Most Americans would agree that taxes aren’t among the top ten things they love about this country — that is, unless you’re a corporation in Arizona looking ahead to SB1643. The bill offers corporations the option to cash out unused Research and Development (R&D) tax credits normally carried forward by taxpayers, totaling around $2 billion in 2019. SB1643 would allow corporations to cash them out at 60 cents on the dollar for “reinvestment” projects, with each corporation limited to $10 million a year or their amount of unused R&D credits, whichever is less. In order to implement this program, the state would appropriate over $50 million from its general fund. The bill would also increase the annual aggregate cap’s refundable portion of the R&D credit from $5 to $10 million. SB1643 passed in the State Senate several days after failing initially last month, and awaits final consideration in the House.
Valid reinvestment projects would include sustainability or water capital projects; building or updating research and development facilities; capital expenditure projects or workforce development projects with universities or career technical education districts, including tuition reimbursement, hiring employees for the institution of higher learning, and apprenticeships; and capital expenditure projects supported by matching funds from federal or national grant programs.
In practice, those reinvestment projects tend to encourage corporations to be fashioned in government and bureaucrat-friendly trappings. Sustainability efforts fall in line with initiatives fulfilling the climate justice portion of the Green New Deal: electric vehicle charging stations, windmills, public transit, solar panels, and greenhouse gas elimination on farms. The city of Phoenix has been the poster child for climate justice, implementing a “cool pavement” pilot program to mitigate urban heat, a phenomenon of higher temperatures in urbanized areas, as well as pledging to become 100 percent carbon-neutral by 2050, eliminating food deserts, and establishing 100 years of clean and reliable water supplies.
Workforce development initiatives would err on the side of social justice activism. One recent example would be defense technology giant Raytheon, whose workforce development initiative, “Stronger Together,” garnered international controversy for requiring employees to adopt critical race theory (CRT) beliefs through a training program. The program targeted white employees, listing white, straight, Christian men as the pinnacle of the “oppression hierarchy.” The company also segregated employees into race and identity groups.
Investigative journalist Christopher Rufo exposed Raytheon’s initiative last July. In an interview with Fox News, Rufo opined that the reason corporations like Raytheon push woke ideologies was to ensure that the government had less reasons to scrutinize them, allowing for an uninhibited flow of taxpayer dollars.
“Think of it as a protection racket similar to the Mafia, where you pay a small fee — in this case, you signal virtue, you hire the right consultants, you sign the right pledges to decolonize your bookshelf or to interrogate your unconscious bias — and then these companies hope to be left alone, that the social media mob, that the politicians in office, that the Biden Administration will keep that taxpayer money flowing because they’ve signaled the right beliefs,” said Rufo.
SCOOP: Raytheon, the nation's second-largest defense contractor, has launched a critical race theory program that encourages white employees to confront their "privilege," reject the principle of "equality," and "defund the police."
Let's review the internal documents.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2021
Raytheon has a headquarters in Tucson.
Banner Health, one of the state’s largest employers, clarifies that its workforce development and training course content is “culturally appropriate” and “trauma informed,” among other things. Those same keywords were present in Raytheon’s woke workforce development program.
Workforce development initiatives with universities under the tax credit program may look like the latest efforts out of Arizona State University (ASU) and its “New Economy Initiative,” which aims to increase the number of science, technology, and engineering workers and therefore attract more large technology companies. The state gave ASU $32.2 million over last year and this year, with an additional $21.2 forthcoming. ASU projected it would double these funds over the next decade, and create 40,000 new jobs by 2041.
As part of a statewide plan to attract high-tech industry, @ASU is building five science and technology centers. Here, we take an inside look at the Advanced Manufacturing Science and Technology Center. @ASUEngineeringhttps://t.co/mbXbx7Xciu
On Thursday, State Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) revealed that Maricopa County election officials ordered postal workers to destroy live ballots that were undeliverable. Fann noted that those ballots were vulnerable because they weren’t destroyed immediately. Fann also insisted that there were over 700,000 ballots that didn’t have proper chain of custody documentation. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer dismissed Fann’s claim in a statement to AZ Free News, explaining that the ballots in question weren’t live ballots and that, upon being discovered as undeliverable, the barcode on each ballot in question is canceled and therefore unusable.
