Kafka in California

Here’s one for you.  A true tale involving a rather intimate friend of mine.  

Slowly down the morning stairs, un-pausing the playlist on his Bose iPod dock, he thought nothing of it when, randomly, Klaus Fluoride’s sinister, baseline made way for East Bay Ray’s stiff-arm salute bar chords on the 1979 version of 'California Uber Alles.'  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_%C3%9Cber_Alles

He wasn't yet aware.    

He was intending to write about Hana Arendt, and Mencius and avarice in Hong Kong but it would need to wait for another day.   His labors were thwarted by the ‘banality of bureaucracy’ as you will see.  A bit more Kafka in 'The Castle' than 'Eichmann in Jerusalem', but still, there is more than a dollop of the baleful here.  

Consider yourselves warned:   If you’ve ever lived in California, the burden of proof’s on you to prove you’re no longer a resident.   If they have any questions, they’ll freeze your accounts and 横征暴敛[1], in order to get your attention. 

There, in his Inbox was an “insufficient funds” email from his friends at Bank of America.  Click into the account and there is a charge he didn’t recognize which had cleaned out all funds.  “Legal Order, LTS.”  Hmm. That doesn’t sound good.  Be brave.  Give them a call.

After yelling “human being, human being” repeatedly to the robot that greeted him and a merciful 10 minutes on hold, he finally got to speak with Kevin who told him that he was terribly sorry for the man's trouble but he would need to contact the State of California.  “Is there any other information about why they are doing this or is there a reference number or something Kevin? “ “No.  There is only a phone number for you to call.”

The California number rang to a flamboyant recorded voice who confirmed that they were in fact closed for the evening.  His morning = their evening, and so he was sentenced to a day kvetching.  "What could California want from me?  I haven’t lived there in eight years.  I had a speeding ticket a few weeks ago during a biz trip there.  Is this an unnoticed PG&E bill that’s metastasized into something huge?"  His wife checked when she was up and their joint savings and her savings account had also been completely cleaned out.  Oh dear.   

By 10:30 PM his evening time the “California” office was open.  Gracie eventually answered the phone.  She was very nice. 

“Did you pay State Tax for 2009 in California?” 

“No.  I haven’t lived there since 2005”

“Did you pay tax in any other state in 2009?”

“No.  I’ve lived overseas”

“Did you pay federal tax on foreign earned income?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Can you fax me your tax return that proves this?”

“Certainly”

“Great.  If you can do that and all’s in order, we can release the money back to your account.”

“Really? Um, OK.  Great.  How long does this take?”

“If all’s OK we can send the bank our notification today.”

“I see.  Well then.  Let me get that for you.”

A few minutes searching for the return and fuddling with online fax services and he got the tax return, off to Gracie.  They received it.  And another woman, who wasn’t nearly as nice, said “Yes, notification has been sent to Bank of America.  Now it’s in their hands.  We can’t say how long their process will take.  There’s nothing more we can say or do.”

He was so glad to have the pain removed and some clarity restored.  But as he got off the phone with Ms. DecidedlynotasniceasGracie, the full weight of the absurdity of what had happened began to descend upon the man.  He thought to himself, that he must have missed this component of the state’s rights debate.

When did they let everyone but me know, he thought, that states now have the right to remove all funds from your personal bank accounts if they become curious as to why it is that you once paid state taxes but no longer do?  What happened to writing someone and asking or indeed warning them that you are considering or about to lay hands to all their assets?     

He was a fair man.  He appreciated that if the government rings up Bank of America about Anwar al-Awlaki or Abu Nazir they expedite rights to freeze this or that diabolical person’s bank account.  But doesn't the bar rest a bit higher than mere curiosity?  Just because you are wondering why someone hasn’t filed a return?  Doesn’t some modest burden of proof lie with the state, before they can pry their way into your account and seize all they find as they had just done? 

In China, he reflected, there is the dreaded hukou system that ties one's identity and entitlements to the particular place you hail from.  Migrant workers in Beijing, therefore, cannot expect to send their kids to Beijing schools.  It always takes Chinese people a few extra minutes to grasp and consider:  In the United States, there is no hukou system.  You can move from state to state, as you will. 

He continued to muse: "The IRS gets a bad rap from state’s rights people and I suppose from all people.  But I, have suddenly become very thankful for the federal process of inquiries, and warning letters, when I consider the awesome power of California.  They apparently feel empowered to reach out to any person who has ever lived in the state and freeze all that person or their spouse's assets, before bothering with any letters or phone calls, just because they’re curious." 

He wondered about the governor.  Jerry’s working hard to right the state’s finances.  If you’d asked him two days ago he'd have told you he was a fan.  "I want you make it Governor Brown.  I want the bridges fixed and the teachers to earn a descent living.  And I don’t know if it’s you or a banal demon on your collections team, but someone has signed off on interstate piracy."

"And", he reflected, "I’m sure its good business.  If you did this to everyone who’d ever lived in the state, and kept the money for a few days each time, and performed millions of micro-trades with a proprietary big-data algorithm, leveraging the money before you returned it, you could probably raise enough lucre to keep the state parks open now that the federal ones are closed.  California is always a bell weather for the rest of the country.  Where the Sunshine State leads, so goes the rest of the nation.  Imagine if all 50 states took up this sort of rapacious buccaneering.  That might descend to something worse than even Jello predicted.

But then again, knowing California, this is probably their proprietary intellectual property for now.  States’ rights.  Exponential growth of one state’s war chest until some fool with more time than me starts a class action suit for all the stress she endured during the process and the rest of the greater victimhood pile on, or a Postal employee who can’t feed their kids dials someone less polite than Gracie and makes front page news in the aftermath. 

The man sighed.  "I’ll have to get to my thoughts about Hana Arndt tomorrow.  Watch out for the “Suede Denim Secret Police . . ."  And do remind me, can any Tom, Dick or Harry open a Swiss Bank Account?"

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[1] héngzhēngbàoliǎn:  to tax by force and extort levies (idiom); to screw taxes out of the people by force