Author Archives: MuzzledNoMore

“Republican hopes for revamping the tax code rest, for now, in the hands of six men.” So says author Richard Rubin in a recent Wall Street Journal article (“GOP Tax Overhaul’s Fate Rests on ‘Big Six’ Talks“, July 7, 2017). These six men, all prominent, influential players in the upper echelons of the US government, have shouldered the task of producing a tax reform plan capable of passage through both houses and subsequently becoming law. The group meets regularly and plans to complete its work in September.

As members of this influential group, these men need to hear from us. What?! “Again”, you ask? Yes, again. We have never been so close to achieving the goal of ending FATCA and/or CBT as we are right now. Recycle an old letter, write a new one, email, Tweet, whatever, but … please … contact these people! (See link to addresses below.)

On Monday afternoon, July 17, 2017 Donald Trump provided some relevant fodder for our communications. In his remarks at the opening of “Made in America” week he said 1) he wants to create a “level playing field” for all Americans and their businesses; and 2) “reciprocity is my favourite word”!

We can inform the “Big Six” that the playing field with the steepest slope of all is the one created by the US tax system (now enforced by FATCA) as applied to Americans who live and work abroad. The alternative, and our request, is the abandonment of CBT in favour of the RBT/TBT of the rest of the civilized world.

And we can inform them also that if Donald Trump loves “reciprocity” it can’t just be the “tit-for-tat” border tax against nations who impose tariffs on US imports (to which he was referring in his speech). He must also be prepared to order US banks to turn over the banking data that foreign nations are demanding as reciprocity under the terms of the FATCA IGAs. His alternative, and our request, is the repeal of FATCA altogether.

For contact addresses please see this link. My thanks to Pacifica!

I thought the results of the Israeli court case deserved their own post.

According to the report, the judge in this case has determined that our expectation of privacy in the modern world is limited. Therefore, Israel must comply with the United States FATCA demands and perform the transfer to the U.S. of the (excuse me) private financial information of Israeli citizens living in Israel just because they have some sort of nominal association with the U.S.

The issue that was completely missed in this case was discrimination, a shocking oversight considering the historical background of the judge’s nation. I hope that Mr. Arvay in his prosecution of the Canadian lawsuit will stress this point heavily. Regardless of whether or not privacy must be held as a limited “right” in modern society, it should be equally limited and not more limited for some citizens than for others. As it now stands in Israel, Canada and every other country in the world, those deemed by the United States to be Americans have even greater limitations placed on their privacy than any other members of their populations.

That is the issue. That is the injustice. That is the wrong. That is our cause.

President Obama gave a speech to the Canadian House of Commons on Thursday, June 29, 2016. I thought his message deserved a response from a US-born Canadian. Here are my replies to excerpts of his remarks.

In his opening statement Mr. Obama addressed the “people of Canada”.

He was certainly not addressing those of us who actually hail from his country originally. In 2010 he signed into law the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) by which he began the extortionate enforcement of an antique law from over 100 years ago that nobody knew about, the law of “Citizenship-based Taxation” (CBT). There are many in the Canadian population reckoned to be American by virtue of birth in the USA even though we have subsequently become Canadian citizens, and are as Canadian as the Prime Minister! Yet because of the law of CBT we are also judged to be US taxpayers until the words “I renounce my United States citizenship” comes out of our mouths at the cost of $2,350 USD,  five years of back taxes, and potentially bankrupting penalties.

Belying the festival of brotherly love in the House of Commons on the 29^th of June, divorcing their connection with the United States is now the primary goal of many so-called “US Persons” in Canada. This is because FATCA demands that all Canada’s banks notify the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) of any clients suspected of being US citizens. The CRA will, in turn, hand over that information (which includes the clients’ names, their account numbers, and the balances in their accounts) to the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The record of a client’s birthplace is enough to set this scheme rolling.

In the few seconds it took each of us to read that dreadful news when it first hit the newspapers in Canada in June 2011 our lives were changed forever.

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A paper detailing the Costs to Canada of the FATCA Agreement has been compiled and is now available. One of the two co-authors is a retired professor of economics at McMaster University. A separate document showing how the Average Annual Tax Payment was derived is also available.

This paper provides useful support for Brockers interacting with Members of Parliament as well as important information for journalists.

Here is the introductory paragraph:

This presentation is constructed to demonstrate the amount of money destined to leave Canada ANNUALLY as a direct result of compliance with the United States Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) regime. This money, instead of circulating in the Canadian economy, being invested to benefit Canadians or remaining in Canadian savings accounts for the future financial security of Canadians, will be paid directly to the United States Treasury where it will benefit THAT country’s residents. Another scenario is that it will be paid into the US Treasury and disappear as a meaningless footnote in the attempt to pay down its impossible multi-trillion-dollar debt.

To give us all a badly-needed lift, Brockers have often quoted the lyrics to familiar songs or have even written their own to go with well-known tunes. I recall a couple of years ago turning up the volume on Trooper’s “Raise a Little Hell” when a Youtube video was posted here! Nobody knows how it works, but music really does do something incredibly wonderful to our hearts.

