Renunciation is a right, not a treasonous act...even in America. Yet.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at an LGBT parade: I guess he thinks it's OK to be transgendered--but woe betide you if you try to change your nationality! (Wiki Commons)

When Democratic politicians begin tearing up their unspoken mandate to be the voice of reason and the champions of personal freedom, it's time to leave.

I have already done that. I saw it coming, and made plans to make tracks. I'm not prescient; I've merely been a journalist for 40 years and reading between the lines of what politicians spout had long since become second nature.

Once I was gone, I realized that I was actually a bit late on the uptake on that one. When we got to England, the local bank phoned to offer us a fantastic interest rate on our savings. We went to see the lady. Upon finding out that I was  US citizen, despite my having dual nationality, the second being that of the Republic of Ireland, she withdrew the offer. In fact, as it turned out, there was no banking product she could offer us except the lowest possible savings and checking plans. Why? She wasn't sure. So I began the research.

 

Everyone tarred with the USB brush

Why? Because in its avaricious attempt to own all the world's wealth, even that which has of its own accord chosen to go elsewhere, it has imposed on foreign banks serving US nationals residing there reporting requirements to the IRS that are draconian in every way. Nor can the banks opt out without incurring penalties that are exacted when they, or their other clients, attempt to do financial transactions in or with the United States. The convenient excuse for this intrusive juggernaut into the sovereign affairs of other nations was the UBS bank agreement a couple of years ago, whereby the notoriously secretive Swiss banks were coerced into giving up details of their well-heeled American clients. At the time, I wondered if it would be ALL their well-heeled American clients...or just the ones not politically safeguarded by the Bohemian Grove, and so on. Or if the one percent had identified and set up a different tax haven for themselves, and had decided the time had come to gather in the gold held by the next three of four percent of Americans.

I don't blame the foreign banks, by the way, for complying. Who wants Uncle Sam peeking into your undies and grabbing a good part of your package just because of Sammy's greed? But in global economic terms, complying is probably less horrific than losing business because of US sanctions.

I do blame the arrogant, avaricious, narcissistic attitude of the American government. The only question I have is this: Is it a case of trickle down? Or trickle up? We found that Reagan's General Economic Theory of Trickle-down was a miserable failure. Instead, wealth trickled up.

Saverin, Schumer, Casey and me--and you, like it or not

After reading the comments concerning Eduardo Saverin's renunciation of his US citizenship, I must conclude that in the United States, arrogance, greed and narcissism trickle up. The recent maneuvers by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Bob Casey (D-PA) make it clear that this is so. If they are responding to the grass-roots opinions vividly expressed on HuffPo and elsewhere regarding renunciation, they are simply the boil at the head of a great chancre of chauvinism--incorporating the other factors mentioned--that needs to be pricked.

A Yale Law professor, Bruce Ackerman, opined in the LA Times (requoted by HuffPo) those who "can look with disdain upon the struggling 99.9% who believe that a commitment to their country is a lifetime affair" deserve to be punished. He spoke, of course, about Eduardo Saverin, Facebook co-founder who relocated to Singapore last September. Ackerman  further stated that he thought that the "number of Americans renouncing their citizenship grew from 238 in 2008 to 1,534 in 2010. This sixfold increase no doubt includes a hefty portion of super-rich cosmopolitans."

He could not be more wrong. Very, very few renunciants are of the super-rich. Most are of the super-disgusted. The United States of America of song and story is long dead; it is the work of alchemists and fools to attempt to resurrect it at this point, and only trompe l'oeil painters have a shot at making it look like something it is not: the home of the brave and the land of the free.

America: "Love it or leave it" attitude..except you won't leave unscathed

The land of the free would not fear the defection, permanently or not, of citizens. If that nation were worthy of returning to, many would come back. Some would not. Some of those leaving for good would be rich, some middle-class, some poor. Same for those returning.

But the "all or nothing, love it or leave it" meme of America holds sway, and now anyone who wants for any reason to dance to his or her own drummer is branded an ingrate, a traitor even.

