The IRS and the Filthy Rich

THE IRS AND THE FILTHY RICH

IRS: 501C4     Social Welfare purpose / not more than 50% can be used for political purposes

The original term used was “exclusively” (1959).  This language was not officially changed but the term “primarily” nevertheless came into play over time.    

IRS: 527       This classification involves the disclosure of name of donors if the organization is seen as a political group or having a political purpose.

In effect, there are individuals who want the first classification rather than the second so they won’t have to disclose the names of their donors.  That is, 527 organizations have to disclose names but not if they are classified as 501C4.  Some of these current 501C4 groups are surprisingly political despite clear guidelines for what constitutes groups devoted to “social welfare.”  If the legal term “exclusively” was insisted upon, they could not keep their 501C4 status and would have to disclose their donors.  Even using the term “primarily” instead of “exclusively”, it is doubtful that their “purpose” would still meet that criteria; they are not mainly “social welfare” groups, in other words, but clearly have a significant political orientation. 

It is some of these very same groups that complain the loudest that the IRS is examining their activity and status too closely for comfort—and no wonder!  They want to ignore the term “exclusively” altogether as though it never existed.  In like manner, they want to gloss over “primarily” as though it’s a wishy-washy word that can include anything under its umbrella--even groups that are highly political rather than truly dedicated to “social welfare” in the usual sense, which is to say, in a non-political manner (as intended by law).  They are subverting and corrupting the legal definitions to suit their own purposes, obviously!  

And it is ever thus, that a powerful elite concentrates its fire-power on any regulatory agencies aimed at curbing its excesses due to the ways in which the rich spread their wealth around to achieve maximum influence.  The richest elites tend to subvert the very intention of a democratic nation to balance the needs of all social classes by not allowing any one group or class to dominate policy for all the rest.  Nevertheless, the wealthy and powerful frequently try to override any attempt to regulate or limit their expanding influence within the political system, even though they know Americans are supposed to live in a democratic society guided by majority rule--or something more than a mere reflection of the wishes of the wealthiest families within our nation.

In sum, conservative groups involved in political outcomes wish to hide from the American people the names of their biggest donors since that could expose their ulterior motives. It would reveal which of these 501C4 groups are at the beck and call of the wealthiest individuals in the country, allowing journalists to trace their selection and development of candidates willing to play ball with the wealthy--if indeed the political ball-carriers themselves are not already a part of this upper crust elite.  For the time being, the wealthiest conservatives can play this shell game of deception by keeping secret who is truly funding these political efforts.  In short, they can now call black white and white black.  

Since the IRS has seemingly "overstepped" its bounds (in appearance if not in fact), these individuals and their slyly crafted "527 organizations" can now set up a huge cry and howl about how “unfair” they are being treated!  Gone the cry of yesteryear that the IRS should stop both individuals and groups from taking unfair advantage of the tax codes—and the latest news that the status of various liberal groups also got reviewed, gets consistently omitted.  Per usual, enter the "double standard" for the rich as they take turns spinning the story in their favor only.  

Yes, the very same millionaires who set up the tax system in the first place to their own selfish advantage, who get away with not paying millions of dollars in taxes, who have more schemes and tricks for making money and manipulating the tax system than you can shake a stick at: suddenly, they wish to play the part of the poor orphaned waif being threatened by the Big Bad Wolf.  Give the American people a break!  Such hypocrisy does far more harm to the moral fabric of America than the IRS “sins” they rail against!

The millionaires and billionaires have never shown themselves to care about real economic fairness for the American people as a whole, nor the democratic standards our country upholds here and in the eyes of the whole world . . . The rich exploit workers, perpetuate poverty, tolerate homelessness, destroy the environment, promote bigotry and racism, make war when it suits them, and selfishly hoard ever greater amounts of cash and gold for themselves . . . and then howl like monkeys gone mad if they get so much as a tiny scratch on one of their financial pinkie fingers! 

"Follow the money trail” as the saying goes.  Then we will see who is getting hurt by the IRS and who is only pretending in order to make political capital.  Meanwhile, they are busily securing their wealth which they wish to categorize as "untouchable" by anyone else other than themselves. They defend this cozy "status quo" as normal and necessary, hiding the fact that they are invariably its biggest beneficiaries.  Any attempts to create a fairer system are met with indignation because such reforms threaten their wealth.  Even expecting the IRS to enforce existing law is too much tor them!

The rich profit mightily from the way things are--they certainly don't want the IRS to examine too closely which groups they support or the reasons why.  If these well-funded groups turn out to be more political in nature than altruistic, then their donors must be disclosed--involving secrets they presumably would rather not reveal.  Why else such resistance to a simple matter?  The wealthiest families in the country benefit from this sleight-of-hand every which way then can, and then some.  This is about their money and power, their “influence” and control, and their determination to have things go “their way” so they can achieve wider political omnipotence to couple with their existing economic autocracy.  They, the aggrieved party??  When hell freezes over!!! 

Behind the 8 Ball: Earned Entitlements

In the news: many stories about war, fighting, violence.  Domestic, national, international: doesn’t matter, such stories abound. In the 50 state capitols, a different kind of fight: harsh words over budget deficits, each side blaming the other.  In the nation’s capitol, the same battle is waged between parties, between political labels, between personalities.  

New ideas come and go; old ideas reappear, are measured, reshaped, discarded.  The struggle develops its own nomenclature: “entitlement” becomes a key term.  Are Americans “entitled” to Social Security, health coverage, retirement pensions, and benefits?  Have we become “soft”, expecting too much? 

Can we make do with less even if it means losing a home, going without medical treatment, ending “retirement” to re-enter the workplace, reducing caloric intake and cutting pills in half, giving up on believing college will be affordable for our children?  
Are we expecting too much from our money economy, our culture, our country?  Are we being selfishly extravagant to the detriment of national needs with financial emergencies piling up one on top of the other?

To what are we, the people, entitled?  How much should we downsize our expectations, our earnings, our comfort level, our material existence, to please the gods of high finance who wish to warn us via Doomsday.net that our lives of sinful luxury and self-indulgence must soon end lest the bankrolls of billionaires begin to shrink to unacceptable amounts!!  

I would suggest we change the landscape of the debate by adding a new word to create a phrase that reads “Earned Entitlement” to counter any suggestion that the American people are part of a selfish arrogant aristocracy asking for something which they haven’t earned.  Many four-letter words come to mind in response to this subtle nuance, this poisoned misuse of the word ENTITLEMENT, but suffice it to say, in regular prose, that any such suggestion is pure nonsense!

People who have worked all their adult years paying into Social Security (and/or other pension plans) have the RIGHT to expect a sizable chunk of money will be returned to them when they retire: THEY HAVE EARNED IT.  Hence, let’s rename this social issue EARNED ENTITLEMENT or EARNED REWARD to take it out of the hands of those who wish to suggest that all of the nation’s economic woes are caused by working people because they expect some level of decency in their standard of living when they finally retire after a lifetime of work and a lifetime of contributing to the nation’s productivity and wealth.  

Granted, each person’s rightfully earned expectations, multiplied by the million-fold, can create its own economic currents—as a mountain is sometimes said to produce its own weather—but even so, that remains but half the story!

What about the enormous amount of wealth sucked out of circulation to be hoarded by the wealthy? (luxury yachts, private jets, multiple mansions and villas, art and jewelry collections, lavish parties on the grand scale, etc.)  Tens of millions of working Americans remain the real backbone of our national economy: responsible for its productivity, producing the goods that support the currency that we all use as our main medium of exchange.  

And yet millions of dollars are daily, hourly being sucked into the private caves, bank vaults, and hidden safes of millionaire-billionaires!  Capitalism may be defined in many ways but certainly, especially during a crisis recession, we should never forget the most basic doctrine of all: the exploitation of working people by the rich! 

Imagine a desert island where many survivors of a ship-wreck have arrived.  There are hundreds of hungry survivors on the south end of the island.  At the other end of the island are a few persons who have amassed a huge amount of food of every kind.  They have enough food to feed everyone for days, for weeks, for months or years, until rescue can be affected.  They are obscenely rich in food!  They have 100 times the amount of food they themselves could ever consume.  

The hungry survivors politely ask these food-wealthy persons if they wouldn’t please share?  To which they receive a resounding “No!”  The food hoarders shout out at the top of their lungs: this is OUR food, OUR property; this all belongs to JUST US and we don’t have to share a single crumb!  You are entitled to none of it, do you hear?  To none of it!”  Now imagine substituting MONEY for FOOD and you get an idea of what America is like, although to say as much is to suggest a scenario that most rich people would rather avoid discussing.  

Add to the above scenario the notion that the food the selfish ones wish to hoard was produced in the first place by the island’s other survivors!  As thousands of pounds of food are being kept from hungry people on the island, is it not true that millions of dollars of wealth are being kept from the American people?  Ask yourself: what is a billionaire?  From whence this wealth?  Whence the sense of ENTITLEMENT that millionaires and billionaires have developed that it is perfectly all right FOR THEM to hoard millions and billions of dollars?  

Who gives them the right to remove all this wealth from the currents of the national economy from whence it first originated, while all the while pretending that this selfishness on their part has no effect on the American people or our national economy?  Why are working people, whose labor already suffers from an unconscionable degree of exploitation (underpaid for the true value of their labor) being asked to make additional sacrifices in order to keep the rich people happy and their enormous wealth intact?    

