The Predatory State of California, Part 2
Due process and rule of law have been replaced with “legalized” looting and harrassment by government in America.
Yesterday’s entry Welcome to the Predatory State of California—Even If You Don’t Live There generated dozens of emails recounting similar stories of “we don’t need no stinkin’ due process” looting and “fishing expeditions” by California and other state/local governments.
Let’s begin with correspondent (and Arizona resident since 2001) R.T.’s experience of his account being looted without prior notice or due process by the state of California to the tune of $1,343. R.T. finally reached an employee of the State Franchise Tax Board and received an explanation.
The state representative stated that “we don’t try to contact the person involved,” i.e. the taxpayer whose account is about to be looted. The rep went on to explain that the state had received a 1099 from a financial institution for the year 2006 and had promptly stolen the citizen’s money in the event that tax was owed to California.
Everyone who believes the government is “here to help disadvantaged people” needs to wake up and ask what kind of government we have when due process has been replaced with “legal” looting. R.T. reported the income in question on his 2006 Federal and Arizona tax return. Wouldn’t common sense, not to mention common law, suggest that the state of California should be required to ask the citizen who now resided in another state if the income in question had been reported in that state?
How about notifying the citizen of the state’s claim and his/her rights to present facts relating to the state’s claim?
There was no due process. How can this be legal in a nation that is nominally governed by rule of law? First the state steals the $1,343 and authorizes its parasitic predatory bag-“person” Wells Fargo Bank to steal another $100 for handling the state’s theft.
A week or two later the citizen is notified of the theft as a fait accompli. Now the onus is on the law-abiding citizen to attempt to reclaim his own money from a distant, all-powerful Kafkaesque state agency. How can this be legal in a nation supposedly operating under rule of law?
Let’s be very clear about what happens here in America on a daily basis:
1. The state (or other agency of government) steals citizen’s money without due process.
2. Then, in a move akin to the executioner making the condemned buy his own death bullet, the state authorizes the “too big to fail” corporate bank which received billions in taxpayer bailouts to steal $100 from the citizen for the digital theft of his money by the state.
3. If the citizen needed that money to pay rent, buy medication to stay alive, etc., tough luck, Buckwheat, the state of California has your money before they notify you of the purported tax liability or provide due process or recourse and now you enter the Kafkaesque insanity of pleading for a “refund” of your own money from an agency designed to thwart transparency and the reclamation of your own money.
So if you get evicted and are living in a cardboard box and pass away due to inability to buy your meds, hey, the State of California’s political class and special interests could care less: they want your money and the rule of law means nothing to them.
If you understand that a purported tax liability is one issue and due process is another far more important issue, then you understand that we now live in an authoritarian nation where “rule of law” is only invoked at the convenience of the political and financial Elites for propaganda purposes.
The state of California has three basic methods of looting law-abiding citizens: