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Schumer Introduces Ex-PATRIOT Act: Will Banish Those Who Renounce US Citizenship
What comes after Banana Republic? Because America is it - after last week Facebook co-founder, and native Brazilian, Eduardo Saverin announced he would denounce his US citizenship, America has decided to make it virtually illegal to denounce one's citizenship in what can only be classified as the dumbest proposed law in recent history: meet the Ex-PATRIOT Act (Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy) proposed by Chick Schumer and Bob Casey. One wonders just how much taxpayer money was spent to pay naming consultants to come up with this witty acronym for a law that can only be classified as utter idiocy. Here is our suggestion for the follow up law: The "GULAG" Act: Get Ur Laughable Asses Gone (although we are open to any other non-taxpayer funded acronym suggestions).
From ABC:
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.
In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap the benefit of tax savings by becoming a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes.
At a news conference this morning, Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey, D-Pa., will unveil the "Ex-PATRIOT" - "Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy" - Act to respond directly to Saverin's move, which they dub a "scheme" that would "help him duck up to $67 million in taxes."
The senators will call Saverin's move an "outrage" and will outline their plan to re-impose taxes on expatriates like Saverin even after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Their proposal would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship.
The plan would bar individuals like Saverin from ever reentering the United States again.
"Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time," Tom Goodman, Saverin's spokesman, told Bloomberg News in an email.
Last year 1,700 people renounced their U.S. citizenship.
So going forward everyone who no longer wants a US passport will have to check a box:
- Are you no longer a US citizen for tax purposes: Yes / No.
And to think there are those who inexplicably say America's elected officials are idiots, and central planning is sure to fail...
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Too expensive. I like Asia, a long way from the tribe and it's influences.
Yes, the New World Order is indeed an Anglo-Zionist construct with its capital in Jerusalem.
Hence why the primary litmus test to becoming president in the United States is swearing fealty to Israel and proving how much one loves the Jews.
Ask the corn dog lady, she has an extra swiss one laying around.
The discourse gets more childish everyday.
What's funny is that this law already exists. Chick just wants his name in the paper again.
I renounced that shit my 1st year of college when it dawned on me id been lied to my entire life about this fake ass democracy.....just trying to figure out how to get my "Shinny" out with the fam.....
Fuck chuck scammer and the USA....
Schumer you DOUCHE!
How about we the people pass the GTFDBOOOA.....Get the Fuckin Douche Bags out of Office Act....It goes into effect on November 6, 2012 you rug wearing D Bag!
We need a new axis of evil
We've had this one a while, it's getting ratty around the edges, and the stains won't come out.
Something this slimy had to ooze out of Schumer.
Word of warning: Do not EVER get between Chuck and a video camera.
pods
Weasels look upon Schumer with disgust.
This is really nothing new. I suggest that you consider taking a few moments to read the link below.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/silver-curtain
It's going to get far, far worse.
Tyler is unquestionablly more knowledgeable and attuned to the financial systems than I will ever be and I nearly always agree with his posts but I need some understanding on this one. Clearly the steps taken were to avoid paying taxes to US citizens. Is the position he should not have to pay any taxes to the US? We could sure use some of that tax revenue to repair roads,bridges among other infrastructure in this country. So, looks like Schumer is trying to close a loophole. The basis is if you do business in this country, you should pay your taxes. The question is not whether to pay taxes but how much. I think if he makes 4 billion, he should pay taxes.
What loophole?
Would you be so kind as to volunteer to pay taxes to Zimbabwe, even though you are not a Zimbabwe citizen?
Actually it is simpler than that - those who generate wealth will always go where they are most welcome.
This is what it's all about.
Exactly - Maybe if the US Gov were not such an inherently inefficient, wasteful, and coercive institution there would not be such a disincentive to paying taxes...
...and the corollary to that is, the people who generate wealth will flee from the places they are most mistreated.
Income tax is slavery.
generate wealth my ass.
That type of attitude is what drives industry and businesses abroad.
The perfect attitude for a self-entitled nouveau 3rd world underclass.
Yep...Wealth is punished in the U.S. because the government cannot manage the government..They want that wealth, they need that wealth..Spending allows the two parties to stay in power.
That implies a certain and unwelcome "holier-than-thou" attitude that says they're supposed to be treated like royalty.
If by "royalty", you mean refraining from taking everything that is theirs that they built from nothing to provide for others, then yes, I suppose they are "holier than thou".
Personally, I just like to hit people with a hammer until they understand that being hit with a hammer is great and awesome, and that only selfish hypocrites don't want to be hit with hammers, and really they ought to be hit with more and larger hammers more often, and they should be greatful for my restraint.
Once the venture capital community and millions of under-recognized contributors at Facebook and other companies renounce citizenship, there won't be many wealth generating citizens left in the USA.
Ironic also that the Internet itself on which Facebook is built arose from US government funded DARPA.
This guy should pay his taxes like the rest of us.
Correction, those who generate real value will go were they are most welcome. Tyler of all people should know most of this "wealth" isn't fucking real, just bullshit paper that loses value faster and faster as long as the moral hazard and the fraud is allowed to continue.
Real capital and talent will always go were they are welcome, not the same thing as "wealth", especially when the majority of that paper wealth is bullshit.
