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American • Re: An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To
IRS Employees Disproportionately Donate to Obama
Statistics reveal an imbalance in a nominally nonpartisan agency. By Andrew Stiles
Andrew Stiles President Barack Obama received more than twice as much in campaign donations from IRS employees in 2012 as did his opponent, Mitt Romney, records show.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which maintains an online database of political contributions, individuals listing their employer as “IRS” or “Internal Revenue Service” donated a total of $48,827 to Obama in 2012 and gave just $20,361 to Romney. That disparity is mild compared with that of 2008, when IRS employees donated $59,959 to Obama, and just $1,950 to his challenger John McCain.
Slightly over 100 IRS employees donated to Obama in 2012, while only 25 contributed to Romney, according to the database, and most contributed less than $1,000. At least one of the IRS employees who donated to Obama in 2012 — Kim Kitchens — appears to have worked in the agency’s Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements office in Cincinnati, Ohio, as of October 2012, according to IRS documents.
AdvertisementThe IRS is under fire this week after a report by the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that agency employees engaged in “inappropriate targeting” of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. Groups had their applications significantly delayed, for years in some cases, and were asked to answer dozens of invasive questions. USA Today reported that even as tea-party groups had their applications delayed for more than two years, similar liberal organizations were swiftly approved for tax-exempt status.
Although IRS officials initially said the wrongdoing was limited to a few “front-line people” in the Cincinnati office, subsequent reports reveal that IRS offices in California and Washington, D.C., were also involved. Senior officials, including acting commissioner Steven Miller, were aware of the targeting as early as May 2012. A number of Republican lawmakers have called on Miller to resign; he is sure to face contentious questioning on Friday when he testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee.
With only two politically appointed employees, the IRS is nominally one of the least partisan bodies in the federal government. In statement released last week, the IRS acknowledged that “mistakes were made” but denied that “any political or partisan rationale” was involved.
President Obama on Tuesday called the behavior revealed in the Treasury inspector general’s report “intolerable and inexcusable” and promised to “hold those responsible for these failures accountable.” However, White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to say Wednesday whether any IRS employees should be fired. “I’m not going to get into specifics about what outcomes should happen here,” he told reporters.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/3 … nate-obama
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed May 15, 2013 5:38 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
American • An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To Pun
An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To Punish Obama’s Political Enemies?
By Michael, on May 15th, 2013
Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving "extra scrutiny" to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear – if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that could actually bring down the presidency of Barack Obama. That is how serious this is. As you will read about below, there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that political enemies of Barack Obama have been singled out for IRS audits. We need to find out who initiated these audits. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, this kind of abuse of government power should sicken and horrify you. If it can be proven that Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to attack his enemies, every single U.S. citizen should be calling for him to resign. This is something that is beyond politics – this is a direct threat to the very integrity of our system.
The recent revelation that the IRS has been specifically targeting patriot groups and Tea Party organizations for "extra scrutiny" has opened up the floodgates. In recent days, a large number of highly respected people have come forward claiming that they were the subject of IRS audits that were politically motivated.
For example, Larry Conners, a respected local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, Missouri says that he was hit with an IRS audit almost immediately after he conducted an interview with Barack Obama in April 2012…
Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS.
I don’t accept "conspiracy theories", but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.
At the time, I dismissed the "co-incidence", but now, I have concerns … after revelations about the IRS targeting various groups and their members.
Originally, the IRS apologized for red-flagging conservative groups and their members if they had "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their name.
Today, there are allegations that the IRS focused on various groups and/or individuals questioning or criticizing government spending, taxes, debt or how the government is run … any involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, or social economic reform/movement.
In that April 2012 interview, I questioned President Obama on several topics: the Buffet Rule, his public remarks about the Supreme Court before the ruling on the Affordable Care Act. I also asked why he wasn’t doing more to help Sen. Claire McCaskill who at that time was expected to lose. The Obama interview caught fire and got wide-spread attention because I questioned his spending.
I said some viewers expressed concern, saying they think he’s "out of touch" because of his personal and family trips in the midst of our economic crisis.
The President’s face clearly showed his anger; afterwards, his staff which had been so polite … suddenly went cold.
