California Anarchoblogs

Some links that have whizzed by my screen in recent days:

War Tax Resisters

• A new edition of The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual, a project of Strike Debt! has a chapter on Tax Debt: The Certainty of Debt and Taxes that was partially inspired by NWTRCC’s material on the subject. (There was some idea-swapping between the Strike Debt crew and war tax resisters at the NWTRCC national gathering in New York last fall.)
• William Ruhaak of has penned a piece on war tax resistance for Pax Christi U.S.A.’s blog. He invites readers who are struggling with their consciences over the issue of paying for war with their taxes to begin by writing and sharing a “statement of conscience.”
• Esther Epp-Tiessen, of Ottawa’s branch of the Mennonite Central Committee, addresses war tax resistance as protest and as conscientious objection:

  Do we use our limited resources of time and money primarily to advance the idea of war tax resistance and a legal peace tax fund for conscientious objectors? Or do we use those resources to speak to the larger policy framework and ethos? To put it crassly, do we advocate for special accommodations for the few? Or do we confront the system that says peace can be built through war and military force?

• Martin Newell has engaged in a variety of anti-war civil disobedience actions, and earlier this month he was sentenced to 28 days in prison for refusing to pay the fines for his previous convictions. He explained:

  Jesus taught us to love not just our neighbours but also our enemies. He showed us by his life and example how to resist evil not with violence but with loving, persistent, firm, active non-violence. It was this revolutionary patience on behalf of the poor and oppressed that, humanly speaking, led to him being arrested, tried, tortured and executed by the powers that be. The acts of witness that resulted in the fines I have refused to pay were a form of conscientious objection. Refusing to pay them is a continuation of that objection. It is a privilege to be able to follow on the path that led Jesus to the way of the cross and resurrection.

Italy

While everyone was busy watching the kerfluffle in Crimea, the people of Venice voted to restore the Venetian Republic and secede from Italy. Italy itself is disregarding the vote and claiming that Venice has no authority to secede. So the movement is moving on to stronger measures. They are taking ideas from other seperatist movements: The referendum itself was inspired by a similar effort in Scotland, and they plan now to redirect their federal taxes to the local government, which is a technique they picked up from the Catalan nationalists.

Some are even taking some inspiration from the “Tea Party” apparently. Check out this flashy video:

Netherlands

Christiaan Elderhorst writes about the recent imprisonment of Toine Manders for his work counseling tax avoidance:

Toine Manders works at the Haags Juristen College (Hague Lawyers Board) and specializes in tax avoidance. Manders refers to tax avoidance as a moral duty. Tax revenue is used by the state to pay for war, prisons, the militarization of the police force and the regulatory agencies which constantly privilege big business. This moral duty is connected the Haags Juristen College’s former business practice which was to help individuals avoid the military draft. Avoiding the draft and avoiding taxes are both ways by which personal contribution to state oppression and war is reduced. Calling this a moral duty is not a far-fetched idea.

Austria

Gerhard Höller, a tobacconist from Wagrain, has launched a one-man tax strike.

“Something has to happen at the grassroots, so that those on top notice how much discontent there already is among the population,” says Höller. He was actually a completely apolitical man, he stressed, but the scandals and the squandering of tax money — “from Eurofighters to the Mortgage Banks” — had gotten on his last nerve. “Enough is enough.”

When I last visited the site with the article covering Höller’s case, it had a reader poll attached to it that asked people to give their opinion of tax resistance as a protest tactic:

Venezuela

I’m hearing a lot of buzz in the twitterverse about tax resistance as a possible component of the ongoing demonstrations in Venezuela, but I haven’t found much more solid information yet. Here’s an example:

England

Another council tax rebel has been jailed. Ross Longhurst stopped paying his council tax in protest against budget cuts:

“These particularily impact on poor people,” he told the court. “We live in a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”

He claimed there were 20,000 people in Nottingham in council tax arrears.

“I refuse to pay in solidarity with and in support of the victims of austerity measures. I encourage everyone in court, including the magistrates, don't pay up.”

Magistrates explained to Longhurst, who arrived with a large group of supporters, that he was likely to go to prison if he refused to pay. Justices even urged him to consult with a duty solicitor. But he confidently said he he had spoken with a lawyer and he did not think there was any need for him to see another one.

Another account adds that “[a]s he was led down to the cells by prison guards he was applauded by his supporters and one could be heard shouting: ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful.’”

One of his supporters, who did not want to be named, said afterwards: “It is a travesty that he has been jailed. It is disgusting, he is an elderly man who was trying to make a stand, he was trying to make the area a better place and this is why he is now behind bars. He has worked and paid council tax, but as all of us do, he got sick of it, he was braver than everyone because he stood up for what he thought was right.”

If you’re curious about war tax resistance, you might want to check out this upcoming “Google Hangout” on the topic:

A recent pie chart from the War Resisters League shows that even as we're told the Pentagon is getting cuts in its budget, a full 45% of the federal budget is still going to the military and to U.S. warmongering.

