GOP plan will ultimately raise taxes on 50% of Americans, nonpartisan assessment says

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/senate-gop-tax-plan-to-ultimately-raise-taxes-for-half-of-us-tax-policy-center.html

President Donald Trump on Monday promised a tax overhaul by Christmas, even as a nonpartisan tax analysis group said the Senate package would leave half of taxpayers facing higher levies by 2027.

•••••

Trump spoke as the Tax Policy Center said that while all income groups would see tax reductions, on average, under the Senate bill in 2019, 9 percent of taxpayers would pay higher taxes that year than under current law. By 2027, that proportion would grow to 50 percent, largely because the legislation's personal tax cuts expire in 2026, which Republicans did to curb budget deficits the bill would create.

The policy center, a joint operation of the liberal-leaning Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, found that low-earners would generally get smaller tax breaks than higher-income people.

In 2019, those making less than $25,000 would get an average $50 tax reduction, or 0.3 percent of their after-tax income. Middle-income earners would get average cuts of $850, while people making at least $746,000 would get average cuts of $34,000, or 2.2 percent of income.

The center also said the Senate proposal would generate enough economic growth to produce additional revenue of $169 billion [$169,000,000,000] over a decade. That's far short of closing the near $1.5 trillion [$1,000,000,000,000] in red ink that Congress' nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated the bill would produce over that period.

•••••

Collecting Taxes Is Government Work

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/09/collecting-taxes-is-government-work.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/opinion/collecting-taxes-is-government-work.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

uried in the Senate-passed version of the big highway bill is a provision that would require the Treasury secretary to use private debt collectors to collect unpaid back taxes.

The provision, added to the bill by Republican leaders, is ostensibly intended to help pay for highways. But it’s a bad idea that should be kept out of the House version of the bill and out of any final compromise version.

Private tax collection was tried in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Both times it lost money. It increases the cost of handling complaints and appeals at the Internal Revenue Service, and it is far less efficient than simply increasing the collection budget of the I.R.S.

Worse, it fosters taxpayer abuse. The debts involved are ones that the I.R.S. has not been able to collect, in part because the taxpayers are too hard-pressed to pay up. A private company is probably not going to have better luck unless it uses abusive tactics.

And yet, private tax collection is an idea that keeps resurfacing. Why? One reason is that it would be a cash cow for the four companies likely to win tax-collection contracts...

•••••

How the Rich Are Gaming The Tax Code In Tennessee

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/10/19/1051271/country-music-star-taxes-tennessee/

By Pat Garofalo posted from ThinkProgress Economy on Oct 19, 2012

According to an investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel, wealthy individuals — including corporate CEOs and country music stars — are taking advantage of a loophole in Tennessee law to claims huge tax breaks on their property. This tax provision is meant to help farmers, but instead is helping members of the 1 percent save tens of thousands of dollars on their property taxes every year:

An investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel and The Commercial Appeal found…an impressive roster of wealthy Tennesseans who make their millions elsewhere but use the farmland protection law to escape much of their local property tax bills — from Fortune 500 executives to country music stars. [...]

In Williamson County, the local assessor has enrolled well-known country music stars such as Billy Ray Cyrus, and Naomi and Wynonna Judd in the program, yet public records reveal little about those operations.

Cyrus, for example, receives a $29,000-a-year tax break on a 467-acre, $6.5 million spread with a tree-topped hill near Thompson Station, Tenn., where the “Achy Breaky Heart” star owns a 7,850-square-foot home. Williamson County records show Cyrus, who’s also lived at times in Los Angeles, holds separate farming greenbelts on six of seven parcels that comprise the 467-acre tract. By law, applications for greenbelt are supposed to be filed with the local Register of Deeds. Yet a check of records there revealed applications for just two of the six farming greenbelts, both from 1994, when the singer disclosed that he intended to raise corn, horses and cattle.

Sadly, this is not a phenomenon confined to the Volunteer State. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) took advantage of lax Florida tax laws and some cows to lower his property tax bill. Tom Cruise pulled the same trick with sheep in Colorado, as did Bon Jovi with beehives in New Jersey. Some corporate campuses even qualify as “farms” because they let a few cows graze on the land.

Media Goes Silent as Gas Prices Fall After Obama Crack Down On Oil Speculation

By: Jason Easley May 4, 2012

The media and the Republicans were happy to blame President Obama for the high price of gasoline in March, but they are giving Obama none of the credit for the drop in gas prices today.

It seems like only yesterday that the GOP and their corporate media lackeys were telling us that gas prices would ruin Obama, but they have gone silent as gas prices have fallen since Obama announced his administration’s crackdown on oil speculation.

As recently as last month, Mitt Romney was still blaming President Obama for the price of gas, “He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened to this economy and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch and what’s happened to our schools and what’s happened to our military forces — all these things are his responsibility while he’s president.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner went as far as to claim that gas prices could cost Obama the election, “But if the economy doesn’t get better, I don’t think he’ll win. If people don’t feel better about government-run health care, I don’t think he’ll win. And if gas prices are $5 or $6, he certainly isn’t going to win.”

The media was happy to give the Republicans a free forum and plenty of airtime to use to blame Obama for gas prices, but on April 17 Obama called for a crackdown on oil speculation, “We can’t afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil, creating the perception of a shortage, and driving prices higher, only to flip the oil for a quick profit. We can’t afford the situation where some speculators can reap millions (of dollars in profits), while millions of American families get the short end of the stick. That’s not the way the market should work.”

Since Obama announced his crackdown on oil speculation, gas prices have fallen twelve cents a gallon. The media response to this news has been total silence.

Want To Boycott Koch Brothers' Products While Shopping? There's An App For That Soon

http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/06/18/microsoft-programmer-turned-democrat-politician-plans-anti-koch-brothers-smartphone-app/

Clare O'Connor 6/18/2012

There’s a good chance billionaire industrialists and liberal whipping boys Charles and David Koch are making money off your weekly shopping cart.

If you’ve ever bought Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups, you’ve contributed cash to Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries.

There’s a good chance billionaire industrialists and liberal whipping boys Charles and David Koch are making money off your weekly shopping cart.

If you’ve ever bought Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups, you’ve contributed cash to Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries.

You didn’t know that, did you? Neither did Darcy Burner, a Democrat running for Washington state’s 1st Congressional District seat — but once she learned how many household products are manufactured by the conservative billionaires’ companies, she decided to take action.

“Our democracy has been bought and sold by people like the Kochs,” Burner said, citing the Citizens United ruling that allows tax exempt nonprofits like Americans for Prosperity, founded by David Koch, to donate anonymously in unlimited amounts to candidates and causes. “When I’m out talking to voters, they say they want a way to take action.”

At her recent Netroots Nation keynote address, Burner pitched her plan of action to an audience of progressive bloggers: a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe bar codes to check whether the Kochs, or other right-wing supporters, are behind a product on the shelves.

Harvard computer science grad Burner has some experience with all things tech herself: she spent years as a programmer at Microsoft and Lotus before entering politics. Her 2012 Congressional bid will mark her third attempt to represent a swath of suburban Seattle popular with fellow techies.

She put her expertise to use designing a mock interface for the app (above, right). Now she’s just waiting on the right team to build the back end.

.....

101 People Sentenced To Die Were Later Exonerated

And there must be many more that were never brought to light.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/21/487535/report-101-people-sentenced-to-die-were-later-exonerated/

By Ian Millhiser on May 21, 2012

A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of Michigan and Northwestern law schools, chronicles over 2000 cases where a person convicted of a crime was later exonerated between 1989 and 2012. More than half of these exonerated persons “were cleared since 1995 in 13 ‘group exonerations,’ that occurred after it was discovered that police officers had deliberately framed dozens or hundreds of innocent defendants, mostly for drug and gun crimes.” Perhaps most distressingly, however, 101 of the exonerated individuals were convicted of murder and sentenced to die — nearly all of whom spent years or even decades behind bars before their criminal conviction was eventually overturned.

The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/15/carlos-texas-innocent-man-death

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 May 2012 23.00 EDT

A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices on the US supreme court, made a bold statement. There has not been, he said, "a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred … the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Scalia may have to eat his words. It is now clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit, and his name – Carlos DeLuna – is being shouted from the rooftops of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The august journal has cleared its entire spring edition, doubling its normal size to 436 pages, to carry an extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law school professor and his students.

The book sets out in precise and shocking detail how an innocent man was sent to his death on 8 December 1989, courtesy of the state of Texas. Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, is based on six years of intensive detective work by Professor James Liebman and 12 students.

Starting in 2004, they meticulously chased down every possible lead in the case, interviewing more than 100 witnesses, perusing about 900 pieces of source material and poring over crime scene photographs and legal documents that, when stacked, stand over 10ft high.

What they discovered stunned even Liebman, who, as an expert in America's use of capital punishment, was well versed in its flaws. "It was a house of cards. We found that everything that could go wrong did go wrong," he says.

.....

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn't committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

.....

At the trial, DeLuna's defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police had looked for a "Carlos Hernandez" after his name had been passed to them by DeLuna's lawyers, without success. They had concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication, a "phantom" who simply did not exist. The chief prosecutor said in summing up that Hernandez was a "figment of DeLuna's imagination".

Four years after DeLuna was executed, Liebman decided to look into the DeLuna case as part of a project he was undertaking into the fallibility of the death penalty. He asked a private investigator to spend one day – just one day – looking for signs of the elusive Carlos Hernandez.

By the end of that single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna's arrest and execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.

Liebman's investigator tracked down within a few hours a woman who was related to both the Carloses. She supplied Hernandez's date of birth, which in turn allowed the unlocking of Hernandez's criminal past as the case rapidly unravelled.

.....

Many other glaring discrepancies also stand out in the DeLuna case. He was put on death row largely on the eyewitness testimony of one man, Kevan Baker, who had seen the fight inside the Shamrock and watched the attacker flee the scene.

Yet when Baker was interviewed 20 years later, he said that he hadn't been that sure about the identification as he had trouble telling one Hispanic person apart from another.

Then there was the crime-scene investigation. Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit's blood type.

Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock – a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans – were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

There was no scraping of the victim's fingernails for traces of the attacker's skin. When Liebman and his students studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man's shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez's blood on the floor – yet no effort was made to measure it.

"There it was," says Liebman. "The murderer had left his calling card at the scene, but it was never used."

Even the murder weapon, the knife, was not properly examined, though it was covered in blood and flesh.

Other photographs show Lopez's blood splattered up to three feet high on the walls of the Shamrock counter. Yet when DeLuna's clothes and shoes were tested for traces of blood, not a single microscopic drop was found. The prosecution said it must have been washed away by the rain.

There appeared to have been an unseemly scramble to wrap up the crime scene. Less than two hours after the murder happened, the police chief in charge of the homicide investigation ordered all detectives to quit the Shamrock and allowed its owner to wash it down, sweeping away vital evidence that could have saved a man's life.

The exceptionally lax treatment of evidence continued even beyond the grave. When Liebman asked to see all the stored evidence in the case, so that he could subject it to the DNA testing that was not available to investigators in 1983, he was told that it had all disappeared.

Having lived and breathed this case for so many years, Liebman says the most shocking thing about it was its ordinariness. "This wasn't the trial of OJ Simpson. It was an obscure case, the kind that could involve anybody. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant."

.....

tags: death penalty, miscarriage of justice

Domestic violence as pre-existing condition? 8 states still allow it

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/10/04/76477/domestic-violence-as-pre-existing.html?storylink=MI_emailed

Posted on Sunday, October 4, 2009
Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Eight states and the District of Columbia don't have laws that specifically bar insurance companies from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition to deny health coverage, according to a study from the National Women's Law Center.

The states are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The study by the nonpartisan, nonprofit center focused on individual coverage, not group coverage.

Some of the states, particularly North Carolina, argue that other statutes on their books address the issue.

.....

Murray remembers three years ago when the then-Republican-controlled Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee blocked her effort to impose a federal prohibition on a 10-10 vote. All 10 who voted against her amendment were Republicans.

"Clearly, the insurance industry influenced that vote," Murray charged.

The Republicans who voted against the measure had received nearly $6 million in campaign contributions from insurance companies, health care providers, the pharmaceutical industry and health care product manufacturers in the years leading up the vote, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

The 10 Republican senators included North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson and Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/10/04/76477/domestic-violence-as-pre-existing.html?storylink=MI_emailed#storylink=cpy

.....

