Monthly Archives: July 2016

(11) Cynical derision of Homelanders is healthy.

At Isaac Brock Society, we have always been not a little irreverent when it comes to discussing the USA’s international tax invasion. Eventually when we meet real Homelanders online or in person, we realize that they suffer from a type of sociopathy that we do well to criticize, deride, and even to spoof.

The coming election in the USA is a choice between a narcissist and a sociopath, a swindler and an influence peddler, a compulsive liar and a pathological liar. The Homelanders are bitterly dividing themselves between these two candidates. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen two such ill-suited people as candidates for the POTUS, and it seems like destiny would force Homelanders to choose between one of these two. Most Homelanders are short-sighted to the point of believing that, if they vote for another party, it means throwing their vote away.

The Republican Party platform is admittedly saying that it will eliminate FATCA and CBT. This is our issue–so if you are inclined to vote on our issues, it seems that there is a clear choice. But I caution against putting faith in either the Republicans or the Democrats. What we have learned in this battle thus far is that we must come up with our own personal solutions because our governments in our home countries have been derelict in protecting our freedoms, and the political leaders in the USA are only concerned about winning over the sentiments of Homelanders. Both candidates are demagogues whose only real concern is to appeal to Homelanders. Neither gives a rat’s ass about us. And so it is clear that there is no real political solution, and our only hope in coming together is to fight this in the courts.

I appreciate Patricia Moon’s  post yesterday about Donald Trump. It was interesting how a satirical post could be so easily believed (I believed it). The ensuing discussion was passionate–and that quickened me  and got me to thinking about some of my favoritest posts that I’ve written for Isaac Brock–irreverent, biting, cynical, satirical; in some cases we have successfully compared the USA to the worst examples of government tyranny in history, and this usually causes an uproar, and some people admittedly have left us. But uncensored derision is part of the DNA of this website, and I do not see that changing.

Previous Derisive Posts (Warning: some of these could come true in our lifetime):

Both our forefathers were slaves: When is a comparison correct and when isn’t it?
Santa Clause arrested on Christmas Eve
The FATCA star: a design suggestion
What would happen if Indonesia reclaimed its most famous former citizenship?
The accidental Kenyan: What would happen if the African nation copied U.S. tax policy? by Don Whiteley
The “Property of the USA” tattoo
Shulman and Flaherty Summit Ends: IRS and CRA to merge

Previous Petros Principles

(1) What the IRS can’t know unless you tell them can’t hurt you.
(2) Fear makes the IRS more dangerous than it really is.
(3) Haste is the devil.
(4) Those most hurt by the IRS’s persecution of expats have engaged the services of cross-border compliance condors.
(5) Those least hurt have done nothing.
(6) Home is where you live.
(7) An unjust law is no law.
(8) Don’t feed the beast.
(9) Do the minimum in trying to achieve the least bad outcome.
(10) coming soon

reposted from Virginia La Torre Jeker ‘s site

Americans Abroad-IRS to be Audited!https://t.co/9wjgfjJR0d

The IRS will soon be audited. Shoe's on the other foot! pic.twitter.com/1FkV3uLBoP

— V. La Torre Jeker JD (@VLJeker) July 17, 2016

Americans Abroad, IRS to be Audited
 
July 17, 2016

Maybe it’s time for the shoe to be on the other foot.

A new tax watchdog group, the Tax Revolution Institute (TRI) believes that the problems with the US tax system “demand nothing short of revolutionary change.” TRI has commenced a major effort to independently audit the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), with the help of all interested taxpayers.

TRI is a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based group, with its nonprofit status currently pending. TRI plans to conduct an “audit” of the IRS, in part, by collecting personal experiences from taxpayers detailing their encounters with the IRS. TRI is “committed to promoting transparency, accountability and integrity at all levels of the US tax system, while researching and developing simple and innovative tax reform solutions to advance freedom and prosperity for all Americans.” As part of its efforts, TRI will also examine the IRS’ employees, work culture, finances, policies and enforcement as well as taxpayer advice given by the IRS. “[T]hrough FOIA requests, briefings, testimonies, advocacy, research studies, white papers, and educational programs, TRI will expose corruption, fraud, and incompetence within the US tax system.” TRI plans to “provide educational tools and resources for tax accountability to policy makers, grassroots organizations, and the American public”.

You can make your voice be heard. Visit TRI’s website. Americans abroad who are experiencing hosts of problems caused by FATCA and citizenship-based taxation can use TRI as a platform for getting their views known and hopefully, acted on!

 
Audit IRS
 
 
Many Americans believe the IRS should be subject to an independent audit. We agree.

We are conducting the first ever independent audit of the IRS, and we need your help.

The Audit will examine all areas of :

The IRS’ treatment of individual taxpayers
The IRS’ treatment of small businesses
The IRS’ expectations of its employees
The IRS’ work culture
The IRS’ handling of its finances
Advice given to taxpayers by the IRS
IRS policy and enforcement
… and more

Click here to read Audit IRS Key Issues List

Every year, the IRS touches the lives of 246.23 million Americans who file tax returns, and has a much greater effect on the lives of the million or so Americans who are subjected to audits.

