1. Tues. May 22nd 6:30 -8:30pm WAPH! TOWNHALL MEETING DIFFERENT by HEART & SOUL Group invites you “CONVERSATION, SETTING THE STAGE FOR METAMORPHOSIS”, an experience you will not want to miss!  the Peace Song Band will provide music. at Unitarian Universalist Church 107 West Barcelona Road, Santa Fe. Please open the beautiful attachment to learn more.

2. Wed. May 23rd 5:30 -7:30 pm Collected Works Bookstore 202 Galisteo St.
Back to our roots – Collected Works Bookstore!
An invitation to celebrate the publication of Corporations Are Not People: A Discussion with Author Jeffrey D. Clements

Sherry Tippett, a former Santa Fe school board member, former assistant city attorney and longtime activist for gun control and other causes, died this week in her Albuquerque home. She was 59.
Tippett was found by a friend who hadn’t heard from her in a couple of days and after Tippett had missed a scheduled meeting, her sister Kate Tippett-Bowles of Virginia Beach, Va., said Thursday.
There were no obvious signs of trauma or suspicious circumstances, said Officer Tasia Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Albuquerque Police Department. The state Office of the Medical Investigator said the cause and manner of death had not been determined.
“Sherry was always so passionate about education,” said Carla Lopez, who served on the school board with Tippett in the late 1990s. “She aggressively gave her all to the schools.”
Tippett, who was raised in the Washington, D.C., area and got a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University, earned her law degree at the University of South Dakota in 1983.
In the early 1980s, she moved to Santa Fe, where she practiced law for nearly two decades.
She made headlines in the early 1990s in her role as the head of a Santa Fe-based gun-control group New Mexico Ceasefire!
Tippett authored a proposed Santa Fe ordinance that would have required gun dealers to provide trigger locks. However, a provision of the New Mexico Constitution prohibits municipalities from restricting firearms, so instead of an ordinance, the council eventually passed a nonbinding resolution encouraging gun dealers to provide trigger locks.
Tippett-Bowles said she believes her sister’s interest in gun control came about because their mother was severely injured in a crime involving guns. “She didn’t die, but she was a paraplegic for the next 12 years,” Tippett-Bowles said.
Tippett was hired as a Santa Fe assistant city attorney in the 1990s. But her relationship with her supervisor became rocky. At one point, according to news reports at the time, Tippett called her boss, the city attorney at the time, a “little bald-headed twerp.”
In 1998, Tippett ran unopposed for a school board seat. She resigned in 2000 to take job as Grant County attorney in Silver City.
By 2003, she moved to Albuquerque, where she had a private law practice focused on civil rights, employment and land and water-rights issues. In 2005, she began a two-year stint as village attorney for Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.
In Albuquerque, Tippett headed a group called the Southwest Global-Local Links Project. She contributed several opinion pieces to the now-defunct Albuquerque Tribune in the early part of this century.
Tippett was elected to KUNM radio board in 2011.
She is survived by her son, Matthew Tippett, who lives in Italy; sister Kate Tippett-Bowles; brothers Richard Tippett, Chris Tippett and Frank Tippett.
Funeral services are pending, her sister said.
Contact Steve Terrell at 986-3037 or sterrell@sfnewmexican.com.
Read his political blog at roundhouseroundup.com

COMMENT: During a one and a half hour presentation at the Mora County Commission “work session” on oil and gas, Tuesday, May 15th, 2012, John Bemis, secretary of the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, (OCD) told the people that “I love oil and gas. Been in oil and gas for 25 years or longer.” As one citizen pointed out during public comment, this swinging door policy between corporate industry and government is a serious conflict of interest here in New Mexico’s government. John Bemis is a “retired” oil and gas attorney now overseeing the regulating of permits for the oil and gas activity within the state of New Mexico.

Speaking on the health, safety, and production aspects of oil and gas development, Mr. Bemis took a six-point outline and sallied forth.

He began with his pet peeve about methane gas which he said, “It bugs me about methane” and went on to talk about the fact that “there is no danger to anyone at all.” A gallon of methane, says Mr. Bemis, “I’ll drink it all (if a gas could be drunk).”

