Most people’s tax returns are ridiculously easy. If you have wages, interest or unemployment benefits, and perhaps have some Earned Income Credit coming, go to the IRS site that directs you to place where you can do your taxes for free. Don’t be scared – it’s routine, fail-safe, and accurate.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If your taxes are more complicated, you are self-employed, itemize deductions, have doubts about whether or not you are entitled to exemptions, buy a tax program. TurboTax will get you through it. They will rip you off to piggy-back a state return, which is a big profit center for them, and maybe even charge to e-file, which costs them virtually nothing. But you are still better off than you would be visiting an expensive preparer.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If you have tax issues beyond the norm – sale of assets or residences, passive investments, minimum IRA withdrawals, audits, rental units, LLC’s and S-Corps and K-1’s, then it would not hurt to visit either a CPA or an enrolled agent. Avoid the shingle-hangers, tax preparers who are neither of those, as they are usually strictly reliant on the software and often turn out shoddy work. CPA’s and enrolled agents must undergo rigorous training. It’s not easy to become either. Do ask your preparer how he/she bills, as many of them, like auto mechanics, work off a schedule and charge $X for this form, $X for that form, without regard to actual time. Those who charge by actual time are usually more reasonably priced. ut remember that if you think the fee unreasonable, you are paying for time, knowledge, and liability.
Continue reading “Avoid H&R Block” →

The things that informed me most were my experiences in fighting for freedom of the press, freedom to communicate knowledge – which, in the end, is freedom from ignorance. Secondly, [were] my experiences in understanding how the military-intelligence complex works at a practical level. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

I just got back from a trip, and in the mail was a Rolling Stone magazine. So typical, it is part pop culture, trying to stay in touch with young people and at the same time wanting to connect with older generations too. So on the cover is David Bowie (John Lennon has the week off), and inside is a full length interview with Julian Assange. Oh yeah – did I also say that Rolling Stone* is one of the few publications in the United States that does actual journalism?**

I set the magazine by my chair, but elected not to read the interview last night as I did not want to become agitated before sleepy time. I read it this morning. I’m not agitated. It’s more depressing than infuriating. The power of the United States National Security State (NSS) is so impressive that it cannot be well-described. It is felt via Assange and Bradley Manning as ominous, far-reaching and oppressive. We are not a free country. I knew that, but did not feel the weight of the oppression in totality until I read his words.

It’s one thing to see him destroyed – he knows that what he was told by a “Western intelligence source,” that he is “fucked,” is true. Whether he is nabbed by Karl Rove’s buddy Carl Bildt in Sweden, or whether the US brings him home via British extradition laws, he’ll likely never experience freedom again. Obama*** intends to fry him, and he has at his disposal the full weight of the military-industrial complex. Companies that have attempted to help him lose clients, individuals lose their jobs. The US media is assassinating his character – there are over twenty million links to him and “rape” now on the Google. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal have conspired against him and yet there are no legal proceedings against the companies in their conspiracy against him – not a good sign. There is complicity, top to bottom, among the corporate, military, media and government wings of the NSS.
Continue reading “Freedom from ignorance” →

Jhwygirl writes about a political discussion hosted by the Policy Insitute last week. The event was not recorded so that the candidates could speak freely. Not kidding. That’s how we roll.

During the event Rep Kim Gillan of Billings is said to have remarked that last year’s oil spill on the Yellowstone River was a benefit. Her words, as cited by jhwygirl:

…there are people in Billings that think the oil spill was a good thing, that it was good for business. They are looking at their watches and asking can we do this again next year?”

It’s not clear from that brief remark whether she is being sarcastic. I doubt it. I ran for legislature in Billings in 1996 and Gillan was a fellow candidate, one of two or three successful ones. I was terribly unimpressed with her at the time, not sensing any progressive impulses in her. She struck me as a right wing Democrat. I would not fully comprehend until the year 2000 how much the Democratic Party leadership despises progressives**.

