Ashcroft has proven himself to be an enemy of the Constitution of the United States, and a threat to our security and liberty. Speak out against his continued trampling of our valued civil rights and civil liberties by joining the Center for Constitutional Rights’ People v. Ashcroft campaign. Join thousands of others calling for Ashcroft’s removal from office by signing a popular indictment of Ashcroft and his attempted destruction of our constitution at www.peoplevashcroft.org.
9 / 1 1:
G E T T I N G T O T H E T R U T H
Why is our government lying to us
about what really happened?
Do you know:
- On September 9th the president had a war plan
on his desk to go into Afghanistan?
- The hijackers names were not on the passenger lists?
- There were up to 23 individually recorded warnings
from a total of 11 allies?
- FEMA agents were already in New York on Sept. 10th?
- Government officials were warned not to fly on 9/11?
- The debris at Ground Zero was removed without forensic examination, shipped to China and melted down?
- The Bush and bin Laden families have been
doing business together since the late 70s?
- The Bush administration tried to obstruct
the investigation from the start?
- This just begins to scratch the surface?
Our site: www.ny911truth.org
For further reading on this critical issue, see:
http://physics911.org/net/index.php
www.serendipity.li/wtc.htm
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
Information is the currency of democracy
- Thomas Jefferson
www.SkyscraperSafety.org
"To the living we owe respect,
but to the dead we owe only the truth." - Voltaire
An amazing analysis of the collapse of the twin towers and the WTC7 is at
http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html.
Vote to Keep Roosevelt on the dime from Change to Ronald Reagan!
Top Stories
Dean to Push Ahead on Presidential Bid
Top Dean Aide Discusses Plans to Back Kerry
Dean Announces National Chairman Is Out
Tutu- Bush, Blair Should Apologize for ’Immoral’ War
The partisan "mastermind" in charge
of Bush's intel probe
Whenever there's a vast right-wing conspiracy, Judge Laurence Silberman keeps turning up. Judge Laurence Silberman, George Bush's nominee to co-chair the commission investigating U.S. intelligence on Iraq, knows quite a bit about the murky intersection between facts and ideology. The senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has been near the febrile center of the largest political scandals of the past two decades, from the rumored "October surprise" of 1980 and the Iran-contra trials to the character assassination of Anita Hill and the impeachment of President Clinton. Whenever right-wing conspiracies swing into action, Silberman is there.
The Computer Ate My Vote
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United States POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
General Daily State-by-State Government News, from Stateline.org
Why did Bush stop flying?
Bush was accepted into pilot school even though he scored in the 25th percentile on a standardized test. The test was given to all prospective pilots and there was no specific score that disqualified a candidate. In addition, Bush had two arrests for college pranks and four traffic offenses before applying for pilot training. Former and current military pilots say it was uncommon for an applicant to be approved for training with such a record. After Bush stopped flying fighter jets in April 1972 and did not take an annual physical examination required of all pilots, the Air Force should have required a hearing known as a flying evaluation board to determine his fitness to fly. Because the federal government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to train each pilot, it typically did not allow them to stop flying without a formal proceeding. Bush's records do not mention a flying evaluation board.
Air of doom hangs over Dean
Milwaukee, Wis. -- Signs mounted Sunday that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, facing a primary day disaster in Wisconsin on Tuesday, will soon drop out of the Democratic nominating contest, ending a once high-flying candidacy that collapsed at the hands of caucus-goers in Iowa and never recovered.
FEC chief backs ’soft money’
Dean asks his faithful to pick TV commercial
Dean passes on blasting Kerry
In Wisconsin debate Sunday, Sen. John Kerry says
he’s prepared for GOP attacks.
Bush Focuses on Economy in Courting Fla.
