Some big signposts this Thursday, 12 June, 2014, pointing past the routine mass surveillance in the West, now, to the tax state at its heart, and the possible permutations of tyranny coming – possible, because the framework for same, the authoritarian surveillance state operating beyond the rule of law, is all in place.
On this day the Fortress of Legislation in Wellington decided to ignore the privacy concerns of its citizens - as evidenced by submissions made - and implement this country’s part in the global mass surveillance program known as the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), via the implementation of an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with the US, which cynically uses IRD’s authoritarian powers (totally) outside of New Zealand’s Privacy Act for a purpose which has nothing whatsoever to do with the New Zealand tax take, but to spy on citizens for the reporting back of all financial information on same to IRS. It’s appalling, and explained fully in my earlier piece, FATCA – The NZ Officials Report: A Crime that Deserves a Revolution.
Regarding this ruthless tax surveillance state, we must not bypass the hyprocrisy of the Left over this issue: read Cunliffe and the Left’s Glaring Contradiction Redux: GCSB v. IRD v. FATCA.
Digest those two items, then the below, and see if you can join the dots which the Left and authoritarian conservative Right don’t seem able to as regards the disintegration of Western freedom to such an extent, I don’t believe there exists a way back anymore; certainly while huge fiat monied, centrally banked governments remain more and more reliant on equally huge tax-takes to support themselves and the generations of cruel dependency unto poverty they have created.
First an interesting and important piece on Peter Cresswell’s NotPC blog by Julian Sanchez on the lessons learned from Snowden one year on which concludes:
Armed at last with a fuller understanding of the surveillance systems our intelligence agencies have been building, it falls to us to assess whether they are truly so necessary to our security that they justify their inherent risks. And the question we should ask about such systems is the question we should ask about, say, biological weapons: not whether we are satisfied with how (as far as we know) they are currently being used, but whether the consequences of their misuse are so great that, if and when it occurs, it will be too late to do much about it.
And on the same day, in addition to the New Zealand governments ignominious IGA to implement FATCA, along comes the IRS sending confidential taxpayer information (illegally) to FBI, to prove, regarding the above quotation, it’s way too late, already:
This is a strange story to write about, because we’re talking about a fairly clear-cut violation of the law, but we’ve grown so numb to Big Government ignoring its legal restraints – and the Obama Administration abusing power for political purposes – that it reads like the epilogue to a story that never really ended.
What we’ve got - according to a letter sent by House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulator Affairs [for fucks sake – sorry, my interjection] chairman Jim Jordan to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen- is the IRS sending a million pages of information on tax-exempt organizations to the FBI, packed into 11 disks, as part of the Tea Party persecution.
[Snip.]
As to any violation of federal law that might have occurred: it’s time for more than just “implications.” Who broke the law, what was the exact nature of their offense, and when can we expect prosecution? It’s quite clear that something contrary to the law occurred here; IRS officials will doubtless portray it as a slip-up, and the Justice Department has already played the “no harm, no foul” card by saying nobody looked at the protected information. But none of that excuses the violation, or the interesting decision to keep it under wraps for so long. Or should we dispense with the pretense that these restrictions are “laws” in the same sense as the legal burdens government places upon its citizens?
The answer to that final question is the tax surveillance states of the West dispensed long ago with that pretence: our tax states operate outside the rule of law of a free society, and our privacy, our right to be left alone so long as we do no harm, was the first right that had to be destroyed. For those of us who demand the freedom which should have been our classical liberal birth right, our governments have become only burdens. We are at that stage in the Bound West, where only the stupid, the ruling political class and their crony stooges, are not very, very afraid anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment