There’s a movement afoot — pushed by groups like “Move Your Money” — that’s encouraging people to take their money out of the big banks that have been plundering the Treasury and put it instead into other institutions like local credit unions.
Another good reason to move your money into credit unions is that, unlike banks, credit unions do not generate taxable profits, and have been tax-exempt since the credit union structure was codified by the Federal Credit Union Act.
Last month’s kamikaze attack on the IRS building in Austin was a good excuse for reporters to go back through the archives and write up something about the recent history of attacks and threats against the IRS and its employees.
One of the better of the bunch was Andrea Ball’s, for the Austin American Statesman. Excerpts:
Threats, contempt come with job for IRS workers
Some Americans heckle or mail tea bags; others, such as Stack, act in more dangerous ways.
Michelle Lowry knows first-hand how much people hate the Internal Revenue Service.
The 37-year-old Leander woman, who processes forms for the IRS in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and pushpins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included — what else? — tea bags with their returns.
And then there’s the weird stuff.
“Sometimes you’ll see stuff that looks like blood on them,” said Lowry, who has worked as a seasonal employee for five years. “We wear gloves.”
Lowry is used to the presence of security guards at the IRS office in which she works. She’s been through evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder. (It turned out to be packing material.) And while she has always known the risks of her job, she wasn’t concerned about her safety until now.
“I’m a little worried, honestly,” she said. “Every time I walk into the building, I’m going to think about it.”
Austinite Jesse Pangelinan, 41, never felt threatened during his 13 years at the IRS. He said it wasn’t until after he left the agency in to become a stand-up comedian that he came face to face with true IRS rage. After he joked about his former job at a comedy club in Ardmore, Okla., one audience member heckled Pangelinan so badly that the heckler had to be removed from the building.
“I was escorted back to my car in case he followed me,” said Pangelinan, who also works at an insurance company in Austin. “The security guard followed me back to my hotel.”
And… right on cue: another “suspicious substance” sent to an IRS building led to an evacuation and the deployment of a hazmat team. The cause of the panic was “an envelope that appeared to have seeds inside” — showing that the level of paranoia has risen to the point where things that are out-of-the-ordinary, even if they appear completely benign, are considered threatening.