That’s to be expected, and I can deal with that just as I did with President George H. Bush’s staff when he didn’t like my questions.
Journalistic integrity is of the utmost importance to me. My job is to ask the hard questions, because I believe viewers have a right to be well-informed. I cannot and will not promote anyone’s agenda – political or otherwise – at the expense of the reporting the truth.
What I don’t like to even consider … is that because of the Obama interview … the IRS put a target on me.
Can I prove it? At this time, no.
But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.
Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Reverend Billy Graham, recently wrote a letter to Barack Obama claiming that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse were both hit with IRS audits very shortly after they ran full-page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment. In fact, both organizations were notified about the audits on the same day. The following is from a recent article posted on redstate.com…
The man known as America’s pastor was among those targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ran newspaper advertisements promoting traditional marriage and biblical values.
“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the Administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” wrote Franklin Graham in a letter to President Obama. “This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.’”
Graham is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as well as the international charity Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations received word of audits on the same day – not long after they ran full –page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment.
The ads encouraged voters to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.”
The ad concluded with the words, “Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me (Billy Graham) that America will remain one nation under God.”
Graham said on Sept. 6, 2012 they received notification that the IRS would audit their taxes.
“In light of what the IRS admitted to on Friday, May 10, 2013, and subsequent revelations from other sources, I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence – or justifiable,” Graham wrote.
You can find a full copy of Franklin Graham’s letter to Barack Obama right here.
The Blaze is reporting on another example of this phenomenon. A respected Catholic professor that had written things critical of the Obama administration was hit with an IRS audit that she believes was politically motivated…
On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told The Blaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.
According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her and “what their politics were.”
It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July.
Unfortunately, these are not just isolated incidents. In fact, attorney Cleta Mitchell recently told Newsmax that she has seen a systematic pattern of politically motivated IRS harassment that only began once Barack Obama entered the White House…
In the case of one such client, she and her family subsequently became targets for audits to their personal and business tax returns, and were even visited by three different government agencies. She also knows of other groups who had surprise visits from the FBI after they applied for IRS status.
Mitchell said she doesn’t believe the president or the White House was uninvolved in the IRS activities, as the administration has claimed.
"I’ve thought for some time that this is politically motivated and that’s the reason it was happening. And, as I said, I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this until 2009, 2010. And the only thing that changed was we had a different administration," she said.
There are some that have been trying to bring awareness to these politically motivated audits for quite some time. One of these individuals is a former classmate of Obama’s named Wayne Allyn Root…
“I feel like a million bucks. I feel absolutely vindicated. I knew this was going on,” Wayne Allyn Root told WND.
Root, the Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 2008 who has claimed Obama was strangely unknown to him and his fellow Columbia University classmates, recounted his story to WND last October of becoming the target of unusual audits, beginning in January 2011, despite a “spotless” 30-year tax record.
He charged in October that the order to audit him came from Obama himself, and he is even more convinced now.
“I believe this is not rogue agents, who would be risking their pension and careers,” he said.
In October, Root said the order to audit him “must have come from the highest levels of government.”
“Obama is using the power of the IRS and other government agencies to punish his political opposition and intimidate and silence his critics,” Root charged at the time.
In that same article, a number of other examples of this phenomenon were cited…
Last year, billionaire Frank VanderSloot became the target of investigations by both the IRS and the Labor Department after he gave $1 million to a super PAC that supported Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The GOP’s biggest donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said a federal criminal investigation into his company’s business practices was politically motivated. Another casino giant, Steve Wynn, also has been investigated.
This week, Root has received many emails from people who identify as conservative and believe the IRS has been harassing them for political reasons.
What happened to businessman Frank VanderSloot is particularly noteworthy. The following is from an article that Rob Bluey authored last year…
On April 20, President Obama’s campaign named VanderSloot to the first presidential “enemies list” since the Nixon era. Eight private citizens were singled out for their donations to Romney. They committed no crimes, sought no attention, and yet they became the subject of Obama’s scorn.
VanderSloot is now facing persecution from the federal government. Kimberly Strassel reveals in The Wall Street Journal that two federal agencies — the Internal Revenue Service and Labor Department — both launched investigations of VanderSloot after his name appeared on Obama’s enemies list.
No matter what you think of Obama’s politics, shouldn’t we all be deeply alarmed that he has an "enemies list"?
With each passing day, the similarities between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon become more glaring.
And Obama has even joked about sending the IRS after people that he does not like. When Obama found out that he was not going to be receiving an honorary doctorate from Arizona State University, he made the following statement…
"President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."
The IRS is not supposed to be used as a weapon, and the White House is not allowed to use information gathered by the IRS for political gain either. But apparently last year someone at the IRS was leaking tax information to someone within the Obama campaign. The following is from a recent article by 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.”
The IRS has been doing all sorts of things that they should not be doing. They are a rogue agency that is completely out of control.
In fact, one new lawsuit alleges that the IRS stole the health records of approximately 10 million Americans…
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. "This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents," the complaint reads. "No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records," it continued.
And guess what?
The IRS is going to be the primary government agency in charge of implementing Obamacare.
Will we soon see the IRS use health information to attack the political enemies of the man or woman sitting in the White House?
Unfortunately, thanks to new "Big Brother" technology that the IRS has been implementing, pretty soon there will be very little about us that the IRS does not know. The following is from a recent article by Richard Satran of U.S. News & World Report…
Consumers are already familiar with Internet "cookies" that track their movements and send them targeted ads that follow them to different websites. The IRS has brought in private industry experts to employ similar digital tracking—but with the added advantage of access to Social Security numbers, health records, credit card transactions and many other privileged forms of information that marketers don’t see.
"Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are," boasted Dean Silverman, the agency’s high-tech top gun who heads a group recruited from the private sector to update the IRS, in a comment reported in trade publications.
So what is the IRS going to do with all of this information?
Well, the following are just a few of the things that they have already said that they plan to do with it…
• Charting and analyzing social media such as Facebook
• Targeting audits by matching tax filings to social media or electronic payments
• Tracking individual Internet addresses and emailing patterns
• Sorting data in 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique "attributes"
• Machine learning across "neural" networks
• Statistical and agent-based modeling
• Relationship analysis based on Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers
So are you alarmed by all of this?
You should be.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … al-enemies
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed May 15, 2013 5:08 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To Punish Obama’s Political Enemies?
Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving “extra scrutiny” to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear – if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that could actually bring down the presidency of Barack Obama. That is how serious this is. As you will read about below, there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that political enemies of Barack Obama have been singled out for IRS audits. We need to find out who initiated these audits. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, this kind of abuse of government power should sicken and horrify you. If it can be proven that Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to attack his enemies, every single U.S. citizen should be calling for him to resign. This is something that is beyond politics – this is a direct threat to the very integrity of our system.
The recent revelation that the IRS has been specifically targeting patriot groups and Tea Party organizations for “extra scrutiny” has opened up the floodgates. In recent days, a large number of highly respected people have come forward claiming that they were the subject of IRS audits that were politically motivated.
For example, Larry Conners, a respected local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, Missouri says that he was hit with an IRS audit almost immediately after he conducted an interview with Barack Obama in April 2012…
Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS.
I don’t accept “conspiracy theories”, but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.
At the time, I dismissed the “co-incidence”, but now, I have concerns … after revelations about the IRS targeting various groups and their members.
Originally, the IRS apologized for red-flagging conservative groups and their members if they had “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name.
Today, there are allegations that the IRS focused on various groups and/or individuals questioning or criticizing government spending, taxes, debt or how the government is run … any involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, or social economic reform/movement.
In that April 2012 interview, I questioned President Obama on several topics: the Buffet Rule, his public remarks about the Supreme Court before the ruling on the Affordable Care Act. I also asked why he wasn’t doing more to help Sen. Claire McCaskill who at that time was expected to lose. The Obama interview caught fire and got wide-spread attention because I questioned his spending.
I said some viewers expressed concern, saying they think he’s “out of touch” because of his personal and family trips in the midst of our economic crisis.
The President’s face clearly showed his anger; afterwards, his staff which had been so polite … suddenly went cold.
That’s to be expected, and I can deal with that just as I did with President George H. Bush’s staff when he didn’t like my questions.
Journalistic integrity is of the utmost importance to me. My job is to ask the hard questions, because I believe viewers have a right to be well-informed. I cannot and will not promote anyone’s agenda – political or otherwise – at the expense of the reporting the truth.
What I don’t like to even consider … is that because of the Obama interview … the IRS put a target on me.
Can I prove it? At this time, no.
But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.
Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Reverend Billy Graham, recently wrote a letter to Barack Obama claiming that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse were both hit with IRS audits very shortly after they ran full-page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment. In fact, both organizations were notified about the audits on the same day. The following is from a recent article posted on redstate.com…
The man known as America’s pastor was among those targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ran newspaper advertisements promoting traditional marriage and biblical values.
“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the Administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” wrote Franklin Graham in a letter to President Obama. “This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.’”
Graham is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as well as the international charity Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations received word of audits on the same day – not long after they ran full –page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment.
The ads encouraged voters to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.”
The ad concluded with the words, “Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me (Billy Graham) that America will remain one nation under God.”
Graham said on Sept. 6, 2012 they received notification that the IRS would audit their taxes.
“In light of what the IRS admitted to on Friday, May 10, 2013, and subsequent revelations from other sources, I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence – or justifiable,” Graham wrote.
You can find a full copy of Franklin Graham’s letter to Barack Obama right here.
The Blaze is reporting on another example of this phenomenon. A respected Catholic professor that had written things critical of the Obama administration was hit with an IRS audit that she believes was politically motivated…
On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told The Blaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.
According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her and “what their politics were.”
It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July.
Unfortunately, these are not just isolated incidents. In fact, attorney Cleta Mitchell recently told Newsmax that she has seen a systematic pattern of politically motivated IRS harassment that only began once Barack Obama entered the White House…
In the case of one such client, she and her family subsequently became targets for audits to their personal and business tax returns, and were even visited by three different government agencies. She also knows of other groups who had surprise visits from the FBI after they applied for IRS status.
Mitchell said she doesn’t believe the president or the White House was uninvolved in the IRS activities, as the administration has claimed.
“I’ve thought for some time that this is politically motivated and that’s the reason it was happening. And, as I said, I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this until 2009, 2010. And the only thing that changed was we had a different administration,” she said.
There are some that have been trying to bring awareness to these politically motivated audits for quite some time. One of these individuals is a former classmate of Obama’s named Wayne Allyn Root…
“I feel like a million bucks. I feel absolutely vindicated. I knew this was going on,” Wayne Allyn Root told WND.
Root, the Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 2008 who has claimed Obama was strangely unknown to him and his fellow Columbia University classmates, recounted his story to WND last October of becoming the target of unusual audits, beginning in January 2011, despite a “spotless” 30-year tax record.
He charged in October that the order to audit him came from Obama himself, and he is even more convinced now.
“I believe this is not rogue agents, who would be risking their pension and careers,” he said.
In October, Root said the order to audit him “must have come from the highest levels of government.”
“Obama is using the power of the IRS and other government agencies to punish his political opposition and intimidate and silence his critics,” Root charged at the time.
In that same article, a number of other examples of this phenomenon were cited…
Last year, billionaire Frank VanderSloot became the target of investigations by both the IRS and the Labor Department after he gave $1 million to a super PAC that supported Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The GOP’s biggest donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said a federal criminal investigation into his company’s business practices was politically motivated. Another casino giant, Steve Wynn, also has been investigated.
This week, Root has received many emails from people who identify as conservative and believe the IRS has been harassing them for political reasons.
What happened to businessman Frank VanderSloot is particularly noteworthy. The following is from an article that Rob Bluey authored last year…
On April 20, President Obama’s campaign named VanderSloot to the first presidential “enemies list” since the Nixon era. Eight private citizens were singled out for their donations to Romney. They committed no crimes, sought no attention, and yet they became the subject of Obama’s scorn.
VanderSloot is now facing persecution from the federal government. Kimberly Strassel reveals in The Wall Street Journal that two federal agencies — the Internal Revenue Service and Labor Department — both launched investigations of VanderSloot after his name appeared on Obama’s enemies list.
No matter what you think of Obama’s politics, shouldn’t we all be deeply alarmed that he has an “enemies list”?