War tax resistance is one way we can redirect our money, time, and efforts away from the war machine and toward a better, more peaceful future.

Ari, Katherine, and Shaolida will discuss why and how they practice war tax resistance — refusing to pay federal income taxes that support the war machine. Followed by Q&A.

The hour-long hangout will start this Thursday, March 27, at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

There’s a new Statistics of Income Bulletin out, with preliminary numbers from the 2012 filing season that show the number and percentage of “lucky duckies” who file tax returns showing that they owed no federal income tax all year:

The list of upcoming Tax Day actions in the U.S. is beginning to fill out.

Here’s the list NWTRCC is putting together. The Global Day of Action on Military Spending (the previous day) is also assembling a list.

And just in time for events like these the War Resisters League has just updated their popular “pie chart” flyer which is meant to show the percentage of your income tax dollar that goes to military spending.

The chart is based on Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2015, but from what I hear, nobody really expects his budget to even come up for a vote. Instead, a divided Congress will wrangle their own budget together. Knowing that his budget would be ignored by Congress, Obama decided to use it more as a public relations vehicle than an actual budget.

Part of this public relations included Pentagon budget “cuts” which, though they’re the sort of “cuts” that always seem to leave the budget bigger than it was last year, and though they are accompanied by an anticipated supplemental slush-fund that isn’t part of the budget, still raised howls from the usual warmongers. In any case, the real budget Congress passes is predicted to stuff all of the usual military pork back in.

So the “pie chart,” which is based on the for-show Obama budget, as bad as it looks, probably understates how dreadful the budget will end up looking.

The newsletter of Pax Christi (“International Catholic Movement for Peace”) has an article on a new variety of war tax resistance:

From local to global… funding of the arms trade

The truth can be simply stated: everyone in the West Midlands who pays Council Tax is funding the activities of the military-industrial complex, led by the likes of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.

As a long-term resident of Coventry, I [Paul McGowan] was well used to hearing the place described as “the city of Peace and Reconciliation.” But the contradiction between this reputation and the discovery that Coventry is one of the seven District Councils of the West Midlands who together founded, and now run, the West Midlands Pension Fund (WMPF), and invests £90 million in arms-dealers, has altered everything I thought I ever knew about the city. When the discovery was shared with the Deanery Justice and Peace Group, we knew we had to act. 2013 became the year of the WMPF campaign.

April 15^th was the Global Day of Action on Arms Spending. Thanks to the interactive map produced by CAAT, we knew that we had two giants of the international arms business operating in our city. (No, we didn’t know beforehand!) These were General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. We picked on General Dynamics because it was bigger than Northrop Grumman, and closer to where most of us lived, made our placards and banners, informed the local media, and set up a two-hour silent protest outside the factory. One of the free papers gave it a good write-up and a photo. General Dynamics refused to comment. A few weeks later, however, General Dynamics closed its Coventry factory. It just shows what can happen when do-gooders are allowed to get their hands on pieces of card and felt-tip pens!

In May, we sent a letter to all Councillors, explaining the background to the campaign and asking for their support. No one replied. Several members of the group wrote to their Councillors, asking for meetings. We took advantage of the installation of the new Lord Mayor to hold another demonstration as the Councillors processed ceremonially into the Cathedral. Even if they hadn’t read their letters, at least they had seen us.

Over the next four weeks we collected signatures for a petition highlighting our aims — divestment from arms companies and an undertaking to work towards an arms-free city. 424 signatures were collected and presented to the Council (by a Conservative Councillor) on 25^th June. The petition was handled in accordance with council procedures, but because of the summer holidays, it was 21^st October before it reached the relevant sub-committee.

In the meantime, we demonstrated silently at the Council House before each monthly meeting of the full Council, and individual Councillors were pressed for their views on specific questions, such as whether an investment in Textron (cluster bombs) reflected well on the City’s image. A further opportunity came on 6^th August, Hiroshima Memorial Day. For a quarter of a century, this has featured a ceremony held in Coventry Cathedral attended by the Lord Mayor. This year, it contained a silent demonstration to draw attention to the financial support which the WMPF gives to companies directly involved in the nuclear weapons programmes of Britain, France, and the U.S.A.

There are other funds across the U.K. run by many of the local councils of the major towns and cities, again funded from Council Tax, e.g. West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. Many of us rely on pensions built up in this way, but we can begin to dismantle the existing arrangements and build new ones. With total assets of £90 billion, local government pension schemes can exert massive influence on big business and big politics, of which the arms trade is certainly part.

As we start 2014, we know that the petition has been through the bureaucratic process, and turned down. I have it in writing from our Pension Fund representative that he regards this as the end of the matter. Sadly, for him, this is not the case. The struggle continues.

