Author Archives: Deckard1138

Cross-posted from Maple Sandbox:

Happy #CanadaDay @JustinTrudeau https://t.co/tbfAG1vjjc R u wearing ur #FATCA Flip Flops 2 celebrate ur capitulation 2 @POTUS?

— Lynne Swanson (@LynneBlaze) July 1, 2016

Happy Canada Day Chief Liberal Flip Flopping Hypocrite Prime Minister Trudeau. Are you wearing your FATCA Flip Flops to celebrate your capitulation to a foreign government?

Liberal Hypocrisy must be stopped. Liberals must stop the dirty work. Liberals must stop this dangerous attack on our privacy and on Canada’s sovereignty. Liberals must stop this Charter violation.

Because a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.

Many thanks to Deckard for his help in putting this video together!

So I just received my 2016 Canadian Census notice in the mail today, complete with a personalized secure access code, presumably to initiate the self-destruct mechanism attached to the few remaining vestiges of privacy I have in my life, and to potentially out myself – and my family – to both the Canadian and US Governments. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, should I really be this paranoid, just because it’s increasingly likely that everyone is indeed out to get me?

While I have so far managed to elude the FATCA police by sheer luck of having never revealed my birthplace to anyone where I bank, I am now confronted with one of the first true conundrums of my post-OMG moment life – how to respond, if at all, to the following census questions:

2016 Census of Population questions, long form (National Household Survey):

STEP B
1. Including yourself, how many persons usually live at this address on May 10, 2016?
1: Number of Persons

2. Including yourself, list all persons who usually live here on May 10, 2016.
1: Family Name(s); Given Name(s)

STEP C
1. Did you leave anyone out of step B because you were not sure the person should be listed? For example, a student, a child in joint custody, a person temporarily away, a person who lives here temporarily, a resident from another country with a work or study permit, a refugee claimant, etc.

1: No
2: Yes. Specify the name, the relationship and the reason.

STEP E
Copy the names in step B to question 1. Keep the same order.

If more than five persons live here, you will need an extra questionnaire.
1. Name.
In the spaces provided, copy the names in the same order as in step B. Then answer the following questions for each person.
1: Family Name, Given Name

SOCIOCULTURAL INFORMATION

12: Where was this person born?

Specify one response only, according to present boundaries.
Born in Canada
1: Nfld. Lab.
2: P.E.I.
3: N.S.
4: N.B.
5: Quebec
6: Ontario
7: Manitoba
8: Sask.
9: Alberta
10: B.C.
11: Yukon
12: N.W.T.
13: Nunavut

Born outside Canada
14: specify country

13: Of what country is this person a citizen?

Indicate more than one citizenship, if applicable.

“Canada, by naturalization” refers to the process by which an immigrant is granted citizenship of Canada, under the Citizenship Act.

1: Canada, by birth
2: Canada, by naturalization
3: Other country — specify

14: Is this person now, or has this person ever been, a landed immigrant?

A “landed immigrant” (permanent resident) is a person who has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities.
1: No. Go to question 16.
2: Yes

15: In what year did this person first become a landed immigrant?

Example: Year 1974
1: Year. If exact year is not known, enter best estimate.

PLACE OF BIRTH OF PARENTS

24: Where was each of this person’s parents born?

a) Father

Mark or specify country according to present boundaries.
1: Born in Canada
2: Born outside Canada — specify country
b) Mother

Mark or specify country according to present boundaries.
1: Born in Canada
2: Born outside Canada — specify country

The bottom of the notice reads:

By law, your responses will be kept confidential.
Thank you for your cooperation.

Didn’t the CRA also recently insist that their handing-over of the financial information of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to the US Government is also being kept confidential? How reassuring.

Now, I’m well aware that there are a million other data points out there already broadcasting every detail of my life to whichever three-letter agency might be interested, but it genuinely concerns me that this very explicit package of personal information is being demanded so unequivocally, right now, when so many of us are still figuratively hiding in the attic, not all that far removed from Anne Frank – and the Canadian Government damn well knows it. The threat is right there on the front of the notice:

Complete the census – it’s the law.

So, that perennial philosophical question: what would Jesus do?
If you are a US Person living in Canada in 2016, what will you do?

