Whose fault, empire? Our fault. Thus, focus upon what we can control.

What We Can Control
by Kathy Kelly (the co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org). She has refused to pay all forms of federal income tax since 1980. See www.nwtrcc.org for more information about war tax refusal.)

In the past year, several groups have asked me to facilitate retreats for people who want to further explore nonviolence. At the retreats, I ask volunteers to role-play situations likely to generate discussion about challenges people face when involved in peace activism. One of the most reliably difficult scenarios stages a spouse raising with his or her partner a decision to become a war tax refuser and stop paying federal income tax.

In one such scene, an anguished husband implored his wife to understand his reasons for stopping payment of federal income tax. "How could you do this to our children?" she asked. "And why didn't you think of this before you became a father?" The husband responded, "Honey, I just want to do something for peace," to which the wife blurted out, "At Christmas?!" The room filled with laughter. Cut! Point well taken.

Last night, after spending Thanksgiving Day with family, my mother and I groaned over TV news clips that anticipated today's shopping binge. Many progressives refuse to participate in the orgy of shopping that accompanies the Christmas season. But what about the appropriations for weaponry that are so hard to eliminate from our personal budgets?

I return in memory to a real life scene that happened not far from the birthplace of Jesus. In April of 2002, Jeff Guntzel and I were part of a small team that had entered the Jenin Camp, in Palestine, during the Israeli Defense Force's "Operation Enduring Storm..."

...picking our way over more ruined homes, while very brave Palestinian men and boys, wearing flimsy surgical masks, retrieved corpses from the rubble, we were approached by three furious mothers who saw us scribbling notes in our spiral pads. "Put this in your notebook," shouted one enraged woman. "It is your country that we hold responsible!" She jabbed my notebook. "Write this! Your country!" Taken aback, I blurted out, "I don't pay my taxes." I was desperate not to be responsible.

Who then is responsible? Of course I'm responsible. I live well in the country that, during the 37-year armed Israeli occupation of Palestine, has given over $100 billion dollars to Israel, mostly for its military. US lawmakers have directed the productivity of US people into a $524 billion budget for US military and security in 2005. When I return to the US after spending a few weeks or months in a war-torn, shattered area of the world, how long does it take for me to adjust to electricity, clean water, phones, computers, plenty of food and easy transport? About eight seconds.

There's no way to run or hide from the truth of the US people's responsibility for reckless warfare, military and economic, in numerous parts of the world. Nor can we hide from the truth about who pays to prepare for future wars. In next year's defense budget, $177 billion is earmarked for weapon systems that won't be available until two generations from now...

...Politically, progressives were defeated by a majority of Democrat voters even before the majority of American voters ratified imperialism...

...We're not listened to by our government, nor, in sufficient numbers, the American people. From most of us, what is required is not our bodies and not our consent - it's our money. This is what we have power over.

We can appropriate money away from militarism to health care, housing and other needs by our resistance, by our nonpayment of taxes for war. As civilian and military casualties mount, as US foreign policy creates terrorists faster than we can kill them, progressives opposed to warmaking simply can't deny a moral imperative: don't turn your productivity over to the warmakers.

Our refusal here in the US can be undertaken at no great risk. We're not talking Germany 1939. More relevantly, we're not talking El Salvador 1980-present. By any measure that takes in the lives of our war-victims and the risks they face, it is no great risk.

Karl Meyer, a pacifist guide for numerous war tax refusers, a man who hasn't paid his taxes since 1960, takes a harder line than I do, but without his perspective I never would have been drawn into allowing the IRS to become my spiritual director. Here are Karl's words: "If progressives fail to resist militarism or refuse participation in it through the one form of participation that is demanded, that is to pay taxes, they should give up their pretensions to being in opposition..."

....................

Discuss. In particular, who here, if anyone, knows about the process of paying taxes in a way where the killing machine does not get my money? I don't plan on being back under the US tax thumb for years, i f ever, but if and when I DO come back I'd like more knowledge about how to do that. I'll be checking out the website Kelly directs people to (above), but if anyone has personal knowledge or experience of war tax refusal, I'd like to read it.

 

Well, I've done that. That's not the issue. The issue is if I believe in fully-funded public education and and fully-funded health care and fully funded social services before an overly-funded military-industrial complex, why should I fail to advocate for a separation and democratization of taxation separate from representation? To be mroe specific, why in fact, in a democracy, should my tax preferences be tied directly and solely to my representative, and to YOUR representative?

