An important story last week from the Inter Press Service News Agency's William Fisher has gone largely uncirculated: as of this writing, Google News lists only the Guerilla News Network as having picked up the piece. Fisher writes:

The Halliburton corporation, already the Iraq war's poster child for "waste, fraud, and abuse", has been hit with a new double-whammy.

The new overcharges bring to $2 billion, or 42 percent of the contract amounts, the grand total of questionable bills from Halliburton.

Forty-two percent! And that doesn't even account for the "legitimate" profits that Halliburton would realize without overcharging. Apart from the destruction wrought by the invasion and occupation (including the use of banned weapons -- Depleted Uranium, napalm and other chemical weapons, cluster bombs), this might be the biggest story of the war: the fucking Vice President's former company (from whom he still receives compensation) is sluicing billions -- BILLIONS -- of taxpayer dollars straight into said former company's coffers. The admixture of State and Corporate interests is the very essence of Fascism. Yet when it occurs in the baldest form imaginable, it's just barely a news item.

Want more? Here are the nation's top six military contractors, ranked by the net gain in military contracts from 2001 to 2004 (with total 2004 contracts, net gain, and percentage gain in parentheses). The data were taken from the War Resisters League's annual Federal Funds pie-chart (available at http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm).

1. Halliburton Company ($8 Billion, $7.6 Billion, 1900%) 2. Northrop Grumman Corporation ($11.9 Billion, $6.7 Billion, 129%) 3. Lockheed Martin Corporation ($20.7 Billion, $6 Billion, 41%) 4. General Dynamics Corporation ($9.6 Billion, $4.7 Billion, 96%) 5. The Boeing Company ($17.1 Billion, $3.8 Billion, 29%) 6. Raytheon Company ($8.5 Billion, $2.9 Billion, 52%)

What you can do: Tax Resistance, people! ETS! has urged War Tax Resistance many, many times over (including in our most recent issue). And it will now do so again.

Consequences? Yes, potentially. But they're miniscule compared with the certain consequences of consenting to pay one's taxes: among others; thousands upon thousands murdered in cold blood, vast regions of the Third World irradiated (and DU is thought impossible to clean up once it has been introduced into the environment) and littered with unexploded ordnance, the militarization of outer space, nuclear proliferation, post-traumatic time-bombs walking our streets, billions of taxpayer dollars sluiced into Dick Cheney's friends' pockets while the budget deficit spirals out of control.

So what are the potential consequences of WTR? They do not include jail time (except in extremely rare cases). They boil down to a chance that the IRS will eventually be able to, by various measures, collect the owed taxes, plus interest and penalties. There are ways of preventing this from happening, and ways of minimising the impact when it does happen.

Note, by the way, that "Tax Day" doesn't arrive once a year -- it arrives twice monthly, assuming Federal Income Taxes are withheld from one's paycheck (there are ways of preventing this from happening, too).

See more responses to common concerns regarding WTR at http://seanacc.org/concerns.htm. And then, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (http://nwtrcc.org) can put you in touch with a WTR counselor in your area.

By taking control of our paychecks, we not only tell the warmongers/Fascists where to stick it, we also take a concrete step in withholding from them the means to conduct their madness. What could be more important?

--Eddie Tews (citations available at http://feedthefish.org/blog/archives/000577.html)