With tax returns and payments due today, I can’t help but think of last year’s post titled “Paying for Our Own Oppression.” The direction I discussed then — the leader’s defunding of federal agencies in the absence of Congress, the arrest of foreign-born dissidents, and attacks on free speech — have continued. Lower courts have stood in his way — for instance, in ordering the release of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk — but higher courts and the Supreme Court have cleared the way for Khalil’s deportation and recissions of federal funding, including the closing of USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Although the Supreme Court struck down arbitrary and corrupt tariffs, new tariffs are in place and no one has received the promised refunds of what they already illegally had to pay. We cannot count on either Congress or the court system to protect freedom and the rule of law.
It has also become apparent that the current regime has engaged in the wholesale theft of public resources and the shaking down of private businesses and foreign entities to enrich the leader, his family, and his cronies. Media concentration in the hands of regime supporters leads not only to propaganda and censorship of alternative perspectives but also to higher prices. The businesses who settled frivolous lawsuits like ABC and the Washington Post, and those who made contributions to receive tariff exemptions like Apple, pass the costs of those thinly veiled bribes on to the consumers. We are all paying higher prices so regime insiders can wet their beaks. Now the leader wants to write checks from the U.S. Treasury to himself for $10 billion, claiming damages from prosecutions related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and his illegal possession of highly classified documents in his Florida home. He has encouraged allies in the Senate to seek their own millions from the Treasury due to their roles in the insurrection.
We’re paying for other kinds of corruption as well. Insider trading skims the cream from the market, leaving the ordinary investor with, at best, whole milk. Those who bought into the crypto and online political betting scams — those who entered those markets without inside information or connections — have lost even more.
What do we get for the money we’ve given to this regime? An out of control ICE that has snatched hardworking immigrants off the streets and placed them into concentration camps (as opposed to the criminal immigrants they promised to deport) and has shot and killed U.S. citizens, two of whom were engaged in First Amendment-protected protests (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) and two of whom just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (Ruben Ray Martinez and Keith Porter). We are now embroiled in a war of choice in Iran, where we have committed multiple war crimes and brought international shipping to a halt with no clear strategy. And our leader has switched sides in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, blaming Ukraine for the war, ending weapons and humanitarian assistance, confiscating weapons that European countries have bought for Ukraine and paid for, and allegedly giving intelligence to Russia to attack Ukrainian positions — even though Russia is now giving Iran intelligence assistance to attack U.S. positions in the Gulf.
In presenting my reasons for continuing to pay taxes, I cited the experience of a Chilean musician who endured severe repression under the Pinochet dictatorship. But my patience is wearing thin, in part because of the corruption, the switching sides on Ukraine, and most recently, threats to disenfranchise large swaths of voters. The SAVE Act, which requires voters to prove their citizenship before being allowed to register and bans mail-in voting, will make it almost impossible for elderly and disabled people to exercise this important Constitutional right. Furthermore, prospective voters must furnish birth certificates that match their current names. That means every woman who changed her name when she got married loses her right to vote, myself included. A marriage certificate will not be sufficient, and anyway these documents can be difficult and expensive to obtain. In order to register or reregister, the prospective voter must show up to the election office in person. Good luck getting an appointment, with tens of millions of people needing to reregister and prove their citizenship. Yes, a passport eliminates the need for the birth certificate, but many people in the U.S. do not have passports (or those passports have expired and may or be renewed based on one’s political views), and passports cost over $100 to obtain, making the requirement an unconstitutional poll tax.
As long as we have the right to vote in free elections, we have a chance to change things. That’s why the midterm elections in November are so important. Any attempt to cancel the election or disenfranchise the other party’s voters strikes me as an unacceptable violation. No taxation without representation! One need only look at what happened in Hungary this past weekend to see how even a tilted playing field — but one in which everyone was allowed to vote — could lead to the downfall of a corrupt dictator when the people had had enough.
