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12 April 22
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A little-noticed provision in the mammoth omnibus spending bill means the country’s corporate watchdog once again can’t tackle dark money.
The stipulation, part of a deal with Republicans to keep the government up and running, means that Democrats are poised to once again break their long-standing promise to shed light on the massive secret corporate spending that now dominates U.S. politics — just as a Biden appointee appeared ready to finally tackle the issue.
For more than a decade, Democrats have been pledging to bring increased transparency to America’s elections by requiring corporations to disclose their political spending, as a way to counteract the flood of “dark money” that’s been flooding into elections since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision granted businesses and nonprofits the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
But Democrats have repeatedly allowed Republicans to include language in must-pass spending bills blocking any efforts by the government to require public companies to disclose their spending — and they quietly did so again last month, too.
A History of Blocking Spending Disclosures
In late April 2010, following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which would have required publicly-traded companies to disclose independent expenditures and electioneering communications to their shareholders.
While the measure passed the House, it died in the Senate, and subsequent attempts to reintroduce it or pass similar laws, such as the For The People Act, Democrats’ ambitious political reform bill, have also been stymied.
In September 2015, Hillary Clinton made corporate spending disclosure a plank of her failed presidential campaign, promising to compel publicly-traded companies to disclose their political giving. Biden’s 2020 campaign went a step further, promising he would “end dark money groups” by barring 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations from spending to influence elections and forcing politically active nonprofits to disclose their donors. Those pledges were echoed in the 2020 Democratic platform.
The 2020 election cycle saw more than $1 billion in dark money spending — much of it going to support Democrats, who once in office, waited months before leading a half-hearted, doomed effort to overhaul election reform.
But even if Democrats were willing to really tackle the issue of corporate dark money, the federal agency in charge of such matters has long been hamstrung in what it can do on the subject.
Every year since December 2015, federal budget legislation has contained a provision prohibiting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency tasked with regulating the securities markets, from developing any new rules pertaining to political spending.
For years, the agency didn’t appear eager to tackle the issue of corporate political spending anyway. President Barack Obama’s SEC chair Mary Jo White, as well as her Trump-appointed successor, Jay Clayton, took minimal action on the matter.
But that seemed to change when Biden nominated Gary Gensler, a Wall Street veteran who served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years, for SEC chair.
At his confirmation hearing last March, Gensler suggested there was a growing demand among investors for a company’s political spending to be considered “material” to company business, and therefore need-to-know.
At the time, Democrats were trying to repeal the anti-transparency rider legislatively. Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) had introduced the Transparency in Corporate Political Spending Act in January 2021 as a standalone version of part of the For The People Act of 2021, the Democrats’ major election reform bill which also included the repeal. Levin had previously introduced the bill in February 2019.
As Democratic efforts at repeal have failed, Republicans have continually attached the SEC political disclosure ban to must-pass spending legislation, as they did with the recent omnibus bill. Democrats have effectively accepted the rider as the cost of keeping the government open.
Corporate Interests Are Keeping Their Dark Money Dark
Big business interests, meanwhile, have consistently lined up against efforts to compel political spending transparency.
In March 2019, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, many of its chapters, and other national, state, regional, and local lobbying groups submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives opposing the For The People Act. The letter singled out the DISCLOSE Act. Signatories included the American Forest & Paper Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the American Bankers Association.
The National Right To Work Committee, a nonprofit that is leading a national fight for anti-union legislation, as well as the United States Telecom Association, which represents the telecommunications industry, also lobbied on the DISCLOSE Act last year.
The big-money network of oil tycoon Charles Koch has been particularly active in trying to keep its political operations completely obscure. At the federal level, the Koch network has been waging calculated warfare against both the DISCLOSE Act and the For The People Act. Lobbying disclosures reveal that Koch Industries’ lobbying arm hired the corporate law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld to lobby on the bill in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2021.
At the state level, Koch’s organizations have also been working for years to keep their dark-money operations secret. In 2014, Americans For Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) — the Koch political network’s charitable arm — sued the state of California over its requirement that nonprofit groups submit their Internal Revenue Service tax forms to state officials. AFPF argued that such requirements violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free association. The case worked its way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in AFPF’s favor in April 2021, striking down California’s requirement.