Another note by Paul McGowan in the same issue details the research Pax Christi has done into which companies manufacture “cluster munitions,” which have been outlawed by a Convention that was signed by the U.K.. Excerpt:

By comparing the data in the IKV–Pax Christi report with the latest statement from the West Midlands Pension Fund on its Equity Holdings, it has been possible to draw up a list of firms known for certain to be still producing cluster bombs, and receiving direct investments of Council Tax money. In addition, and this is entirely new for us, we now know which financial institutions in receipt of direct WMPF investments are themselves lending money and managing the assets of cluster bomb manufacturers such as Alliant Techsystems (U.S.A.), Hanwha Corporation (South Korea), Singapore Technologies Engineering, and Textron (U.S.A.).

This throws a little more light on Hedley Lester’s refusal to pay his council tax, which I reported on last month.

From the 18 March 1843 Monmouthshire Merlin:

Rebecca and Her Daughters

More Gates Destroyed.

Monday, Rebecca and her daughters appeared at the Plaindealings and Cotts Gates, in the neighbourhood of Narbeth. It is said that the party mustered about 100 strong, and in each instance the gates were completely demolished in the very short space of ten minutes. The Pembrokeshire grand jury have returned a true bill of felony against Thomas and David Howell, two of Rebecca’s daughters.

This may be older news than it appears to be, as the Pembrokeshire assizes had already acquitted Thomas Howell and David Howell on 8 March. On the other hand, Henry Tobit Evans’s book on the Rebecca Riots puts the destruction of the Plaindealings and Cott’s Lane gates as having taken place on 29 March — eleven days after the date of this newspaper. Again, it seems like it is going to be difficult to arrive at an accurate chronology of the Rebeccaite activity.

Here are some excerpts from a recent heartwarming article from Spain:

One student donates to the social struggle an award presented by [Education Minister] Dolores Serrat

Alba Pedro, a student of Computer and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Zaragoza who yesterday received one of six Student Prizes (education and values) issued by the Social Council of the Aragonese campus, will donate the amount received (500 euros) to “a resistance fund,” which is a temporary institution based on support and solidarity used to alleviate specific economic problems.

The academic, who received in a green shirt [a symbol of protests against education budget reductions] against cuts the prize from the hands of the Minister of Education, said that “my outcomes, my effort, and my very existence have been possible thanks to all those who came before me. I would not be here without a public education and the incredible teachers that I have had, who have not only formed me academically, but have inculcated in me enormously worthy and noble values,” he elaborated later in a statement.

The recipient is the antimilitarist activist collective Mambrú, which carries out campaigns such as War Tax Resistance, which will begin at the end of this month with the objective of not accepting previous declarations that the Treasury submitted for the income tax return and then redirecting the funds from military spending to social projects.

You can read Pedro’s full statement (in Spanish) at this link

I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my screen in recent weeks:

War Tax Resistance News

• Erica Weiland penned a thoughtful piece on War Tax Resistance as Self-Care at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.

• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is right around tax day (April 15) again this year, and the coalition is making plans for a variety of protest actions.

U.S. Tax Law News

• If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the U.S., you’re supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J. Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor” though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid SE/payroll taxes entirely.”
• NPR looked into Why More Americans Are Renouncing U.S. Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes, and how the U.S. tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.

Tax Resistance in Spain

• Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes. Excerpts:

  Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes, created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than ever it has become indispensible to put an end to the particracy of lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.

  It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the exclusive benefit of the people.

• Meanwhile the number of towns in Catalonia that have stopped paying their taxes to the federal government, sending them to the regional government instead has risen to 54. This is currently only a sort of quasi-tax-resistance, as the regional government dutifully forwards these taxes to the central government, but it is part of a strategy of strengthening the regional tax agency in anticipation of eventually making the buck stop there in “the transition to statehood.”

Tax Resistance in France

• Yes, they’re still burning “ecotax” portals in Brittany. The latest one was partially burned on the night of the 5^th, which damaged it enough that the authorities ordered it to be removed.

A Look Back at the Poll Tax Resistance Campaign

• Chris Robinson has published a series of reminiscences of the campaign against the poll tax that brought down Thatcher’s reign in Great Britain:
  1. The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign
  2. A Paler Shade of Red
  3. Get Militant
  4. Revolution Down Below
  5. The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
  6. The Art of Self-Defence
  7. Demo
  8. Victory
• I also found some archives about the poll tax resistance effort at an Anarchist Communist Federation website.

Tax Resistance in Greece

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement won’t quit either. Thousands of Greeks marched at Afidnes and raised the toll gates there last month.

Tax Resistance in the Dominican Republic

• I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commericial unions are squabbling over whether to support a business strike in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.

Tax Resistance in Argentina

• Last month, twenty “productores, industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly: “manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads. The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their businesses impossible to operate.

Tax Resistance in Great Britain

• “A mother of three is so incensed by the Isle of Man’s new sewerage charge she has pledged to go to prison rather than pay it.”