Shumer and Casey are fools. But they are fools likely to appeal to the lowest common denominator of American. The ill-educated (regardless of academic credentials). The impoverished who think the money of a few measly millionaires--and those of us who paid just ordinary folks' ordinary taxes--will solve the problem. The self-righteous. The unimaginative. The fearful. The jealous; perhaps those are the worst of all, as they might hide their base emotion under a cloak of drum-banging patriotism.

There is already a law on the books that requires that those whom the State Department finds--in its singular and unsupervised inquiry--to have left the US for tax purposes may never again set foot in the nation. Whether or not they have family left behind. Whether or not, one assumes, they meant to return with the solution to poverty or the cure for cancer. Period. Amen. End of story...the black-and-white No Man's Land that I once thought only Republicans loved so well.

Poor old Ackerman. He also noted, "If an American wishes to separate himself from this country and its people, he is taking a step of deep significance. He should not be able to easily return and brag to his friends about the billions he is making by evading civic responsibilities." Such a deluded man for someone with academic credentials. The Reed Amendment addressed that more than a decade ago. As for it being a significant step, as I've noted before, only the United States, among so-called First World nations, makes a renunciation irrevocable. Indeed, most other nations don't require any formulaic process at all; people just leave, and come back, at will.

The personal aspect for an ordinary citizen of the globe

So there it is. I had no intention of bragging about anything, least of all the millions I don't have, have never had, and don't expect ever to have. I don't brag about the fact that I have the luxury of a second (well, now an only) citizenship; I am grateful, because it allowed me to renounce. I am very, very grateful for that. I don't intend to brag that I left; I merely offer that after 50 years in the trenches--from the time as a teenager that I became aware of the disparities in American society and the disingenuousness of its politicians--I decided I needed a few years of peace and quiet and humble enjoyment of my husband, my pets (grieving the horse left behind with a friend because he was too old to travel) and a small, polite, lovely nation, unfettered with the constant need to protest something outside my immediate environment, or protect something within. I was late, I might add, protecting our assets from the Bush meltdown, so it is definitely a humble exile I have decided to enjoy.

I never intended to ever set foot in America again, with or without renouncing, although I doubt even the State Department could make a case that a basically penniless, semi-retired journalist renounced for tax reasons, especially since my tax rate is higher in the UK. I did, however, take the precaution of obtaining high calibre legal representation for the renunciation to ensure that I could re-enter the US if I ever want to. To see my family, friends and aged horse, perhaps, although all but the horse can visit me here, and are welcome.

Nor did I intend to let this cat out of the bag without prior notice to my family and friends. But in the end, I decided the chips will just have to fall where they may. I have taken care of business assiduously, and delayed my own pleasure, for 45 years. And I suspect I still take care of business: I think it is the business of my soul to use what I know and who I am to attempt to shed some light on how the world works, take it or leave it.

I am not, in fact, going to return to the United States. My chiropractor asked me yesterday, as he worked on a mighty sprain, whether my family was upset that I had left.

I said I didn't know. I guess now I will find out.

***

POSTSCRIPT: Americans are, at present, still guaranteed the right to renounce US citizenship if they can find another nation that will have them. No mean feat, actually, unless one has megabucks and can buy one's way in (certain nations sell citizenship) or are descended from a citizen of a nation that recognizes one or two generations removed as their own, such as Ireland (my own salvation) and I believe Greece and Italy, under some circumstances, and even the UK for one generation. However, renunciation comes at a cost. While each person's emotional cost will differ, all will pay $450 for the privilege, a fee that is actually a burden to some renunciants, thereby belying the claim that most are rich. Moving abroad is expensive; some do it with every cent they can round up and adding half a thou to that is burdensome, and, I have read, sometimes impossible. It is a right, then, like voting was a right, back in the poll tax era. Unfortunately, while voting rights got nominally more expansive (except in Florida in 2000, when some people were chased from the polls for being the wrong color), the right to leave and seek one's fortune elsewhere had gotten more dear. Many legal scholars also believe the fee is illegal, it being the ordinary business of government to serve its citizens in such ways free of charge. And when the fee is exacted (extracted?), the renunciant is STILL a US citizen. Only after the fee is paid, the interview is endured, the oath taken and the State Department's magic woven is the person relieved of his or her US citizenship.