Senators Who Voted To Protect Oil Tax Breaks Received $23,582,500 From Big Oil

http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/03/29/454853/senators-who-voted-to-protect-oil-tax-breaks-received-23582500-from-big-oil/

By Rebecca Leber posted from ThinkProgress Green on Mar 29, 2012 at 8:00 pm

In a 51-47 vote, 43 Senate Republicans and four Democrats filibustered to protect $24 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil. Although a majority voted for Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) bill, it fell short of the 60 needed. The only two Republicans to break rank were Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

A Think Progress Green analysis shows how oil and gas companies have funneled cash to the same senators who protected its handouts:

– The 47 senators voting against the bill have received $23,582,500 in career contributions from oil and gas. The 51 senators voting to repeal oil tax breaks have received $5,873,600.

– The senators who voted for Big Oil’s handouts received on average over four times as much career oil cash as those who voted to end them.

– Overall, Senate Republicans have taken $23.2 million in oil and gas contributions. Democrats received $6.66 million.

– Since 2011, Senate Republicans have voted seven times for pro-Big Oil interests and against clean energy three times.

Democrats who joined the Republicans in defeating the bill include Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Jim Webb (D-VA). Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) broke ranks and voted to cut the tax breaks. Two senators, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) didn’t vote.

Republicans have taken an overwhelming 88 percent of oil and gas contributions this election cycle. While showering politicans with cash, the oil industry also spent over $146,000,000 on lobbying last year.

[...]

tags: corruption
..

Clarence Thomas’ brand of justice

The prosecutor should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice, and given a lengthy prison term.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/clarence_thomas_brand_of_justi034689.php

January 11, 2012 12:35 PM
By Steve Benen

n 1995, a group of men burst into a New Orleans home in search of money and drugs. They ordered those inside to lie down and then opened fire, killing five innocent people. One man, Larry Boatner, survived the violence and identified Juan Smith as one of the assailants.

Boatner’s testimony was the only evidence presented at trial, and it proved persuasive enough to convince a jury. Juan Smith was convicted of murder.

There was, however, a problem. The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office decided to hide relevant information from both Smith’s lawyers and the jury: mere hours after the slayings, Boatner told police he could only describe the gunmen as black men, and five days later, Boatner said he never saw the intruders’ faces.

Smith’s conviction was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the conviction yesterday in an 8-1 ruling. The court majority found that the relevant evidence obviously needed to be shared with the defendant’s attorney as part of the discovery process. The question before the court was whether the disclosure of the evidence would have affected the outcome of the trial, and eight of the nine justices endorsed common sense and said it would.

As Adam Liptak reported, Clarence Thomas disagreed.

Justice Thomas’s dissent, at 19 pages, was almost five times as long as the majority opinion. “The question presented here is not whether a prudent prosecutor should have disclosed the information that Smith identifies,” Justice Thomas wrote.

Rather, he wrote, the question was whether Mr. Smith had not shown a reasonable probability that the jury would have reached a different conclusion had it known of the undisclosed statements. Justice Thomas said a careful review of the balance of the evidence demonstrated that nothing would have changed.

Has Thomas never heard of “reasonable doubt”? Prosecutors had no fingerprints, no weapon, no DNA, and no physical evidence of any kind. They had one witness, who said he never saw the faces of the murderers.

A Supreme Court justice believes a jury wouldn’t have cared about these details at all?
..

Wrongly convicted of murder, man is rebuilding his life in New Orleans

A very common thread in cases of wrongful conviction - police and prosecutors hiding evidence of innocence.

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/12/wrongly_convicted_of_murder_ma.html

Published: Sunday, December 25, 2011, 7:00 AM Updated: Sunday, December 25, 2011, 8:59 AM
By Jake Clapp, The Times-Picayune

In the past, when Greg Bright bought a vehicle, he took size into consideration. "I always went for bigger cars," Bright said. "Just because I wasn't sure if I would have to sleep in it at some point."

Now at 56, Bright is looking for a house in his native New Orleans. It will be his first permanent home in the eight years since being released from Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he and his co-defendant, Earl Truvia, spent 27 years for a murder they did not commit.

Bright and Truvia, 53, recently were awarded $190,000 each by the state under a Louisiana law that grants compensation to those wrongfully convicted. The compensation -- $150,000 in standard compensation and $40,000 in loss of life claims -- came after a four-year struggle with the state that ended in May.

"The compensation was much needed, to pay bills, debts, things I needed," Bright said. "But I've been frugal. I know that amount of money can go quickly if I don't use it wisely."

Bright and Truvia were given mandatory life sentences on July 29, 1976, for the second-degree murder of 15-year-old Eliot Porter. Porter's body was found underneath a building in New Orleans' Calliope public housing complex on Oct. 31, 1975. He had been shot twice in the head.

The two men were arrested at their homes on Nov. 15 after a witness claimed to have seen Bright and Truvia with Porter on the night of the killing, although there was no witness to the actual shooting. Bright said he had did not know the victim, the witness, nor his co-defendant beyond seeing them in the neighborhood.

The prosecution's case centered on the testimony of the single witness, while Bright and Truvia's defense never called witnesses that could have provided both men with alibis. The jury deliberated just 12 minutes before reaching a guilty verdict.

In the years after, Bright and Truvia tried to piece together a case for their innocence, but ran into a sea of red tape, until the Innocence Project New Orleans took their cases in 2001.

It came out that the original witness was unreliable and further evidence was not presented to the jury, including a coroner's report that placed the time of Porter's death significantly later than the time the witness heard gunshots. And there was an undisclosed police report that indicated two other likely suspects.

In February 2003, the Innocence Project helped Bright and Truvia present their cases and their convictions were overturned. The men walked out of prison free men on June 24, 2003. But the better part of their lives were lost and they were without money or jobs.


[...]

..

Activists Fight Back With ‘Occucopter’ Drone

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/citizens_fight_back_with_occucopter_drone_20111221/?ln

Posted on Dec 21, 2011

The worldwide uprisings of 2011 have seen ordinary people use surveillance and communication technology to protect themselves against oppressive governments. Now, New York City’s Occupiers are taking such tactics to the skies with the “occucopter,” a lightweight, camera-mounted helicopter that can be controlled with an iPhone.

OWS activist Tim Pool brought the technology to the movement. He’s modified the recording software to make it livestream ready and is busy making further adjustments that would enable multiple long distance operators to take control of the device in the event authorities shut down any number of them.

[...]

He told us that the reason he is doing this “comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have. It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident.”

[...]

..

Cops Invade Occupy Boston To Seize Its Sink

If the Boston police don't have anything better to do with their time, are there too many of them?

http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/12/01/380357/cops-invade-occupy-boston-to-steal-its-sink/

By Brad Johnson on Dec 1, 2011 at 10:19 pm

This evening, riot police invaded the Occupy Boston encampment to seize the protestors’ kitchen sink. The action, which led to the arrest of three protesters and a police officer accidentally stepping on a college-age female protester, was in evident violation of the restraining order that forbids the seizure of personal belongings extended today by Suffolk Superior Court Frances McIntyre.

Police seized the newly donated graywater sink and tossed it into the back of a police wagon, as other police with flex cuffs blocked occupiers. Dozens of motorcycle police arrived. A brief skirmish ensued as some protesters linked arms to block the wagon from leaving. In the ensuing sink seizure chaos, occupier Suzi Pietroluongo was stepped on by a police officer. When the police wagon sped off, the back doors were open and the sink was hanging out.

[...]

..

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/occupy-wall-street-un-envoy_n_1125860.html

December 2, 2011
Dan Froomkin

The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."

"If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued.

[...]

"One of the principles is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don't work anyway, he said. In Occupy's case, he said, "disbanding them by force won't change that attitude of indignation."

[...]

"We're seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.

"The demonstrations are treated as if they're presumptively criminal," she said. "Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene."

[...]

Using the same lens placed on the Occupy movement to look at, say, the protest in Egypt, Verheyden-Hilliard said, observers would have focused on such issues as "Did the people in Tahrir Square have a permit?"

La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," he said. That's especially the case when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."

"In this case, the demonstrations are going to the center of the issue," he said. "These demonstrations are exactly challenging the basis of the debate."

Indeed, commentators such as Robert Scheer have argued that the Occupy movement's citizen action has a particular justification, based on the government's abject failure to hold banks accountable.

La Rue said he sees parallels between Occupy and the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests. In both cases, for instance, "you have high level of education for young people, but no opportunities."

[...]


..

Police bar reporters from covering Occupy protest

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/12/4378810/reporters-covering-occupy-wall-street-protest-outside-obama-fund-rai

By Joe Pompeo
8:43 am Dec. 1, 2011

Reporters told Capital last night that New York Police Department officers turned them away when they tried to report on an Occupy Wall Street protest outside of a Midtown fund-raiser for President Barack Obama, despite a memo the police commissioner sent to the rank and file last week reminding officers of standard procedure for allowing journalists to cross police lines.

Last month, 13 media organizations sent a letter to the NYPD's deputy commissioner for public information, Paul Browne, accusing police of being "more hostile to the press than [during] any other event in recent memory" in the wake of the police action that cleared Zuccotti Park of protesters Nov. 15. The letter contained detailed accounts of police arresting and in some cases allegedly roughing up journalists during the demonstrations.

After a Nov. 23 meeting between representatives of several of those news outlets and NYPD brass, Police Comissioner Ray Kelly sent a memo last week to officers "ordering them," as the Associated Press put it, "not to unreasonably interfere with media access during news coverage and warning those who do will be subject to disciplinary action."

Meg Robertson, who works for MSNBC, said unreasonable interference is exactly what she found when she sought to cover the protest near the corner of 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, where demonstrators had been corraled into a "free-speech zone," demarcated by police barricades, near the Obama event.

"I identified myself to a number of NYPD as a member of the press and they would not let me close to the penned in area," she wrote to Capital in an email account of the events last night.

[...]

When Josh Harkinson, a New York-based staff writer for Mother Jones, showed up around 9:30 and identified himself to police as a journalist, he was told to leave the area, he said.

Later, he was able to sneak past police and gain access to the protesters along with another journalist, Andrew Katz, who reports for The Brooklyn Ink, a local website produced by Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

Harkinson said he again identified himself as a journalist and started interviewing protesters from a spot in front of the barricade. That's when an officer grabbed him and physically escorted him away from the scene, he said.

"It wasn't violent, but he pushed me out," Harkinson said.

Katz was standing nearby.

"One officer actually said I could go into the kettle where the protesters were, but [another] officer grabbed my arm, and then [Harkinson], and said we had to leave the area," Katz told Capital when we reached him shortly after the confrontation.

"Three officers," Katz continued, "including a female officer who gripped her arm around my hip, escorted us a block down to 52nd Street behind a set of barricades. As that was happening, Josh was filming and we both took turns asking the officers why this was happening. They barely spoke but the female officer kept saying she already answered my questions before, which she did not."

[...]

..

Pepper-Spray Creator Decries Use of Chemical Agent on Peaceful Occupy Wall Street Protesters

www.democracynow.org - Democracy Now! speaks with Kamran Loghman, the expert who developed weapons-grade pepper-spray, who says he was shocked at how police have used the chemical agent on non-violent Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide -- including students at University of California, Davis, female protesters in New York City, and an 84-year old activist in Seattle. "I saw it and the first thing that came to my mind wasn't police or students, it was my own children sitting down having an opinion and they're being shot and forced by chemical agents," says Loghman, who in the 1980s helped the FBI develop weapons-grade pepper -spray, and collaborated with police departments to develop guidelines for its use. "The use was just absolutely out of the ordinary and it was not in accordance with any training or policy of any department that I know of. I personally certified 4,000 police officers in the early '80s and '90s and I have never seen this before. That's why I was shocked... I feel is my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for."


tags: police brutality
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Grandfather injured, arrested in Walmart brawl

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/25/justice/arizona-walmart-arrest/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

By Greg Botelho, CNN
updated 12:34 AM EST, Sat November 26, 2011

An Arizona man lay handcuffed and non-responsive on the floor of a Walmart on Black Friday, as his emotional grandson stood nearby.

Jerald Newman, 54, spent Friday night in a Maricopa County jail hours after being arrested for allegedly resisting arrest and shoplifting, according to the county sheriff's department.

But the suspect's family members, as well as at least one witness, said the man is innocent and that the treatment was unnecessary.

Newman's daughter said that she, her father and other family members were in the packed Buckeye, Arizona, store soon after it opened late Thursday night.

"They were just letting people in; there was nowhere to walk," Berneta Sanchez told CNN. "And teenagers and adults were fighting for these games, taking them away from little kids and away from my father."

The grandson, Nicholas Nava, told CNN affiliate KNXV that Newman had grabbed one video game and put it under his shirt so that others jostling for the game didn't take it from him. One person alerted a police officer, who then approached Newman.

David Chadd, a CNN iReporter from Las Vegas, was among those shopping for video games set up in the Walmart's grocery section in a mass of people. He said Newman "was not resisting" arrest as he was led away from the crowd by a police officer.

The officer, Chadd said, then suddenly hooked the suspect around the leg, grabbed him and "slammed him face first into the ground."