Here is the full text of the motion to dismiss:

ENTRY AND ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE AN
AMENDED VERIFIED COMPLAINT (DOC. 32); GRANTING DEFENDANTS’
MOTION TO DISMISS (DOC. 26) PLAINTIFFS’ COMPLAINT (DOC. 1); AND
TERMINATING CASE.

Here, analyzing each Plaintiff individually, the Court finds that none of the Plaintiffs has standing to sue Defendants. No individual Plaintiff has suffered an invasion of a legally protected interest, which is concrete and particularized, and actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical. Moreover, no alleged injury is fairly traceable to the actions of the Defendants, but rather, the actions of an independent third party. Finally, there are no allegations that it is likely that the alleged injury will be redressed by a favorable decision. See Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560–61. In reaching these holdings, the Court analyzed the proposed Amended Verified Complaint, (doc. 32-1), which could not withstand Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss, (doc. 26); therefore, the proposed amendments are futile.
Accordingly, all claims are DISMISSED for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(1), against all Defendants, without prejudice.

UPDATE: Here is a new article from CGMA Magazine detailing the lawsuit dismissal:

US Court dismisses FATCA challenges

And as reported yesterday in Law360:

Sen. Rand Paul’s FATCA Lawsuit Tossed For Lack Of Standing
By Jack Newsham

Law360, New York (April 26, 2016, 9:15 PM ET) — An Ohio federal judge tossed a lawsuit filed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and several current and former U.S. citizens living abroad that challenged key elements of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, saying the plaintiffs hadn’t shown that the law had harmed them or probably would harm them.

Paul and nine others lack standing, U.S. District Judge Thomas Rose ruled, and they still haven’t done anything to fix the problems Judge Rose identified when he refused to issue an injunction against the law’s provisions in September…

Registration required to read the rest of the article.

Here’s an unsympathetic Forbes story from October 2015 about the same lawsuit and the original motion to dismiss:

Rand Paul Suffers Setback In Foreign Reporting Lawsuit

DRAFT 2016 DEMOCRATS ABROAD PLATFORM

Democrats Abroad has released its draft 2016 platform and readers of this new election year manifesto are invited to “JOIN OR LOGIN to leave a comment” until April 27th, by completing an online survey.

As usual, there are plenty of widely divergent, even contradictory, statements and goals contained within the platform’s pages. For example, DA favours

…restoring U.S. citizenship to persons born abroad who lost it by failing to meet residency requirements in a section of the Immigration and Naturalization Act that was repealed in 1978…

while calling for

…an amnesty program for foreign nationals who are citizens of the United States in name only, with no nexus to the United States other than their birth on U.S. soil or birth abroad to a U.S. parent, to allow them to shed their unwanted U.S. citizenship on a no fees, no penalty and no tax filing or reporting basis.

This thread is intended for those who would like to comment on this latest DA dispatch without potentially outing themselves in the process. We would encourage Democrats Abroad to carefully read and consider the thoughts and opinions of our commenters here, as well as those who choose to take the survey and comment on DA’s web site.

Following a suggestion made by Bubblebustin at the Media and Blog Articles thread today, here are some links to an excellent series of personal blog posts by a 23 year old woman who calls herself The Dualist:

HALF AND HALF

FINDING OUT I WAS A 23 YEAR-OLD US TAX “DELINQUENT”

ASSESSING MY OPTIONS FOR ADDRESSING MY NEWLY-DISCOVERED ‘DELINQUENT’ US TAX SITUATION

As Bubblebustin describes, “A young woman discovers her US tax and filing obligations and realizes she’s damned no matter what she does. She speaks for many of us when describing her OMG moment to the current struggle whether to renounce a citizenship she still identifies with.”

The Dualist was born in the UK, moved to the US as a toddler and lived there until the age of thirteen, then moved back to the UK.  Here are some excerpts from her vividly-told story:

I have introduced myself to people as half-English and half-American ever since I was old enough to respond to the question, “where are you from?”. It is almost always the first thing I say when asked to tell somebody about myself. I never reflected too deeply on what being half-English and half-American actually meant. It has just been the simplest, shortest way of alluding to certain personal circumstances, like having an American father and an English mother; as well as experiences, like moving between England and the States growing up, that have contributed to who I am.

