Man blows up his house and flies aeroplane into tax office

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I sympathize with this guy and I have to think that his actions are somewhat crazy and harming people who probably aren't that evil.

That being said, I could also sympathize with a suicide bomber, a Christian extremist, and a Nazi.

lol

don't act like you weren't giddy as a school girl to blame this on the Tea Partiers and this supposed "right wing militia movement" when you heard this guy crashed into an IRS office. I actually think that was your initial intention of posting this thread.

Agreed.

The sad thing is that where I draw the line is (speaking hypothetically)....

IF I wanted to do something like this, would I really make a difference? Strap a nuke to my back and take out the entire Federal Reserve Board when it's in session? That'd make a statement and an impact. Fly a plane into a rented building with a bunch of worker ants in it? You're just harming some grunts. Those in power will laugh at you and just use your act to justify being harder on people.

If he wanted out of the BS and to make a vivid statement in his death, he should have showed up on the steps of the closest major IRS office (in a high traffic area) with a protest sign and major media already present for a "press conference." Then, he should have doused himself with accelerant and set himself on fire. If he pre-treated his clothing beforehand, the odds of surviving should be pretty low. Nobody but himself would get hurt and the IRS would have a PR nightmare to work with.

Although there are various ways of making a supreme sacrifice you will always be discounted as a nut. To turn things around requires more cleverness than violence. I have no ideas but I can see what doesn't work.

Plane snake topic

He was a fool, and endangered others' lives, by setting fire to his house and then using a plane as a bomb.This is an act of crime, not bravery. Foolish and dangerous.

Did they ever find out what led him to this?

That's the weird thing, he doesn't seem to have been on anybody's radar before this. He stated that he served 10 years in prison, but the feds so far haven't dug up any federal prison records (the manifesto said it was a federal tax case).

The guy seems to have been a tax protester with a bad attitude. As I have zero sympathy for nuts who say that a govt doesn't have the right to tax, I retract my earlier statement. I'm not so sure he was a normal guy pushed to the edge, but a deliberate anti-government belligerent upset that he didn't get any breaks. Tax protesters have a 97% conviction rate, unless it's some podunk farm county somewhere. Juries tend not to like them.

I wonder how come the Feds aren't all over the place, handing out a life history on this guy to the media. If he was a convicted tax protester, and served prison time and had several other fines for evasion, you'd think they'd have some knowledge of him. I've been checking the Austin American Statesman website (statesman.com) all day, and nothing has come up. A reporter played in a cheap band with the guy, and wrote down what he remembered. Wifey isn't commenting except to say that she's sorry.

Nobody at all seems to have had any clue that this guy was nuts. He passed an FAA medical screen last year, and nothing raised any eyebrows (being under psychiatric treatment is a definite grounding). A few people said, yeah he hated the IRS, but who doesn't? I've yet to find any sympathy for this guy on the forums I frequent, which are full of some definite right wing people. There are Facebook groups "friend of Joe Stack" type things, but that's normal. You'd think that a guy who is a convicted tax protester would have been noticed more.

No, this person did not claim that the government had no right to tax, he simply was critical of the over-zealous pursuit of the powerless and the principle that there's one law for the little people that is unyielding and merciless and one of the powerful and connected, which is to let them do what they want. He remarked that people are lied to and that they try to force on them a morality that they themselves do not keep. There is no justice and no rule of law. If there was rule of law, the War Crimes Act of 1996 would be enforced on Bush and Cheney, and that means they'd be subject to trial for a crime punishable by death. The law says that if you torture people to death, you are to be executed, according to the War Crimes Act. Not only will there be no execution, there will be no trial. It's as if the law doesn't exist. This is just one extreme example, but a very important one. Then I could always mention how people who plotted to put California in the dark were not charged with crimes, most of them, and certainly not the kinds of charges that an Al-Qa'eda operative would be charged with if they were to have put California in the dark.

It IS true that there is no law for important people and the law for little people seems to be centered around making as many people criminals as possible in order to provide grist for the prison-industrial complex. That said, I have no sympathy for anybody who puts themselves in the crosshairs of the beast.

Read the entire manifesto; he stated that he was a member of what could be called a tax protest group, meaning that he deliberately enticed the govt to come and get him out of principle. That is just stupid. Once you're in the system, you never leave. And this idiot had a knack for putting himself in the crosshairs again and again. He got two companies suspended in California for failing to file tax returns, in 1994, 1996, and 2002. A repeat offender. There was some sort of incident where his wife didn't report her income (likely under his guidance) and his CPA ratted him out, and he got charged AGAIN with tax evasion.

There's word coming out that his wife was getting ready to dump him because his obsession with tax protest was dragging her down with him, and she was too smart for it. She likely told him she wanted a divorce. He then posted the final version of his manifesto, and flew his plane into the IRS building. I fail once, shame on me. I fail for the eighth or so time, and I am an EPIC FAIL. A failtacular. This guy was a failtacular. Tax protesters NEVER win, they tend to spend lots and lots of time in federal prison. Some quit, others have too much gumption, and get kicked by the donkey again and again and again and... Eventually, dementia results from all those blows to the head, and people go off the deep end.

My dad was big on tax evasion when I was a little kid, when I was five years old he changed the name attached to my Social Security number to resemble his, so he could evade taxes. 30 years later, I had to go down to Social Security with my birth certificate and original SS card to prove who I was, to fix his dumb idea. And I had to give up the SS card that I'd been issued at birth and that I treasured. I eventually got a new one, but it was as if I'd been asked to give up a treasured item, it really upset me.

Tax protest was everywhere in the 70s, upper income earners had a de facto 100% rate when fed, state, and local taxes were added up. Reagan slashed the rates and defused the bomb. W only slashed rates for the rich, not the middle class or poor. Under Reagan, most people got a break. It seems that politicians are now too greedy to do what Reagan did, so the bomb is ticking once again. If it explodes, the consequences will be grave. Reagan knew that the bomb couldn't be allowed to blow. Today, everybody is betting that only the little people will be hurt when it blows, and that mountains of money will cushion the elite. I'm afraid that's not the case, just ask Marie Antoinette.

The wealthy get a very good deal when it comes to taxes, and this explains in part the massive growth in executive compensation (milking their companies), and more of an emphasis on looting and short-term gains, and of wage depression and offshoring and a host of other evils causing the collapse of society. Back when they had real taxes on the rich, they'd be forced to put more money into the companies and more money into wages - if they took too much, they lost 90% over 1 million earned or 70% of that or whatever. It paid to put money in the company and not to loot it. Now, it's about looting and hollowing out, and using a lot of that money to create speculative bubbles like during the Roaring 20s after Coolidge removed most taxes on the rich.

Right now, there's a tax burden that spares the truly powerful and the truly powerful get disproportionate benefits of that wealth. People would have better opinions of paying taxes if they got decent services for their money. As it is, these are very poor.

The middle class pay higher taxes than the rich. David Cay Johnston proved it in his book Perfectly Legal. That's not fair. Reagan slashed taxes, but the middle paid less too. After he was gone, policy became to soak the middle and give the benefits to the rich. W accelerated it. Now the entire economy has been looted, and the rich want it ALL! They really don't care who they hurt in the process. Eventually they'll realize that they can't pay private armies enough to protect them, and that like the Romans their armies are made up of barbarians and that's where their sympathies lie, and the gates get opened to the angry hordes by the elite's own guards. By then it will be too late. Basic services are slashed to the point where they no longer function, schools are in chaos and roads have huge potholes and the cops simply don't care about anybody except the rich, and the rich simply spend their way around the mounting societal problems. Eventually the end will be here, and they won't be able to kill us fast enough to stop the revolution.

How the hell can you laugh at a serious, would be fatal, domestic terrorist attack?

What "supposed rightwing militia movement"? Many in the anti-government "Patriot" and militia movements have lauded Joe Stack's actions.*

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*NOTE: I did not say Tea Partisans, as the "Patriot" and militia movements are much more extreme the Tea Partisans.

Supposedly this guy's big feud with the IRS started with some obscure provision in the 1986 Texas revised code stating that they wanted computer programmers to report quarterly rather than yearly. The guy took them to court lost. Started several small computer software companies - refused to pay his taxes - was continually shut down for refusing to pay his taxes. In the end he killed his wife and kids, burned down his house, and flew his plane into an IRS building.

Sometimes you can see where someone has a cause, sometimes you can see where with some people the elevator simply doesn't go all the way up (ie. they aren't all there). I'd really bet on the later in this case.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O58RcCSvoK8[/youtube]

It was the federal (not state) Tax Reform Act of 1986. The point was to kill most tax loopholes, which had created a cottage industry of tax shelters and $499 courses on how to evade taxes. A provision forced independent contractors for high tech firms, such as software engineers like Stack, to be treated more like employees, complete with tax withholding by the "employer". Instead of the contractor reporting his income quarterly based on an estimate, he was now subject to withholding like a regular employee.

Stack apparently didn't like that and got deep into the tax protest movement. At one point, he got into some goofy scheme that involved declaring his house to be a church and himself to be a pastor, in order to claim nonprofit status. The scheme was shut down and the participants got spanked. He started companies that were shut down for not filing returns.

He even dragged his wife into the mess-he got her to not report some small income she had (apparently she was teaching piano lessons or something-she's a classically trained pianist), and the CPA he hired helpfully told the IRS that he was hiding income. His wife eventually got sick of him, and walked out. That's why he snapped. Mamas, don't let your babies marry tax protesters.