Perhaps if you look at methane in an isolated test tube and no flame is present, that is possibly correct, but we are looking at its impacts in our ecosystems, our homes and the whole of Mother Earth…. and the entire galaxy if we extrapolate on the interconnectedness factor here which Albert Einstein preferred in order to understand the entire impact on all matter.

According to Antonio Ingraffea, Corneal University professor, methane gas is 3-4 times more damaging to the ozone layer than flared gasses at a well site or CO2 emissions from other sources, hence contributing to more rapid warming of our earth’s atmosphere,. The most recent studies presented by NPR’s story on emissions today (http://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/151545578/frackings-methane-trail-a-detective-story) covers unreported leakage of high levels of methane gas detected at Colorado’s oil and gas sites.

Split estate was an issue of interest to Mr. Bemis. While an attorney in Farmington a few decades ago, he stated that realtors did not want disclosure of this fact because he said they couldn’t sell property with this knowledge. And not surprisingly, throughout New Mexico, split estate is not required to be disclosed when property is transfered. Two other aspects about split estate Mr. Bemis did not touch upon. Insurance companies are raising rates on home owners where fracking is occurring, and in some cases, excluding insurance in the homeowner policies. (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/analysis-insurers-tough-price-fracking-risk-190740918–finance. html) Property value declines range anywhere from 15%-75% where natural gas and oil drilling and fracking occur, and some banks are refusing mortgages with concerns over property devaluation. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/us/rush-to-drill-for-gas-creates-mortgage-conflicts. html? _r=1) People who do not own their mineral rights in some gas drilling states are being evicted from their land as well. (http://www.lockhaven.com/page/content.detail/id/537912. html)

Mr. Bemis called split estate a legal issue, but given the texture and content of these issues, perhaps this could be debated… that it is more an issue of human rights being trumped by corporate power and that this is a political rather than a legal issue. Certainly with industry and our state government sharing such close quarters, it gives us suspect.

When Mr. Bemis began talking about fracking, all eyes in the room where were upn him. “We need two things,” [for fracking] he said. “Porosity and permeability.” He went on to say that there is “so much protection [during the fracking process] that there is no problem.” All that is used is “. .. nearly all water and a little bit of gel.” And ” . .. what is left behind is little beads of sand.” If your source of information came solely from Mr. Bemis’ presentation on Tuesday in Wagon Mound you would think all was hunky dory as one citizen stated during her comment time.

The facts, however, show that depending upon the type of shale formation being drilled and fracked, between 2-9 million of gallons of fresh drinking water and 1000s of gallons of chemicals (many highly toxic) along with radioactive isomers that are added to the sand, are pumped into the earth with each frack job. A well can be fracked upwards of 20 times. “It’s [fracking] never been a big deal” said Mr. Bemis. What he failed to report is that the latest field fracking, called slick water high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing technology which was introduced just five years ago on the gas fields is indeed a different animal than what preceded it. And that the water contamination complaints along with air pollution and illness and deaths near frack sites have mounted since 2007 exponentially.

“It’s a fairly controlled process that does not come back up to contaminate groundwater.” It is up to the regulatory agency (OCD) to not make groundwater contamination happen.” The Wyoming wells in Pavillion tested by the EPA show otherwise. Bemis called this a “big to do” in Wyoming saying “that the EPA did such a poor job, they couldn’t tell the chemicals . ..” In response to a question from a Wagon Mound resident about water contamination in San Juan County: Bemis said, “I know there has been [well water] contamination in the San Juan Basin. I was on a case that had it. And they were trying to decide which company . . .. so there has been contamination . .. not widespread contamination. “It’s not a widespread issue, but it has happened.”

Mark Fesmire, former head of OCD has recorded over 800 industry-cited reports on surface water contamination from drilling for oil and gas with most of these reported in San Juan County.

When you consider the mission statement of OCD it is not any surprise that the sliding door between industry and our government is in full operation. The regulation of fossil fuel extraction is in descending order of priority by OCD: • “To prevent waste [of the resource below the surface]” • “To protect correlative rights (to produce in an efficient way)” • “Required to protect groundwater” You will note that with the oil companies being exempt by the 2005 Energy Bill, they have no responsibility or culpability for any water contamination, so reports and small fines are the norm.

“We have strong regulatory oversight in New Mexico” stated Mr. John Bemis. Which leads us to the story below. “with 10 inspectors, and 60,000 active wells, that’s 100 wells per inspector.” The math was redone by during citizen comment: 6,000 wells per inspector!

“Wells are monitored on a visuale basis” said Mr. Bemis. “Monitoring water wells is not a typical way of the oil industry.” “Leaking is rare, rare, exceptional at 6,000 feet and it has nothing to do with groundwater.”

Secretary John Bemis “. .. I think we owe all of our citizens across the entire state the same degree of protection whether it’s Santa Fe in the Galisteo Basin, whether it is Farmington, whether it is Hobbs. If we are not doing it right in Hobbs we shouldn’t be doing it. And we shouldn’t be saying well, it’s OK for Hobbs but it’s not OK for somewhere else. And I think we owe everybody the same degree of protection. We should do it right wherever we go. And we should protect our groundwater. If we can’t protect our ground water, then we shouldn’t be doing it. It is just that simple.”

Commission chair John Olivas after listening to the presentation by Secretary John Bemis and county attorney Steve Ross, who presented on the merits of regulating oil and gas via the Santa Fe Oil and Gas Ordinance said: “I would prefer to fight these guys [oil industries] in court rather than clean up after their mess [referring to allowing the oil companies to be regulated through regulatory ordinances].” Commissioner Olivas is the sponsorer of the Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance, which bans fracking in Mora County which was introduced to the commission last September. It has still not been passed by the commission. Chair Garcia stated that over 95% of the citizens in Mora County are against oil and gas drilling.

–Drilling Mora County

As an example of deepening water woes, Martinez noted the water shortage in the northern town of Las Vegas. Martinez’s office stated that 2011 was the second driest year ever recorded in New Mexico.

“In addition to the work we’re doing at the state level to assist communities facing serious drought conditions, I’m hopeful this declaration will assist them in securing any available federal funding as well,” Martinez said.

Martinez’s counterpart in Chihuahua, Governor Cesar Duarte, also recently reached out to his own federal government for help in coping with drought. Last month, Duarte requested about $200 million from the Calderon administration for water infrastructure projects, emergency food aid and agricultural subsidies to help rural communities under environmental stress. According to Duarte, natural water supplies for 300 communities in the Sierra Tarahumara region have dried up and stopped giving the essential ingredient of life.

“According to the National Water Commission, Chihuahua is the state confronting the severest drought in the country..,” Duarte said.

Under the circumstances, rain normally might be welcome relief in New Mexico and Chihuahua. But unseasonal storms accompanied by high winds lashed through the region last week and left minor flooding, some power outages and a tree crashed into a house in Albuquerque. In Socorro County, New Mexico, a highly unusual tornado startled the small town of Magdalena. “And we were so scared we had to run to the closet,” resident Monique Baca was quoted; no significant damages were immediately reported from the twister.

Across the border in Chihuahua, the precipitation sowed a path of destruction through far-flung farming communities, where golf ball-sized hail was reported. At least $40 million in estimated losses were racked up for cotton, chile, wheat, corn and pecan farms.

The municipalities and communities most affected included Galeana, Ascension, Buenaventura, LeBaron, Flores Magon, and Villa Ahumada. The Pecan Producers Association estimated a 100 percent loss in some of the state’s orchards, and growers took measures to rehabilitate trees so production could resume within two years.

As reports were still trickling in from remote areas, the Chihuahua State Secretariat for Rural Development reported damages to more than 3,000 acres of jalapeno chile peppers, nearly 2,000 acres of oats and more than 2,000 acres of wheat. Approximately 23,400 acres planted in cotton were judged a complete loss. In total, 30,000 acres or more of cropland and orchards could have been impacted.

If drought and extreme weather aren’t enough, Chihuahua has also counted at least 723 forest fires since the beginning of the year.

In New Mexico, Governor Martinez’s drought declaration re-convened the New Mexico Drought Task Force. Led by the State Engineer, the task force’s mission is to make recommendations to the Governor on “ways the state can prepare for and mitigate the problems that occur in New Mexico due to persistent drought conditions.” The task force was ordered to meet in open public meetings at least once each quarter.

The New Mexico Drought Declaration cautioned that it might take “several years of higher than normal precipitation and snow pack for current reservoir storage to recover,” as well as a “considerable amount of precipitation and snow melt run off” for the restoration of decent soil moisture and plant vegetation conditions.

