So, first my bank tells me there’s a tax levy on my bank account – which I believed, since the Alabama tax dept. has been after me in any case. Then it turns out to be some alleged credit card debt from years ago. Now tonight, on returning home, just as I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of my current financial crisis, I find a notice from the good old Alabama Department of Revenue demanding that I pay $9,097.15 within the next ten days or else they threaten to issue a writ to seize “your bank accounts and/or up to 25% of your wages, or issue an execution on real/personal property,” etc. I guess this just isn’t my week.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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I think you should start putting up some documents for people to see, just in case.
If I had $20k to give you, you’d have it. I’d fly south and hand it to you personally. Unfortunately I’m just a broke youth with dreams of being somewhat more wealthy. Hopefully one of our more successful Agorist associates can lend a hand.
I think you should start putting up some documents for people to see, just in case.
Fair enough. Here’s a screencap of my online bank info (I’ve blocked out the account numbers) showing the negative balances; I took this on July 22nd, the day after the first crisis hit.
And here’s a scan of the Alabama tax notice I received today.
I’m hoping I can at least persuade them (or get a lawyer to persuade them) to go with the up-to-25% wage garnishment rather than the seizing-accounts and seizing-assets route.
My offer to send cookies stands.
When I read this post, I think of John Patrick McEnroe’s famous quote:
“Oh man you can’t be serious, you CANNOT be SERIOUS”.
Well, while this is worse in one way (the government rather than a private creditor), it’s better in another (I have some advance warning, and might be able to get them to go with garnishing 25% of my wages, which would be seriously rough but, unlike the other options, not a homelessness-threatening emergency).
Are you in contact with Marc Stevens (marcstevens.net) at all regarding your situation, Roderick? I’d highly recommend getting his input on this whole fiasco if you haven’t already.
All the best to you.
Does this mean you’re *only* being hit with the state tax stick, and not by *both* the state stick and the credit card debt stick?
Do the donations you’ve received so far significantly offset the 9K the bastards are demanding of you?
I’ve donated what I can sanely afford. I wish I could do more, but I am starting a business and this is my only chance I’ll have in my life to work as I’ve always dreamt. I will lend up to an additional US$500 if enough people will match the pledge to avert disaster, but I would wait to first make sure this is absolutely necessary. I would personally appreciate if anyone able and willing to match a pledge to keep Roderick in the black would state so either publicly or privately, so that the cost can be distributed as widely as possible.
Professor Long is the individual within our movement of highest real and conventional stature, and it is in every left-libertarian’s self-interest to do whatever is possible and necessary to support him.
Otherwise, Noli nothi permittere te terere.
Does this mean you’re *only* being hit with the state tax stick, and not by *both* the state stick and the credit card debt stick?
It’s both sticks. I think these guys are hurting in the economy and looking to grab some revenue any way they can.
Do the donations you’ve received so far significantly offset the 9K the bastards are demanding of you?
No, but I’m hoping they won’t need to — I hope I can get the tax cops to garnish my wages instead, since by their own testimony there’s a 25% limit on that. I have an appointment with a lawyer, so we’ll see.
What is the statistical likelihood of these complementary disasters happening on nearly the same *day*? And *both* based upon similarly tangled but nearly untraceable claims that you owe the system money, in contexts where you are effectively guilty until proven innocent, and where you have to pay from the privilege of a trial?
And what justifies the summoning of a previous credit card debt from nowhere? How can they just spontaneously decide that you owe them money immediately after years of apparent noncommunication? Do collection agencies just leave cases sitting around until the time comes when they really need to squeeze some money out of a convenient victim?
I once knew a woman who had the misfortune to be hunted by collection agencies; the money they tried to demand from her (to pay for her own forced psychiatric incarceration after attempted suicide) grew from an initial $500 to something in the ugly 4 figures before she eventually outsmarted the bastards.
I may be wrong, but you hardly seem like the type to try to evade reality and invite slavery by spending money one doesn’t have. Your writing style is honest and forthright and doesn’t sound as if you’ve all along been shadowed by inevitable mundane disasters.
Which means that the system hit you twice with very similar sticks on very similar excuses almost simultaneously. Twice is coincidence.
evade reality…
Randian detected! So stupidity and greed can’t just be stupidity and greed, they have to be “evasion”…?
