Category Archives: Taxation

Eric Garner: Peaceful Entrepreneur, Killed By Cop

Free Markets, Private Property, Regulation, Taxation, The State

Liberty’s quixotic hero, William Norman Grigg, documents and deconstructs the murder by cop of Eric Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for doing nothing naturally illicit. Arguably, Garner was being entrepreneurial, trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

READ ON.

News Blackout For Barack

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Taxation

It looks like CNN might have been shamed fleetingly into fulfilling its mandate: covering current news. Yesterday, out of the blue, Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview not entirely friendly with that piece of detritus, IRS Chief JOHN KOSKINEN. By contrast, a day prior, reporter Dana Bitch ran a smarmy, lighthearted and facetious segment about the Internal Revenue scandal, suggesting it was a figment of the minds of Republicans. Perhaps the stark data of the sparse coverage of this and other Obama scandals, gathered by Media Research Center senior news analyst Scott Whitlock, and presented to large audiences by Bill O’Reilly, did something to create oscillation in the closed media circuit (“circus” is a better word).

… A grand jury is investigating whether members of Mr. Christie’s staff sabotaged traffic on the bridge to get revenge on a political opponent. The story is valid and the network news went wild with it, devoting 112 minutes to the situation in the first week, 112 minutes.
But when the VA scandal story broke, there was no coverage on the nightly network news broadcast for almost two weeks. No coverage.
When the lost IRS email story broke, just three and a half minutes combined on all the network newscasts. Unbelievable. That is a news blackout.
On the newspaper front, the big three liberal papers – the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post – printed fifty-six stories and commentaries about Governor Christie in the first week. Fifty-six.
First week of the V.A. Scandal, two stories. First week of the IRS scandal, three stories. You want media bias, there it is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Crime And No Punishment

Constitution, Liberty, States' Rights, Taxation

More proof that the Constitution is worse than useless: John Boehner is “taking the president to court,” for “amassing power at the expense of the legislative branch.” This infraction, pronounces a Washington-Post liberal, correctly, has been a trend “not just for the past five years but for a generation or more. The Prince of Orange is mostly right about the problem, if not the time frame.”

Equally futile for our liberties is the grandstanding against the d-cks from the agency whose job description is to oppress and steal: The Internal Revenue Service. You abolish such a den of iniquity and vice, you don’t tweak it.

But what makes Boehner’s “long-shot litigation” meaningless is that, other than impeachment, which seldom happens, and the chocking off of finances (also a rarity)—the marvel that is the US Constitution offers no serious remedies for punishing officialdom.

Mark Levin talks-up the idea of a state convention. Yeah right. As I countered in “Secession, Not Convention, Offers Salvation,”

To reclaim the republic, Levin and his listeners hold out hope for the atrophied states and their unexercised role in the amendment process, as stipulated in Article V of the Constitution. Never mind that the states, contrary to the mistaken predictions and hopes of the Constitution makers, have never initiated a constitutional amendment; and never mind that even in the event that the states demand a constitutional convention, there is no mechanism to compel Congress to act.

The great constitutional scholar James McClellan was no “neo-confederate.” Yet even an ardent defender of the Constitution as was McClellan conceded that, sadly, “the Framers relied on the good faith of Congress for the observance of the requirement” and that, when it came to a constitutional convention, “there was no way to force Congress to act.” (“Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” p. 310.)

Ultimately, the legislatures of two-thirds of the states have to unite to call on Congress to hold a national constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the dead-letter Constitution. Levin and his listeners are deluded if they think that the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, will unite for this purpose; salvation is more likely to come from dissolving dysfunctional political bonds.

UPDATED: GOP, RIP, AWOL On IRS

Democrats, Ethics, Liberty, Republicans, Taxation

Seventy one percent of Americans want the Internal Revenue Service investigated for targeting tea-party groups (presumably for opposing Barack Obama).

Pat Caddell is perhaps the only Democrat (other that Dennis Kucinich) capable of expressing righteous indignation over such stuff—stuff that should outrage every moral human being with some affinity for the principles of liberty, namely a government subject, at the very least, to the same laws as the governed.

“Establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after Tea-Party groups,” contended Caddell. These groups “are an outside threat to their power hold, the lobbying-consulting class of the Republican party. The IRS now may also proceed against businesses that are cutting their work force. It is a lawless organization that no one will investigate.”

AND:

“This is about preserving privileges and arrangements that benefit these people over the country. And I’d say… it is worse than seedy. It is worse than corrupt. It is the issue that no one is allowed to speak up and the American people in the polls know it. This is a corrupt political system that doesn’t function, and as Michael Dukakis once said: It rots from the head down.”

Lest you think I’ve been taken in by Caddell, here is another instance, documented on BAB, where Caddell cannot contain his visceral revulsion for the abuse of power to which Americans are subjected. Is Caddell perhaps an Old Democrat; one of those good Dixiecrats?

Former polster Caddell was able to get to the crux of the arrest and attempted prosecution of a parent for questioning the pedagogues about the Common-Core Curriculum.

“What we saw here is bigger than just this. The people are the slaves to the office-holders: superintendents who won’t take questions, the EPA that goes to Alaska on to conduct a … raid, SWAT converging with guns on a gold-mining operation in a little town; the things that government does now to oppress people; the laws that we have, the NSA, the fear people have of the state spying on them and imposing on them–this is a kind of soft despotism, whereby if you get out of line, we’ll get you. We work for them. Public servants are the masters; we are the servants of the political class.”

UPDATE (6/24): “Seventy six percent of voters think IRS emails were deliberately destroyed.”