War Tax Resistance Can Look Like Opposition To State Tax Giveaways For Wealthy Corporations

Below is the text I prepared for remarks on a panel at Maine's annual war tax resistance gathering yesterday in Portland. Despite elaborate preparations with a helpful tech person from USM, when the time came I was unable to show the visuals I had prepared to go along with my talk. So here is the whole presentation as a blog post.

I was honored to meet fellow panelist Georges Budagu Makoko. A member of the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi tribe, George spoke of fleeing from the horrors of war in DRC Congo and then Rwanda. He was granted asylum in the U.S. and became a citizen and father of two young citizens. Now George educates people on how war drives immigration. He led a discussion where several of us considered how to move past fear and take an honest look at how the U.S. military contributes to conflict and suffering around the planet. I want to read his book, Ladder to the Moon. 

The third panelist, Bob Klotz of 350 Maine, spoke eloquently of the addiction and suffering he witnesses in his work as a physician's assistant, and the connection to the suffering of the environment under the carbon belching Pentagon.

War Tax Resistance Can Look Like Opposing State Tax Giveaways For Wealthy Corporations
by Lisa Savage    10/27/18

War tax resistance is usually thought of as refusal to pay federal taxes associated with the Pentagon's mammoth budget. But resistance comes in many forms, and a grassroots campaign here in Maine is one of them.

I was asked to speak today about the campaign to resist a $60 million tax giveaway by the state of Maine to the mega wealthy weapons manufacturer General Dynamics.

Graphic: Providence Journal "Defense firms spend big on lucrative stock buybacks"

The resistance to this piece of legislation, LD1781, succeeded in reducing the amount to $45 million. It also succeeded in changing the source of the giveaway from being excused from turning over state taxes withheld from workers' paychecks at Bath Iron Works, which is a subsidiary of General Dynamics. It also delayed the bill's passage -- thus driving up the cost of lobbying for GD -- and exposed the Democrat's caucus in the Maine House as liars. It galvanized public support, and drew Maine's big city newspapers into the effort to silence dissent around corporate welfare. It laid bare the bipartisan nature of corporate government we labor under at the city, state and national level.

Some background information is relevant. When "progressive" Democrat Chellie Pingree was still in the Maine legislature in 1997, the then-Senate majority leader spoke out against a tax giveaway for General Dynamics. The occasion? GD was threatening to close the historic Bath Iron Works shipyard it had recently purchased unless Maine taxpayers funded an expansion of the facilities there. Pingree was quoted at the time as saying, “I don’t think BIW would deny that General Dynamics could pay for the expansion. The question is, ‘Would they?’” 

By the time Pingree had ascended to Congress, she defended her support of Pentagon budgets by explaining to me personally that she had been threatened in Washington DC by an unidentified "they" i.e. "They say, do you want to be responsible for the loss of 3,000 jobs your first term in office?" 

The threat worked well, because Pingree's vote just recently helped pass the largest Pentagon budget in years.

Community organizers in the city of Bath have fought this kind of thinking for years now. They've opposed big tax breaks for BIW from Bath as well as from Maine. They've worked with the workers and the unions at BIW to oppose the warped thinking that relies on fear and arm twisting to squeeze tax breaks from cash strapped public entities while executives receive tens of millions annually, and billions are expended buying back General Dynamics' own stock.

  

They've shared the news that building weapons is actually an ineffective jobs program; studies show that thousands more jobs are generated by investing in health care, education, or other kinds of manufacturing.

Bath residents Bruce Gagnon and Mary Beth Sullivan outside General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works shipyard.

 So much for background. A chronology of this year's campaign against LD1781 goes something like this:

Democrats Jennifer DeChant in the Maine House and Eloise Vitelli in the Maine Senate agree to co-sponsor a bill written by lobbying firm Preti Flaherty on behalf of General Dynamics/Bath Iron Works.

Rep. DeChant blocks videographer Martha Spiess from attending an informational meeting requested by her constituents in Bath. She later admits this was wrong and apologizes. But, she subsequently blocks me from her account as a Maine legislator on Twitter.

Investigative journalist Alex Nunes of Rhode Island contacts Maine resistance organizers to offer his expertise on General Dynamics' strong arming of state governments in Rhode Island and Connecticut. He provides data on executive compensation, earnings, and stock buybacks by General Dynamics.