Yes, I’ve learned from Rand. I’ve also learned from Sartre and Leo Strauss, both of whom would likely recognise the issue (Sartre, certainly), if in other terms.
I don’t think ‘stupidity’ and ‘greed’ are any kind of inherent tendencies which we’re cursed with, or external forces which just happen to us.
I think ‘greed’ is technically a vice of excess ultimately reducible to ignorance of contextual value, but I don’t like the word and don’t get along very well with most people use either the words ‘greed’ or ‘vice’ frequently. I think ‘stupidity’ can mean slowness of thought, an undeveloped or impaired conceptual faculty, or an attempt by consciousness to blot out awareness. Only evasion occurred to me as even a formal possibility here.
I’m aware that my understanding of human beings differs from many popular views. But I find most conventional understandings to be false, harmful, and extremely boring.
So, sure, I’m deeply influenced by Rand. Who have you learned from?
I’ll donate $100 if you make a professionally produced Current TV pod explaining why left-libertarians, let alone high-performing left-libertarian professors, should never ever ever ever keep all their liquid wealth in the Man’s bank-state cartel. I’m sure others will pledge into a contingency market.
Good luck, Roderick.
The “Yikes” just keep coming. Open a bank account in another jurisdiction.
Is that legal?
I will make it legal!
Holy shit. So is this just incredibly bad timing of two incredibly bad financial episodes?
Yup.
Somehow I doubt that coincidence has anything to do with this.
Well, one is the Alabama state government, and the other is a private collection lawyer in North Carolina; while the coincidence is startling, I have a hard time concocting a plausible conspiracy theory.
I knew a friend who worked in a Chicago strip club run by organised crime. According to her, the modern mob doesn’t typically punish its enemies by sending out legbreakers. Instead, the mob just calls associates who work within the IRS to endlessly harass chosen victims.
In San Francisco, a woman who campaigned against institutionalised fraud and coercion by strip club owners found the police involving themselves in a child custody dispute; she subsequently had the child taken away from her.
Institutions such as governments and corporations are in the last analysis shells within which are simply individual people. These institutions present a black box to those outside the institutional networks, but within the networks the boundaries between one institution and another aren’t always as important as personal connexions, which may cross institutional boundaries. At the very top one sees interlocking directorates and family dynasties. Most bureaucrats I’ve known who have any degree of personal energy function primarily by knowing useful people in other organisation; their immediate duties are as much the means and the end to them.
A feudal lord might raise his first son to inherit an estate, a second to become the bishop, all the while trading his daughters off to form connexions with other families. I see little reason to expect a congealed corporatist society to work very differently.
I recall watching a friend’s prostitution case in the Bay Area. The judge, the prosecutor, and my friend’s lawyer all knew each other and spent most of the time using legalese to essentially gossip- high of flattery, low on substance. The lawyer would run from courtroom to courtroom, talking with other lawyers about which judge could be arranged at one time and trading favours and bits of information in what approximated a ritual. Laws were invoked, but not as a set of principles to be applied- rather, it was a question of getting the right subsection to apply at the right place and time. One needed a lawyer, the reason had little to do with a need for legal knowledge. Rather, in a lawyer one paid for an insider to social networks who would for a certain period of time pull connexions and play the r00lz in your favour. The entire place clearly understood that this was the way things really worked but left it unmentioned.
In a system where most cases are settled not by trial but by informal plea-bargaining it makes sense that everything becomes a matter of who you know and who likes you. The laws anchor the system, but they’re applied to craft the outcome desired by whoever wins the game of push.
In another case, a victim I also knew first hand told me she walked in on the defence and prosecuting attorneys chatting about how to handle her case in ways which were distinctly not in her interest. They apparently saw each other constantly and their loyalty to their social set far exceeded concern for either justice or (in the defence attorney’s case) the client’s interests. The victim was being charged with excuse crimes covering a desire by San Jose authorites to get at a transgendered woman who had caused trouble for the principle at her daughter’s school. She was sexually abused in a jail, harassed in her home by police, and the courts and every lawyer she met with quickly found a reason to pretend she wasn’t there. The establishment just locked up and refused to admit anything unseemly was happening. The woman in question eventually fled the country and when I last knew her was hiding in Australia,
I don’t know what is going on in your case, and I wouldn’t label this persecution without further evidence. But I’ve heard enough stories from very credible sources to know that this kind of corruption and targeted persecution is very much a reality in contemporary America. The real use of power has only a loose relation to the written laws, and the real social networks have a similarly loose relation to formal organisational structures. Political targeting becomes easily possible not because of any special conspiracy but because fitting institutional duties to the needs of one’s clique within an utterly unprincipled but politically homogenous class is just business as usual.
