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From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-americas-national-security-apparatus-partnership-big-corporations-cracked-down

A new report is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement.

By Alex Kane
May 21, 2013

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in a new report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled ” Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time–to the point of “obsession,” the report notes–to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

Much of the report hones in on the Occupy Phoenix branch of the movement and Arizona counter-terrorism agents monitoring, tracking and cracking down on the protests.

For instance, when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was planning on coming to Phoenix in October 2011, a “counter-terrorism” detective employed by the Phoenix Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau exchanged information on potential protests with a JP Morgan Chase security manager. The detective, Jennifer O’Neill, received information on Dimon’s travel plans, and then shared information about Occupy Phoenix. O’Neill said that she and another officer had tracked the online activities of Occupy protesters to find out if they were planning to protest Dimon. No plans for protest were discovered by O’Neill, who also works with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, otherwise known as the Arizona fusion center.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-americas-national-security-apparatus-partnership-big-corporations-cracked-down

From The Progressive:  http://www.progressive.org/spying-on-occupy-activists

By Matthew Rothschild
May 20, 2013

With all the hullabaloo over the IRS’s special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, a far worse case of political meddling and governmental overreach has been going on: The spying on leftwing activists in the Occupy movement.

Thousands of documents obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show how Homeland Security and local law enforcement were obsessed with the Occupy movement and other activists.

They treated Occupy activists as potential terrorists.

They infiltrated Occupy meetings.

They tracked Occupy activists online.

They kept an eye on the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he visited an Occupy protest in Phoenix.

They also monitored the protests against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

And they shared information and coordinated planning with some of the very financial institutions that Occupy was protesting.

Based on these documents, I wrote the cover story for the June issue of The Progressive, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, you have to wonder why Homeland Security and law enforcement were focusing so much attention on Occupy and ALEC activists rather than on those who presented a real risk of terrorism in the United States.

Michael Isikoff of NBC News notes that law enforcement in Boston were tracking Occupy protesters at the same time they were not following up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Continue reading at:  http://www.progressive.org/spying-on-occupy-activists

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/food-stamp-cuts_n_3313264.html

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-billions-in-taxes-congressional-panel-says.html?hp&_r=1&

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: May 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday.

The investigation is expected to set up a potentially explosive confrontation between a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, at a public hearing on Tuesday.

Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world.

“Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax offshore tax haven,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that is holding the public hearing Tuesday into Apple’s use of tax havens. “Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.”

Thanks to what lawmakers called “gimmicks” and “schemes,” Apple was able to largely sidestep taxes on tens of billions of dollars it earned outside the United States in recent years. Last year, international operations accounted for 61 percent of Apple’s total revenue.

Investigators have not accused Apple of breaking any laws and the company is hardly the only American multinational to face scrutiny for using complex corporate structures and tax havens to sidestep taxes. In recent months, revelations from European authorities about the tax avoidance strategies used by Google, Starbucks and Amazon have all stirred public anger and spurred several European governments, as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based research organization for the world’s richest countries, to discuss measures to close the loopholes.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-billions-in-taxes-congressional-panel-says.html?hp&_r=1&

See Also:

Business Insider: Rand Paul Blasts His Colleagues, And Says It’s Outrageous That Apple Is Being Harassed About Its Taxes

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/the_real_irs_scandal_targeting_by_class/

For all the outcry about targeting by ideology, IRS has for years unfairly favored a different group: the rich

By David Dayen
Thursday, May 16, 2013

For all the talk of scandal regarding the IRS targeting groups named “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” it’s not hard to draw an additional lesson from the facts of the case — a pattern that follows the well-worn model of the modern political age: Benefits flow to the rich and the well-connected, with pain for the rest.

The Cincinnati incident, which has already cost the job of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller (who was not the commissioner when the scandal occurred – this would be like the State Department reacting to the tragedy at the Libyan consulate by firing a low-level bureaucrat coincidentally named Ben Ghazi), is definitely scandalous in its own right. As the Treasury Inspector General report details, it’s completely inappropriate for the IRS to burden any subset with invasive information requests based merely on keywords or policy positions.

