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.

The State of The Hammer

Texas is not as timid as the Federal Department of Just Us has become, in terms of Bush II era criminal conduct.

The feds did not have the cajones to prosecute Tom DeLay, a.k.a. "The Hammer", however, Texas justice is a little less ... shall we say "formal".

A jury convicted DeLay on a conspiracy theory, and on money laundering, for which the maximum is life in prison.

The toxins of power got to DeLay when he began to go with the corrupting flow, rather than fight to stay old school honest.

An appeal is sure to follow.

Psyops Psyche! - 2

In the first post in this series Psyops Psyche! we discussed some of the tricks of the trade which the intellectual warmongers have in the bag of tricks they picked up at the local War College.

Those colleges do a hat trick that surreptitiously replaces enlightenment with indoctrination.

Therefore, when the big demented guy kills a few hundred thousand the medal of honor factories work overtime, but when the little demented guy kills less than a hundred the warsters polish up the nukes.

How is that?

It comes by way of conditioning, the technique of the psyops folks to teach you, using the power of the mass media, when to war drool and how much to drool.

Relax, North Korea has no oil, so if you drool on turkey day, only drool over the turkey, because North Korea <-> South Korea are only going to destroy a few hapless souls around the edges:

China and the United States pledged on Wednesday to maintain peace and stability and to seek denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, as well as an early resumption of six-party talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on its website.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai and U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth met in Beijing and made the pledge one day after North Korea's shelling of a South Korean island.

(Reuters). Evidently, according to the spin, there will be a few carriers going around in circles following in the footsteps of the ambassadors, but no massive crispy critters makers will be used say "official sources":

Hey kids, shake it loose together

The spotlights hitting something

That's been known to change the weather

Well kill the fatted calf tonight

So stick around

Youre gonna hear electric music

Solid walls of sound

...

But they're so spaced out, bennie and the jets

Oh but they're weird and they're wonderful

Oh bennie she's really keen

Shes got electric boots a mohair suit

You know I read it in a magazine

Bennie and the jets

(Benny & The Jets). "Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before."

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Open Thread

Your turn ...

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North Korea Provocations Continue

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Will BP Make it Right

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Admiral Supports START

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A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 3

In the previous episode of this series we looked at how the "DNA" of MOMCOM is in, around, under, and over all of us to a degree we are in general utterly unaware of.

If the data are correct, the stuff everything is made of is going bye-bye eventually, since "these things take time to remedy" say the politicians, and since time is axiomatically represented by the same graph, there just may not be enough time.

Our series "The Peak of Sanity" can also be associated with that graph, in terms of the 98% middle class and poor, even though the 2% (who run things & have the money) passed the peak of their sanity long ago, which is how we got to this point in the history of this civilization in the first place.

I ran across a site that uses effective analogous language which can help counter the pulses of denial flowing from the collective lizard brain:

The issue is not one of "running out" so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn't need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.

In a similar sense, an oil based economy such as ours doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.

(Life After The Oil Crash). If you really think about it, it doesn't matter whether or not the data are perfectly precise, the principle is clear enough to turn the lights on (if we have any lights left), and clear enough to make us realize renewable energy is a life and death proposition for civilization.

At the very first instance we foresaw this we should have begun to abandon temporary oil energy sources forthwith, and for the sake of the survival of this civilization, rushed forward toward clean, renewable energy sources.

That would have been about 1970 (Hubbert curve) or 1973 (oil embargo), or soon thereafter, when President Jimmy Carter halved our dependence on foreign oil, made a plea that we begin conservation, and urged a move toward clean energy sources.

Carter was soundly defeated in the very next election for some reason, which reminds me of what blogger disaffected implied in a recent comment on a Dredd Blog post:

"[MOMCOM] can actually make the people demand their own oppression"

(Comments). MOMCOM has been quick to retaliate, like the Mexican drug lords, against those who would disrupt the oil addiction trade routes as Carter attempted to do.

Another Dredd Blog commenter Randy commented on an
interview with Noam Chomsky, which points out that MOMCOM has a bit of dementia of the very serious type:

The scholarly literature is pretty straight on this. With regards to Latin America, but in general it's true worldwide, the main scholarship on "democracy promotion" is by Thomas Carothers. He's a neo-Reaganite ... [who] calls every leader "schizophrenic."

(Comments, see also The Business Elites ... Are Instinctive Marxists, where the quote originates). It seems to me to be realistic to consider MOMCOM to be suffering from a schizophrenic condition, since MOMCOM is way down on the decline slope of the peak of sanity bell curve.