Additional sources: El Semanario de Nuevo Mexico. May 17, 2012. El Heraldo de Chihuahua, May 12 and 13, 2012. Articles by Emmanuel Hernandez and editorial staff. Kob.com, May 13, 2012. Krqe.com, May 11 and 12, 2012. Articles by Mark Ronchetti. La Jornada, April 14, 2012. Article by Miroslava Breach and Ruben Villalpando.

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S. -Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription: e-mail fnsnews@nmsu.edu

Corporations Are Not People:,

A Discussion with Author Jeffrey D. Clements
Wednesday, May 23, 5:30p-7:30p  Collected Works Bookstore  (Back where we started from. . .Arrive early!) 202 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501

The event is hosted by Connected Works Bookstore and the discussion will be moderated by Craig Barnes, founder of the movement, “WeArePeopleHere!”, and host of the radio show, Our Times with Craig Barnes.

The event is cosponsored by the League of Women Voters of Santa Fe County, Common Cause New Mexico, South West Organizing Project, We Are People Here!, and Collected Works Bookstore.

With a foreword by Bill Moyers, Corporations Are Not People tells the true story of how some of the largest corporations in the world organized to take over our government and Constitution, culminating in 2010 with the 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Website: http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com Event is free and open to the public. Copies of Corporations Are Not People will be available for purchase.

A state audit of the municipal government of Sunland Park, New Mexico, has uncovered not only sloppy accounting practices but widespread violations of New Mexico state law and city spending regulations. While some former officials implicated in wrongdoing have already been charged in related criminal cases, the audit casts a larger net that could land other individuals in and out of Sunland Park city government in a big heap of trouble. And according to State Auditor Hector Balderas, the buck should stop with the border city’s fractious city council.

“There are violations of law related to budget and inventory that fall on the authority of the governing body, which is the city council,” Balderas said. The state official told Frontera NorteSur that the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration (DFA), which took charge of Sunland Park’s municipal finances after suspending two city officials on May 14, is now looking into the roles of the different council members in allowing one of New Mexico’s most impoverished towns to run up deficits, misuse budgets and illegally expend funds, including moneys allegedly spent on sexual entertainment at a U. S-Mexico border legislators’ conference held last fall in Saltillo, Mexico. The Saltillo finding has been turned over to the FBI, Balderas said.

As the Land of Enchantment celebrates its centennial anniversary as a U. S. state, Sunland Park now has the dubious claim of fame to being the only known municipality in New Mexico history where the state stepped in, suspended officials and seized at least partial control of local government functions.

Pressed if Sunland Park’s financial scandals were the result of professional ignorance or willful law-breaking, Balderas said indications of both problems were evident to him. “There are clear signs of incompetence and negligence,” Balderas said, “but there are also signs of conspiracy and people working together to violate the law,”

In a report released this week, Balderas and his staff zeroed in on 27 separate findings related to regular budgets, special funds, travel policies, and the Open Meetings Act.

The audit contains information that had not been previously publicly reported. For example, the report found that eight Sunland Park Police Department computers and three standalone hard drives were not disposed of in a proper way, possibly exposing confidential information to identity theft schemes. According to Balderas, the State Motor Vehicle Division is now looking into the matter.

Balderas’ team was unable to verify the status of many other assets presumably owned by the city, since Sunland Park officials “failed to provide” investigators with a “complete certified listing of capital assets” for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, according to the report. Information was missing for the city’s solid waste, water, wastewater and motor vehicle fund divisions, the report said.

And the audit took the Sunland Park city government to task for hiring its attorney, prominent Santa Fe lawyer Frank Coppler, in a non-competitive manner that allegedly violated the Procurement Code. The report stated that the city paid Coppler $481,378 in fees for fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Coppler was unavailable for comment, and his office said the lawyer would send a statement via e-mail on Tuesday, May 15. However, Frontera NorteSur still had not received the response as the evening publication deadline approached .

A major area of concern for Balderas’ team of investigators is the $12 million-plus Border Crossing Fund, established with a donation by Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino owner Stan Fulton, for the development of a new crossing between the New Mexico town and the northwestern edge of Ciudad Juarez. Balderas contended that the fund served as a “personal slush fund” for some Sunland Park officials, though certain legitimate expenditures were also documented, he was quick to add. Balderas confirmed that the remaining portion of the fund is under the control of the DFA,

New Mexico’s state auditor said he would like to see some of the money misspent in Sunland Park paid back but to the taxpayers, but did not know how likely the prospect for reimbursements was due to the city’s shaky financial situation.

