Trust in the IRS, RIP
Contributed by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)
All,
Few abuses of governmental power can match those of today’s IRS. The chillingly illegal targeting of Americans exercising their right to free speech and assembly certainly harkens to earlier examples of terrible abuse by our Government.
J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI spying on political opponents immediately comes to mind, as do the attempts to silence Daniel Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers affair. The heartless disregard for the rights and welfare of largely powerless American by the IRS also reminds us of the CIA mindset when it used American GIs as Guinea pigs during their LSD experiments a half century ago.
But the IRS abuses are worse for at least two reasons. The first is that the scope of the targeting was far beyond anything seen before: it was truly a systemic nation-wide assault. Let there be no mistake, it was a police action designed to suppress dissent as the IRS punitively defined it.
The second shocking characteristic of these crimes is the victims. I cannot recall another case where the Government clandestinely attacked Main Street America. These victims were not power players like Hoover’s enemies, or a small number of brave outspoken individuals like Ellsberg and his followers, this was going after your neighbor, your coworker, a friend or family member who posed no undue threat to anyone or anything. They were targeted because those with power wanted to silence their political voice. The actions by the IRS were despicable.
That this disease in the IRS starts at the very top of the organization is abundantly clear by simply reviewing a few short facts:
Shakespeare wrote that, “The truth will out.” When the IRS knew a bad report was going to be made public, it decided to deceive the American people by not forthrightly issuing a statement. Instead, in a fitting example of its sick organizational culture, it decided to manipulate the facts.
It wrote both a question and answer on the issue intentionally designed to make the IRS “look good” and then found a fawning member of the Washington media to play out the Q&A charade in public. The IRS then created the “rogue agent” myth to avert any blame. How sick is that?
Next, simply look to the “Three (non-) Talking Heads” of the IRS.
First you had former-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman who, when asked about his hundred plus trips to the White House over three years, gave a flippant answer that he recalled going to an Easter egg hunt. The message seemed clear: Shulman had nothing but contempt for the Congress and they were going to have to hunt for the truth without his help.
Next, you had Shulman’s replacement, Steven Miller, who told Congress on 3 May 2012 that, “There’s absolutely no targeting” even though senior IRS managers were aware of the targeting as early as June 2011 and, when caught, Miller had the gall to aver on 17 May 2013 that, “I answered all questions truthfully.”
Again, this displayed the incompetence and arrogance of an IRS leadership that feels that when it intentionally deceived the Congress and the American people it was being truthful. That is pathetic.
Finally you have Lois Learner who stated that she did nothing wrong and then invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid possibly incriminating herself in some wrongdoing. Good grief!
No wonder a low-level IRS officer in Cincinnati recently stated that the superiors are trying to blame them and throw the little IRS guys “under the bus.”
The IRS in its current form is a cancer eating away at American body politic.
Tweaking and shuffling the internal “card decks” inside the IRS cannot cure this illness. In times of emergency, it sometimes necessary to figuratively “tear down the walls with an axe” and that time is now.
While Congress needs to clean up the tax law, the only comprehensive solution is to eradicate the IRS culture of unaccountable elitism in the senior leadership and the callous and apparently criminal targeting of American citizens by its employees.
The IRS – like the FBI, CIA and Pentagon in the past – needs to be thoroughly shaken up and cleaned up and the first step in cutting out the cancer is to immediately and completely dismantle the IRS non-profit department and assign its work elsewhere until a new healthy organization can be formed.
Mike
