Authoritarian, anti-democratic power networks are being re-branded as trendy, philanthropic-style forums
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones, Infowars.com, May 13, 2013
The secretive Bilderberg Group is currently undergoing a major transformation that will see it and other high profile networks merge under the banner of Google as the elite accelerates its plan to consolidate its technocratic agenda.
This past weekend, Infowars reporters Paul Joseph Watson and Jon Scobie visited the luxury Grove Hotel in Watford, UK, site of the 2013 Bilderberg Group conference set to take place June 6-9, a clandestine annual gathering of over 100 of the world’s most influential power brokers in the fields of politics, academia, technology, business and banking.....
Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.
IRS employees in Cincinnati told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists. .....
PUBLISHED: 16:18 EST, 13 May 2013
Lengthy questionnaire arrived more than two years after the Richmond Tea Party applied for tax-exempt status. IRS demanded 'names of the donors, contributors, and grantors' and insisted: 'Please identify your volunteers'
Tax collectors began in 2012 to scrutinize conservative nonprofits more closely than others. Documents show senior IRS officials in Washington knew of the practice as early as August 2011, but the White House says it learned last month
The Internal Revenue Service wrote to the Richmond Tea Party last year demanding to know the names of all its financial donors and volunteers, as part of a 55-question inquisition into its application for tax-exempt status, MailOnline has learned......
Tea Party and conservative constitutional groups may be the new targets of the Internal Revenue Service, but former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld reveals in his new book out this week that outspoken businesses critical of the federal government are also singled out by the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission.
In "Rumsfeld's Rules, Leadership lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life," the former chairman of G.D. Searle & Co. said that business leaders often bite their tongue rather than criticize presidents out of fear the administration will retaliate.
In a chapter titled "The case for capitalism," Rumsfeld notes that business leaders like to pose with presidents but "we seldom read about prominent business leaders directly critiquing the actions of the federal government or stepping up to defend the advantages of free markets and the opportunities they create for the American people."……
At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.
The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.......
Probe Says Tax Agency Used Sweeping Criteria to Scrutinize Conservative Groups
By JOHN D. MCKINNON and SIOBHAN HUGHES
The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe.
The investigation into the IRS's targeting of conservative groups has revealed that high-ranking IRS officials knew as early as 2011 of the practice. John McKinnon reports.
The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups......
Matt K. Lewis
A little over a year ago, I reported that, ”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.”
Now — on the heels of news the IRS’s apology for having targeted conservative groups — NOM is renewing their demand that the Internal Revenue Service reveal the identity of the people responsible.
“There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,” said NOM’s president Brian Brow, in a prepared statement. “The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.”…..
House and its allies have been drawing attention to the political activities of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. In an August 9 speech, President Obama singled out Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political group founded by David Koch in 2004. In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Obama said:
Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don't know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don't know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.
"Using a great deal" of research by the left-wing Center for American Progress, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported in the magazine's August 30 issue that the Kochs are "waging a war against Obama." Reason's Nick Gillespie argued that Mayer's report was nothing more than "sly innuendo and revelations as lame as they are breathless," but that hasn't stopped top Democrats from blasting the Kochs for funding the Democrats' political opposition……..
In a sweeping and unusual move, the Justice Department secretly obtained two months’ worth of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press as part of a year-long investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot last year.
The AP’s president said Monday that federal authorities obtained cellular, office and home telephone records of individual reporters and an editor; AP general office numbers in Washington, New York and Hartford, Conn.; and the main number for AP reporters covering Congress. He called the Justice Department’s actions a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into newsgathering activities.
The aggressive investigation into the possible disclosure of classified information to the AP is part of a pattern in which the Obama administration has pursued current and former government officials suspected of releasing secret material. Six officials have been prosecuted, more than under all previous administrations combined……
Gov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe
By MARK SHERMAN
— May. 13 10:53 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls…..
by Hans Bader on May 13, 2013 · 0 comments
The IRS didn’t just investigate groups based on their perceived political views, but also targeted groups for “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” or advocating limits on government. The Washington Post reports:…. In other news, the Obama administration declared on Thursday that the federal civil-rights laws Title IX and Title IV require colleges to adopt campus speech codes broader than those that have been previously struck down by some federal appeals courts. It also demands very stringent snooping and micromanagement of students’ private lives. Education writer Joanne Jacobs writes that the new rules are so broad that they effectively “make every student a sex harasser.” The civil-liberties group FIRE objects to the new rules here at this link. So the IRS is not alone in disregarding the First Amendment......
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