Tyler Durden wrote:
Right. Agreed. But if the wealth was generated here, in the USA, then many of us patriots think that a fair tax ought to be paid to the federal government, however corrupt and criminal that government might be currently. We American patriots all acknowledge that the federal government is corrupt and criminal (Sen. Schumer is a good example), but some of the wealth that was generated here IN THE USA belongs to the American people.
-- Paul D. Bain
paulbain@pobox.com
Actually, it belongs to the people who earned it. But, then, that brings up the debate about the legality and morality of income tax.
Current situation is different. Rich people are leaving the ship because the holes they created are not plugable.
so "those who steal wealth will always go where they can hide it."
The spending hole will never be filled with taxes. Your bridges, roads, and infrastructure are paid for with debt.
You're an idiot, how much of that nearly 1 Trillion in stimulas went to fixing roads, bridges and infrastructure in this country in 2008?. Fucking idiot morons like you that think those that hold power will make the right decisions for the rest of us on how and where to spend OUR MONEY. Go back to your central planning worshipping workshop you fucking douchebag. Its no wonder our country is fucked with people like you breading let alone voting.
Rage. Rage and more Rage. How's that working out for ya?
Everyone sees where the U.S. and Europe are headed, massive tax increases on "the rich" (anyone making more than the highest paid bureaucrats) to prop up their failing socialist states. People like this Brazilian Face Book funder/founder create wealth IN SPITE OF GOVERNMENTS, not because of them.
But tell me again about the taxes he owes "to U.S. citizens." Which ones? The fat ass 5 foot nothing illegals and their anchor babies? The crack heads in the ghettos? The red necks burying bags of junk silver coins on their 2 acre compounds in the Mid-West? The Hollywood elite? The New York bankers? The Washington political elite?
To whom does he "owe" HIS money?
Schumer is in favor of you paying taxes, he is also in favor of his Wall Street buddies NOT paying taxes.
"Are you no longer a US citizen for tax purposes: Yes / No."
Thought this was already covered by the presumption that leaving the US with >$2m of assets is considered for tax purposes. Then again, closing tax loopholes for all, including the jurisdictional ones, is welcome.
At best, Saverin's like a john that dumps a prostitute once done with them. More accurately, he's a traitor who painted his own large bullseye on the back; unlike Brazil, any future US administration willing to act on him will not care where he is in the world.
--
Once again, this proves that you don't follow in his footsteps by attracting unwanted government attention.
A target on his back? Are you suggesting they're going to drone him?
I don't know what his fate will be nor know the means of any potential demise. The more likely scenario is that Saverin would be taken in alive to reclaim any assets + interest, then dumped wherever convenient.
What I am suggesting is that Saverin did himself no favor by thinking that he can escape the reach of the US. When offended enough, the US government does not care where you are; if you wish to minimize government confiscation, don't follow in Saverin's footsteps by attracting a ton of attention to yourself.
You have just defined a tyrannical regime. So you are blaming Saverin for trying to flee it? Sounds awfully blame-the-victim-y.
Before the US was a tyranny, when people could keep what they honestly earned -- 100% of it-- people fled TO the USA.
Curiously, immigration of highly productive people to the US began to dry up after 1913. All we get now are poor Mexicans who are intent merely on sending their money home, and have no interest in improving their station in life.
You seem confused. America is a totalitarian fascist police state. The rule of law left this land long ago.
If you want to see a case of "Pick up that can, citizen!" tyranny, Singapore has far outdone the US. Saverin wont see it as his kind are protected from the regulars through the tyranny of the Singapore government.
That country does worse by its own to protect its business class royals like Saverin. Then you call it anything but tyranny.
So, how exactly would someone who is worth a great deal of money choose to live somewhere else without attracting the attention of the US Government?
Never let any of that money touch the banks. Any bank. Worldwide.
Pretty unrealistic, unless you're a drug dealer. If you're a drug dealer, use the cash to buy gold, pre-paid credit cards, bit coins. Then go wherever you want.
But if you start living lavishly they will zero in on you. The American fascist police state has global reach, which is pretty much the secondary slogan of the U.S. Navy.
"Global Reach...for American fascism."
Tyranny always comes from the left!
Can you be more specific for this savvy crew?
Brown Shirts.
Blackshirts were moseley/mussolini's boys right?
Maybe you never heard of National Socialism?
They said something about it when i toured auschwitz.....................
http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Seizure-Power-Experience-1922-1945/dp/0531056333
Probably the best book on the subject, when it happens again it will be using the same social control methods at the local level.
I really shouldn't respond but seriously? If liberal deomcrats calls themselbves republicans does that make it so? NO. It's ones actions that determine what they are. And germany under the nazis didn'y nationalize business; they protected it and helped it flourish. It worked. They got out off a depression. I fucking hate the Nazis so please to don't misinterpret my words. But to call them leftists is nonsense and to say all tyranny comes from the left is doubly nonense. It comes in a variety of forms. Not that you give a fuck, but seriously the whole left/right thing in America is ridiculous and a distraction. The tyranny coming to the USA is nether left no right; it is an oligarchy.