Maricopa County Election officials claimed they could account for every ballot delivered to the election departments. Fann refuted that claim. Instead, she claimed that there were ballots returned to the post office because they were undeliverable, and the election officials ordered them to be destroyed because they weren’t “needed.”
“Those ballots never went back to the election department, they never went back to run back,” said Fann. “Those were still live ballots that anybody could’ve tampered with until such time that the post office destroyed them. Why were we allowing that to happen?”
Fann said that there were investigations underway to determine the legality of allowing the postal office to destroy live ballots on their own time.
These remarks were conferred in an interview with “Conservative Circus,” where Fann asserted that Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s interim report of the 2020 election was only “scratching the surface,” and that more would come to light. Fann confirmed that Brnovich’s report discovered exactly what she expected they’d find. She ascribed Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and mainstream media’s negative, “apoplectic” reactions to the report, as described by host James T. Harris, as fear over full exposure of the mass cover-up of problems in the 2020 election.
“It’s still a cover-up. I don’t say that lightly,” said Fann. “We’re finally being validated that, yes, in fact there are problems with our elections system here in Maricopa County.”
AZ Free News reached out to Richer about Fann’s claims. Richer reiterated the county’s promise that they could account for every one of those undelivered ballots, and that none of the canceled ballots were voted on. He asserted that Fann was misconstruing a normal partnership between elections offices and post offices.
“Karen Fann is again distorting the truth to fit her narrative. Since 2015, Maricopa County has used an ‘Electronic Service Requested’ endorsement on election mail. We have a contract in place for the United States Postal Service to provide the Elections Department with an electronic file on each mail piece so the office can expedite address checks as required by law. Ballots returned through the Electronic Service Requested process are not ‘live ballots’ as Karen Fann stated. Each early ballot has a unique barcode that cannot be replicated. The barcode on each returned packet is canceled and the ballot can no longer be used to cast a vote,” responded Richer. “The fact is, the United States Postal Service is a government agency tasked with the safe handling of billions of pieces of mail, including the secure destruction of undeliverable election mail. This process is used by Elections Departments nationwide. Maricopa County has a record of every mail piece returned through this process as well as every ballot returned by voters. Our system shows that no attempt has ever been made to cast one of these canceled ballots.”
AZ State Senate President Karen Fann discusses AG Mark Brnovich's latest report on election integrity and also disc https://t.co/ed70TIZqP7
Brnovich’s report explained that his Election Integrity Unit (EIU) discovered instances of election fraud, but that their review is ongoing and therefore limited to further disclosures on that subject. The attorney general summarized that there were system-wide issues with early ballot handling and verification, calling the signature verification system “insufficient” against preventing fraud. One example noted that well over 206,600 early ballot affidavit signatures were verified in an average of 4.6 seconds per signature. Brnovich also revealed that about 20 percent of early ballots were improperly transported from drop locations to election headquarters.
“We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona,” said Brnovich.
Fann lamented that several Republican colleagues joined Democrats to kill several election integrity bills this session. She said that the problems highlighted by Brnovich’s report were only several of the problems that would be found pending further investigations. Fann didn’t name the “one or two Republicans” that prevented key election reform legislation from passing, but our reporting indicates that she was likely referring to State Senators Paul Boyer (R-Glendale) or Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-Scottsdale).
“This is why it is so important we do not ease up on this,” said Fann. “We know where the problems are, so why aren’t we securing that so that the problems don’t happen again? That’s all there is to it.”
Fann called it “frustrating” that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors pushed back against any scrutiny of their elections. She also called out County Recorder Stephen Richer for falling short of his campaign promises, in which he pledged to right the wrongs of former recorder Adrian Fontes. Fann added that Richer’s public remarks about how their county ran the 2020 election perfectly contradicted an email she brought to the “Conservative Circus” interview, in which Richer said there were “plenty of instances of actual prosecuted and convicted election fraud violations.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) promised to vote for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson about two hours before the Senate voted to confirm her.
Sinema’s remarks mirrored those issued earlier this week by Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Sinema emphasized Jackson’s amount of trial court experience, though she didn’t delve into the details of Jackson’s more controversial cases involving violent criminals like child rapists.
