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Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Co., 2010, pp.250–255: “Race suicide” loomed as an issue “fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country”. For Roosevelt, this was not a matter of workers … Continue reading
In these final hours of this year I’d like to recollect on some of the notable events, the highs and lows we experienced, and to share one last victory before hitting the town tonight.2010 was defined by the struggle against racist legislative attacks …
Continue reading at Fires never extinguished: A blog of the Phoenix Class War Council …
A quote to-day from Chapter 23 of one of my Christmas presents — In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent’s delightful book on artificial languages, their inventors, and the communities that (sometimes) sustain them.
We should admire [the inventors of artificial languages] for their raw diligence, not because hard work is a virtue in itself, but because they took their ideas about language as far as they could go and really put them to the test. Who hasn’t at one time or another casually suggested that we would be better off if words had more exact meanings? Or if people paid more attention to logic when they talked? How many have unthinkingly swooned at the
magicof Chinese symbols or blamed acrimony between nations on language differences? We don’t take responsibility for these fleeting assumptions, and consequently we don’t suffer for them. The language inventors do, and consequently they did. If we pay attention to the successes and failures of the language inventors, we can learn their hard-earned lessons for free.We can also gain a deeper appreciation for natural language and the messy qualities that give it so much flexibility and power, and that make it so much more than a simple communication device. The ambiguity and lack of precision allow it to serve as an instrument of thought formulation, of experimentation and discovery. We don’t have to know exactly what we mean before we speak; we can figure it out as we go along. Or not. We can talk just to talk, to be social, to feel connected, to participate. At the same time natural language still works as an instrument of thought transmission, one that can be made extremely precise and reliable when we need it to be, or left loose and sloppy when we can’t spare the time or effort.
When it is important that misunderstandings be avoided, we have access to the same mechanism that allowed Shirley McNaughton’s students to make use of the vague and imprecise Blissymbols, or that allows deaf people to improvise an international sign language—negotiation. We can ask questions, check for signs of confusion, repeat ourselves in multiple ways. More important, we have access to something that language inventors have typically disregarded or even disdained—
mereconventional agreement, a shared culture in which definitions have been established by habit. It is convention that allows us to approach a Loglan level of precision in academic and scientific papers or legal documents. Of course to benefit from the precision you must bein onthe conventional agreements on which those modes of communication depend. That’s why when specialists want to communicate with a general or lay audience—those who don’t know the conventions—they have to move back toward the techniques of negotiation: slowing down, answering questions, explaining terms, illustrating with examples. […]When language inventors try to bypass convention—to make a language that is
self-explanatoryoruniversal—they either make a less efficient communications tool, one that shifts too much of the burden to negotiation, like Blissymbolics, or take away too much flexibility by over-determining meaning, like Wilkins’s system did. When they try to take away culture, the place where linguistic conventions are made, they have to substitute something else—like the six-hundred-page book of rules that define Lojban, and that, to date, no human has been able to learn well enough to comfortably engage in the type of conversation that any second-semester language class should be able to handle.There are types of communication, such as the
languageof music, that may allow us to access some kind of universal meaning or emotion, but give us no way to say,I left my purse in the car.There are unambiguous systems, such as computer programming languages, that allow us to instruct a machine to perform a certain task, but we must be so explicit about meanings we can normally trust to inference or common sense that it can take hours or days of programming work to achieve even the simplest results. Natural languages may be less universal than music and less precise than programming languages, but they are far more versatile, and useful in our everyday lives, than either.Ambiguity, or fuzziness of meaning, is not a flaw of natural language but a feature that gives it flexibility and that, for whatever reason, suits our minds and the way we think. Likewise, the fact that languages depend on arbitrary convention or cultural habit is not a flaw but a feature that allows us to rein in the fuzziness by establishing agreed-upon meanings at different levels of precision. Language needs its
flawsin order to do the enormous range of things we use it for.
—Arika Okrent (2009), In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. ISBN 978-0-385-52788-0. 256-258.
Something important to remember: we are, after all, so often calling for clarity in language (whether as philosophers or political radicals or…) and when we do that it’s often easy to think that what we need is language that is perfectly clear. But this is a will-o’-the-wisp; what is interesting and important is clarification as a practice — not the ex ante features of a language or a text, but the process of a conversation.
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.
How can volunteering in an IRS-sponsored program and helping people file their tax returns be a useful thing for war tax resisters to consider? When those tax returns overwhelmingly result in refunds that take money back from the government and give it to lower-income people.
The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (or VITA) program enlists ordinary people like you and me to help people — typically people with low incomes — fill out their income tax returns. The individual sites are run by a variety of non-governmental organizations, but the program itself is sponsored by the IRS, which also provides some funding.
Most of the people who get assistance with their returns from the VITA program qualify for refunds (for instance, in 2004, returns filed through the program brought in $66 million in additional federal taxes, but paid out $996 million in refunds). Some of these people, in the absence of this program, either would not file for their refunds or would not know how best to take advantage of the credits and deductions that make the refunds possible.
