THE HARM CAUSED TO AN INNOCENT FAMILY

FATCA

An anonymous donor who contributed to the ADCS lawsuit sent me a long letter. It contained these words:

“I can feel the fatigue in our small team, but please forward my words of encouragement: We are the only ones fighting FATCA [‘…the most arrogant piece of illegal, immoral and evil overreach by any foreign — yes, America happens to be foreign to the rest of the world…’] and CBT and any injury we can do to it will crack it open and show how evil it is inside. If we stop, nobody will do it.”

He/she describes some of the harm:

“I also join a small testimony how all this affected my family.
My mother, the only one with a hint of a long faded American accent, is scared of talking in public. She hasn’t had access to a bank account in three years, she cannot be associated with any of our businesses and cannot even be named on any of the assets she should be entitled to. She has become a non-person and so would we if our very dirty secret was discovered. Because of the fear of her place of birth being noticed at the U.S. immigration, we missed the funerals of her four closest relatives, including her parents.
[Bold in original:] Let me repeat this: my mother wasn’t present at her parents’ funerals because she feared it might destroy the life of her husband and children!“

…and the extreme anger:

“We used to be the best Ambassadors for America. We always found an excuse when the wretched country trampled human rights, invaded foreign countries, manipulated the markets, or just crashed the World economy. Now, we hate it with so much rage that we can’t ever forgive it. I personally swear never to go there again, never buy American again and systematically oppose the will of the US in my private life and professional and [xxxxx] careers. I would rather catch AIDS than ever have an American passport again.”

20 thoughts on “THE HARM CAUSED TO AN INNOCENT FAMILY”

  1. I have great sympathy and total understanding for everything that you have written above. The United States is no longer the country that we may remember from as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago. It’s citizens mean very little to those in power, especially to the current Obama administration and the Democratic Party. I was once a loyal proud Democrat and so was my entire family and extended family. Not anymore! FATCA and the entire nightmare created around it is a total Democratic Party creation and a pet project of the current president. No Democrat will ever receive the vote of any member of my family, nor of my family in the United States. They all follow this closely, as do so many U.S. based friends. All are outraged and vow to show solidarity. We see the injustice so clearly through laws like FATCA and the fact that even after five years of bringing this issue to the attention of lawmakers, nothing really changes and there is no democratic exchange between legislators and those they are supposed to represent. That is not a democracy and that is what hurts us all so deeply, namely to see that a country has betrayed its citizens, betrayed its fundamental and founding values, that it opts to extort money from its own citizens under dubious “laws”, whose legality is openly questioned, to prey upon its own citizens and harm their lives and that of their families, threaten their financial well-being, even after hundreds of articles, thousands of letters, countless calls and making officials, senators, congressmen and others aware of the harm being done to their own people. Journalists have sounded the alarm, foreign leaders have sounded the alarm, financial experts have sounded the alarm. There is little, if any, concern or interest, nor any immediate action taken. They simply don’t care about their people. The citizen is nowadays but a mere pawn in the U.S. system, to be extorted and exploited if possible, threatened whenever possible and ignored at all times. That is not how a good country treats its citizens. No wonder that thousands upon thousands, if not millions, have either renounced their U.S. citizenship, are in the process, or are seriously contemplating it. What has been the reaction of the Obama administration to this terrible state of affairs? Instead of realizing that something is very wrong, when you have thousands of your own citizens running for the exits, it sought to further punish these abused citizens by increasing the financial burden of renouncing, by increasing the fee by 422% with no discussion or forewarning! That is most definitely not how a good country treats its fellow citizens.
    The United States has now turned its former goodwill ambassadors, its citizens living outside of its borders, into angry and resentful people. They have turned their citizens abroad, their valuable foot soldiers on the ground in foreign lands, able to speak languages and understand the culture, able to build exports for U.S. goods and services, into enemies, who now wouldn’t lift a finger for a country that has betrayed them.
    Who in their right mind would want to be a citizen of such a place, that extorts money, imposes outrageous and unjust laws, threatens, harasses and abuses its own law abiding citizens, who already pay taxes in the countries where they live, who only want to live normal peaceful lives in another country, just like millions of other citizens of other nationalities living throughout the world? The U.S. citizen living outside of the United States is today exactly like a Soviet citizen was in the dark communist past, a person who only wants to avoid anything to do with the “mother” country and its authorities, who doesn’t want to return, a population living in fear and under oppression, knowing that the only way to extricate themselves from the injustice and the abuse put upon them, is to renounce their citizenship, their allegiance and their ties, exactly as oppressed Soviet citizens once did. What a very sad and tragic state of affairs and what a sad place the United States of America has become under the current administration and its Democrat Party followers.

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  2. @Marc Well said!
    Today Bloomberg says End the American Expat Tax.
    Bloomberg says:

    Only two nations in the world tax their citizens who live abroad. One of them is a small and vicious African dictatorship. The other is the world’s most powerful democracy.
    Does the U.S. really want to share this distinction with Eritrea?

    I think Congress and U.S. Treasury have clearly shown they do want to share that distinction with Eritrea.
    Wait. The U.S. condemned Eritrea at the UN for its simple (1 easy form, 2% of income, send the cheque) CBT.
    The US does not want to share that distinction. They want to have the distinction of being the only country in the world to harass and terrorize its citizens and former citizens.
    They are also determined to be the only tax haven in the world.
    The story in this post is horrendous–but too similar to too many other stories. And the U.S. dares to call us cheats and criminals!

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  3. Were you able to communicate with that donor at all, Stephen?
    This person’s statement is one of the most egregious of all I’ve read on the subject of our *extreme anger*. Mine is quite extreme as well on many levels, for several personal reasons as well as the many relating to all of us affected by the implementation of FATCA in the countries where we choose to live. The only way I can fight back is, as this donor has, to give to ADCS-ADSC.
    What also fans my anger is that we cannot all come together as the stronger force we could be. The only reason I can see is that some are *solving their own family’s US problem* and then getting on with their own lives, as apathetic as the Conservative government to the bigger fight for loss of rights and freedoms of all Canadians and the sovereignty of this great country — to the USA.

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  4. wow. powerful story. sad story. outrageous story. My heart goes out to the family and the poor mother. I totally get it, because my mother felt the same way (she no longer remembers any of this fatca mess, which is an absolute blessing). She apologized to me for ‘putting me in this mess’. Like it’s her fault! Someone said that our govt has no soul, and that’s true, but I think the US govt has edged over into sociapathy.

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  5. Not to mention the US citizenship attached to non-USA people, simply “because we said so”. This of course, feeds nicely into expansion of their extortion attempt, aided and abetted by our clueless Finance Ministry.

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