This is an incredibly important video. It took me a couple of watches before I really started to understand it. The first time, I thought it was getting bogged down in semantics, particularly near the start. The second time around, I reaslised just how important the words and their meanings actually are. This is not tinfoil hat stuff. It all checks out, and you can check it out for yourself quite easily, but how this information can be interpreted, and to what ends, is something that requires a lot of thought.
( tried to upload it to here, but it's too big)
You can watch the original HERE
I can't help thinking that although the analysis is an absolute eye-opener, the conclusions leave something to be desired. If nobody paid their taxes, there'd be no schools or hospitals, except for those that could afford it, for example.
5 comments:
I finally got round to watching that video at your behest. And there's certainly some interesting information in it, though his revelation about how our institutions of power have all donned the trappings of corporations isn't as new or earth-shattering as he'd like it to be. Indeed he omitted to mention what I see as the most sinister aspect of that process; which is that corporate entities have been bestowed all of the important rights of an individual person while evading most of the important responsibilities before the law.
Also, his insistence on making the distinction between a "person" and a "man/woman" was a little disingenuous. He did allude to the extreme consequences of enforcing that distinction close to the end (as something he was going to try to do in the future but that even he hadn't done yet). For most people, in our current society, it's simply not possible to give up things like passports, bank accounts, property ownership (from houses to cars to televisions), access to state benefits (including free or state-assisted medical treatment) and even dog ownership.
Completely escaping the systems of modern society may be technically possible, but only if you can accept your loss of access to the benefits of social membership (and very few can do that). For him to achieve this might be an interesting 'proof-of-concept', so to speak, but it's not a practical way of changing society for the better.
It also fails to address the most important lesson of Orwell's 1984... that is that the institutions of power remain in power precisely because they are in power in the first place. If John Harris "falls down the stairs" of Hackney police station, it matters little if he refused to use the title "Mister".
Thanks for taking the time to watch it Jim. It's been going round and round in my head for weeks, but nobody seems prepared to analyse it. As I pointed out in my original post, the way this information is being used is of some concern. I'm sure it will help some activists stay out of jail from time to time, but the tpuc website is full of tales of people avoiding paying their council tax and the like. So what sets out as as quite a radical left wing message gets turned into the Tea Party. I can imagine my boss (self made millionaire) using this information to avoid paying tax, just as much as I can imagine an activist friend using it to cock a snook at the police and judiciary. I wish the anti poll tax movement had been more aware of this back in the day. I suppose they were. The council had to send two letters, and the courts assumed that since they'd sent two, you must have recieved at least one of them, and therefore you understood/accepted/etc. ie) Rode roughshod over it all when it suited them anyway.
Nice to hear from you!
... but the tpuc website is full of tales of people avoiding paying their council tax and the like...
Yeah, I find this extremely problematic. None of us like paying taxes, but one assumes that those who avoid their council tax aren't disposing of their waste themselves, avoiding any street at night that has public lighting and will refuse to call the fire brigade if their house is on fire?
If someone is required to pay tax, can afford to do so and has been means-tested to that effect, then refusal to pay isn't some kind of attack on the state, it's just an attack on the rest of us who end up paying for their medical treatment, fire service and waste disposal.
Sure, we can hate some of the things that our taxes are spent on. But isn't health care worth paying for? And of course, those below the tax threshold are supported by the rest of us who pay our taxes. And that's fine too.
More than fine actually, it's bloody brilliant -- redistributive taxation is possibly the most incredible thing that the human race has ever come up with. It's no less than a mass display of compassion for those less fortunate than us.
Evading that display of compassion is certainly not something to be proud of.
You know what really pisses me off about tax?
The fact that I've just spent many hours adding up loads of numbers for my self assessment for the year 2008 - 2009, but I've done the numbers for 2009-2010 by mistake.
Fuckity fuckeroo. Not all in vain I suppose, because I can put the figures somewhere safe and have the work already done when I come to do the next self assessment return.
But I've got to find the other load of books and papers and do it all again.
Gah!
Well there. Done. Certainly the income side of it has now been tabulated. I should gather all the reciepts and stuff, but a rerasonably close estimate should be OK for now.
I reckon, in the financial year 2008/9, I took £15,399 in exchange for my labour.
However, my overheads (car, fuel, advertising, etc) came to somewhere around £9,360 which means I earned the princely sum of £6,039.
And that, believe it or not, is an improvement on the previous year.
2009/10 is likely to be a bit better though. I've added up the income, and that's about 10k higher. But I'm now shelling out an extra 5k in franchise fees, so I reckon I'm now up to about £11,000. Marvellous. Got letters after my name, I have and everything.
Thank fuck for working tax credits.
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