Monthly Archives: March 2017

Entertainment Weekly, RedditEntertainment Weekly reports on unseemly acts of eco-terrorism in Oakland, California: Somebody is chopping up perfectly good trees to mirror the selfless act of the titular character in Shel Silverstein's classic 1964 picture book, The Giving Tree.

Let's not mince words. Written by a Playboy mansion habitue and composer of "A Boy Named Sue," The Giving Tree is about a female tree that literally gives up every aspect of her existence to please a spoiled, uncaring boy. By the end of the volume, the tree is reduced to a stump where the boy, now an old man, can park his ass. Decades past the Sexual Revolution, it's damn nigh impossible to read The Giving Tree as anything other than sublimated male anxiety over the rising tide of unfettered feminine sexuality and freedom. Wouldn't it be great, the book effectively asks, if women on the cusp of societal emancipation, would sacrifice every aspect of their being for jerk guys?

You don't have to be an Ayn Rand fan to read the book this way (though it helps). In 2013, Reason interviewed novelist Arin Greenwood about her excellent YA title Save the Enemy, in which the teenage girl protagonist is searching for her kidnaped father, a weirdo with libertarian sensibilities.

From the book:

Your dad probably read you books like The Giving Tree when you were a kid. My dad did read me The Giving Treeonce, calling it "evil" in that it "promotes the immoral destruction of the self." (I was four.) He preferred Atlas Shrugged, which is basically about how rich people shouldn't pay taxes. He has explained to me a lot over the course of my seventeen years that taxes are "slavery."

Though no libertarian herself, Greenwood nonetheless told us, "Personally, I am a little creeped out by The Giving Tree."

As are we all, Ms. Greenwood, as are we all.

Watch The Giving Tree vs. Ayn Rand: YA Author Arin Greenwood on Save the Enemy:

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The Giving Tree: Bad Book or Worst Book? - Reason (blog)

Yet another fight is shaping up over elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, which on Thursday the Trump administration announced as part of its first federal budget proposal. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, a chief revenue source for PBS and National Public Radio, would also get the ax.

How many times has this battle already been fought? Welcome to Groundhog Day.

Heres one big difference between the cultural life of today and of 1965, when the NEA was founded: Where once a public museum audience and a private commercial market for contemporary American art were tiny, now they are vast and international. Imagine where todays cultural life would be if the federal agency, born into an era of general indifference to the arts, had never existed.

Consider: During those 50 years, a modest but not insignificant number of artists have gotten exceedingly rich. Charitable foundations established by just four of them the late Mike Kelley in Los Angeles and Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol in New York have combined assets in excess of $2.25 billion, according to their most recent tax filings.

The resources of those artist-created foundations vary, and they are put to different charitable ends. But theyre giving back. The Warhol is arguably the largest source of grants made to institutions that support artists, surpassing the federal government.

Our public investment is working. Pulling the plug is unwise. As with any other infrastructure, from bridges and roads to power supplies, an arts infrastructure requires maintenance.

The NEA was instrumental in creating an infrastructure for these artists popular success. Their numbers, however, remain modest, and popularity is not always the sole gauge of importance. Imagine what could happen if the battle-scarred agency, rather than limping along fighting opponents as it has for half its institutional life, was empowered to do its full share.

This is all you really need to know about the looming battle over the arts endowment:

Out of sight, out of mind. The NEA has not been popular among conservatives and the GOP since 1965, the year the federal agency was founded. Theyve been trying to kill it for half a century not because they hate art, but because they hate government.

The other day, the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, D.C., overseen by a couple of Nobel laureates and other prominent economists, published a devastating bar graph. If you thought charts were dull, this one would snap your head around.

The design is sort of like Trump Tower looming over the Big Shot thrill ride at the Stratosphere hotel in Las Vegas, plus a neighborhood Taco Bell. It compares the annual federal allotment to the National Endowment for the Arts (just under $150 million) and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting ($445 million) to the estimated cost to taxpayers of Melania Trump choosing to live in New York City rather than in the White House (about $2 million daily). This means an annual government outlay of more than $700 million. The first ladys tall bar on the graph towers over the others.

Estimates that high have been disputed. But the Center for Economic Policy Research also notes correctly that the NEA, CPB and seven other relatively low-cost domestic programs are on the chopping block not for diligent reasons of fiscal restraint. The NEA gets 0.004% of the $4 trillion U.S. budget, or 0.014% of the $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending. Together those nine cuts would add up to a pittance. Elimination will have roughly zero effect on the federal deficit, which President Obama slashed by nearly two-thirds.