Except when it comes from the right, or middle, or any other neat little Bernay's package to sway the sheep.
With your comment, I am actually surprised you know your left from right?
pods
You've reached that age now so its time to have "the talk"....
This whole red team/blue team thing you got going is cute, but its not entirely accurate, the people/lizards/aliens running the show dont care who wins the elections as they back both sides and see it as a win/win situation. (for them anyway)
They dont give a fuck about the politicians, they simply hedge their positions with both teams and act accordingly, anyone who thinks a left/right ideology will save us is smoking the cool aid, the politics of viewpoints is over, survival rules are survival rules and they dont care which team you support.
Best of luck.
You might want to go see who voted for NDAA.
FUBAR, 'Nuff said
Di'Amato was right! What a fucking putzhead!
Someone should keep a running list of all the warmongering and police state legislation proposed.
Here's another recent one.
Ron Paul Statement on H.R.4133 – United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, May 9, 2012
This bill states it is to be US policy to "help Israel preserve its qualitative military edge"
[and]
that it is the policy of the United States to "reaffirm the enduring commitment of the United States to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state."
However, according to our Constitution the policy of the United States government should be to protect the security of the United States, not to guarantee the religious, ethnic, or cultural composition of a foreign country. In fact, our own Constitution prohibits the establishment of any particular religion in the US...
The bill was introduced by Rep. Eric Cantor and had 304 co-sponsors!
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR04133:@@@P
update: passed 411-2 in the House, only Ron Paul and John Dingell voting against.
RWe2Late wrote:
===============================
===============================
An excellent point, and it illustrates why even Rep. Ron Paul is NOT a true conservative, contrary to what many ZH participants seem to believe.
-- Paul D. Bain
paulbain@pobox.com
Swearing fealty to the Jews is a pre-requisite to joining the political elite in the Anglo-Zionist military empire.
Schumer believes in welfare for wall street and subsidized banker bonuses. eff him.
Schmuck Schumer believes in anything that will get him on TV. The word is that the most dangerous place in Washington DC is between Chuck Schumer and a television camera.
Is this Schumer dude a Borg on a mission for the Collective or something?
Never let it be said that Chcukie is not a player in the who-is-the-biggest-statist-douchebag contest!
Somebody needs to slap this punk-assed commie bitch in the face and threaten him to a duel on the capitol steps!
Man I hate the 21st century!
The monster is getting desperate...
People want to leave your oppressive regime so you make it "illegal" to do so. Welcome to East Germany. Worked out well for them in the long run!
I've warned people to get out now while they can, before the gates come crashing down.
Well, the gates are crashing down. You don't have much time left. Today it's the billionaires, tomorrow the millionaires. After that, nobody will be allowed to leave with their assets intact, however humble they may be.
And after that? Well, they'll decide whether you can leave based on your job skills and potential earning power. If they consider you useful to the fascist regime then you won't be allowed to exit.
Sorry Lads, you dont deserve politcians like Schumer. Saverin, the "worst kind of capitalist" who is making Uncle Sam 360 million dollars richer is "made in America"; US upbringing, US educated and US business culture. Schumer should thank him for the gift.
VOTE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS OUT OF OFFICE !!!!
Can we vote Castro.
What a bunch of collectivist nonsense when i hear "US upbringing, US educated and US business culture" - Did he NOT PAY FOR COLLEGE ? DID HE NOT PAY HIS EMPLOYEES ? DID HE NOT MAKE MONEY FOR HIS SHAREHOLDERS ? stupid collectivist nonsense, you deserve the living hell USSA will become with these policies. It worked really well in Europe , your turn to enjoy it !!
"Where liberty dwells will be my country." Benjamin Franklin
I got it wrong after looking it up..
http://quotationsbook.com/quote/23238/
"where liberty is, there is my country."
to think when i was in China, i could drink beer in the streets of Shanghai, walk right into the shanghai stock exhange with jeans and a t-shirt and go right into the elevator without any issue. .. makes me wonder just how far we've weened off of liberty in our country.
Oh we still have liberty here. Just have to ask 30 people for permission to exercise it.
pods
Seriously, can anyone remember a bill sponsored by Senator Schumer that didn't make you cringe? He always comes across like "I am everything that is wrong with regulation". All his bills are pure faux populism.
Up Chuck Chuck - Noo Yawk's finest!
And Moses said to pharoa, "God says let my people go."
The German poet-dissident Wolf Biermann wrote many years ago: "I can only love what I am also free to leave".
OT, but I think it fits the general discussion thread of screwing you over.
If you default on student loans, can the government take your foodstamps to pay the banks back?
America has become a roach motel. You can enter but you cannot leave.
"If you love somebody, set them free." Sting.
What was the East German national anthem. I think it's (still) illegal to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles" in the Federal Republic.
I'm guessing that an x amount of billion(s) will provide an adequate amount of solace.
What morons vote these imbecil's in?
The children of morons and imbeciles?
Does the US need walls to keep its citizens in?
Next step will be trying to keep illegals inside USA.
Let's see Schummy, a guy helps create one of the most popular business models in US history and generates billions in revenue for you to tax. And because he want's to leave the US to avoid you @ss raping him even more, you want to banish him like some Medieval lord.
