California Anarchoblogs

Human minds are subject to predictable optical illusions, which can turn concentric circles into apparent interlocking spirals, make still things appear to be moving, and so forth.

There are also auditory illusions, like the Shepard Scale, which appears to be constantly ascending or descending in pitch while in reality it just cycles through the same set of notes:

People are also vulnerable to regular, predictable, remarkable flaws in the ways we predict events, handle statistical data and uncertainty, remember our own lives, assess the quality of our information, anticipate what will make us happy, and so forth. These cognitive illusions are only recently undergoing rigorous exploration, and Daniel Kahneman is one of the top names in the field.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman introduces his model for understanding these illusions. Roughly: people have two cognitive systems for evaluating information and making decisions — System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, subconscious, and automatic, but is prone to some easily-exploitable biases and illusions. System 2 is slow, must be deliberately invoked, works consciously, and saps mental energy; while it can fill in some of the gaps where System 1 fails, it has some blind spots of its own, and can be over-reliant on the snap judgments of System 1 as the basis for its own decisions.

The ways in which our minds can be persuaded to fail to make the right decisions are not at all subtle. For instance, people who hold one hand in a painfully-cold container of water for 60 seconds before removing it, and at another time hold the other hand in a painfully cold container of water for 90 seconds that gets slightly less-painfully cold during the last 30 seconds, will later report — more often than not — that they would prefer to repeat the second of these painful experiences over the first one, even though the second one includes just as much pain and even adds to it.

Then there is the “halo effect” by which if we find something to be good or bad in some quality, we tend to bias our beliefs about its other qualities in the same direction whether or not we have any good reasons to do so. For instance, when Claire Wolfe reports:

When I was a kid during the cold war, I had this image of the Soviet Union as a place that was always gloomy — perpetually leaden skies, perpetually leaden people, gray and brown garb, no joy. Even as a young adult I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that even in darkest Siberia they had sunny days. Or that Russians loved their country. Or wore bright colors. Or that they sometimes sang and laughed and danced and joked.

Even now, I have to make a conscious mental adjustment to picture unfree places having sunshine or joy. Or residents who burn with love for them.

Wolfe is describing this “halo effect.” Her perception of the Soviet Union as a repressive tyranny subconsciously colored her ideas of its beauty, colorfulness, and the capacity for joy in the people who lived there. The converse of this is that when we suffer from this illusion, we may look around at our beautiful, colorful, joyful surroundings and blind ourselves to the potential of unseen tyranny.

There are many such illusions, and Kahneman describes several in detail. Many more, one suspects, remain to be mapped out.

The marketing and propaganda industries are of course eagerly studying this new research into the various ways in which they can trick us into parting with more of our resources or doing more of their bidding while receiving less in return. (I was not surprised, but a little alarmed, to learn that much of Kahneman’s research has been done with the support of the Israeli military, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the [U.S.] Department of Defense.) We, the intended victims, are much slower to educate ourselves. Perhaps books like this will help.

I missed this when I was first composing this post, but Slate ran an article a couple of days ago about how the halo effect helps determine whom American voters elect as the U.S. government’s president. It turns out that looks are very important. Indeed, if you know what traits to look for, you can do very well at predicting the results of elections where you know nothing at all about the candidates except that you have a good head-shot photograph of them.

Here is some more news from the war tax resistance movement in Spain. This comes from the Canal Solidario site (translation mine):

First signs of support for the work presented by the Coordinator. Thanks “Blanquita”!

The group Coordinadora d’ONGD i altres Moviments Solidaris de Lleida [Coordination of Development NGOs and other Solidarity Movements of Lleida] participates in the Military Awards

The first conclusion from the awards organized by the Ministry of Defense is that the economic crisis has not reached everywhere. More than €45,000 in prizes for praising the activity of the Spanish military and the military life.

These figures outrage, but in reality represent only the crumbs from the table of military spending in Spain, which exceeded €17 billion in 2011.

Seeing as cuts in social spending (in cooperation, education, health, …) are emphasized in all administrations, we will try our luck in the “Military Awards.” The work we are presenting in the competition is “Tax Resistance, disarm your taxes,” and our dream is that, if the work sticks as a painting, we will win the prize for general painting (€7,000) in order to spend this money to spread the word about the tax resistance campaign that we are about to launch. You can support us on Twitter using the hashtag #EjercitoSinCrisis [economic crisis-free military]. Wish us luck!

