BRATTLEBORO — Tax season in the U.S. comes and goes virtually unnoticed.
A little math here. A little grumbling there. A ritual letting of blood, and it's all over.
But there was a time (I'm thinking Boston Tea Party here) when paying taxes - or, rather, not paying them - in the U.S. was a pointedly political act, a demand that a government provide society with the actual services that taxpayers paid for.
Since then, taxpayer resistance in the U.S. has been strategically and effectively marginalized with inane and dishonest mass-media imagery of mouth-frothing, armed white supremacists holed up in shacks in the woods of Wisconsin, surrounded by tinned peas and yelling butchered Common Law and obscenities at bemused federal agents.
But not every nation treats its tax resisters in the abysmal way the U.S. treats them. In some nations, the umbilical cord that connects paying taxes with the funding of essential public services has not been so cynically severed.
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One such nation is Ireland.
This case is evident following a 5,000-strong protest in Ireland's capital city, Dublin, against the $130 property tax, an amount it is estimated will be 10 times higher next year.
The protesters in Dublin represented about a million Irish citizens nationwide who have refused to pay the $130 property tax, which, their government has assured them, is vital to keep ordinary public services going.
The Irish government is controlled by the Troika, the European Union's creator of, and collection agency for, coerced defaulted sovereign debt. It is comprised of the unelected International Monetary Fund, the unelected European Central Bank, and the unelected EU Commission.
The Troika has threatened the Irish people with a Greece-style stripping of sovereignty in the event of failure to pay the tax.
Until recently, this threat has worked wonders on getting the Irish to be compliant.
However, with the deadline to pay the so-called “household tax” now passed, fully half of Ireland's taxpayers - more than 1 million people - have flatly refused to pay.
This leaves Ireland about $100 million short of the necessary $200 million intended collection amount.
Some say Ireland's tax resistance is a response to the call of a Group of Nine opposition politicians, who called for exactly the type of non-payment and protest that was engaged in by 5,000 people in Dublin and thousands more nationwide.
The Troika-controlled Irish government doesn't buy that explanation, and is planning to levy fines and sue non-payers.
Whatever the reason for Ireland's tax resistance, its tactic of going straight for the Troika's jugular by simply not paying the tax seems to have paid off - and then some.
Likely not coincidentally, while protestors were protesting the property tax, the Troika was busy restructuring a $4.1 billion note, created so that Irish taxpayers can pay off bankers' debts, into a less pressing government bond, repayable in 2025. It was due on the same March 31 property tax deadline.
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For the people of the U.S. - and particularly its millions of legitimate tax resisters - the question now is: When the banksters' Panzer-like divisions of debt enforcers land on U.S. shores, as they certainly will, will what is happening in Ireland stay in Ireland?
Or will what Irish taxpayers are doing now create a template of resistance for U.S. taxpayers, who have a history of tax resistance, and who are becoming increasingly outraged at the ongoing shoveling of private bankster debt onto the public's balance sheet?
Maybe what happens next in the U.S. will be determined by whether Ireland taxpayers' victory in this battle translates into a sustainable victory over the banksters and technocrats currently tyrannizing the people of Europe.
And, if Ireland's taxpayer victory can be leveraged into a broader victory for the other 500 million people in the Troika-controlled European Union, and U.S. taxpayers make a similar stand, then can we expect a more positive depiction of the U.S. tax resister?
I certainly hope so.