POLICE STATE - Feds to "monitor newsgathering decisions"

The Fascist News Police

It is not one fascist horror a day any more.  Now

they are coming at us by the truck load.

What the Fuck!  -  Will you guys stop the goose stepping out there in the hall?  I'm trying to Blog in here.

The Washington Times reports that the unelected Federal Communications Commission finds itself on the defensive over a proposed research project that critics say directly threatens First Amendment protections for the news media.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in a Feb. 14 letter to congressional Republicans made public Thursday, defended the agency’s proposed “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” as part of its mandate to “promote the policies and purpose … favoring diversity of media voices.

The FCC contract proposal calls for government investigators to explore the process by which stories are selected, as well as perceived bias at individual stations and perceived responsiveness by reporters and editors to “underserved” populations.
 

The prospect of a government agency monitoring newsgathering decisions and editorial control has infuriated some critics and even sparked a public condemnation from one of the Republican appointees to the FCC itself.

The FCC is in charge of granting operating licenses to radio and broadcast stations, and the new data could influence their decisions whose license is renewed in years to come.

“They could sit down at the end of the licensing period and say you only had 25 percent of the stories that were positive about government, and they could pull licenses because they think the stories are biased,” he added.

Many critics have blasted the new study, saying that the study is a blatant affront to constitutional first amendment freedom of press protections.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and 15 GOP members of the committee wrote a blistering letter to Wheeler in December after learning of the FCC’s proposed study.

“It is wrong, it is unconstitutional, and we urge you to put a stop to this most recent attempt to engage the FCC as the ‘news police,’” they wrote.


Read more: The Washington Times.


            Welcome to Obama's America

Glenn Beck

'We're Literally Living in 1984'

Obama's IRS Demands Businesses Show “Bonafide Reasons” for Layoffs

Can You Hear The Goose Stepping?

• The IRS has become the thug enforcer of our Führer and his Brown Shirts in Congress.  The IRS is now dictating to businesses their hiring and firing.
• Just in case you wonder why the "small government" GOP has not reformed the IRS it is because the IRS is the proud creation of the Republican Party.  See our article "Obama Channels Republican Socialism." 

The IRS will require employers who terminate employees to show that they did so for “bona fide business reasons” in order to be eligible for delaying the ObamaCare health insurance employer mandate.

Under new guidelines announced on February 10, the IRS will delay the mandate until 2016 for medium-sized businesses employing between 50 and 99 people.

The Treasury Department/IRS document outlining the regulations first states:

An applicable large employer [more than 100 employees] that, for a calendar month, fails to offer to its full-time employees health coverage that is affordable and provides minimum value may be subject to an assessable payment if a full-time employee enrolls for that month in a qualified health plan for which the employee receives a premium tax credit.

As might be expected, some employers who are slightly above the 100-employee limit might trim their staffs a bit to qualify for the delayed mandate. Obviously, since a company cannot function with an inadequate workforce, it will cut staff only if it makes good business sense to do so — regardless of the ObamaCare regulations.

Some companies may very well have been considering making cuts anyway, and the government regulations would merely provide more incentive to do what was needed. But the IRS does not see things this way reports the New American.

In a show of bureaucratic magnanimity, “to assist these employers in transitioning into compliance,” the IRS has provided “transition relief” for employers who have an average of at least 50 but fewer than 100 full-time employees during 2014.

To qualify for this “relief,” however, the company must “not reduce the size of its workforce or the overall hours of service of its employees in order to satisfy the workforce size condition set forth in paragraph (1) of this section XV.D.6.”

(One can just imagine an IRS bureaucrat visiting a company and writing them up because they are in violation of “section XV.D.6.”)

The IRS regulation further states: “A reduction in workforce size or overall hours of service for bona fide business reasons will not be considered to have been made in order to satisfy the workforce size condition.” (Emphasis added.)

Examples of “bona fide business reasons” acceptable to the IRS include “business activity such as the sale of a division, changes in the economic marketplace in which the employer operates, terminations of employment for poor performance, or other similar changes unrelated to eligibility for the transition relief provided in this section XV.D.6.” If the layoffs were made for these reasons, the IRS assures us, they will “not affect eligibility for that transition relief.”