Daily military spending in Spain: €47.24 million

During 2011 there was €17,244,750,000 of military spending (source: Report 7: The truth about 2011 Spanish military spending, Delas Center). Military activity is justified, even in times of crisis and social cuts, by the false idea of “security.” But, what if we would address international problems not from a military perspective but from the view of peaceful conflict management? Fewer humanitarian wars and more serious policies.

One option is tax resistance: the readiness to refuse to collaborate with the government in the costs of preparing for war and the maintenance of the military. It consists of diverting, in a simple way, a part of this tax to a project or organization that promotes the culture of peace.

During the Crimean War the British government hiked the income tax in order to raise funds to carry on the fight. This led to a debate amongst British Quakers over whether this income tax increase was a “war tax” that they should refuse to voluntarily pay.

Income Tax.

To the Editors of The British Friend

Esteemed Friends, — Doubtless many Friends have seen and read the Act of Parliament, passed in the last session, for increasing the Income Tax, yet I should think by far the greater majority have not done so; especially as the act was not passed until the holding of the Yearly Meeting. I have thought if the accompanying extracts were published, a more extensive and correct knowledge of the tenor of the act would be obtained, and might lead Friends to consider whether it be right for them to pay such tax.

If these views coincide with yours, the insertion of the accompanying will be esteemed.

William Wood.
The Retreat, York, 1^st Month, 24^th, 1855.

Extracts from the Act passed in 6^th Month, last.

We, &c., the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament assembled, towards raising the supplies to defray the expenses of the just and necessary war in which your Majesty is engaged, have freely and voluntarily resolved to give and grant unto your Majesty the rate and duty hereinafter mentioned.

6^th. This Act shall commence and take effect from and after the 5^th day of April, 1854; and, together with the duty therein contained, shall continue in force during the present War; and until the 6^th day of April next after the ratification of a Definitive Treaty of Peace, and no longer.

At the London Yearly Meeting, in May, 1854, this war tax was on the agenda, as The British Friend reported:

An attempt was also made to elicit some authoritative opinion in reference to the Income-tax, this having been imposed, as expressly stated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the purpose of enabling this country to carry on the war. The question raised was, whether, as a Society, we could, in consistency with our well known testimony against all war, pay this assessment. Reference was made to the minuteness with which the Society inquired into infractions of our Testimony against tithes, till it seemed impossible to discover, in some instances, whether they had the most remote bearing on our Testimony in this respect. In the Income-tax, however, were we to pay it unhesitatingly, it appeared to be the opinion of the two or three individuals who introduced the question, that we should be decidedly violating one of the most important of our Society’s testimonies; and it was therefore desirable that the Yearly Meeting should pronounce distinctly what was the duty of our members in regard to the payment of this impost. The whole subject was at last referred to the Large Committee; and, to allow of its having time for interchange of sentiment, the meeting adjourned about half-past six, when the said committee came together, and sat till after eight o’clock, having before it the consideration of the returns of tithe distraints, &c., and subsequently the disposal of the question last referred to, when the conclusion arrived at was, to frame a paragraph expressly bearing upon it in the general Epistle.

I found what I think were the “general” epistles for 1854 through 1856 on-line. The last two are vague on the subject of war taxes, which suggests that those meetings were unable to come to a consensus on recommending a particular course of action. The 1855 epistle merely noted that the meeting had “been introduced into very solemn and painful feelings” and had issued “an Appeal to our fellow-countrymen on this deeply affecting subject” (of the war, not of war taxes) and recommended that Friends should “so watch over their own spirits that they may be preserved from in any way countenancing the war-spirit either in conduct or conversation,” which could only be interpreted as a call to war tax resistance by those who were already convinced along those lines. The 1856 epistle was even weaker: because the Crimean War was over by that time, most of the references to war were thanksgiving for the end of the latest one.

The 1854 epistle was more explicit, saying that:

no plea of necessity or of policy, however urgent or peculiar, can avail to release either individuals or nations, from the paramount allegiance which they owe unto Him who hath said, “Love your enemies.” … Let us honestly examine our own hearts, whether we are ourselves so brought under the holy government of the Prince of Peace, as to be willing to suffer wrong and take it patiently, and even, if required, to sacrifice our all for the sake of Him and his precious cause.…

Under existing circumstances, we would entreat our friends everywhere to be on their guard against entering into any engagements in business, which would be likely to involve them in transactions connected more or less directly with the maintenance of war or of a military establishment.

