-man tax strike. “I did not pay my taxes this year. I just didn’t have the money,” he wrote. “Now I will not pay my taxes until every single Lois Lerner email is released and the people who planned and carried out this governmental travesty are held accountable.”
• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC writes about the war tax resister presence at the recent climate change march in New York City.

I think today is the day that Italy’s “Northern League” promised to launch its tax strike. They’ve got a history of big bluster and no action when it comes to tax strikes, though, so I’ll keep my eyes peeled but I’m not holding my breath.

Some news in brief from here and there:

• The IRS Commissioner and the National Taxpayer Advocate are each predicting that the upcoming federal income tax filing season will be especially challenging for the agency. Indeed they’re throwing around adjectives like “miserable,” “worst,” and “unacceptable” and they haven’t even really gotten started yet.
  
  Among the factors making this year particularly bad are the launch of Obamacare’s tax credits (and penalties), hostility from Congress, and uncertainty in tax law because Congress has yet to decide which expiring tax laws it will retroactively extend at the last minute.
  
  Good luck getting help from the agency over the phone if you get confused. They’re expecting to be able to answer only about half of the calls they get, after an average on-hold time of over a half-hour, and even then will only be able to answer the most elementary tax questions.
  
  All of this is bound to increase taxpayer frustration and anger towards the tax-collecting bureaucracy, as well as making it a more unpleasant place to work.
• A fellow named Valentin from Chicheboville decided to protest the enormity of his taxes by paying them with an enormous check — a piece of cardboard two-meters long.
• You may have heard of mass protests in Mexico over the government’s collusion in massacres of student demonstrators there recently. The protesters have admirably started burning government buildings including the statehouse in Guerrero and the headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. A side-note of interest here is that some businesses in Acapulco, Guerrero, have launched a tax strike to protest the government’s failure to protect the tourist trade from the losses caused by demonstrators!
• The government of Greece keeps adding to the Greek tax burden, and more Greeks keep reaching their last straw. In September, another 851,201 Greeks were added to the delinquency lists, raising the total from 2,451,909 to 3,303,110 — about 30% of the population of Greece. The government is using a variety of carrots and sticks to try to bring these numbers down.
• l’intraprendente takes a look at the fizzling of the Northern League’s anticipated tax strike.

Some international tax resistance news briefs:

• The Socialist Worker covers the anti-water charge movement in Ireland. Included in a sidebar is a link to this video in which Nicky Coules explains how people can uninstall and bypass a water tax meter installed at their homes:

• In the South China Morning Post, Louise Lee suggests that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists launch a tax resistance campaign:

  Tax resistance, or the act of consciously not paying tax, would enable residents from all walks of life to directly throw a wrench into the gears without having to risk life and limb.

  Symbolically, tax resisters would be sending a loud and clear message to the administration that it does not have the mandate to govern. And since tax records are properly kept, this form of civil disobedience would also produce an indisputable number of participants and, by extension, act as a de facto referendum.

  Tax resistance also satisfies the Occupy movement’s principle of non-violence. No participants can escape the legal ramifications of their action, either, avoiding the problem of “free riders”.

  Some might argue that tax resistance would hurt innocent citizens such as those who rely on government assistance and social services. My response is that pro-democracy activists can perhaps learn from Julia “Butterfly” Hill, an American activist, who took US$150,000 of tax money and donated it to civic organisations to help various causes. To paraphrase Hill, the act of tax resistance is not refusing to pay tax, but paying the money where it belongs because the government has failed to do so.

  Campaigns to pay taxes in multiple, inconvenient, symbolic amounts, and to delay rent payment in government-owned housing, have already begun, as I noted a few days back, and there is also now a campaign to refuse outright to pay a small (HK$10) amount of the tax bill.
• A self-employed Italian tattoo artist (sounds better in the Italian: “tatuatrice”) named Chiara Rizzi has made waves by announcing her refusal to pay extortionate taxes:

  I am self-employed, and first and foremost a single mom of a beautiful baby girl, and I declare openly that I am unable to pay, with my income, all of the taxes that the state demands from me. I appeal to the principle of necessity and to the capacity to pay in proportion to income, respectively, as established by articles 54 of the criminal code and 53 of the Italian Constitution to justify my categorical refusal to continue to contribute, by means of taxes, to the expenses for the maintenance of the privileges of the political class that governs us: the real villain of this economic crisis.

  She explains: “This is not a new idea. To pay to able to work, to pay to be able to survive, this is called extortion. This is called mafia. This is called usury.… I’d rather die fighting than suffocate in silence.”
• A poll conducted by Tilder-LCI-Opinionway found that people in France feel that the most significant economic event of 2014 was the abandonment of the écotaxe by the government in the face of a vigorous campaign of direct action from the bonnets rouges.
• Tens of thousands of Greek drivers are turning in their vehicle license plates rather than pay vehicle registration taxes.
• In what is beginning to seem like one of those jokes that goes on and on until it starts seeming funny again, Italy’s Northern League is once more threatening a tax strike.