Nunes' freedom of access request turns up email exchanges between Rep. DeChant and BIW vice president John Fitzgerald. The two discuss strategy to pass the bill, including not engaging with her constituent Gagnon whom Fitzgerald mis-characterizes as "a one man band."

I share a cartoon with legislators which names 80 people who stand with Gagnon in opposing LD1781. Seventeen organizations in Maine endorse the resistance campaign. Letters to the editor and op-eds pour in to Maine's newspapers opposing LD1781, so many that the Bangor Daily News and the Kennebec Journal stop printing them all (I know this because one of mine was among those not published).

Gagnon begins a hunger strike at the gates of BIW and vows to continue until the bill is voted up or down by Maine legislators. He encounters Fitzgerald, who yells at him. Supporter Mary Kathleen organizes solidarity fasting by 27 folks in Maine and beyond. Regis Tremblay makes a series of videos about the hunger strike which he publishes on YouTube to be shared on social media.

Hundreds of us contact our alleged representatives in the Maine legislature to express opposition to the tax giveaway bill.

LD1781 stalls in a series of contentious hearings in the Maine legislature's Taxation Committee. BIW vice president Fitzgerald testifies and makes the fatuous statement, "For us to be punished because our owner has capital seems unjust!"

I create a cartoon showing real injustice: 43,000 children in Maine growing up in poverty while the bloated wealthy feed from the public trough. The cartoon is shared widely via email and social media.

Bloggers and alternative media run articles opposing the tax giveaway. Community radio station WERU interviews several resistance leaders. 

The Bollard, a Portland monthly, runs a cover story titled "Ship Of Fools" by editor Chris Busby that features the chilling subhead "Tax breaks for BIW, World War III for us."

Citizen lobbyists throng the halls outside the taxation committee hearing with signs and leaflets expressing their opposition to LD1781. 

They attempt to speak with legislators who pass by deep in conversation with BIW executives and Preti Flaherty lobbyists. Eventually the public is excluded from the taxation committee hearing room as BIW fills the seats with employees it busses in and pays to attend.

Constituents are sidelined into a separate room where they can watch the hearings on closed circuit television.

The bill is revised to reduce the ask to 75% of the original, and to restructure the source of the tax giveaway from payroll tax withholding to state income taxes BIW owes.

BIW's largest union, S6, declines to endorse the bill. 

The bill finally emerges from committee with an "ought to pass" that at least one member of the committee admitted was wrong but voted for anyway (you may well speculate on Rep. Ryan Tipping's motivations for that choice).

Citizen lobbyists against LD1781 who were present in the State House for the Senate vote.

The Democratic Caucus in the Maine House falsely tells members that all  unions at BIW are in favor of the tax giveaway bill. My husband Mark Roman gets a panicky reaction from our Republican representative Bradley Farrin when he mentions that S6 failed to endorse; Farrin does some hasty research on his phone (presumably, looks for an email from Preti Flaherty) and assures Roman that S6 just hasn't endorsed the bill "yet." At least one rep expresses anger that she has been lied to in caucus.

On medical advice, Gagnon ends his hunger strike on day 37 just prior to the floor vote on the bill. A handful of legislators voted no, and the tax giveaway passed into law granting $15 million less than General Dynamics and its wealthy executives and shareholders had asked for.

Was it worth it?

Courthouse support for Aegis 9 civil disobedience trial in Bath featured resistance to LD1781

 Scores of people in Maine and beyond collaborated on this resistance effort. Environmental activists who know war is not good for climate. Educators who know war budgets aren’t good for schoolchildren. Grandparents who know war is not good for anyone’s children. This campaign was beneficial in that it brought people together to work for the common good.

It also provided a good platform for communicating beyond the choir about where our tax dollars go and about who really deserves to benefit from public support.

Graphic: Jason Rawn

If Protesting Doesn't Do Anything, Then Why Are The Powerful Determined To Eliminate It?