As business executives have found in the past, however, government regulations enforced (or not) at the sole arbitrary discretion of agency bureaucrats is the stuff of which political pressure is made. It becomes an excellent tool to punish or reward companies according to the degree that they support the regime in power. This becomes even more likely if the regulatory process is made though executive dictates, rather than the legislative process.

Obamacare Collapse - Only 50% Pay Their Premiums

"You mean it's not free?"

The White House has been dealt a stunning new blow on Obamacare sign-up numbers with reports showing that only about half of the people "enrolled" at healthcare exchanges in various states have actually paid their premiums.

With the March 31 deadline for enrollment just seven weeks away, the number of sign-ups in federal and state marketplaces has slowed down to an alarming figure since the sudden surge in the latter part of December and early January reports Newsmax.

But the bigger problem for the Obama administration is that roughly 50 percent of consumers who had supposedly enrolled for Obama's healthcare reform have missed their payment deadline for Jan. 1, according to Investor's Business Daily's website Investors.com. 

In Washington state, the exchange had set a goal of signing-up 340,000 participants by the end of next month, but little more than half that number, 170,000, had filled out the Obamacare forms.

But even more devastating for the proponents of the Affordable Care Act is that only 88,071 of those had paid their premium as of Feb. 1st, which is a little more than half the sign-ups, or a little more than 25 percent of the number that Washington had hoped to enlist by March 31 with their premiums paid up.

In Wisconsin, Deputy Insurance Commissioner Dan Schwartzer said only about half of the 40,752 state residents that signed up for health insurance through Obamacare by December 31 have paid their premiums and are currently receiving coverage, according to the ABC TV station WXOW19.

In Nevada, they had hoped to have 115,000 signed up for Obamacare by the March 31 deadline for individuals. But so far it looks like it's going to fall well-short of that goal with just 14,999 having paid their premiums by Feb. 1, which amounts to 66 percent of those who enrolled.

In Minnesota, Conservative Intelligence Briefing reported that 27,775 households had received private coverage from the MNsure exchange as of January 18. But only 14,500 have paid or have payments pending – a little more than half.

Minnesota, which has a goal of 67,000 sign-ups by March 31, has also been hit by a slow-down in Obamacare enrollments. After having soared by 4,000 a week for five weeks over December and early January, the rate has gone back to the November crawl of just 700 a week.

Bing censoring search results for users in the U.S.

Microsoft Censors Your Searches

• American English and Chinese language queries for terms such as ‘Dalai Lama’ return radically different results on the Microsoft search engine for Bing and Yahoo.
• In censoring searches by the public, Microsoft is acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the US in the same way it filters results in mainland China.

Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.

These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship reports the UK Guardian.

A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama (达赖喇嘛) on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, China’s heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu.

The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.

Search results on Bing for ‘Dalai Lama’ in Chinese.
Photograph: Guardian

Running the same search in English on Bing generates a list headed by the Dalai Lama’s own website then links to his Wikipedia page and news reports, including one from Phayul.com, a pro-Tibetan independence website. The English search results page also shows images of the Dalai Lama, unlike the Chinese search.

Search results on Bing for ‘Dalai Lama’ in English.
Photograph: Guardian

Google, by contrast, generates broadly similar results for both English and Chinese searches. For Dalai Lama in Chinese it offers two Wikipedia pages as the top results followed by a series of news reports, one from Tibet.

A search on Bing in Chinese for Bo Xilai (薄熙来), the former high-flying Chinese government official now serving life imprisonment for corruption, shows equally different results. The top search result is again Baidu Baike. Wikipedia is the third entry. There are no western reports on the politician on the front page. In English the search is topped by Wikipedia, then by stories from the New York Times, BBC and Financial Times.

A Google search in Chinese starts with the Wikipedia page and then several news articles chronicling his downfall from sources including the BBC and Voice of America.

