The Americans queueing up to renounce their citizenship
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries. Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Oh also our lazy, clout-chasing fourth estate bears a significant portion of the blame, though I'm convinced their initial contributions were accidental.
No grand conspiracy, just a lot of assholes and idiots and people who should have known better found out that it doesn't take all that much power to damage institutional trust, and got addicted to the sensation of destruction.
This is absurd.
The alt-right doesn't do anything. They have no power or funding and are suffering actual casualties through repeated assassinations. Pim Fortuyn was murdered, Trump's survived a few attempts, Charlie Kirk was murdered, 7 German AfD candidates mysteriously dropped dead before the election, and something like 30 politicians were outright murdered in Mexico ahead of the last election. To say nothing of the bodies of dead whistleblowers that have been piling up.
You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud? And all of these deaths just so happen to align to keep neo-Marxist agents in power across the west. Nothing to see here, I guess.
You cite an "informal coalition" between a bunch of unrelated groups while simultaneously blaming everything on the stupidity and greed of the electorate. You're not making a coherent argument, just throwing a bunch of lies at the OP and seeing what sticks.
Speaking of lies, this is a big one.
1) Heather Heyer, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, just to name three that were killed in broad daylight. Two of them were killed by fascist paramilitary agents of the government in broad daylight. So the first part of this statement is blatantly untrue.
2) I’m not sure if you differentiate the “alt-right” from the current fascists who are in power, but the president has publicly called for the extermination of an entire civilization. So that’s something they want to do, not just the things you list. So again, another lie, or at least a deliberate omission if I’m trying to be charitable.
> Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. You definitely have people who hate their domestic political enemies so much that they'll throw themselves in with foreign powers who oppose them.
> Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Perpetrators? No, come on. People seem to love to hate on the common man for some reason (maybe beating down on other common men makes some common men falsely feel bigger). But they're just easy targets, because they can't fight back.
The real "perpetrators" if you can call them that, are the elite people in places of power, who are trusted with responsibility but too-often prioritize their own parochial interests.
Case in point: the Democratic party. They've been screaming from the mountaintops since 2016 about the dangers of authoritarianism, many of which have come to pass. But what do they do? Compromise to form a broader coalition to meet the existential threat? No, of course not. Instead they cater to divisive special interests; wag their fingers at everyone they turn off who doesn't vote for them; and look no father than hoping they can eek out narrow, unstable partisan victories by turning out their base.
Self-destruction is the point of critical theory, and the explicit goal of its architects. For some reason this curriculum is only pushed on western countries.
This article is about people renouncing citizenship based on the current administration. That is very short sighted.
PS: The Dutch government can still tax my assets, regardless of the 183 days rule. So there is a risk to me for keeping my passport.
OK, but what if each year you had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars (that you maybe don’t even have) to an accountant, because complicated paperwork is demanded of you? What if you got audited and then were required to pay for very expensive authorized translation into English of very many pages of financial documentation?
> The bank accounts aren’t a big issue, plenty of Americans in the EU seem to manage.
People manage until they don’t. Expats do get debanked. Sometimes American passport holders are limited to a single bank in a country, and its offerings aren’t the best for the type of customer they are. Very often a bank will allow Americans to open an account, but will bar them from many types of services like investments for retirement.
> This article is about people renouncing citizenship based on the current administration.
That is the spin that The Guardian puts on it, because politics make the story sexy. But the statistics of citizenship renunciation that the article cites are mainly motivated by the hassles of being a US citizen abroad, not just bitterness towards Trump.
Then, if you do not plan to ever go to the US you can just forger about your US nationality and do not file any documents there, including taxes (which you pay in the country you are in, and hush away your US citizen obligations).
This will not work in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national - and things get gross if you are. I don't know if you have such questions elsewhere.
This is illegal from a US perspective. US personal income tax is on worldwide income, regardless of where a citizen happens to be living. Some countries have mutual agreements with the US that mitigate that, but that’s the fundamental legal position.
> in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national
What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
Yes. It also need to be enforceable.
Take GDPR. If say a US website serving pages to the EU does not follow it at all, or even does everything the other way (collection, ...) the only thing the EU can do is wave their finger. Except if the site has options in the EU.
If you cannot enforce a law it is either dead, or you resort to bully actions like the US does (an example was Trump going account Iran the first time agent an agreement was signed, and telling the EU companies that if they continue to do business with Iran, their US subsidiaries will be fined)
> What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
This is simply because we are chickens. Hopefully we will get rid of that someday.
No other country has such advantages like the US with the question about citizenship in financial documents. This is a disgrace.
Yes, so your point is? You seem confused.
The exception being bully tactics they still can afford (less and less, thank you Mr Trump), or the fear countries have to annoy the US and who agree to extraterritoriality, as it is the case with the tax law.
Not sure where you seem to be confused.
The US has thousands of treaties with other countries, covering everything from human rights to nuclear weapons to tax. The European Union is entirely based on such agreements, as is the United Nations. If such treaties didn't exist, neither would the world as we know it today.
More than 60 of the treaties the US is party to are tax treaties, which are mutual treaties that both countries benefit from. Those other countries enforce those treaties within their borders. That should help you understand what's happening here.
> Not sure where you seem to be confused.
You wrote that laws "need to be enforceable" and then complained about "[resorting] to bully actions". Guess what, that's a big part of how laws are enforced, everywhere in the world. It's why police forces and armies exist. You seem to be looking at individual pieces of the picture without understanding how they connect.
Of course. Now: how many countries have a special arrangement with European banks to have their citizens prominently marked as "special cases", an arrangement that is beneficial to only one side? And a gigantic pain in the ass for people who are American citizens but have no links to the US, just the fact that they happened to be born there?
> You wrote that laws "need to be enforceable" and then complained about "[resorting] to bully actions". Guess what, that's a big part of how laws are enforced, everywhere in the world. It's why police forces and armies exist. You seem to be looking at individual pieces of the picture without understanding how they connect.
Thank you for pointing out the fact that I do not understand this.
If I am a US citizen outside of the US, whatever the US request from me, I can just let go. If I never step foot in the US. Additionally, if you are in Europe, this is hardly doable because of how we are vassals.
On the larger scale the US do force extraterritoriality via the use of economic threats.
I am fully aware that treaties work until they don't, and international law works until it doesn't and the UN works until it doe snot (for the latter it does not work in the first place for for the sake of the explanation let's say it does)
Have you ever opened an account in a bank in Europe?
What mitigation are you talking about? Does it apply to Sweden?
For the record I am not a US citizen, fortunately.
There is one single country in the world that bullied its way into imposing its tax regulations into the heart of European banking systems.
If you have similar tax regulations in any other country in the world, it has zero impact on you in Europe (say if Vietnam required double filing like the US and you were German-Vietnamiese, you could ignore them when living in Germany because no bank will ask you "are you a Vietnamese citizen?")
This is too say that Europe has been a doormat when it comes to such extraterritoriality and this is slowly changing over the last US presidency. At last.