Category: insider corruption

Categories
insider corruption

Incumbency Protection Racket

While discussing the latest IRS scandal — the one about how the IRS has been (is still) stacking the deck against non-​lefty nonprofits seeking tax-​exempt status — the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto mentions another kind of deck-​stacking: campaign financial regulation.

Seems that Hillary Clinton, still running for president, is using her serially disgraced husband’s 501©3 foundation as a launching pad or financial resource for political operations. Taranto wonders whether the IRS “would investigate the Clinton Foundation for evidently acting as a front group for a political campaign” — quickly adding that his question is “facetious” given the fact that “the Obama IRS only goes after little guys.”

Suppose, however, that there were in fact an inquiry into the relationship between Hillary’s incipient campaign and the foundation? The point Taranto wants to make is that whether we’re talking about the IRS code or campaign finance regulation, it’s easier to comply with “complex and burdensome regulations on political speech” when you have resources to splurge on lawyers who can ensure that you’re obeying the letter of the law. Thus, the regulations “give incumbents a huge advantage over upstart challengers.”

Though hardly the only problem with CFR, this bedrock truth about the regulatory regime undermines the claim that such regulations serve only to “level the playing field.” What they really do is make it impossible for an unknown, un-​wealthy but otherwise viable challenger to quickly “level the playing field” by accepting large checks from donors convinced of the challenger’s electability and election-worthiness.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Paging Woodward and Bernstein

The Federal Election Commission is now implicated in the Obama administration’s years-​long hounding of groups ideologically hostile to it.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Kimberly Strassel details how, at the behest of a lawyer in the Obama administration, FEC staff “have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS’s infamous Lois Lerner.” After the Obama lawyer filed a complaint with FEC against a conservative organization called American Issues Project in 2008, FEC staffers asked Lerner about the group. They went on to repeatedly challenge AIP’s non-​profit status, cooking up new report-​length rationales each time a previous one was exploded.

Papers like The Wall Street Journal as well as various blogs have published regular updates about how IRS personnel — top officers, not just a few file clerks — really did go after ideological critics of the Obama administration in the run-​up to the 2012 election. But a “paper of record” like The New York Times barely notices the story except to rationalize it away. Same with other “liberal” outlets.

How many dots must be connected before left-​leaning media mavens and their troops say “this is too much even for us! Letting IRS, now FEC, plus anyone in the Obama administration who winked and nodded get away with this would be hazardous to our own health! The next administration may be staffed by unscrupulous Republicans instead of unscrupulous Democrats! We’re going to start reporting on this! We may even criticize such abuse of power! Sharply criticize! Yeah!”?

How many?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture insider corruption national politics & policies

Non-​Reciprocity

There’s a basic rule that folks who seek power tend to forget and those in power flout outright: the principles we foist on others must apply also to ourselves.

Notoriously, Congress piles regulation over regulation upon the American people, but absolves itself from those very same laws. This became an issue, recently, when our moral exemplars on Capitol Hill began to speak loftily for a higher minimum wage and against modern internship programs.

“A new study,” Bill McMorris wrote last month, “found that 97 percent of lawmakers backing the minimum wage are relying on unpaid interns to help get the bill passed.” McMorris used the H‑word in his title, as have many similar reports before him: hypocrites.

The program requirements of the Democrats’ “ObamaCare” have proven to be more burdensome than Nancy Pelosi promised. So President Obama now declares, unilaterally, to postpone applying the employer mandate in the law. Consider, too, the many waivers granted to other groups for various rules and regulations rules. None of this was done to better implement a carefully thought-​out policy, but not to aggrieve certain influential groups.

And here we get to the heart of today’s weakness on principles.

You see, it’s not individuals who matter to our leaders, it’s powerful groups … groups that fund or swing re-elections.

And that’s the principal reason government policy works at cross-​purposes, to our general detriment. Instead of insisting on broad rules that apply to all, our leaders pit group against group, favoring one, then another, then later still another.

Madness for us; method for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

IRS’s Targeting Was Targeting

The more we learn about the latest IRS scandal, the harder it is to evade what it is all about: the systematic thwarting— for years on end — of legitimate applications for tax-​exempt status submitted by Tea Party and other conservative groups.

