Towards a one party state: no criticism allowed
The IRS (US tax service) is investigating the NAACP’s (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) tax-exempt status, according to the NAACP’s chairperson, because of a critical speech he made about Bush:
Documents provided to The Associated Press on Thursday by the office of Julian Bond, chairman of the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said IRS agents were investigating his keynote address July 11 at the NAACP’s annual convention in Philadelphia.
In that speech, Bond said of the Bush administration: “They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division. They’ve tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They write a new constitution of Iraq and they ignore the Constitution here at home.”
For an organization to keep its tax-exempt status, “leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official organizational functions,” according to an Oct. 8 letter to the NAACP from the IRS office in Louisville, Ky.
The NAACP had until last Saturday to respond but was granted an extension until next week, Bond said. He criticized the IRS for trying to limit the group’s ability to express its opinions.
“Coming just weeks before the election, what other reason could there be,” Bond said in a telephone interview Thursday. “We have always been nonpartisan, but we are not noncritical.”
He charged that the investigation amounted to a “blatant political use of the IRS.”