OUTSIDE, INSIDE A POLICE STATE

Program Summary: April 25, 2015

@Naomi_Fowler produces for the Tax Justice Network the monthly "Taxcast." 

In the April 2015 Taxcast: How just are our tax systems towards women? Plus: one of the USA's biggest corporations (and tax avoiders) is repatriating billions from offshore and re-focusing on good old manufacturing again, and remember how the UK Prime Minister was 'leading the world' in transparency measures not so long ago? We discuss the letter a former Cayman Islands lobbyist and Conservative peer wrote to reassure the tax haven that it was an empty gesture to distract from the proposed Financial Transaction Tax.

Then from Great Speeches and Interviews, Sacramento, CA "Inside the Police State."

 Police officer Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded his supervisors telling officers to manipulate crime statistics and make illegal arrests from 2008 to 2009. The Village Voice series that broke Schoolcraft's story was written by Graham Rayman. Ira Glass narrates the story. "Police Officer Schoolcraft, who worked in the relatively high-crime 81st precinct in Brooklyn, was not a happy camper. Some might call him a malcontent.
In 2009, he began to secretly tape-record precinct roll calls at which commanding officers ordered cops like himself to refuse to take robbery victims’ crime complaints. Cops were also ordered to downgrade felonies — which are serious crimes — to less serious misdemeanors so that the precinct would appear safer than it actually was. Schoolcraft’s secret tape recordings might well have been ignored, had not the police department then done something shocking.  On Oct. 31, 2009, Schoolcraft left his tour early, saying he felt sick, and returned to his apartment in Queens. What happened next tells us much about "the police state."