Tax Surveillance is the Heart of the Surveillance State: Snowden; IRS & FBI; FATCA and NZ’s IGA Implemented Today.

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.

Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act - Redux. Stymied in Best Practice.

Finally, a little victory.

The precursor of the below email is my earlier post regarding Judith Collin’s infuriating Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act. I’m wondering about the cost of this legislation to both our liberty, and the economy, given the bureaucratic monster it has unleashed. And just how much this Act, like the diabolical FATCA, is down to US bullying of New Zealand at the expense of our privacy and right to be left alone.

On the fifth day of my supposed annual holiday I have had to send this to a Christchurch law firm regarding a client trust property transaction, for which I am an independent trustee (all names redacted):

... here's the bit where you find I'm a pain in the arse, however I finally want to know the current law regarding witnessing and other matters. I was hoping to have this transaction dealt with by the time we left Geraldine, and as I said in my previous email, from this point I'll be asking my trust clients to please install their solicitors as independent trustee, but this would not necessarily have been the case were our legal processes, especially around contract, up to pace with the twenty first century use of Internet. I can be in the middle of nowhere here in the Marlborough Sounds doing my client work online, working seamlessly and securely through encryption with IRD, etc, until it comes to legal processes such as this, a simple contract for the sale of land: the legal profession and its legislative framework, seems to have barely moved beyond chiseling promises in granite, or medieval quill scrawled on parchment with a waxed royal decree, despatched over four days by horse and rider. Judith Collin's big government bureaucratic new Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act has made this situation noticeably worse, laying to waste the efficiencies that might have been gained for the productive sector, with the Internet as a way to transact contract quickly and cheaply.

[Snip.]

... my major problem is this growing conundrum around witnessing our driver's licences, passports, etc, on the authority to act, on every single client transaction - and for a start why are we repeating this every transaction? [Mrs H] and I are the only two here in the Mahau Sound because we 'are our firm', there is no one else to witness, other than our neighbours (some of whom I do know despite studiously endeavouring to know no one here, given we come to get away from people.) Going by what other solicitors are making us do since Judith Collin's new Act, here and in Geraldine, you will therefore want a solicitor, JP, notary public, et al, to witness our signatures and identification? That will be beyond inconvenient, possibly impossible, because from where we are in the Sounds it will involve a day trip. [Mrs H] is refusing to get in the car for that, she wants four weeks annual holiday, doing nothing (perhaps the odd nice winery meal). Note it isn't practical for us to have a power of delegation for our many trips to the Sounds, and in absence of these increasingly pedantic requirements, nor would we need one unless going overseas for a length of time. Until this stage I've not managed to get a single legal office to quote me the section and clause of this Act that says, for example, the retired school teacher neighbour we have, whom we can walk to for a cup of tea, and who knows us well,  isn’t better placed to witness our ID's and signatures over any solicitor, JP, et al in Blenheim, who wouldn’t know us from Al-Qaeda sleepers. That is, if you are going to insist on total inconvenience to myself and [Mrs H], is this mandated by an actual Act, or, is this the legal profession's pursuit of best practice in the chase of insane legislation? Because if not mandated by the letter of the law, then we'll just pop over to the neighbour - it is, after all, merely witnessing our corporeal selves, and we are merely the independent trustee :)

That said, got to go, [Mrs H] is looking daggers at me on the deck.

 And from this my tiny victory. The lawyer concerned – and I know I was a royal pain, sorry - said I could use my neighbour as witness, so the legislation does not demand a lawyer, JP, etc to be witness: all the lawyers making us do this up until now have I presume been following their new best practice – read ‘cover our arses’ – evolving from the profession (plus financing sector) around this monstrous Act of Judith's. I’m not necessarily blaming the licencing monopoly of lawyers for that. The blame rests squarely with the over-regulation of this small population of our's that would disappear in a single suburb of Hong Kong: the more rules created, the more moribund will become any system as participants seek to cover themselves due to perceived risk of falling foul of the state, or sued in contract. (And for those wondering why I didn’t just read for the applicable part of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, as to witnessing requirements, I have enough trouble keeping up with constantly multiplying income tax legislation, as you’ll see in my next post, and clearly there is no specific clause stating this in the Act, regardless, just the corpus and intention of that Act as interpreted by the legal profession, so I would've had to read the whole ruddy thing.)

This gets me back to where I started on the earlier post :

So my problem looks predominantly to have been legal best practice, no doubt being promulgated out of the professions continuing education programs. Peter Cresswell has a great piece on how bad for business - and my mental health -best practice is:

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I’ve grown heartily sick at the number times I've encountered wankers waffling on about "the importance" of following something called "best practice"—a practice by which everyone in a profession or industry is encouraged to copy the practices of those whom the wankers deem to be the best.