Well guess what Schummy, given your Jewish ancestry it's reasonable to expect you to be more sensitive to retribution behavior used by the likes of not only Medieval lords but Communist's and Nazi's.
You are utter scum.
My offering. The IDIOT ACT. Investigate, Detect International/Offshore Taxpayers Act.
Schumer is such a ballsucker. Can we please just expatriate his monkey ass & be done with it?
And we mock Cuba and North Korea for not letting their people leave the country?
pot..kettle...etc...
I always wondered what it would be like to live in East Germany - now I am finding out one step at at time.
Gosh the soviet memories this brings back...
How does RENOUNCE become DEnounce ?
Is it now COMPULSORY to be a US Citizen until death - my it is getting rather like Islam after all ?
DAMN'd: DUMB ASS Motherf;;;;;; neo-democrat dipsticks or maybe dickheads as a finish or start.
Time agan and agan Schumer has proved himself a retard.
Now I know what those soon to be deployed 28 pound drones against the amerikan people are for -- whatever schummy says...
The founders specifically discussed banishment as one of the "cruel and unusual punishments" that are expressly forbidden in our Constitution.
Then again, Schumer has spent his entire adult life working as hard as he can to subvert our Constitution. So this should come as no surprise.
I thought the Democrats were against torture.
Perhaps it would behoove one to look up the definition of 'US citizen. You will find that you are collateral to FEDCORP debt, you have no constitutional rights as you are not a party to that contract.
Do your homework.
Does this also apply to those who are NOT "citizens" but instead only "permanent residents"?
In other words, if one were to renounce their permanent residence status...do they still get taxed and "banned from the club"?
As a side note: "I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member" - Woody Allen (? or was it Groucho Marx?)
Are you no longer a US citizen for tax purposes: Yes / No.
No, but my secretary paid more taxes than me anyway.
The Land of the Free.
Castro must be laughing hysterically.
Unless i believe 9-11 was internally planed and executed false event, terreorist cannot believe what they did to this country.
Hah! I'd love to see THAT pass. Congress really is stupid enough to put themselves out of work, if not six feet under.
The US is the only major nation to treat its citizens as slaves and tax their income even when they don't live or work there.
Now these fascist Democrats want to push it even further.
We need a law to deport Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey or any official who fails to keep their oath of office.
i've been sitting here now for the past 45 minutes getting madder & madder & mad as hell. those S.O.B.'S , ALL OF THEM, THE WHOLE ROTTEN LOT of the Fed Gov't & corrupt New York bullion banks, it's a criminal syndicate, a racket, all corrupt, the whole rotteness of it all. GET RID OF THESE PEOPLE & LEAVE THE GOOD PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY ALONE !
For the most part Americans are not "good people." They are, in fact, imbeciles, thugs, murderers, and greedy self centered narcissists. They love their fascist police state because it makes them feel safe. They love their global military empire because it makes them feel powerful. They love fascism and the police state.
Americans love Facebook, and American Idol. They love TV and Hollywood and the propaganda that they spew. They live in a delusional fantasy world based on false perceptions of reality shaped by the media.
Those few who desire liberty are a small minority indeed. That is the first thing you need to realize about the "good people" of America.
So does anyone wonder why everything is starting to become unglued, with idiots like this in postiions of power?
As they pull money from the space program and direct it to installing a giant invisible fence around all U.S. land. "Oh look honey we got free necklaces from the government."
So what does it mean when Government 'oops' General Motors expatriates Cadillac manufacturing to China?
bastards
Except that the US production will not be done by the Chinese. It will remain in North America.
Only a small step now to shooting people in the back trying to escape. Next we'll have people in small boats trying to make it to Burmuda or Cuba.
Correct, the gates are closing fast. You want to be out before 2013 if possible. After that you may only have a few months.
How about the Sex patRIOT Act?
Surely that would start an Uprising!
If that's what's cumming, then I'm all in!
I don't know, seems simple to me. Leave and never come back. What the hell are they going to do send people after you overseas? Doubt it. LOL. Screw them.
The local police of whereever you are will size you and assist in your extrordinary rendition.
Given the US, that's more likely to happen than you think. There really isn't any way to escape the reach of the US; the better way to live is to not attract attention to yourself.
This is what you guys call "liberal?"
Time to go back to school and learn the root of the word. It's not Greek, it's latin, from liber which means "free (man)."
In American, "liberal" has become slang amongst the poorly-educated and highly-indoctrinated to mean "asshole."
The US is the only nation to tax income earned in other countries by residents of other countries. This is currently restricted to those who had the misfortune of once being a citizen. (Remember, native born Americans don't get to choose their citizenship --- it is forced upon them.) Perhaps the next step will be to "award" such tax residency to others who just have jucy incomes to tax. Maybe that way, many foreign born, foreign resident, wealth generators can become US citizens without the bother of moving here and we can tax their overseas income too.
[Double post.]
edited .. double post ... sorry
We mocked the evil empires of the Cold War era for putting up walls to stop their citizens from escaping. It was barbaric and demonstrated everything that was wrong with communism. If the system is so bad that people want to run from it... then it must be wrong.
Now, the US is trying to establish a capital wall to keep money from leaving. If the system is so bad that people want to run from i... then it must be wrong.
