(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.
 

(7) An unjust law is no law.

Commentary:

Lex iniusta non est lex has a long tradition going back to St. Augustine. The world’s greatest human rights heroes remind us that unjust laws are illegitimate.

Unfortunately, in today’s Western world, lawmakers, law enforcers, and victims need reminding that an unjust law is no law. People are essentially law-abiding often to the point of scrupulousness. Civil obedience has become second nature, since the majority of us ordinary people start with the assumption that government is benevolent.

The cross-border compliance condors have taken advantage of this essentially law-abiding character. They try to infect their clients with a kind of tax scrupulosity, a pathological guilt and fear that if they do not do exactly as told, the IRS will destroy them with taxes, fines, interest, and jail time–and it would be the client’s own damn fault because it was their duty as a citizen to keep up with the requirements of the IRS.

My writing at the Isaac Brock Society has often focused on the injustice of the laws and their application to expats. This articulation of the injustice has been of clear benefit to our readers, if only to confirm that it is the USA Federal Government that has become criminal and that their own innate sense of what is unfair was right all along.

Why is the IRS persecution of expats unjust? Here are some ways that have been explored over and over at the Isaac Brock Society:

• It is an assault on the tax bases of every country in the world via the Trojan horse of the diaspora of so-called US citizens.
• The taxes collected are for the benefit of Homelanders and not for those who are taxed.
• The IRS has spawned a parasitic industry of compliance condors who produce nothing but paperwork and are an economic drain to the countries in which they ply their illegitimate craft.
• The IRS has created innocent victims, not least of all those expats who went into the money laundering program for criminals called OVDP.
• Unjust laws have criminalized the failure to fill out forms (FBAR, 8938) for reporting innocent bank accounts.
• Unjust laws (FBAR, FATCA) attempt to force people to yield voluntarily their own privacy rights or force foreign financial institutions to violate local privacy laws.
• The IRS has violated the citizenship rights of thousands: forcing some to renounce US citizenship, and treating non-US citizens, against their will, as though they were US citizens.
• Extra-territorial taxation of US citizens in essence is a tax on the right to return. It is unjust to tax human rights.
• The IRS threatens expats with excessive fines that are not proportional to the infractions committed (such as the FBAR 300% fine of the value of unreported financial accounts).
• The US government has also forced many expats underground and into de facto exile. Many are now afraid to mention their origins in public or visit their native land to see their families.

Previous discussions:

Civil Disobedience, FBAR and Forms 8854 and 8938
California genocide and the Indian Tax Revolt of 1851
Fair tax, unfair tax: or When is it paying my fair share?
Burning down barns is not wrong because it is illegal; it is illegal because it is wrong
When law becomes a substitute for morality

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.

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.

(6) Home is where you live.

Commentary:

After the American Revolution defeated the British, the Loyalists to the crown fled–many of whom settled here in Ontario where I live today. The Americans seized their property in the US. The early Americans looked askance at those whose loyalties were stronger for their mother country than it was for the new homeland.

Now the situation is reversed and the USA requires Loyalist-like patriotism from its expats around the world. Yet I have found that the one of the major principles that has guided my actions in this IRS persecution of Americans abroad is that home is where I live–not where I come from. My instincts tell me to protect this community, the people who are near me.

American exceptionalism may require that I consider the USA my home. Indeed, sometimes when I passed the border, the US border guard would say, “Welcome home!” Each time I crossed the border, however, it felt less and less like home, and when finally I read about certain expectations that the USA had upon me and my family here in Canada, I realized that the USA had become foreign and hostile. My home is now here. It has been for quite some time.

Previous discussions:

Homelanders Abroad at American Expatriates Facebook Group
Homelanders Abroad are drawing lines in the sand
Who is the real Peter Dunn?

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.

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.