First let me say that there was an excellent article by Harry Targ on the distortions of the IRS "tax exempt" status, which makes central point that groups on the right who hypocritically attack "big government" are using the law, which gives tax exempt status to groups that are engaged primarily in "social welfare activities" to fund both campaigns for legislation and politicians who seek to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, further undermine the NLRB and other legislation and campaigns which by no stretch of the imagination can be called "social welfare activities."
Harry Targ concludes that "If the Internal Revenue Service is to be criticized, the atttacks should be leveled at the government's inadequate scrutiny of political lobbying groups who are granted tax exempt status contrary to the the intention of the law."
Of course the Republican leadership is howling for "jail time" for those responsible and railing against the Obama administration, which has condemned the specific acts in no uncertain terms.
But no one is talking about the sordid history of using the IRS as a weapon against the left, especially the CPUSA and in the Nixon administration liberals and Democrats.
For example, the IRS destroyed financially Dashiell Hammett, author of the Maltese Falcon, the Thin Man, and other successful novels and stories and Communist party activist, putting him in a Catch 22 financial hole and compelling him to spend the last years of his life supported by his longtime companion and fellow activist Lillian Hellman. A
and that was part of a larger pattern aimed at CPUSA members and also at various organizations which the FBI saw as "communist front" organizations.
When Supreme Court decisions began to limit the FBI's activities directed against the CPUSA they launched the so called "Counter Intelligence Program(Cointelpro) to harass CPUSA members and their families, create divisions within the CPUSA, spread charges of racism and anti-Semitism within the party and from the Soviet Union to demoralize members.
In the aftermath of Watergate, the Church Committee, investigating the abuses of the intelligence agencies stated that "in its efforts against the Communist party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns. It never told the IRS why it wanted them and the IRS never attempted to find out."
The Cointelpro program lasted formally until 1971, expanding its list of targets to civil rights groups, women's rights groups, peace groups(in its very last years the Black Panther Party actually replaced the CPUSA as its number one target.)
Richard Nixon hugely expanded these actions of the IRS against groups and individuals that he saw as his political enemies, prominent Democrats(even some Republicans) and activists of both centrist organizations and left organizations of all kinds.
It would take a great deal of time to go into these actions but here is one significant moment. John Dean, by his own subsequent admission, handed in a list of 576 names to the IRS Commissioner, Johnnie Walters, on September 11, 1972, in the most of the presidential campaign. The list was of supporters and even staff members of the McGovern ongoing McGovern presidential campaign
One could go on and on about Nixon and his successors --Nixon's specific instructions to have the IRS go after expletives deleted "Jews" whom he saw as supporting his enemies, the harassement of peace groups, sancturary groups, and in a famous incident the progressive magazine Mother Jones by the "anti-tax" Reagan administration and of course later actions by the George W. Bush administration, including a questionable audit of the NAACP.
That the IRS has long been used as a political tool should not be a surprise. Most of its targets have been on the left or in the center, even though there are examples of investigations of fundamentalist Christian Schools and various groups on the right claiming tax exemption status on religious grounds.
No one of course associated with the IRS to the best of my knowledge ever went to jail or even lost a job for the abuses directed against the CPUSA by IRS connivance with the FBI. Or against Civil Rights and Civil Liberties groups, women's rights groups, peace groups, et al.
The lessons to be learned from this scandal for me are the following
The IRS must be compelled to cease and desist in targeting individuals and groups across the political spectrum with audits and other actions.
The laws governing tax exempt status must be both reviewed and, in the kinds of cases that Harry Targ and others mention, be seriously enforced.
Congress must seriously restrict the use of money in political campaigns and activities which has turned U.S. politics into a business of fund-raising for campaigns and payoffs to politicians.
Finally, tax reform itself, eliminating loopholes and, most importantly, raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, would put the IRS to work doing what is supposed to be doing, what a regulatory agency is supposed to do, that is fairly and fully enforcing law.
