05/16/13 – Jim Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashScottHortonShow.
And our next guest is my good buddy, Jim Bovard.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
You guys all know Jim Bovard.
He wrote most of the books, well, the ones that Tom Woods didn't write, this guy wrote, and most in the world, 51%, including The Farm Fiasco and Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain.
And the subtitles are all really great, too.
You've got to check them out.
Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy.
And the latest is his memoir, Public Policy Hooligan, which is hilarious and which you can read on your Kindle or whatever you got there.
I highly suggest that you do that.
And also, I want you to look at this great piece in the Wall Street Journal.
And if you get, you know, the best thing to do is go to Google News if you want to read a Wall Street Journal piece.
And if you click from there, you should be able to read it.
But otherwise, you can go to jimbovard.com.
No paywall there.
Go to jimbovard.com and you can read it at his blog, too.
It's called A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting.
And man, this is really good.
I like histories of political persecutions, Jim.
Why don't you take us back?
Yeah.
Well, there is a history of political persecution is the perfect phrase for this, Scott, because this is what the IRS has done since the 1930s, if not before.
And it's been, the historians have documented, the journalists have documented, and yet for some reason, there is still this notion that we're supposed to presume that the IRS is playing fair nowadays and that it could not possibly be corrupt with the current president or the last couple presidents or whatever.
Yeah.
Well, just think about what their job is.
I mean, their job is assessing how much everyone earned and how much they owe.
There's nothing right for abuse in that, right?
Well, and Congress does such a horrible job of writing many of the laws.
This is part of the source of the controversy right now about the nonprofit status that the Tea Party and other conservative groups have gotten shafted by the IRS on.
The laws and the regulations are vague, clumsy, and paradoxical.
And so you just have these bureaucrats and someone says, well, do what you think is best, which is almost always a bad idea to tell bureaucrats that.
Well, you know, one thing too about presidents, I notice, is that the further back in history they go, like George W. Bush, I mean, he was president, what, two generations ago or something?
And now people think of him as not that bad, really, because as time goes by, you know, and then we start thinking of people like whatever JFK, he might as well be on Mount Rushmore and whatever for as much as everybody worships him.
And basically, you have to respect the office, Jim.
And so ultimately, people just, I don't think, wouldn't believe the way you tell this history here and citing your sources too, of virtually every single president since Franklin Roosevelt using the IRS as a form of a personal Gestapo.
Well, and using it to punish their enemies and often to suppress their critics.
That was what John F. Kennedy did.
There was a speech that Kennedy gave in which he denounced the discordant voices of extremism and derided people who distrusted their leaders, almost exactly what Obama said at Ohio State University a few weeks ago.
And yet, shortly after Kennedy made that speech, he signaled that he wanted the IRS to be vigilant on the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.
And a few days later, the IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit Project, which targeted right-wing groups, including the FEE and the American Enterprise Institute and the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
And Kennedy knew about this.
Kennedy was on top of this, and he was, Kennedy had signaled to the IRS chief that he wanted to be aggressive on this.
He sent out, that was a memo, a few weeks, a few months before he was assassinated.
So it wasn't like this was some throwaway line on his speech, but he was very, very clear on this.
Nixon came into power and greatly increased the amount of persecution, I guess, for lack of a better term, that the IRS did.
There was a project, Nixon created the Special Services Staff, which was known by its acronym SSS, and which tied together almost all the IRS activities that involved militant or radical or subversive organizations.
More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or their slant during Nixon's presidency.
Wow.
You know, I'm sorry, this is a great history, and we have all the time in the world for you to tell it, and I really want you to take all the time in the world to tell it, too, but I just want to interrupt you here just to dwell on that for just a second, because everybody knows a little, at least, about COINTELPRO, right, and picking a fight between different factions of Black Panthers and persecuting people this way and that, but I don't know.
Maybe in the past I heard of this, but maybe this is the first I've ever heard of the IRS's involvement in that very same type thing.
I mean, that sounds like what you're talking about.
It was part of COINTELPRO.
Very much.
In the 1960s and early 70s, there was a fair amount of, shall we say, cooperation between the FBI and the IRS.
There were a number of names that were given back and forth for the agencies to look at.
There was a very good report, the Church Committee did a great series of reports on COINTELPRO coming out in late 1975, early 1976, and they had a separate report on the IRS, and it's a really good reading, and it was shocking to me, and I'd written about the IRS a number of times, and it was like, wow, maybe they weren't wearing white hats.
