The Richmond Tea Party has been alleging that it is being singled out for unfair treatment from the city of Richmond, Virginia after officials have opened a tax audit of the group. These Tea Partiers complain that the city has been much more lenient on Occupy Richmond (which recently faced arrests after resisting an eviction) and that 99 Percenters are getting preferential treatment.

Yet the Richmond Tea Party just got an unexpected ally in its claim against the city — Occupy Richmond. The group put out a statement defending the Tea Party group and criticizing possible politically-motivated retaliation against it by the city:

After the city accused the Richmond Tea Party of being overdue on tax filings,Occupy Richmond issued a statement saying “it would not surprise us” if the move was “retaliation” for the Tea Party’s criticism of Mayor Dwight Jones. [...] “The Tea Party and Occupy movements disagree on many, many issues,” Occupy Richmond’s Thursday statement said. “This should not stop all Americans from proudly standing together against government abuses.”

Richmond Tea Party spokeswoman Colleen Owens says the group “never really had any kind of beef with the Occupy people” and that she’s “glad the Occupy group agrees with us.”

Original article here. ThinkProgress ignores the tea party’s underlying complaint; that while they had to pay hundreds of dollars for permits to hold rallies, the Occupy crowd is able to conduct an ongoing protest and encampment without any permits. Still, credit to the left for recognizing abusive government tactics.

First some back story: as reported on the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Richmond Tea Party delivered an invoice for charges incurred in our previous three Tax Day rallies at Kanawha Plaza because Mayor Jones chose to allow Occupy Richmond protesters to convene in the same park for two weeks.

The Mayor not only allowed the Occupiers to break the law, but he visited them in the city-owned park. “Jones said that as a ‘child of civil rights’ and protests, he had allowed the group to remain in the park but understands his mayoral responsibility to uphold laws of the city,” reported the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Apparently his mayoral duties included preferential treatment for a group he sympathizes with ideologically at the expense of the taxpayers.

The blog Virginia Right reported that the city provided services such as portable toilets, trash pickup, etc. The incomplete invoices obtained from the city totaled $7,000. This was only a portion of the actual costs to taxpayers because the costs of police, helicopter and incarcerations were not included. Also not accounted for was the 24-hour police protection of the Mayor’s home after the Occupiers moved their camp next door to the Mayor’s house. The Richmond Tea Party, conversely, paid for all services for our rallies, including the police, portable toilets, park fees and permits, amounting to approximately $8,500.

Our actions apparently struck a nerve. Our invoice to the Mayor was covered by hundreds of news outlets, including the AP, Richmond Times Dispatch, Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post. On October 31, I appeared on Fox Business, Neil Cavuto’s show, and was interviewed about our actions. Reportedly, at least two Richmond City Council members agreed with our plight. “I guess we’ll be writing a check to the Tea Party people,” said Councilman Bruce W. Tyler, as quoted in the Richmond Times Dispatch. “You can’t treat one group different from the other. It’s unfair.”

On November 14th, representatives of our Tea Party attended the City Council meeting to speak to the Mayor and Council during the citizen forum. Mayor Jones, apparently too busy to listen to his constituents, got up and left before we spoke. He had no problem inviting members of the Occupy group to his office for a closed door meeting days later, at the same time refusing to meet with us.

His administration, however, found the time to send us an audit letter (provided in full below). No need for the city to audit the Occupiers, because, as the Mayor knows, all of their costs were provided by the taxpayers of Richmond(via Gateway Pundit). Here is the City Audit Letter Notification:

In the audit letter signed by Cynthia Carr, Field Auditor for the City of Richmond, it states that our Tea Party is delinquent in filing of Admissions, Lodging, and Meals Taxes with the city and as such our group has been targeted for a comprehensive audit. Well, aren’t we special? In fact, as part of the Business License we have with the City, a form is filled out by our treasurer every month (as required). We have never charged admission or had lodging or meals associated with our rallies. Every month the forms are appropriately filled with zeros. Ms. Carr goes on to say that if we don’t respond within 15 days, the City will make a statutory assessment–meaning they’ll pick an amount to charge us.