Hair salons and indentured servitude in America

Flag of the Republic of Ireland, my homeland (Wiki commons)

I just recently returned to a hair salon I had abandoned about 14 months ago. Before that, I loved the place. For several years, I had actually planned my trips from the States to the UK so that my hair wouldn’t get too awful before the next visit to that salon.

But, after living here for a year and a half, my intense admiration waned for a bit and I thought I’d try out another salon. Just to compare. Just to be sure.

The first new one I tried had some advantages. It was lovely, I mean really gorgeous. A sort of modern traditionalist décor, all cream and grey and polished aluminium chandeliers in a Listed Building. One didn’t lean back over a sink for washing. Rather, one reclined on a sort of sofa-like thing and the stylist held one’s head in her hands while washing. Very posh, decadent even. No dripping, no crinked neck. The stylist was a lovely young woman with lots to talk about. But the haircut was horrible.

I next tried a very popular, incredibly unattractive but somewhat lower priced salon. Great cut. Truly great. But the neck crinking over the sink was horrific, carried out at the hands of apprentices. And the stylist had nothing to talk about. Nothing. Not one thing. Very boring 45 minutes, especially when one expects the usual buzz and chatter of a salon, and that small guilty pleasure is denied. But the cut―did I mention?―was great.

Still, at length, and on a day I needed to be well-served because the haircut preceded a very important trip to London (the reason for which will be apparent further down), she decided her phone calls to set up a wedding gig were more important than properly drying my hair. When I left the salon to do errands before going home, I was miserably uncomfortable. It’s not like January weather in Devon is balmy. So,  40 shivering minutes later I returned and demanded that she dry my hair properly.

Valued customers

For my most recent cut, six weeks after the wet-head routine, I went back to my first salon, to the stylist I had crossed oceans to visit. Whose name, as it happens, is Laura.  I cringed about it. I felt like…well, like an ingrate. Finally, I just thanked her for taking me back.

She looked at me like I was a lunatic, as did the salon owner who cuts in the next chair. “Of course we accept you back. In fact, I expect people to shop around once in a while, and return here if we give what they truly want,” the owner said. When I told them about the wet hair day, my stylist said, “That’s not my idea of customer care. Would you like another latte?”

Some are welcome, as long as they obey

Thinking about the ramifications of renouncing one's American citizenship this morning, that incident came to mind. And then I recalled a business I once profiled. It is a big business. International. It fills a large employment bill in a small town in the upper South, USA. They pay well and offer great benefits, including paying total tuition for an employee’s wife or children who wants to earn a college degree. Problem: Employees can never leave.

OK. They can leave. They just can never come back. They are not, in short, free to test the waters or their skills in another environment, to see if there could be something more fulfilling for their heart, mind or soul; there isn’t much in town more fulfilling for the bank account, especially in non-skilled and semi-skilled work. But still, to some, there are things more important than dollars.

It’s not slavery, exactly. But it is some form of illicit ownership. Sure, it’s a personal choice to leave and seek. But it is a lifetime decision, not just a decision about a job. No Prodigal Son scenarios allowed. This bespeaks a fundamentalism that, in industrial terms, is more exacting even than a story in the Old Testament. There is no gentleness, no acceptance, no forgiveness, no understanding of the human need to seek. There is nothing but hardness, a rather cynical trade of exceptional money for excessive and unconscionably exacted loyalty. It’s the capitalist way.

Which brings me, inexorably, to the subject of renouncing US citizenship.

For most nations in the world (the political horror known as Eritrea excepted), a citizen who goes abroad to work pays taxes in the nation he or she lives and works in. An American citizen who tries that, or even a green card holder who has spent 12 consecutive years working in the US and is thereby claimed by the US as a US person*, is SOL. Taxes must be paid to the US and the new nation, above a specific (and always changing) dollar amount of income. And regardless of income, an IRS form must be filed, an FBAR must be filed, and starting in 2013, yet another compliance form is demanded. 