Dean Quiet on Why Chairman Left Campaign
Dean’s Campaign Chairman May Soon Back Kerry
Labor Losing Clout in Presidential Politics (RA)
Bush’s driving records disclosed
Woman Denies Rumors of Kerry Affair
Permanent residency ordered for 22,0000 asylum holders
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Click on the Bush/Tony link and enjoy the show
http://jefffisherforcongress.com
International POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Iran Speaker Defends Standing in ’Unfair’ Election
Belarus Chief Seeks Tighter Control
U.S.- No Concessions to North Korea
Salaries of Diet members’ secretaries likely to be subject of debate again
Taiwan’s Chen Says Unification with China Possible
U.N.- Cuban Dissidents Held in ’Alarming’ Conditions
al-Qaida Backer Gets Death in Uzbekistan
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Prospective Homeowners.com
An affordable housing solutions group
BUSINESS, JOBS, TAXES & ECONOMY
Most Siemens Software Jobs Moving East
Honda to Make Engines for Jets with GE
Global Chip Equipment Sales Rise 48 Percent
French Officials Eye Open-Source Apps
Commentary- Inventing The "Clinton Recession"
State buying more goods through online auctions
Group of O’Fallon, Ill., workers aim to join union
China outstrips Korean car production
Big beer producers accused of locking up restaurant market
Switzerland’s price watchdog has launched an investigation into exclusive contracts signed between the nation’s big brewers and restaurant owners. Smaller beer producers have complained that their larger rivals are shutting them out of a lucrative market.
Swiss look to Finland for economic model
Who is to blame for job losses in the west?
Press Release » Tax Me If You Can
Watch: Thursday, February 19, at 9pm, 60 minutes
It was one of corporate America's biggest hidden profit centers in the past decade--the tax shelter--and it became so lucrative that last year it helped major U.S. companies cut their tax rate to just half of what they had historically paid, leaving individual taxpayers to make up the difference.
The General Accounting Office estimates that illegitimate tax shelters cost the government more than $85 billion in recent years.
"Anything that's not being paid that should be paid, that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up," asserts Charles Rossotti, a Republican businessman who became commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1997 and spent five years battling bogus shelters. Rossotti estimates that because the government is not collecting all that is owed--the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters--everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should.
In "Tax Me If You Can," airing Thursday, February 19, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE® correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.
"These were close to sham transactions--some were clearly sham transactions, [that] had nothing to do with investment," says John "Buck" Chapoton, former treasury department policymaker in the Reagan administration. "They simply were financial mechanisms for creating losses--tax losses, not economic losses."
FRONTLINE's Smith notes, "Chasing bogus tax shelters for the IRS was like a game of cat and mouse. The IRS had a terrible time finding them because they were hidden deep in tax returns. Once the IRS spotted one type of shelter and issued a regulation to block it, the shelter promoters had designed a new one. The IRS was forever playing catch-up."
To overcome this problem, Rossotti asserts that Congress must now enact sweeping legislation to ban any tax shelters that do not have legitimate business purpose, and he warns of the danger of inaction.
"I think this thing is going to rebound in a serious way as the economy improves," Rossotti tells FRONTLINE. "The fundamental drivers of this are still there. It's still a very profitable business for the promoters. The law is still way too weak and too murky."
In "Tax Me If You Can," Smith follows the tax shelter trail to some surprising places. Smith discovers that sewer pipes in the city of Bochum, Germany, for example, have offered a huge tax write-off to the major American bank, Wachovia, of Charlotte, NC.
It was a deal that Bochum city officials couldn't refuse: Through a complex, long-term lease-and-service transaction, the city would lease out its underground sewer pipes to Wachovia for $500 million. The city would then immediately lease the pipes back, thus retaining use of its sewer system, and repay the lease over a period of many years. In return, Bochum was immediately paid a $20 million fee. Wachovia would eventually get its money back--plus a fast, multi-million-dollar tax write-off.
Wachovia declined to be interviewed by FRONTLINE. But working with Wachovia's annual reports, Robert McIntyre, director of the Institute for Taxation and Finance, details the payoff to Wachovia's bottom line from many leasing deals similar to the Bochum transaction.
