cheese it, the cops!

in favor of tax evasion

i was listening to diane rehm today. they were talking about 'inversion', in which an american company merges with a (much smaller) overseas company, then officially moves its headquarters to avoid paying corporate income tax in the us. people calling in were incredibly outraged; one called it 'treason'. but very few people of any sort anywhere voluntarily pay more taxes than they are legally obliged to, and there is absolutely no moral reason to. taxation is merely coercion or extortion; by all means evade it if you can. oh we have to help those furthest down, pay for infrastructure, etc. yeah plus we are supposed to be morally obliged to pay under coercion to have ourselves surveilled without our own knowledge, for drones, to maintain a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal, for elected officials to yap at each other like parrots and try to manipulate us with jive, to intern tens of thousands of latino immigrants, for the prison-industrial complex. we are morally obliged pay for policies devoted to moving all the wealth produced by our society to wall street. we are supposed to pay to have ourselves put into fatal chokeholds because we are selling lillegal (=untaxed) cigarettes on the street, or to fund the abuse of our children. 

but we are in this together! what about the collective? yeah what about it? because this sort of universal coercion makes any authentic collective action impossible by definition. if you believe yourself to be morally obliged to capitulate, i guess go ahead and pay all you have to realize the projects of the wealthy and powerful and murderous, which according to you embody your very identity. but you're operating with a moral code according to which coercion is cooperation, extreme enforced hierarchy is egalitarian, violence is order: in short, according to which evil is good.

standards are falling

speaking of the practice of calling anyone you disagree with a terrorist, harry reid calls bundy and the 'militias' that have rallied in his support 'domestic terrorists'. on morning joe this morning, mike barnicle waved around a dictionary, defined 'terrorism' and asserted flatly that reid was perfectly right. barnicle was obviously wrong, even by the inadequate definition he quoted. no one is a terrorist without committing any actual acts of violence, no matter how you cut it. 'they're resisting our government', said barnicle, showing exactly who he is, the goddamn commie. no wait! he's a fascist. he's a monphysite, i tell you, a blanquist, a witch. anyway only an embezzler or a jacobin quotes webster's dictionary in defense of his monstrous positions, like osama with the koran.

this phenomenon of using 'terrorist' completely indiscriminately to mean whomever you don't like is self-consuming: the word is meaningless in these doinks' mouths, and all they are trying to do is manipulate their followers, if any, into a rage. i hear that in dc, people are tossing the term around in marital spats. i'm sure bundy calls reid a terrorist too. we need higher standards both of terrorism and of meaningfulness. if i were a terrorist - and i'm sure i am by barnicle's or reid's or assad's standards etc - i'd be getting pissed off. geez y'all count anyone as a terrorist these days! christ i had to earn that shit by blowing people to smithereens; now all you have to do is wave the wrong sign or get tased. what is the world coming to? we used to have standards.

stick it

obama and many other rationalizers of oppression take this approach, among a hundred other distractions, red herrings, etc, to the nsa: hey google and facebook do it, so hahaha! first of all, no they don't, in many dimensions. really do you think facebook is putting backdoor code into google, etc? but here's the thing: i'll be as worried about google or verizon having my info as i am about the us government when google has 'the greatest military the world has ever known', sprawling systems of incarceration, the power of coercive taxation, thousands of heavily armed thugs in suits, predator drones, high-end torturers, and so on. until then, take this argument and stick it.

pee tardy

i just want to say this up top: no doubt the tea party consisted of ignorant rednecks operating out of racial resentment. their opinions were manipulated by fox and rush, rather than by the harvard j.d.s manipulating the opinions of decent people from portland. however, they were so, so right about obama, and about the nature of the american government now, and about the fact that the american political tradition of freedom, as enshrined in the constitution, is over, betrayed. so absorb that. pardon my 'you' but i can't help it: they were right and you were wrong. they were true and you were false. they were clear and you were muddy. they were zoysia and you were astroturf. they were oppressed and you were oppressors. they said something and you said nothing. birtherism turned out to be a nice false symbol of the truth, which is perhaps why it has a bizarre power and immunity to evidence. right the man was born in america. but he is not an american as i would understand what that means.

safety first

well, you sort of figured they were scooping everything. really, obviously, most of us only depend for the non-detection of our crimes on the fact that there's too much information to actually read, though i'm sure the algorithims get better here as in china. but however: understand that anyone is arrestable at any time, in virtue of their tax posture, drug consumption, possessions of one sort or another, associations. that is really the squishy totalitarian sine qua non or some shit. yo y'all want this. you need to be safe! neo-cons and safetynetters agree. you have already been searched.

remember last week, when you were arguing that the government is all of us, working together, our agent of collective identity, our collective justice? funny what it takes to make that shit happen.

one thing you see immediately: the government regulates these communications companies, and these communications companies maintain an oligopoly, and they  and it are all one big sprawling machine when it comes to processing your information. also health-care, benefits, taxes are all worked in; you are never not embroiled. but you just just try to chill and there's no real reason you should particularly come to anyone's attention. can't intern everybody! but we could intern anybody.

where is russ feingold? paging russ feingold!

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Iran, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or 'safety-net' programs that enhance consumption and give large parts of the population a sense of dependency and security; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance;  overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.  

 

taxation as an art

one 10k item in the irs's party budget was a speech on 'leadership through art,' by a painter who, on the spot, created paintings of great leaders such as . . . bono. this tells you all you need to know about the current state of tax policy, visual arts, and music appreciation in this, the greatest nation in the history of my ass. joe scarborough, in rare form this morning, hopes that the work depicts bono playing poker with dogs.

maintain absolute silence

everyone - every single person and organization - has a conflict of interest when it comes to talking about the irs.