What is best for society?  What happened to “caring and sharing”, as ordinary people do for one another?  What happened to the language of the Declaration of Independence?  Where do we, the people, get OUR sense of entitlement?  “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  That’s OUR source of entitlement: the very Birth Certificate of the United States of America!   

Where do the rich get THEIR sense of entitlement?  Not from the Declaration of Independence; not from the Constitution; nor from the American people, I daresay.  Theirs comes from from social stratification inherently and violently unequal wherein the wealth hoarded by the rich derived from the labor and misery of millions of people at the bottom of society: serfs, slaves, peasants, laborers, factory workers, miners, textile mill hands, railroad employees: the list goes on.  Historically, the rich accumulated their great wealth based on the labor of the common people.  That wealth is as much the people’s as it is theirs, truth be told!

When we talk about ENTITLEMENT in the future, perhaps we should more carefully distinguish between the EARNED ENTITLEMENT and EARNED REWARDS of working people who paid in to Social Security their whole working lives in order to create a viable retirement funding plan for themselves and their families, and the obscene SELF-AWARDED ENTITLEMENT of the wealthy believe the protection of their millions of dollars is more important than the economic health of the nation.

What may we say of the morality and economic logic of the richest families who control the corporations and factories, here and overseas, and who constantly remove billions of dollars from the economy annually while selfishly squirreling away enormous amounts of wealth derived from the productivity of working people!  

People who work for a living can look with pride upon the fact that they have EARNED their livelihood and their right to a decent standard of living when they retire. 

LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS FROM NOW ON TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT:

THIS IS OUR EARNED ENTITLEMENT

AND NOTHING LESS!!! 

PEOPLE ARE “ENTITLED” TO THAT WHICH THEY HAVE EARNED!!   

To Steal or Not to Steal

Never mind Shakespeare’s more adept philosophical phrasing "To be or not to be": such quasi-metaphysical soul-searching belongs to an age of the past.  Today’s coming up generation must needs redefine the Old Bard's puzzlement to fit a rocking boogie tempo more to the liking of their hip-hopping lip-rapping finger-licking new age party down rapster mind mentality . . .
and therefore “to be or not to be” rightly must redefine itself to something closer to the real nitty gritty, to the funky getdown, to the essence of the nut and the nut of the essence, namely: to steal or not to steal, that is the question! And also the answer since any fool done know if you needs what they’s got and u can quick-finger make off with it there ain’t no calamity Jane a-waitin’ in the chicken-lickin’ hot spicy wings so long as you ain’t got to do no hard time then shopliftin’ is cool
but only up to a point the point being where they see you catch you string you up figuratively literally metaphorically which is when your finger is up in the air and you giving the ol’ “forget you!” sign to the Man who then breaks your finger off at the bottom of your spine so u be hurtin’ a dam long time which means stealin’ ain’t no longer cool nor good for your shade of color and skin tan if u want to live longer than tomorrow /
so no more “this is mine and this is yours” / u steal from me you don’t steal from mine / but the golden rule has always been a foot up your ass so who got the gold ain’t the fool eating from the dumpster / ain’t the pothead smokin’ up the chimney stack with Santa Nobody / ain’t the junkie smellin’ stuff he ain’t got no business smelling /
ain’t your old lady doing it hot and right or your ex-whatever calling u to tell u she gonna fix your wagon like you ain’t never been fixed  before / like u ain’t got no need for all 4 wheels spinnin’ faster than them circles around the sun moon stars right after you been knocked out and a second before u comes back to / ain’t nothing really black in this world any more except the final knockout /          only the color by itself which ain’t even no color lest you got a different color / unless u got the rainbow in your soul / I ain’t sayin’ stealin’ is cool ‘cos it ain’t / but I ain’t saying it’s always wrong ‘cos I ain’t no Puppet Fool for the Man / and it ain’t ‘cos you can do it that makes it this or that / it’s what your heart tells you just like anything else in this ol’ world /
but don’t come a-cryin’ and a-bitchin’ to me if you don’t know the Man’s law and they use it to make a shroud to wrap your lawless lifeless bloodless body / u ain’t got no reason to complain / u go outlaw road and u die outlaw dead / then shut your yap / u ain’t got no right to complain / to steal or not to steal is not the only friggin’ question a mind can ask / get your ass out of the gutter and live like a man live like a woman live like an LGBT or whatever the hell u think u is /
I am done preachin’ to a sea of fools / to think or not to think / to question or not to question / to obey or not to obey / Brother Martin the Reverend asked u to be righteous / u remember / that is the only path fork choice that really matters / u either rise or u sink / ain’t nobody gonna choose to go thru life treadin’ water / treadin’ blood forever-and-ever /
u either sink to the bottom of the stinkhole or u rise with the rising sea the risin’ tide of people everywhere fightin’ for a chance to live a better life / fightin’ for you and fightin’ for me brother! don’t worry about the small stuff but keep your eyes on the prize of a soul victorious and a life worth livin’ / a life that means something to somebody /
when u is all said and done and finished and buried who gonna remember you if you ain’t willing to stand up and be counted among the righteous?  Fight for justice, brother! let the chips / dominoes / fake bills fall where they may / u don’t need no fake currency to know love / friendship / a righteous life / u is the real thing / 
show people you got a mind and a heart and a soul / show them u dig what it means to be your own person / not a copycat phony imitation of something that ain’t got no business taking the place of something as fine and real as you / “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream!”  

