Tag: taxes

Taxpayers to Be Held Liable After Black Pastor Arrested for Watering Flowers

On the day he was kidnapped and thrown in a cage, Pastor Michael Jennings had harmed no one, committed no crime and was actually being a good neighbor. He never thought that being asked to water his friend’s flower bed would lead to such a police interaction but thanks to ignorant and apparently-racial profiling cops in Alabama, that’s exactly what happened. Now, the taxpayers of Alabama will be held liable for the actions of the cops.

According to Georgia Public Broadcasting, Jennings, a longtime pastor at Vision of Abundant Life Church in Sylacauga, Ala., is being represented in his newly filed federal lawsuit by national civil rights attorney, Harry Daniels, and attorneys Bethaney Embry Jones, Joi Travis and Roderick Van Daniels. They hosted a news conference Saturday with the Alabama NAACP to discuss the case.

“I’m here for accountability, and I’m here for justice,” Jennings said.

“These poor judgment decisions reflect poorly on the type of training the Childersburg police officers receive … if they were acting in accordance within police guidelines,” Alabama NAACP President Benard Simelton said in a statement to NPR.

As we reported at the time, Jennings was kidnapped by police in May — his kidnappers, two officers with the Childersburg police department. The entire interaction was captured on video.

According to police, they showed up at Jennings’ neighbor’s house that day claiming they received a call about a suspicious person. Being that Jennings has lived in the neighborhood for years and is long time friends of his neighbors, he is hardly suspicious yet police would use this claim to violate his rights.

As the video shows, Jennings is literally watering his neighbor’s flowers when police show up because this is exactly what his neighbors had asked. When the unidentified officer asks the pastor what he is doing, Jennings told him that he had just gotten back from conducting church and he stopped at his neighbor’s home to water their flowers because they had asked him to do so.

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Former Gov. Phil Bryant helped Brett Favre secure welfare funding for USM volleyball stadium, texts reveal

Text messages entered Monday into the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former Gov. Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre’s volleyball idea a reality.

The texts show that the then-governor even guided Favre on how to write a funding proposal so that it could be accepted by the Mississippi Department of Human Services – even after Bryant ousted the former welfare agency director John Davis for suspected fraud.

“Just left Brett Favre,” Bryant texted nonprofit founder Nancy New in July of 2019, within weeks of Davis’ departure. “Can we help him with his project. We should meet soon to see how I can make sure we keep your projects on course.”

When Favre asked Bryant how the new agency director might affect their plans to fund the volleyball stadium, Bryant assured him, “I will handle that… long story but had to make a change. But I will call Nancy and see what it will take,” according to the filing and a text Favre forwarded to New.

The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport. Favre received most of the credit for raising funds to construct the facility.

Bryant has for years denied any close involvement in the steering of welfare funds to the volleyball stadium, though plans for the project even included naming the building after him, one text shows.

New, a friend of Bryant’s wife Deborah, ran a nonprofit that was in charge of spending tens of millions of flexible federal welfare dollars outside of public view. What followed was the biggest public fraud case in state history, according to the state auditor’s office. Nonprofit leaders had misspent at least $77 million in funds that were supposed to help the needy, forensic auditors found.

New pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts related to the scheme, and Davis awaits trial. But neither Bryant nor Favre have been charged with any crime.

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IRS unmasked: Away from politics, America’s tax agency has lots of warts, and ammunition

The Internal Revenue Service has long been a political football. Democrats alleged that in the 1960s it was used by Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon to subvert civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists, while Republicans alleged a decade ago it wrongly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups.

More recently, Democrats have argued the tax agency needs $80 billion in new enforcement to end tax cheating and ease budget deficits, while Republicans say the new spending signed by President Joe Biden will only create an army of 87,000 armed agents intent on wreaking havoc on the middle and working classes.

With so much emotion, scandal and political rhetoric, it’s sometimes hard for everyday Americans to sort fact from fiction. So the team here at Just the News did a deep dive to put together a list of facts about the IRS that aren’t in dispute, from whom it audits to why it buys ammunition and arms its agents.

As Sludge Pours from Mississippi Sinks, Biden Admin Seeks $13 Billion MORE for UKRAINE

According to Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, although the water treatment plant finally failed in August, the system “has been failing for decades” and nothing is being done.

“I have said on multiple occasions that it’s not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when our system would fail,” Lumumba said.

Even before it failed, the city had been on a months-long boil notice because of a warning over disease carrying bacteria in the water supply. Since 2016, officials knew about the corrosion of the system and inadequate treatment — yet nothing was done — and now sludge pours from Jackson residents’ water taps.

Lumumba estimates that it would take roughly $1 billion to get the systems back up and running in a safe capacity but they don’t have it. This is particularly perplexing to many folks who have watched a record amount of US taxpayer dollars in recent months flow outside of the United States and into Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine began in February, Biden authorized $1.3 billion followed by an additional $13.6 billion. This original $15 billion of your tax dollars that got dumped into Ukraine to arm literal Nazis in the region was offensive enough but it was just the tip of the iceberg. In May, the House passed yet another massive spending bill, authorizing another $40 billion in your tax dollars to arm Nazis and keep the country at war. And they show no signs of slowing down.

Since then, various packages of cash and weapons of mass destruction, ranging from just a few hundred million to a billion, have flowed into the arms of welcoming Ukrainian politicians and military leaders.

In late August, the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, this was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. But that wasn’t enough, apparently.

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SWAT Team Raids Innocent Elderly Couple, Destroys Their Home Because Their Power Bill Was Too Low

Even in states with legal marijuana, law enforcement’s addiction to the drug war still lingers like a dark cloud over over the land of the ostensibly free. Even in California, who has paved the way in legalization of cannabis, police officers still violently, and with extreme prejudice, lay waste to the rights of innocent people who dare grow, use, or sell this most beneficial plant.