Still not a straightforward advocacy of war tax resistance, but more in harmony with it.

And it came to pass in 1896 that there went out an ordinance from Her Majesty the Queen of England that all the territories adjacent to the Colony of Sierra Leone should be taxed.

This tax, though similar to ones that had been successfully imposed in other imperial “protectorates,” was resisted, and led to a violent rebellion and then to a crackdown in which dozens of Hut Tax rebels were hanged and hopes for the independence of Sierra Leone from foreign rule were, for decades, frustrated.

Most of the summary I’m giving here today is based on the Report By Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Correspondence on the subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1898, issued on this date in 1899, which is very critical of the colonial administration, but which necessarily has a pro-imperialist bias (the Commissioner’s commission came from Her Imperial Highness after all).

The British coalesced the coastal African colony of Sierra Leone, and its adjoining inland “protectorate,” by negotiating with individual kings of the many small political groups native to the area. These negotiations usually culminated in a treaty signed by the local king and the colonial governor that ceded certain rights over territory to the British in return for protection (including mediation and sometimes military intervention in inter-group conflicts) and often a periodic payment by the empire to the native king.

The British also made some effort to combat the still-ongoing slave trade in the area. This, to the residents, was a mixed blessing depending on whether they had been prey or predator. The fortunes of some local elites had been made in the slave trade when it was still being encouraged by Britain, and slavery had also become a local institution — with a large percentage of the population of the protectorate being slaves. The British by this time were actively suppressing the slave trade, having had a change of heart about their own former pro-slavery politicies about a century prior, but they didn’t try to abolish slavery in the protectorate or to free those currently enslaved there. However because the British legal system did not recognize the validity of slavery, it wouldn’t treat enslaved people as property to be reclaimed if they did manage to escape to a British-controlled area, and some of the kings complained that their slaves were taking advantage of this to escape.

The British used this half-hearted effort to combat slavery in Sierra Leone as a moral prop, much in the same way that modern American imperalists in the middle east will pretend to care about women’s education in Afghanistan or the rights of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq when the occasion calls for crocodile tears.

Sierra Leone’s importance to the British was in part because it was “the only suitable coaling station England possesses on the west coast of Africa.” It does not seem to have been otherwise a great source of benefit for England, not having known mineral resources of much use then, or agricultural exports worth getting excited about; but in the Monopoly game that was the imperialist scramble for Africa, it was better to have poor colonies than no colonies at all. Before the Hut Tax that was scheduled to go into effect in 1898, the colony’s revenue came from customs duties.

The British colonial rulers had deputized some natives to be imperial “Frontier Police,” but in a classic imperial snafu, these more-or-less completely unsupervised police, because they had no particular investment in the British project or the reputation of the empire, tended to use their authority to settle old scores, shake people down, and take untoward sexual liberties with those they lorded over. There seemed also to be instances of gangs impersonating Frontier Police in order to assume these same advantages. Because they did all this as de facto representatives of The Queen of England, and often represented themselves as imperial judges and legislators as well as cops, their abuse or assumption of power reflected back on the Empire and made it harder for it to get respect.

In addition, the colonial government relied on the Frontier Police when it was trying to collect the tax or to take reprisals against tax-resisting groups or kings. Even worse, when the colonial government justified the tax to the people in the area harassed by the Frontier Police, it did so by saying the money was necessary in order to finance this largely unappreciated police force.

The 1896 Protectorate Ordinance that instituted the Hut Tax also gave the colonial administration greater powers than before — and by fiat, marking a striking change in attitude by the empire toward the kings that it had previously been negotiating with. Provisions of the new ordinance included “limiting the forensic jurisdiction of the Chiefs [kings]… enabling the Governor to unmake and make Chiefs, to banish persons from any part of the territories without any charge and without opportunity of a hearing or defence, and… imposing taxes”

Almost immediately as word of the ordinance got out, petitions came in from a variety of groups asking that it be rescinded. The Hut Tax in particular was described as onerous and impossible for poor people and villages to pay, as well as an outrage against the institution of private property: “our own true fear is that paying for our huts naturally means no right to our country” (or, as another aboriginal political scientist patiently explained: “Paying for a thing in our country means that you had no original right to it; so it seems as if they had no right to their houses.”)