Indigenous people led a protest at the White House during the Obama years, holding a die-in to illustrate the effects of the proposed Keystone oil pipeline on multiple forms of life. Source: toyboathouse.com

I'm going to take a step back from considering the accelerating madness of current events to ponder a question that dogs me and other dissenters: what can we do about it? "It" being, for me, the wars on Afghan people, Palestinian people, Yemeni people, Syrian people, Iraqi people, indigenous people, black people, immigrant people, female people, etc. Also the destruction of Earth's life support system by unhinged capitalist exploitation, wars being a major factor.

Anti-Vietnam war protesters march down Fifth Avenue near to 81st Street in New York City on April 27, 1968, in protest of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese war. The demonstrators were en route to nearby Central Park for mass “Stop the war” rally. (AP Photo) Source: namvietnews.wordpress.com

It may be that what sparked this blog post was watching a bit of archival footage of thousands of young people -- my generation -- in the streets chanting "no more war." This was in the intro to a documentary about mythology and hero's journeys. I had switched it on expecting to see a lot of art from various cultures but instead found myself watching two old white men talk about people, using all male pronouns and 99% male examples. Ho hum, I turned it off.

Let me just say that I don't like to be one of those elders who dwell insistently on the past. It's a mistake because it closes off our minds to learning what perspectives younger humans are bringing to this long, strange trip we're on. Maybe it's just because I'm on the tail end of the baby boomers and thus not old enough yet to dwell primarily in the land of memory. In any case, perhaps ironically for a history buff, I find people insisting on living in the past to be extremely boring.

Bath, Maine resident Bruce Gagnon's hunger strike against a tax giveaway to a weapons manufacturer drew supporters who fasted with him, press coverage from a local newspaper, and probably influenced eventual reduction of the giveaway to $45 million. Source: Joe Phelan photo / Portland Press Herald

Another thing that jogged my thinking about what kind of resistance is actually effective was some negative feedback in response to a War Tax Resisters annual gathering that I was invited to speak at. The requested topic is something I know about intimately since, while I wrote about opposing LD1781 and then went to do my paid job, my husband went to his unpaid citizen lobbyist job at the Maine legislature earlier this year. The mega wealthy corporation General Dynamics was twisting arms and telling lies to get a big tax giveaway from our very poor state on top of the largesse from the Pentagon and the city of Bath where they operate a shipyard that builds weapons of mass destruction.

So the WTR folks asked if I would talk about that resistance. Another activist in Maine contacted me to say that he was dismayed that a particular advocate of war tax resistance had shilly shallied on the question of whether the IRS can or will go after a war tax resister's social security checks. I can attest that they can and will because they did so to my husband's check after we refused to pay the hefty balance owed to the war machine even in addition to the thousands they had already deducted from my paycheck. "Make them come after it," is a slogan of WTR and make them we did. However, when it was all paid back and the monthly SS deposit was restored, my husband said he didn't want to do that anymore. So, full disclosure, I am a bit of a fraud as a war tax resister at this point.

 A helicopter used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan Source: scout.com

The other thing that has been stuck in my craw lately is the request by a local mom that we have schoolchildren send messages to her son who is on a helicopter crew in Afghanistan. I remember this student as a sweet, bespectacled boy with acne, and gentle soul who was respectful to his teachers even in adolescence (fairly rare around here). His mom and he are not doing well emotionally. He enlisted because of his love of helicopters, but now he's battling the horror and depression of picking up dead and mangled humans and flying them elsewhere.

The possibility that little children be put on the road to thanking him for his service filled me with horror and dismay. In the political vacuum that a public school in a conservative rural area creates so that civil war doesn't break out in the lunchroom, it is considered fine to bring up supporting a local boy without any hint of concern for the thousands of mangled Afghan boys and girls that the 18 year long occupation of that country has produced.

So I just had to raise my hand.

I said, let's be careful when we're speaking to students about this request not to glamorize the prospect of enlisting in the military. We're speaking to an audience that has seen thousands of hours of sophisticated advertising designed to make them believe that enlistment is glorious and heroic, that hides the ugly reality from them. And recruiters lie, all the time.


It was quiet as everyone contemplated this turd in the punch bowl.

Then one brave soul spoke up and said, I have a son who did that, enlisted, and he is not the same as he was before.

I followed up with an email to the group providing a link to the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, in case they wanted to know more about what's going on in Afghanistan. One person responded and I'll bet she will follow up because she is a life long learner with a keen interest in other cultures, and in learning about what she does not know.

