Tag: police state

One Hundred Years of IRS Political Targeting

One hundred years ago, Senator James Couzens, a Michigan Republican, took to the Senate floor to denounce the Bureau of Internal Revenue for abusing its power and trampling innocent taxpayers. Couzens launched a sweeping Senate investigation of federal tax collectors. One year later, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes as Couzens stepped out of the Senate chamber. Couzens fought the case, and eventually proved that he had actually overpaid his taxes by roughly one million dollars, as David Burnham noted in his 1989 classic, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. But the precedent of the IRS exploiting its power to attack its critics was firmly established.

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on political critics such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and prominent Republicans like former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944 when he spiked an IRS audit of massive illegal campaign contributions from a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s career would likely have been destroyed if Texans had learned of his dirty-dealing. Instead, LBJ survived and scores of thousands of Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died as a result.

President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and derided people “who would sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and make Americans distrust their leaders.

At a news conference a few days later, a reporter sought his views on the legality of campaign contributions supporting ”right-wing extremist groups.” Kennedy replied “As long as they meet the requirements of the tax law, I don’t think that the Federal Government can interfere or should interfere with the right of any individual to take any position he wants. The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable to—for nontaxable purposes. But that is another question, and I am sure the Internal Revenue system examines that.”

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A brief history of the “biodefence” era and how they convinced nations to give up our rights for “pandemic safety”

Dr. Meryl Nass outlines the 25-year history of the “biodefence” programme and how they generated the “national will” to give up our civil and human rights in the name of “pandemic safety.”

She also discusses how the World Health Organisation – a specialised agency of the United Nations that is concerned with international public health – has repeatedly failed to “champion health and a better future for all” over the past 20 years.

Note: “Biodefence” is enclosed in quotation marks because as Dr. Nass noted in a report published last year, under the guise of preparing their defences against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted “dual-use” – both offensive and defensive – research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms. And, employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was renamed as “gain-of-function” research.

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Georgia Independent Bookstore Sues Jail Over Policy Banning Book Shipments

A Georgia jail is refusing all books shipped to inmates, except those that come from major retailers. One local bookshop is suing, saying that policy is unconstitutional.

In May 2023, two different people visited Avid Bookshop, a progressive independent bookstore located in Athens, Georgia. Each customer purchased three books to mail to an inmate at the Gwinnett County Jail. Both packages were returned, with papers from the jail listing the reason as “Not from publisher/authorized Retailer.” The shoppers asked Avid if the store could mail the books directly.

Each time, Luis Correa, Avid’s operations manager, packaged new paperback copies of the same books and mailed them directly from the store. Aware of the jail’s stated policy that shipments “must have a packing slip or receipt stating what is in the package,” Correa included both. (Correa declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Again, the packages came back, with a sticker saying they were “not sent from publisher or authorized retailer.”

Gwinnett County’s website states that “magazines/non-local newspaper subscriptions and books will be accepted as long as they are mailed directly from the publisher or authorized retailer,” but it gives no clarification on what an authorized retailer is or how to become one.

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New EU Rule BANS Garden Bonfires

It’s now gone a few years since the British left the EU, in part because they didn’t like all the restrictions and rules that they were coming up with.

Now there is a new rule.

People will be banned from starting bonfires in their garden to burn garden waste such as grass, leafs and sticks.

This is because the new law requires that food and organic waste be sorted and recycled.

Meaning that people who are tending their garden will have to either compost their garden waster or deliver it in for recycling.

In Scandinavia it is tradition in the spring where homeowners tend their garden and start bonfires to burn up garden waste, which will now be banned.

People are now paying with microchips in their hand.

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Kansas Lawmakers Consider Proposal To Jail Farmers Who Grow Hemp With Too Much THC

State law enforcement, local prosecutors and a lobbyist convinced legalization of medical marijuana posed the greatest threat to quality of life in Kansas tried to quietly squeeze into a bill lowering fees on industrial hemp producers an amendment that could send wayward farmers to prison for years.

The threshold between freedom and incarceration under the amendment advocated by the executive director of Stand Up for Kansas, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the Kansas County and District Attorneys Association would be a laboratory test measuring whether a hemp product had a THC content greater than 1 percent. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Kansas allow harvesting, processing and marketing of hemp with less than 0.3 percent THC.

“I just need help understanding who are we going after? I hope it’s not our industrial hemp producers,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican and farmer. “Is there some place we can look to find out how much this is being abused? I’m trying to understand where all the abuse is at.”

Stand Up for Kansas leader Katie Whisman said she couldn’t document the threat posed by crooked hemp farmers. The former Kansas Bureau of Investigation administrator did say establishment of industrial hemp as a row crop in Kansas created “a lot of confusion for law enforcement” personnel. She said one source of frustration was the challenge of differentiating between legal hemp and illegal marijuana.

“They look the same,” she said. “They smell the same. Is that hemp? Is that marijuana? How do we enforce that?”

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A total eclipse of the smart

We had our small respite from things as they are, languishing as we all mostly were here in the gloom of the moon as it traversed the sun. For a small few minutes we were insignificant, mere pinpricks of importance on the face of a planet in this immeasurable cosmos.

Our small worlds rendered foolish in the vastness.

We can be, if nothing else, grateful to science for understanding and predicting the eclipse and perhaps religion and folklore for its explanations because it must have been quite a ruckus for primitive tribes once upon a time. The not understanding drives us humans to understanding and explanation. Some of us. We don’t want the unpredictable.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

It is a distance too far to bridge almost now… the path to normal. We are watching a changing world. To see it from both sides right now is an experience. The far left is convinced that the far right are totalitarianisms and the far right is utterly convinced that the far left are. It boggles the mind some days. How can both be true? But they can be. It is perhaps in this that we can find the long sought end to divisiveness among us all: Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Both sides can agree. It is what it is, no matter what it is labelled.

Totalitarianism shifts its shadow over the light of all we humans have fought for throughout history: the right to freedom of a society and the individual and peace and the pursuit, albeit difficult sometimes, of happiness. But then there are those who live in a mechanized world where there is a black and white answer to everything and all things need to be controlled so that a prescribed outcome will happen.

Predictability is all they want and they can only achieve it through a kind of worship of power and a kind of blind obedience to a vision of a utopian future. For these groups, there are no greys nor discussion nor other options.

So many of the things the new ideologues want could never be achieved in a free democratic world and so that has to change. They can do it from the left or they can do it from the right but it is almost inevitable the way things are going. And when these things happen, people change. People change. Sometimes, most times, not for the better. The shadows drift at the edge of lives down through the generations. The broken hope. The famished trust. The bewildered pain. The misplaced anger. The children of the world’s history of atrocities will never feel safety again.

How many generations it will take to replace the fear is anybody’s guess. We still see 2,000 year old fear as if it were yesterday in the world today. It rages on the streets and fuels wars and shatters hope. We have not lived long enough perhaps. I do not know.

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House Votes To Extend Warrantless Spying Powers

US lawmakers have passed a bill reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law which allows the government to surveil American citizens without a warrant. A small group of Republicans previously blocked the vote, but allowed it to proceed following a minor amendment to the law.

The two-year extension passed the House on Friday in a bipartisan vote of 273-147, with 126 Republicans and 147 Democrats supporting the bill, which will now proceed to the Senate. Though lawmakers also debated an amendment that would have forced federal agencies to obtain warrants before spying on Americans, it failed in a tie vote.

“This is how the Constitution dies… This is a sad day for America,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said after the amendment went “down in flames.” He noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson provided the tie-breaking vote to kill the warrant requirement.

Though Johnson was once a vocal critic of FISA’s Section 702 – which handed US intelligence agencies sweeping powers to spy on Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – he quickly reversed course after his promotion to House speaker.

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Texas puts Delta-8 THC products in state lawmakers’ crosshairs

The salad days of gas station weed in Texas may be coming to an end.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is including a ban on Delta-8 and Delta-9 products in his list of goals for the 2025 Texas legislative session, putting the future of the popular and controversial hemp products in jeopardy.

In his 2024 Interim Legislative Charges prospectus, Patrick outlined his desire for lawmakers to “examine the sale of intoxicating hemp products in Texas.” The document also calls for legislators to “make recommendations to further regulate the sale of these products, and suggest legislation to stop retailers who market these products to children.”

Both Delta-8 and Delta-9 are THC molecules capable of producing an intoxicating effect, but Delta-8 occurs naturally in marijuana in much smaller quantities. Delta-8 first hit Texas shelves after a loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp but did not specify what form of THC would be regulated. Since then, Delta-9 products have also emerged in low-THC edible forms.

Six years later and two years after Texas began allowing hemp plants in Texan soil, over 7,000 businesses in Texas operate retail hemp licenses, and hundreds more possess the license to manufacture and market their own hemp products. Meanwhile, traditional marijuana is still only legal medically, and its use is heavily regulated. The so-called grey markets have drawn ire from lawmakers concerned that the products, which are not regulated by the FDA, are too easily accessible to minors.

The Texas Department of State Health Services first moved to ban Delta-8 in 2021, but an injunction has halted the prohibition, leaving Delta-8 on the market for now.The Lieutenant Governor’s language in legislative charges does not appear to leave room for a possible middle ground between an unregulated cannabinoid free-for-all and outright ban. 

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Speaker Mike Johnson Claims Classified Briefing Made Him Flip-Flop on Spy Powers Reform

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday explained his apparent flip-flop on a controversial surveillance law, saying that he now favors limited reforms after receiving a classified briefing.

Speaker Johnson was asked by reporters why he changed his opinion on reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial surveillance law that is meant to target foreign adversaries, but often surveils Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Johnson this week came out against a warrant requirement for Section 702 and moved not to allow an amendment that would have barred intelligence and law enforcement agencies from purchasing Americans’ private information through third-party data brokers. This is considered a run around the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches.

This amounts to a dramatic reversal, since Johnson supported legislation to close the data broker loophole in July 2023, and the Louisiana congressman supported the USA RIGHTS act, which FreedomWorks described as one of the “strongest possible reforms” of FISA.

Johnson said his reversal came after receiving classified briefings on Section 702. He explained:

When I was a member of Judiciary I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over… and then when I became Speaker I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing on sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective.

“That’s part of the process, you have to be fully informed,” he added.

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Georgia Cops Are Still Hassling Vape Stores Over Legal Products

In 2022, Reason reported that local police departments in Georgia were hassling vape and smoke shops for the legal products they sold. Two years later, those products remain every bit as legal as before, but cops are still making life difficult for vendors.

On March 13, officers with the Newnan Police Department Drug and Vice Unit raided Newnan Tobacco & Vapor. According to The Newnan Times-Herald, officers said the raid came after “compliance checks with local stores that sell Delta 8, 9 or THC products.”

Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, which creates the “high” from using marijuana. Ever since the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the list of controlled substances, federal law limits the amount of delta-9 in any substance to 0.3 percent.

But around the same time the Farm Bill became law, scientists discovered delta-8 THC, which produces a similar “high” as delta-9 but can be synthesized out of CBD derived from hemp. (A similar process produces a similar compound, delta-10 THC.) Since the Farm Bill specifically legalized the sale and production of hemp, it was assumed that any hemp byproducts were legitimate, as well—and in 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed.

Georgia passed a similar law in 2019, which legalized hemp in the state, as well as “all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of isomers, whether growing or not, with the federally defined THC level for hemp or a lower level.”

And yet police departments hassle smoke shops over their perfectly legal products.

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