THE TELEGRAPH: A pilot set fire to his house and then committed suicide by flying his small plane into a tax office in Texas.
Joseph Stack left a six-page suicide note in which he railed against the Internal Revenue Service, the US federal tax agency.
He wrote: "I am finally ready to end this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man let's try something different. Take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
"There was a storm raging inside me. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are brainwashed to believe there is freedom in this land."
In his suicide "manifesto," which he posted on his own website, Stack also railed against Wall Street bankers, the Catholic Church, President George W Bush and the health care system. >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Thursday, February 18, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: In his long, rambling suicide note Joseph Stack painted himself as a hard working American who was being exploited by a corrupt establishment and forced to hand over his retirement money in taxes.
Stack complained that anyone who stood up for the principal of "no taxation without representation" was now labelled a "crackpot." He accused corporate leaders of being "thugs and plunderers" guilty of "gluttony and overwhelming stupidity" and politicians were "thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags."
He said the US health system was a "joke" and accused drug companies of "murdering tens of thousands of people a year" but his strongest words were reserved for the tax system.
Stack said: "Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand.
"The law requires a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing. If that's not duress then what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is." >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Thursday, February 18, 2010