China heavily censors the internet for its own citizens, blocking website content and monitoring the internet access of individuals. Major US firms including Twitter are blocked, while others including Google have clashed repeatedly with the authorities over censorship.

The information was first collected by censorship blog Greatfire.org. Author Charlie Smith said he had originally discovered the discrepancies while checking for information on his own website, FreeWeibo.com, a site for anonymously searching Chinese social media.

“The first thing we noticed was our index page was not showing up. It specifically did not show the homepage. But it was in Google,” he said.

“It’s a bit crazy. Any Chinese person who is searching in Chinese from overseas is being treated as if they have the same rights as a resident of mainland China. So we won’t show them the accurate search results if they search for Dalai Lama. What you get is state controlled propaganda,” he said. “Except they don’t tell you the results have been censored. If you were in China they would at least tell you that.”

“We thought there had been a mistake so we wrote to Microsoft and they said ‘no comment,’” he said.

Microsoft did not return calls for comment from the Guardian.

Bing accounts for a small percentage of search in China but has been building up its web services in the country. Microsoft is in the middle of hiring 1,000 new employees to build up its services in China.

Google to Transmit Your Cellphone Videos to Police

Google to Act as a Police Spy

• You know that fine print you don't read?  I suspect that buried somewhere in that print is you giving permission to assorted multi-national corporations to "share" your private information with the police or military.
• So-called "private" companies can get around the 4th Amendment need for a search warrant and collect your data.  They can then "voluntarily" share that information with the government.

The American Police State  -  Google has filed a patent for identifying when a “mob” event takes place by detecting when a number of cellphone videos or photos are taken at one particular location with the intention of forwarding such information to law enforcement authorities.

“When there are at least a given number of video clips with similar time stamps and geolocation stamps uploaded to a repository, it is inferred that an event of interest has likely occurred, and a notification signal is transmitted (e.g., to a law enforcement agency, to a news organization, to a publisher of a periodical, to a public blog, etc.),” states US Patent #20140025755.

 

The patent raises questions about what level of remote access Google or any other company should have to your cellphone, and how such information may be abused or misinterpreted to alert authorities to ‘suspicious behavior’ which is in fact completely lawful reports Infowars News.

 

Time and location data pertaining to photographs and videos is a feature which already exists in virtually all modern cellphones.

 

“Would only photos/videos you uploaded as publicly viewable be included into this system? Could you opt out? Could Google access the private content stored on your local device for these purposes?” asks Quentyn Kennemer.

 

Such a system could easily be exploited by law enforcement authorities for a multitude of reasons, including the surveillance and monitoring of protesters.

 

The potential threat to privacy and freedom that would be created if these kind of measures became commonplace is open ended. Back in 2012, Apple filed a patent allowing it to wirelessly disable cameras on iPhones by “forcing certain electronic devices to enter “sleep mode” when entering a sensitive area.”

 

Protests, political gatherings and other events at which authorities wish to prevent communication, documentation or video streaming could be turned into dead zones by creating a “geofence” around designated locations.

 

We have also seen preparations for giving police or government the power to impose a “blackout” on all communications during certain times because cellphones can “annoy, frustrate, and even threaten people in sensitive venues.”

 

 

CEO Billionaires Defend NSA

The government's defense of constant surveillance of the American public reached a new level of absurdity when Obama compared Paul Revere to the NSA. Now it's time for the corporate billionaires to defend what their puppet Obama can't. Enter Bill Gates and Marc Andreesen to tell that we need to trust the NSA and we're too stupid to understand the technology. William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA worldwide understood the technology and has been telling us that the NSA is breaking the law.

 

 

 

 

Liberty - Going, going, gone.

Congressional Corruption - Everyone is on the take

"Corruptus in Extremis"

• We are ruled by a government of whores.
• Let's boil this down, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans give a shit about the average American.  Washington is one giant pig trough of corruption and everyone is lining their pockets with cold hard cash.

Retroactive Bribery  -  Bribery is simply a matter of timing.  If you take an envelope full of cash for "services rendered" while in office then you go to jail.  But if you take that very same envelope for "services rendered" after you leave office then it is a job related bonus.  Legal bribery.

The nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation found that former congressional staffers who take jobs as lobbyists make considerably more than the average lobbyist with no government attachments, showing the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street.

According to the study, both former staffers who list their previous congressional office and Hill alumni who choose not to advertise that information make substantially more than the average contract lobbyist.

Between 1998 and 2012, the median revolving door lobbyist who disclosed his congressional office earned $87,680 more than the median revolver who did not. In 2006, the difference was a little more than $122,000 reports the Daily Caller.

As of 2012, the median salary for a lobbyist who listed their former place of Hill employment is slightly above $300,000 and a former Hill staffer who did not reveal this information takes in around $280,000. Lobbyists with no government experience barely make it past six figures.

Here are the top five congressional offices that brought in the highest annual median salary per lobbyist between 1998 and 2012:

• Maryland Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer: - - -  $641,095
• Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill First: - - - - - - $630,619
• Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus - - - - - $576,275
• Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott: - - - -  $418,268
• Louisiana Democratic Sen. John Breaux:  - - -  $415,433

Hoyer was House Democratic leader, Lott and Frist Senate Republican leaders. Baucus chairs the Senate Finance Committee, on which Breaux once served.

Some congressional offices have established larger footprints on K Street than others.

Here are the top five offices with the most former staffers-turned-lobbyists:

Pennsylvania Democratic and Republican Sen. Arlen Specter : 27
Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott: 25
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy: 21
Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist: 20
Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison: 19



Corporatism Rules America
Wall Street raped the financial system with phony home loans and imploded the economy causing a Depression.  The criminals who did this are then bailed out with taxpayer cash by the politicians who looked the other way rather do proper oversight.  No one on Wall Street went to jail and the "fines" paid by the banks were covered by cash from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve. 
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The political liars and their aids who made it all possible are rewarded with retroactive bribes in the form of high paying jobs as lobbyists or in corporations for services rendered. 

There's no Democrats and Republicans.
"There are no sides. There's no Sunnis and Shiites. There's no Democrats and Republicans. There's only HAVES and HAVE-NOTS. 
.
This is a country, where the Secretary of Defense can go on T.V., and tell the American public, oh, that "This is about freedom! It's not about oil!" And nobody questions him, cuz they don't wanna hear the answer, because it's a lie! There are only so many places at the table, Gunnie. Now, are you on the INSIDE, or are you on the OUT?"
Senator Charles F. Meachum
Shooter (2007)

 

Ford Motors Keeps Records of the Laws You Break

Corporate Big Brother is Watching

• Ford Executive: ‘We know everyone who breaks the law’ thanks to our GPS in your car.  Ford will also have a record of every friend you visit, every store you shop at or every political meeting you attend.
• Take a guess how long it will take for the Big Brother NSA to tap into this "privately" collected data. 

Corporatism  -  Mussolini said it was the merger of State Power and business.  Now we see so-called "private" corporations acting as agents for the Federal Police State.  The endless spying of "private" companies gets around the 4th Amendment restrictions on government.  But Big Brother Government can tap into this privately collected data at will.

Ford's Global VP/Marketing and Sales, Jim Farley, said something both sinister and obvious during a panel discussion about data privacy at CES, the big electronics trade show in Las Vegas.

Because of the GPS units installed in Ford vehicles, Ford knows when its drivers are speeding, and where they are while they're doing it reports Business Insider.

Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone," he told attendees.

Rather, he said, he imagined a day when the data might be used anonymously and in aggregate to help other marketers with traffic related problems. Suppose a stadium is holding an event; knowing how much traffic is making its way toward the arena might help the venue change its parking lot resources accordingly, he said.

Your car's Black Box recording you

DR-200 Vehicle Black Box Camera - Dual View - G Sensor - GPS Logging - Speed
Complete vehicle monitoring solution simultaneously captures audio, video and GPS.

Spread Your Butt Cheeks Wide

Big Brother is Fucking You

The 4th and 5th Amendments are being abolished

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See articles

Black boxes forced on your car by Big Brother

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Feds mandate a Black Box spy device on every car

The Bill of Rights is Abolished
The Federal Government mandates that private auto makers install Black Box spy systems on every car in America.

Google wants to put microchips in your skull

Obey Your Masters

Microchips implanted in your skull by Google . . . shit,

what could possibly go wrong with that?

What the Fuck!  -  The madness just does not end.  Now Google wants to put microphones in your bedroom and microchips in your skull.

"I don’t have a microchip in my head – yet," says the man charged with transforming Google’s relations with the technology giant’s human users.

But Scott Huffman does envisage a world in which Google microphones, embedded in the ceiling, listen to our conversations and interject verbal answers to whatever inquiry is posed.

Huffman, Google's engineering director, leads a team tasked with making conversations with the search engine more reflective of the complex interactions people enjoy with each other reports the UK Independent.

A microphone hanging from the ceiling, responding to verbal queries, would remove the need to whip out a phone to remind yourself what time tomorrow’s flight leaves. It could also make sure you don’t miss the flight altogether.

 

When challenged on the likelihood of such a system being vulnerable to NSA wiretapping, Huffman glibly responded that people should just trust Google (a company that allowed the NSA to mine data from its cloud network “at will”) to safeguard their information.

 

Huffman touted the features of such a system, suggesting people could ask Google to screen football highlights on their television via the microphones, or arrange travel plans.

 

“I could ask my Google ‘assistant’ where we should have lunch, that serves French food and isn’t too expensive? Google will go ‘Ok, we’ll go to that place’ and when I get in my car it should already be navigating to that restaurant. We’re really excited by the idea of multiple devices being able to talk to each other,” said Huffman.

“Google believes it can ultimately fulfil people’s data needs by sending results directly to microchips implanted into its user’s brains,” states the report, a concept which Huffman welcomes reports Infowars News.

 

Although the idea of embedding a microchip inside the brain is a horror for some, there is a whole movement of people who call themselves transhumanists that will openly embrace such a scenario. Those who refuse to adopt the technology will eventually be seen as luddites and technophobes.

 

If Google’s transhumanist utopia is to be achieved, the microchip inside the brain must eventually become as ubiquitous as the cellphone. This will all be promoted in the name of convenience and Google will assure us that strong safeguards are in place to protect privacy (while they are work hand in hand with the NSA to desecrate privacy).

From so-called “smart” street lights that use microphones to record conversations, analyze voices and track people, to Xbox and cellphone devices that do likewise, our entire environment is being turned into what former CIA director David Petraeus hailed as a boon for “clandestine statecraft.”

 

According to whistleblowers like William Binney , the NSA is already recording our conversations, via email, phone and VOIP, and analyzing them in real time. Once our homes and our streets are festooned with microphones, the last refuge of privacy will be completely eviscerated.

 

 

Glenn Beck's "SURVEILLANCE STATE"

 

 

 

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell
    1984    

____________________________________

1984 is Here.
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." 
  - - - Robert A. Heinlein

See some our recent articles on the growing and unconstitutional 1984 Police State.

THE FEDERALIST - "Now the NSA is spying on Internet gamers without a warrant"

THE FEDERALIST - "Facebook Listens to Your Phone Calls - Welcome to 1984"

THE FEDERALIST - "Fed 1984 Surveillance Center to Open in Oakland"

THE FEDERALIST - "Feds to track your car's speed, location and number of passengers"

THE FEDERALIST - "1984 Tracking Boxes in Seattle - Fully funded by the DHS"

THE FEDERALIST - "1984 - Over 7,500 drones in U.S. airspace spying on you for Big Brother"

THE FEDERALIST - "AT&T is on the CIA payroll"
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THE FEDERALIST - "Senate Backs More and Expanded Big Brother Spying."

THE FEDERALIST - "Does Google work for the NSA?"
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THE FEDERALIST - "Obama is ‘Mining’ Your Behavior on Social Media."

THE FEDERALIST - "CIA Software Company Collects Obamacare Data."

THE FEDERALIST - "Electronically Tracking America's Breast Implants - Big Brother is in Your Bra."

THE FEDERALIST - "A Twitter-Fed alliance to spy on "depressed" people."

THE FEDERALIST - "China hires two million Internet "monitors"

THE FEDERALIST - "Religious Persecution at Lackland Air Force Base - The Thought Police are Here"

THE FEDERALIST - "The NSA hacks circle the wagons to defend unconstitutional spying"

THE FEDERALIST - "DHS to scan every face at local hockey game"

THE FEDERALIST - "Obama to scan 42 Billion credit card transactions"

THE FEDERALIST - "Government Satellites to Control Your Car's Speed"

THE FEDERALIST - "DEA has been spying on your phones since 1987"

THE FEDERALIST - "Governments spy on 38,000 Facebook users"

“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me--”
George Orwell
    1984    

 

Merry Christmas - Obamacare is Under Your Tree

A Gift From Our Dear Leader

Support our People's Republic, stop trying to become

a bourgeois pig and give the gift of wealth

re-distribution during this Winter Solstice Festival. 

The gift of Obamacare Fascism that forces you to buy the products of private insurance firms is the gift just keeps giving all year. 

The Democrat run People's Republic of California health exchange launched a campaign Thursday that urges people to give the “gift of health” this holiday season by pledging money to help them get insured under Obamacare.

Covered California is targeting young people with the campaign, because healthy consumers are essential to balancing out risk pools when sicker patients, who can no longer be denied coverage, enter the individual market because of the new health care law.

The statewide campaign lets parents or other other loved ones give a certificate that pledges money to the person who needs insurance. They can also send an e-card with a personal message and information about coverage options under the Affordable Care Act reports the Washington Times.

“You can’t make the medical decisions for your adult children, but you can help them get affordable health insurance under Covered California,” said Claire Lipschultz, state policy advocate for the National Council of Jewish Women-California. “Young adults tend to think that nothing will harm them. Moms know you are healthy until you are not. So, be sure your loved ones are covered.”

California, by far the nation’s most populous state, decided to run its own exchange instead of relying on the balky federal exchange website, HealthCare.gov.

Commie California considers paying poor people to drive electric cars

The morning flag raising at the California state capital.

"From each according to their ability"

• Coming soon - a taxpayer voucher of $21,000 for each “poor” person to drive an electric Nissan Leaf.
• This is full blown Mussolini style socialistic corporatism with the wealth being re-distributed to government approved businesses and voter groups.

The People's Republic of California  -  One longtime critic of federal transportation spending once concluded that it would be less expensive for the government to buy every new transit rider a Jaguar XJ8 than it would be to build certain new rail systems. Unfortunately, Democratic California officials may not have realized that the idea of buying people new cars wasn’t a serious proposal as much as a way to illustrate a point about excessive spending.

The unelected Democrat run California Air Resources Board is now embarking on a program that would help poor people buy energy-efficient vehicles. In one scenario posed by the agency, a “voucher” might even pay the full price for a Nissan Leaf, an electric car with an MSRP above $21,000, or for used cars with lower price tags.

In a staff report released on Nov. 19, the agency analyzes its Enhanced Fleet Modernization Program authorized in 2007. Funded by a $1 surcharge on vehicle registrations, the $30-million-a-year program is essentially a “cash for clunkers” deal. It provides motorists with $1,000 to $1,500 to retire their high-polluting vehicles reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The board also sponsors a pilot program that provides up to $4,000 for certain motorists to ditch their old cars and buy late-model, cleaner vehicles. The board admits that the current program is “overly complicated” and “highly bureaucratic,” so it’s looking for ways to streamline and expand it so that more people take advantage of the assistance.

 

Two new laws enable this effort. AB 8 extended the life of the $1 surcharge until 2024. And SB 459 directs the agency to offer vouchers at “no less than $2,500.” There is no apparent maximum. The law authorizes “an increase in the compensation for low-income vehicle owners as necessary to balance maximizing air quality benefits while ensuring participation.” One goal, as explained in the SB 459 fact sheet, is to promote “transportation justice.”

 

Apparently, wealthy people already are benefiting from subsidies to high-end electric car makers such as the Tesla. This law brings car subsidies directly to lower-income people.

 

The law was authored by Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Calabassas, recently named one of two Legislators of the Year by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers for her efforts to promote cleaner air.

 

In a chart in the staff report, the Air Resources Board looks at the potential “incentive” that would be needed to encourage people to buy the desired type of car. It finds, for instance, the agency would need to pay the “full cost” of a vehicle for a family of two to buy a new electric car or $18,000 for a family of three to buy a used hybrid.

 

The agency isn’t saying that it will necessarily provide such large subsidies, but the report does lay the groundwork for much larger subsidies than are now available.
 

Sucking on the Public Teat
Everyone from illegals to the poor to the middle class to the rich just can't wait to latch onto the Public Teat and suck down that sweet, sweet re-distributed taxpayer cash.

Chinese 'Food Colonies' set up in Canada, the U.S and the Ukraine

"Daddy bought me Canada for my birthday."

The Road to Serfdom

• All over the world nations are selling off and/or stealing private property in order to sell it to socialistic government owned or backed businesses.
• Chinese "settlers" in Canada are buying up land and businesses with funds often provided by state-owned firms back in China.

With too few farms in China to feed a burgeoning population, Chinese immigrants have started buying up agricultural lands in Canada and shipping produce to Asia.

Provincial authorities counted a half dozen large investment firms buying up farmlands in the province of one million people, but could not say if any of them are linked to Beijing, nor estimate the size of their land holdings.

After Chinese state-owned firms poured vast sums into neighboring Alberta's oil sands -- which forced Ottawa to tighten its investment rules to try to prevent foreign governments from controlling Canadian resources -- many in rural Saskatchewan are quick to believe that Beijing is now targeting their farmland to feed its people reports Agence France-Presse.



"Some people say that the Chinese state is behind this. That's wrong," said Andy Hu, the 39-year-old chief executive of Maxcrop, an upstart investment firm that deals in rural Saskatchewan real estate.

One example is Howard Yong, a Chinese entrepreneur who immigrated to Manitoba last year and is now a permanent resident, owns the 320 acre farm east of St. Laurent.


FACT - Most immigrants don't show up with the cash to buy 320 acre farms.  They are backed by "investors" connected and interconnected to and financed by the government of China.

Yong has been busy since his arrival, partnering with two University of Manitoba graduates, both of Chinese descent, to form a company called WYNN Agricultural Investment Management Ltd.


The partners have ambitious plans to create a network of Chinese owned farms near St. Laurent on the east side of Lake Manitoba.

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 “Our goal is to set up a special region, to set up a Chinese agricultural community,” said Will Yue, WYNN president and a University of Manitoba economics graduate, who previously worked as a business consultant for Chinese clients in Canada.


“If we go to cattle and grain together … maybe 100,000 acres. Or maybe bigger than that,” Yue said.


Since forming WYNN Agricultural Investment Management earlier this year, they have helped Chinese clients buy five cattle farms in the area, for a total of 3,000 acres.


 However, they’re not satisfied with that progress because they were planning to have 10 or 20 farms by this time.
 “We hope it can be faster than this. There is really a lot of Chinese investors, they are very interested in farms,” said Yue, who is from Hubei province in China and has permanent resident status in Canada. 


“But we have to do more extensive promotions and marketing (of our services).”
 The partners want to help Chinese investors interested in buying Canadian land and farms.


For the full article go to Farmland Grab.org

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Under a 50-year plan, Ukraine will initially provide China with at least 100,000 hectares - an area almost the size of Hong Kong - of high-quality farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.

 

A Chinese "Food Colony" the size of
Hong Kong in the Ukraine 

 

China will plough billions of yuan into farmland in Ukraine that will eventually become its biggest overseas agricultural project.

The move is a significant step in China's recent efforts to encourage domestic companies to farm overseas as China's food demand grows in pace with urbanisation.