It’s getting pretty thick and deep in the redoubts of those still claiming that only a few rogue, overwhelmed IRS clerks fashioned the policy “accidentally.”

Far from being limited to the inadvertent machinations of a few harried, bungle-​prone IRS clerks huddling furtively in airless, lightless, low-​ceilinged Cincinnati basement rooms, the scheme to put the Tea Party applications on the glue-​laced slow track has its origin in the nation’s capital. We’re now learning that the IRS chief counsel himself is implicated in the determination to be dilatory.

That’s a guy named William Wilkins. Appointed by the President.

Some also still claim that left-​leaning non-​profits were as much beleaguered by unwarranted IRS delays as right-​leaning non-​profits. The facts don’t support this notion. Some “progressive” and “Occupier” groups seem to have undergone slow review, but not the same pattern of excessive inquiry and drill-​down information mining that has emerged for conservative groups.

Moreover, an IRS abusing our civil liberties equally isn’t the answer.

As Carol Liebau noted last week, the latest revelations confirm that “there was, in fact, a dedicated ‘Tea Party Coordinator’ at the IRS, a position that has no analogue on the left.…” IRS targeting does not equal standard scrutiny. “The term refers to concerted efforts to harass law-​abiding Americans (seeking tax-​exempt status) based on their (right-​leaning) viewpoint alone.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

S.O.P. at the IRS

Remember the IRS scandal? I mean the one about how the Internal Revenue Service has been monkey-​wrenching the applications for tax-​exempt status submitted by politically non-​leftward organizations (Tax Prof Blog has the latest).

But politically motivated clogging of an application process is just one way that the IRS abuses us. Victims of its normal forms of abuse have also been coming forward lately, seeing that they now have at least a temporarily receptive audience.

One such is Jeffrey Black, former employee of the Federal Air Marshal Service, who has long tried to fix the problems he sees with the Air Marshals. It seems that not every colleague appreciates it.Jeffrey Black

After retiring in 2010, Black appeared in a documentary (“Please Remove Your Shoes”) about the pseudo-​security measures we have to endure at the airport. Why not? He couldn’t be fired any more, right? But the day the documentary premiered — “almost to the hour” — the IRS notified him that he was being audited. It also slapped a lien on his home.

In the end, their investigation turned up $480 that Black owed the IRS, which he paid; and $8,300 that the IRS owed Black, which IRS didn’t pay.

“Being a veteran of extensive retaliation … I am not surprised about this,” he told CNN. “It is basically the only way they can still … retaliate against me after I retired.”

The IRS denies that audits are ever politically motivated.

They deny many things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption political challengers too much government

Protesting “Capitalism”?

While Americans appear mildly unsettled or perhaps “ticked off” about recent government revelations, elsewhere in the world citizens move from “unease” to “unrest” and outright “protest.”

The protests that erupted first in Turkey and now in Brazil and elsewhere are filled with the ranks of the young, not a few of whom have noticed something: They are getting a raw deal.

Many of their issues are meat-​and-​potatoes: lack of jobs, burdensome student debts and, in Brazil, a bus fare rate increase made ugly in the context of cost overruns in taxpayer support for the World Cup and Olympics.

The young Turks protested, at first modestly, over planning for a park, but a harsh police crackdown led to more widespread marches, sit-​ins, and demonstrations — which now often bring up questions of the current administration’s repressive anti-​modernist, anti-​freedom agenda.

This more heroic theme resonates elsewhere, too.

In Bulgaria the issue most protested appears to be police brutality and the general spirit of repression. In Latin America, opposition to corruption has moved from old stand-​by to vital question of the day.

The saddest statement I heard was this appraisal, hailing from the BBC, of the general climate: “today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.”

Well, that’s not laissez faire capitalism that’s failed, but crony capitalism. Laissez faire’s truly free markets require a rule of law, the suppression of government corruption, and effective public accountability.

But that’s not what’s dominant. America itself serves, today, not as a beacon of liberty but of institutional control, of crony capitalism.

We need to protest that here, again, in the U.S.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.