The point of the bar graph was to demonstrate that an expenditure benefiting a presidential whim dwarfs modest ones that benefit the nation as a whole. Like all good graphic design, it did its work well. Which is one reason it pains me to think that it wont much matter.

The hit list drafted by the White House budget office is ideologically driven. Whether its the diverse American cultural infrastructure or our collective duty to help the poor, federal assistance lies far outside a greedy worldview popularized by junk novelist Ayn Rand in her potboilers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Those juvenile texts, comic books without the pictures, are beloved by GOP leadership.

In 1964, just at the moment legislation was being written to establish the NEA, Rand published The Virtue of Selfishness. The idea that the federal government should play an active role in arts support, common across affluent Western European democracies, had been percolating during the Eisenhower years. But selfishness did not drive the NEAs creation.

Tragedy did. Shocked sorrow at President Kennedys assassination dominated the national mood, which Lyndon Johnson leveraged into otherwise nearly impossible legislation the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and establishment of the NEA.

Not for nothing does the first photograph in the NEAs official history show John Fitzgerald and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy with Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals, who famously performed at the White House in 1961. When Washingtons plans for a National Cultural Center, conceived during the Eisenhower years, finally opened a decade later, its new name was the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Johnson is the only American president to have worked in a New Deal agency. (He ran Franklin Roosevelts National Youth Administration in Texas during the Great Depression). His Great Society was crafted in the New Deals image.

Ever since, the NEA goes on the chopping block whenever Republican conservatives gain power in the nations capital. Yes, Richard Nixon famously upped the endowments budget more than any president, but thats because the Californian was notoriously insecure about being seen as an uncouth rube. He let his true feelings be known in a private 1970 memo to H.R. Haldeman, unsealed in 2010.

Describing Modern art as something the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in, Nixon arrived at the political calculation that those who are on the Modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway. Traditional art was fine with him, but he quietly ordered Modern paintings and sculptures to be pulled from American embassies.

Since Ronald Reagan, the arts agency has been whittled away to a mere shadow of its former self. In inflation-adjusted terms, it spends $100 million less today than it did 20 years ago. But even in its financially straitened condition, it manages to help mostly small arts organizations across the country, either directly or through allocations to every state arts council.

Whenever the executioner mounts the platform, arts supporters fight back with the same litany. The arts are essential, not secondary. Smaller mid-American communities will be hardest hit. Jobs will be lost. Veterans programs will disappear. Quality of life will suffer. Arts education will vanish from more school curricula. Etc.

We are hearing this lucid inventory recited again for the umpteenth time. All of it is true.

Yet, given the players, expect it to fall on deaf ears this time. How many in the Trump administration cabinet were expressly chosen to dismantle the programs under their purview, whether civil rights or education, environmental protection or healthcare? Neoconservative writer Ronald Radosh explained that Stephen K. Bannon, the presidents chief strategist, once told him, I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of todays establishment.

Simple people who are puzzled by organized society, as writer Gore Vidal once described Randians and their anti-government ilk, now run the legislative and executive branches. This is their chance.

Because demolishing the little NEA is a metaphor for undoing the big New Deal, it is only right to give FDR the last word.

In a 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, deep into the Great Depression and just a week before elections, Roosevelt railed against what he called the hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government that let the 1920s roar and the 1930s collapse.

Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government, with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent, he thundered. Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide.

Americans still believe him. Last year, Ipsos Public Affairs published a survey commissioned by Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group that favors federal funding, showing that, by a 2-1 ratio, Americans support doubling the NEA budget the opposite of penciling it out. Nonetheless, hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing indifference to the arts is poised to become Trump-era doctrine.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

@KnightLAT

ALSO

These are the 19 agencies Trump would stop funding entirely

PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting push back on Trump's proposal to defund

Trump budget would eliminate funding for National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities

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The NEA works. Why does Trump want to destroy it? - Los Angeles Times

Seth Weathers loves The Duke.

In John Waynes movies, the political consultant said he finds a do-whatevers-gotta-be-done attitude thats easy to embrace.