It’s not just bad grammar, it’s bad for business.

It is, of course, simply a recipe for encouraging mediocrity and box-ticking, discouraging entrepreneurial experimentation and innovation.  For banishing competition and difference. To substitute conformity for innovation, and “conventional wisdom” for independent thought. To establish an establishment.

Until recently, wankers like this were a danger only to themselves and to know-nothings who paid for their advice and could be safely ignored. (Wankers like this always charge for their advice--and the more worthless it is, the more they charge. As Greek philosopher Thales was supposed to have observed around 2,500 years ago, the most difficult thing in the world is to know oneself; the easiest is to give advice to others. The wankers always charge the most for the least.)

But with the government increasingly trying to put every professional's head into one noose--and with the grey ooze of bureaucracy increasingly covering every part of the country, ignoring this stupidity is becoming increasingly difficult. With the onset of compulsory occupational licensing for everyone from drainlayers to financial advisers, pretty soon we will see the elevation of “conventional wisdom” into law, to be ignored only at the risk of expulsion from one’s chosen profession.

“Best practice” is a recipe for the calcification of industry, and the banishment of the very entrepreneurial experimentation that drives production and technology improvements.

Finally, to show Judith it’s not only from this ranty libertarian perspective that there is a problem with this Act; look at the havoc its begetting all of us, from selling a property to such a simple thing as opening a bank account where all a person wants to do is deposit their own money, a transaction that is no business of the state at all. For the cost to New Zealand in resources and time, multiply this inconvenience by the thousands of such transactions occurring every day:

The NZ anti-money laundering law makes it ridiculously cumbersome to open a new bank account.
— Juha Saarinen (@juhasaarinen) March 18, 2014

@juhasaarinen YES, THIS.
— (

◞ꈍ∇ꈍ) (@ksuyin) March 18, 2014

@juhasaarinen and buy a house
— Hadyn Green (@hadyngreen) March 18, 2014

@ksuyin Two hours at the bank, a blizzard of forms and three days later, they need another document? WTF?
— Juha Saarinen (@juhasaarinen) March 18, 2014

@fastchicken No no, British banks need a w instead of a b in their names. I needed a referee to open an account.
— Juha Saarinen (@juhasaarinen) March 18, 2014

@juhasaarinen wait till you have to do t for a disabled child....
— Rob Hosking (@robhosking) March 18, 2014

@oharris69 This is it. It seems to be a US demand, yet it's without a US equivalent. To reduce NZ businesses and banks' competitiveness?
— Juha Saarinen (@juhasaarinen) March 18, 2014

@oharris69 That may not end well for anyone.
— Juha Saarinen (@juhasaarinen) March 18, 2014

Those last few posts are interesting. This Act is coming from Judith succumbing to US bullying and coercion: at some stage I shall have to write a post on the crossover of this to that other privacy destroying monstrosity, FATCA, and how that US fist into the belly of the West’s dying classical liberalism, thus the destruction of the Free West via the colonising US tax surveillance state, made possible only from the complete capitulation of our rights by our gutless politicians, is not even constitutional in the US.

Of Law Revue Girls & Thorny – Privilege & the New Puritanism; Blog Inequality; Identity Politics; Quotas.

Next time you seek to silence an individual who has offended you in some way with words, especially one sworn to an ethic of do no harm, and you seek to silence them with their privilege, then wonder if you’re not simply reinforcing it. That’s privilege as a wall of your making, over which two people can no longer even shake hands to explore the differences that make life the celebration it should be, rather than each left to guard their side of the wall, wallowing in a morass of ignorance, and too often, fear.

[The first section below was originally this post’s ending; I’ve rearranged the order as the initial two sections were only ever about getting to this …]

Identity Politics and Privilege – Law Revue Girls & Context of Comedy:

On Twitter, Saturday night, identity politics got itself into its usual abject mess. Though of all its victims, I wouldn’t have put my money on the Law Revue Girls, clever makers of that  feminist parody of Robin Thicke’s execrable Blurred Lines:

Saturday night the Law Revue Girls Twitter account tweeted the following, defending feminist Lily Allen’s music video from being racist:

I would put calling @lilyallen racist up there with calling Macklemore privileged,  in the stakes of no purpose. Missing the message.
— Law Revue Girls (@LawRevueGirls) November 16, 2013

You can imagine what ensured. Let me show you:

For all those who don't understand why we make fun of #WhiteFeminists, the @lawrevuegirls multi part tweet defence of Lily Allen sums it up.
— Aunty Haurangi  (@_surlymermaid) November 16, 2013

And:

@LawRevueGirls yes, how nice for you #privilege
— Gina Rangi (@mokai77) November 16, 2013

Despite one of the Law Revue Girls described herself as a racial 'fruit salad', they belatedly attempted to extract themselves from the shit-pond they’d unwittingly dived head first into:

Not trying to start a war, I *just* think the world's a bit screwy if the only thing you notice when watching a music video is skin colour
— Law Revue Girls (@LawRevueGirls) November 16, 2013

They should’ve known better; the Left aren’t forgiving, and they’re hardest on their own, and so it on went all night. I suspect the Law Revue Girls will now do what all wise people should do – I’m not a wise man - when their privilege is stuffed into in their mouths: shut up. Even Left stalwart, Chris Trotter, admits this mainstay of Left politics, on the silencing of Willie Jackson and John Tamihere:

Rather than korero, the left-wing social media’s first instinct was to condemn, threaten, punish and shut down.

Because the Left typically, arrogantly, are not interested in interacting with differing opinion: they simply seek to shut that opinion down. (For Libertarians reading, that’s an interesting link).

Was Lily Allen’s music video racist? Here’s her defence: you decide.

That’s not the point for me anymore; which is this new linguistic puritanism stalking the land through our fellow citizens, sifting every word for privilege and thought crimes. Giovanni Tiso used this new puritanism of language (hence thought) to take down Willie and JT: I’ve written why I’m not comfortable with that. I wonder if Giovanni understands he’s put himself in the same moral arbiter role of ‘the people’ as Whaleoil has, who would shut down, I suspect, much of the comedy I love: I’ve written on that, also – can a rape joke be defended. About the time radshitzy, neo-Marxist feminist Thorny put herself so humourlessly in my life, checking my privilege for daring to enter her Tweet timeline – that’s all I did, I chipped in on a tweet – I noticed she was also attacking comedian Raybon Kan; I have no idea why, it would be some joke or other she thought he should be shut down for.

I love comedy. Read this link. I love comedy; ‘it lights a fire that warms the coldest nights of my mind’. I record the stand-up on the comedy channel to watch on Friday night: so let’s not kid ourselves where this leads. I suspect less than fifty percent of the stand-up acts on Apollo Live, et al, would survive this new citizen policed thought-crime puritanism. Of home-grown shows, I can guarantee you 7 Days, and Jono and Ben at Ten, two great shows, will very soon not pass muster.

I’m over it. And remember no surveillance Big Brother state can survive for long without an acquiescent people: the secret police usually only ended up on your door when your neighbour potted you in. So though this post doesn’t initially impact on the coercive state, you can bet it ultimately does: hate speech laws, cyber bullying laws, will be the legislative manifestation.

The ethic of this blog is individualism. It is only a classical liberal individualist ethic that will ultimately heal the –isms: sexism, racism, et al. I’ve written further on collectivist identity politics on my post regarding that radshitzy clique of neo-Marxist feminism, but for the record:

In some enlightened age we will meet each other as individuals, representing only ourselves,.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 16, 2013

Next time you seek to silence an individual who has offended you in some way with words, especially one sworn to an ethic of do no harm, and you seek to silence them with their privilege, then wonder if you’re not simply reinforcing it. That’s privilege as a wall of your making, over which two people can no longer even shake hands to examine the differences that make life the celebration it should be, rather than each left to guard their side of the wall, wallowing in a morass of ignorance, and too often, fear.

[Following, is how this blog post started …]

Gender Quotas:

I’ve been meaning to get back to the Labour Party’s gender quota again: passed, at last, in their annual conference some weeks ago, they'll be running a quota to ensure women comprise 50% of their caucus. This weekend, my loquacious slanderer, Thorny, has kindly provided me with the impetus to make a comment, albeit vicariously. By showing the logic hole, or at the least, missing piece, in her latest post, Ladies, Step Up To The Platform, - Just Not The Mic - nice title Thorny - I wish to keep a promise I made to the Labour women MP’s in this old post of mine concerning this year’s Labour Party leadership contest, which ultimately no woman MP contested (link below):

… all I’m saying is a Labour woman MP must have a tilt [for the Labour Party leadership]. Because this will become my business if, when Labour ever gains that sandpit in the Fortress of Legislation, it then attempts to implement not just a gender quota within the party - which I couldn’t care less about, that’s Labour Party business - but also force it on the private sector, making gender quotas an issue of the voluntary, free society, versus the coerced one again. If no woman contests this [leadership], I'll be pointing out the double standard here. [Why should you demand, by force, what you’re not prepared to do the hard yards for?]

I would love to put the below questions to Thorny by posting on her site, but like so many Left blogs, she lacks professionalism, either deleting comments, or worse, over-writing and mis-representing them, so here we go. Thorny is opining the representation of women in Martyn Bradbury’s Lefty diatribe, The Daily Blog:

Just one question.