In the wake of that ruling, Republican state legislators in a number of states began pushing bills to prevent state officials from compelling donor disclosure from political nonprofits, including in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
Several of those bills have similar language to a model from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-backed pay-to-play operation that serves as a channel for corporations to influence state legislators.
Corporate interest is winning its fight to keep dark money dark. Democrats’ new omnibus spending bill means that the SEC, with Gensler at its head, will once again be unable to do anything to compel disclosure by public companies to their shareholders of political spending for at least another year.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. (photo: Ronald Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia annexed the southern region of Crimea in 2014. Russian-backed separatists and forces, as well Ukrainian soldiers, have since been fighting in the eastern region of Ukraine.
In an interview Sunday on CBS News' 60 Minutes, the Ukrainian leader said it would be worth meeting for face-to-face peace talks with his Russian counterpart, acknowledging that they won't agree on everything but might agree on a ceasefire. Talks so far between the two sides have failed to yield a peace agreement, although there have been some humanitarian corridors agreed upon allowing citizens to evacuate.
Putin declared the "special military operation" in Ukraine on February 24, launching attacks at several major cities, including the capital Kyiv. Despite heavily outnumbering the Ukrainian army, Putin's forces failed to capture the capital and most other urban centers, and the Russian military has since moved its attack to the east of the country. Thousands have died, including civilians, and millions have had to evacuate their homes and flee to surrounding countries.
In the CBS interview, Zelensky said that Ukraine was "not ready to give away our country."
"I think we've already given up a lot of lives, so we need to stand firm for as long as we can. But this is life, different things happen," he said.
"We understand the Russian side. We understand one of their provisions has always been to recognize Crimea as Russian territory. I would definitely not let them recognize that," he added.
Zelensky also said Russia wants to take southern parts of Ukraine, like Mariupol, the port city that has come under some of the worst Russian shelling since the war began, killing hundreds of civilians and leaving them struggling to evacuate the city safely. Many remain trapped in the city and have been deprived of access to electricity and clean water, according to Ukrainian officials.
Zelensky said that in negotiations, Moscow would probably ask to lay claim over some of this territory.
"I clearly understand that questions like this would be raised in negotiations if there ever are any, but we were not willing to give up our territory from the beginning. Had we been willing to be giving up the territory, there would have been no war," he said.
Ask what would winning look like to him, Zelensky said: "First of all, our people would definitely feel victory. They would come back; the return of refugees is blood for the body of Ukraine. Without them, there's nothing. The bombardments would end, we would recover our territory, and there would be no Russian soldiers in our country."
"Yes, I understand they will not withdraw from Crimea and will be arguing and negotiating for one territory or another in the south of our country, the Donbas. I know exactly what has happened after which we can say 'this is victory', but if you don't mind, I'm not going to talk about it just yet."
Newsweek has contacted the Russian foreign ministry for comment.
Now that Russian forces have moved to the east of Ukraine, a huge battle for the Donbas region is expected to ensue, and Ukrainian officials have urged citizens to evacuate before Putin's forces invade.
Meanwhile, in the UK's ministry of defense warned on Monday that Russia may look to use phosphorus munitions in Mariupol, after they were allegedly deployed in the eastern region of Donetsk.
The subway attack took place at a station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
A suspect set off a smoke device and fired shots inside a subway train in Brooklyn during the morning rush hour.
Sixteen people were injured in the incident, 10 by gunfire, New York Fire Department Acting Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said in a briefing, attributing the other injuries to smoke inhalation, shrapnel or panic.
Five of the gunshot victims were in critical but stable condition, but there were no life-threatening injuries, officials said.
The attacker fired a handgun, and fled the scene. Police officials called on the public to contact them with any photos, videos or other information that could shed more light on the incident or lead them to the suspect.
Kenneth Foote-Smith told the local NBC TV station that he was in the train car ahead of the one where the attack happened just before 8:30am (12:30GMT)
He said it began as the N train pulled out of the 59th street station.
Foote-Smith said he saw white smoke billow in the adjoining train car and heard loud bangs.
“We crowded to the end of the car,” he said. “It was just a really scary moment for everyone.”
He said the train stopped in the tunnel, then travelled into the 36th street station in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighbourhood where the conductor told passengers to get onto an adjoining R train. He and others, including some who were injured took that train to 25th street, where emergency personnel tended to the wounded, he said.