Wayne was always the one going to the town, the little sheriffs given up, cant fight, criminals are gonna overrun the town, and no ones gonna fight. All the other guys are a bunch of [wimps], Weathers says. And Waynes like no, were gonna stand up and fight to the death and kill them all.

To his clients, the brash 32-year-old Republican strategist wears the white hat. Others would rather see him ride out of town.

Weathers, the former director of Donald Trumps Georgia campaign, has been in the national spotlight recently after Gwinnett County Commissioner Tommy Hunter, a longtime client,called civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis a racist pig on Facebook. He has stood by Hunter since the day the commissioners Jan. 14 Facebook post went viral, and hes made plenty ofnew enemies along the way.

Weathers has publicly sparred withvarious Democratic officials, the attorneys whofiled an ethics complaint against Hunter, andAtlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. Hes become a second target for those protesting the commissioner, too.

Mr. Weathers is certainly the moral equivalence of Commissioner Hunter, Gwinnett County Democratic Party Chairman Gabe Okoye said. They are birds of the same feather, but [Weathers] may be worse, because he is more calculating.

During a recent interview at an Atlanta-area steakhouse, Weathers dismissed that assessment with a hearty laugh.

I dont give a [expletive] what people think about me, he said. I know people say that. But I really dont [care].

A brass-knuckle fighter

Weathers childhood was spent playing along the train tracks in downtown Norcross. Home-schooled, he jokes that hes had basically no education. He said he read Ronald Reagans autobiography when he was about 14 years old and listened to talk radio.

I dont know, Weathers said. I just always liked politics.

Weathers did not go to college and started a web design business fresh out of high school. With a second job working the night shift at OfficeMax helping make ends meet, he began to make his way into the political world, too.

Id be stocking [stuff] at night, and then go throw my suit on and go to a luncheon at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce that day, he said.

By 2010, Weathers had served as an e-consultant for several campaigns. He made the leap to full-service consulting less than two years later.

One of his first clients was Tommy Hunter, who reached out before Hunters 2012 county commission run.

Weathers also handled the 2014 campaign of State Sen. Michael Williams (R-Cumming), who in Oct. 2015became the first member of Georgias General Assembly to offer public support for Trump. By then, Weathers wasalready the director of Trumps Georgia campaign.

I read The Art of the Deal at 18, and Ive followed Trump since then, Weathers said. Hes a brass-knuckle fighter. Id wanted him to run for years.

Weathers official time with the Trump campaign lasted only about two months, though. Its unclear why Weathers left the campaign, and he calls rumors hinting at a reason for his departure fake news.

The official line is that Weathers transitioned out of his position to devote his time to pursuing work with outside organizations and down-ballot races through his firm.

Its personal

Weathers now lives in Johns Creek with his wife and two sons, one thats 4 1/2 and another thats less than two weeks old. The latter is named Rearden Wayne Rearden coming from a character in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, Wayne being an homage to the movie cowboy.

On the same day his youngest was born, Weathers did a TV interview on the Hunter situation in the hospital parking lot.

For most consultants that I interviewed and talked to, it was a job, Williams, the state senator, said. To Seth, its personal.

Weathers has plenty of detractors. Reed, Atlantas mayor, recently suggested that he lacks a moral compass. But clients love that hes so willing to go to war for them, either in the press or in person. On Valentines Day, he quicklyushered Hunter out of a tumultuous meeting with the Gwinnett NAACP.

And Weathers likes defending his clients, and the political gamesmanship involved, perhaps more than any other part of his job.

He said he has no regrets about his handling of Hunter who, in his eyes, has been railroaded after saying something dumb that had nothing to do with racism.

I like fighting for the person thats just gonna get run the [expletive] over if someone else doesnt fight for them, he said.

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Meet the brash Atlanta consultant battling 'racist pig' backlash - MyAJC

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt (Gage Skidmore | Wikimedia Commons)

A YEAR ago, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was the focus of national outrage when it was revealed that residents of Flint, Michigan, were being poisoned by their own drinking water, thanks in significant part to the actions of Snyder's pro-business, do-nothing-for-the-poor administration.

Today, with Donald Trump's appointment of Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it's as if Flint never happened.

Bought and paid for by the Oklahoma energy industry, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times as that state's attorney general. Today, he's in charge of running the agency...into the ground.

With Pruitt's appointment, the Trump administration hopes to repeal any meaningful regulation and enforcement of the energy and farming industries, as well as wage an ideological attack on the environmental movement, which the right views as an existential threat.

"Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace," said Trump after the election, claiming that the EPA has an "anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs." The irony is that Pruitt's draft budget for the agency calls for 3,000 layoffs and a 25 percent funding cut in order to free up money for the military.

In a recent interview with CNBC, Pruitt said that he doesn't think carbon dioxide is "a primary contributor to the global warming that we see." This is science that not even Shell or ExxonMobil dispute. He has called himself a "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda"--but hasn't had anything to say about the $300,000 in donations that the energy companies gave to his Oklahoma campaigns.

Pruitt was also caught letting Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma's largest oil and gas companies, write an official complaint to the EPA using his official attorney general letterhead. And it wasn't until his confirmation hearings this year that some 3,000 e-mails Pruitt wrote to oil and gas companies as attorney general were finally released, after he refused previous requests to release them for several years.

As 350.org Executive Director May Boeve noted, "You couldn't pick a better fossil fuel industry puppet."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE OPENING act for Pruitt was Myron Ebell, Trump's pick to head the EPA transition team. This "libertarian gadfly" is the director of global warming and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and is known for his hostility to the EPA, science and the reality of global warming.

Ebell suggested firing 10,000 of the EPA's 15,000 current employments, half of whom are scientists. James Delingpole of Breitbart "News" relished Ebell's appointment, writing, "The left just lost the war on climate change...Yup, greenies. That climate change gravy train you've been riding these last four decades looks like it's headed for a major, Atlas-Shrugged-style tunnel incident."

In addition to staff and budget cuts, the White House draft plan for cuts at the EPA includes the elimination of 38 programs as well as many grants to clean up contaminated industrial sites, climate change initiatives and aid to Alaskan villages.

Research and development funding would be cut 42 percent, and the overall reduction of funds and staff would make an already weak enforcement division even weaker. As for the Office of Environmental Justice, Trump plans to shut it down.

"The point here will be, more than in any prior administration, to reduce the agency's effectiveness so much that it can't recover even when the political winds change," wrote the Natural Resources Defense Council's David Doniger.

However much the administration would like eliminate any fetter on profits, they won't be able to rip up existing protections without lengthy legal battles. But we shouldn't expect the courts to win these battles without a loud movement countering Trump and Pruitt.

The first victims are the Clean Water Rule and the Clean Power Plan, which the Trump administration is targeting because they're part of Obama's climate legacy, as meager as it is.

The Clean Water Rule involves defining what bodies of water are federally protected. Trump's executive order in February to roll back the rule is more about following through on a campaign promise he used to whip up resentment against the EPA with rural voters.

But the EPA is already too weak and pro-business to enforce regulatory compliance. The lack of enforcement on drinking water partially explains why Flint happened and why we have a national crisis of clean drinking water. The EPA estimates that the nation's failing water infrastructure will take 20 years and anywhere from $384 billion to $1 trillion to repair.

If Trump does address the water crisis in some way, you can bet it will involve privatization and profit.

Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP) aims to reduce carbon emissions from power plants to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, which the market, not regulation, will accomplish through the glut of fracked natural gas and cheaper renewables at the expense of coal.

Keith Gaby of the Environmental Defense Fund noted, "The crazy thing is, [Obama's CPP] is a really flexible plan, very business-friendly." Eliminating it won't revive the fortunes of coal if current natural gas production continues. So Trump's attack is largely ideological.

Trump and Pruitt have also opened a review of new rules requiring automakers to meet fleet fuel efficiency target of 54.4 miles per gallon by 2025, which in reality is about 40 miles per gallon.

Not only will this prevent a reduction in carbon emissions, it will save automakers money while costing consumers and average of $8,000 more in gas per new vehicle.

United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams raised concerns about emissions, but was told by Trump that, "We all agree with you 100 percent. One hundred percent. We want you to make great cars, but if it takes an extra thimble of fuel, we want you to do it."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE STORY of how Republican President Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon created the EPA in 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, can help us to see how we can defend the EPA today.

The radicalization of the 1960s included rising demands that government must protect land, air and water from industrial pollution. Nixon, a paranoid, power-hungry conservative, felt compelled to create a unified regulatory agency to improve water and air quality, lower vehicle emissions, stop dumping the Great Lakes and guard against oil spills.

Multiple protest movements and a stronger left put the Nixon administration on the defensive. The key to beating back Trump lies in deepening the current radicalization, building the left and eventually making business as usual impossible.