All it would take is some federal employee with an assignment or a grudge who knew people who knew people. We know that social anarchist groups do get watched, harassed, and infiltrated. There were recently some absolutely certain cases of this happening in New Zealand in connexion with the Oct. 16th ‘terrorism’ raids. The anti-globalisation movement has been similarly targeted. It’s amazing how quickly the local fire department can discover building code violations in any building once enough protesters gather within it.
The ALL has rightfully tried to affiliate with social anarchism and is involved with several causes (anarchism, agorism, intellectual property, antiwar, migrants’ rights, radical labour organising, drug decriminalisation, sex work, police brultality) which could very cause it to stand out from garden variety libertarianism in the eyes of the state. So I don’t think it unreasonable to reflect on the suspicious timing of these two absurd shakedowns.
After all, these kinds of tactics would hardly surprise anyone were they to be carried out by the governments of Russia, Thailand, or Mexico. Certainly most of us have become used to thinking of America as a different kind of country, but that was then. In Imperial America the old liberal democratic rules simply don’t apply, and we should adjust out habits, expectations, and rhetoric accordingly. The police arrest without cause and routinely torture; the media lie according to elite necessary; citizens are barred from travel according to secret political lists; a vast prison gulag extracts slave labour from ethnic and political criminals; peaceful protests are shut down and nobody notices. In this context, I think the possibility that the powers-that-be might use cartel finance to harass political dissidents is hardly farfetched. A country on the eve of dictatorship acts much like one.
Rather, in a lawyer one paid for an insider to social networks who would for a certain period of time pull connexions and play the r00lz in your favour. The entire place clearly understood that this was the way things really worked but left it unmentioned.
This reminds me of a quote from Children of Dune…
“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.”
Sounds like it’s time to strap in for a real shitstorm, professor.
Or you could just flee. I hear tell that Slovakia is lovely this time of year…
Aster: I’m planning to send $400 or $500 myself.
This site was down for a while today, I was worried about compounded problems, as that’s just been my experience. Perhaps my experiences have accustomed me to the thinking of “when it rains, it pours”.
Anyway off-topic:
Students for Liberty debate Students for a Democratic Society! I just got an e-mail about this and there was a Facebook link made for the event. Here’s their very odd description in the e-mail,
Somehow I don’t think that they have any idea what they’re arguing for or against, or who they’re actually arguing with.
>“That’s right. Students For Liberty, the student organization that stands for a philosophy of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, will be going head to head against Students for a Democratic Society, the student organization that supports violently taking over buildings, attacking school employees, and imposing their personal beliefs on all of society.
That is a lolful sentence.
File this one in the folder marked “Are you a feminist? I hate feminists!”
We should be cordially sharing a platform with SDS, at least on some issues and before a public of young people who need to be shown how SDS-style social idealism and concern for principle connects with libertarian principles and need not be contrary with radical free-market antistatism. This is a missed opportunity for a mutually beneficial alliance between people who very likely ought to be friends. Even where competition between libertarianism and the activist Left is unavoidable we should try to win by inspiringly out-Lefting the Left rather than try to snub them down with scolding, distinctively parential rhetoric.
It’s depressing to see that this senseless reflexive anti-leftism still persists in unreconstructed form among young libertarians. Left-libertarianism, to be successful, needs to become culturally visible enough that an event like this can’t get started without someone at least mentioning the left-libertarian approach. Ideally, people in the SDS should have heard of us themselves. So how does one make a political movement loud? (and hopefully loud with substance)
Perhaps the ALL should set up institutions for campus outreach? If one the things we offer is a community where it’s understood that everyone has social permission to ignore authority within left-libertarian cultural spaces we will win those whose desire for liberty is most serious. People properly join groups like the SDS as much for the culture and the people as for any linear political ideology… what they personally seek is a more meaningful and exciting world than the one conventional society offers to them. Left-libertarianism can give young people a sense that the world is theirs to make over again without the collectivism and material guilt which burdens too much of the Left.