In tandem with the fellowship I’ve experienced and the support I’ve received from the people on this blog, music has been what has gotten me through the FATCA/CBT minefield without stepping on a bomb. A side-effect of my own “OMG moment” was the discovery of a previously untapped well of creativity that I had not ever explored before. Since 2012 I’ve managed to write a short album’s worth of songs inspired almost entirely by the situation in which we have all found ourselves. There are 11 songs so far with a twelfth in the works.

Most of them are unrecorded as yet. For several personal reasons I have not shared them before, but I would like to offer three of them to you today. They are not “Hi-Fi”. They are raw, un-produced, and unedited, recorded in my living room. They are what they are, including everything I wish could have been better.

“Pay the Piper” (2012) might be called a “blues autobiography”; Out of the Shadows (2013), from my pre-blogging days, is about what it’s like to be in hiding without a voice; Rosa (2014) tells the story of Rosa Parks, our heroine from the civil rights  movement. They can be found on the IBS Youtube link thanks to the hard work and generosity of Deckard. My sincere thanks to him and everyone else who made the upload possible! I hope you enjoy listening!

“We are here; we are not going away; as Canadians we expect the protection of the Canadian government.” This is what the new government in Ottawa needs to hear from us in less than a week’s time. If (God help us) we still have the old prime minister, he needs to hear from us … again.

Let’s muster together our letter-writing forces and fill the incoming prime minister’s inbox on his first day in office. Our issue needs to be front and centre in his mind, not on the back-burner. We have languished there long enough.

The new prime minister needs to be reminded that under the terms of the FATCA IGA (p. 18) signed by the Canadian and US governments the Agreement is to undergo further consultation between the parties before the end of 2016. He needs to know that we expect him to request certain changes to the Agreement to bring it into line with what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms demands. Reference to birthplace as an acceptable indicium of US citizenship needs to be removed as well as reference to the reporting of account balances. Only an account’s earnings are relevant to income taxation and therefore it is only earnings that should be reported. These are but a couple of examples from the long list of grievances that we hold against the FATCA IGA.

It would have been easier if these things had been hammered out during the negotiations with the United States before the IGA was signed in the first place but this would have required the exercise of statesmanship of an order sorely lacking in the Conservative government. Instead of achieving a workable compromise we got complete and total acquiescence. We need to respectfully call on the new prime minister to now be that expert statesman who is needed to reverse the damage done by such a wholesale capitulation to unreasonable foreign demands.

Let’s make each and every one of our voices heard once again before our new PM is barely seated at his desk.

The opposition candidates for the 2015 Canadian Federal Election are busy finding office space, gathering volunteers and developing strategies for keeping the seats they have and expelling the Conservative incumbents from those they don’t. Let’s give them some help!

If opposition candidates were Members of Parliament during the past couple of years they probably know about the FATCA IGA that the Conservative government signed with the Americans. It’s been a year and a half since the deed was done and they could probably use a refresher. If they have not been sitting in Parliament they will need to learn from scratch about us and the Conservative sell-out of our Charter rights and financial privacy.

On the continuing page is the cover letter that I have sent to the opposition candidates in my own riding. Attached to the letter is a link to a re-working of my “Introduction to FATCA” that some of you may have read here at Brock. This current version is specifically tailored to an audience of Canadian opposition party candidates.

Please feel free to make use of these materials however you wish in your correspondence with candidates in your own ridings. We can help them win and they can help us regain our status as 1st-class Canadians!

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UPDATED!!

FOX News and Facebook have teamed up to present the first debates of the 2016 race for the Presidency of the United States.

“The format will allow Fox News viewers and Facebook users to share video questions via the social media site, some of which will be used for the debate, the network said.”

Readers of IBS who are also followers of Facebook may want to prepare questions that they would like the candidates to answer, such as this suggestion from Shadow Raider: “There are an estimated 8.7 million Americans living abroad, a population larger than 39 states. The United States taxes these people, but they cannot benefit from what their taxes pay for, since they are outside the country. The United States is the only country in the world that taxes its citizens abroad, other than the repressive government of Eritrea, which was condemned by the United Nations for this very practice. Should the United States tax people based not on citizenship but residence, like the entire rest of the world does?”

The first debate is scheduled for August 6, 2015 at 9:00 p.m. ET and will be aired on the FOX News Channel.

Moderators: Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace

Questions can be uploaded here (Thank You, Shadow Raider!):
https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/videos/10153438307721336/
https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/app_665293576939321
It can be just text, and the second link doesn’t appear to require a Facebook account.

This is another great opportunity to make our voices heard. Let’s make use of it!

https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews

https://twitter.com/foxnews

Bret Baier’s FB page: https://www.facebook.com/BretBaierSR?fref=ts email: http://bretbaier.com/contact/index.php Twitter: @BretBaier

Megyn Kelly FB page: https://www.facebook.com/MegynKelly email: megynkelly@foxnews.com Twitter: @megynkelly

Chris Wallace FB page: https://www.facebook.com/FoxNewsSunday email: http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/ Twitter: @chriswallace4

A new idea for FATCA reform has been suggested, and discussed by Democrats Abroad. Brockers might like to discuss it also. Is this a workable solution or just another complex piece of patchwork?