"It was like a bowling ball hitting the ground, that's how bad it was," he said.

That was around when Sanchez said she heard of the altercation from across the store and ran toward her father.

"I was fuming," she recalled upon seeing her father on the floor. "They wouldn't let me near him at all, they were telling me to stay back."

Video, recorded by Chadd and later posted on CNN's iReport, shows an apparently unconscious Newman head-down on the floor in a pool of blood. As he's turned over, Buckeye police officers appear to attempt to revive him -- at which point his face, covered mostly in blood, is revealed.

Several voices, apparently those of fellow shoppers, are heard saying, "Why would you throw him down so hard? All he did was shoplifting and you threw him down like that?" Another person says, "They threw him down. He wasn't doing anything wrong."

Two citizens then appear to come to Newman's aid by applying paper towels to the man's nose. Chadd estimated that Newman was knocked out for about 10 minutes, all the while gushing blood and handcuffed.

[...]

Members of the Buckeye Police Department did not immediately respond to CNN calls Friday for comment. Assistant Chief Larry Hall told KNXV that Newman struggled after getting hurt, saying he was aggressive and escalated the situation.

[Wouldn't it be unnatural not to struggle if we were being hurt?]

[...]

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Everything You Need To Know About How Painful Pepper Spray Is In One Simple Graphic

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/11/23/everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-painful-pepper-spray-is-in-one-simple-graphic/

November 23, 2011

A Scoville Heat Unit is used to measure the chemical “heat” produced by a pepper when it comes into contact with the human body, particularly the eyes, mouth or nose. Most people gag on jalapenos which only have a maximum rating of 8000. Habaneros cause people to break down and weep and they have a maximum of 350,000. The weak pepper spray available to the public starts at two million Scovilles while the heavy duty stuff used by the police tops out at 5.3 million Scovilles. Yeah, you read that correctly. 5,300,000. And they sprayed this stuff down peoples’ throats that were doing nothing more than sitting on the ground. Welcome to America, Home of the Free*

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Rocrast Mack Murder At Alabama Prison Followed Trail Of Violence By Guards

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/rocrast-mack-murder-alabama-prison-brutality_n_1107687.html

First Posted: 11/22/11 05:11 PM ET Updated: 11/22/11 06:45 PM ET

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Late on the night of August 4, 2010, a badly beaten young man arrived at the trauma ward of Jackson Hospital here. Although the patient was hardly a flight risk, security was tight and prison guards crowded into the emergency room as doctors began treatment.

The patient's limp body spoke to the savagery of an assault that had left deep contusions on his legs and torso, and inflamed knots bulging from his head and face. He was unresponsive, with fixed and dilated pupils, and doctors quickly diagnosed a traumatic brain injury. Only a ventilator kept him alive. He never regained consciousness and died the next day.

His name was Rocrast Mack. An Alabama prison inmate, his death at age 24 came at the hands of six corrections officers, who took turns battering him with their fists, feet and batons in retribution for a minor altercation with a female guard earlier that night, according to witness accounts and prison records.

Civil rights advocates call Mack's death an avoidable tragedy, the inevitable product of a profoundly dysfunctional state corrections system in Alabama that ranks among the very worst America has to offer.

It is a system flooded with low-level drug offenders like Mack, who was sentenced to 20 years behind bars after pleading guilty to selling $10 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover cop in 2009.

Alabama is also emblematic of a broader problem facing America's prison system: In many states, there simply isn't enough room to hold all of the people who are incarcerated. Against that tableau, inmates often born and bred in hard luck circumstances now find themselves mired in a loop of violence that extends from the street and into prisons themselves.

Yet even in a nation that has little to boast about in terms of prison efficiency and quality, Alabama stands out for what appears to be the sheer brutality and freewheeling nature of its corrections system.

Starved of funds, the state's aging prisons suffer from the worst overcrowding in the nation, operating at an average of 190 percent of their design capacity. Ventress Correctional Facility, where Mack died, is an outlier even by this standard. Built in 1990 and designed to accommodate just 650 men, the facility now holds 1,665 prisoners -- more than 255 percent of its capacity.

Alabama has not ignored Mack's death. Last month, more than a year after it occurred, the Alabama attorney general charged the ranking officer at the scene, Lt. Michael A. Smith, with intentional murder for the beating.

