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
9/11 widow alleges government knew of attack
Mariani believes that people in the U.S. government knew of an impending
attack on American soil and believes that President Bush, himself, knew of
the attacks and did nothing to prevent them. She believes this was done to
enlist support for the war on terror from the American people. “(U.S. Attorney General) John Ashcroft stopped flying in July 2001 and other
people in the government were warned,” said Mariani. “We weren’t warned. If we had been, we wouldn’t have been flying.” And, according to her website, www.911forthetruth.com, Mariani may not be alone in her beliefs. The site, which has recorded over 34,000 visitors since its posting just after the first of the year, also has a petition calling for the government to seek the truth and release documents pertaining to the 9-11 investigation. They are hoping 1 million Americans sign the petition.
Prosecutor in Terror Case Sues Ashcroft
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington.
Bremer Hints He May Bar Iraqi Islamic Law
U.S. allies pressured to justify war support
Arabs in U.S. Raising Money to Back Bush
Democratic Frontrunner Kerry Leads Bush
by 5 Percentage Points in CBS Poll
Vt. Judge Rules on Dean’s Sealed Records
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United States POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
General Daily State-by-State Government News, from Stateline.org
COLUMN- Save the Democrats, kill Kerry
When 2005 roles around, and America is facing four more years of Bush, we can point the fingers at the primary-voters who put Kerry in the democratic convention with the most delegates. I can't foresee Kerry finding any way to bring moderate or swing votes back to the democrats. I can't see him winning the election any more than I could see Gore doing it. If my conscience would allow it, I would vote for Bush again to punish the Democratic Party for nominating one of its weakest candidates. But my conscience won't allow it, so I'm going to have to do my best to put this stoic flip-flopper in the oval office.
Gays answer GOP call for candidates
If they become the party nominees -- and seven are running unopposed in the March primary -- that guarantees the Log Cabin members a seat on the state GOP central committee and the possibility of more seats, depending on how well the candidate runs.
DNC won’t heed Kerry’s call to end ’AWOL’ attacks
Cheney Presses Congress to Keep Tax Cuts
FBI chief- Arabs helpful in war on terror
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Click on the Bush/Tony link and enjoy the show
http://jefffisherforcongress.com
International POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Health of Nations
Is France’s Center Coming Unglued?
What Bush vs. Saddam Is All About
Ariel Sharon survives vote over settlements
Rwanda Revisits Its Nightmare
Haiti Rebels Kill Police Chief, Officers
Haitian president pleads for help to end rebellion
Pakistan Arrests Pearl Murder Suspect, Colleague
Powell urges Tunisian president to pursue political reform
Son of Chechnya’s president denies link with disappearances
Liberal MP John Bryden quits party, criticizes Prime Minister Paul Martin
On Russian TV, Whatever Putin Wants, He Gets
Tories unveil economic blueprint
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Prospective Homeowners.com
An affordable housing solutions group
BUSINESS, JOBS, TAXES & ECONOMY
North Fork to Buy GreenPoint for $6.3 Bln
Kerry Attacks Bush’s Economic Policies
Shipping Out White-Collar Jobs
Riding High In ’Jobless Recovery’
Kerry Promises to Halt Flow of Jobs Out of U.S.
Bush Touts Tax Cuts As Economic Solution
Cingular Wins AT&T Wireless for $41 Bln
Federal Appeals Court Upholds Do-Not-Call Registry
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
Research in Italy Turns Up a New Form of Mad Cow Disease
Marriage License Denied, Women Start Legal Action
O.C. Clinic Sees Pot as a Valid Treatment
From Space, a New View of Doomsday
Bush Tries to Boost Troop Morale in La.
Report- Cambodians Resort to Eating Rats
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Fear of catching bird flu from eating chicken has prompted some people in northwest Cambodia to resort to eating rats, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
A new reality in reducing sprawl found
More shop for drugs in Canada
Powerful interests may clash in push to heal the oceans
Antibiotic Use Linked with Breast Cancer Risk
Offshore B.C. drilling bans could be lifted
Antioxidants Appear to Protect Against Diabetes
More Evidence Vegetarian Diet May Cut Cancer Risk
Physical Fitness May Protect Aging Brain
Clogged Arteries Can Cause Mental Decline
Low Antibody Levels Tied to Virus in Elderly
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
Cattlemen Awarded $1.28B in Lawsuit
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- A federal court jury awarded $1.28 billion Tuesday to a group of cattlemen after finding that the nation's largest beef packer, Tyson Fresh Meats Inc., had unfairly manipulated cattle prices.
Fraud Kicks in Months Ahead of Medicare Drug Discount Card
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ABOUT EDUCATION
Bill would bar school bans on cellphones
Academic Freedom Prevails, Panel Says
Parents Say Threat to School Overblown
Scam Alert- He’s disappeared - and so has teachers’ money
Radical exams overhaul proposed
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
Uncovering Calif.’s overlooked slave past
Cow Drags Farmer to Safety in New Zealand
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Capital Equipment Leasing & Residential Property Financing by
Progressive Business Office Support Services
