Tag: police state

IRS Hiring Another 3,700 Tax Enforcers, Watchdog Warns Those Earning Under $400,000 Could Be Targeted

IRS hiring 3,700+ tax enforcers to audit higher earners but a watchdog worries about audits for those under $400,000 due to unclear “high-income” definition.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking to hire over 3,700 additional tax enforcers as it ramps up its audit crackdown of higher-earning taxpayers, though a watchdog warns that Americans making less than $400,000 could get caught in the dragnet because the agency doesn’t have a clear definition of “high-income.”

The IRS said on Sept. 15 that it had opened over 3,700 positions nationwide to assist  with “expanded enforcement work” that focuses on complex partnerships, large corporations, and high-income earners.

The compliance positions will be open in more than 250 locations across the United States and are part of a “sweeping, historic” tax enforcement crackdown that leverages cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence, to catch tax evaders more effectively.

The hiring will be for higher-graded revenue agents, with the IRS calling on people in the financial services industry—such as tax accountants, forensic accountants, auditors, and controllers—to apply.

The IRS is flush with cash from a recent congressionally-mandated infusion of $60 billion in new funding, with some of the money already having bolstered the tax agency’s ranks substantially. Recent reports indicate that hiring is up around 13 percent over the past year, allowing the IRS to hit a decade-high of nearly 90,000 staffers.

But while the recent batch of new hires was focused on taxpayer service positions, the newly announced hiring thrust is looking to give the IRS more enforcement muscle.

“This next wave of hiring will help the IRS add key talent like tax accountants to help reverse a decade-long decline of audits for the wealthy as well as complex partnerships and corporations,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement.

“These new employees will be focused on higher-income and complex tax areas like partnerships, not average taxpayers making less than $400,000,” Mr. Werfel added.

But Mr. Werfel’s pledge not to target Americans earning under $400,000 rings hollow, given a recent watchdog report that called into question the ability of the IRS to make good on this pledge because it either lacks a clear definition of “high-income” or uses outdated tax examination activity codes that put the threshold for high earners at $200,000.

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People injured or bereaved by Covid vaccines ‘speak in code online over censorship fears’

People left injured or bereaved from vaccines are being forced to speak in code online about their symptoms for fear of censorship, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s chair, was also told at a hearing on Wednesday that healthcare workers are afraid to speak out about side effects they have had from the jab, over fears they will be punished by their bosses.

It comes as campaign groups representing hundreds of people who suffered illness or lost loved ones after being vaccinated will be allowed to give evidence to the public inquiry.

Anne Morris KC, representing UK CV Family, Vaccine Injured Bereaved UK (VIBUK) and the Scottish Vaccine Injury Group, told the inquiry: “Censorship is a very real issue for the vaccine injured and bereaved.

“Their support groups have been shut down by social media platforms and their experiences censored by the mainstream media.

“They have to speak in code online for fear of having the only source of support taken away from them.”

She added: “They face stigma and abuse for sharing their symptoms in the context of the Covid vaccine, even being branded as anti-vax for sharing very real and medically proven vaccine injuries.”

The inquiry was told that those left genuinely injured or bereaved from vaccines are unable to express or record their experiences without being “misunderstood, misrepresented or used for somebody else’s agenda”.

A survey of UK CV Family members reported that 73 per cent have considered suicide, with a member of the group having taken his own life last August.

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What Does “Far-Right” Even Mean Anymore?

“Far right” is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

Anybody taking the legacy, corporate media at face value these days is likely under the impression that the entire world is being overrun with “far-right” extremists, after all, anything orthogonal to the current WEF-inspired world order seems to be, by definition, far right.

If it wasn’t apparent already, it became obvious during the pandemic how establishment narratives are promulgated by corporate media cartels to enshrine elite-approved canon.  For that to work, it was key to neutralize non-conforming impulses, and the way to do that, it seemed, was to label it all as “far right”.

The term has now been so misplaced and over-used that it becomes impossible to differentiate between fast rising maverick politicians from skinheads with swastika tattoos. Make no mistake, this is deliberate.

The standard playbook is to cast anything gaining momentum as “populist” – which is always implicated as being  wrong-headed and retrograde, even though a literal definition of the word simply connotes that large swaths of the population are feeling strongly about something (usually some manner of getting screwed by the elites).

