The IRS As A Political Weapon - 2

"IRS is picking on us" - John Boy

In this series we have taken a look at several aspects of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

When the news media get bothered by IRS practices, or when they get bothered by secret government seizure of their phone records, often there is a bigger story that is not being reported (see e.g. Warriors Press For Propaganda - 4).

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has many posts over a span of time of several years which have had to do with the IRS when it was a toy of the king, when it was a toy of presidents, and when it was a toy of The Department of Just Us (DOJ).

Here are some examples:

The IRS As A Political Weapon

Wee The People - 2

Toxic Minds Produce A Toxic World

Why is It The Busiest Tax Court?

Why is It The Busiest Tax Court? - 2

It Is Not Wrong To Avoid Taxes

2 4 U 1 4 me - Isn't That Tax Special?

Politicization Of Internal Revenue

So, as you may surmise, this conservative media story that "IRS is requiring neoCon political hit groups to toe-the-line for a change" is not the big story the media pumps it up to be.

I say that because the IRS is always doing something all rogue and mavericky somewhere to some citizen as the above posts show (but John Boy doesn't cry then as he is now).

That is why Dredd Blog, after running across a story of the recent use of tactical nuclear artillery shells in Syria, wondered if that is the story the mass media is covering up for The Wartocracy.

This whining by the Establishment Media is unavailing since they are silent when those things happen regularly to the 99% of us whom their 1% puppeteers are constantly abusing.

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John Boy (in "kosher drag") petitions IRS for relief:

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Why is It The Busiest Tax Court? - 2

The Month of The Taxman

April 15 is tax day and April 1 is April Fool's day.

Some say that is a distinction without a difference.

As usual some things tend to stick more solidly to the pages of history than other things tend to, thus, from time to time here at Dredd Blog we review what was posted on Dredd Blog in some of the pages that make up a small part of the history of it all.

On this date in 2009 the following text was posted to history:

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We recently pointed out that the landscape of US tax law is a murky place. Now we want to point out that the Federal District Court offers a jury trial by one's peers. But it is a place where only the wealthy, along with their expensive lawyers, tend to venture.

For the rest of us, the US Tax Court does from 85% to 95% of the tax cases, depending on the year.

The number of cases filed in The Tax Court, after 1999, has grown consistently:

# filed .......... year

31,450 .......... 2008
30,442 .......... 2007
26,993 .......... 2006
24,801 .......... 2005
24,931 .......... 2004
22,451 .......... 2003
20,291 .......... 2002
14,649 .......... 2001
13,545 .......... 2000

One wonders why, when a taxpayer's chances of winning in that court are extremely slim. Some reports show a 7 - 3, or even an 8 - 2 ratio (IRS wins 8 out of 10 cases, taxpayers win 2 out of 10 cases) in that court:

... an examination of raw numbers shows ... the taxpayer doing better in the general jurisdiction district court than in the specialized tax court. Some studies show that the taxpayer wins only 5% of the time in tax court as compared to 20% to 30% of taxpayers winning in the district court, with other studies acknowledging at least a 20% percent differential (Geier 1991. p. 998). The data used for this study show a 12% differential, with taxpayers winning 20% of the time in tax court and 32% of the time in the district court. These differential rates have led some scholars to argue that the tax court is ... biased in favor of the [IRS] ... Kroll 1996 ...

(Fed. Dist. Ct. vs Tax Court, PDF). My reading of the published cases over the past 10 years is not so promising, and I would say that it is more like 9 - 1. That is, IRS wins 9 out of 10 cases in the Tax Court.

But that ratio could be because the government needs money more at some times than it does at other times.

Which could mean that the pressure which deficits put on IRS and the Tax Court causes variation in decisions for taxpayers from time to time.

The US Tax Court is the court for the poor and middle class, and the US District Court is for the well to do:

Of course, litigating in the tax court is not the only option for the taxpayer. The major alternative to the tax court is the United States District Court, the court of general trial jurisdiction in the federal system. To sue in this court, the taxpayer must pay the disputed tax, and then sue for a refund in the United States Federal District Court ... The taxpayer files the claim, and the case is tried in the taxpayer’s local district. The taxpayer can, and usually does, request a jury trial. Decisions of these courts can be appealed to the circuit within which the court is located.

(ibid, emphasis added). The poor and middle class who can't afford a lawyer and who can't afford to pay the tax out front, then ask for it back in a District Court, must go to the tax court.