You don't have to renounce US citizenship. the congress ONLY has legislative authority over their jurisdiction, which is land owned by the UNITED STATES. You have to claim you were never a 14th amendment citizen (slave) the government makes the presumption you are one. With that said, chucky is a traitor like almost all the congress and should be removed from office and tried for treason. I believe that day is approaching fast.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311
Seems kind of important to include facts about existing tax law on the subject doesn't it?
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-110hr6081rds/pdf/BILLS-110hr6081rds.pdf
massive dick head, how about because I'm thinking of leaving not because of taxes but because I can be locked up without tial fo execising my feedom of speech in this county. going to wite the douche now
I think your "r" key is broken.
I think he got "feedom" right.
So shouldn't the new bill be called Ex-PROPIATE bill? As in we will expropiate your money because we feel like it even if it would seem to be unconstitutional.
i would be very happy to never go back to the USA again. who needs the shithole run by punks like schumer?
GETTING OUT
As I and my two required French witnesses emptied our pockets to pass through the metal detector, at the hidden American presence post, in Lyon, I welcomed them to the new world, the home of the brave and land of the free. We were there at the appointed hour to complete the process of renouncing my U.S. citizenship.On the drive to Lyon and while waiting in the reception area of the hidden American presence post, our discussion was about my deeper reasons for renouncing. My political feelings are rather well known ( for those that do not know, I object to being a citizen of a dominion of the Likud party of Israel) but an explanation of my deeper reasons required an explanation of why Americans think and behave as they do. To do that I spoke about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.
Most people understand that there is no way you can escape being conditioned by your society, one way or another. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. So am I. When you go to the ATM machine and punch the buttons to make cash fall out, you are doing the same thing as the chickens that peck the colored buttons to make corn drop from the feeder. You will not do a single thing today, tomorrow or the next day that you have not been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do -- mostly along class lines.
This indoctrination, or conditioning, folows approved methods, and toward the same end: Maximum profitability for a corporate based state.
Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of "appropriate behavior," is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality.
Given the financialization of all aspects of American culture and lives, even so-called leisure time, it is not an exaggeration to say that true democracy is dead and a corporate financial state has now arrived. The corporations have controlled the US legislature for the past several decades and recently the investment bankers have successfully achieved their soft coup of the US Executive. If you can get your head around that, it's not hard to see an ever merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. Or Japan for that matter. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information.
None are immune. Even if one renounces citizenship, that act is a reaction to the state, and therefore a result of it. It's still part of the financialization of consciousness.
This financialization of consciousness under American style capitalism has become all you know. That's why you fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. You believe that you dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed you. They entertain you. Corporations occupy one full half of your waking hours of your lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal you when you are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul nor human emotions. That you look to them for so much makes you part of a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of your culture. Yet to you, they are like the weather.... just there.
All live together in this corporate fetish cult. You agree upon and consent to its reality, just as the Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl and the lost people of Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies of their remote island had significance.
Strangely enough, even as a population mass operating under unified corporate management machinery, most Americans believe they are unique individuals, significantly different from every other person around them. More than any other people, Americans fear loss of uniqueness. Yet you are not unique in the least. Despite the American yada yada about individualism, you are not special. Nor am I. Just because we come from the manufacturer equipped with individual consciousness, does not make us the center of any unique world, private or public, material, intellectual or spiritual. The fact is, you will seldom if ever make any significant material or lifestyle choices of your own in your entire life. If you don't buy that house, someone else will. If you don't marry him, someone else will. If you don't become a psychologist, lawyer or a clergyman or a telemarketer, someone else will. You are all replaceable parts in the machinery of a capitalist economy. "Oh but we have unique feelings and emotions that are important," you say. Psychologists specialize in this notion. Yet, I venture to say that none of you will ever feel an emotion that someone long dead has not felt, or some as yet unborn person will not feel. You are swimmers in an ancient rushing river of humanity. You, me, the people in back country France, the child in Bangladesh, and the millionaire frat boys who run your financial and governmental institutions with such adolescent carelessness. All of your lives will eventually be absorbed without leaving a trace.
Still though, for Western peoples in particular, there is the restless inner cultural need to differentiate your lives from the other swimmers. Most of you, especially as educated people in the Western World, will never overcome that need.
Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is the good news.
The bad news is that you nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of your consciousness, public and private. And, the control is tightening. I know it doesn't feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else is doing the same things, so it must be OK. This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in your case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture.
When you feel that such a life is normal, even desirable, and you act accordingly, you become helpless.... a learned helplessness. For instance, most Americans believe there is little they can do in personally dealing with the most important moral and material crises ever faced, both in America and across the planet, beginning with ecocide, war making, and the grotesque deformation of the democratic process you have settled for. Citizenship has been reduced to simple consumer group consciousness. Consequently, even though Americans are only six percent of the planet's population, you use 36% of the planet's resources. You interpret that experience as normal and desirable and as evidence of being the most advanced nation in the world. Despite that your lives have been reduced to a mere marketing demographic.
Americans live in a universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and "safety," as defined by police control. They are conditioned to believe they have the best lives on the planet by every measure. So when they see a different life-style, they experience fear. Anything outside of the parameters of the cultural hallucination they call "the first world" represents fear.
