Salon.com > Joe Stack

Why so little attention to Vernon Hunter?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:23:00 +0000

I traveled this weekend and missed the identification of the only person killed by Joe Stack in his unsettling attack on the Internal Revenue Service office in Austin last week (h/t Crooks and Liars, Will Bunch). He is Vietnam veteran and IRS worker Vernon Hunter.

His son, Ken Hunter, told local reporters he was tired of the media paying too much attention to the fractured and incoherent political beliefs espoused by the demented Stack, and not enough attention to his father's life:

"There was just too much going on about what the guy did and what he believed in, and enough's enough. They don't need to talk about him. Talk about my dad. You know, some people are trying to make this guy out to be a hero, a patriot. My dad served two terms in Vietnam. This guy never served at all. My dad wasn't responsible for his tax problems."

Hunter said his father was the kind of guy who'd have tried to help Stack with the tax troubles that supposedly drove Stack to the violence that took Hunter's life.

Daughter says pilot in Texas IRS crash was a hero

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:22:00 +0000

The daughter of a man who crashed his small plane into an Internal Revenue Service building called her father a hero for his anti-government views but said his actions, which killed a tax service employee, were "inappropriate."

Joe Stack's adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America" from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: "Yes. Because now maybe people will listen."

Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin last week, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself, after posting a ranting manifesto against the agency and the government. He apparently set fire to his home before flying his plane into the office building.

Hunter's son, Ken Hunter, said he's alarmed by comments that called the pilot a hero.

Joe Stack wasn’t wrong about the tax code

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:32:00 +0000

That 1986 change in the tax code that Joe Stack, the suicidal pilot who crashed his plane into an IRS building on Thursday, cited as a primal grievance in his online manifesto? According to David Cay Johnston, writing in the New York Times, Stack's beef was legit: the law "made it extremely difficult for information technology professionals to work as self-employed individuals, forcing most to become company employees."

And the original reason for the law, well, one can understand why some people would find it a little crazy-making.

The law was sponsored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, as a favor to I.B.M., which wanted a $60 million tax break on its overseas business.

Under budget rules in effect at the time, any tax breaks had to be paid for with new revenues. By requiring software engineers to be employees, a Congressional report estimated, income and payroll taxes would rise by $60 million a year because employees had few opportunities to cheat on their taxes.

At CPAC, Joe Stack ignored — or joked about

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:26:00 +0000

Speakers at CPAC haven't been shy about griping about the way the Obama administration handled the Christmas Eve attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight. Just Friday morning, for instance, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said one of his main new ideas (in what he plans to make an idea-driven campaign for the 2012 GOP nomination) was, "No more giving Miranda rights to terrorists in our country!"

But almost no one has found much reason to bring up a more recent instance of what could pretty easily be called terorrism -- Joe Stack's suicidal flight into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, as CPAC was getting started. The whole day of speeches went by Thursday without so much as a mention or a pro-forma expression of sympathy for anyone injured in the crash.

Until Friday morning, that is. Introducing Grover Norquist, the rabidly anti-tax conservative activist, Human Events editor Jed Babbin cracked a joke about the incident. "I'm really happy to see Grover today," Babbin said. "He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

Who’s to blame for Joe Stack?

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:19:00 +0000

I admit that when I first heard reports that an angry tax protester flew his plane into a building housing the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas, I thought: Was he a tea partier? We all jump to conclusions. Having read his manifesto several times, in all its ideological incoherence and self-pity, and watched the news all day, I don't see evidence for my conclusion-jumping and I'm glad I kept it to myself (even on Twitter).

Others on Twitter weren't so reticent. Once the IRS connection was made, I saw a few liberal friends suggest tea partiers were likely to blame. As I write at the end of the day, no connection has come to light. On the right, as Alex Koppelman reported, Glenn Reynolds and pals insisted the mainstream media would soon be blaming conservatives. Likewise, at the end of the day, that didn't happen, either.

I had a few minutes of near-pique, though, as many people complained about the failure to call Stack a terrorist – even though his "manifesto" suicide note made clear his act was political protest, and his target was the IRS. It's pretty obvious that if his name was Yusef Muhammed Stack, a lot of people would be using the T-word about what happened in Austin, very quickly.

Joe Stack’s lament

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:44:00 +0000

The litany of grievances recorded in Joseph Stack's suicide manifesto is so vast and all-encompassing that it puts your average paranoid conspiracy theorist to shame. Few targets escape his disgust and hatred: The government, the drug and insurance companies, "the joke we call the American medical system," the "vulgar, corrupt Catholic church" and equally "corrupt unions," the "sleazy executives" of accounting firm Arthur Andersen and Detroit's auto companies, savings and loans firms, the city of Austin, wealthy bankers, "pompous political thugs and their mindless minions" and, of course, the ultimate target of his wrath, "Mr Big Brother IRS man."

There is a disturbingly familiar echo here of Michael Douglas' character in the 1993 movie "Falling Down" -- the engineer betrayed by larger forces who goes mad, and wonders, at the very end, how he became the "bad guy." Attack dogs of the left and right will no doubt strive to plug Stack into a politically appropriate box. But good luck with that. Stack's last words offer as clear proof of ideology-transcending insanity as any psychiatrist could demand. Even more compelling, at the heart of his lament is a grievance so specific as to make larger political themes more or less irrelevant. Judging by his own words, Stack was driven mad by a 1986 change in the tax code governing independent contractors working in the world of high tech.

What were Joe Stack’s politics?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:20:00 +0000

Lately, it seems that any murder or attack like the one that took place in Austin, Texas, Thursday is potential partisan fodder. Not every incident fits the bill, of course, but in a case like Thursday's -- in which Joseph Andrew Stack, the man said to have flown a plane into a government office building, left behind a manifesto of sorts -- you can expect people on both sides to start evaluating the situation for potential political gain.

That's already happening today, especially online, where people are parsing the suicide note Stack posted on his Web site, EmbeddedArt.com. But because of the number of people and organizations that Stack railed against, most people have held off trying to ascribe any particular set of political beliefs to him. (The primary villain in Stack's narrative is the IRS, but he also reserved some ire for executives at General Motors, drug and insurance companies, politicians in general, the Catholic Church, an unnamed steel mill and the union that represented its workers, Arthur Andersen, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., certified public accountants, the Federal Aviation Administration and former President George W. Bush "and his cronies.")

Police Chief: One federal employee unaccounted for

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:19:00 +0000

The events in Austin are now slowing down, so we're going to stop our live updates for now. But we'll keep our eyes and ears open for any new developments.

5:53 PM: In a news conference, the Chief of the Austin Police Department calls the incident a "criminal act by an individual." He is reluctant to call it terrorism until more information about the pilot's motivations come to light.

5:47 PM: The Chief of the Austin Police Department reports that one person, a federal employee, remains unaccounted for. Neither the body of the pilot nor the body of the federal employee have been recovered.

5:43 PM: The Chief of the Austin Fire Department says that the fire is primarily extinguished and that the fire department is "currently doing a search for victims and anyone unaccounted for."

5:12 PM: Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, releases a statement commending everyday citizens who responded with "selfless acts of heroism." The statement also says that his office is working with law enforcement agencies and warns against speculations about what is "currently an open investigation."