Once there most often they try to win pro se (representing themselves without a lawyer).

The middle class and the poor who go to the Tax Court can't have a jury decision. Instead they must rely on the Tax Court judges. The very Tax Court judges whom the scholars have said are biased in favour of the IRS:

These differential rates have led some scholars to argue that the tax court is ... biased in favor of the agency (Kroll 1996; but see Maule 1999). One scholar notes it is this potential for bias that has led Congress often to resist creating other specialized courts (Baum 1990). While most scholarship has failed to develop a coherent theory for why such bias exists, posited reasons include such factors as ideology, institutional design and structure, prior IRS work experience, the type of litigant, attorney representation, and even social and personal characteristics of the judge.

(ibid, emphasis added). Yesterday on the floor of the House of Representatives one of the Carolina representatives said that there was a surge in the increase of Boston Tea Party gatherings in his area.

He went on to say that taxpayers do not like it when their money, earned from hard work done before their shower, is taken from them and given to the banksters who work after their shower.

Why is that not surprising?

The answer to "why all the filings in the Tax Court?" is desperation. Both the government and the people are desperate for money.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the tripling of tax cases in the tax court happened in the same years (2000-2008) that the Bush II regime ruled the roost (wink, wink).

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It appears, upon a cursory examination, that filings in the Tax Court have averaged in the neighborhood of 31,000 cases per year since 2008.

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Beatles, The Tax Man:

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The IRS As A Political Weapon

Some folks don't realize that the Internal Revenue Service is one of the biggest political tools.

It is a political tool which can be, and often has been, indiscriminately used against opponents of the doctrines of the establishment elite 2%.

It doesn't take conspiracy theory rhetoric to come to that conclusion, it has been out in the open in the political literature, legal opinions, and even in the media for ages.

In fact, the misuse of a taxing authority was one of the King of England's favorite tools, leading those who established the U.S. Constitution to not attempt to carry those practices over into the new country, the new nation.

Author John Sbardellati pointed out what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall once famously stated:

Titled after Chief Justice John Marshall's all-too prescient dictum that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy," John A. Andrew's final book uncovers the myriad ways the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations politicized the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), misusing its immense powers in order to exert heavy pressure on political and ideological foes. Published posthumously, the finished product benefits from the labors of friends and family, colleagues and publisher. The result is invaluable portrait of a renegade government agency seldom studied by researchers. According to Andrew, there is a good reason for the dearth of studies on the IRS. Researchers are hindered by what Athan ...

(Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, Issue 3: Sbardellati, John. “Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon”, emphasis added). Those who inhabited the White House long ago noted that power to destroy increases exponentially during times of war:

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

(Greatest Source of Power Toxins, quoting James Madison, 4th U.S. President, emphasis added). These illicit techniques were habitually practised by the King of England, which led to these statements in The Declaration of Independence:

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power ... imposing taxes on us without our consent

(The Unanimous Declaration). These practices seem to be insidious, engrained in the lizard brain, and constantly re-emerging through the toxins of power:

When it comes to secrecy, however, the CIA may not be the worst offender. Another federal agency shares a passion for the shadows. Ducking disclosure and hiding from its past, this agency is far larger and more intrusive than the CIA. It touches the lives of millions of Americans, yet it reveals surprisingly little about itself. Another spy agency, perhaps, sporting a "black budget" and official "nonexistence"? Far from it. It's the Internal Revenue Service ... In a series of well-publicized disclosures last April, word surfaced that IRS employees were snooping through Americans' personal tax returns. Outraged members of Congress crafted a quickie legislative fix, outlawing illicit browsing and promising criminal penalties for the inveterately curious. The bill was symbolically rushed through just in time for tax day. Americans, presumably, were supposed to feel relieved ... What we should feel is frightened. The uproar of browsing obscured a far more serious problem plaguing the IRS: its deep-seated culture of secrecy. Hiding behind a well-intentioned law gone horribly wrong, the agency shields itself from effective public scrutiny. Ironically, this passion for secrecy helps make the IRS politically vulnerable, contributing to its popular image as an overpowerful, unaccountable federal agency.

(Tax History Project). The despotic practice of using IRS as a secret weapon against any dissent continues:

Richard Nixon was known for his infamous “enemies list” that started as a list of 20 political opponents and then grew to include hundreds. The purpose of the list was revealed in a 1971 memorandum from White House Counsel John Dean to Lawrence Higby titled “Dealing With Our Enemies.”