The charge, which could put Smith behind bars for life, is unusual. Even when excessive force is alleged after an inmate death, prosecutors rarely bring charges above manslaughter or negligent homicide, according to Gene Atherton, a former prison administrator and consultant on use of force in prisons and jails.

Federal prosecutors have also taken action. On Nov. 18, the Justice Department said a junior officer involved in the assault, Scottie T. Glenn, had pleaded guilty to two felonies: violating Mack's civil rights and conspiring with fellow officers to cover up the assault.

Civil rights advocates welcome the charges, but say they don't go nearly far enough. What is truly needed, they say, is widescale reform to alleviate brutally harsh conditions that foster violence by inmates and guards.

"What happened with Mr. Mack is almost predictable," said Charlotte Morrison, a senior staff attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, a prisoner legal assistance group based in Montgomery.

[...]

"We've seen a dramatic increase in the number of complaints coming into our office concerning guard-on-inmate assaults," said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of EJI. "Physical assaults of inmates by guards have become an accepted part of the culture in a lot of Alabama prisons."

Facilitating the abuse are outdated standards for monitoring guard and inmate interactions -- video cameras, common in most state and federal prison systems, are rare in Alabama, for instance -- and follow-up investigations after assaults that are haphazard at best, critics say.

Such shortcomings in oversight allow problem officers to operate without consequences until they inflict a catastrophic injury on a prisoner, as in the case of Mack, according to Sarah Geraghty, senior staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta civil liberties group that works extensively in Alabama's prisons.

"The department has been on notice a long time that they have a serious problem with how they investigate reports of brutality," she said. "Their approach has been to bury their heads in the sand."

[...]

Allegations of widespread inmate abuse at the prison are further bolstered by a sworn statement made by Paul T. Costello, a Ventress guard, filed in late October in U.S. District Court in Montgomery in response to an inmate lawsuit.

The document indicates that in July 2009, a group of Ventress guards, including two senior officers, witnessed Smith's violent assault on an inmate, then falsified internal reports and perjured themselves in federal court by denying their involvement in the incident.

[...]

In at least once instance, he found, the violence had had fatal consequences. In 2005, guards at Donaldson beat a mentally ill prisoner to death, in an incident with clear parallels to the killing of Rocrast Mack.

The inmate, Charles Agee, 40, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was repeatedly struck in the head with batons and punched in the stomach by several officers after he swung a plastic chair at a guard, causing him to stumble and sprain his ankle, internal prison reports show. Carried bloody and unconscious to a medical station, Agee was thrown forcefully into a chair, causing him to pitch forward and strike his head on a wall, a prison nurse later testified.

He went into a seizure and died a few minutes later. A coroner ruled the death a homicide after an autopsy found four broken ribs, a punctured lung and a lacerated spleen, and determined he died of massive internal bleeding. But no criminal charges were ever filed, and the officers involved kept their jobs, court records reveal.

In 2009, the state settled a civil rights lawsuit filed by Agee's family for an undisclosed sum and without admitting wrongdoing.

Yet despite the class-action suit's allegations of widespread guard-on-inmate violence, the Alabama Correctional Organization, a professional association representing hundreds of Alabama prison guards, including 25 Donaldson officers, filed a highly unusual brief in support of the prisoners' case. (Alabama corrections officers are not represented by a union.)

"Without intervention and relief, a number of prisons in the system, including Donaldson, can appropriately be characterized as a ticking time bomb," Lloyd Wallace, the group's president, and a captain at a nearby maximum-security prison, wrote in the brief.

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The cop group coordinating the Occupy crackdowns

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/11/18/cop-group-coordinating-occupy-crackdowns

11.18.11 - 11:23 am | Shawn Gaynor

As cities across America evict encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement, similarities of timing, talking points and tactics among major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs have led critics to wonder: Is some sort of national coordination going on?

The White House says there’s no federal oversight. Speaking November 15 aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said “The president’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues.”

But a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events.

Speaking to Democracy Now! On November 17, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler acknowledged PERF's coordination of a series of conference-call strategy sessions with big-city police chiefs. These calls were distinct from the widely reported national conference calls of major metropolitan mayors.

The coordination of political crackdowns on the Occupy movement has been conducted behind closed doors, with city officials and PERF refusing to say how many cities participated in the conference calls and the exact nature of the discussions. Reports of at least a dozen cities and some indication of as many as 40 accepting PERF advice and/or strategic documents include San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Portland, Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington DC.

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