 

It all began during a client dinner in the City in London one evening. I was sitting at a large table with around a dozen people. Half of them were our firms’ clients, and the other half were my colleagues. The most senior employee of the client firm present, an American, noticed my accent and asked me where I was from. I explained that I was a dual citizen, and that I had grown up in the US. After a few polite questions about where I had grown up, and when I had left the country, he abruptly asked:

“So, do you file your US taxes?”

 

In the period after the initial “oh my god” moment I felt seriously paranoid, scared and confused about what I should do. The whole concept of citizenship-based taxation was so bizarre to me, and its enforcement rules so disproportionate, that trying to come to terms with it all could be best described as disorienting. ‘Surely this is all just a big misunderstanding,’ I often thought, ‘or a bad dream!’

 

Why does the US government want to make our lives so difficult when we have done nothing wrong? Why are they burdening us to continually prove that we are innocent, and invading our privacy using third parties and foreign governments to make sure that we’re telling the IRS the truth? Why are they terrorizing us with threats of bankrupting penalties, incarceration and (very recently) passport revocation? What exactly are they hoping to achieve, when the vast majority of us do not even make enough money to owe taxes to the US?

Can they talk about the ‘land of the free’, or being ‘leaders of the free world’ with a straight face anymore?

UPDATE: Saturday, November 21, 2015
Please see the following post from John Richardson which explains how the FATCA IGA and the CBT lawsuits have different donor bases as well as a specific request regarding donations to ADCS.

As posted today by John Richardson at citizenshiptaxation.wordpress.com:

The #CBTLawsuit rollout is beginning – we need YOUR support

This post is to:

– announce the “roll out” of a lawsuit filed in the United States
– against the Government of the United States
– to strike down the most egregious aspects of U.S. “place of birth taxation”
– and provide relief for those who reside outside the United States and are unjustly, unfairly and unlawfully burdened by the attempt of the United States to impose its laws on the residents and/or citizens of other nations.

The lawsuit will require a large amount of funding including an immediate injection of $25,000.

For those who only want to contribute the funding are invited to go here. Those who want to understand what we are doing read on.

Source image courtesy of Sally Edelstein and her web site Envisioning The American Dream.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/09/21/irs-and-fbi-track-americans-who-renounce-citizenship-why-is-fbi-list-longer/

A new article by Robert Wood highlighting the disparity between IRS and FBI renunciation lists. The Isaac Brock Society is name-checked for its pioneering role in tracking and flagging the inconsistencies in this data. Here’s an excerpt:

The FBI and the IRS don’t agree, yet both are ostensibly tracking the same data: how Americans are giving up their citizenship. For several years, a historical trickle of renunciations of U.S. citizenship has spiked materially. The trickle is now more of an open faucet, though one difficulty in determining the flow is available data. The IRS publishes a list, but many people who have expatriated claim their names are never on the IRS list.

Each three months, there is a public name and shame list published by the Treasury Department based on information from the IRS. The list each quarter is incomplete so the numbers are under-stated, some say considerably. For example, consular expatriations where people do not file exit tax forms with the IRS are apparently not counted. Indeed, the Treasury Department’s published list states explicitly that this is just a list of those about whom the Secretary of the Treasury has data. Statistics are also not available for why people say good-bye.

Now, a new report flagged by Paul Caron backs up the claim that the IRS is undercounting Americans who are renouncing citizenship. The report quotes extensively from Andrew Mitchel, an attorney who specializes in renunciations. Mr. Mitchel compares IRS and FBI data and says the gap between the two sets of figures is significant. Mr. Mitchel credits Canada’s Isaac Brock Society for beginning to track the FBI data in 2013.

The US Department of Justice has issued a 57-page response to the filing of a Motion for a Preliminary Injunction by the James Bopp FATCA repeal legal team. The DOJ’s argument begins as follows:

Plaintiffs seek an extraordinary order that would halt enforcement of several duly enacted statutory provisions, along with associated regulations and implementing international agreements, aimed at curbing offshore tax evasion. The challenged laws are essential to tax enforcement, and the injuries that plaintiffs allege they have suffered as a result of such laws are self-inflicted, speculative, or even illusory. Plaintiffs’ claims for relief fail for lack of Article III standing, are jurisdictionally barred by the Anti-Injunction Act, and are meritless as a matter of well-established constitutional law. The preliminary injunction should be denied because plaintiffs have no likelihood of success on the merits and have no irreparable injury—certainly none to outweigh the great harm that the Government, and public interest in general, would suffer if enforcement of these laws were enjoined.