“Judge Jackson brings to the bench a wealth of knowledge, more trial court experience than all other current Supreme Court Justices combined, a commitment to respect precedent, and a proven independent, pragmatic approach to judicial decisions. Judge Jackson has exceptional qualifications and will serve our country well in the years to come,” wrote Sinema.
Statement on Voting to Confirm the Nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court pic.twitter.com/gW56qH8ccz
The Senate Republicans known within greater GOP circles as “Republicans In Name Only,” or “RINOs,” were the ones who rejected their party’s stance to confirm Jackson: Mitt Romney (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AL), and Susan Collins (R-ME).
Judge Jackson’s confirmation was a historic moment for our nation. We’ve taken another step toward making our highest court reflect the diversity of America. She will be an incredible Justice, and I was honored to share this moment with her. pic.twitter.com/K8SAh25NL5
In the weeks before Jackson’s appointment, reporters discovered that the White House briefings of Jackson’s rulings in which she administered punishments below sentencing guidelines excluded the more controversial cases.
Three consumer taxes should be immediately suspended to help Arizonans deal with post-pandemic inflation, and two of those taxes should be abolished altogether, State Sen. Warren Petersen argues.
On Tuesday, Petersen (R-LD12) called for a temporary halt to Arizona’s 19 cents per gallon gasoline tax. He also wants to see the food tax and the residential rental tax not only suspended, but also eventually abolished.
Petersen doubled down on his proposal Wednesday, telling KFYI’s James T. Harris there is “no reason” his proposal cannot be implemented in light of Arizona’s more than $1 billion budget surplus. Especially with a Republican-controlled Legislature and a Republican governor.
“People are absolutely reeling from inflation right now but we have state and local governments that have more cash than they’ve ever had before,” Petersen said, adding that his proposal would bring “immediate relief to some of the people that need it the most.”
Suspending the gas tax until the end of 2022 would help Arizonans at the pump, Peterson explained. He added that the move could bring even further relief for consumers due to high gas prices being integrated into the cost of everything else people buy.
The state’s huge budget surplus is more than enough to supplant the $300-$350 million in gas tax revenues needed to fund transportation projects across the state, Petersen said.
While a gas tax holiday would be temporary, Petersen is calling on his fellow lawmakers to support a permanent end to the food tax in Arizona.
“That just hurts the poor more than anybody, and only some cities charge it,” Petersen told Harris.
As to his third suggestion of the abolishment of residential rental taxes, Petersen questioned why a special consumer tax is charged of those living in a rental unit.
“Nobody should charge this,” he argued. “People don’t pay a tax every single time they pay their mortgage, but yet tenants every single time they pay their rent they pay a tax on their rent.”
Petersen believes the time is right for Gov. Doug Ducey to call a special session so that lawmakers can provide immediate relief through the huge budget surplus.
Nearly five months ago, a group of mothers publicized a Google Drive dossier on them and other parents perceived as political enemies, compiled by the father of their Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) board president, Jann-Michael Greenburg. The trove of political opposition research leaked by SUSD mother Amanda Wray quickly made international news, and became known as the “Greenburg Files,” or “Greenburg Dossier.” Jann-Michael’s father, Mark Greenburg, didn’t shy away from the uproar that ensued.
In January, Greenburg filed an initial complaint in the Maricopa County Superior Court against the Wrays for defamation, as well as violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Several weeks later, Greenburg amended his complaint to only sue for CFAA violations, striking all claims of defamation. Reporting on his lawsuit was featured in one place: the Arizona Republic, behind a subscriber-only paywall. In response, the Wrays issued a motion to dismiss, claiming that Greenburg had ulterior motives aligned with SLAPP behavior: “strategic lawsuits against public participation” to silence free speech.
A status conference is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:30 am. A scheduling conference is also scheduled for May 19 at 3 pm. The requested relief totals nearly $10,000.
Greenburg is represented by attorney Christopher Rapp of Ryan Rapp Underwood & Pacheco. Amanda and Daniel Wray are represented by John Wilenchik of Wilenchik & Bartness and acclaimed GOP chairwoman and attorney Harmeet Dhillon with her law group. Judge Joan Sinclair is listed as hearing the case.