After initial reports that undetonated devices had been found at the scene, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) tweeted there were no active explosive devices at the station.
Police were searching for a suspect, described as a Black man wearing a green construction vest and a grey hooded sweatshirt.
Video from the scene showed people tending to bloodied passengers lying on the floor of the station.
Other videos of the immediate aftermath showed smoke coming from opening doors of a train car as it pulled into the 36th street station.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo said hundreds of police officers were on the scene in the hour after the attack “actively” searching for the attacker.
“Officers are actually going through the tracks, walking in the tracks, looking potentially for the shooter or looking for fragments of bullets, as well,” Elizondo told Al Jazeera. “This is going to be an ongoing investigation, for many hours, at least initially, not only looking for the shooter but also gathering evidence.”
More than a dozen police and fire vehicles with blue and red lights flashing were on the street outside the station, and federal officials from the FBI and other agencies joined them as the morning wore on.
“There’s going to be a collaborative approach” to the investigation among local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, retired NYPD lieutenant Darrin Porcher told Al Jazeera. NYPD detectives will be working with members of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), he said.
Investigators will be seeking to assemble video of the suspect entering and leaving the subway system and will seek to determine the potential source of any smoke devices recovered at the scene, Porchin said.
Trains in and out of the station were stopped, causing major transport delays. Schools in the area were put on lockdown, with students sheltering in place.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in isolation after a positive COVID-19 test, issued a video statement thanking those who responded at the scene and calling on the public to contact law enforcement if they have any information connected to the attack.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the incident.
Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, was also monitoring the situation, his spokesman said.
Gun violence is a continuing issue in the US. There have been 131 mass shootings in the US – including this one – and more than 5,000 people killed in shootings nationwide so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a data-tracking group.
Two pro-abortion demonstrators are surrounded by anti-abortion demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court on November 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Texas prosecutors dropped their nonexistent case, but it will still have a chilling effect.
The woman was indicted in March after she miscarried and allegedly told staff at a Starr County hospital that she had tried to induce her own abortion. The staff then reported her to the police. It’s not clear how long she had been pregnant or how she sought to induce an abortion. (Her attorney could not be reached for comment on Monday.)
But what is clear is that she never should have been charged. Texas law bans abortion providers from performing the procedure after about six weeks into pregnancy and from giving patients abortion pills after 49 days from conception. But there is no Texas law that criminalizes or imposes penalties on people who have abortions. And state law also explicitly exempts people from criminal homicide charges for having abortions.
“The issues surrounding this matter are clearly contentious, however based on Texas law and the facts presented, it is not a criminal matter,” Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez wrote in his Sunday announcement that he would be dropping the charges.
“It shouldn’t have happened and there are clear ways that it could have been prevented,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at the reproductive rights group If/When/How, which is covering the woman’s legal expenses through its Repro Legal Defense Fund. “If the health care providers that she reached out to kept her information confidential. If law enforcement who pursued this rightly realized that there was no criminal wrongdoing here.”
But the fact that it did happen means damage has already been done: The woman’s name and mugshot have been published across national media, further upending her life. And the case may dissuade other Texans from not only self-managing their abortions but also pursuing critical medical care for fear of the repercussions.
Why was a woman charged for a legal abortion in Texas?
It’s not clear what law the Starr County District Attorney’s office thought the woman had broken when they charged her. A representative for the office declined to comment beyond Allen Ramirez’s statement on Sunday.
Texas has recently enacted one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. The so-called Heartbeat Act, which went into effect in September, allows private individuals to sue anyone who provides or assists in an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically about six weeks into pregnancy — before most women even know they are pregnant. As a result, it’s now effectively impossible to get a physical abortion in Texas, driving people to self-managing abortions, primarily by means of FDA-approved pills, or to seek an abortion in a neighboring state. But that law only implements civil, not criminal penalties. And it explicitly exempts from liability people who get abortions.
As Diaz-Tello said, “Neither ending a pregnancy nor losing a pregnancy is a crime under Texas law.”
The Starr County District Attorney’s office nevertheless pursued its case, getting a grand jury to sign off on a March 30 indictment, which is not yet publicly available. The county sheriff arrested the woman on Thursday, and she was released from jail on Saturday night after reproductive rights groups posted $500,000 in bail on her behalf. It was only after her case received national attention that the district attorney’s office made a reversal and dropped the charges.