In the memo, Dean explained that, “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly - how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” ... Nixon’s use of the IRS as a political tool was an abuse but hardly anything new. One of the most egregious offenders of this type of abuse was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In Roosevelt’s first term as President, Andrew Mellon became a primary target for investigation. Mellon was Roosevelt’s polar opposite in economic philosophy. Mellon, a former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover, was widely popular and he was critical of Roosevelt’s use of expansive government spending programs as a solution to the depression. Through his longtime friend and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau and his Attorney General Homer Cummings, Roosevelt went after Mellon with a vengeance. According to author John Morton Blum (From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis,1928-1938, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959, I p324-5), when Elmer Irey, the head of Morgenthau’s intelligence unit at the Bureau of Internal Revenue (later renamed the Internal Revenue Service) hesitated to go after Mellon, Morgenthau called him personally and demanded Irey conduct the audit. Morgenthau told the prosecutor in the case that “You can’t be too tough in this trial to suit me.”

(IRS As A Political Weapon). It hardly takes genius to realize that Bush II and Cheney I would consider using the IRS as a political weapon to be a fundamental right, seeing as how they still openly declare torture to be fine with them.

The lizard brain of the IRS knows no bounds once it is unleashed upon the citizenry.

This search using IRS as the keyword will bring up Dredd Blog posts on the subject "IRS". By popular demand, there will be more.

Wee The People - 2

About an anniversary ago there was a post on this blog entitled "Wee The People".

Not much has changed since then in terms of the tension and struggle between "we the people" and "we the government".

A few million more homes lost, jobs lost, and health care lost while more of the 700 bases in Afghanistan are being built as our states, counties, and cities fail.

Symbolic of the disdain despots tend to have against the people is this story about IRS:

Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv's owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff's on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was ... 4 cents.

(Sacramento Bee). Meanwhile IRS allows billions of dollars to be hidden in foreign bank accounts by the one percenters, the warmongers who are plundering America.

Two beloved presidents explained the struggle to wee the people, and make giant the Big Brother Government:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

(President, General Eisenhower). An earlier president detailed one mechanism MOMCOM uses to plunder the middle class and poor:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied : and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.

(President James Madison). The mainstream media (MSM), Big Oil, and the Military are the "M" components of MOMCOM.

Their essential effort is to wee (continually minimize) the control of the people, while making government control over people big, Bigger, then BIGGEST.

The struggle is between attempts by the people to find a way to starve the monster, and attempts by MOMCOM to keep a big boot on the neck of the people, should the propaganda of the media fail to do the job of deceit.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Toxic Minds Produce A Toxic World

Joe Slack of The Billy Eli Band looses his grip on sanity, lets himself be pushed over his edge, and then into his own abyss of violence against IRS.

Like Slack, we all have our own edge, our own abyss, and we have a common edge, the common abyss of our species.

The difference is that most folks are able to put up a good fight against madness, even though our government is not doing that very well these daze, and has gone over the edge itself.

Way over the edge

This blog is all about resisting the toxins of power that seep into government, then come upon us through government madness, but doing it with free speech and petitions to the government.

Resisting the toxins, not giving in to them, is the way of healing.

It is our patriotic duty to say ouch when we do not like government action, to protest, to try to vote the madness out of office; thus, to try to heal the government when it gets sick, so that citizens like Joe Slack do not loose the struggle and go off into madness as a result.

Joe Slack stopped treating the infected government as if it were a disease, and in his mind began to treat it as an evil personal attack by other fellow citizens upon him personally.

That is not real.

The IRS employees he could have killed are doing their jobs, following regulations, and following statutes.

When they don't, the remedy is the court system, appeals, and complaints to government:

The right to sue and defend in the courts is the alternative of force. In an organized society it is the right conservative of all other rights, and lies at the foundation of orderly government. It is one of the highest and most essential privileges of citizenship, and must be allowed by each state to the citizens of all other states to the precise extent that it is allowed to its own citizens. Equality of treatment in this respect is not left to depend upon comity between the states, but is granted and protected by the Federal Constitution.

(Chambers v. Baltimore & O. R. Co., 207 U.S. 142, 148, emphasis added). We have an obligation to heal one another with our laws and with reason; we all must be doctors and nurses in that sense.