So here's what I'm thinking does and does not "work" in terms of resistance to the kleptocracy that seems intent on destroying the world in exchange for a bit of transitory "wealth."

Voting Are you kidding me? I could paste in 1,000 links here to show that free and fair elections and true representation for people like me and thee is a thing of the past in the USA. One will suffice: Maine's Senator Susan Collins received hundreds of thousands of dollars in "dark money" campaign contributions after her support for the loathsome Brett Kavanaugh to ascend to the Supreme Court.

Protesting/Demonstrating Remember that film clip of thousands of young people chanting "no more war" and ask yourself if that's what ended the war on the people of Vietnam. If your answer is No or Maybe not, there were a lot of factors, ask yourself this: did it end the draft?

Ending military conscription forced the Pentagon to rely on the economic draft which has always pushed young people who grew up in poverty to enlist. Relying on volunteers has led to paying the NFL and other sports franchises to stage patriotic pro-military shows at games, beefing up the recruiting budget, going after increasingly younger students during the school day, and stop-loss which forces traumatized veterans back into combat again and again and again. A sobering thought from this baby boomer: a tour of duty in Vietnam was a year, then you got to go home. The fact that the rest of your life might be ruined by what you saw and did there was of little interest to those who sent you, but it has led to one of the highest suicide rates for any group in our country.

Wendy Bergeron-Laurence staged a 13 hour lone demonstration in Waterville, Maine July 9, 2013 to show her support for theTexas legislator who had staged a 13 hour filibuster on behalf of women's reproductive freedom.

Protesting in person, sometimes all alone, goes on all the time -- though it is mostly ignored by corporate media. Just how much the ruling elite fears outpouring of political action from the people was illustrated this week when it unveiled extensive new restrictions and fees for protesting in the nation's capital. The National Park Service has jurisdiction over many of the spaces used for protests, and it is required to gather public input before imposing the new regulations. You can learn more about the details and weigh in here.

War Tax Resistance This has been going on for centuries, with the American Friends Service Committee (aka Quakers) leading and educating. There are a lot of forms of withholding the tax dollar that Congress spends about 65% of on military these days (more if you include the Veterans Administration budget). You can hide income so it isn't taxed, you can become too low income to owe taxes, or you can simply fail to pay up. Advice is to do it honestly and with full disclosure so that the IRS can't convict you of tax fraud. Not enough people have done this to be able to tell if it is effective. Certainly borrowing to fund wars that exceed the public purse is galloping, and servicing that debt may be a crucial factor when this empire falls.

Communication  I like this one the best. Lots of protesting/demonstrating operates in this arena. Because it really is about people's hearts and minds, because information is power, and because the dissemination of misinformation has become turbocharged in the age of mass media and the Internet. Just this past month all of us cell phone users got a mandatory text message from FEMA so that the executive branch of the feds can warn us about emergencies. The effects of 9/11 are wearing off; students in 9th grade today were not even born when it happened. Can't wait to see what kind of terror our rulers come up with next to justify even more surveillance, repression and wars for resources.

Women and supporters in Poland protesting abortion ban in 2016 Source: The Bubble

Civil Disobedience / Women's Strike  When this comes up somebody always has to reference Lysistrata. Did I mention that I'm old? So, I don't think a sex strike is going to be nearly as impactful as would the women of this country simply withdrawing their labor. (If sex seems like work, then by all means refrain from that, too.) I do think this has a better and better chance of occurring, but it won't be in response to wars, because the empire's wars are largely invisible except to working class and poor families with loved ones involved (see Communication above). It probably won't be in response to rape culture, either, although that's an issue more and more young women are refusing to remain silent about.



A women's general strike will probably come about in response to the loss of reproductive freedom. The women of Poland and Ireland have set an example for U.S. women to follow, and I hope I live long enough to see us do it. Is the future female? Stay tuned.

Mainers Protest The Pentagon Budget And Environmental Costs Of Militarism #GDAMS

Federal income taxes were due on April 19 this year in the U.S., so organizers Martha Spiess and Rosalie Tyler Paul organized a rally on the day with speakers including myself for the Maine Natural Guard, Ginny Schneider for War Tax Resisters League, Bruce Gagnon for Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Richard Clement for Veterans for Peace and Michelle Fournier for 350.org Maine.