At any time, the IRS can demand up to six years of accurate financial information. Failure to provide this information can result in large fines and penalties, even in the absence of due legal process.

Unfortunately, the IRS does not meet the standards of transparency that it enforces on others. Lacking public oversight or accountability, the agency has frequently denied requests for information, ignored subpoenas and destroyed records. It has also been found to provide misleading and inaccurate information in response to legal requests.

Anything you share with us will be kept in the strictest confidence. We never publish personally identifying information. We also offer assistance to individuals who have been victimized by un-professionalism or corruption within the IRS. Just check the “I need help” box when completing the form.

Thank you for help.

To learn more about the people conducting this audit visit:

Tax Revolution
 

 (9) Do the minimum in trying to achieve the least bad outcome.

Sabrina: More isn’t always better, Linus. Sometimes it’s just more.

Commentary:

Once your life is in the hands of a compliance condor, fastidiousness becomes the norm, and you will find that IRS requires forms for many aspects of your life that you never knew were even taxable. The compliance industry also has a penchant for telling you that it is better to be safe than sorry. Principle 9 is really a reiteration of the first: (1) What the IRS can’t know unless you tell them can’t hurt you.

It is perhaps best not to tell compliance condors, if ever you engage one, more than a minimum of information–because there is no client confidentiality with a tax preparer. Furthermore, they will not be happy if you tell them about something and do not take their advice to file the correct form.

Doing the minimum may mean doing nothing at all. Not filing and coming into compliance. Not renouncing or even reporting your prior relinquishment of US citizenship to a Consulate to obtain a CLN. In some cases it means renouncing or relinquishing, and not coming into IRS compliance. Each person’s case is different, and because our governments and banks are not protecting us, each person is on their own to find a solution.

In my own case, doing the minimum meant getting out of the IRS system as cleanly as possible, and so I deemed it necessary for myself to relinquish my citizenship and to file my final 1040 tax returns and the exit form 8854. But I did the minimum necessary to escape the IRS and I did not employ a fastidious compliance condor.

Here are some concrete examples of doing the minimum, especially in the Canadian context.

1. RRSP (Form 8891): Is it really necessary to file since the IRS will not find about these accounts under the FATCA IGA? If you have already filed for an account in the past, perhaps yes. But why introduce new information to the IRS.
2. Fifth Amendment privilege: Not every line of IRS forms has to be filled out. If the information provided could lead to a criminal investigation, it is perfectly acceptable to write “Fifth Amendment” which is a signal to the IRS that you are invoking your  privilege. By law, however you are expected to provide all the information that they need to assess your taxes.
3. Mortgage FX gains and real estate capital gains: Mortgage foreign currency gains are considered taxable as are real estate capital gain. But real estate transactions are not part of the FATCA IGA.
4. TFSA and treating TFSA as a foreign trust: The US taxes TFSA but under the FATCA IGA they will not know anything about them unless you inform them. Furthermore, apparently the IRS has not ruled that TFSA must be treated as a foreign trust.
5. CRA forms and Social Insurance Number: My preparer once stapled my Canadian tax return to my 1040. I would say that is a complete no-no. It gives the IRS all kinds of superfluous information that could be used against you in a court of law. Once I took over my own reporting using TaxAct, I sent the minimum of information to the IRS in order to properly report my income. I am not even sure whether the IRS can even require proof of income (such as T4 or T5 in Canada).
6. Personal corporations: It may be that a person can do a simple tax return for the IRS without getting fastidious about how some of the actual income was deferred in a personal corporation.

Previous Petros Principles:

(1) What the IRS can’t know unless you tell them can’t hurt you.
(2) Fear makes the IRS more dangerous than it really is.
(3) Haste is the devil.
(4) Those most hurt by the IRS’s persecution of expats have engaged the services of cross-border compliance condors.
(5) Those least hurt have done nothing.
(6) Home is where you live.
(7) An unjust law is no law.
(8) Don’t feed the beast.

About: Petros is the alias of the founding administrator of the Isaac Brock Society. Petros Principles are guidelines that have helped him and others deal with the United States’ world-wide tax invasion.

 (8) Don’t feed the beast.

 And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority.

Revelation 13:1–2 (RSV)

Commentary:

Apocalyptic literature portrays great empires as beasts that devour and destroy everything in their path. In the above citation, the Apocalypse of John describes the Roman Empire as a beast which gets its power from the dragon (Satan). The Roman emperors taxed the peoples that they conquered in order to maintain their military might and their political advantage against their internal rivals. Egypt was the bread basket of Rome. It fed the beast.

The world’s beast today is unquestionably the USA. It has extended its military might across much of the planet. It maintains its economic might through the monetary system. The USA beast feeds on the world through its imposition of the US dollar as the world’s currency of trade, and it benefits from most countries maintaining US dollars in their own reserves. Since Nixon took the USA off the gold standard in 1971, the USA beast exports its dollar, which as a fiat currency costs virtually nothing to make, in exchange for real goods (oil, manufactured goods).  The USA beast employs deficit spending which devours the value of the dollar and effectively  taxes all foreign holders of USA dollars. Not only so, but the USA has weaponized the banking system to combat its enemies. No one can buy or sell anything without the mark of the beast (Rev. 13.16-17).

