How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → conferences & gatherings → June 2017 Conscience and Peace Tax International general assembly in London

Some recent links of interest:

• For Independence Day, Popular Resistance reminds us that the American Revolution was won before the Revolutionary War began thanks to nonviolent resistance tactics, tax resistance in particular.
• The government of India is trying to create a nationwide goods-and-services tax that would replace the patchwork of regional tax systems that cause so much inefficiency in the Indian economy. Any effort like this is going to have winners and losers. Some of the losers are fighting back:
  • Wholesale and retail textile workers in Chandigarh shut their shops and took to the streets to protest the new tax structure.
  • A thousand movie theaters in Tamil Nadu shut to protest that state’s imposition of a 30% entertainment tax on top of the 18–28% goods-and-services tax that applies to that industry (other Indian states have abolished their own taxes as the goods-and-services tax took effect). They’ve so far been frustrated in their attempts to get film superstars to support their strike.
• Conscience and Peace Tax International is trying to rise from the ashes. After their acrimonious conference in 2013, the dissolution and reformation of the organization, and the deaths of officers Roy Prockter and Dirk Panhuis, the group was on-the-ropes. They recently held a new conference in North London. The group is almost entirely focused on “peace tax” schemes, wherewith particularly conscientious citizens would be able to segregate their own tax payments into non-military parts of their nations’ budgets.
• Someone’s started a tax strike petition at change.org (“Defer payment of federal income tax until Trump leaves”). Doesn’t seem to have much momentum behind it so far…

Some recent links of interest:

• More Thoreau bicentennial notes, including a surprising number in the German press:
  • Radio Open Source shares a podcast series on “A Wild & Disobedient Life.”
  • People’s World gives a wikipedia-like retelling of the life and thought of Thoreau.
  • Die Presse brings us “Der Aufstand des rechtschaffenen Bürgers” (The uprising of the righteous citizen), which talks mostly about how Thoreau’s theories of civil disobedience and conscientious objection continue to influence dissenters to the present day.
  • Sonntagsblatt gives us “Aussteiger, Literat, Rebell: Vor 200 Jahren wurde der U.S.-Philosoph Henry David Thoreau geboren” (Dropout, writer, rebel: 200 years ago the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born), which notes that “even today, U.S. citizens refer to him when they refuse to pay taxes.”
  • Welt gives us “Das anarchische Herz” (the anarchic heart) of Thoreau.
  • Wiener-Zeitung compares the thought of Thoreau and Ernst Jünger, in “Mythos Wald”.
• Forty businesses in Italy organized to refuse taxes to protest the government’s plans to lodge refugees near their businesses without sufficient planning.
• Here’s another report of the Conscience and Peace Tax International gathering in London last month, this one in German, from Wolfgang Steuer of Netzwerk Friedenssteuer.
• If you’re going to mail a bomb threat to the IRS don’t leave fingerprints and certainly not entire fingers.

A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, with content including:

• possible implications for American tax resisters if Obamacare goes under
• Larry Rosenwald admits that Thoreau is way too radical for him
• reflections on the IRS’s new ability to deny passports to tax scofflaws
• international news, including a redirection tally in Spain, and a report on the Conscience and Peace Tax International conference
• an announcement of the November NWTRCC National Gathering
• Larry Bassett shares his letter to the IRS over his recent $128,005 tax refusal

Hannnelore Morgenstern, of the German “peace tax” group Netzwerk Friedenssteuer, sent me a recap of the Conscience and Peace Tax International conference that was held in London in June. (I have made some edits for clarity, as English is not Morgenstern’s best language):

Fourteen participants from six countries met to make the necessary decisions. Now the work of the Board has been strengthened and the assignments for our Geneva delegate have been appointed. Board members are Jan Birk, Derek Brett, Robin Brookes, Dietmar Czemy (chairman), and Milena Romero. If necessary, Chris Coverdale and Cathy Deppy want to support the board. And it needs support.

Since the transformation of the association, only a few countries have reregistered themselves. In order for us to continue our work, we must levy a membership fee from now on. The modest balance in our account only allows for three assignments to the CPTI delegate, Christophe Barbey, in Geneva. New ways of funding must be found.

It was agreed that the website should be updated and maybe even redesigned. An expert, and the money, remain to be found.

No announcement was made regarding the next international conference.

For some context, one of the things CPTI members seem to value most about the organization is that it has “special consultative status” at the United Nations. Christophe Barbey is the representative at the UN who carries out whatever privileges this allows CPTI.

CPTI dissolved at its meeting in 2013 with the intention of reforming in another host nation under the same name. That, and the deaths of two board members, disrupted the already fraught group, and they’ve been struggling to find their footing ever since.

The group has only a tangential relationship with war tax resistance, though some of its members are war tax resisters. The group is mostly composed of representatives of various national “peace tax”-promoting groups, and it hopes to somehow convince some authority in the United Nations to declare that this form of conscientious objection to military taxation is a universal human right.