Greenburg’s lawsuit characterized Amanda Wray as a “political operative,” pointing to the private Facebook group she organized, “SUSD-CAN,” short for “Scottsdale Unified School District Community Action Network,” a parent and community advocacy group concerning SUSD issues like masking, vaccinations, LGBTQ+, and critical race theory (CRT). He alleged that Wray stole his private information and documents by accessing the dossier, and that she doxxed him by publishing and discussing his home address, license plate, and Paycheck Protection Program loan information on the Facebook group page.
The lawsuit explained that Greenburg shared access to his server, or Google account on which the dossier was located, with three other individuals, one of whom he identified as his son, Jann-Michael. Greenburg insisted that the Google Drive dossier was otherwise password protected. He claimed that inadvertent public access to the dossier was granted through a setting unknown to him at the time enabling third parties to access the server without a password: the use of the Google Drive’s URL. Jann-Michael inadvertently shared that URL with SUSD parents in an emailed response to defamation accusations by including 13 screenshots of public Facebook comments stored within the dossier, one of which included the URL.
“The situation was the equivalent of Plaintiff’s son accidentally disclosing his username and password,” read the complaint.
Wray was accused of intentionally breaching the Google Drive dossier by using a third party to create a hyperlink with the inadvertently-shared URL. Greenburg also accused Wray of copying, deleting, adding, reorganizing, and renaming files on his server. He estimated that she caused him a loss amounting to at least $5,000.
The Wrays’ motion to dismiss insisted that Greenburg failed to state a claim in which relief can be granted. They rejected claims that the Google Drive in question was made private, noting that Jann-Michael shared a publicly accessible URL that only needed to be typed into a web address bar to be accessed. They added that Daniel couldn’t be roped into the lawsuit because claims of “ratify[ing]” Amanda’s access to the dossier weren’t proof of liability.
“Amanda cannot be liable for criminal ‘computer hacking’ just for clicking a hyperlink created by a third party (who is not a party to this action) to the URL for Greenburg’s Google Drive that Greenburg’s son published for anyone to see and use,” read the motion to dismiss.
In a follow-up reply to Greenburg’s response to their motion to dismiss, the Wrays’ attorneys again questioned his motives for suing after challenging the truthfulness of his claims. They characterized his lawsuit as a continuation of the dossier.
“This lawsuit is the latest, and hopefully last, chapter in Greenburg’s unlawful harassment and intimidation campaign against Ms. Wray and SUSD parents in retaliation for their advocacy regarding the SUSD school board,” wrote the Wrays’ attorneys. “[T]his lawsuit was brought to deter or prevent Ms. Wray from exercising her constitutional rights and right to petition [and] intended to harass and/or cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation[.]”
In mid-February, a third-party forensic investigation carried out by Loehrs Forensics determined that neither the SUSD email server or four personal computers issued by SUSD were used to create, access, modify, or share the Google Drive folder containing the dossier.
Law enforcement cleared the Greenburgs of any wrongdoing. Scottsdale Police Department (SPD) determined in December the dossier didn’t violate any laws because it contained open source and public documents only. Attorney General Mark Brnovich asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate nonetheless, positing that Jann-Michael may have conspired to wield his power over parents. AZ Free News inquired with Brnovich’s office if any DOJ investigation ever took place. They didn’t respond by press time.
As AZ Free News reported, Jann-Michael admitted to having a history of sharing computers with his family members. He was also listed as one of the individuals who had editing access to the dossier.
No parent should ever be intimidated by a school board for exercising their constitutional rights.
Our office sent letters to Scottsdale Unified School District and DOJ today, regarding the alleged dossier. https://t.co/tUHBqLcl4z
In February, leadership within the University of Arizona (UArizona) sciences published papers championing an old claim made by the Chinese government: that COVID-19 originated naturally at a Chinese wet market. Also behind those papers were researchers intimately steeped in government efforts to prove that COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab whose research on coronaviruses was funded by the government — the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
UArizona Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department Head Michael Worobey and PhD student Lorena Malpica Serrano co-authored two papers alongside 34 scientists to claim that COVID-19 came from two encounters with animals at a wet market. One of those scientists, virologist Robert Garry, was hand-selected by NIH director Francis Collins to dispute whistleblower research from summer 2021 that COVID-19 was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology eight miles from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Another scientist, Netherlands molecular expert Marion Koopmans, served on the World Health Organization (WHO) mission in early 2021 to analyze the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan — a mission that concluded with a report blaming wet market animals that was fraught with errors, rejected by WHO leadership, haunted by claims of Chinese government interference, and ultimately walked back on by several mission members.