I am going on memory here now, but as I remember, Gillan, the wife on a physician, had gotten a later-life masters in economics. Most likely she studied neoclassical economics, and credulously sponged it up – I was not impressed by her intellectual firepower. But she learned duckspeak, and was thereby set to go into politics properly trained in right wing economics.

I believe in public education, and that our brains and grades should be the guide by which we advance, and not our bank accounts. I wonder if Gillan would survive in a merit-based system. The remark above, if cited correctly, is testimony to the Carolyn Kennedy* syndrome: too much education wasted on too little brain.
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*To avoid the tinge of sexism, this could also be called the “Steve Forbes Syndrome.” It is not gender-based, but rather a phenomenon of
privilege, where people like Gillan, Forbes, and George W. Bush have access to higher education without meriting it. They are taught the words, but never quite grasp the music. In Bush’s case, it made him a dangerous man. The others are just annoying.
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**I hasten to add that I brought about my own electoral defeat without assistance from anyone.

Glenn Greenwald cites Law Professor Jonathan Turley in listing the assaults on the Bill of Rights taking place in the post 9/11 environment, first brought on by the George W. Bush Administration and now intensified by Obama:

1. Assassination of U.S. citizens;
2. Indefinite detention;
3. Arbitrary justice;
4. Warrantless searches;
5. Secret evidence;
6. War crimes;
7. Secret court;
8. Immunity from judicial review;
9. Continual monitoring of citizens;
10. and Extraordinary renditions.

Any student of post-war America realizes that all of this went on from VJ day forward. The US was in a position of unparalleled power, and the people who ran the country were no less susceptible to absolute corruption than anyone before. It happened quickly, with passage of the National Security Act of 1948, changing the name of the War Department to “Defense,” and conversion of the wartime OSS into the peacetime CIA. Soon thereafter came McCarthyism and the attack on civil liberties in the name of anti-communism. Wars, major and minor, were routine.
Continue reading “They are always with us …” →

Let’s see now … we’ve invaded without just cause, killed thousands of civilians, dropped bombs on wedding parties, used drones for random killings … what else can we do …what else can we do to help these people? Thinking …. thinking…
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PS: The War Department says that the four soldiers have been identified and that charges could be brought as early as today (Friday, 1/13). This sends a powerful message to all other soldiers in our various wars: “Dammit, you guys, would you poleeeeease fer Chrissakes look around as see if someone has a camera running?”
PPS: I don’t see any weaponry around the dead guys, probably stripped of guns, but then there is always the possibility that these are not soldiers. The War Department says they are “Taliban Fighters,” which roughly translated is like “Al Qaeda'” or a name we use to designate subhumans that are OK to kill or torture (killing being the easiest way out for them). For all we know, these could be perfectly innocent people, not even fighting back. The one on the left could even be female, or perhaps quite young.

Is it just me? First, Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, William Daley and now Jacob Lew. What they have in common? Well, let’s say that they are ‘insiders,’ Wall Street variety.

What does the COS do? According to Wiki,

The duties of the White House Chief of Staff vary greatly from one administration to another. However, the Chief of Staff has been responsible for overseeing the actions of the White House staff, managing the president’s schedule, and deciding who is allowed to meet with the president. Because of these duties, the Chief of Staff has at various times been labeled “The Gatekeeper”, “The Power Behind the Throne”, and “The Co-President”.

So the question I pose is this: Is Obama even appointing these guys? Does Obama have any control over who is at State, Treasury or War? Or is he a willing captive, pretending to be the man behind decisions made by others? It’s been apparent some time now, perhaps since Watergate, that presidents can be taken down, so perhaps the culling process now yields weak men like Obama, willing to be the Monkees pretending to play their own instruments when we all know they are not. It’s just a show? Is the office completely captive now to what FDR called “economic royalists?”

Has it come to that? I suspect so.

Hannah Arendt, in her essay “Ideology and Terror” (1953), spends the last few pages talking about loneliness, isolation, and solitude. I knew what lay ahead as I read, as it was not my first time through, and I still don’t quite comprehend it. I expected her to say clearly that totalitarian states rely on isolated individuals, as the only power that individuals have is to band together with others. And she does say that, to wit:

It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, “acting in concert” (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition.

Here is what I brought into the essay regarding isolation: I was listening to David Sirota’s local talk show one morning, and the subject of 9/11 “Truthers” came up, and Sirota got very agitated and stated bluntly that such subject matter would never be debated on his show, that Truthers bring no evidence to the table, and that he does not discuss whether the sky is blue or water wet. And my immediate reaction was to sympathize with him, as he and I both harbor doubts about the official story. Some of that stuff is just too bizarre to believe (cell phone calls from 35,000 feet, a driver’s license that falls several hundred stories from an incinerated airliner and lands on a New York sidewalk, free-falling buildings whose ashes are laden with thermite and a 16 foot hole that consumed a Boeing 767.
Continue reading “Arendt, Part 3: There will be blood” →

If only the Nazis could have embraced contradiction. After they accepted the premise of Master Race and inferior peoples, it followed that for one to extinguish the other was the right thing to do. It was logically consistent. In the same vein, if Americans could simply accept the idea that Muslims, even though being violent people following a false religion, were nonetheless rather harmless, we could let them live too, maybe even self-govern. It’s not logical, but it would sure makes our lives (and theirs) better if only because we are not running around massacring people.

I’m still digging into Hannah Arendt’s essay, Ideology and Terror, 1953. This is unusual for me in that I am trying to understand her premise and follow through on it to see if it is useful in understanding of how the world really works. I should admit that I am smitten by her. She witnessed first-hand the Nazi regime and its effects on the military and intellectual classes. She fled, while those who did not either gave in and participated or perished. She tried, and without use of bad humans, to explain what had happened there. Continue reading “The ice cold logic of totalitarianism” →

Hannah Arendt was a product of a highly developed Jewish intellectual culture that existed in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler’s Reich. She was able to flee and come to the United States in 1941. Her former lover, Martin Heidegger, succumbed and was one of the intellectual class that supported Hitler. (Such a class also flourished in the US, but was forced underground by events. It is still with us. Current Bush family scions stem from ardent Hitler supporters.) She later rekindled that affair in secret, as love overcomes all.

Arendt was a disciplined thinker who wrote in hard prose that requires concentration and patience. She will carry on about an idea, develop it and then, in one sentence finish its expose’ with startling clarity. So it is that she tells us after several pages of her essay called “Ideology and Terror” (1953)* that terror in a totalitarian society serves the same purpose as “honor in a monarchy, [and] virtue in a republic.” What is needed is what Montesquieu called a “principle of action”, or a reason to move forward.

Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of Nature or History with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered; eventually its force will always prove more powerful than the most powerful forces engendered by the actions and the will of men.** But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom – irrelevant and arbitrary as they may deem it – is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and die can only be regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces. Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning.

Continue reading “Old tryanny, new names” →

Naomi Klein crossed a line in her book “Shock Doctrine.” In it she identified terror as the primary weapon of totalitarianism. She would be fine doing that if she only stuck to American principles and identified terrorists as non-American actors. But she didn’t and is therefore, like Chomsky, a non-existent person in our society. She has power and influence, but we have to seek her out. She will not appear to us unless by accident, as she is not allowed in mainstream media.

The idea that Americans can be totalitarians and terrorists at once is abhorrent to our intellectual class because we are thought to represent noble ideas like “capitalism” and “free enterprise.” Embedded in both labels is the idea that our way of life represents the apex of human freedom. Therefore the idea that we would torture or enslave other humans is the very antithesis of our being.
Continue reading ““Americanism” and terror” →