Stay in the sense, avoid the toxins, and avoid the nonsense, as we try to fix our broken government.

Why is It The Busiest Tax Court?

We recently pointed out that the landscape of US tax law is a murky place. Now we want to point out that the Federal District Court offers a jury trial by one's peers. But it is a place where only the wealthy, along with their expensive lawyers, tend to venture.

For the rest of us, the US Tax Court does from 85% to 95% of the tax cases, depending on the year.

The number of cases filed in The Tax Court, after 1999, has grown consistently:

# filed .......... year

31,450 .......... 2008
30,442 .......... 2007
26,993 .......... 2006
24,801 .......... 2005
24,931 .......... 2004
22,451 .......... 2003
20,291 .......... 2002
14,649 .......... 2001
13,545 .......... 2000

One wonders why, when a taxpayer's chances of winning in that court are extremely slim. Some reports show a 7 - 3, or even an 8 - 2 ratio (IRS wins 8 out of 10 cases, taxpayers win 2 out of 10 cases) in that court:

... an examination of raw numbers shows ... the taxpayer doing better in the general jurisdiction district court than in the specialized tax court. Some studies show that the taxpayer wins only 5% of the time in tax court as compared to 20% to 30% of taxpayers winning in the district court, with other studies acknowledging at least a 20% percent differential (Geier 1991. p. 998). The data used for this study show a 12% differential, with taxpayers winning 20% of the time in tax court and 32% of the time in the district court. These differential rates have led some scholars to argue that the tax court is ... biased in favor of the [IRS] ... Kroll 1996 ...

(Fed. Dist. Ct. vs Tax Court, PDF). My reading of the published cases over the past 10 years is not so promising, and I would say that it is more like 9 - 1. That is, IRS wins 9 out of 10 cases in the Tax Court.

But that ratio could be because the government needs money more at some times than it does at other times.

Which could mean that the pressure which deficits put on IRS and the Tax Court causes variation in decisions for taxpayers from time to time.

The US Tax Court is the court for the poor and middle class, and the US District Court is for the well to do:

Of course, litigating in the tax court is not the only option for the taxpayer. The major alternative to the tax court is the United States District Court, the court of general trial jurisdiction in the federal system. To sue in this court, the taxpayer must pay the disputed tax, and then sue for a refund in the United States Federal District Court ... The taxpayer files the claim, and the case is tried in the taxpayer’s local district. The taxpayer can, and usually does, request a jury trial. Decisions of these courts can be appealed to the circuit within which the court is located.

(ibid, emphasis added). The poor and middle class who can't afford a lawyer and who can't afford to pay the tax out front, then ask for it back in a District Court, must go to the tax court.

Once there most often they try to win pro se (representing themselves without a lawyer).

The middle class and the poor who go to the Tax Court can't have a jury decision. Instead they must rely on the Tax Court judges. The very Tax Court judges whom the scholars have said are biased in favour of the IRS:

These differential rates have led some scholars to argue that the tax court is ... biased in favor of the agency (Kroll 1996; but see Maule 1999). One scholar notes it is this potential for bias that has led Congress often to resist creating other specialized courts (Baum 1990). While most scholarship has failed to develop a coherent theory for why such bias exists, posited reasons include such factors as ideology, institutional design and structure, prior IRS work experience, the type of litigant, attorney representation, and even social and personal characteristics of the judge.

(ibid, emphasis added). Yesterday on the floor of the House of Representatives one of the Carolina representatives said that there was a surge in the increase of Boston Tea Party gatherings in his area.

He went on to say that taxpayers do not like it when their money, earned from hard work done before their shower, is taken from them and given to the banksters who work after their shower.

Why is that not surprising?

The answer to "why all the filings in the Tax Court?" is desperation. Both the government and the people are desperate for money.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the tripling of tax cases in the tax court happened in the same years (2000-2008) that the Bush II regime ruled the roost (wink, wink).

It Is Not Wrong To Avoid Taxes

It is wrong to evade taxes.

Avoid and evade do not equate.

Our language has taken such a hit from business and other propaganda that it is no wonder an English professor at Rutgers wrote the book Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore.

Appeals Court Judge Learned Hand, one of our better known jurists, put it this way:

“Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.”

(Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809, 810 (2d Cir. 1934) (Hand. J.), aff'd, 293 U.S. 465 (1935), emphasis added). That is an explanation of avoiding taxes.