How the fuck are you going to do any of that when you’ve already got a roster which is 38% women …

But those women only provide 6% of the posts?

I have done this math.  I have a goddamned spreadsheet.  Because I’ve seen so many people comment about the fucking flood of chaff which covers the TDB front page.

38% women posters.  6% of the total posts.

Trouble is, the accuracy of her conclusion of misogyny, or certainly larceny, can only be proven by a second series of related questions, namely:

Have more women that those 38% approached Bradbury about contributing content, and has he turned those women down?

If this is the case, Thorny has a valid point, given Daily Blog’s Left-Liberal-quota agenda nonsense. Unfortunately Thorny provides no evidence of this; so I’d be interested to know from Bradbury’s point of view what the answer is. Perhaps someone might ask him for me: while I read widely amongst the cross section of blogs, my experience has been very few of the Left have any interest outside their own bullying world view, and if I'm not mistaken, that walking ego, Martyn Bradbury, has blocked me, also.

Further, of the 38% of female contributors providing only 6% of content, are they actually producing an equivalent 38% content which Bradbury is then refusing to publish? Is their productivity that of the men on the site? Bradbury can only publish what he’s been furnished with.

Again, if that is the case, Thorny has a point, but no evidence is provided of same. It’s just the accusation not backed up with detail, and the smear against a Bradbury it's postulated is concerned only with his ‘liberal cred’- (on which Thorny may well be right).

Until those points are answered factually, then based on the fact that ultimately no Labour woman MP did put their hand up to contest the Labour Party leadership, preferring, instead, an enforced quota, I’m going to fantastically – don’t you dare take this out of context – put myself on Bradbury’s side of the equation, until the numbers are given one way or the other.

Mind you, the Left continuing to pull itself apart: what a shame. I guess the bright side is the more time they spend being vicious to each other, the less time they have visiting viciousness on the rest of us.

Blog Inequality:

By the bye, Thorny’s statement in her piece that her blog is ranked in Ken Perrot’s Open Parachute blog rankings, led me to do the irresistible: checking her ranking against mine. Damn: she’s above me in the blog rankings :) Over October she was placed fortieth, I – ahem, low posting month – was way down at eighty fifth.

That's hardly fair; surely my viewpoint is being stifled here? In the worthy cause of combating blog inequality, shouldn’t her readers be forced to read mine to give equal weight to our views? Just as I am forced by that ruthless mechanism of state, the tax department, to share my income with all and sundry, and supporting Thorny's tax surveillance state I have no agreement with, then why shouldn’t Thorny be forced to share her readership with me?

… The answer is obvious: because such a notion is stupid. More than that: unjust. But that’s exactly what the Left advocate with my income, and if you speak up against them, then as is their modus operandi, they will simply seek to beat you into silence with your privilege.

Albeit, before leaving this topic, I would like to take the time to sooth my sore ego, almost the size of Thorny’s, who the odd time I’ve ‘interrupted’ her on Twitter since she first falsely foot tripped me, has - pot/kettle - laid the charge against me of attention seeking; ironically in the exact manner Edwardian gentlemen sought to side-line the suffragettes by condescendingly calling them attention seekers, as if they were but truculent little children.  It seems Thorny has gone full circle.

But of course my readership is minute: my central ethic, unfettered freedom of an individual human being to do and say as they like so long as they harm no one, is an ethic not shared anymore in the West. The battle I fight was lost a long time ago, and I'm just filling in time between drinks, while they remain legal. And I’m not overlooking the seeming illogic that Libertarian NotPC gets something like thirty thousand visits a month, way more than me also: people who believe in freedom tend to be working people, with little time for reading, and what is happening here is that over more than twenty years of hard grafting, Peter Cresswell has formed for himself a monopoly for that time – bastard. I’m working on my complaint to that oxymoronic Commerce Commission right after this missive, to see if I can get them to pare him down to my size: my recommendation will be that he only be allowed to post once a fortnight until his visits are reduced to my level. I don’t plan to do anything different, such as be more productive or more creative: I don’t need to so long as the state will intervene to take the share he has won in the market of blogs, and give it to me under the sanction of fairness.

Related Posts:

GenderPolitics / Rape Culture: The Unbearable Silencing of Willie Jackson and JohnTamihere.

Radshitzy Feminism, Police Investigative Technique:Identity Politics Deconstructing Law and Sense

This is None of My Business, but … Labour LeadershipQua Women & Maori MPs

Rape Culture: The Roast Busters

Of Comedy, Whaleoil, Kim Dotcom Freedom of Speech and Bounded Liberty.