FBAR: Fubar by any other name

The FBAR is particularly nasty. There is no way for people of average means to even know about it, since the only reference to it is on the IRS form filled out only by those who earn MORE THAN $15,000 A YEAR IN INTEREST. I know of not one single person who has bank accounts earning interest in that range. Obviously, such a thing wouldn’t apply to me.

But if the FBAR isn’t filed, the Treasury Department can charge $10,000 per incident per year. It must be filed any time an American citizen or long-term green card holder is a signatory to any account (bank or investment or business ownership) that is worth more than $10,000 in a calendar year. Even for one day. So, if Joe Schmoe of Kokomo inherited $20,000 from a Scottish uncle and decided to just leave it in Scotland in a bank account for, oh, ten years until retirement and the possibility to travel, guess what? The Treasury, in cahoots with the IRS, could assess Joe a fine of a minimum of $100,000 on his inheritance. If Joe’s wife, also an American or green card holder, also had ownership of the account―and married couples might certainly arrange that, wouldn’t you think?―then she would  be liable for an additional $100,000 in fines.

Bad hair salons, strong-arm companies and the Yewnited States

But what has this to do with hairdressing? Everything. Because for the past several years, increasing numbers of Americans have been not only expatriating in protest over political matters if they could; they have been renouncing their US citizenship. Tearing up their passport and proclaiming they are finished with the double-taxation and virtual indentured servitude to the US banking industry in cahoots with the IRS and Treasury. And they are not welcomed back.

American expats who renounce their citizenship, as increasingly they must in order to conduct the simple business of living abroad, are treated like employees of that upper South industrial company, not like the valued customer of a hair salon. Almost any other citizen of the world can leave his or her home nation, move elsewhere for any length of time and pay taxes in the new nation, and return home to be welcomed with open arms. And they will NOT have the onerous reporting requirements and threats of fines to contend with in the meantime. No other nation on earth (except the aforementioned execrable Eritrea) thinks it owns its citizens―body, mind and soul―and demands obeisance from them even when they’ve chosen to make a home elsewhere for a while, or forever.

Threatening foreign banks to aid in rounding up US expats

Living abroad as an American is becoming more difficult by the minute. A new slew of reporting requirements for individuals was crafted in 2010; a huge number of requirements for foreign banks granting so much as a checking account to US citizens living there have made it all but impossible for US citizens to get simple banking services in much of the world. Why would ANY foreign bank want to pony up its records because the IRS wants them? They fear refusing because of possible reprisals against their nation’s international businesses, and they fear opening up the internal workings of their systems to US scrutiny. It’s a case of “Who died and left the US boss?”

Answer: No one. But the United States Congress doesn’t know that.

Stupid is as stupid does

Of all this, including the financial requirements of expats and the financial institutions abroad, Jackie Guignon, director of American Citizens Abroad, explains:

What the US is doing is pushing away a lot of people who are very honest, and work or live overseas for a multiple of reasons; they are cutting the branch on which they are sitting.

If you don’t have that international network of people who are loyal to your country and move back and forth freely you are at a major disadvantage. The diaspora is fundamental to developing international business.

Apparently, Uncle Sam thinks international business can be developed by browbeating foreign financial institutions and punishing expats who sometimes end up not being just expats, but renunciants, in order to cope with the US government-induced impossibilities of living abroad.

Uncle Sam, global bully boy

Uncle Sam was always a global bully boy. But lately, he has become mean as well as aggressive.

Lots more people than ever before are opting to sever their ties completely with the United States. They can do this if they have a second citizenship, and many people either married to foreign nationals or having worked in a foreign nation for years can do it fairly easily, as well as those who are descended from foreign nationals. While you must be a son or daughter in most cases, Ireland, and in a more limited way Greece and Italy, grant citizenship to second generation members. If you’re Jewish, and you want Israeli citizenship, as I understand it, you’re home free. 