"Amazingly, in 2002--even though it reported $4 billion in profits--[Wachovia] reported that it didn't pay any taxes," McIntyre tells FRONTLINE. "They worked it by sheltering all of their income. They said they saved $3 billion in taxes over the last three years from leasing--huge write-offs."
"Tax Me If You Can" also reveals how some of America's most respected accounting firms drove the tax shelter wave, generating dozens of shelters that were mass marketed and then found to be illegitimate by the IRS and the courts. In the documentary, Smith speaks with a former tax attorney for KPMG, who describes how the firm's accountants and attorneys were ordered by KPMG tax executives to design--and market aggressively--as many tax shelters as possible, since the firm made a profit based on how much it saved its clients in taxes.
KPMG declined to speak to FRONTLINE. But recently the firm fired and/or retired several of its leading tax partners who had overseen KPMG's tax shelter operation, after they had been called to testify in a congressional investigation.
"Tax Me If You Can" concludes by reporting that while the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate has passed broad tax shelter reform legislation, both the Bush administration and private sector companies, such as accounting and leasing firms, oppose a Senate-backed provision requiring that shelters have economic substance and genuine business purpose to be legal. The House of Representatives has so far declined to pass such legislation, which remains bottled up in the Ways and Means Committee.
"You're talking about powerful accounting firms, powerful legal firms, powerful investment bankers in a conspiracy to promote these tax shelters," declares Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who sponsored the Senate bill. "They also have a fourth arm. They hire some of the most powerful lobbyists in town to work against this legislation."
"Tax Me If You Can" is a FRONTLINE co-production with Hedrick Smith Productions. Hedrick Smith is senior producer and correspondent. Rick Young is producer and director.
In conjunction with the television broadcast, FRONTLINE and Marketplace will produce a two-part series based upon Hedrick Smith's investigation. The public radio series airs Wednesday and Thursday, February 18 and 19, on Marketplace. The series is produced by Rick Young for FRONTLINE and by Marketplace's Stephen Henn for American RadioWorks.
(If you want to support Bush's Campaign, Buy Dell Computer
whose CEO was GW's Campaign Manager in 2000)
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Santa Barbara Social Enterprise
helping youth learn job skills
HEALTH, FAMILY, CONSUMERS, SOCIETY & ENVIRONMENT
Woman, 91, loses arms after pitbull attack
Same-sex couples receive blessing
Clinical Trials Update- Feb. 13, 2004
Activists to raise cash for child war victims
Care2 Make a Difference: The #1 Environmental Network for a Healthy Living & a Healthy Planet
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CORRUPTION, LAW, CRIME,
COURTS & PUNISHMENT, ETHICS
INVESTIGATIONS & COVER-UPS
Belgium, Israel Say Tensions Are Over
JERUSALEM - Belgian and Israeli foreign ministers said Monday their governments have reconciled after Belgian war crimes charges against Israel's prime minister were dropped.
Investor files suit against Franklin
Chretien full of jokes, won’t answer questions
about sponsorship scandal
Brazil Chief Confronts Corruption Scandal
Kuwait Lawmakers Approve Iraq Fuel Probe
Halliburton Suspends Invoicing in Dispute
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ABOUT EDUCATION
Michigan Fights Brain Drain with College Loans (RA)
Whites-only scholarship announced
BRISTOL, R.I. (AP) — A student group at Roger Williams University is offering a new scholarship for which only white students are eligible, a move they say is designed to protest affirmative action.
4-year college experience no longer the norm, statistics say
The Orfalea College of Business challenges highly motivated students to become tomorrow's socially responsible business leaders through a learn-by-doing, technology-oriented education.
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INTERESTING, SCIENCE, CULTURAL & ENTERTAINMENT NEWS
Clinton writes own ticket
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Capital Equipment Leasing & Property Financing by
Progressive Business Office Support Services