In an era where confidence and credibility of our incumbent institutions is in secular decline – given their stunning incompetence, not to mention self-serving hypocrisy and corruption, the public is becoming increasingly fed up with their betters. That means whatever appeals to them has to be repackaged as “far-right”, lest the movement gain momentum.

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The climate change proposal which means you’d never see the Mediterranean again

Steve Coogan is not the first person you think of when considering the climate crisis.  And yet, earlier this week, I found myself recalling one of his greatest sitcom scenes as I read through a study on how to cut carbon emissions in some of the world’s largest cities.

You probably know it – the six minutes of excruciating comic perfection where Coogan’s greatest creation, the failing chat-show host Alan Partridge, meets a BBC commissioning editor to pitch suggestions for new TV programmes. The lunch goes badly, and growing ever more desperate, Partridge starts throwing increasingly random ideas across the table. “Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank”, he suggests. “Inner City Sumo! Monkey Tennis?”.

There is nothing about budget travel with retired middleweights in “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” – a report from the environmental group C40 Cities that has found itself in the spotlight. But then, C40 Cities is a serious organisation, comprising 96 major urban centres, on six continents. It meets regularly to discuss how we can lessen our collective carbon footprint, and its dispatch contains some genuinely sensible ideas – reducing the amount of clothing we buy, the amount of electricity we use, the amount of meat we eat.

However, its suggestions on aviation are Full Partridge in their lack of connection to reality – seemingly muttered at random, in a bid to get something, anything on paper. The citizens of the C40 Cities (and with London, New York, Sydney, Madrid and Rome part of the club, as well as Mumbai, Dubai and Rio, that means a good many of us), it says, should rein in their use of aircraft to one return flight, of no more than 1,500km (932 miles) in total distance, every three years. Better still, they should do so by the year 2030.

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Animal-Grade Prison Food Indicts US Society

I’ve written in the past about an awful experience I had in prison a decade ago while serving 23 months in prison after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program.  I was doing my time at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a low-security prison in the Appalachian Mountains.  One of the very first things I found, on my very first day, was that the food was bad. Very bad. 

I arrived in prison on a Thursday.  The next day, Friday, was “fish day.” A fellow prisoner warned me to skip the fish. “We call it sewer trout,” he said. “you don’t want to put that in your body.” Sure enough, when I got in line in the cafeteria, I saw boxes stacked behind the servers. Every box was very clearly marked, “Alaskan Cod.  Product of China. Not for human consumption. FEED USE ONLY.” That’s what the servers were slopping onto our trays. 

Things only got worse from there. I won’t go into detail about the rat that drowned in the Kool-Aid dispenser. I suppose things like that will happen from time to time. But one incident still makes me angry 10 years later. Every Wednesday evening was “taco night.”  This disgusting concoction was ground beef, some sort of “sauce,” and a little onion. It was truly inedible and I threw it away more often than I ate it.

One day, guards posted a memo from the warden in every housing unit saying, “Sorry. Through no mistake of our own, the company that sends us the ground beef for tacos accidentally mismarked a shipment of dog food as ‘ground beef’. That dog food was served to inmates. The Bureau of Prisons will fine the company.”

I later read in Prison Legal News magazine that the company was fined and the BOP kept the money.  But the real shame here isn’t even that we ate dog food.  The real shame is that we didn’t even realize that it was dog food because the food is so bad every day. I can’t tell you how many expired foods we were served, still in the packaging, and how many years-old frozen bagels, dyed green for some previous St. Patrick’s Day, we were served every Sunday for a year.

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Why are People so Obedient? – Compliance and Tyranny

“And the word “courage” should be reserved to characterize the man or woman who leaves the infantile sanctuary of the mass mind.”— Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly

In the privacy of our minds many of us disagree with the ideologies, political agendas, and government mandates of our day, yet in public we comply. We do what we are told, say what is politically correct, and justify our hypocrisy by telling ourselves that we are powerless to change society, and so we might as well blend in with the crowd. In this video, we explain why publicly conforming to what we privately disagree with makes us complicit in tyranny, and why each of us has far more power to influence society than we have been led to believe.

In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted an experiment which demonstrated the degree to which individuals will reject what they think is true in order to conform to the majority. In the experiment, Asch showed a test subject two cards. On the first card was a single line, and on the second card were three lines, A, B, and C, with only line C being the same length as the line on the first card. Asch instructed the test subject to state which line on the second card was the same length as the line on the first card. However, before the test subject gave an answer, they witnessed 7 confederates – or individuals who were in on the experiment – state that line B was the same length as the line on the first card. Rather than state the obvious truth, the test subjects gave the same wrong answer as the group 37% of the time, and of the 123 test subjects who took part in this experiment, two thirds went along with the group at least once. Asch’s experiment confirms what philosophers have been reiterating for thousands of years: for most human beings conforming to what others say and do – no matter how objectively false or absurd – takes precedence over adapting to reality and discovering the truth.

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COMPANIES ALREADY BAN THE USE OF THEIR DRUGS FOR LETHAL INJECTION. NOW THEY’RE BLOCKING IV EQUIPMENT.

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURERS are refusing to sell their products for use in lethal injection, The Intercept has learned. The stance could further hinder states’ ability to carry out death sentences at a time when similar restrictions have limited access to drugs.

The four companies that have raised objections are Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Fresenius Kabi, and Johnson & Johnson. In addition to manufacturing drugs, they make IV catheters, syringes, medical tubing, and IV bags, products states rely on to administer lethal injection. In statements to The Intercept, the companies said that the use of their equipment in executions contradicts their values.

“Johnson & Johnson develops medical innovations to save and enhance lives,” Joshina Kapoor, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson, wrote in an email. “We do not condone the use of our products for lethal injections for capital punishment.”

Fresenius Kabi, a German company that specializes in IV devices, told The Intercept that it would seize its products from corrections departments if it became aware of their use in lethal injection. B. Braun, which is also headquartered in Germany, said it prohibits its U.S.-based distributors from selling products to prisons for executions. Baxter International, a health care company based in Illinois, confirmed through a spokesperson that a 2017 statement opposing the use of its products in lethal injection applied to medical equipment as well as drugs.

For more than a decade, pharmaceutical companies have forbidden state corrections departments from using their drugs in U.S. execution chambers. The restrictions have led states to track down execution chemicals through unscrupulous suppliers, devise new lethal injection protocols using untested drug combinations, or pursue alternative methods of execution.

But there has been little inquiry into the equipment used to perform lethal injections. The manufacturers’ newly public positions are representative of the growing role private companies are playing in the future of lethal injection and could fuel a new swath of legal challenges as lawyers seek information about the products utilized to kill their clients.

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Veteran RCSO officer kills himself amid investigation

A veteran officer with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office has killed himself amid an investigation by his agency.

The body of Investigator Brian Manecke was discovered on a dirt road in Lincolnton on Friday night. He had apparently killed himself, and the GBI was investigating the death along with Coroner Tim Quarles.

The sheriff’s office issued a short press release late Friday: “On September 15, 2023 at approximately 6:20 pm, the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office was notified by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office that they located an employee of RCSO in their personal vehicle, deceased with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The investigation into this matter is being held in the jurisdiction of Lincoln County and no other information is available for release at this time.”

The death came as the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office looked into complaints from other law enforcement officers in the region that Manecke had been posting pictures of their children on social media pages that were pro-pedophilia. He was accused of taking a photo of two children from a woman’s Facebook page and posting the image on a known pedophile site, claiming the girls were his. The sheriff’s office had taken out search warrants to look at his devices, including his phone and computer.

But before they could download the material, Manecke disappeared and did not answer phone calls from his supervisor. Then his body was discovered in Lincoln County.

The parents first complained last week to the sheriff’s office about Manecke posting their children’s pictures on social media. They complained again this week when they didn’t feel enough was done. They reached out to WGAC’s Austin Rhodes, who talked about the case on his afternoon radio show on Thursday and Friday.

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A Jan. 6 rioter was convicted and sentenced in secret. No one will say why

Hundreds of rioters have been charged, convicted and sentenced for joining the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Unlike their cases, Samuel Lazar’s appears to have been resolved in secret — kept under seal with no explanation, even after his release from prison.

Lazar, 37, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, was arrested in July 2021 on charges that he came to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, dressed in tactical gear and protective goggles, and used chemical spray on officers who were desperately trying to beat back the angry Donald Trump supporters.

There is no public record of a conviction or a sentence in Lazar’s court docket.

But the Bureau of Prisons told The Associated Press that the man was released from federal custody this week after completing a sentence for assaulting or resisting a federal officer. Lazar was sentenced in Washington’s federal court on March 17 to 30 months in prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons, but there’s no public record of such a hearing. He had been jailed since July 2021.

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