All day tabling by Ginny Schneider for the War Tax Resisters Resource Center included a penny poll for people to indicate where they would like to see their taxes spent.

Coverage by WCSH Channel 6 t.v. showed many ways of understanding the true costs of militarism, from dollars spent in Fiscal Year 2015 -- $598.5 BILLION, representing a 54% slice of the discretionary budget pie -- to environmental destruction from wars and weapons. Coverage by Maine Public Broadcasting Network was the first mainstream media mention of the Maine Natural Guard campaign. Yay!

It was great to have an environmental group ably represented by Michelle's remarks on the intersectionality of the struggles to overcome racism, materialism and militarism. She also provided context on the Pentagon's gargantuan carbon boot print around the planet, saying it is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

I am continuously amazed at how many environmental groups and individual activists ignore this issue. Maybe the tide is turning as young people like Michelle realize that if you're not including the military in the carbon and other pollution equations, you are not really talking about the problem.

To order your organic cotton t-shirt, leave a comment on this blog with name and your size. Cost is $20.

It's why I have been offering people the chance to join the Natural Guard campaign -- in Maine or wherever they are. Many dedicated activists have come forward to take the pledge to bring up environmental harm when "security" is being discussed (generally as a pretext for more bombing -- as of this week, U.S. taxpayers are sending B-52s to bomb Syria). The second part of the pledge is to bring up the Pentagon in discussions about responding to climate change.

Burning fossil fuels to secure corporate access to more fossil fuels around the planet is a dead end game. Ditto ramping up nuclear weapons under Obama's administration in order to threaten competitors for dwindling resources. The radioactive pollution created by those weapons of mass destruction is an environmental cost that will be paid for generations to come.

How A Nice, Middle Class Girl Became A War Tax Resister

Remarks to the 29^th Annual Gathering of New England War Tax Resisters & Supporters                     Oct 4, 2014    The New School      Kennebunk, Maine

The title of my talk today is: How a nice, middle class girl become a war tax resister, and my choice of words is deliberate.

As a privileged member of the ruling class in the empire of the United States, I was brought up to be nice. My New England grandmother told me a few things that stayed with me: Fools’ names and fools’ faces are often seen in public places. And, pretty is as pretty does. These things were meant to elaborate the concept of nice behavior: don’t call attention to yourself, be discreet in word and deed, and know that your actions speak louder than your hairstyle or grooming or attire. Although those things should also be nice.

My grandparents voted Republican and went to church on Sundays. At home they might drink and even curse, but in public they were pillars of the community: she on the public library board of directors, he in Augusta at the state house, representing. My father, their only child, was a little less nice, a little more rowdy. But he passed on the wise words of his father, a World War I vet who walked with a limp and died young of heart failure after being gassed while laying in killing field in France, wounded at 19. My grandfather told his son, No war is a good war. Don’t believe them when they tell you the next war is a good war. There is no such thing. But he paid his taxes. As did my grandmother after he died.

My other grandparents were very poor, migrant farm workers out of Oklahoma. They nurtured a deep distrust of all forms of government. But my grandmother was in thrall to the authority of evangelical preachers, and both she and her husband understood that to render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s was a necessity of living in this country. My California grandfather was drafted into WWII, leaving two children and a wife to fight in the Pacific theater. He was among the first troops sent into Nagasaki after it was destroyed by an atomic bomb. When he returned home he never spoke of it. He never spoke of much of anything in my experience. My California grandparents both worked hard, bought land and built a home, though my grandfather refused his GI bill benefits. But he paid his taxes. As did his widow after him.

My father and mother debated politics at the dinner table, and for years they were Republicans. Mostly because they thought of the Democratic Party as racist. They voted for Richard Nixon twice, and defended the Vietnam war – for a while. In the end, the civil rights movement changed their thinking. My father warned me that the US would become a police state in my lifetime. He ran for city council in our small town in California, and after he retired to Maine he ran for the state legislature. He probably cheated a little on his federal income taxes, but he paid them. After he died, my mother had a tax accountant help her pay her taxes. She had lost any scrap of faith she might have once held in the federal government, but she was afraid of authority. She didn’t actually care all that much about being nice. She had survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, gotten a college education as an adult, and lived the middle class life in a split level with a view of the Pacific Ocean and four rebellious children. She wasn’t going to rock the boat.