But let’s consider how this played out. The New York Times’ Nick Confessore reported this week that the groups applying for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status and singled out for inspection were primarily small, local conservative (and a few liberal) organizations, who barely spent any money on elections. Meanwhile, groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the liberal Obama-supporting Priorities USA, who did the lion’s share of campaign spending among these types of organizations, not only faced no such examination, but survived multiple efforts by campaign finance reform advocates to get the IRS to revoke their tax-exempt status because of their voluminous political activities.

Why would this be the case? First of all, a 501(c)(4) group need not apply with the IRS to prove its tax-exempt status; it can simply self-declare, avoiding an initial review process. The IRS encourages groups to file applications, but those with the resources to hire a smart tax lawyer know they aren’t required to go through the trouble. Needless to say, most local Tea Party groups didn’t have that kind of professional expertise. So generally speaking, the small fish revealed themselves to the IRS initially, and since Congress requires reviews of every application for tax-exempt status, these groups become the low-hanging fruit, prone to investigation.

Furthermore, Tea Party groups did themselves no favors by filling out the applications in an amateurish manner, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the New York Times and columnist at TaxAnalysts.com David Cay Johnston. “It’s like applying for a mortgage,” Johnston told Salon. “If you write it out wrong, you’re going to get flagged. And there are examples of these groups saying they’re not political and then saying their goal is to influence legislation.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/the_real_irs_scandal_targeting_by_class/

From Common Dreams:   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/21

Soil, that humble brown stuff we call dirt, is part of the answer to saving our future

by Judith Schwartz
Published on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 by Common Dreams

Late last week the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossed the 400 parts per million (ppm) threshold. From a climate standpoint this is alarming, and points to the urgency of shifting away from fossil fuels. However, I also feel that our sole emphasis on CO2 blinds us to other means of addressing climate change—notably by returning carbon to where it belongs, in the soil. For this approach represents not only our greatest opportunity to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, but simultaneously enhances soil fertility and biodiversity, and the land’s ability to retain water.

We get the impression that human interference with climate is a sky thing: those greenhouse gases we keep pumping into the air. But it’s also a ground phenomenon. The flip-side of rising atmospheric CO2 is the loss of carbon in the soil, the main component of soil organic matter. More carbon is stored in soil than in the atmosphere and plants combined. Over time, more CO2 has entered the atmosphere from soil-disturbing agricultural practices than the burning of fossil fuels. Once we understand this, and encourage land management strategies that store carbon as opposed to promoting its oxidation, things look different. This is cause for optimism because while we can’t un-burn fossil fuels (futuristic geoengineering tricks notwithstanding), we can effectively return carbon to the soil.

According to Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University, who speaks widely on the topic, soil-carbon restoration can potentially store about one billion tons of atmospheric carbon per year. This would offset around 8 to 10 percent of total annual CO2 emissions and one-third of annual enrichment of atmospheric carbon that would otherwise stay in the air. Allan Savory, whose TED 2013 talk on greening deserts and reversing climate change has gone viral, stresses the potential of grassland soils for storing carbon. He says applying Holistic Planned Grazing—a land management framework in which livestock are tools for land restoration—on half the world’s grasslands could bring atmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. With estimates of soil carbon losses well into the tens or even hundreds of gigatons, even slightly increasing soil organic carbon would greatly help efforts to mitigate climate change.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/21

From The Dallas Morning News:  http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/xeriscaping-bill-passes-house-preventing-hoas-from-restricting-drought-resistant-landscaping.html/

By Claire Cardona
May17, 2013

The House on Friday approved a bill that would prevent homeowner’s associations from restricting drought-resistant landscaping, also known as xeriscaping.

According to the bill by Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, an association could require a plan for review or approval, but can’t unreasonably deny a landscaping design because it doesn’t fit with the other lawns in the neighborhood.

The bill passed quickly and without debate on a voice vote. It will now go to the governor.

In March, East Dallas resident Burton Knight was told by the Dallas Landmark Commission that the water-saving lawn, which included cactuses, was not historically appropriate for the neighborhood.

“Many Texans want to do their part to conserve water and it’s outrageous some busybodies in HOAs would stand in the way,” said Environment Texas Director Luke Metzger. “This legislation protects the rights of Texans to respond to the drought through smarter use of our limited water supply.”

Complete article at:  http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/xeriscaping-bill-passes-house-preventing-hoas-from-restricting-drought-resistant-landscaping.html/