[HCCN] Fwd: Resistance to War, Frank Donnelly

[Judith Robbins]

> please read
> (Patrick O'Neill is cofounder of the Fr. Charlie Mulholland  
> Catholic Worker House in Garner, NC, an intentional, pacifist  
> Christian community that provides hospitality to women and children  
> in crisis. He and Frank Donnelly have been friends for 28 years.)
>
>
>
>
> By PATRICK O'NEILL
>
> BANGOR -- On July 26, my friend, Francis "Frank" Donnelly must  
> report to a federal prison in Estill, S.C. to begin serving a year- 
> and-a-day sentence for war-tax resistance. On June 14, Donnelly was  
> sentenced in U.S. District Court for failing to pay his taxes.  
> Donnelly's case, however, was atypical. The Bangor Daily News story  
> about Donnelly's sentencing reported that about three dozen peace  
> activists stood outside the federal courthouse to show support for  
> Donnelly's stand as a war-tax resister.
>  Because he is opposed to war, Donnelly, who also faced a court  
> martial during the Viet Nam War years, refused to pay his federal  
> taxes because a large portion of those taxes are used to bankroll  
> what Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military industrial  
> complex." It was during the Viet Nam War that a younger Donnelly,  
> then in the Army reserves, landed in the brig for refusing to wear  
> his uniform as a protest of the war. He also went on record then as  
> a war-tax resister. At his court martial Donnelly said he wouldn't  
> take his military pay or pay for war through taxes. For those of us  
> who stand with Donnelly in opposition to wars and killing, his  
> stand as a war resister is laudable. At present, the United States  
> is at war overtly in two nations, and we maintain a military  
> presence in more than 100 nations.
>
> At the sentencing, U.S. Attorney James McCarthy called Donnelly a  
> "run of the mill tax cheat." He berated Donnelly because he made a  
> good living for a few years as a lobster broker, enough to buy a  
> small house in Costa Rica, and a lot in Florida, which is not worth  
> very much. He also chastised Donnelly for loaning some money to his  
> friends. He said Donnelly was wrong to apply for food stamps and  
> heating assistance for his home in Lamoine, ME, a modest home that  
> he bought for $20,000 in the 1980s.
> U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock, who sentenced Donnelly,  
> also came down hard on the defendant for not going public about his  
> tax resistance. Woodcock, who seemed to be conflicted about how to  
> punish Donnelly, believes civil disobedience is best expressed in  
> the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, who believed in open and public  
> discourse in his peace campaigns. While Gandhi, and later in the  
> 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed their direct  
> action openly in the public square so to speak, Donnelly's decision  
> to quietly refuse to pay his taxes is also a valid option of war- 
> tax resistance. During his sentencing hearing, Donnelly said: "I am  
> not a wealthy man." He drives an old Buick, and lives modestly in a  
> small home.
>
> Yet, Donnelly was unfairly portrayed by the government as being  
> greedy and hypocritical, in effect saying that his failure to pay  
> taxes was morally invalid because he made a decent living for a few  
> years selling lobsters, and he didn't go public with his anti-war- 
> tax views.
>
> During the sentencing hearing McCarthy said Donnelly's gross  
> receipts for some years were more than $1 million. These figures  
> were not accompanied by the fact that Donnelly often made just a  
> few cents on the dollar profit as he drove a small truck 200 miles  
> a day in his lobster business. McCarthy also read aloud a  
> classified ad Donnelly had taken out to rent his home in Costa  
> Rica. What did not come out was the fact that Donnelly rented the  
> home just once for $150 and often let people use it for free.
> Donnelly only applied for food stamps and heating assistance  
> following his guilty plea last November. He is now unemployed.
> When all was said and done, Woodcock sentenced Donnelly to prison,  
> added more than $92,000 in fines and restitution and a year  
> probation. The Internal Revenue Service has also presented Donnelly  
> with a bill for almost $1 million for back taxes and fines, a  
> figure that grossly distorts Donnelly's income, and imposes a life- 
> long debtors' prison sentence on him.
> After his sentencing, Donnelly said he wished he had been more  
> transparent in his war-tax resistance, but his witness remains  
> powerful. Another component of nonviolent resistance, one I  
> consider more important than transparency, is the willingness of  
> someone to accept the consequences of his or her actions, something  
> Frank Donnelly will do July 26 when he reports to federal prison  
> for a year. Donnelly is paying a heavy price for his convictions, a  
> price that few of us would be willing to make as a witness against  
> the madness of war.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mainetalk.org/pipermail/hccn_mainetalk.org/attachments/20100714/7494b17a/attachment.htm>