There’s good reason not to prosecute people who self-manage abortions or have otherwise adverse pregnancy outcomes: It could have a chilling effect on people who need medical care. That’s why the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association have all opposed criminalization in those kinds of cases.
“I think it would give anyone pause,” Diaz-Tello said. “If they were experiencing an obstetrical emergency — whether they had self-managed an abortion or whether they were just in the midst of a pregnancy loss — the possibility that they could be investigated, thrown in jail, and have their mugshot placed all over the news is going to have a deterrent effect.”
The Starr County case isn’t the only example of people being criminalized for self-managing abortions. Diaz-Tello said that her organization has identified at least 60 instances nationwide over the last two decades so far.
Prosecutions over abortion might become more common if Roe is overturned
The Starr County case came at a moment when many Republican-led state legislatures are enacting draconian anti-abortion laws. For example, an Oklahoma bill, signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt Tuesday, goes even further than the Texas law. It enacts a near-total ban on abortion except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Under the bill, any medical provider who performs an abortion faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines.
There’s a limit to how far Republicans can go as long as the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade survives. The decision recognized a pregnant person’s fundamental right to seek an abortion, but found that states could still impose restrictions on the procedure in the service of protecting the pregnant person’s health and the potential life of a fetus once it can survive outside the womb.
The Supreme Court is widely expected to overturn Roe in the coming months. Many red states already have trigger laws on the books that would allow the state to prosecute people who provide and receive abortions, potentially making the practice more common.
Texas, for instance, passed a law last year that would completely ban abortion if the Supreme Court were to “wholly or partly” overturn Roe. Starting 30 days after such a decision, abortion providers in Texas could face up to 20 years in prison or up to life if “an unborn child dies as a result of the offense.”
Though that law still wouldn’t criminalize people who get abortions, as the Starr County case attempted to, it could put doctors and their medical support staff in a harsh new kind of legal jeopardy.
U.S. tax forms. (photo: Forbes)
I don’t normally do this, but in the context of TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s latest all-too-well-timed piece on paying (or rather not paying) one’s taxes, let me quote a couple of paragraphs I once wrote for this site about my own distant past and then briefly explain why:
“And here’s a little story from the Neolithic age we now call ‘the Sixties’ about that moment when the U.S. military was still a citizen’s army with a draft (even if plenty of people figured out how to get exemptions). At a large demonstration, I turned in my draft card to protest the war. Not long after, my draft board summoned me. I knew when I got there that I had a right to look at my draft file, so I asked to see it. I have no idea what I thought I would find in it, but at 25, despite my antiwar activism, I still retained a curiously deep and abiding faith in my government. When I opened that file and found various documents from the FBI, I was deeply shocked. The Bureau, it turned out, had its eyes on me. Anxious about the confrontation to come — the members of my draft board would, in fact, soon quite literally be shouting at me and threatening to call me up essentially instantaneously — I remember touching one of those FBI documents and it was as if an electric current had run directly through my body. I couldn’t shake the Big Brotherness of it all, though undoubtedly my draft card had gone more or less directly from that demonstration to the Bureau.
“As it happened, my draft board’s threats put me among the delinquent 1-A files to be called up next. Not long after, in July 1970 — I would read about it on the front page of the New York Times — a group of five antiwar activists, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, broke into that very draft board, located in Rockefeller Center in New York City, took the 1-A files, shredded them, and tossed them like confetti around that tourist spot. And I never heard from my draft board again. Lucky me at that time. Of course, so many young, draftable American men had no such luck. They were indeed sent to Vietnam to fight and suffer, sometimes to be wounded or killed, or (as surprising numbers of them did) join the antiwar movement of that moment.”
Those paragraphs came to mind because of the story Rebecca Gordon tells today about her own urge to resist America’s wars and the moment when she could personally go no further. It made me realize that, in some sense, thanks to those five women long ago, I was relieved of a decision I have no idea how I would have dealt with in the end. At that time, many young men like me were going to Canada rather than be drafted into the military and risking deployment to Vietnam. But I actually visited Canada soon after I turned in my draft card and, much as I liked the neighborhoods in Toronto where I spent time, I found I simply couldn’t imagine leaving my country, no matter what. It just wasn’t me. And that meant, when I was called up again, choosing either jail or the military. It was my luck, I suppose, that I never had to make that decision, which undoubtedly would have led to a very different life than the one I’ve had.