Republicans Overseas and others are reacting strongly to DOJ’s victim blaming tactics. Here are links to the original story at Republicans Overseas and to John Richardson’s comments at ADCS.

Here, again, is the complete DOJ document: DEFENDANT’S MEMORANDUM IN OPPOSITION TO PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

It is obvious that victim blaming is, and will continue to be, a central tactic of this Administration, as it is finally put on the defensive and forced to justify its outrageously discriminatory and immoral FATCA campaign. Now may be a good time to remind ourselves of the essential characteristics and dynamics of victim blaming, which easily scale from the most primal one-on-one bullying to the systematic targeting and abuse of entire groups by the state. Here are a couple of good references to start with:

http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=glbtc

Victim-blaming is a phenomenon that has been happening since at least the beginning of recorded history but has only recently been identified as a dynamic used to empower the criminal and maintain the status quo. Victim-blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or abuse is held partly or entirely responsible for the actions committed against them. In other words, the victims are held accountable for the maltreatment they have been subjected to. Perpetrators of crimes for which they blame the victim commonly enjoy a privileged social status opposite the victim, and their blame typically involves use of stereotypical negative words. The phenomenon of victim blaming is thus common in hate crimes, discrimination, rape and bullying. The main motivation for people to victim-blame is to justify abuse or social injustice. However, it is not only the perpetrator who engages in the victim-blaming. Perpetrators, bystanders and society and even the victims themselves practice and enforce victim-blaming. Each group of people who blames the victim does so for different reasons based on their power or lack thereof, self-defense and desire to find logical reasons for abuse or social injustice.

William Ryan coined the phrase “blaming the victim” in his book Blaming the Victim in 1971, as a response to years of oppression and the civil rights movement. He describes victim- blaming as a way to preserve the interest of the privileged group in power (Zur). Since then, advocates for crime victims, particularly those of rape, have adopted the phrase. Although Ryan coined the phrase, the phenomenon is well developed in psychology and history. As previously stated, victim-blaming has been happening at least since the beginning of recorded history. There are many examples of victim-blaming in the Old Testament regarding tragedies justified by blaming the victims as sinners (Robinson 141). Unfortunately, victim-blaming is still rampant today and has only recently been identified as problematic.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-love-and-war/201311/why-do-we-blame-victims

Victim blaming is not just about avoiding culpability—it’s also about avoiding vulnerability. The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable. The idea that misfortune can be random, striking anyone at any time, is a terrifying thought, and yet we are faced every day with evidence that it may be true.
 
In the 1960s, social psychologist Dr. Melvin Lerner conducted a famous serious of studies in which he found that when participants observed another person receiving electric shocks and were unable to intervene, they began to derogate the victims. The more unfair and severe the suffering appeared to be, the greater the derogation. Follow up studies found that a similar phenomenon occurs when people evaluate victims of car accidents, rape, domestic violence, illness, and poverty. Research conducted by Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman suggests that victims sometimes even derogate themselves, locating the cause of their suffering in their own behavior, but not in their enduring characteristics, in an effort to make negative events seem more controllable and therefore more avoidable in the future.

Lerner theorized that these victim blaming tendencies are rooted in the belief in a just world, a world where actions have predictable consequences and people can control what happens to them. It is captured in common phrases like “what goes around comes around” and “you reap what you sow.” We want to believe that justice will come to wrongdoers, whereas good, honest people who follow the rules will be rewarded. Research has found, not surprisingly, that people who believe that the world is a just place are happier and less depressed.

But this happiness may come at a cost—it may reduce our empathy for those who are suffering, and we may even contribute to their suffering by increasing stigmatization. So is the only alternative to belief in a just world a sense of helplessness and depression? Not at all. People can believe that the world is full of injustice but also believe that they are capable of making the world a more just place through their own actions. One way to help make the world a better place to fight the impulse to rationalize others’ suffering, and to recognize that it could have just as soon been us in their shoes. This recognition can be unsettling, but it may also be the only way that we can truly open our hearts to others’ suffering and help them feel supported and less alone. What the world may lack in justice we can at least try to make up for in compassion.