Under the 50-year plan, Ukraine will initially provide China with at least 100,000 hectares - an area almost the size of Hong Kong - of high-quality farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, mainly for growing crops and raising pigs reports the South China Morning Post.

The produce will be sold to two Chinese state-owned grain conglomerates at preferential prices. The project will eventually expand to three million hectares.

Ding Li, a senior researcher in agriculture at Anbound Consulting in Beijing, said the deal was a big move for China compared with earlier overseas agriculture.

In April 2009, China had slightly over two million hectares of farmland abroad, he said. "So three million hectares would mean a very big project."

The agreement was signed in June between the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and KSG Agro, Ukraine's leading agricultural company, XPCC said in a statement.

XPCC, also known as Bingtuan, is a quasi-military organization established in Xinjiang in the 1950s to reclaim farmland and consolidate defences against the Soviet Union, whose "granary" at that time was, ironically, the Ukraine.

The statement did not reveal the value of the investment, but the Kyiv Post reported last month that it would be more than US $2.6 billion. The newspaper called it an "unprecedented foreign investment" in Ukraine's agriculture sector.

China has made substantial agricultural investments elsewhere, notably in South America.

Beidahuang acquired 234,000 hectares to grow soya bean and corn in Argentina, while Chongqing Grain paid US$375 million for soya bean plantations in Brazil and US $1.2 billion for land in Argentina to grow soya beans, corn and cotton.

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Chinese Communists buy U.S. pork giant

The top executive at Shuanghui is a high-ranking member

of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese targeted the American company Smithfield Foods which won national security clearance for its $4.7 billion sale to a Chinese meat processor.  The deal recently closed and ownership changed over to China.

The Chinese firm Shuanghui is effectively controlled by the Chinese government meant that it presents a national security threat to the United States.

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The top executive at Shuanghui “is a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party,” and he was appointed to that job by the party. “If he does not do what they say, they will remove him or worse.”

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In addition, the transaction is being financed in part by the Bank of China. “The Bank of China does not finance any transaction unless it is told to do so by the Chinese government”. “By any measure, this is a Chinese-controlled company.”

See the full article at Chinese Communists buy U.S. pork giant

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A Serf bows to his Lord.
Free men own private property. Serfs own nothing and serve as tax slaves,
working the land and forced to turn over the wealth they produced to
their Lords and Masters in Government in return for "protection".

The Road to Serfdom Series
..

The world is moving toward a modern form of Neo-Serfdom where everyone works for the all-powerful State or businesses controlled by the State.  A world where individual property rights and freedom do not exist.

Freedom is slowly vanishing.  What happens when the major employers are owned by government backed investment groups, or your food comes from government owned farms, or your news is delivered by so-called "private" corporations that are in reality connected and interconnected to governments?

George Orwell had a name for it:  Big Brother.  Benito Mussolini had a name too: Corporatism or Fascism.

Please check out other stories in our Serfdom series.

THE FEDERALIST - "Chinese Communists buy U.S. pork giant"

THE FEDERALIST - "A Massive Theft of Cambodian land by Europe"

THE FEDERALIST - "Private property confiscated in Ethiopia & sold to multi-national corporations."

THE FEDERALIST - "Tax Slavery American Style - Feds Profit off Student Debt."

THE FEDERALIST - "Slavery returns to Europe"
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THE FEDERALIST - "China to buy up the Australian dairy industry."

THE FEDERALIST - "China Buys Up the United States."

THE FEDERALIST - "750,000 Chinese have Colonized Africa"

THE FEDERALIST - "Korea secretly buys Australia."

THE FEDERALIST - "Australia and Africa become Arab Food Colonies."

THE FEDERALIST - "China buys Australia (For Cheap Too)"

THE FEDERALIST - "The Chinese conquest of Africa"

THE FEDERALIST - "China buys New Zealand - The Road to Serfdom, Part XVII"

THE FEDERALIST - "Arab Food Colonies in Black Africa."

THE FEDERALIST - "Chinese colonization of New Zealand blocked."

THE FEDERALIST - "Chinese "Slavery" in Africa - The Road to Serfdom, Part XIV."
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