Other people, Gordon included, then and since, weren’t so lucky. No group called Five Women Against Uncle Sam destroyed her tax records in 1992 and so, today, she can tell you her antiwar story and remind us that we all have limits when it comes to our moments of decision. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
“Too Distraught”
Confessions of a Failed Tax Resister
I’d used that mailbox as my address on the last tax return I’d filed, eight years earlier. Presumably, the agent thought she’d be visiting my home when she appeared at the place where I rented a mailbox, which, as I would discover, was the agency’s usual first step in running down errant taxpayers. Hands shaking, I put a quarter in a pay phone and called my partner. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her.
Resisting War Taxes
I knew that the IRS wasn’t visiting me as part of an audit of my returns, since I hadn’t filed any for eight years. My partner and I were both informal tax resisters — she, ever since joining the pacifist Catholic Worker organization; and I, ever since I’d returned from Nicaragua in 1984. I’d spent six months traveling that country’s war zones as a volunteer with Witness for Peace. My work involved recording the testimony of people who had survived attacks by the “Contras,” the counterrevolutionary forces opposing the leftist Sandinista government then in power (after a popular uprising deposed the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza). At the time, the Contras were being illegally supported by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
With training and guidance from the CIA, they were using a military strategy based on terrorizing civilians in the Nicaraguan countryside. Their targets included newly built schools, clinics, roads, and phone lines — anything the revolutionary government had, in fact, achieved — along with the campesinos (the families of subsistence farmers) who used such things. Contra attacks very often involved torture: flaying people alive, severing body parts, cutting open the wombs of pregnant women. Nor were such acts mere aberrations. They were strategic choices made by a force backed and directed by the United States.
When I got back to the United States, I simply couldn’t imagine paying taxes to subsidize the murder of people in another country, some of whom I knew personally. I continued working, first as a bookkeeper, then at a feminist bookstore, and eventually at a foundation. But with each new employer, on my W-4 form I would claim that I expected to owe no taxes that year, so the IRS wouldn’t take money out of my paycheck. And I stopped filing tax returns.
Not paying taxes for unjust wars has a long history in this country. It goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay them to support the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). His act of resistance landed him in jail for a night and led him to write On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, dooming generations of high-school students to reading the ruminations of a somewhat self-satisfied tax resister. Almost a century later, labor leader and pacifist A.J. Muste revived Thoreau’s tradition, once even filing a copy of the Duty of Civil Disobedience in place of his Form 1040. After supporting textile factory workers in their famous 1919 strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and some 20 years later helping form and run the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (where my mother once worked as a labor organizer), Muste eventually came to serve on the board of the War Resisters League (WRL).
For almost a century now, WRL, along with the even older Fellowship of Reconciliation and other peace groups, have promoted antiwar tax resistance as a nonviolent means of confronting this country’s militarism. In recent years, both organizations have expanded their work beyond opposing imperial adventures overseas to stand against racist, militarized policing at home as well.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Each year, the WRL publishes a “pie chart” poster that explains “where your income tax money really goes.” In most years, more than half of it is allocated to what’s euphemistically called “defense.” This year’s poster, distinctly an outlier, indicates that pandemic-related spending boosted the non-military portion of the budget above the 50% mark for the first time in decades. Still, at $768 billion, we now have the largest Pentagon budget in history (and it’s soon to grow larger yet). That’s a nice reward for a military whose main achievements in this century are losing major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But doesn’t the war in Ukraine justify all those billions? Not if you consider that none of the billions spent in previous years stopped Russia from invading. As Lindsay Koshgarian argues at Newsweek, “Colossal military spending didn’t prevent the Russian invasion, and more money won’t stop it. The U.S. alone already spends 12 times more on its military than Russia. When combined with Europe’s biggest military spenders, the U.S. and its allies on the continent outspend Russia by at least 15 to 1. If more military spending were the answer, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Defense” spending could, however, just as accurately be described as welfare for military contractors, because that’s where so much of the money eventually ends up. The top five weapons-making companies in 2021 were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technology, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics. Together, they reaped $198 billion in taxpayer funds last year alone. In 2020, the top 100 contractors took in $551 billion. Of course, we undoubtedly got some lovely toys for our money, but I’ve always found it difficult to live in — or eat — a drone. They’re certainly useful, however, for murdering a U.S. citizen in Yemen or so many civilians elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and Africa.
