Contributors

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Was the IRS Scandal Just "Stop and Frisk" for Rich White Guys?

The two-month-long Stop and Frisk trial in New York is winding down:
Plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York claim the New York Police Department, its supervisors and its union pressured police officers to stop, question and frisk hundreds of thousands of people each year, even establishing quotas. They argue that 88 percent of the stops involved blacks and Hispanics, mostly men, and were in fact a form of racial profiling.
This idea of profiling is not limited to stopping black and Hispanic men on the street. Conservatives like Ann Coulter think random searches of airline passengers are ludicrous. They're convinced we should stop wasting time searching random passengers and concentrate on ethnic profiling, which means going after any young men who look vaguely "Muslim," whatever that is.

So in the conservative mind, the New York cops were just doing their jobs: catching the bad guys.

It's therefore ironic that conservatives are outraged. The IRS was just conducting their own form of profiling. The people in the Cincinnati determinations office claim they had no partisan motivations whatsoever. The claim is plausible. They were overworked and doing a terribly boring job that no one in the IRS wants to do. Naturally they're going to take some shortcuts.

Just like beat cops "know" that blacks with droopy pants and Hispanics with loads of tats are carrying illegal drugs and guns, isn't it completely possible that IRS employees think they "know" that angry white conservatives constantly screaming about taxes are trying to cheat the IRS? Their profiling may have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with prior experience.

Think about it. If it was your job to ferret out non-profit tax cheats and you saw an application from a liberal group clamoring to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and then one from a Tea Party group that's bitching mightily about taxes, which one do you think is more likely to be a tax-evasion scam for wealthy billionaires spreading anonymous propaganda to get their guys elected?

Non-profit social welfare groups are supposed to promote social welfare issues, not get involved with electoral races. But many of these conservative groups, including the American Future Fund and the Government Integrity Fund, explicitly stated on their IRS applications that they would not spend money  politics and then immediately ran political ads in favor of specific candidates. Is it any surprise that the IRS would then view similar groups with suspicion?

The IRS's singling out of "Tea Party" and "9/12" named organizations was just as wrong as the actions of cops who harass men on the street based on their skin color. But so far the IRS case appears to be nothing more than misguided profiling, a concept that conservatives wholeheartedly endorse when applied to Muslims, blacks and Latinos.

So, when Ann Coulter starts expressing sympathy for the thousands of minority men minding their own business getting hassled, beat up and jailed by cops trying to fill out a quota, I'll start expressing sympathy for all those poor billionaires and corporations who were subjected to filling out more forms and answering more questions in order to anonymously buy tax-free TV ads for their political minions.

1 comment:

Juris Imprudent said...

That's right N, two wrongs make a right. What a great justification in your mind, huh?

Never mind that Obama's own astroturf operation is also a 501(c)(4).