Over the last year, Worobey has researched for a connection between COVID-19 and the Chinese wet market. Last March, Worobey teamed up with four other researchers to posit in a paper that COVID-19 wasn’t the first coronavirus outbreak among humans — three of those researchers, University of California in San Diego scientists Jonathan Pekar, Niema Moshiri, and Joel Wertheim joined him on the two papers published most recently. That paper claimed that an earlier variant successfully jumped from animals to humans between mid-October and mid-November of 2019. Worobey and his peers largely dismissed the notion that COVID-19 originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
“The first described cluster of COVID-19 was associated with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late December 2019, and the earliest sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes came from this cluster,” read the report. “However, this market cluster is unlikely to have denoted the beginning of the pandemic, as COVID-19 cases from early December lacked connections to the market. The earliest such case in the scientific literature is from an individual retrospectively diagnosed on 1 December 2019. Notably, however, newspaper reports document retrospective COVID-19 diagnoses recorded by the Chinese government going back to 17 November 2019 in Hubei province. These reports detail daily retrospective COVID-19 diagnoses through the end of November, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was actively circulating for at least a month before it was discovered.”
Then last November, eight months after the collaborative March paper, Worobey appeared to believe more greatly that the wet market was the origins for COVID-19. He published a solo paper examining available records to link the virus to the wet market. It appears that three months after that solo paper, less than a year after dismissing the notion that the wet market was the origin of COVID-19, Worobey and several of his colleagues came to completely flip on their prior findings.
Their latest paper was picked up by the New York Times as a feature story. The acclaimed preprint recounted how the scientists studied a plethora of data, including virus genes, market stall maps, and social media activity of the earliest COVID-19 patients following several weeks in 2019 at the Huanan wet market. However, the Times noted that the papers didn’t identify the market animal that spread COVID-19 to humans.
In fact, no American or Chinese scientists were able to test the market animals claimed to be the cause of the COVID-19 outbreak; before anyone could, Chinese police shut down and disinfected the market. Only after Chinese police finished their work were scientists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention able to come test the area. Since there were no market animals left, the researchers sampled market interiors and stray animals. That was in January 2020. The Chinese scientists sat on this collected evidence until several months ago, a day before Worobey’s report at the end of February. The Chinese government’s report conflicted with the Worobey papers, noting that the sampled animals were negative for the virus and that all evidence of COVID-19 was found in relation to human activity in the surrounding environment.
We have just released two preprints on the origin of SARS-CoV-2:
In the year prior to Worobey and his colleagues advancing the argument that COVID originated from the wet market, an outside researcher attempted to enlighten the conflicting narratives. This scientist claimed in a paper that the virus was engineered in a lab within miles of the wet market.
As Vanity Fair reported, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom authored his standalone paper after discovering the disappearance of several Chinese papers detailing several SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences. The sequences are like points on a sequential map, allowing scientists to track the origins and evolution of a virus. Bloom suspected that the Chinese government destroyed evidence of the genomic sequences because they engineered the COVID-19 virus. His further investigation caused him to believe that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted evidence as well at the behest of the Chinese government. Bloom passed his findings laid out in the paper on to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Collins.
Bloom’s paper was with contention from outside experts brought forth by Collins in a meeting: an evolutionary biologist, Kristian Andersen, and the virologist involved in Worobey’s latest papers, Robert Garry. Andersen accused Bloom of unethical behavior for daring to investigate something that Chinese scientists deleted. Andersen insisted that the genomic sequences from Wuhan were of no concern.
Fauci sided with Andersen. He vouched for the Chinese scientists’ integrity, noting that their reasons for deleting the sequences were unknown. Yet, both he and Collins didn’t agree with Andersen when he pressured Bloom to allow edits to his paper.
As the Vanity Fair article outlined, Fauci and Collins had a vested interest to support the notions of natural transmission, not a lab leak, because of their relationship with EcoHealth Alliance — the nonprofit research organization that funded the coronavirus bat research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Emails obtained through public records requests revealed that EcoHealth Alliance CEO Peter Daszak thanked Fauci for dismissing lab leak theories, with Fauci responding in kind.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