The Pentagon threatens the world with more than the direct violence of war. It’s also a significant factor driving climate change. The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. If it were a country, the Pentagon would rank 55th among the world’s carbon emitters.
While the military budget increases yearly, federal spending that actually promotes human welfare has fallen over the last decade. In fact, such spending for the program most Americans think of when they hear the word “welfare” — Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or TANF — hasn’t changed much since 1996, the year the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (so-called welfare reform) took effect. In 1997, federal expenditures for TANF totaled about $16.6 billion. That figure has remained largely unchanged. However, according to the Congressional Research Service, since the program began, such expenditures have actually dropped 40% in value, thanks to inflation.
Unlike military outlays, spending for the actual welfare of Americans doesn’t increase over time. In fact, as a result of the austerity imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that “by 2021 non-defense funding (excluding veterans’ health care) was about 9% lower than it had been 11 years earlier after adjusting for inflation and population growth.” Note that Congress passed that austerity measure a mere three years after the subprime lending crisis exploded, initiating the Great Recession, whose reverberations still ring in our ears.
This isn’t necessarily how taxpayers want their money spent. In one recent poll, a majority of them, given the choice, said they would prioritize education, social insurance, and health care. A third would rather that their money not be spent on war at all. And almost 40% believed that the federal government simply doesn’t spend enough on social-welfare programs.
Death May Be Coming for Us All, But Taxes Are for the Little People
Pollsters don’t include corporations like Amazon, FedEx, and Nike in their surveys of taxpayers. Perhaps the reason is that those corporate behemoths often don’t pay a dollar in income tax. In 2020, in fact, 55 top U.S. companies paid no corporate income taxes whatsoever. Nor would the survey takers have polled billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Carl Icahn, all of whom also manage the neat trick of not paying any income tax at all some years.
In 2021, using “a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years,” ProPublica published a report on how much the rich really pay in taxes. The data show that, between 2014 and 2018, the richest Americans paid a measly “true tax” rate of 3.4% on the growth of their wealth over that period. The average American — you — typically pays 14% of his or her income each year in federal income tax. As ProPublica explains:
“America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.”
So, if the rich avoid paying taxes by holding onto their assets instead of selling them, where do they get the money to live like the billionaires they are? The answer isn’t complicated: they borrow it. Using their wealth as collateral, they typically borrow millions of dollars to live on, using the interest on those loans to offset any income they might actually receive in a given year and so reducing their taxes even more.
While they do avoid paying taxes, I’m pretty sure those plutocrats aren’t tax resisters. They’re not using such dodges to avoid paying for U.S. military interventions around the world, which was why I stopped paying taxes for almost a decade. Through the Reagan administration and the first Bush presidency, with the Savings and Loan debacle and the first Gulf War, there was little the U.S. government was doing that I wanted to support.
These days, however, having lived through the “greed is good” decade, having watched a particularly bizarre version of American individualism reach its pinnacle in the presidency of billionaire Donald Trump, I think about taxes a bit differently. I still don’t want to pay for the organized global version of murder that is war, American-style, but I’ve also come to see that taxes are an important form of communal solidarity. Our taxes allow us, though the government, to do things together we can’t do as individuals — like generating electricity or making sure our food is clean and safe. In a more truly democratic society, people like me might feel better about paying taxes, since we’d be deciding more collectively how to spend our common wealth for the common good. We might even buy fewer drones.
Until that day comes, there are still many ways, as the War Resisters League makes clear, to resist paying war taxes, should you choose to do so. I eventually started filing my returns again and paid off eight years of taxes, penalties, and interest. It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.
“Too Distraught“
The method I chose was, as I’ve said, not to file my tax returns, which, if your employer doesn’t withhold any taxes and send them to the feds, denies the federal government tax revenue from you. Mind you, for most of those years I wasn’t making much money. We’re talking about hundreds of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost tax revenue. Over those years, I got just the occasional plaintive query from the IRS about whether I’d forgotten my taxes. But during the mid-1980s, the IRS upgraded its computers, improving its ability to capture income reported by employers and so enabling it to recreate the returns a taxpayer should have filed, but didn’t. And so, in 1992 an IRS agent visited my mailbox.