When my middle son was a college student we visited him together, my mother and I. He was reading Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky, and we both wanted to read it after he was finished. My mother took it home with her and for months I would ask if she had finished it yet so that I could have my turn. She was a voracious reader, and it was a slim volume. Eventually she sent it along with the confession: It was very difficult to read this book, because I was overwhelmed by feelings of shame on every page. While I was busy raising kids and paying the mortgage and getting supper on the table, this was being done in my name. And, I looked the other way.

I, too, looked the other way when Reagan used my tax dollars to terrorize our neighbors in Central America. I filed a 1040 form year after year as I worked to keep bread on the table and a roof over our heads, while the US toppled democratically elected governments around the globe, installing friendly dictators instead. I paid state and local taxes in Los Angeles as the LAPD, a notoriously racist policing organization, beat up Rodney King and countless others like him. I paid a lot of taxes the year 9/11 was allowed to happen and Bush Jr. announced that we would retaliate against a country whose harbors would no longer be safe. Didn’t he know that Afghanistan, which we invaded and bombed and have been occupying ever since, was a landlocked country? Ok, maybe Bush didn’t know. But surely his speechwriters did?

I was a history major at Bowdoin, a scholarship student. I studied the tax revolt that become the war for independence from the empire of Great Britain. I now see that we are the inheritors of their imperial mantle, an upstart colony with mad natural resources that, like Carthage, grew up to eclipse the mother country. The British Parliament and Crown made the mistake of overtaxing their colonial subjects to pay for wars that started on one continent and finished on another. In college I also studied the revolutions of Europe, people rising up against the French monarchy which had bankrupted the nation waging wars, against the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its boot on their necks. I studied how the Ottoman Empire bankrupted itself piling up debt to wage wars defending its far flung colonies, and how Europe and the US scrambling to grab those colonies led to the war my Maine grandfather suffered in. I studied how the people of India used creative nonviolent methods to kick out the British, and how much violence they endured as the price of freedom. I studied how the civil rights movement in this country organized to struggle together to achieve their ideals, making history when a teenaged girl and then a grown woman refused to give in to apartheid on the bus.

Rosa Parks, arrested for a second time and charged with violating a law against boycotts.

But I still went to work – as a journalist, an arbitration administrator, an advertising executive, and then as a small business owner – and I still paid my taxes.

In 1994, I left the business world and became a public school teacher. It was a great job for me because I’ve always been fascinated by learning and I enjoy working in a field that allows me to be creative. Surviving the bureaucracy became my challenge and, so far, I have. But there was a major bump in the road, a bump which educated me mightily. And I believe it led, indirectly, to my becoming a war tax resister.

In 2000 the state of Maine decided that in order to continue working as a public school employee I would need to give my fingerprints to the FBI database. It was not that I or other employees had been accused of a crime – in this case, child molestation – but we were to be deemed guilty until proven innocent.

This seemed to me and to many others a clear violation of the Constitution, and a struggle ensued. The Maine legislature twice rescinded the law, but the governor twice vetoed their legislation. I learned about organizing and resistance from my children’s teacher, Bernie Huebner, who resigned from teaching the gifted and talented students of our district, a job he loved. Eventually I, too, resigned from my job in protest of this gross violation of privacy and the rule of law. But after a year working in the private sector a family health crisis sent me back to public education. With inky fingers I again filled out a W-4 form claiming my allowances for dependents and rendering up a hefty portion of every paycheck to Uncle Sam, who was bombing any number of civilians and funding any number of warlords on any given day with my hard earned money.

I had protested the first Gulf War with an infant in my arms, astonished at how quickly sabre rattling and chauvinism swept through my community in central Maine. As the second round of fighting Saddam Hussein for control of Iraq’s oil fields approached, I found myself one evening clutching a candle on the Margaret Chase Smith Bridge in Skowhegan, shivering in the chilly March twilight. I’d been joining a group standing each Sunday afternoon with signs against the impending shock and awe campaign being pushed through Congress and the United Nations. That particular Sunday the US was very close to concluding a decade of sanctions against Iraq that had killed thousands of innocent children. The bombs would begin falling on Baghdad quite soon.

