Political Groups and the Internal Revenue Service

What is it with the IRS?

I’ve searched the last 15 issues of the Providence Journal for any mention of the IRS agents who testified before Congress last week and found none.  The three big revelations (at least of which I’m aware, through my non-mainstream-media reading) are that:

  1. The Tea Party scrutiny went all the way up to White House appointee IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkins (which Peggy Noonan calls “a bombshell“).
  2. The delays of Tea Party tax exempt applications were unprecedented, and appear to have been designed mainly to be delays.
  3. And progressives groups were, in fact, not given the Tea Party treatment for their applications.

I also fruitlessly searched the paper for any mention of revelations that former Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s tax records were “misused by an individual” in Delaware state government.  That access is especially conspicuous inasmuch as it happened on the day that she declared her run for office, in 2010, and the same day also saw an IRS “computer glitch” place a tax lien on a house that she had previously owned — information that was then made public… before the supposed homeowner knew about it.

One might think such stories would be worthy of publication in Rhode Island’s paper of record on the principle of keeping readers broadly informed about the national political scene and governance. After all, we are Americans as well as Rhode Islanders, and the aforementioned IRS counsel was logged in for seven hours as meeting with the President two days before the Tea Party guidelines emerged.

There’s a local hook, as well, following up an article from May about a Bristol woman who began a course of curious IRS audits when she made national news as a Tea Party organizer. (To be clear, though, Marina Peterson is now a former local woman, having joined the frustrated exodus of people who fear Rhode Island’s political and economic problems are irredeemable.)

Lately, it seems that all roads lead to the IRS, and not only because the agency will have an even more pervasive role in people’s lives as the enforcement arm of ObamaCare’s mandates (toward which Rhode Island’s government is charging full speed ahead, to subject the people of the state to the disastrous national law).

Yesterday, I was looking for information on a possible $72 million sewer project currently being lowered onto the financially struggling backs of my town’s 15,000 residents.  Tiverton’s newly redesigned Web site doesn’t appear to have any information on the subject.  More accurately: The links that look like they might be intended to provide the details all lead to file-not-found messages.

However, very prominent on the site, as one of four stories highlighted in the town’s rotating slider, is a link to Celebrate Tiverton, a private organization’s event scheduled for multiple days this weekend.  The organization in question is “Tiverton First-Tiverton Proud,” a 501(c)(3) organization with the same principal organizers as Tiverton 1st, a local political action group with substantial overlap with the Democrat Party and many of whose endorsed candidates now hold public office in town.

The interesting IRS connection is that Celebrate Tiverton’s Web site is registered to Michael Silvia, who is Director of Online Experience & Operations Management at the Internal Revenue Service and has been a presenter at those IRS conferences that we hear about from time to time.  In his spare time, Silvia runs Mystic Communications, which has a sparse, nondescript Web site and is based in Medford, Massachusetts, where he lives.

Campaign finance filings show Silvia to be a Democrat donor in that state, and his brother is a Democrat state representative there. He did not respond to emails sent to his multiple public addresses.

The Silvias appear to be from Fall River, which is the city just north of Tiverton, so it was surely somebody’s personal connection that led Celebrate Tiverton to Michael for (most likely) inexpensive, ideologically sympathetic Web design services.  Still, it’s entirely unsurprising, isn’t it, that a director at the IRS would be a Democrat who is involved in politics even down to the local level, with a political  organization that claims to speak for “the whole community” and that is promoted prominently on the town’s official Web site?

A friend of mine recently observed that the political tactics of the big-government establishment are scalable, meaning that one’s observations of what’s happening locally apply at the state and national levels, as well. At least when the same political party and ideology control at each tier.

Most profoundly is this true for people who do not buy into the basic premises of expansive government, who must operate within a system that is designed to lock them out. It’s a system in which the government’s revenue-collection arm scrutinizes local groups for political activity, and in which nobody in the supposedly watchdog media takes much notice when political groups of a different bent promote their events using government resources.

That environment may be the core motivation of people like Marina Peterson who are fleeing Rhode Island and other blue states, and it should be a central matter of concern for those who live in places where it’s still possible to take refuge.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in The Ocean State Current, including text, graphics, images, and information are solely those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the views and opinions of The Current, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, or its members or staff. The Current cannot be held responsible for information posted or provided by third-party sources. Readers are encouraged to fact check any information on this web site with other sources.

YOUR CART
  • No products in the cart.
0