I'm writing a work of fiction where one of the early protaganists launches a grassroots initiative for L.I.T.E. - Line Item Taxation Expression. It's a taxation system where, having calculated the amount of tax to be paid, ad having had established by representatives the BARE MINIMUM PERCENTAGES each section of each department of government needs to function, a 50/50 breakdown of my taxes is assumed, where, among the first 50%, the bare minimum precentages are taken. The second 50% is entirely discretionary, where each taxpayer can fund more fully aspects of government they see fit. Thus, if, after meanginful and sustained debate, it is established that for the 2004 tax year the bare minimum percentage for the Department of Defense is established at 10%, if I choose to giv, out of that second 50% of my total taxes, an additional 2%, or 16% or 50%, I can choose to do so. If I choose to give only the bare minimum, and give the rest of my percetnage to education, health care and social services, then so be it as well.

L.I.T.E. - How about that as a proposal? Or are folks wholly committed, in the light of past performance, to the idea of committing all our trust and confidence to our representatives?

 

Your disparagement notwithstanding (calling the right and rgiteous fight for continuing expansion of the Constitutional franchise "cherry picking"), are you a landed white Male with appropriate heredity? If not, what do you think you'd be doing were it not for folks railing against the parts of the government they did not like?

Stop. Spouting. Foolishness.

 

Answer my question.

 

L.I.T.E., the concept I alluded to, talks about bare minimums, and about the fact that taxation amount wouldn't change, just provide a discretion with half of it. Under that scheme, the debate would be around what constitutes a bare minimum, and, if gov't departments REALLY wanted our discretionary funds, a level of transprency heretofore not really seen. Would that transparency result in more work for ad agencies? Probably; there'd need to be a strengthening of truth--and-clarity-in-advertising laws and legislation like that, but I think that any active citizen would prefer that federal government take their bare minimums from half the $1 trillion per annum in the General Fund, and allow citizens to decide how to spend the other $500 billion.

Maybe not. Who knows? An approach like L.I.T.E. is my bare minimum though.

 

Why? (...stick around for it...)

 

No, I'm advocating the bare minimums to run our departments as they are currently constituted, not a re-conception of departments based upon the bar minimums for societal survival. So, for example, a Dept. of Education or Defense would have debated openly that which they needed, as a minimum, to do the job, thus incurring open debate ON what their job actually is and how it should be approached, etc., as opposed to some conception of "bare minimum" that argued no Dept. of Defense or of Education at all.

At least, that's what this protaganist will be arguing. She loses, btw. But as a way of talking about choice in where our taxes go, I thought I'd throw it out there. Some really funny replies though, outside yours, which was reasonable. McGuirk had the whole department here laughing...nothing like free cyber-humour.

 

So your current representatives are not in fact representative? (Stick around...)

 

Wrong. Link?

This is, amazingly, both myopicly and galactically stupid. Oh, uh, link?

You would, you're wrong and almost everyone I spend (spent) time with in America, from all over the nation, be it Dallas, Miami, Ontario CA, Seattle, Philly, North Jersey, South Jersey, Rockville MD, D.C. are generally living refutation of your assertion.

Because we're not the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. Not yet. We aren't a bare minimum society, expecting and promoting bare minimums. We're a fully fund it society, but that should be cojoined with a fuller expression of citizen choice.

I have no link, but I think that if L.I.T.E. were implemented, you'd find an overwhelming funding of education and health care and social programs, and a reduction of defense to levels refective of the levels seen around the world among major powers. The major side benefit would be the transparency of process...the anti-pork power of it all, to be frank.

While I'm sure those I know deserve it, I'm not sure you do. I think that, given your positions taken here, you really do deserve everything this government does, starting with, sadly, making life hard for at least some of your BC compatriots. Are you telling them that they have folks like you to thank for their newfound financial difficulties?

 

The sense of personal empowerment (and, for many, I'd guess including yourself, the bit of responsibility in terms of realising there's so much more to KNOW before we could effectively allocate taxes with a clear conscience) is exciting, isn't it? I think it would break down a bit like this: Departments, now fighting not with isolatable, easily lobbyable representatives for thier budget dollars, would have to convince the people themselves. I think that their convincing, were the law put to use correctly, would take the form of legally binding information fronted with ad campaigns (and the amoutn spent on that would have to be capped as well, I think). Getting behind the ads to the real information, and havng a year-to-year (or maybe you cold commit a certain percentage for a specific number of years, allowing departments to implement strategically) ability to look at a department and hold them accountable for what they just claimed they'd do, would be a far more transparent process, whatever you think of it as an enitre concept, than what we have now, no question. The thing, to me, hinges upon rooting out all the Rove-ian loopholes, and keeping Congress from providing any through the back door of their own, less transparent, processes.

But even if you were to eventually tell me that this is sh!t and for me to go ******** myself, I appreciate the fact that you seem to acknowedge the excitement inherent in the idea...to me, its a citizen idea, a democratic idea, that balances better the notion of representative republic and information-era citizenship.