Forcing the oppression of people by making them addicted to oil as a means of sophistication, even if they have been trained Pavlov style to drool for it, is a clear sign of a schizophrenic condition, especially when we consider that oil addiction is destructive to civilization via the global warming / climate change it is bringing (which the Pentagon portion of MOMCOM calls "a threat to U.S. national security").

Dredd Blog has pegged manufactured oil addiction as a part of the Destroy America In Order To Save It thingy (which shows MOMCOM is way schizo).

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

The Peak Of Sanity - 2

Insanity & Intelligence are different issues

In the first post of this series, we focused on the more damaging and eventually fatal dementia emerging within the USA.

In this episode we are going to focus on "lighter", yet more widespread dementia that, while not physically fatal to individuals, can indeed be fatal to an entire civilization.

Remember that the observance of a national dementia only arises when it is institutionalized, after it becomes part of the national behavioral characteristics, the national fabric, like propaganda-deceit, which, in the USA we affectionately call "spin" (maybe because spinning some one around and around makes them dizzy?).

Let's pause further to remember that dementia is "degree based", beginning from the mildest forms & degrees, then going all the way to the wildest and most fatal forms & degrees such as the 100% fatal Alzheimer’s we talked about in the first post of this series.

In this post the foundation for identifying the national dementias to be focused on is the failure to consider the future in sufficient degree.

Only by having a grasp of the future can we judge our mastery of the present, at least in terms of how we are preparing for the future in the present.

I like to read history and palaeontology, but I don't get into those disciplines to find out where we are going as a civilization, or as a planet.

In this post even though we will do some background checking by referring to a scientific paper entitled "Biological Determinism / Fatalism: Are They Extreme Cases of Inference in Evolutionary Psychology?", we are not considering that paper as a way to look backward, as if that would tell us what is ahead.

One of the problems I have with some of the fundamentals of our institutionalized educational practices that teach science is that they are often too retro.

So much of some of the areas of science seem to be an exercise of driving while looking in the rear view mirror, rather than looking out the wind shield to see what is ahead.

Much of the rationale for this is the overblown notion "we can't know the future", so scientists tend to argue about the past with religionists (evolution vs. creationism); but guess what geniuses, we can not go back in time, we can only go into the future because "time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future" as the song lyrics remind us.

We need to learn and focus on the science that reveals the future to us, then use it to take us into the future in a manner that is fitting to that future.

Who the hell thinks science is going to take us millions of years into the past, a thousand years into the past, or even a year into the past?

That is why Ecocosmology Blog and the tenets of Ecocosmology were set forth, to assist with a look forward based on solid science, so that we can measure our human nature now, then modify it as needed to comply with the sure to arrive future, because the past is never going to show up, no matter how well we know it.

Here is a quote from the paper that does some focus on that mystical realm we call human nature, in terms of its past and its future:

The major difficulty in breaking human nature down into its most basic elements is that it is an amalgamation of both biological and cultural influences. This problem is conveniently represented in the all-too-familiar nature-nurture debate. In other words, how much of human nature is the result of genetic influences (i.e., genes), and how much is attributable to learned cultural influences; variably known as memes (Dawkins, 1989). sociogenes (Swanson, 1983), or culturgens (Wilson, 1975)?

...

Psychological processors (modules) in the brain are the product of natural selection through environmental pressure to succeed, survive, and reproduce. But the manifestation of the mindware (thoughts) and the overt behaviors that are born from these active and behaving cortical modules, is shaped by the environment.

...

The learned cultural traits that should appear after the human species suffers a major catastrophic blow to its viability may be the replacement of religious teaching with the teaching of environmental and scientific literacy. In light of such threats, social priorities will have to change or we will perish. The integrity of the human species is what hangs in the balance.

(Biological Determinism / Fatalism, emphasis added). If our Sun is what scientists tell us it is (now 'a life sustainer'), and if we know what the Sun will become (an Earth destroyer), then our current civilization's future is the span of time from now until the Sun destroys this planet (unless of course "civilization" destroys civilization first).

Thus, the Dredd Blog definition of national dementia is: any cognitive process that delays, impairs, or destroys the ability of civilization to survive on this planet by harming this planet (during the time we develop space travel technology with which to find another planet to live on when the Sun begins to destroy the planets near it, including the Earth).

In other words, cognition and behavior at odds with the tenets of Ecocosmology are dementia in and of themselves, but more than that, as we spew toxins into our environment and behave in hostile ways, then deeper dementia like Alzheimer’s will be produced (which will further limit our ability to survive by inhabiting this universe properly).

Unfortunately, there is a growing body of evidence (Anomaly Overload: An Evolutionary Theory of Truth) that indicates we have passed the peak of sanity in this civilization, so we may be left with only the hope of a better civilization next time around.

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