Every power the state assumes to protect you, will be used against you. This is the way of the state.
Another post documenting the ever swifter trip down the road to our serfdom in the West. This week we find just as the GCSB has been illegally spying on New Zealand citizens, so has the Department of (In)Justice in the US been secretly, and illegally, wiretapping the free press:
The US government reportedly secretly seized telephone records of reporters and offices belonging to Associated Press news agency for a two-month period last year, the agency has said.
The Associated Press on Monday described the action, which targeted its correspondents, as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations.
AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency's website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the agency and its reporters.
"There can be no possible justification for such an over-broad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," Pruitt said in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.
An AP story on the records seizure said the government would not say why it sought the records.
And this on top of, as I covered in my previous post, underling staffers in the IRS inappropriately targeting conservative groups in the US, including the Tea Party movement, just as in New Zealand IRD have now moved into the political sphere of denying Family First tax exempt status due to its beliefs – no matter how bigoted those beliefs are.
All the while, our ministers have further concluded that some of the costs of New Zealand absurdly administering the US tax base, will now be shifted from the private banks, that is, you and me, customers of private banks, which and whom shouldn’t be responsible for the US tax base either, to the New Zealand taxpayer - that’s you and me again. This in reference to the US government enacted FATCA, which I’ve also written on before, that atrocity of criminal law-making whereby the US - one of only two countries to run a citizenship tax – has turned itself into an uber-surveillance state to hound its citizens no matter where they live in the world in order they cough up tax to operate a country some of them have never lived in, nor will do so, ever. My only comment necessary as I tweeted to the ministers (unanswered, of course).
@deloittenztax @craigfossmp #FATCA Where is principled argument that NZ business & taxpayer not front US IRS tax-base costs? @peterdunnemp
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 14, 2013
Regarding FATCA, my next post will be to highlight some sensible Canadians who are fighting this monstrosity of statism, via the Isaac Brock Society.