Yet, even if one thinks in that sort of outdated terminology, First, Second and Third World, (the Fourth World Movement was co-founded by my wife) and most Americans do, then America is a second world nation. You have no universal free health care (don't kid yourself about the plan underway), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status, if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a "career." High infant mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet consisting of tasteless factory food, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy, 17% unemployment, racial and economic segregation, even by your own definition you are a second world nation.
But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy throwaway technology, that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright colored signs for Circuit City and The Gap (rest in peace), the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow and red wrapper on the burger inside its bright red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience. These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick conditioned illusion, the one I call The American Hologram, is indeed real. If it's bright and shiny and new, it must be better. Right? It is the complete opposite of real life.
So how is it that Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that you prefer such things as Facebook (I closed my Facebook account, too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into your brain looking for fried chicken in a styrofoam box? Why prefer these expensive earth destroying things over love and laughter with real people, and making real human music together with other human beings -- lifting your voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.
And the answer is this: You suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Your national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. You live in a "theater state."
In your theater state, you know the world through media productions which are edited and shaped to instruct you on how to look and behave and view the outside world. As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Ostensibly non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, as the American empire's cultural machinery weaves and spins out your cultural mythology.
Cultural myth production is an enormous industry in America. It is very similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, or cathedral-building in medieval Europe. And in your obsession with violence and punishment, two characteristics of a consensual police state reality, you are certainly similar to prison camp building in Stalinist Russia. Actually, you are pretty good in that department, also. Consider that one fourth of all the incarcerated people on earth are in U.S. prisons. They are U.S. citizens imprisoned by their own government. They are also mostly black or brown skinned and/or poor.
In any case, the media culture's production of martyrs, good guys and bad guys, fallen heroes and concept outlaws, is not just big corporate business. It is the armature of your cultural behavior. It tells you who to fear (Middle Eastern terrorists, Mr. Chavez in Venezuela, and foreign made pharmaceuticals), who to scorn (again the same candidates, along with Brittney Spears for her lousy child rearing skills). Your daily news is the modern version of Roman coliseum shows. Elections are personality combat, chariot races, not examinations of solutions being offered. None are offered. As a result, you get puerile policies, such as, "You are either with us, or against us."
What are being offered are monkey models. Man as a social animal necessarily mimics the behavior he sees around him, whether it be by real people or moving images of people. This eye-to-brain to mimicry connection does not care. Consequently, you know how to act and what the things around you are because television and media tell you. Television is the software, the operating instructions for your society. Thus, social realism for you is a television commercial for the American lifestyle: what's new to wear, what to eat, who's cool (Obama[sorry folks; it may be a different portrait but it is in the same frame]), what and whom to fear (that perennial evil booger, Castro) or who to admire (Bill Gates, pure American genius at work). This societal media software tells you what music your digitized corporate complex is selling, but you never see images of ordinary families sitting around in the evenings making music together, or creating songs of their own based upon their own lives and from their own hearts. Because that music cannot be bought and sold, and is not profitable.
So instead of a daily life in the flesh, belly to belly and soul to soul, lived out in the streets, and parks and public places, in love and the workplace, you get 40-inch televisions, YouTube, Cineplexes, FoxNews, and the myths spun out by Hollywood.
Now, for a national mythology to work, it has to be accessible to everyone all the time, it has to be all in one bundle. For example, in North Korea, it is wrapped up in a single man, Kim. In America, as I have said, it is the media and Hollywood in particular. Hollywood accommodates Imperial myths, melting pot myths, and hegemonic military masculinity myths, and glamour myths. It articulates your culture's social imaginary, which are the prevailing images that a society needs to project about itself in order to maintain certain features of its organization. And the features of your media mythology are terrifying, when you think about them.
It is watching "Man on Fire," with Denzel Washington's tragic pose and his truthful bullets, and his willingness to saw the fingers off Mexicans to get the information on time to protect us from "The Evil". It is the absorption of that electronic mythology that allowed you to co-sign the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Incidentally, speaking of Abu Ghraib, there are thousands of other, far more grisly Abu Ghraib photos, which you have not been allowed to see. Believe me, they picked the gentlest ones to release. Anyway, when the media and government people in power made that selection, they were managing your consciousness.... what you know and don't know; keeping you calmer by withholding the truth. Rather like not upsetting little children so they will continue to quietly behave the way you want.
But, like children, the American public got bored with the subject of torture long ago, so you quit seeing the victims. Plenty of new evidence has been coming out for years since Lynndie's famous pics from Abu Ghraib. But the short American attention span, created by your rapid fire media, says, "Move on to the next hologram please. Whoa! Stop the remote. Nice butt shot of Sarah Palin there!"
The result is that Americans cannot achieve the cathexis needed. Cathexis is the ground zero psychic and emotional attachment to the world that cannot be argued. It is beyond ideological challenge because it is called into existence affectively. Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. And in that, you remain mostly a nation of children. You never get to grow up.
So you tell yourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales -- that you are a great and compassionate people, and that you are personally innocent of any of your government's horrific crimes abroad. You believe you are guiltless as individuals. And you do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as you cannot see beyond the media hologram. However, it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. You are a nation of latch key kids, who are babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.