With each passing day, the similarities between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon become more glaring.
And Obama has even joked about sending the IRS after people that he does not like. When Obama found out that he was not going to be receiving an honorary doctorate from Arizona State University, he made the following statement…
“President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
The IRS is not supposed to be used as a weapon, and the White House is not allowed to use information gathered by the IRS for political gain either. But apparently last year someone at the IRS was leaking tax information to someone within the Obama campaign. The following is from a recent article by 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.”
The IRS has been doing all sorts of things that they should not be doing. They are a rogue agency that is completely out of control.
In fact, one new lawsuit alleges that the IRS stole the health records of approximately 10 million Americans…
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. “This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents,” the complaint reads. “No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records,” it continued.
And guess what?
The IRS is going to be the primary government agency in charge of implementing Obamacare.
Will we soon see the IRS use health information to attack the political enemies of the man or woman sitting in the White House?
Unfortunately, thanks to new “Big Brother” technology that the IRS has been implementing, pretty soon there will be very little about us that the IRS does not know. The following is from a recent article by Richard Satran of U.S. News & World Report…
Consumers are already familiar with Internet “cookies” that track their movements and send them targeted ads that follow them to different websites. The IRS has brought in private industry experts to employ similar digital tracking—but with the added advantage of access to Social Security numbers, health records, credit card transactions and many other privileged forms of information that marketers don’t see.
“Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are,” boasted Dean Silverman, the agency’s high-tech top gun who heads a group recruited from the private sector to update the IRS, in a comment reported in trade publications.
So what is the IRS going to do with all of this information?
Well, the following are just a few of the things that they have already said that they plan to do with it…
• Charting and analyzing social media such as Facebook
• Targeting audits by matching tax filings to social media or electronic payments
• Tracking individual Internet addresses and emailing patterns
• Sorting data in 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique “attributes”
• Machine learning across “neural” networks
• Statistical and agent-based modeling
• Relationship analysis based on Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers
So are you alarmed by all of this?
You should be.
As I discussed in my previous article entitled “100 Years Old And Still Killing Us: America Was Much Better Off Before The Income Tax“, Congress should close the doors of the IRS and throw away the key. It is a deeply, deeply corrupt government agency that has gotten wildly out of control.
After what you have just read above, is there anyone out there that would disagree with me?
View full post on The Economic Collapse
The big banks are even bigger than most think.
I was 30 when I began to realize the absolute genius (evil and good) inherent in modern accounting. My whole life I had thought it was just simple inflows and outflows. Boy I had no idea of the level of creativity.
The world is driven by accounting. What’s an asset? What’s a liability? Questions with seemingly easy answers (and they are fundamentally,) but ones which when thrown into the alternate universe of high finance accounting are not.
That is why, as this article reports, the size of the big banks is actually much larger than they report. They are composed partially of “banking dark matter” which though unseen nonetheless increases the mass of the behemoths, bending and warping the economy around them.
(From The New York Times)
Under American accounting rules, banks that trade a lot of derivatives can keep literally trillions of dollars in assets and liabilities off their balance sheets. Since 2009, they have at least been required to make disclosures about how large those amounts are, but the disclosures leave out some things and — amazingly enough — in some cases do not seem to add up.
The post The big banks are even bigger than most think. appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
Oil And Gas • Is California Going to be the Next Bakken, only Bigger?
Is California Going to be the Next Bakken, only Bigger?
http://www.righands.com/news/news-detai … igger–289
Where’s the next oil-boom going to happen? The answer may shock you!
Everyone has been watching the race for Arctic-circle riches and the explosive growth of the Bakken. Now the New York Times is now reporting that things are heating up in a big way in… California!
When people talk oil, certain names always come up; Texas, Alaska, and of course, North Dakota, but not everyone realizes that California is number for on the list of oil-producing states. The San Joaquin valley stretches 400 miles from just south of the border with Oregon down to the town of Bakersfield, just north of Los Angeles. That’s about the same length as the distance between Dallas and Laredo in Texas. At the southern tip of the valley is the Midway-Sunset oilfield. Between the day it was first drilled in 1894 and 2006, Midway-Sunset produced nearly 3 billion barrels of oil and by 2008 there was still an estimated reserve of roughly 532 million barrels.