When the government, disregarding these complaints, began collecting the tax, perhaps because it had been forewarned by all of this petitioning it “came to the conclusion that the exercise of force, peremptory, rapid, and inflexible, was the element to be relied on in making the scheme of taxation a success.” This was because without “a good show of force in the shape of Police in each of the districts in which the collection is to take place, the natives may passively resist the authorities collecting the tax, and do all in their power to evade it.”

Colonial district commissioners would summon together the kings in a district, ask them to pay up, then arrest them and hold them hostage if they refused or were unable — imprisoning them until they or their subjects coughed up the tax as a ransom, or sentencing them to hard labor for their refusal. These acts, though done by colonial district commissioners and not by the even more arbitrary Frontier Police, were no less extra-legal (the law provided only for property levies against non-payers, not arrest or criminal prosecution, except in the case of fraud in which case the punishment was only to be a fine). The commissioner who wrote the report on the Hut Tax War says bluntly: “The arrests and imprisonments were not legal under the law of the Protectorate Ordinance, or any other law under which the District Commissioner was authorized to act.” Later, this became standard practice for the Frontier Police collectors: (“it seems indeed to have been taken as the proper practice to make the Chief or Headman of the town a prisoner in this way until the tax was paid”).

The humiliation of their kings, far from intimidating the populace, further infuriated them, and convinced them that the ultimate aim of the British was to destroy their own system of governance, take their land, and mine them for exorbitant taxes.

A king named Bai Bureh, in Kasseh, assembled an armed group, called “war-boys” in Chalmers’s report, which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that Chalmers labels “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities” — and thus the Hut Tax War began. Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side. Chalmers is surprisingly sympathetic to the aims of the rebels at this stage, quoting a member of the colonial forces as saying of their own aims, “being unable to arrest him [Bai Bureh], we destroyed his country and that of other Chiefs also, whom we were unable to arrest,” while of the rebels:

The character of the war as on the side of the Native forces, except in two attacks upon Port Lokko and another upon Karene, was defensive, probably the only mode of fighting possible to them as against troops having European organisation. It is well to remember the fact that they waged no warfare except against the troops and Police. There were missionary and trading stations absolutely at their mercy; but there were no plundering raids, and not a trader or missionary was killed, with the exception of the missionary, Mr. Humphreys, who lost his life through persisting in pressing on upon a journey along a particular road against the warnings of the war-men, who told him that they could not permit him to pass, and it even appeared that in killing him the men acted of their own accord, and not by the order of any one in authority. Mr. Elba in narrating his interview with Bai Bureh said that he appeared to be sorry for the occurrence.

The actions of the Imperial troops, on the other hand, resulted in “the laying waste of a country of about thirty miles’ radius round Karene, and the destruction of 97 towns and villages, having an aggregate population of over 44,000.” Chalmers implies that Imperial troops and their Frontier Police allies cut a path of unprovoked and senseless destruction through the territories they passed through during a punitive expedition — murdering, kidnapping children, burning villages — and then falsified their reports to say that they had been responding to attacks by “war-boy” guerrillas.

Meanwhile, tax collectors even in more subdued areas were acting with brutality and impunity: “houses were broken down or burned when the tax was not paid… [or even] after the tax had been paid… Goods were distrained at under values. In many cases where the tax was paid, it was by means of money borrowed at high interest; the Police took whatever they wanted for their own use without payment; they used threats freely, even to use their rifles… it is impossible to do otherwise than conclude that there were very many examples of cruel and flagrant abuse of authority, utterly unsanctioned by the law.”

This in sum convinced many people in Sierra Leone that the British had determined to inflict an all-out, no-quarter-given war on them, and they decided to respond in kind. Over a few days “the male British subjects in Bandajuma, Kwallu, and Sulymah Districts, with few exceptions, were murdered. A number of women also were murdered, and after an order went forth from the leaders staying the killing of women, they were treated as captive slaves. All property belonging to British subjects was plundered…”

This included the English missionaries and missions, which had not before been the objects of hostility. Chalmers notes that “the missionaries at some of the Mendi stations had preached sermons shortly before the outbreak in support of the Hut Tax, and advising the people to pay the tax,” and suggests that possibly “the people considered [that] the missionaries showed by these sermons that they identified themselves with the Government, and had common purpose with the Government in the enforcement of the Hut Tax.”