Only a month earlier, a friend, my partner, and I had bought a house together. So, when I saw that “Call me,” on the agent’s business card, I was terrified that my act of conscience was going to lose us our life savings. Trembling, I called the revenue agent and set up an appointment at the San Francisco federal building, a place I only knew as the site of many antiwar demonstrations I’d attended.
I remember the agent meeting us at the entrance to a room filled with work cubicles. I took a look at her and my gaydar went off. “Oh, my goodness,” I thought, “she’s a lesbian!” Maybe that would help somehow — not that I imagined for a second that my partner and I were going to get the “family discount” we sometimes received from LGBT cashiers.
The three of us settled into her cubicle. She told me that I would have to file returns from 1986 to 1991 (the IRS computers, it turned out, couldn’t reach back further than that) and also pay the missing taxes, penalties, and interest on all of it. With an only partially feigned quaver in my voice, I asked, “Are you going to take our house away?”
She raised herself from her chair just enough to scan the roomful of cubicles around us, then sat down again. Silently, she shook her head. Well, it may not have been the family discount, but it was good enough for me.
Then she asked why I hadn’t filed my taxes and, having already decided I was going to pay up, I didn’t explain anything about those Nicaraguan families our government had maimed or murdered. I didn’t say why I’d been unwilling or what I thought it meant to pay for this country’s wars in Central America or preparations for more wars to come. “I just kept putting it off,” I said, which was true enough, if not the whole truth.
Somehow, she bought that and asked me one final question, “By the way, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an accountant,” I replied.
Her eyebrows flew up and she shook her head, but that was that.
Why did I give up so easily? There were a few reasons. The Contra war in Nicaragua had ended after the Sandinistas lost the national elections in 1990. Nicaraguans weren’t stupid. They grasped that, as long as the Sandinistas were in power, the U.S. would continue to embargo their exports and arm and train the Contras. And I’d made some changes in my own life. After decades of using part-time paid work to support my full-time activism, I’d taken a “grown-up” job to help pay my ailing and impoverished mother’s rent, once I convinced her to move from subsidized housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. And, of course, I’d just made a fundamental investment of my own in the status quo. I’d bought a house. Even had I been willing to lose it, I couldn’t ask my co-owners to suffer for my conscience.
But in the end, I also found I just didn’t have the courage to defy the government of the world’s most powerful country.
As it happened, I wasn’t the only person in the Bay Area to get a visit from a revenue agent that year. The IRS, it turned out, was running a pilot program to see whether they could capture more unpaid taxes by diverting funds from auditing to directly pursuing non-filers like me. Several resisters I knew were caught in their net, including my friend T.J.
An agent came to T.J.’s house and sat at his kitchen table. Unlike “my” agent, T.J.’s not only asked him why he hadn’t filed his returns, but read from a list of possible reasons: “Did you have a drug or alcohol problem? Were you ill? Did you have trouble filling out the forms?”
“Don’t you have any political reasons on your list?” T.J. asked.
The agent looked doubtful. “Political? Well, there’s ‘too distraught.’”
“That’s it,” said T.J. “Put down ‘too distraught.’”
T.J. died years ago, but I remember him every tax season when I again have to reckon with just how deeply implicated all of us are in this country’s military death machine, whether we pay income taxes or not. Still, so many of us keep on keeping on, knowing we must never become too distraught to find new ways to oppose military aggression anywhere in the world, including, of course, Ukraine, while affirming life as best we can.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has won a referendum he supported asking whether he should finish his term. (photo: Eduardo Verdugo/AP)
Lopez Obrador had supported the referendum, which the opposition dismissed as a distracting propaganda exercise.
Lopez Obrador won slightly more than 90 percent of the vote on Sunday, with turnout hovering at an estimated 18 percent of eligible voters, far below the 40 percent threshold needed for it to be legally binding.
Opposition leaders had actively discouraged people from voting, with many condemning the poll as a propaganda exercise and a costly distraction from more pressing problems.
Both critics and supporters had viewed the victory as all-but a foregone conclusion, although the vote has raised suspicion it could open the door to extending presidential term limits, now limited to a single six-year period.
The 68-year-old president, who had been the architect of the country’s first-ever “recall referendum”, hailed the result as historic, but quickly sought to douse concerns he planned to use the result to pursue a constitutional reform allowing him to seek another term after his current term ends in 2024.