Of course, anyone with a Facebook account can leave a public comment regarding this event. Perhaps there exist left-libertarians who would like to add some words? Or perhaps we could write to the SDS contingent and show evidence that a self-conscious and organised faction of libertarians identifies with and not against the goals of one of the Left’s better and certainly most celebrated organisations? Marja’s in DeeCee. Anyone else? I wonder who in the ALL has the individual or institutional name recognition and/or credibility with progressives.
I’d be glad to go, but I don’t have any literature handy, or any particular idea of how to bring people together.
As for Roderick’s situation, I may be able to spare some cash for the time being, but not indefinitely.
No lit handy?
http://invisiblemolotov.wordpress.com/
Please print as much you like. I recommend offices and college campuses for good double sided printing for “free”.
If only it weren’t so long, the ideal lit to hand out would be Rothbard’s Liberty and the New Left.
That link seems not to be functional right now, but the HTML version works.
I’m not really sure what good, if any, I can do there. The Sunday bus schedules were always flaky, and … according to the Metro trip planner, you can’t get there from here [any more].
I made it. Fairly good discussion. I asked one question, but didn’t get the chance to ask a second question I had hoped for on the rights of children to choose their caregivers.
>People properly join groups like the SDS as much for the culture and the people as for any linear political ideology… what they personally seek is a more meaningful and exciting world than the one conventional society offers to them.
That is true. A lot of life choices are made not on cold calculation, but on affinity.
Marja, contact me if you want NJ ALL to ship you some nice stapled ALL literature.
Also, I tried to post a comment suggesting Roderick put his Paypal button in the sidebar, but something went wrong.
It would need to arrive tomorrow, since the event’s on Sunday, so that’s none too practical. If there are any other left-libertarians in the DC area who have access to free/cheap printing, it would help.
Students For Liberty, the student organization that stands for a philosophy of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, will be going head to head against Students for a Democratic Society, the student organization that supports violently taking over buildings, attacking school employees, and imposing their personal beliefs on all of society.
I’m guessing that wasn’t jointly drafted by both groups?
You’ve guessed correctly I guess.
Dude, that sucks.
I’m not sure I really see how having a different bank account somewhere else could avert this. As far as I know only rich members of the ruling class are allowed to have swiss bank accounts and aside from paypal there’s not really any other viable options besides banks in the US to store cash in.
Keep it in a safe deposit box. Banks don’t know the contents of those.
I did some research and apparently a safe deposit box in a bank would not help Roderick; the IRS apparently can order your SDB “frozen”:
Can law enforcement authorities access my safe deposit box without my knowledge or permission?
If a local, state or federal law enforcement agency persuades the appropriate court that there is “reasonable cause” to suspect you’re hiding something illegal in your safe deposit box (guns, drugs, explosives, stolen cash or money obtained illegally), it can obtain a court order, force the box open and seize the contents. What about non-criminal matters, such as a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a company, or other people over money they say you owe? The IRS can “freeze” your assets (effectively placing a hold on your bank accounts and safe deposit box) until the dispute is resolved. Private parties also can freeze your assets but doing so involves going before a judge and proving that there is a legitimate dispute over a debt.
http://foreignborn.com/self-help/banking/10-sd_boxes.htm
“As far as I know only rich members of the ruling class are allowed to have Swiss bank accounts and aside from paypal there’s not really any other viable options besides banks in the US to store cash in.”
1) Have we not ALLies in several countries?
2) What does it actually require to set up an offshore bank account, anyway?
3) I don’t personally have a great deal of confidence in the American dollar.
4) Perhaps an economist reading this could kindly share knowledge and advice?
I do not understand why you cannot get a small short term loan. If not from the banks which are being heavily pressured to loan money then why not from your employer? Most employers will make emergency loans.
He mentioned something about that; any success Roderick?
Most employers will make emergency loans.
State universities (actually, universities generally) are tangled up in red tape like you won’t believe; I know a number of people who tried to get advances on their salary from university employers, and none succeeded.
In any case, I won’t need much financial help in dealing with this tax thing IF they can be persuaded to garnish my wages instead of going the freeze-and-seize route. A 25% reduction in wages would be a hardship, but it wouldn’t be the kind of emergency for which I’d have to solicit help; I’d just to have to live ultra-lean for a year or so, and I’ve certainly done that before.
As Kris Kristofferson once said, “don’t let the bastards get you down.”