Balderas recalled that he had handled tough situations, ranging from the embezzlement case in the Jemez Mountain Public School District to belligerent Public Regulation Commission officials, but had “never seen the level of abuse” and “the penetration of criminals” as in Sunland Park. The shenanigans, he said, amounted to organized crime. “Even the mob has more respect than to use tax dollars,” Balderas asserted.

In addition to Governor Susana Martinez and the DFA, which has already intervened in the border town brouhaha, Balderas’ report is being sent to New Mexico State Attorney General Gary King, the Third Judicial District, the New Mexico State Police, the Tax Fraud Investigations Division of the Taxation and Revenue Department, the FBI, the U. S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico and the Legislative Finance Committee headed by border-area Democrat John Arthur Smith of Deming.

While Balderas’ staff found plenty of grist for law enforcement authorities and lawmakers to mull over, the state auditor emphasized that the probe is far from over. “We’ve spent thousands of hours on this report and we’re beginning a second audit,” Balderas said.

In an election year, the thickening smoke from the Sunland Park scandal could drift far and wide.

Meantime, political uncertainties continue to grip the town of about 14,000 people. Twice within the past week, the city council has failed to name a new mayor. The seat has stayed vacant for months, and the winner of last March’s election, Daniel Salinas, remains jailed in Dona Ana County on charges of extortion, bribery and fraud stemming from many of the situations outlined in New Mexico State Auditor Balderas’ report.

The former mayor-elect and ex-city councilor has entered not-guilty pleas to the numerous felony counts against him.

Last month, city councilors elected a young newcomer to the political scene as mayor. But 24-year-old New Mexico State University graduate Javier Perea resigned his post only days later after New Mexico State Attorney General King advised the city government that Perea’s election might have occurred in violation of the Open Meetings Act. The next city council meeting is scheduled for Friday, May 18, at 6 p. m. in the courtyard outside municipal government offices. Like other council sessions in recent months, the next meeting promises to be anything but dull.

-Kent Paterson

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S. -Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription: e-mail fnsnews@nmsu.edu

The latest job reports numbers show that New Mexico added just 804 jobs in March 2012; virtually unchanged from March 2011 (800).  By comparison, our neighboring states have continued to add jobs at a rate near or above the national average of 1.5%.  Oklahoma: 2.4%, Texas 2.3%, Colorado 2.1%, etc.

Even Utah, with a similar population and rural density far surpassed New Mexico with job growth coming in at 2.3%, a full 0.8% more than the national average.

Despite Martinez’s claims that New Mexico is more business friendly under her watch, corporate CEO’s recently lowered New Mexico’s business friendly rating in its first reporting of New Mexico’s business climate judged entirely by policies under a Martinez administration.

“This governor has had almost eighteen months to turn jobs around.  While the rest of the West as a whole is leading job creation in the nation, New Mexico is bucking the trend,” says ProgressNow NM’s Pat Davis.

“It’s not enough to talk about jobs anymore.  We have to level the playing field for local businesses to incentivize Main Street job creation and stop vetoing critical public programs which create jobs in our small towns.”

“Governor Martinez has spent more time in office talking about her next job in Washington than the one she has now in Santa Fe.  It’s time to shelve the rhetoric and veto pen and get money back into our communities where people need to work.”

A full analysis and links to the data is available online at ProgressNowNM.org

By Dave Lindorff

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.

Remember, this sprawling yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of responses to its FOIA filing is one Nov. 5, 2011 from the NOC Fusion Center Desk, which collects at the federal level and then distributes the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders. Although none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information were widely disseminated by the DHS.

Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS, the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers around the US.

Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression. Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would “reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist. Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law enforcement, intelligence and military network.

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists, it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy actions.

These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:

Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants — the Federal Protective Service (FPS) will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.

There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS “background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)

The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out lie:

DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.

Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.

The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.

The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the “We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/white-house-dems-back-banks-over-protests-newly-discovered-homeland-security-files-show-feds-central. All rights are reserved.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/colonized_by_corporations_20120514/

Posted on May 14, 2012