Because of their addiction to the war on drugs, cops in Riverside County have just cost the taxpayers of their town $136,000. The money was paid to Chen-Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband, Jiun-Tsong Wu, 75, to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that their two homes were broken into by armed agents of the state and ransacked as officers looked for non-existent marijuana plants.

According to Alex Coolman, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the elderly couple, police were monitoring power bills of town residents and used the low amount of the couple’s bill as reason to believe they were growing marijuana.

“This was a very strange and frightening incident,” Hwang said in a release from Coolman’s office. “We did nothing to deserve this, and it made us feel unsafe in our own homes.”

The raid unfolded on August 5, 2021 and caused thousands in damage to the couple’s home.

Apparently police in Riverside County monitor power consumption and when they see low power usage, they automatically assume that people are stealing power to grow marijuana.

“The deputies believed the defendants were stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low, and they said as much,” Coolman told the Press-Enterprise.

But the couple was not growing marijuana and their power consumption was low because they used solar power and were “thrifty,” according to Coolman.

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Former Atlanta official gets 14 years in corruption case

A pastor, political operative and former high-ranking Atlanta city official was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison after a jury found her guilty of charges stemming from a long-running federal investigation into corruption at City Hall.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones told Mitzi Bickers that the evidence showed that she was involved in “a deliberate, calculated plan to cheat” the taxpayers of Atlanta over a number of years. In addition to the prison time, he ordered Bickers to pay nearly $3 million in restitution to the city and to serve three years of supervised release once she’s out.

Bickers, 56, was the first person to go to trial in the investigation into corruption during the administration of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. She helped Reed win election and then worked as his director of human services for several years. Prosecutors said she used her influence to funnel roughly $17 million in business to city contractors Elvin “E.R.” Mitchell Jr. and Charles P. Richards Jr. in exchange for more than $2.9 million in bribes for herself and others.

A jury in March found Bickers guilty on charges including money laundering, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit bribery.

Prosecutors had asked Jones to sentence Bickers to serve 17 and a half years in prison. Her lawyers asked for a much lower sentence, pointing to the five years that Mitchell got and the two years Richards got.

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The Eulogy of Queen Elizabeth II that You Won’t See On Your TV

Turn on a TV, open a web browser, or scroll social media and you will not be able to avoid headlines and hashtags about Queen Elizabeth II passing away. After news broke that she was under “medical supervision,” media crews have stationed themselves out front of Buckingham Palace and its a veritable red carpet event as royals from all over Europe arrive to pay their respects and offer support.

On Thursday, newly elected British PM Liz Truss said the “whole country” was “deeply concerned” over the news of The Queen’s deteriorating health.

“My thoughts – and the thoughts of people across our United Kingdom – are with Her Majesty The Queen and her family at this time,” Truss stated.

Hours later, and surrounded by her royal family, Queen Elizabeth II took her last breath. Now, all the constant reporting has turned to memorializing her.

But is the queen really someone to be hailed as this expounder of all that is good? Should her face be plastered on screens worldwide and a 24/7 memorial be rolled out in her honor? Maybe so, but not for the reasons corporate media will tell you.

On top of mothering a child predator and helping to cover up his crimes, Queen Elizabeth — during her time as a monarch — fleeced the taxpayers of England for hundreds of millions just to pay for her castle. 

During this time, she hid her finances offshore — despite the fact that the Royal Family is tax exempt — and made countless billions off the backs of her subjects.

She also oversaw the horrific colonization of multiple territories in Africa and Asia in which people were savagely tortured, their land stolen, and their people slaughtered.

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Blinken In Surprise Visit To Kyiv Unveils $2BN More Aid Amid ‘Successful’ Counteroffensive

“In meetings with senior Ukrainian officials, Blinken said the Biden administration had notified Congress of its intent to provide $2 billion in long-term Foreign Military Financing to Ukraine and 18 of its neighbors, including NATO members and regional security partners,” the Associated Press writes.

The nearby countries “at risk” from Russian aggression were listed by the State Dept as follows: 

Pending expected congressional approval, about $1 billion of that will go to Ukraine and the rest will be divided among Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, the State Department said.

Earlier in the day, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced a freshly approved military assistance package to Ukraine of of $675 million. 

This brings US aid to Ukraine to $14+ billion, given that at the end of last month the Pentagon issued a statement saying security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021 has totaled $13.5 billion. At the end of August, the Pentagon reported that since January 2021, the United States has provided Ukraine with more than $13.5Bln in security assistance. Some reports are currently tallying the total at $15.2BN.

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UFO in Texas? Mysterious lights caught on camera in Round Rock

Did people in Central Texas see some UFOs in the sky?

That’s what many people are wondering after several videos captured some mysterious lights in the evening on September 1.

Video shared to FOX 7 Austin caught the lights in the Round Rock area of Brushy Creek.

Emily White, who spoke to FOX 7 Austin’s Rudy Koski, says, “It was mesmerizing, honestly. It was so silent because if it was one light, then I would have maybe thought, ‘Oh, a helicopter, a plane, something like that.’ But like there was so many of them together.”

When asked if she thought it was a close encounter, White said, “I’ll be honest, kind of. I don’t know if I believe in all that, but, I don’t know. Maybe, I hear a lot of it in like America that that kind of things happens. I think it’s just because of like it didn’t make any noise at all, which I just thought was really odd. But, yeah, definitely, definitely felt like it was like the alien invasion or something on the way.”

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