You may or may not watch much television (I only watch television when the show is about me) but the average American spends almost one-third of his or her waking life doing so. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television constitutes your reality in the same fashion that water constitutes the environment in a goldfish bowl. It's everywhere and affects everything, even when you are not watching it. Television regulates your national perceptions and your interior ideations of who Americans are. It schedules your cultural illusions of choice. It pre-selects candidates in your elections. By the way, as much as I prefer Trojan Horse Obama over the other non-option, I fully understand he is there because he was selected by the illusion producing machinery of television, and citizens under its influence. It is hard to underestimate the strength of these illusions.
TV regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons. It tells you, "It's Christmas! Time to shop!" Or "it's election season, time to vote." Or "it's football season, let's rally passions and buy beer and cheer." Or that America's major deity, "The Economy," is suffering badly. "Sacred temples on Wall Street make great sickness upon the land!" Or most ominous of all, "It's time to make war! Here, there and again."
It is fair to say that television and the American culture are the same thing. More than any other factor, it is the glue of society and the mediator of your experience. American culture is stone cold dead without it. If all the TVs in America went black, so would most of America's collective consciousness and knowledge. Because corporate media have replaced nearly all other previous forms of accumulated knowledge.
Especially the ancient forms, such as contemplation of the natural world, study and care of the soul. And I do not mean soul in the religious sense either. I mean the deeper self, the one you go to sleep with every night.
The media have colonized your inner lives like a virus. The virus is not going away. This commoditization of human consciousness is probably the most astounding, most chilling accomplishment of American capitalist culture.
Capitalist society however, can only survive by defying the laws of thermodynamics, through endlessly expanding growth, buying and using more of everything, every year and forever. Thus, the cult of radical consumerism. It has been the deadliest cult of all because, so far, it has always triumphed, and has now spread around the earth and its nations.
Why has it been so viral, so attractive to so many for so long? How did it come to grip the consciousness of so much of mankind, from Beijing to Bangladesh? Thuggish enforcement accounts for part of it, of course. But it has succeeded, too, because it requires no effort, no critical thinking, not even literacy, only passive consumption. This easy addiction to consumption is probably hard wired into us. Every one of you will continue to play out your lives as contributors to ecocide and global warming, mainly because it's easier. And besides, you are not offered any other real options, and you don't know any other way. Nor can you ever know any other way without making a great effort.
How to make that effort? (Assuming you even want to.) Consuming images, goods or buying your identity at Old Navy or a retro clothing shop takes no real effort or thought. Just money. Text messaging your whereabouts at the mall may be a technological wonder, but you're still absolutely nowhere if you are just one more oral grooved organism in the food court at the mall moving in a swarm toward Mrs. Field's cookies.
So how do you escape the programming of the food court, and, I might include, escape even those parts of this school of life that may serve more to indoctrinate than enlighten you? All pedagogy, even the best, is nevertheless about control. How does one escape such a total system?
In a word, renounce... Step aside and observe from the outside.
Even your most well intentioned thinking and study of the afflictions of Africa and Latin America, American inner cities or Appalachia, suffers from hubris, because they are necessarily the products of western propertized and monetized thinking that cause the problem. So now you study your victims with great piety. And supposedly teach them solutions to the problems you continue to cause for them. Western people studying globalization's horrific effects, or rape in Africa, or world poverty are doing so under the assumption that such things can be dealt with through some social mechanistic means, through analysis and unbiased reason and rational value-free science, by a network of officially sanctioned alphabet agencies.
For years, I have wanted to see the opposite take place. To see well fed, educated Americans learn from the poor of the earth. Do what Gandhi advised, let the poor be the teachers. Go among them with nothing, one set of clothing and no money, keep your mouth shut, and do your best not to affect anything (which is impossible, I know. But you can come, as they say, "close enough for government work.")
Then just let the world happen to you, like they do in the so-called "passive societies," instead of trying to happen to it in typical Western fashion. Not trying to "improve" things. Maybe practice milpa agriculture with Mayans on the Guatemalan border, watching corn grow for three months. Fish in a lonely dugout, sun-up to sun-down, in the dying reefs of the Caribbean, with only a meal or two of fish as your reward. Do such things for a month or two.
First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures your well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you are the unknowing captors.
In conclusion, I would point out that each of us is but one strand in the vast organic web of flesh and blood chlorophyll. All things and all beings are inextricably connected at the most profound level. Any physicist will confirm this. We are bound by its every wave and particle, all of us -- the lonely night clerk at Motel 6 and the leviathans of the deep, the sleeping grandmother in France and the maimed Iraqi child in Kirkuk. It can be understood by anyone though, simply by owning one's own consciousness. And in doing so you find that ownership and domination are both temporary and meaningless. And that the animating spirit of the earth is real and within us and claimable.
The purpose of life is to know this. Einstein glimpsed it. Lao-Tzu knew it. So did St. Francis. But you are not supposed to. It would shatter the revered, digitized, super-sized, utterly meaningless hologram. The one that mesmerizes you, and mediates your every experience, but isolates you from universal humanness and its coursing energies. Such as love. Or mercy. Compassion. Existential pain. Hunger. Or the unmitigated joy of simply being alive one finds in children everywhere, even among the poorest. Most of the human race still lives in that realm.