Just to the east is the "Monterey Shale" formation, estimated to contain two-thirds of America’s total estimated shale oil reserves. According to the U. S. Energy Information Administration, the play has thought to have 15.4 billion barrels, which would be more than four times the reserves of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.
Of course the oil has always been there, but only now is the technology available to extract it profitably. Although the oil in the Midway-Sunset is usually less than 2,000 feet beneath the surface, in the Monterey Shale, the black gold lies 6,000 to 15,000 feet down. Advanced techniques now allow economical ways to access the reserves and some of the big names in oil exploration, including Occidental, Hess and Venoco are already lining up.
Landmen have also been talking with individual landowners and buying mineral rights, and snapping-up leases on federal land, often bidding upwards of a thousand dollars an acre in auctions that once drew only the minimum of two dollars.
All this has not gone unnoticed by "environmental groups", some of whom, including the Sierra Club, have sued the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Conservation, hoping to block exploration and force stricter regulatory oversight. Given America’s insatiable appetite for oil, it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to halt the march of progress. When the action starts in earnest rig hands will be able to move to California, far from the freezing cold of the Bakken and the blistering heat of Texas
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Thu Feb 07, 2013 9:23 pm
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Bigger Than China
CNSNews discovers that the U.S. Federal Reserve has become the single largest holder of U.S. government-issued debt, as it now owns a larger share of that debt than China!
In data released Thursday afternoon, the Federal Reserve revealed that its holdings of U.S. government debt had increased to an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 as of the close of business on Wednesday.
The Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt have increased by 257 percent since President Barack Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, and the Fed is currently the single largest holder of U.S. government debt.
Political Calculations discusses how the Fed’s various quantitative easing programs are primarily responsible for the Fed’s accumulation of the U.S. government’s debt during the last four years, and the extent to which it has offset an even larger share of debt from being accumulated by foreign interests:
The Federal Reserve’s various quantitative easing programs of recent years, where the U.S. government-chartered central bank has purchased large quantities of U.S. government-issued debt in its attempts to keep the U.S. government’s spending elevated and the U.S. economy stimulated by lowering long-term interest rates, are especially interesting in the degree to which they’ve succeeded in offsetting the share of the U.S. national debt owned by foreign interests.
Here, the Fed boosted its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities from a low of $474 billion on 18 March 2009 when it launched QE 1.0 to a peak of $1.684 trillion on 21 December 2011, which fell back to $1.676 trillion by 26 September 2012 – just before the end of the U.S. government’s 2012 fiscal year.
The Fed also boosted its holdings of other federal agency debt securities from $48 billion on 18 March 2009 to a peak value of $169 billion on 10 March 2010, which has slowly declined to $83 billion as of 26 September 2012. All told, the Federal Reserve held an additional $1.21 trillion of the U.S. national debt compared to what it did before it began its quantitative easing programs.
As a result, the U.S. Federal Reserve has gone from holding 4.7% of all U.S. government-issued debt as of 18 March 2009 to holding 10.8% of it as of the end of the U.S. government’s Fiscal Year 2012. During the peak of the program, the Federal Reserve crowded out almost every other purchaser of U.S. government-issued debt.
Assuming that other U.S. entities would have been unable to accumulate more of the U.S. national debt than they did during this period and that the U.S. government would have spent as much money as it did, if not for the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programs, the share of the U.S. national debt held by foreign entities would have increased to 41.7%, with the bulk of the foreign acquisitions going to China.
As it stands, a little over 1 out of every 3 dollars borrowed by the U.S. federal government is now owned by foreign interests.
Compared to its previous record, we see that the Fed has now surpassed its previous record from December 2011 for the amount of U.S. government-issued debt that it holds by more than ten billion dollars.
At present, the second largest non-U.S. government agency holder of the United States’ public debt is China, or rather, Chinese individuals and institutions, who hold 8.1% of the total amount of the total U.S. public debt outstanding.