An interesting section in Chalmers’s report concerns the anarchic instincts of the people of the area and how these were underestimated by the more thoroughly conquered British citizens who took taxation in stride. Excerpts:

[A] tax of the nature of the Hut Tax is unknown in native custom, and… it is highly obnoxious. With a great deal of prevailing loyalty to authority, the native African mind has a strong grasp of the idea of individual liberty, and a tax peremptorily imposed irrespective of the consent of the tax-payer is felt to be derogatory to liberty. Moreover no people has ever welcomed direct taxation or received it even with toleration unless they have become aware that the Government they are required to support brings to them reciprocal advantages worth paying for.

We must accept the fundamental fact that the Chiefs and people of the Hinterland of Sierra Leone have as yet only very slight knowledge of the English Government or its beneficent aims. It has been recognised by many of the Chiefs that the English rule is beneficial inasmuch as it has tended to allay and prevent inter-tribal raids, which are condemned by general native opinion. And they probably have some feeling of security from the hope of English protection if threatened by outside enemies. Beyond these advantages nothing tangible or intelligible has as yet accrued.

The advantages recognised scarcely suggest to the native benefits of a nature which ought to be paid for by compliance with a tax which they regard as oppressive and unjust in itself, and in the peculiar significance attributed to it, viz.: that it implied a taking away of the right of the people in their own country, and a taking away of the right of ownership in the houses, an implied meaning which spread widely and deeply.

It is said that those ideas can be got rid of by explanation. That of course depends on the patience, skill, and success of the officer who undertakes to explain; he would start with a strong prepossession against his arguments. It is true that Chiefs occasionally draw contributions from their people, but these are of the nature of free-will offerings for particular purposes known and approved of by the people, as in the characteristic instance mentioned by Captain Fairtlough — the coronation of a Paramount Chief, or other occasion for festivities. I have found no instance of a Chief attempting to raise anything of the nature of a regularly recurring revenue in this way.

• Chief Henry Tucker, a loyal Chief of the Meudi country, said, “The people are not pleased in paying this tax; they do not know what tax is. The place is newly made Protectorate. I think the Government ought to have given them a little more time to get used to it. Their houses are hardly worth four shillings [the Hut Tax was five shillings]… To us to pay the Hut Tax is quite a strange thing. That discourages them altogether… I knew it would not work smoothly. My mother and father never knew what tax was. People said whoever paid the tax would be killed. That showed very very strong feeling… Chiefs ask their people for contributions. Suppose, for instance, I wanted to visit some other Chief; I would leave it to them. They would give what they could; but to say they must give the Chief so much each year — no!”
• To nearly the like effect are some remarks of Colonel Gore, the Colonial Secretary: “I should have left them a little longer to see the results of civilisation. They are not enlightened enough yet to understand it. It might have been better to wait a little. We are taking all their power away from them now… I do not think they were given long enough to understand it. I do not think they have grasped it.”
• Chief Hanna Modu: “This Hut Tax affair is very great. Our fathers did not know anything about it. If they wanted it, they should have sent a letter to us to meet in one place and say, ‘We wish you to do such a work for us.’”
• Karene Chiefs: “If you come through the King we will do what we can, but not a yearly payment, for that would be the same as a tax… Our forefathers were good friends with the Government. What we hear now as to our own country where our forefathers lived, is that if we want to live in this country we must pay Hut Tax: we have only mud-houses covered with grass; if we want to sleep in that hut we must pay for it. Our forefathers did not sell their country to the Government, it was a friendship; what belongs to us belongs to you as a friend.”
• “If asked for contributions occasionally, we would do what we could.”
• “Government should say, We want you to help us with such an amount, but not to go and say, You must pay… Willing to give as a voluntary contribution; but it would be selling the country if the Government came and peremptorily demanded it.”
• “If Government asks us to give some rice for the Frontier Police; we will do what we are able, but to compel us to pay the Hut Tax, we are not able; if we pay for the house it does not belong to us any more.”