Blessed is the one who joins them. Because he or she learns that the truth is not relative, nor is it provided by the corporation and that because the human mind seeks balance, social justice is not only inescapable in the long run, but inevitable.
At the conclusion of the renounciation process, the US consul shook my hand, offered his congratulations, for I no longer would be obligated to pay US taxes. What a chump!
Is this a standalone short story, or the first chapter in a novel?
Neither, but you point out an additional reason for my renouncing... I think and feel more deeply than the Amerikan sheeple.
You can't be fucking serious? but I think you are. Bub.. FREEDOM is the inevitable. Social justice is what happens when dick-faces like schumer don't want people to be free.
Seems there's always someone to blame for having the "greatest share" of fucking up the world. I've come to most of my own wisdom during periods of hardship. We're all creatures of constant change, and you know what they say: it's time to buy only when there's blood in the streets.
You selling enlightenment? There's no market for it.
tl;dr
But like most leftist socialists, you place the blame solely on corporations rather than allotting the required amount to the state itself. America is not run by corporations, it is a fascist military empire where state and corporate power are effectively one in the same.
So the military passes intelligence on economic/business matters to the corporations and the corporations provide jobs/taxes to the state. The state protects the corporations because the corporations provide for the state. In fact, U.S. corporations are "US persons" by law and treated as such.
You refuse to acknowledge that the power of the state supercedes that of corporations. It is not the corporations that have corrupted the state, but the central planners, socialists, and tyrants that have shaped conditions within the state such that they encourage and create the types of megacorporations and their behavior you observe today.
Like most extreme Leftists, socialists, and statists, you worship the state and believe it should run everything in human life. It is merely those "damn corporations" that ruin things. I reject your worship of central state authority and mock your long winded rant as the same old tired anti-capitalist, pro-statist leftist tripe that we've all heard a thousand times before.
Amen.
The death of freedom has fueled what we see now. One evidently now needs a permit from government to enjoy it, and if you make a profit while doing so, they'll let you know how much you owe for their assistance to your efforts, in providing you with the permit.
The State is just another corporation. You're in no position to label the author. You don't even know what he wrote.
I find it ironic that the Government would want to stop individuals from escaping U.S. taxes by moving overseas while at the same time rewarding corporations that do the same thing.
Geeeee...... It's almost like they were trying to destroy our country, values, free markets, capitalisim, economy or something. Never happen here.
Why stop at 30% ? Why not confiscate ALL of ones savings if leaving the USSR ? As a matter of fact, why not execute anyone that wishes to escape ?
You have to heat the water slowly, or the frog will jump out.
Pro-tip: this is why you should NEVER let them know anything about what you are earning or what you have. Seriously.
Nuke it from Fukushima - it's the only way to underscore the obvious.
hey, Schunmer is a true 'roid, but the facebook jerk is simply doing a tax avoidance ploy... and blatant tax avoidance is not legal or right... just change the nonsensical act proposal to tax all who renounce citizenship retroactively for 24 months after they leave. No biggie.
PS: The country sure blew their chance by letting Ron Paul fade away... we all will regret that, and soon.
Your taxes are supposed to pay for the services you receive. He won't be receiving any more. Sounds fair to me. If we were getting the best deal on services to tax burden he wouldn't be leaving , would he? But no, we have spend money on non-taxpayers and use tax money to bribe corporations. If I paid tax I'd leave too. I make good money, but under our insane tax laws I pay no taxes despite making over 100k.
The absolute irony of the situation is, this is brought to you by a US government run by a Kenyan! LOL
And to think that people (including most of the Republican party) laughed at Ron Paul when he made those comments about an armed border with Mexico.
When I leave the fascist American police state later this year I do not intend to ever return anyway. Friends/family can come visit me rather than risk my life and liberty to re-enter the most high tech surveillance based police state in human history.
Biometric face scanners at all ports of entry/airports. TSA rapists everywhere. CBP check points on the highways, 50 miles from the border. Paramilitary police armed with everything from automatic weapons to armed drones.
Yea, I'll pass on all of that. Yet most of my parent's generation, the Boomers, will tell you with a straight face that the U.S. is hands down the greatest country on Earth. Despite the fact that most of them have never possessed a passport or traveled anywhere more exotic than Puerto Rico.
I think they call it battered wives syndrome.
They've never heard it on TV, God knows they aren't going to be told now! That would mess everything up. You can bet someone will be blamed but you can bet the farm that it won't be any of them. "Them," do exist.
This is the subrosa beginnings of capital controls in the US. The controls will be overt sooner in the Euro-zone, but they're coming here too. A lot of economic damage caused by retarded politicians, coming soon.
BTW, it's "renounce," not "denounce." One REnounces one's citizenship.
Unless you feel really passionate about it
Can we all take a moment of silence and pray that a flesh eating bacteria consumes this piece of shit, human, that we must endure as a non-representing representative.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that Congress can not strip anyone of citizenship for any reason.
Well, try committing a felony and see how well that works for you.