Joe Stack's eerie suicide screed rips the curtain open and reveals a bitter bile this country does not know what to do with.
Liberals will surely dismiss Stack's rant as a broiling anti-government battle cry -- Tea Party on steroids. Conservatives will dismiss it as the petulant whine of a "victim" who couldn't hack Capitalism.
The tortured manifesto cannot be properly labeled as "left-" or "right-wing." Rather, it's a non-partisan screed against problems roiling the Republic - and Stack's head - for years. A crippled economy dominated by political and corporate potentates. A campaign and election system rotted by special interests and money. Byzantine tax laws that baffle small business owners and individuals.
History animates Stack's crime and screed. His crime consciously mimics 9/11. And his suicide note recalls the Great Depression.
"I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything," Stack wrote. "Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual". Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes... isn't that a clever, tidy solution."
Then Stack agonizes over a more recent recession:
"Return to the early '80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a 'wet-behind-the-ears' contract software engineer... and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706..."
Like much political protest today, Stack's rant is a sloppy kiss to populism: It confuses and conflates its Washington rage with its Wall Street rage. While the two forces clearly share their bed - or trough, more accurately - their problems and wrongdoings are not the same.
Those who hurl indiscriminate anger at Washington with indiscriminate anger at corporate America obscure the very nature of - and the viable solutions to - what shackles them. Yes, pizza might aggravate an elderly man's heart disease, but banning pizza from his diet will neither eliminate his heartburn nor his heart disease. There's a difference between a problem, its mere irritants, its causes, its symptoms, and its effects.
The violent, inchoate, widespread anger at Washington and Wall Street often confuses all of those.
Pointing out his lack of savings and retirement options, Stack complains of once "living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time."
It's deja vu: Stack echoes a discharged GI who blew up the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. In his hometown newspaper in Lockport, New York, Timothy McVeigh lamented in the winter of 1992: "The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries."
Our collective -- popular, governmental, corporate, media -- brushoff of economic hardship and anti-social vitriol is tragic. Add to McVeigh's, or Stack's, economic anxiety a dash of nativism, government bashing, and (well-placed) resentment over Wall Street or bailouts, and you have a recipe for even more violence.
"The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws..." wrote Stack. "By not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at "big brother" while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won't continue; I have just had enough ... Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."
Stack explicitly cites history in thought, word, and deed: the Great Depression, the 1986 Tax reform Act, the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis and "bailout," the Oklahoma City Bombings, the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the recent 2008 bailout. The rest of us should take heed: America suffers from amnesia. We ignore the historical, yet recurring, events and lessons that would make millions of our lives more financially, emotionally, and physically secure.
Deplorable though he might be, Stack is not quite a "random bad apple." His act might be uncommon, but his jumbled populism is not. His crime is in no way excusable; but it spotlights a larger problem that both political and corporate elites like to caricature or dismiss: visceral populist anger. In turn, the likes of Stack often misdirect or poorly define the contours of Washington and Wall Street misbehavior.
Stack may have suffered from mental illness, but he is also very much a symptom of this nation and the times.
We ignore - or dismiss as "lunatic" - his screed, suicide, and crime at our own risk.
I feel this was the final proof that now has given the malcontent reasons to do what was just done. Maybe it is time to head for the hills. I fear, we can expect more of the same. Sad, very sad.
So, what Mr. Benjamin seems to be saying is that this principle, applied by the powerless individual, is "confused" whereas, when it is applied by the System, it is "comprehensive"!!
In contrast, when conscience-driven Buddhist monks wished to make a statement against the brutality of the Vietnam War, they doused themselves with gasoline and set fire to themselves. Yet here in America, it seems that men under duress want to take innocent people down with them. If Joe Stack truly wished to make a statement against the government, he would not have tried to take down as many others as he could along with himself.
shoes or about to be, is that he had reached the point where he had nothing to loose.
Are you listening Washington and Wall St.? You'd better be....
Do you want to know why a lot of people don't like Keith Olbermann? Last night on his show, he described Stack as a tax protester and government protester. A very simplistic description of him, i believe most would think. He also pointed to a facebook group where he read one supporter of his, and essentially tried to paint Stack as part of a right wing conspiracy, or, at the very least what the right wants to do.
He claims to be different from his right wing counterparts, and his supporters often use the line "Keith uses the facts", but facts are not always facts until the whole argument is considered, therefor making him just as partisan as Sean Hannity
Stack didn't want assistance, what he wanted was freedom. To be left alone, unmolested, not singled out for government mistreatment and inspection.
I wish people would stop thinking of the government as some kind of entity with a conscience, with a soul, with morals. Our leaders have forsaken us , they have made their "across the aisle" and "back room" deals, and done what they think will get them re-elected. It has nothing to do with what is right (unless it is what is right for their main special interest groups, who can bring them the votes they need).
I know you are just being optimistic, but the truth is, this is going to occur a lot more in the future.
When April 15th rolls around & people have no money to pay past taxes....those late penalties start coming in & piling up to obscene levels.