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Mo’ Bigger Welfare
It’s not exactly news that the United States harbors an enormous number of people on welfare. By one account, more than 100 million Americans are on at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And since President Barack Obama gutted the 1996 welfare reforms by removing work requirements, the number of adults on foods stamp skyrocketed from an already high 1.9 million in 2008 to 3.9 million in 2010. Less well known are the government costs involved in welfare.
According to information from the Senate Budget Committee, in 2011 the United States spent $61,194 on welfare programs for each household in poverty. According to some committee members, if this spending was converted to cash and handed out to those below the poverty line, it would exceed by more than 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold of $22,350 for a family of four.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States spends more on welfare than Social Security, Medicare, defense, or any other item in the federal budget. Federal spending on approximately 80 welfare programs has risen 32 percent since 2008. Include state contributions to those programs and the amount approaches $1 trillion. These fathomless costs illustrate some economic realities.
Despite what some people imagine, a dollar cannot be extracted from a taxpayer, travel to Washington DC, go out on the town, and then return intact as $1 to a district in the form of benefits. That is because all taxpayer dollars must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic sediment. The welfare bureaucracy has a stake in the expansion of the number of people on welfare, not in the reduction of that number. This dynamic helps explain why, even in the worst recession since the 1930s, the federal government has made no serious move to trim bureaucratic waste. Indeed, the current administration larded up an already bloated Leviathan by adding new federal agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
That happened under Barack Obama who now gets four more years, but this is not a partisan issue. George W. Bush, a Republican, was the biggest spendthrift since Lyndon Johnson. Whoever happens to be in the White House, government spending and dependency seem to increase in tandem.
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U.S. Debt Bigger than GDP
Terrence Jeffrey of CNSNews.com reports:
According to the most recent official estimate by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Gross Domestic Product for 2012 will be $15.6061 trillion–or about $440.5 billion less than the $16.0466 in debt that the federal government had accumulated as of the close of business on Monday.
In other words, the debt is now approximately 103 percent of GDP.
The U.S.’ debt-to-income ratio is up from roughly 75% at the end of December 2008.
Meanwhile, President Obama doesn’t seem to be too aware of just how big the United States’ total public debt outstanding has become:
Might we suggest that the President pay more attention to the U.S. Treasury’s The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It web site?…
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Other • The engineering of bigger financial bubbles
The engineering of bigger financial bubbles – corporate profits as a percent of GDP at record levels while unemployment is historically high and record number of Americans on transfer payments. Paying interest on excess reserves to banks for our own bailout funds.
Posted by mybudget360 in bailout, banks, debt, economy, European Union, federal reserve, government, wall street
The market is perched on the edge of a chair looking out for what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have to say. The almighty Oz is the only game in town. With the Fed, the expectation is of some sort of additional quantitative easing to prime the economy once again whereas the market is looking for some big sort of action by the ECB to keep the Euro together. One thing is certain however and that is we are now in a bailout bubble. The markets are now managed proxy systems of the too big to fail banks. The system has been very effective in siphoning off wealth from the middle class of many countries and creating massive wealth discrepancies that have not been witnessed since the Great Depression. Many in the public are woefully uninformed since rarely is this analysis leaked out in the media. Yet as we go down this road, it is becoming more obvious that to keep this system going, more and more bailouts are required.
Hunkering down
US households continue on the path of deleveraging. The personal savings rate is ticking back up which is not necessarily a good sign for an economy so reliant on spending:
Many Americans are finding their borrowing constrained as due diligence is now performed on the market. You have 46 million on food stamps so it is unlikely this group is a market to lend to. You have a large aging population that is probably a group that is unlikely to receive long-term loans. And younger Americans are already saddled with massive student loan debt. What group is willing to go into massive debt here?
The average per capita income is $25,000 so banks are simply hoarding the money to repair their badly hurt balance sheets:
The irony of the above is the Fed needs to shell out interest on these excess reserves. Now the interest paid is only .25 percent but on a balance of roughly $1.5 trillion it works out to:
$3,750,000,000 annually
This is money that banks can easily put into work by lending to Americans but instead keep them held as excess reserves with the Fed. It is essentially a closed feedback loop that allows these banks to get bigger on the action and work of the real economy. If you look back even just a few decades, banks were set to be a proxy of aiding the real economy. Today, we have a large financial sector that essentially strips profits from the real economy.
