On April 11, the ongoing saga of journalist and transparency activist Julian Assange took a dangerous turn.  Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, revoked his asylum in that country’s London embassy. British police immediately arrested him — supposedly pursuant to his “crime” of jumping bail on an invalid arrest warrant in an investigation since dropped without charges but, as they admitted shortly thereafter,  actually with the intent of turning him over to US prosecutors on bogus “hacking” allegations.

The US political class has been after Assange for nearly a decade.

In 2010 WikiLeaks, the journalism/transparency service he founded, released information revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as State Department cables exposing — among other things — Hillary Clinton’s attempts to have American diplomats plant bugs in the offices of their UN counterparts (Clinton, at one point, tried to raise the possibility of having him murdered for embarrassing her so).

In 2016, WikiLeaks released Democratic National Committee emails — provided by an as yet unidentified whistleblower — exposing the DNC’s attempts to rig the Democratic presidential primaries in Clinton’s favor.

At no point has Assange been credibly accused of a crime. He’s a journalist. People provide him with information. He publishes that information. That’s an activity clearly and unambiguously protected by the First Amendment.

Even if Assange was a US citizen, and even if his activities had taken place in territory under US jurisdiction, there’s simply no criminal case to be made against him.

So they’re manufacturing one out of whole cloth, accusing him of “hacking” by asserting that he assisted Chelsea Manning with the technical process of getting the 2010 information to WikiLeaks.

But once again: Assange is not a US citizen, nor at the time of his alleged actions was he anywhere that would have placed him under the jurisdiction of the United States.

Even if he did what he’s accused of doing, the current state of affairs is the equivalent of the city government of Chicago asking Norway to extradite a French citizen on charges of not cutting the grass at his villa in Italy to the specifications of Chicago’s ordinance on the subject.

There are certainly criminal charges worth pursuing here.

The US Department of Justice should appoint a special counsel to probe the Assange affair with an eye toward firing, seeking the disbarment of, and prosecuting (for violations of US Code Title 18, Sections 241, Conspiracy Against Rights, and 242, Violation of Rights Under Color of Law) the DoJ bureaucrats who hatched this malicious prosecution.

The first step in the process, though, is for US president Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange for all alleged violations of US law on or prior to April 11, 2019.

Assange is a hero. Time to stop treating him like a criminal.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Assange is a hero, not a criminal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Helsinki, Finland Times, 04/12/19
• “Pardoning Assange would be the first step back toward rule of law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Arab American News, 04/12/19
• “Pardoning Assange a step back to rule of law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Cook Islands News, 04/12/19
• “Pardoning Assange Would be the First Step Back Toward Rule of Law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 04/12/19
• “Pardoning Assange Would be the First Step Back Toward Rule of Law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 04/12/19
• “Pardoning Assange Would Be The First Step Back Towards Rule of Law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pakistan Today [web and print], 04/14/19
• “Pardon Assange, then probe his prosecution,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Wilson, North Carolina Times, 04/14/19
• “Pardoning Assange: the first step back toward rule of law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 04/15/19
• “Assange is a hero,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingston, Jamaica Observer [web and print], 04/15/19
• “Pardoning Assange Would be the First Step Back Toward Rule of Law,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/17/19

“Congressional Democrats and Republicans,” reports ProPublica, “are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.”

Specifically, the  House Ways and Means Committee just advanced a bill perversely called the “Taxpayers First Act.”  If passed by Congress and signed into law, it would become illegal for the IRS to “compete” with private sector tax preparation services like H&R Block and Intuit (the owners of TurboTax) by allowing taxpayers to skip those middlemen.

This is actually the status quo, not by law but by agreement between the IRS and the US tax preparation industry, which knocks down billions every year preparing and filing returns. If you want to file directly with the IRS, you have to do it on paper, by snail mail.  And the industry spends lots of money lobbying to keep it that way. Hence, the effort to write the deal into law.

On one hand, given a choice of filing through a private company whose advertised mission is to save me as much money as possible, or through a government agency whose job is to wring as much money out of me as possible, I’ll pick the private company every time.

On the other hand, the tax preparation industry is a parasite on top of another parasite. The tax system feeds on you. The industry feeds on the tax system.

You’ve probably heard political candidates promise to make your tax return “so simple it will fit on a postcard.” Ever wonder why they never deliver on that promise?  These companies don’t just lobby to be the middlemen in a complex system, they also lobby against legislation that would simplify the system (potentially making their services unnecessary).

Speaking of which, Congress isn’t the only government body at work on this subject. The IRS itself is working on a new version of the W-4 form that employees must complete to have the “right” amount of tax withheld from their paychecks.

USA Today‘s article on the new W-4 project says that filling it out will “be a lot like doing your taxes again. … The new [draft] form referenced up to 12 other IRS publications to fill it out. It was so complex and different from the previous W-4 form that Ernst & Young worried employees would struggle to fill it out correctly and employers may need to offer training beforehand.”

If there’s anything worse than the government stealing a piece of every dollar you earn, it’s the government forcing you to do a bunch of paperwork — or pay someone to do that paperwork — to make sure they get “enough.”

Frankly, I’d rather be mugged. Same scenario, but muggers aren’t quite as smug and rude about it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The Government is Hard at Work Keeping Tax-Preparation Complicated and Expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, River Cities’ Reader (Iowa), 04/09/19
• “The government is hard at work keeping tax preparation complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Orange County, California Register, 04/10/19
• “The Government is Hard at Work Keeping Tax Preparation Complicated and Expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 04/10/19
• “The government is hard at work keeping tax preparation complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Inland Valley, California Daily Bulletin, 04/10/19
• “The government is hard at work keeping tax preparation complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Torrance, California Daily Breeze, 04/10/19
• “The government is hard at work keeping tax preparation complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Los Angeles, California Daily News, 04/10/19
• “The government is hard at work keeping tax preparation complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 04/10/19
• “The tax preparation industry leeches money off taxpayers,” by Thomas L. Knapp, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo [web and print], 04/11/19
• “The government works hard to keep tax preparation complicated,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 04/12/19
• “Tax prep complicated and expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sanford, North Carolina Herald, 04/13/19
• “The Government is Hard at Work Keeping Tax Preparation Complicated and Expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 04/15/19
• “The Government is Hard at Work Keeping Tax Preparation Complicated and Expensive,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/15/19

A February Harris poll finds that 49.6% of Millennial and Generation Z Americans would “prefer living in a socialist country.”

US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), among other politicians, proclaim a message of “democratic socialism,” evoking an ideology last ascendant in the early 1900s when Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas moved the needle in US elections.

But the devil is, as always, in the details. The goals of today’s American “democratic socialism,” as laid out in Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution, in Sanders’s “Stop BEZOS Act,” etc. look a lot more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s effort to “save capitalism” through welfare statism than like the proposals of socialism’s last rise to prominence.

The essence of socialism as laid out by Proudhon and Marx and promoted by the International Workers of the World, et al., came down to destroying the wage system and building a classless society based on worker ownership of the means of production.

Those earlier socialists would almost certainly have lauded gig economy workers as examples of what socialism sought. Today’s socialists disdain them.

Consider gig economy drivers, once just called “gypsy cabbies.” In recent years many of them have chosen to affiliate with services like Uber and Lyft to get easier connections to people seeking rides.

Gig economy drivers own the means of production (their cars).

Gig economy drivers set their own hours and choose their own workplaces instead of slaving away on  someone else’s terms.

Gig economy drivers can use customer discovery services like Uber/Lyft, or they can go their own ways (many Uber drivers give me their cards, telling me to call them directly next time and cut out the capitalist middleman).

But today’s “democratic socialists” fought tooth and nail to preserve the capitalist “medallion cab” monopoly, and having lost that fight they’ve re-oriented their struggle toward roping the drivers, and the companies they choose to work with, into the old-style capitalist “wage employee” system.

Even the most virulent revolutionary Marxism posited that the state would wither away as workers seized the means of production, got rid of the bosses, and started working for themselves. That didn’t work out — the socialist parties ended up substituting themselves for the old ruling class, operating in the name of, but not as true proxies for, “the workers” — but that was the goal.

In the US, the same kind of substitutism came about “democratically” and incrementally as “progressives” co-opted pieces of socialist-sounding reforms. But just like the Marxist-Leninist parties in the old Soviet orbit, today’s “democratic socialists” are … well, conservative.

They don’t want the wage system to go away. They just want to run it.

They don’t want the workers to own the means of production. They just want to tax and regulate it.

They don’t want a classless society. They just want to be the new ruling class.

US president Donald Trump is already touting the 2020 presidential election as a referendum on “socialism.” Are any real socialists going to show up for that fight?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The Gig Economy is What Yesterday’s Socialists Said They Wanted. Why do Today’s Socialists Hate it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, River Cities’ Reader (Iowa),  04/05/19
• “Why do socialists hate the gig economy?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Wilson, North Carolina Times, 04/07/19
• “The gig economy,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, Virginia Legacy [web and print], 04/10/19
• “The gig economy is what yesterday’s socialists said they wanted. Why do today’s socialists hate it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Columbia, South Carolina Panorama [web and print], 04/13/19
• “The Gig Economy is What Yesterday’s Socialists Said They Wanted. Why do Today’s Socialists Hate it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/14/19