That means, considering the ethnicity of the US, that a lot of US expats are eligible for the second citizenship that would allow them to renounce their US citizenship should they ever fully understand that a person held to the bosom of a nation against his or her will--as the US does to all its expats--is not truly free. In short, once they've stopped drinking the Kool-Aid of American freedom, which is lip service to a fact long since destroyed by Republican politicians and capitalist juggernauts.

Turning a right into a de facto privilege

Renouncing US citizenship is a right; if it were not, then the entire nation would be not only de facto slaves, but actual slaves. However, it does cost $450 to renounce, which makes it equate nicely with indentured servants having to buy their way out of their indenture. And one must show up in person to renounce in front of an embassy officer and a Stars and Stripes, the latter just for dramatic effect, I understand.

Once a US citizen has renounced, there is no going back. Not only will that former US citizen not be welcomed with open arms should he or she decide, after checking things out, that the US is where they want to be after all. Renunciants are shifted into the lumpen mass of global proles seeking a better life in the great North American monolith and must wait their turn, if ever, to live there. And then the ex expat would have to apply for citizenship as if her or she had lived forever in Romania and knew squat about the US of A.

Renunciants must even obtain visas to visit, although if they are now citizens of visa waiver countries, they can avoid that. But even so, their names will be run―in a new program for a new charge of $14 per head per visa―through a global criminal data base, lest a former American with a jaywalking citation in Singapore contaminate the dubious ethics of a nation that stood still for Bush and Cheney, the BP/Halliburton killing of the Gulf of Mexico, Monsanto’s mere existence, Limbaugh on the airwaves and myriad other abominations far more egregious than a parking ticket in Cartagena.

When they have  received the all-clear from the great snooper computer in the sky, and they attempt to enter the sovereign territory of the United States, they will need both their new passport and the Certificate of Loss of Nationality (CLN), the document that results from renunciation. Why? Because otherwise the brain trust at immigration will turn them back. The expatriated/renounced traveller will come up on the database as a US citizen, and US citizens MUST travel into the US on a US passport.

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was simply travelling through the US with his family on the way to a holiday elsewhere a few years back when he was turned back. Literally. He had to fly home and apply for a US passport. (I wonder if they rushed it? No matter. Holiday ruined, absurdity ascendant.) It turns out Johnson’s mother had been in New York when he was born so he was, automatically and technically, a US citizen. Johnson had never given it a second thought. He was British. His parents were British. He was brought back to the UK immediately. He knew he was British, just like all the other British kids he grew up with. But the American immigration officer insisted that Johnson’s a Yank and wouldn’t let him even pass through the US on the way to his destination elsewhere. Perhaps the immigration officer had forgotten the US tossed the Brits unceremoniously out about 250 years ago; why would that same nation want to lay claim to one now? If I had been caught in that net, I'd have screamed exactly that loud and long...as I was about to be deported anyway.

I don’t think, actually, that Johnson renounced. Or at least, an Embassy official I had a conversation with didn’t think he had.

But I have. 

I did not want to die an indentured servant to anyone. I have citizenship, with thanks to my blessed grandmother, in the Republic of Ireland. With Ireland's EU membership, that allows me to live freely in Ireland or any of the European Union member states. As my 65^th birthday is now approaching, it seemed high time to get it done, to leave the nation where fate decreed I would be born, and adopt the nation(s)** that choice demands for the feeding of my soul. No one lives forever, not even former Yanks who felt―when the postie knocked and delivered that CLN yesterday a scant eight weeks after my visit to the little bit of US territory on Grosvenor Square in London―that the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders.

“I wonder why I should feel this way, this enormous sense of relief?” I asked my husband.

“I think that’s a question that would more properly be posed to the United States government,” he replied.

___

 * It is permissible to say "What the F?" at this point. I did, as did my husband, a formerly green-carded US person.

** My soul has always longed for Ireland, and for France. I live in the UK now, but I'm less than an hour by plane from Dublin flying from a local airport, and an hour by ferry from Calais from a port not too far up the road. A strategic position, I think. Plus southwestern England is a very Celtic place.