So the City and Mayor apparently feel that the Richmond Tea Party has not paid its fair share for use of Kanawha Plaza. We challenged the Mayor’s unequal treatment between groups and he responded with even more unequal treatment.

This story has also fired up other Tea Party groups across the country that have had the laws and fees applied unequally in regards to Tea Party rallies and Occupy protest camps. The message coming from mayors in numerous cities is that they are willing to spend millions in taxpayer money to accommodate the Occupiers that are breaking the law but have no problem charging Tea Party groups that follow the law exorbitant fees and making them jump through hoops to acquire permits (via Yahoo News).

The Richmond Tea Party stands for constitutional adherence, and clearly this has been unequal treatment under the law. We stand for fiscal restraint, and this is a case where a mayor used taxpayer money for his personal agenda. We stand for virtue and accountability in government and that is why we have taken a stand. We will be submitting a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request for all city correspondence pertaining to our Tea Party and its decision to audit us. We will not be intimidated and we will not back down. A Richmond attorney and fellow Tea Partier is currently reviewing our situation. Also, the ACLU has also contacted us inquiring about this matter.

For inquiries pertaining to this story you can email Colleen Owens at ColleenO@richmondteaparty.com
Colleen Owens
Media Contact
Richmond Tea Party
Twitter: @Colleen4Tea
email: Colleeno@richmondteaparty.com

Cross-posted from Right Side News.

There is debate as to whether these rotten scams could even be legal in Illinois!  But, we’ve discovered that sweetheart union leader access into our Illinois state pension system is an even larger scam.

On September 29^th, we broke this story nationally on the third largest conservative talk radio program: 34 union leaders who are not government employees are draining nearly $340 thousand per month from the state teachers’ pension system.

Last Sunday, the Illinois Statehouse News was the first Illinois newspaper to investigate.  No other newspaper has covered the statewide angle.

Former employees of the National Education Association (NEA), Illinois Education Association (IEA), Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), and Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB), drawing pensions have collected more than $47 million from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS), to date.

It’s an on-going $47 million pension scam.  Union leaders who are not government employees are draining millions in teacher retirement pensions.

How did we unearth this pension abuse?

On September 13^th, our organization For The Good of Illinois launched www.openthebooks.com. We posted the pay and pensions of virtually every public employee from every level of Illinois government.  7 million lines of data and a grand sum of a quarter trillion dollars of government spending are posted online.

At openthebooks.com, citizens are uncovering sweetheart insider deals given to organizations that are not government entities.  With their lobbying power, unions and non-profit organizations exert so much muscle in Springfield that they’ve literally written themselves into the government’s pension code.

Consider these examples:

The second highest teacher pension in history goes to the former President of the NEA (national teachers union, Washington, DC)- $20,200 per month.  Additionally, we identified thirty-three union leaders draining $318 thousand a month from the teacher pension system.  Read more here.

Newspapers identify the example of Kenneth Drum. Drum has a state teachers’ retirement of more than $160,000 a year.  Drum only worked for 12 years as a teacher.  Drum’s large pension comes not from his time in the classroom, but rather because of a 20-year career at Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT). He’s collected more than $2 million in retirement.

Three of the top six largest pensions in municipal retirement history are paid to retirees from non-profit, non-government organizations:  Park District Risk Management Association ($20,125 per month), Illinois Association of Park Districts ($18,436 per month), Illinois Municipal League ($15,076). All organizations participated in end of career salary spiking to maximize the government pensions. See this at openthebooks.com and choose RETIRED;  VILLAGE, TOWNSHIP, COUNTY, LOCAL.