A nice man stood beside me on the bridge and saw that my sign was about to blow away in the wind. He grabbed it and held it, a plastic lid with NO WAR rendered in duct tape, and we talked. A young man driving by parked his car and came back on foot to ask why we were standing there. He had a cousin in the Army, and a friend about to ship out for Kuwait. Why were we against this war against a vicious dictator who gassed his own people?

My husband to be, Mark Roman, whom I had just met told the young man: When I was your age the government was trying to draft me to fight in Vietnam. I watched the Bay of Tonkin coverage on tv and I became aware that the government was lying to me. That’s what it feels like now, too. The government is pushing to go to war based on lies. It sounds the same now as it did back then.

Mark and I have been together now for 11 years. We’re married and we file a joint tax return. For the first several years together we filed our 1040 and we protested Bush’s, then Obama’s, wars. We stood on bridges and marched down highways. Along with many others here in Maine we waged the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign. Responding to the economic downturn in 2008, we pointed out that domestic budgets were being slashed to pay for a few hours or days of US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. We helped pass resolutions at the local and state level calling on Congress to stop spending 51%, then 54%, then 57% of its annual allowance on the Pentagon and its greedy contractors, so wealthy they are statistically the .001% income bracket. We visited our so-called representatives with our demand to fund butter, not guns. We wrote about it in the newspaper, talked about it on local access tv, and spoke about it in public squares. I began to get involved with Codepink when I saw women like me confronting war criminals like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld in Congressional hearings broadcast on C-SPAN.

We stopped being nice. On one of the anniversaries of shock & awe Mark and I got arrested at the White House for failure to disperse. I hovered behind Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with a pink sign that said GIVE US OUR $$$$$ BACK as he testified about where the taxpayers’ bailout of his Wall St. buddies had gone. I crashed Chellie Pingree’s posh fundraiser in a towering pink wig, and handed out Bring Our War $$ Home leaflets to her supporters. I helped organize Draw-a-thons and printed posters and t-shirts and learned to make videos and speeches and how to manage email listservs.

But I still paid my taxes.

It was during Obama’s first administration that my husband and I decided to heed the call of war tax resisters like Larry Dansinger, and take the risk of putting – or not putting, as the case may be – our money where our mouth is. Showing no taxable income isn’t an option for us because I still want to work as a school teacher. Mark is self-employed and each April 15 we usually wrote a hefty check for the amount of federal income taxes owed in addition to what has already been withheld from my paychecks all year. Writing that check is what we stopped doing. Larry’s advice was to keep it all above board, to let the IRS know what we were doing and why, and in his words “make them come after it.” That they have done, twice garnishing Mark’s social security benefits and sending innumerable threatening letters. We have piled up fines and interest, and I’m sure there will be more fun to come. I worry about leaving this as a giant problem for my heirs when I’m gone. As we “know” there are only two sure things in this life: death, and taxes.

Before Mark shares the letter we send the IRS along with our 1040 form each year, I’ll leave you with one last family story. Last summer I visited my uncle in Australia, they first time I had made that journey since he emigrated when I was a kid. He and his wife are folkies, musicians with a wide circle of friends who emigrated from various parts of the British Isles, mostly, and are lefty leaning. One of their friends asked me tentatively if I would be offended by the Australian perception that I live in something approaching a totalitarian state. I said that I would not take offense, and that I spent a good part of my spare time agitating against military spending. Also that my husband and I are war tax resisters. This news frightened them. They reacted with shock. How could I get away with that? Wasn’t it dangerous? Why didn’t we end up in federal prison?

I acknowledged that it’s not without risks but that it goes at least partway to settling the moral queasiness of being a tax paying citizen of the US empire. I like to think the taxes that I do pay go to education and health care, housing and job training, environmental protection and sustainable energy development – not to  revenue for General Dynamics, Halliburton, Blackwater and the rest of the war profiteers. I know the real portion of the federal budget spent on nuclear weapons research plus the Pentagon (including the NSA) plus caring poorly for veterans is way more than 50% -- probably more like 2/3. But I take comfort in knowing that I take a stand and insist that this could be, and should be, a republic and a democracy, as promised.

Because right now what we have is taxation without representation. And you know where that kind of thing leads.