The March for Science and the People's Climate March, both in late April, will be excellent opportunities for progressives and radicals to unite in a show of force against Trump.

Scientists fed up with the Trump administration's mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue and the threats to defund or silence research and scientific advocacy spurred a group of them to organize the march on Earth Day. The main science rally will be in Washington, D.C., but over 295 satellite marches are registered on the event's website, with 395 events taking place globally.

The following weekend will see a similar mobilization in D.C. for the People's Climate March, backed by many of the coalition members who organized the massive 2014 People's Climate March in New York City.

We know that Trump, like Nixon, hates these mobilizations--and this is just one of many reasons to organize and resist.

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Running the EPA...into the ground - Socialist Worker Online

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

So said William Kingdon Clifford, a 19th-century English mathematician and philosopher. Inspiring words, but did you catch the one glaring error? He forgot the women!

If Clifford had known Vivien Kellems, he wouldnt have made that mistake.

Born in 1896 in Des Moines, Iowa, Kellems was a locomotive that never quit. Indeed, to continue the train analogy, she was a real-life Dagny Taggart, the railroad vice president protagonist of Atlas Shrugged. Before Kellems died in 1975, she could proudly look back on a life of service to her country as a successful entrepreneur, an accomplished public speaker, a political candidate more interested in educating than in winning, and, most famously, as a tireless opponent of the IRS and its tax code. Outspoken to the end, nobody ever accused her of hiding her light under a bushel.

While earning her bachelors degree in economics from the University of Oregon in 1918, Kellems gave her classmates a dose of the spunk that would mark the next half-century of her life. She became the first and only female on the college debate team, humbling many men in a competition widely thought at the time to be for males only. She went on to earn a masters in economics in 1921. Decades later, while in her 70s, she started work on a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The focus of her dissertation was the issue that made her a virtual household name in America: the income tax.

The Roaring Twenties were well under way when Kellems and her brother Edgar invented the Kellems cable grip, used for lifting and supporting electrical cables. With a thousand dollars she had saved and another thousand borrowed, she founded the Kellems Company in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1927 to manufacture and market the device. By the time World War II broke out, she was a wealthy woman with an intensely loyal following among her hundreds of employees.

When the war demanded grips to lift 2,700-pound artillery shells, Kellems innovated and ended up selling two million of the resulting product to the armed services. Doing business with the military also introduced her to the seamy side of government the endless and often needless or duplicative paperwork, the meddlesome bureaucracy, the increasingly complicated and dubious tax code, and even a dangerous naivet about foreign regimes.

Most Americans were reluctant to criticize Washington in the early years of the war. Other more pressing matters occupied us, as the Axis powers scored one victory after another. But when Kellems saw waste, bungling, and stupidity in government, she didnt hesitate to speak out and make headlines. She was incensed by the US governments shipping thousands of tons of vital materials to Stalins Soviet Union at a time when our own war effort demanded them. To a Chicago audience, she prophetically warned, Mark my words. This temporary ally will soon pose a mortal threat to the United States and the entire free world.

Roosevelts minions were not amused by Kellemss very public disapproval. Her private correspondence was intercepted by the Office of Censorship (yes, we had one of those), then leaked to two newspaper columnists and a congressman friendly to the administration. Nothing in her letters was in any way incriminating, and no action was ever taken against her, but it was plain that the government wanted to embarrass and intimidate her into silence. It underestimated Kellems, big time.

As the tax burden soared, so did Kellemss resentment of the confiscatory marginal rates (as high as 90 percent on personal and corporate income) and the bullying tactics of the revenuers. In speeches around the country, she ripped into FDR for promising lower taxes during his first presidential campaign in 1932, only to deliver relentlessly higher rates ever after. Treasury Secretary and FDR crony Henry Morgenthau hinted at treason charges and proceeded toward legal penalties against Kellems. Fortunately, those threats were sidelined by both the wars end and a scandal that enveloped the Bureau of Internal Revenue (predecessor to the IRS). Thanks in part to Kellems and the women around the country that she personally stirred up, congressional investigations led to the indictment or voluntary retirements of hundreds of BIR employees for violating the very tax laws they were supposed to enforce.