In particular, millions of households in the United States that qualify for the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit fail to apply for it either because they do not know about the credit (or that they qualify for it) or because they are overwhelmed by the paperwork involved.
A volunteer with the VITA program may, by doing so, redirect tens of thousands of dollars from the U.S. Treasury into the pockets of lower-income people. As one war tax resister put it: “The harder I work the longer the Sheriff of Nottingham has to keep his hands in the air as I pull coins from his purse.”
There are far more people who need help filing their returns than there are VITA volunteers. You don’t have to be an income tax wizard — the IRS provides free training, and you can also volunteer to help in ways that don’t directly involve tax preparation if you really don’t want to go anywhere near a 1040.
This free training can also be useful to people who want to be tax resistance counselors, or who just want to learn more about the IRS-approved methods of keeping their money out of the government’s hands.
Each client brings in a different set of tax challenges, some of which would probably be difficult for seasoned tax professionals to wrap their minds around, but volunteers do their best to come up with complete and accurate returns based on the information they have to work with.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any centralized resource you can go to in order to find out how to volunteer in your area. You may have do do some on-line searching and keep track of volunteer postings in your neighborhood. The IRS may put up a partial list of sites at this page. You can also try calling your local IRS office, or the national IRS tax assistance number at 1-800-829-1040. Training classes typically begin around December or January, while the actual tax return preparation and filing peaks around March and early April.
It would be natural for war tax resisters to have mixed feelings about cooperating with the IRS, even when this cooperation is in service of taking money out of the hands of the warfare state and giving it back to people. One volunteer resister wrote:
I have conflicting feelings about it. On the one hand, just about everybody I work with is getting a refund, and the sum of my work helps take money from the U.S. Treasury, with the money going back to families who have had it taken from them all year in the form of FICA and federal income tax withholding.
On the other hand, it requires me to collaborate in the tax filing system in an uncomfortable way. And to some extent I participate in the IRS’s attempt to recast itself from a bullying olympian of larceny into some sort of social welfare agency — “look at us giving money to the poor!”
It might seem like an even better idea for a resister to volunteer for the VITA program and then bend the rules to take even more money in refunds for clients than the law explicitly allows.
You can certainly choose to look the other way when your clients make unlikely claims that seem as though they might be in the service of tax evasion. But it would not be ethical to make your clients take risks on your behalf by getting creative with their forms on your own. For example, some people who file returns through VITA are applying for citizenship or for asylum, and it is important to them that they file lawful and honest returns so as not to jeopardize that process.
The Earned Income Tax Credit provides additional money to low-income people who have a small amount of declared earned income. Because of this, some low-income people who earn their money in the underground economy may be motivated to try to bring their income above-ground. This could have the effect of weakening the underground economy and thereby making more of the economy vulnerable to taxation. By volunteering for VITA, you are helping people to apply for this credit.
There’s a good interview with Kathy Kelly up at Waging Nonviolence. It includes a bit on her tax resistance:
JMR: Why did you decide to become a war-tax refuser?
KK: When it dawned on me that my neighbors didn’t have food, that the youngsters would be remarkable if they made it though their teenage years, and that people in my neighborhood were sleeping in abandoned buildings. There’s no way I was going to go to a teaching job and spend much of my teaching day trying to teach youngsters about opposition, radical opposition to nuclear weaponry and then take a third of my income and then pay for nuclear weapons and the rest of it. It wasn’t even a question once I realized, and I thought “Of course! What a relief! I don’t have to pay those taxes.” I never will pay those taxes and since the day that I first made that determination, there hasn’t been a doubt in my mind. I will never pay federal income tax.
Empiezan a llegar los cedulones de desalojo [uruguay]: EMPIEZAN A LLEGAR LOS CEDULONES DE...
So, what has 2010 been all about? This year saw the ruling class put the recession behind them and the “recovery” – clawing back and shoring up the power structures of capitalism. It gave the working class austerity, to pay for that recovery. And it ha…
Get On The Right Track. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-12-22). I am an anarchist. I am not trying to make government function more efficiently. I am trying to dismantle government while minimizing the harm to people caught in its machinery.
(Linked Friday 2010-12-31.)
The recent very suspicious death of Phoenix police Sgt. Sean Drenth (as yet unsolved) and October’s outrageous murder of unarmed Phoenix resident Daniel Rodriguez in his own home by Officer Richard Chrisman provides me an opportunity to revisit some of…
Continue reading at Fires never extinguished: A blog of the Phoenix Class War Council …
From the Record Courier: Dec 30, 2010... Deputy Corrections Director Greg Cox will take over that department from Howard Skolnik.Cox came to Nevada from Illinois in 2003 and has served as warden both at High Desert and Southern Desert state prisons in Nevada....
San Diego native Jim Miller heads up the coast to give a reading from his new novel, Flash, at Modern Times in SF! Check the book out — Mike Davis called it a “remarkable novel … nothing less than a secret history of southern California—a radical past that might yet redeem our future.” How can you resist that?