        The Reverend was a-preachin’ to save your soul man / to save the souls of all of us / ain’t it time we stood up and shined?  Ain’t it time to be a-knowin’ and a-sayin’ we done heard the Reverend speak the true-blue gospel loud and clear and its echoes keep on a-ringing in our souls? Ain’t it time?    

Damn it Brothers and Sisters

       AIN’T IT TIME!!!

The Principal's Office: Navy Yard Shooting on 9/16/13

(This reflection is not intended for those who were never sent there!)

Odd, isn’t it, how many of us boys were sent to the principal's office at one time or another?  Oh, the reasons they were many: some small, some momentary lapse of judgment.  How polite we were in face of admonition, how contrite our faces, how humble in our place, and (later) how frightened in our worries lest our parents discover our transgression!  “A phone call home, you say?  Oh no sir please not that! I promise to be good!  I promise you whatever I’m supposed to say—I promise you anything!”

And yet, how many of us grew up to be good people when we took on the mantle of responsibility, when we struggled through college, when we began working for our pay, when we became fair kind adult human beings . . . and hardly a thought did we give to the other kind of kid also sent to the principal’s office, whose resentment grew, whose frustration festered, whose anger remained, whose need to seek revenge intensified . . . until one day we turn on the news and watch in disbelief the latest scene of mass murder and mayhem . . . 20 kindergarten kids last year . . . now, twelve more bodies at the Navy Yard in DC . . . someone named Aaron Alexis "already dead" is the likely culprit.

It’s hard to imagine the journey this boy this man must have traversed from that first breath of life to the moment when (with mighty arsenal in hand) he opened fire delivering fiery death everywhere . . . from first breath of life “to the principal’s office” . . . and then one day inexplicably decides to deliver death to his fellow human beings who never did him any harm (in the ordinary sense) . . . from first breath of life to the finality of death . . . with only one stop in between: the principal’s office.   

Chicken!

                                                        

       Chicken is such a delicious food . . . And yet--ironically enough--if one boy called another boy "chicken" when I was a young lad, them thar was fightin' words extremus maximus and it was almost impossible NOT to fight over such an insulting label: truly did it give such offense!!  
        And there were kids, myself included, who more or less firmly resolved not to fight as a way to settle differences--but the one taunt that could break down the most heartfelt resolution was that one terrible, challenging, and provocative insult!  
         If the offender kept at it, dangling the word on all sides-- "chicken,chicken, CHICKEN!"--eventually your resolve would just break down completely and fall to pieces.  Pretty soon the issue must be settled in hand to hand combat like the jousting knights of medieval times . . . charge!  Black eyes, bruises, and bloody noses were the order of the day.

And every boy knew this about every other boy: that the accusation of "coward" found in the taunt of "Chicken!" struck at the very heart of one's self-image--at the heart of his sense of courage and conviction.  It simply could NOT be allowed to go unchallenged!  One's very manhood depended on chastising the offender!  
Oh yes, life was simple in those days . . . or so it may seem now in retrospect since we as children tended to be blissfully unaware of adult dilemmas, nor had we learned to recognize that swift-flowing social currents could be churning right beneath our feet. We were happily oblivious to a hell of a lot but at least we knew this much: if another kid taunted us with "Chicken!" it required swift and decisive action!  
Thus do words take on double meanings while our ability to make an informed decision often depends on how well we understand the meaning of the word in context--along with any subtle nuance or "slant" the speaker may wish to impart through vocal inflection . . . 
Yes, this is a story of long ago, of a much simpler time of black and white, good and evil.  We boys were completely unsophisticated compared to this modern hip generation.  I’m sure no sophisticated reader today would take the slightest offense if I were to call him “chicken, chicken, CHICKEN!"” . . . or would he??!!