Kellems could get fired up about intrusive government at any level. When the state of Connecticut passed a law in 1947 forbidding women to work after 10:00 p.m., she sprung into action. Her friend, the Hollywood movie star Gloria Swanson, describes what happened:

Charging rank discrimination, she brought several hundred women in to work at her factory one night, but no arrests were made. Finally, she got a job in an all-night diner and threatened to work there every night until the legislature acted. Two days later, the law was repealed.

The year 1948 is pivotal in the Kellems timeline. Franklin Roosevelt was three years gone and Harry Truman occupied the Oval Office. What started out as a temporary and voluntary wartime measure tax withholding was made permanent and compulsory. Kellems would have none of it. She was not about to become an unpaid tax collector for the feds without a fight.

In February 1948, she began paying her employees in full, which meant they had to cough up the required taxes and pay them directly to the federal government. Within days, she was on NBCs new show Meet the Press only the second woman to appear as a guest on the program. The withholding law, in her view, was unconstitutional. The very rationale for creating it to make the costs of big government less visible to workers was, in her mind, yet another reason to get rid of it. People needed to know what their government was costing them. Violating the law was the only way the issue could be settled once and for all:

If High Tax Harry wants me to get money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the Internal Revenue Department. He must pay me a salary for my work, he must reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax, and I want a badge!

She wrote to the Treasury secretary to inform him of her decision and added, I respectfully request that you please indict me.

Fearing an unfavorable ruling in the courts, the government dodged and weaved. The indictment never came. Instead, the IRS sent agents to her bank and seized the $6,100 it said was due.

Kellems fired back with a lawsuit against the government, and in 1951, a jury ordered the feds to return the money, with interest. She continued to press for a decision on constitutionality, and finally, in 1973, the United States Tax Court formally rejected her argument. Meanwhile, she had relented to prevent her company from going bankrupt from IRS seizures. With great reluctance, she began withholding taxes from her employees.

In 1952, she authored a book detailing her fight and the case against the income tax. Titled Toil, Taxes and Trouble, its still available. Powerful and entertaining at the same time, its full of insights about taxes and the proper role of government. In the words of Romaine D. Huret, author of the excellent 2014 book, Tax Resisters,

Kellemss book explored the brainwashing of taxpayers. The income tax, she wrote, was a way for the government to deliberately hide from employees the payment of their taxes and thus to prevent them from becoming tax-conscious. Throughout the book, she identified the foes against which she was struggling with a vivid, and at times colloquial, vocabulary: they were the tax grabbers and tax planners yellow cowards, mangy little bureaucrats in Washington.

In the 1960s, with the withholding issue still to be resolved, Kellems took up another tax crusade the built-in penalty against single people. Income tax rates for an unmarried person were as much as 42 percent higher than those for married couples making the same income. Congress finally recognized her point, and in 1969, it gave her a partial victory by cutting the disparity to a maximum of 20 percent. Swanson wrote,

Vivien could quote passages from the Constitution by heart, recite the legislative history of obscure sections of the Internal Revenue Code, and do it all in a grandmotherly, finger-wagging manner that disarmed even the most experienced politicians.

The Bridgeport Post paid tribute to Kellems in an editorial. Lamentably, there may be no newspaper editor in Connecticut with the guts or the wisdom to print something like this today:

When it comes to possessing a spine of pure steel, we wonder if there is any man or woman in Connecticut who can match Miss Kellems. One lone woman against the whole U.S. government! If there are persons and we know there are who think she is simply a pugnacious person making a personal fight over the withholding tax, they are doing her a great injustice. Her interest is one of deep conviction and firm principle based on study of the history of the Constitution of the United States. She understands the circumstances which gave birth to this country, the firm realization of the founders that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and the steps which they took to prevent this power from being misused.

Kellems ran four times for public office in Connecticut, once for governor and three times for US Senate. Though she never won, she did something all too many candidates seldom do: she educated people. After a Kellems campaign, nobody could say she stood for what she thought people would fall for.

She never changed her mind about the income tax. The personal income tax forms that she filed for each of the last 10 years of her life were all blank. Apparently not even the IRS wanted to tangle again with this scrappy patriot.

Whether you agree or disagree with Vivien Kellems on the issues, you have to give her credit. She had principles sound ones, in my estimation and the courage to stand for them come hell or high water.

This piece was originally published at the Foundation for Economic Education on August 12th, 2015.

The rest is here:

Vivien Kellems: Please Indict Me! - Learn Liberty (blog)