By comparison to US currency debasement, the taxes paid by expats hardly contribute anything to the beast. Nevertheless, expats do feed the beast in two main ways:

1. The US tax compliance industry, which is a tentacle of the beast, depends largely on the hapless expat.
2. The IRS brags about their special offshore programs.

We should do everything in our power not to encourage the spread of the USA tax compliance industry. Indeed, I recommend that we lobby for legislation to ban compliance condors from our countries. Feeding this industry, which is part of the agency capture of the corrupt USA government, is a bad idea. It leads to more bad and abusive legislation, as the compliance industry has a huge lobby in DC, and this in turn feeds more parasites around the world. One of the best strategies for curing Candida is to starve it of its main foods, sugar and simple starches. I suggest the same for this world-wide infection of compliancitis–we must starve it of expat sugar.

The IRS brags about how it has made US $6.5 billion from the Overseas Voluntary Disclosure Programs.  But of course this is likely gross revenue from the program and has not deducted the countless hours spent by IRS employees who persecuted middle-class citizen abroad like Marvin van Horn.  But such gloating would likely fool the math-challenged American public for whom $6.5 billion seems like an extraordinary amount of money. But in terms of annual federal expenditures of $3.95 trillion, it would feed the beast for only about 14 hours. So clearly, the IRS vaunts this figure of $6.5 billion for the purposes of propaganda and demagoguery.

In my opinion, expats can have a significant collective effect on these two aspects of the beast. Feeding the beast only makes it more powerful. So it is definitely in our own interests not to feed it.

Previous discussions:

The nature of the beast: feeding on EX-pats
California genocide and the Indian Tax Revolt of 1851
The Conscience of a Lawyer and the FBAR Fundraiser

Previous Petros Principles:

(1) What the IRS can’t know unless you tell them can’t hurt you.
(2) Fear makes the IRS more dangerous than it really is.
(3) Haste is the devil.
(4) Those most hurt by the IRS’s persecution of expats have engaged the services of cross-border compliance condors.
(5) Those least hurt have done nothing.
(6) Home is where you live.
(7) An unjust law is no law.

About: Petros is the alias of the founding administrator of the Isaac Brock Society. Petros Principles are guidelines that have helped him and others deal with the United States’ world-wide tax invasion.

UPDATE: If you just can’t stomach Trump or Clinton, here’s a list of write-in candidates

Some notables (can you believe these?)
 
VADER, DARTH SPOKANE,WA 10/27/2015 Write-In
MOUSE, MICKEY ANAHEIM,CA 08/30/2015 Write-In
THE ELF, BUDDY NORTH POLE,AK 08/10/2015 Write-In
RAFF, RIFF NOTRE DAME,IN 02/04/2016 Write-In

ALSO: 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments released by Wikileaks leads to resignation of Wasserman-Schultz; shut-down of Bernie confirmed

Search the DNC database

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but as things stand today, I think Trump will win. Here's my 5 reasons why: https://t.co/jotMPWmt96

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) July 23, 2016

Michael Moore wrote a compelling post on why Trump is going to win. It is difficult to imagine he is wrong………

Some excerpts:

Friends:
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.

I assumed during the primaries that certainly the American people would come to their senses and that someone who wasn’t in the main spotlight would emerge toward the end. That someone seemed to be Kaisch…but it wasn’t to be. Now, I suppose many are assuming the same sort of thing regarding Hillary. Even if you don’t like her, she is the more reasonable choice. America has changed and I am sure those of us who have been gone for decades no longer have a real “feel” for what is going on down south.

1) Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.

I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 ………

Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.

From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here….

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

Being from Ohio, and seeing Michigan towns when driving back to see family, it is not at all hard to imagine this. Lots and lots of factory workers here and unhappy ones at that.
 
 

2) The Last Stand of the Angry White Man.

Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them.
Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!

This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!

 
 
Can’t relate to that at all so will say nothing…….
 
 

3) The Hillary Problem

Continue reading →

One year ago I had the pleasure of joining John Richardson, Tricia Moon and Bahmen Yazdanfar on That Channel.

 
A pair of Brit-based wonks have copped aether space on LSE USCentre for their views on — put on your seatbelt — how expatriate Americans are the most important voting bloc you’ve never heard of.

Go no further than this end-of-article paragraph lead-in:

Democrats Abroad and Republicans Overseas remain vibrant and ambitious organisations …

The whole piece is a hype front-end for a “report” (not read) titled America’s Overseas Voters: How They Could Decide The US Presidency In 2016.

The main use of this emission for Brock may be to serve as a piece of triangulation fuzz on recent ruminations about the appearance in the Republican party platform of language relating to extraterritorials.

It’s all about trying to scrape up every possible vote in what could become a weird and very tight contest? And once those votes are counted … well, that platform guff did whatever it was supposed to. Or not. Not to mention those rapporteurs.