People are going to feel targeted & that no one is looking out for them.
We will see how flexible the IRS is then with poor people. I bet they won't be flexible at all.
Cmon people you are paying a tax on your blood, sweat, tears & working life.
WE DIDNT HAVE AN INCOME TAX UNTIL WE GOT A CORRUPT PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL CENTRAL BANK THAT PRINTS MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR & CHARGES US INTEREST TO USE IT.
Why do you think President Andrew Jackson, JFK, Abraham Lincoln were against having one.
The IRS is their mafia money collection armed forces. (Thats what happens when you don't pay...they come to your house with guns, take everything you have & put you in prison.)
It was basically an argument for accepting any inequity some evil control freak wants to impose on a population, so my post here is a refutation to that kind of thinking.
"Live humbly, without liberty or dignity? That's not maturity, that is sheepish stupidity. Only a dullard is content to live like some kind of vassal, tithing most of his work product to his master. Wake up, Tom...take the blue pill.
If everyone followed your milquetoast philosophy we'd all be sipping tea through our crummy teeth and eating crumpets at 4PM. "
There is a spiral, glued relation between knowledge /power that you cannot untangle. It is facelss (no conspiracies) and unchangeable. The only action possible is individual local resistance. Changing leaders won't work. It may speed or slow things but that's all.
Go Google "section 1706".
As best I can tell, if some company ( which exists to make money by hooking up independent contractors with companies that need something done) gets you an assignment doing something for some company, you have a greater chance of being ruled as an employee of that company that needs something done (which means everybody having to go back and re-do all of their tax paperwork months later) than if you contract directly (as an independent contractor) with that company that needs something done.
But only if you're working in the computer industry.
(I'm pretty sure there are no subsections involving phases of the moon or the analysis of animal entrails, but don't hold me to that)
Without a CPA or attorney, I promptly contacted the IRS and told them that I was willing to work with them to handle this situation. The IRS agent and I agreed that they would end up taking my future refunds as "installment payments" in order to satisfy the debt that I had accrued. Even though I was not at fault for this--my temporary homelessness and the closing of the company for which I worked made it nearly impossible for me to get my tax records in a timely manner--and even though I was making little more than minimum wage at my new job, I did not try to make excuses for the past. I took my lumps and my responsibility seriously.
Had Mr. Stack not hung around with people from the anti-tax movement--which has been around decades longer than the Tea Party movement--maybe he would have taken his lumps and responsibility seriously as well. But that is a moot point, for he has made it so.
Your country was founded by tax protestors. Income tax started in the US when you got stuck with a private central bank that many of your presidents warned you over & over about.
The IRS income tax exists to take money from the largest pool of people who can't defend themselves (slaves) & pay the vig (interest on the money printed out of thin air by the 'fed' private central bank.
Wake up lady.
Because really they are just confused people who lack understanding and historical perspective. Polarizing, self-aggrandized paranoid delusional malcontents.
Case in point. Nobody jumped from a window when the market crashed in 1929, only a few even committed suicide altogether, the first about 10 days later. One guy jumped to his death weeks before the crash.
No, the real source for their anger should be the middle class itself who have surrendered their power and turned on their own with every chance they could get. Anger and violence against the capitalist machine we have unleashed will get us nowhere as we ourselves are to blame for unleashing it and until we redress our deficiencies as a democratic people we will get nowhere in the battle for a more equitable society.
We can change the world, but people like Stack will never be a part of it.
Let me ask you, in which election was it, that the middle class voted to create the IRS, to create income tax? Where are these middle class people who surrendered their power? What WAS this mysterious power that "the middle class" once wield that they just whimsically gave up?
And now, we're "deficient". Are you *sure* you don't work for the IRS? Who says things like "redress our deficiencies" except a government bureaucrat or a prison warden? "Looks like what we got here..is failure to communicate." "Need to get your head right, son"
"Yes, boss, I got my head right. Just let me out of the hole".
This thread is already giving me the creeps.
Not the first time this has happened. During the American Revolution many could not bring themselves to blame the King, even after the Revolutionary War started at Lexington and Concord. I have a reproduction of a map of the forces made right after the battle and the British troops are labeled "Ministerial Troops". Even after thet were attacked, many still could not give up the idea that the divinely guided monarch was really on their side, it had to be the shifty ministers who where misguided him.
You might not know this, but Benjamin Franklin spent quite some time diplomatically attempting to steer Parliament towards colonial autonomy. Eventually of course he realized that they were too militant and overbearing to ever allow it. So when he came back to the US it was with revolution as a "plan B" of last resort.
Just as the IRS is the agency that steals our money. Whether they do so with the approval of Congress, or at its behest is not relevant. The masters are responsible for the acts of those in their service: This is accountability. To use the colonial reference, the Americans until 1775 petitioned the King for a redress of grievances, which he denied. It was not until he declared the agents to be in open rebellion against him that they were forced to accept that diplomacy had failed and since they were now in modern terms, "enemy combatants" they had no choice but to walk down that path, as revolutionaries. What other option was there?