Seems to me they “grasped the results of civilisation” pretty well.

David Chalmers’s report, which amounted to an indictment of the policy of the colonial government, and cast the blame for the war and the massacres that resulted on the ineptitude, clumsiness, brutality, and extralegal overreach of the Hut Tax and its enforcement, was not at all welcomed by the government that commissioned it. The story they wanted to hear was that the Hut Tax War was “the result of an inevitable conflict between ancient barbarism and advancing civilisation,” nobody’s fault but of the child-like natives who, unable to comprehend that the benefits of their colonization would have to be paid for, threw a tantrum in the classic manner of unchristian savages everywhere.

Chalmers died in mid-1900, about a year after his report was presented to Parliament, at which time his report was already being savaged by anticipatory attacks from its targets and their defenders in the British government. The backlash reminded me of what happened more recently when General Antonio Taguba released his insufficiently-whitewashed report on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse.

Chalmers’s recommendations, which largely amounted to treating the people of Sierra Leone with respect to their human dignity — not in repudiation of the imperialist project, but in order to live up both to its oft-pretended ideals of extending the blessings of civilization and to its promise of financial and strategic rewards to the empire — were largely ignored, and the empire doubled-down on its “exterminate the brutes” policy.

From the Journal of the Life and Religious Labors of Thomas Scattergood comes this account from Great Britain on this day in 1796:

Set off pretty early, and rode nine miles to Grange meeting; five men and four women made up the meeting, when it separated for the transaction of business; the queries were read, and it was a very low time. The gallery where we sat appeared tumbling down, and a damp earthen floor. When the query respecting bearing arms and paying fines for war, &c., was read, an old woman openly acknowledged, after her husband said he had not paid such a fine, that she did; and made light of it, concluding it would not stand in her way.

Scattergood was one of those mentioned as having visited Samme Hunt during his imprisonment for tax resistance, in the journal of John Hunt.

He is remembered today as a mental health reformer. A Scattergood Foundation working to improve behavioral health is named after him, as is The Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Healthcare.

In an earlier journal entry, from February 1793, Scattergood showed how he considered the official plunderers in uniform to be common criminals — sinners in need of repentance:

…went to S.M.’s, where we had a religious opportunity, which I hope will not soon be forgotten by either parents or children. This family, amongst many others in these parts, were robbed and spoiled in the time of the late war. Their house was burnt, and one of the children told us, that a man who was instrumental in spoiling their goods, was at meeting last Fourth-day week, in which I had to speak to murderers, thieves, &c., and pointed out to them the necessity of endeavouring to do all in their power to make restitution. The child observed that he seemed much brought down, and his lips quivered.

This would have been somewhere in America — Georgia, I think. Scattergood didn’t leave for Great Britain until the following year.

The Friends’ Intelligencer for this date in 1901 summarized some news from the Woman’s Journal as follows:

Mary Anthony’s Protest

Miss Mary S. Anthony, of Rochester, N.Y., who not long ago subscribed the last $2,000 needed to secure the admission of girls to the University of Rochester, has notified the county treasurer that she will refuse to pay her taxes, on the ground that she is not permitted to vote, and that there should be no taxation without representation. Miss Anthony is that sister of Susan B. Anthony of whom a relative once said, “Susan could always preach, but Mary practices.” In Rochester alone 9,991 women pay taxes on $28,672,974 worth of property.

In answer, it is pointed out that minors, aliens, idiots, and insane persons are taxed, yet not allowed to vote.

Apparently, Anthony later dropped her refusal and decided to pay under protest instead — enclosing letters of protest to the City and County Treasurers’ offices with her checks.

Some years back, Cindy Sheehan, furious at the war that had killed her son, and increasingly upset at government deceit, decided to withdraw her financial support from the federal government by resisting taxes.

She chose to refuse to file returns — completely withdrawing her cooperation from the IRS. The IRS has since called her on the carpet and asked her to tell them details about her assets (so they can decide what to seize). She has also refused to comply with this.

In a recent post on her blog Sheehan discusses her case, and also some of the criticism she has been getting from pro-tax American liberals.

Even in the years that they are trying to collect 105k in back taxes, fines, and interest, I re-invested most of the money I ever made by speaker’s fees, donations, or book sales right back into the movement. Now, I intentionally live simply and don’t own anything the establishment considers of value. If the IRS goes looking for my assets, they will not find anything. If I had some kind of secret trust fund, I certainly wouldn’t be scraping by for rent money every month.