But there are zones where one unwittingly evades when one intended in good faith to only avoid.

Judge Allegra of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out that in many areas of our tax system there are shadow zones.

Zones where the courts have to pull out their judicial flash lights and magnifying glasses, then enter into the shadows where we can't see them. We can only hear their voices:

When does a taxpayer cross the fault line between the cheering fields of tax planning and the forbidding elevations of form over substance, far enough, at least, to require a transaction to be recharacterized for tax purposes? No map – statutory, regulatory or otherwise – precisely reveals this point of no return. Rather, in turn, the taxpayer, the government, and, ultimately, the judicial traveler are guided only by multi-factored analyses, balancing tests and other forms of ad hocery, which, if properly employed, serve hope that the terrain’s true character will be revealed. This tax refund suit presents not one, but two opportunities to exercise these faculties.

(Principal Life Insurance Co. v U.S., 2006). The shadow cast by the tax code makes long shadows indeed, and only those who can afford to hire CPA firms (the wealthy and the corporations) can venture into those shadowy zones.

That small percentage of taxpayers use specialized firms who have infra-red detectors and night goggles with which to venture into those shadowy zones.

Unfortunately, for the remainder of us, the moralist tax propagandists have injected fear into our minds. We of the middle class, increasingly, never even steer near those shadowy tax zones.

Like our ancestors who always steered clear of the well publicized and propagandised "edge of the earth", in tax matters we incessantly recite the mantra "err on the safe side".

Then there are the tax protesters. Those tax vandals and barbarians who rush headlong past every sign and warning, yelling and whooping with no consideration whatsoever of any tax norms.

Even though countless tax court decisions, for decades, have rejected their time-worn mantra ("there is no such thing as an income tax"). A mantra which they incessantly recite to judges who struggle with judicial patience, but who seem to always impose fines upon them.

Will this cacophony and lack of clarity, encrusted with the icing of "all is well that ends well", ever subside?

2 4 U 1 4 me - Isn't That Tax Special?

The politicians who have been banksters are treated like royalty.

The people are treated like the subclasses when it comes to taxes sometimes.

Professor Caron notes:

This provision was extraordinarily valuable to Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, both of whom had hundreds of millions of dollars in unrealized capital gains in Goldman Sachs stock. When they were appointed secretary of the Treasury, they were able to realize all the gains on their stock shares, saving them tens of millions of dollars in taxes, and diversify their portfolios at the same time.

What I have always found interesting about this obscure provision of the tax law is that it recognizes a principle that ought to apply to all taxpayers.

(TaxProf Blog, italics added). What, the tax laws are not even handed? Banksters are special? No way, not in my country!?

Politicization Of Internal Revenue

One of the first things despots do is to seize control of as much of the governmental machinery as possible, and then turn that power against political "enemies".

Ongoing investigations have found that Bush II formed The Department of Just Us out of the former Department of Justice. That investigation is not over.

A former head of the Internal Revenue Service recently died. He had said:

President Richard M. Nixon tried several times to fire him because he would not use the tax agency for political purposes

(NY Times). I am wondering when it is going to be revealed that Bush II also used the IRS extensively and much worse than Nixon did?

One case in point is the Siegelman case which is still in progress. It has one facet where the tax returns of individuals were leaked illegally.

Another case in point is the NAACP case where the IRS eventually dropped the case after facing stiff resistance. Like the DOJ politicization case, republican senators had demanded actions against political "enemies":

On Nov. 12, 2004, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson responded to a letter from Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who asked for more information on the motivation for the audit and expressed concern about Nixon-era type intimidation tactics. Everson’s letter said the IRS had not received any request to audit any group from the executive branch, but that two members of Congress requested “we look at one or more organizations in this area.” Everson said those requests were treated the same as any other third party referral.

(IRS v NAACP, emphasis added). One of those falsely complaining about the NAACP was neoCon Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's Morning Joe who was later voted out of office.

Joe has "advanced" to using the media for propaganda purposes after having used the IRS for those purposes before being voted out of congress.

These types of wrongful IRS punitive measures are possible when politicians like Scarborough take advantage of untrained IRS employees who trust those politicians blindly.

Call the DOJ and report any suspicious IRS activity which you think is politically motivated. There has been an abundance of it over the past 8 years but the statute of limitations has not run.