“I’m going to continue serving until the last day of my term. I’m not going to go past that because I’m a democrat and I’m not in favour of re-election,” he said in a video message.
Costing millions of dollars and heavily publicised in the capital, the referendum had asked Mexicans if Lopez Obrador’s mandate should be revoked “due to loss of trust”.
Alejandro Moreno of the PRI party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000, tweeted that Lopez Obrador’s ruling Morena party had turned the referendum into a “mockery” to “satisfy its own ego and continue deceiving Mexicans”.
However, the leader of Morena, Mario Delgado, said voters had recognised Lopez Obrador’s “dedication to the most needy and the enormous moral authority with which he governs”.
“Only an indomitable, unwavering democrat like him can subject himself to a recall process,” he added.
Since taking office in December 2018, Lopez Obrador has fallen short of campaign pledges to reduce violent crime and lift the economy, unsettling investors by trying to renegotiate contracts and tightening state control of natural resources.
But his successful rollout of welfare programmes and public image as a morally upright defender of the poor against a corrupt, wealthy elite has helped buoy his popularity.
He entered the referendum with a 60 percent approval rating.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited St. John and St. James parishes on a 'Journey to Justice' tour in November. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
Complaints allege that industrial facilities have discharged “excessive levels” of carcinogenic chemicals in a majority-Black community.
The two complaints, filed in January on behalf of community groups and the Sierra Club, accuse the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or LDEQ, of allowing several facilities – including a chemical complex, a plastics plant, and a proposed grain terminal – to operate without updated permits and release dangerous levels of air pollution, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported. One complaint also contends that the Louisiana Department of Health failed to provide residents living near the chemical complex, Denka Performance Elastomer, in St. John the Baptist Parish with information about the health effects of chloroprene, a byproduct of neoprene rubber production which the EPA says is “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
The complaints allege that these plants have discharged “excessive levels” of carcinogenic chemicals in an industrial corridor with some of the nation’s highest cancer risk and a majority-Black population. According to the EPA’s EJScreen tool, nearly every census tract between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — an area environmentalists call “Cancer Alley” — has a higher cancer risk from toxic air pollution than 95 percent of the country. The Denka plant, in particular, is located just half a mile away from Fifth Ward Elementary School, where more than 90 percent of students are Black.
“They are busing Black children from all over the parish into that school, and this plant is poisoning them,” Robert Taylor, whose community group the Concerned Citizens of St. John filed one of the complaints, told a local radio station. “When are they going to do something?”
The EPA will investigate permit approvals for at least seven current and two proposed projects in the area, according to the Associated Press. These facilities are accused of emitting or planning to emit high concentrations of fine particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and carcinogenic chemicals including chloroprene, ethylene oxide benzene, formaldehyde, and ethylene oxide. In doing so, the EPA will determine whether the agencies violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents programs receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.”
The Louisiana agencies acknowledged the complaint and said they will work with the EPA during the investigation. “We believe LDEQ’s permit process, prescribed by state law, is impartial and unbiased,” Gregory Langley, press secretary for the agency, told The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate. “LDEQ handles all issues with a fair and equitable approach.”
A spokesperson for Denka denied the accusations in the complaints, according to the newspaper, pointing to Louisiana Tumor Registry results that show no widespread elevated cancer rates in St. John the Baptist Parish compared to the state average.
The EPA’s response comes as the Biden administration ramps up enforcement of polluting industries and promotes its commitment to environmental justice. Administrator Michael Regan visited Cancer Alley in November on a tour of environmental justice communities, where low-income residents of color face disproportionate impacts from issues like flooding and toxic pollution, and promised more aggressive monitoring of air pollution in industrial areas across the South.
And this isn’t the first time that the Biden EPA has used its powers to investigate alleged discrimination in state environmental agencies. Last year, the EPA found that the Missouri Department of Natural Resources violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, after environmental and civil rights groups challenged the state agency’s decision to extend an operating permit for a fuel transport site located near a low-income community of color in St. Louis.
“We are grateful that the EPA is taking environmental racism seriously; it has real-world consequences that the Black community in St. John the Baptist Parish has been dealing with for far too long,” Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed one of the complaints against the Louisiana agencies, said in a statement to E&E News. “The government must protect its citizens, and this investigation is the first step.”
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