Unlike you, I’ve earned millions of dollars through writing. True, the bulk of that was in modest, regular increments over a 45-year period, mostly salary from this newspaper, where writing is only one of several duties — there is navigating the web of colleagues and superiors, the strategic cordiality, the gossip, the bowing, the scraping, the “yes sir, that is a brilliant idea” side as well.
Occasionally — very occasionally, of late — freelance checks show up: article payments, book royalties or advances, and I will announce the sum in my best imitation of a stentorian Bill Kurtis proclamation: “Bumpty-bump thousand dollars!” And my wife, God bless her, dutiful sworn officer of the court that she is, will observe, as if on cue: “Of course, you have to pay taxes on that.”
Silly me, I take her at her word. When April 15 comes around, we do indeed pay whatever portion — and it can be between a quarter and a third — that our accountant says is due the federal government.
So it was with gratitude that I recently read in the Sun-Times how Mayor Brandon Johnson’s new communications director, Rachel Cohen, deliberately withheld federal income taxes on her freelance work as a protest against ICE. Can we all do that? Because I too have freelance, and I too have serious disagreements with a considerable part of the federal government — the entire executive branch leaps to mind.
If we can simply withhold our taxes, then not only will I have registered a protest, but saved myself some significant scratch as well, manna I will need on the long slog through retirement, set to begin … well … maybe sooner than I care to if I keep turning in stuff like this.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for social action. Protests such as last year’s at Broadview were not just heroic, but essential. Like colonial Minutemen pouring out of their farms and shops to face the British, patriotic Americans poured into the streets to show that we do not want federal thugs grabbing our neighbors out of their cars for the crime of having immigrated to this country, plunging them into some nightmare gulag system, the true horror of which is not yet fully known. We haven’t yet saved the United States from despotism, but if it is indeed saved, they deserve ample credit.
But I’m also a chronic law abider. I can’t rip the tag off a new mattress. My fingers tingle seeing how glibly some break the law and get away with it.
Yes, there is a tradition of tax evasion related to the mayor’s office. Mayor Harold Washington, you might recall, did not file his federal taxes for four years in the 1960s — not even as a protest, but due to being disorganized, he later said. The IRS went after him, and though it was determined that he had actually paid the baseline amounts, and only owed $508, that was enough for him to plead no contest and be sentenced to 40 days in the Cook County Jail in 1972, serving 36.
He “forgot,” Washington told the Sun-Times editorial board during his 1983 run, adding “maybe a psychiatrist could explain it.” He still won.
“I’m not proud of this,” Washington added, as opposed to Cohen, who seems very proud.
Will his aide’s admitted criminality come to dog Johnson as he battles against long odds — underfinanced and under-popular — for a second term? His chief rival, Alexi Giannoulias, has his own finance-related baggage: his family’s Broadway Bank collapsed in a klaxon of allegations, though no criminal charges were filed.
The mayor does have a reputation for ignoring certain illegalities — teens rampaging through the Loop get an avuncular chuckle when downtown businesses might prefer the youths hauled off to the clink. And if I ever talk to Rachel Cohen — I actually had lunch with her predecessor, Erin Connelly, which, though pleasant, did not lead to anything in the newspaper — I’ll ask: what makes her think the money she withheld from the government would have been used to buy shock gloves for ICE? Maybe it was the cash needed to buy milk for pre-schoolers (oh wait, we stopped doing that, right?). OK then, to the shrinking part of the federal government that isn’t self-dealing and corruption.
We’ll never speak. The whole reason for hiring an online influencer as communications director is because you want to bypass traditional journalism, avoid anyone who might do that thinky, judgy thing, and go straight to ballyhooing the public directly. Why have your actions parsed by the keen, knowledgeable eye of a Fran Spielman when you can hand Rachel Cohen a pair of pompons and have her leading cheers on social media? Maybe that’ll work for him. We’ll see.