Yeah, well, you know, I guess it's funny because everybody knows the cliché, but I think I'm guilty of not really applying it enough, but the cliché I'm referring to being, well, you know, they couldn't get Al Capone on anything, but they could get him on tax evasion, and they went ahead and nailed him to the wall on that.
And basically the point being, sort of like mail fraud, as long as you open your mailbox and receive junk mail or something, they can find a way to prosecute you for that if they want to.
It's that same sort of thing.
They can use the IRS against anyone when all else fails.
It's the go-to crime that everyone's guilty of, no matter how many lawyers they hire to help them fill out their forms in the first place.
Yeah, and a huge factor there is that the tax law is, it's a mindless tangle, there's so many contradictions and so much vagueness, it creates a lot of arbitrary opportunities for political appointees and for bureaucrats, and this has been a problem going back at least 30 or 40 years, that the tax code is almost incomprehensible, and yet, thanks to it being almost incomprehensible, that creates a lot of opportunities for abuse, and these are opportunities which have not been neglected.
And this has been pointed out by the General Accounting Office, by various independent commissions and stuff like that, and yet Congress has not chosen to fix the tax code.
And by doing that, congressmen are yapping left and right about how the IRS has done all these bad things, but Congress bears much of the blame on this, because Congress could have made a much clearer tax code, a much clearer tax law, but they haven't done that.
Right, well, and of course, it's sort of like abortion or some of these other issues where the Republicans like to have them as unresolved in their so-called favor from the view that they pretend to support, just because they like to have it as a political issue perpetually, you know?
They don't want to win, they want to continue fighting about it and saying, ooh, evil IRS, we Republicans will stand up for you and just keep playing that same game.
Yeah, but the GOP hasn't stood up really for that since the late 1990s, it was Senator Roth of Delaware who pushed through some fundamental tax reforms and forcing the IRS at least temporarily to treat people better, but he did not have that broad support until he had some really good witnesses and really pushed the issue and framed it, but so many people in Washington did not give a darn about that, and that's 15 years ago now, and since then, the IRS has committed a great number of abuses, but almost nobody in Congress has done any heavy lifting on this, except when it might impact the money that congressmen receive personally, or the money that's spent to benefit their campaigns.
That seems to be almost the only issue that holds congressmen's attention.
Right.
Yeah, you know, it's funny too, when I read your article, the thrust of it I get is like, Jesus, is there nothing that's beyond the pale?
You know, like where you talk about, in here, this report about the congressmen personally just siccing IRS agents on whoever they want, like, it seems like even Tom Brokaw or whatever, one of these hairdos on the nightly news, that seems like the kind of thing that would breach even their protocol.
You're supposed to be a little bit more underhanded than just obviously using the IRS this way.
Can't anyone ever get in trouble for that?
Well, I mean, that was a story that the Associated Press did in late 1999, and what they found was that officials in the White House and a lot of congressmen in both parties had prompted hundreds of audits, IRS audits of their political opponents, congressmen would even send personal demands to the IRS that some critic or someone in their district or somebody who they did not like would be audited, and what the IRS would do would treat these, you know, as very hot and they would expedite them.
They were obliged to respond to the congressman's office within 15 days, and so there was very special treatment for these.
But the whole idea that congressmen can effectively secretly stick federal agents onto whoever they please, this epitomizes Washington's contempt for the average Americans.
And I was amazed that this was not a far more controversial report.
What the IRS did was prohibit people from learning what had been done in these audit requests by saying that the congressman's requests were confidential, as if they were part of the tax return, and of course they were not.
But that was typical of how the game was played in Washington, and this is something which should have been at least as big of a controversy as anything that Bill Clinton did during his years with the IRS and the White House.
Well, you know, I don't know if this was originally part of the plan for withholding.
I think obviously they wanted to make it less painful to take the money right out of your check before you get it on Friday, kind of a thing, obviously.
But it ended up, in effect, with the refunds at the end of the year, the silent stealing all year long, and then the refund at the end of the year.
It's not that they always outright make the mistake that, wow, neat, the government is writing me a check for a lot of money.
They know better than that.
They know it's their money.
They know it's a refund.
It's called a tax refund.
So they sort of kind of get it.
But on the other hand, it really does sort of make a welfare recipient out of all of us.
It makes us all kind of...
Well, it doesn't make a welfare recipient out of us, but I would love to see polls.
I'm sure someone's done a survey on this to see how many people who receive a refund from too much money being withheld from their paychecks don't recognize that this is their own money, because there's a significant share of that.
And it's been corrupted even more by Congress with the expansion of the earned income tax credit sham, where they're basically using the IRS to pass out welfare and claiming it's not welfare because it's kind of tied somehow vaguely to something called a tax credit, which isn't really a tax credit.