I don’t own anything and I don’t want or even need to own anything that the 1% tells me that I need to own to make my life “worthwhile.” I have had to pare my life down to one that is oriented, not around things, but around ideas, people, activism, peace and mostly, love.

According to the Irish Times,

A group fighting the new household charge are holding a meeting today at the Teacher’s Club on Parnell Square in Dublin to gear up their campaign for non-payment.

TDs Joe Higgins, Clare Daly, Joan Collins, Richard Boyd Barrett, John Lyons, Mick Wallace, Thomas Pringle and Séamus Healy, MEP Paul Murphy and councillors Ruth Coppinger and Ted Tynan launched a national hotline for their campaign against the household charge and water charge last Thursday.

The campaign has a website.

The International Year Book for 1900 included this summary of events in Catalonia:

The National Union Movement

The refusal of Catalonia to pay imposts, late in 1899, led to the formation of a committee of National Union, which assumed the direction of the widespread movement for reform. The greatest activity was displayed by the merchants of the northeastern part of the country, but the economic feature was not the only one. To some degree all the liberal elements in Spain sympathized with the National Union party, for its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments. In view of the excessive burden of taxation and the government’s policy of expenditure the National Committee advised property holders to refuse to pay taxes. On January 14, 1900, 400 delegates, representing 50 chambers of commerce. 39 agricultural societies, and 37 mercantile and industrial associations, met at Valladolid and adopted the programme outlined above. The fiercest opposition to the Nationalists came from the upper classes and the clergy, who would wish to see the army aggrandized and secular education neglected. The government vigorously prosecuted the leaders of the National Union party and all who refused to pay taxes. In May riots broke out in Seville, Valencia, Polencia, and Barcelona. Martial law was declared in the provinces of Valencia and Barcelona, and on June 21 in Madrid. The constitutional guarantees were suspended in many other provinces, and at the end of the year had not been restored.

I think this was part of the same agitation that led to the “tancament de caixes” — an event that has the same sort of rhetorical value in Catalonia today as the Boston Tea Party does in the U.S.

A while back, Greek economist Varufakis Yanis explained the recent outbreak of tax resistance in Greece (translation mine, from a Spanish language op-ed):

The last recourse for stolen dignity

With his outrageous satire Can’t pay? Won’t pay!, the playwright Dario Fo incited the audience to rethink their political responsibilities. During the last two years, Greece has witnessed a spontaneous application of Fo’s title. It began with the nation’s highways, when drivers refused to stop at toll-booths, demanding that they be permitted to pass without paying. Their defiance was prompted by the appearance of reports in which they were informed that the previous government had sold the future earnings from the toll-booths to private investors using complex financial derivative instruments that had been designed by the bank Goldman Sachs. The idea that the money that Greek drivers should pay the government during the following years for maintaining the highways had been usurped by politicians and financeers aroused the anger that propelled these protests.

Later came the continual assaults against the dwindling savings of the population, determined by a government whose panic over its own bankruptcy led it to lose any sense of decorum. All households, including those of low income, have received tax notices in which were required additional taxes of a retroactive character, without any justification, and in a form that any decent court would have declared illegal. And when, in consequence of the destruction of jobs and of salary cuts, many people found it impossible to make these payments, what did this socialist government think up? The brilliant plan to introduce new taxes, this time by means of the electric bill, with which families were extorted from by being told that if they would not cough up their dough [soltar la pasta], they would have to cook over coal stoves while their children would do their homework by candlelight.

In this climate of total bankruptcy of the social contract between the government and the governed, citizens find it easy to say that justice requires tax resistance and civil disobedience. This movement does not start as something political. The I’m not going to pay is all about the result of a sad and simple inability to cope with the payment of more taxes. But when the state reacts with aggression and without scruple, anger accumulates and, spontaneously, takes the form of a crusade to defy the predatory state.

It is likely that this will not help to resolve anything. But at least the disobedience that we are seeing everywhere, from the courtyards of the nation’s schools to the toll-booths on the highways, from the headquarters of the electric company to Syntagma Square in Athens before the Parliament, could well be the only recourse that citizens have to reclaim part of their stolen dignity.