My renunciation of citizenship is the subject of a feature article at Global Post:

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/111205/stateless-slovakia–renounce-us-citizenship-mike-gogulski

Many have burned their passports as a form of political protest. But Gogulski is one of only two Americans known to be ballsy enough to have filed the paperwork needed to officially become stateless. And he’s hoping to inspire others to do it, too.

[...]

Gogulski says it’s all been worth it. It’s all about proving a point, he says — that the system can’t control him and that citizenship is a silly, anachronistic construct.

He could apply for Slovak citizenship but he likes being stateless. For one thing, it certainly is quite the conversation starter.

Gogulski’s ultimate goal: To start a revolution of sorts in which Americans begin giving up their citizenship and become stateless en masse. Maybe, he says, he can be the symbolic beginning of this movement.

“I know the chances of that are about this small though,” he says, holding his index finger and thumb together in the air.

With that, the bleg. Folks, I could use your help — financial help. With my Bitcoin mining operation blowing up in my face in early August, I’m only now pulling myself out of what has been a long, dark bout of severe depression. A depression awful enough that I haven’t been able to work until just recently.

Needless to say, that leaves a massive hole in my budget. Many things are past due, and I’m not certain how I’m going to make rent this month, just before Christmas.

If you have a bit to spare, please visit my support page, with my gratitude.

Peace,
Mike

If wee Kal-El came to Earth today the way he did back in the late 1930s, he would be arrested on arrival as an illegal immigrant and disappear into an ICE detention camp for decades… assuming that the SuperToddler wasn’t just blown out of the sky by the US Air Force.

From ComicsAlliance:

The key scene takes place in “The Incident,” a short story in Action Comics #900 written by David S. Goyer with art by Miguel Sepulveda. In it, Superman consults with the President’s national security advisor, who is incensed that Superman appeared in Tehran to non-violently support the protesters demonstrating against the Iranian regime, no doubt an analogue for the recent real-life protests in the Middle East. However, since Superman is viewed as an American icon in the DC Universe as well as our own, the Iranian government has construed his actions as the will of the American President, and indeed, an act of war.

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

A couple months ago there began the annual string of stories about people giving up US citizenship, which almost invariably mention that renunciants’ names are required to be published in the Federal Register.

So I went and checked the Federal Register online. Searched for my name, no result. Located the reports that are periodically filed (“Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen To Expatriate, as Required by Section 6039G”) by the IRS, searched them from the end of 2008 to present. Hmm, I wasn’t there.

Eventually, I was able to track down the IRS employee responsible for compiling those reports, and called her. She seemed a bit taken aback by my call and my request to have my renunciation published, but she took my info (including links to supporting documents on this site) and promised she’d get it done.

Lo and behold! 76 FR 7907 – Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate, as Required by Section 6039G (PDF, last page)

And that ends that!

Jeff Knaebel, R.I.P.

From the Hindustan Times:

American kills self, blames India, US

An American national disturbed over denial of Indian citizenship allegedly committed suicide by immolating himself on a hill at Virat Nagar, around 75km from Jaipur, in the wee hours of January 26. Jeff Knaebel, 72, had been living in Shimla since 1995 and had repeatedly tried to get Indian citizenship. He was from San Francisco in California.

Superintendent of police (Jaipur rural) Mohan Singh said on Thursday, “The deceased has left behind a suicide note which mentions, ‘January 26, Republic Day, 3/4 moon. In protest of cruel incidents of the US and the Indian government, please don’t disturb until the police comes, documents are in the handbag’ (sic). Apart from some papers, Rs45,000 was recovered from the handbag which Knaebel, as per suicide note, wished to be distributed among poor widows.”

Police have recovered five bottles of a chemical, which Knaebel is suspected to have poured on himself, and a lighter from the spot.

The SP said preliminary inquiry revealed Knaebal was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.

Had moved SC

On May 14 last year, Knaebel, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had approached the Supreme Court seeking political asylum in India.

Knaebel had torn his passport at Rajghat on June 19 in 2009. “After tearing up my passport, I’m stateless,” he had told HT. Arguing his case, Knaebel said US policies were based on war and destruction.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These were coming to me at a rate of one every three to four months, until last week. In this past week, I’ve been contacted by three different people aiming to renounce US citizenship. Sure, that might just be random cluster in the data, but it seems significant.

And then there’s this:

More Americans Give Up Citizenship As IRS Gets Aggressive Overseas

By Martin Vaughan, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

The number of American citizens and green-card holders severing their ties with the U.S. soared in the latter part of 2009, amid looming U.S. tax increases and a more aggressive posture by the Internal Revenue Service towards Americans living overseas.

According to public records, just over 500 people worldwide renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009, the most recent period for which data are available. That is more people than have cut ties with the U.S. during all of 2007, and more than double the total expatriations in 2008.

The author, Martin Vaughn, contacted me via Facebook, having found his way to my blog. Since he was looking specifically for people who had or who were considering expatriating for tax reasons, I couldn’t really help him, and the article came out a few days later.

There’s one factual error I spotted in the article:

In order to give up U.S. citizenship, a person must obtain or have citizenship in another country.

Ah, facts…

US citizenship, if the State Department’s recently-announced plan to raise consular services fees goes through.

From the Klasko, Rulon, Stock & Seltzer, LLP blog:

Documentation for Renunciation of Citizenship – The cost study found that documenting a U.S. citizen’s renunciation of citizenship is extremely costly, requiring American consular officers overseas to spend substantial amounts of time to accept, process, and adjudicate cases. A new fee of $450 will be established to help defray a small portion of the total cost to the government of documenting the renunciation of citizenship.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

At the old Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Photo: Oles Cheresko, Markíza

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

This particular bit has been taking up two slots in my inbox for a while, and it’s time to purge:

From “Sioux Warrior” at 2:54am:

why did you renounce US citizenship? are you fucking insane?

Um, yes… yes, yes I am?

And from “Sioux Warrior” at 3:02am:

ok you burned your ssa card. wow. You could have simply cut it up. You are still on file at SSA. it does not matter that you burned it. I get SSI income, I agree that the SSA really sucks ass. I want them out of my life. If an illegal alien uses your SSN, they won’t do anything.

I hereby disclaim all liability in connection with your use, storage, processing or retransmission of this information.

From the show announcement:

On Todays Show We Have Jeff Nabers & Phoebe Chongchua Authors of 5 Steps To Freedom. How To Cut Your Dependence On Institutions And Escape Financial Slavery. Also On The Show: Mike Gogulski Who Has Renounced His American Citizenship And Is Now Living In Bratislava, Slovakia. Hosts James Cox, Michael Shanklin & Todd Barnett will be discussing The Movement’s articles on current.com, and the weekly news events. Please Call In To The Show On (347) 633-9636

I’ve clipped out my segment and provide it here as a podcast.

Listen below, or download. 26m59s, 12.3MB MP3.