And this has been a huge nightmare that Congress has voiced on the IRS, because this is a program that's always been fraud ridden, and this is partly because of how Congress wrote it.
Yeah.
But I guess I just meant it in the sense...
It's a very vague sense, really, but it's enough where it seems like it's actually operating in the interests of some people.
Not that they vote directly on that or whatever, but it certainly, I think, dulls the outrage when George Bush is sending everybody an extra $300 rebate check at the same time he's sending this, you know, going $5 trillion into the hole, invading Iraq, you know what I mean?
Absolutely.
They go, well, I guess war is good for the economy.
Look at me.
Yeah.
Now, you know, it's interesting, because I have memories.
I first started paying attention to politics in the mid to late 1970s, and President Carter came in office, and he was proposing to have the government send every household a $50 check, and there was outrage by Republicans, and a lot of very good criticism of that.
And then you fast forward 25 years with George W. and all of a sudden, well, it's a good idea.
Yeah, we're going to stimulate spending.
Well, yeah, and it's just fascinating how the standards for...
I mean, it was a horrible idea when a liberal Democrat first proposed it, but this is typical how tax policy is scored in Washington.
There are very few folks who are willing to throw the same penalty flag for conservatives and liberals and for Republicans and for Democrats.
Yeah.
All right.
I want to tell you real quick a story, and then I want to ask if you've got any good ones for us.
I know you do, but I knew a guy, I met a guy who, he owned a lumberyard, and he always was afraid of the tax man, so he had a lawyer and an accountant, and they worked together, and they made sure that everything was cool, and he paid early, and he jumped through every flaming hoop.
That's the way he told the story anyway.
He didn't even mind overpaying, just so that he wouldn't have the worry, you know?
He said, don't find any clever loopholes, boys, just pay them, you know?
And then they came for his ass anyway, and they nailed him to the wall, and they destroyed him, and they destroyed his family, and they destroyed his business, and everyone was fired, and the thing all went bankrupt, and the pigs ended up getting to keep whatever couple of tens of thousands of dollars they were after that they got out of this guy's hide, and his life was over.
And you know, at least at the time I met him, he hadn't blown his own brains out yet, but it seemed to me like, wow, these guys are sort of a foreign invading army of terrorists, destroying the lives of the American people.
They're no alphabet agency or something.
They're ruthless villains.
Jim, do you have any anecdotes along those lines, or counter to them, maybe?
Oh, gee, I've never heard anybody criticize the IRS like that.
Never?
You know, there's a bunch of anecdotes I have like that.
I've got it back almost 20 years old now.
I had a chapter in there called Taxing and Tyrannizing, which I reread for the Wall Street Journal piece, and there were a number of cases there, horrendous cases, which I've forgotten about.
There were also a number of excellent cases that came out from the Senator Ross hearings in 1997-98, where very similar to that, the IRS would go in and basically ruin people's lives, and often based on totally bogus charges.
So this has happened, and it's the kind of thing which, it should be far easier for victims to be able to get justice from the IRS and the courts, but the courts and the processes are structured very much in favor of the government.
Right.
I mean, really, I don't understand all the intricacies of it, but they'll get you stuck in administrative court inside the executive branch where you don't even get to talk to a real judge.
He looks like one with that black robe, but not really, right?
Well, administrative law is almost a contradiction of terms as far as private citizens trying to get justice from a federal agency, because it basically is a way for them to postpone for two or three or four years the person getting access to a real Article III federal independent judge.
But these are the laws that Congress wrote, this is what Congress wanted, and it's a farce for Congressmen to be saying, for most Congressmen to be saying, well, it's too bad these injustices occurred.
There are a handful of folks who are trying to do good work and roll back the abuses, but very few at this point.
All right.
Well, thanks for being one of them, Jim.
I sure appreciate it.
Well, thanks, Scott, for raising hell and trying to wake people up out there.
All right.
Thanks for joining me again.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Jim Bovard.
He's got one at the Wall Street Journal, and you can find it at jimbovard.com as well.
It's called A Brief History.
It's really good, too.
He's got a lot in there for as brief as it is.
A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting, and check out the memoir.
It's great.
It's called Public Policy Hooligan.
This guy, seriously, this is not just some made-up PR.
Really, he's been denounced by the heads, personally denounced by the heads, of 10 or 15 different agencies.
You can read all on his Wikipedia entry, I seem to remember, from a long time ago, and probably at jimbovard.com as well.
His books are absolutely brilliant, and most especially my favorite is Attention Deficit Democracy, too.
It's really great stuff and good for your brain.
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