The bubble pathway is rather apparent:
Source: Global Economic Analysis
Corporate profits as a share of GDP are now at record levels while we have high unemployment, lower paying jobs, and a massive number of Americans on transfer payments. So how are these profits achieved? By allowing giant loopholes to avoid domestic taxes, bailouts that provide gambling funds to spend in global markets, and leveraging US Fed power to garner profits in lower cost markets. This is anything but a free market yet the analysis presented to the public is that this is just the way things go. Austerity for you, bailouts for us. The banking system is unfortunately too big and is extracting economic rents from sectors that would actually benefit the public more.
It is likely that there will be no movement on enforcement with teeth in 2012 being an election year. From one bubble to another but the big difference here is that this bubble is targeted directly to the financial sector.
http://www.mybudget360.com/engineering- … #more-4181
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Jul 31, 2012 1:04 pm
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Technology and the Internet • Is Facebook A Bigger Ponzi Scheme Than Madoff?
Is Facebook A Bigger Ponzi Scheme Than Madoff?
Facebook is turning out to be the poster child for everything that is corrupt on Wall Street. From fraudulent representation of financials to the fleecing of widows and orphans.
The Facebook stock offering was priced at $38 per share, giving it a $104 billion market cap. Before the stock freed up to trade, Bloomberg News’ Trish Regan tweeted that the opening indication was in the $53-$55 range. No doubt she was just regurgitating the fraudulent representation of the demand for the stock from her "sources" at Morgan Stanley, the book-runner for the deal. The opening trade was $42.05 – a market cap of $113.5 billion and the high-tick trade was $43, a market cap of $116 billion. Currently the stock is trading at $31.32, down another 7.8% on the day and a market cap of $84.5 billion. Facebook stock has lost almost $32 billion in market cap since its opening day peak.
While someone at Morgan Stanley was texting Trish Regan about how strong the demand was and that the stock would open up about 40% above the IPO price, Morgan Stanley was busy raising the retail broker limit on stock allocation from 500 shares to 5,000 share. Let’s examine this for a second. One thing I would like to know is how much stock was directed into Morgan Stanley’s retail brokerage stock distribution network AFTER the allocation limit was raised to 5,000 shares. Trish Regan should learn to do some intelligent due diligence before she allows Wall Street to use her as a spunk receptacle again. I’ve always thought she was idiot and a Wall Street harlot, but now a lot more people will realize the truth about her and about financial media in general.
Not only did Morgan Stanley enable its retail broker network to stuff retail investor accounts with this crappy deal, but Morgan Stanley’s Facebook stock analyst, Scott Devitt significantly cut his revenue forecast while the stock was being marketed to investors, LINK. Did Morgan Stanley’s brokerage force tell retail stock investors about this BEFORE stuffing them with more of this overvalued piece of garbage?
As to whether or not Morgan Stanley and its brokers violated SEC and FINRA laws would be very easy to investigate. All sales and trading phone lines are taped and it would be simple to subpoena all retail brokerage statements for investors who were sold Facebook stock. The question is, will Barack Obama order SEC Chaircrook Mary Shapiro and Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate this financial rape and pillage of the public? Please note that is merely a rhetorical question, as we all know the answer, based on Obama’s dismal record of investigating a prosecuting financial fraud.
What does this have to with Madoff? It looks like the actual amount of losses from the Madoff Ponzi Scheme was somewhere around $15 billion. We’ll probably never know the truth, but I bet the Wall Street firms who were custodians and fund conduits for Madoff’s operation know. So far, Facebook has raped investors for about $18 billion based on a $38 issue price, and about $32 billion based on the high tick after trading commenced. This is a direct transfer of $18 billion from the pockets of investors to the pockets of Mark Zucker, Facebook employees and Morgan Stanley (and the other underwriters). This is a de facto Ponzi scheme.
What do my insights on the Facebook Ponzi scheme have to do with gold? I’ll let Ayn Rand explain, through the voice of Francisco D’Anconia in "Atlas Shrugged:"
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims.
http://truthingold.blogspot.ca/2012/05/ … -than.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue May 22, 2012 1:35 pm
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