The Chicago Tribune outed union leader Dennis Gannon who was re-hired for one day at the City of Chicago and then retired with a $158,000 city pension. See this at openthebooks.com and choose RETIRED, CITY OF CHICAGO.  Gannon has the #1 city pension between the years 2000-2010.  He’s already drained a million dollars of city pension.

The greed of union leadership and other insiders is draining government pension funds. Unearthing these insider scams helps to protect the hard working rank-and-file government employees and taxpayers. Since the sustainability of Illinois’ pension systems is in question, public employees and taxpayers deserve hard facts and estimates of our liability.

Stop the insider pension abuse.  End the “pension invention” of sweetheart union access to government retirement systems.

greenjobs_gw_03

A $500 million green jobs program at the Department of Labor has so far provided only 15 percent of current participants with jobs, leading the agency’s inspector general to recommend that the bulk of the money be returned to the Treasury.

The program, which was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aims to find employment for almost 80,000 people by providing grants for labor exchange and job training projects. With those grants expiring over the next 15 months, IG officials concluded that the program would fail to come close to that target.

More than $300 million remains unspent, according to the report (pdf). Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who requested the Labor audit when he was ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the findings show that Congress should focus on creating jobs in all sectors of the economy.

“This report paints a pretty bleak picture of the program’s effectiveness in job creation,” he said in a statement. “It’s hard to see how leaving $300 million in unused funding for the program in the hands of the Labor Department benefits either the taxpayers or the unemployed.”

The report comes as the bankrupty of solar manufacturer Solyndra has reinvigorated GOP criticism of the Obama administration’s green jobs initiative. Congress is now investigating the Department of Energy’s half-million-dollar loan guarantee to the company, and the controversy has become a political issue (E&E Daily, Oct. 3, 2010).

Read the whole thing here.

Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.

Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later.

“People including our government put blinders on and did not want to believe in the obvious,” Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst in Boston for Canaccord Genuity Inc. of Vancouver, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government. “The fact that the government chose Solyndra as their white horse is mind- boggling.”

Read the whole thing here.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.

“Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management,” Acting Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said in a statement. “Shortcomings in three areas again prevented us from expressing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements.”

The main obstacles to a GAO opinion were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.

In addition, the GAO said last week it was unable to render an opinion on the 2010 Statement of Social Insurance because of significant uncertainties, primarily related to the achievement of projected reductions in Medicare cost growth. The consolidated financial statements discuss these uncertainties, which relate to reductions in physician payment rates and to productivity improvements, and provide an illustrative alternative projection to illustrate the uncertainties.

Dodaro also cited material weaknesses involving an estimated $125.4 billion in improper payments, information security across government, and tax collection activities. He noted that three major agencies — the DOD, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor — did not get clean opinions. Nineteen of 24 major agencies did get clean opinions on all their statements.

Read the whole thing here.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are complaining that legislation funding a settlement for discrimination against black farmers sets too high a bar for claimants.

The lawmakers argue language added by the Senate, which is meant to prevent fraud in the program, sets higher standards for proving a claim than were required for other groups trying to prove loan discrimination by the Department of Agriculture.

“There’s no question. The bar is much higher,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), a CBC member and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

The legislation to be sent to the president would provide $4.55 billion to settle longstanding discrimination claims with the Department of Agriculture from black and Native American farmers.

The additional steps added to the claims process include an audit by an inspector general and oversight by the attorney general’s office, as well as a review by the secretary of Agriculture, who must sign off on a farmer’s claim.

Attorneys involved in cases must swear in writing that the claims are legitimate, and a special federal “adjudicator” must also take an oath that the claim is legitimate and may request additional information and documentation. At the end of the process is another round of oversight and review from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice at the top levels.

Thompson argues the additional standards are unfair, and that black farmers are being treated differently from other groups.

Read the whole thing here. An audit? Oversight and a review? Verification that claims are legitimate? These aren’t obstacles to compensation, they are, or damn well ought to be, basic minimum requirements for any multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded settlement. These provisions had to be added…