Orwell's 1984: Blueprint for US Authoritarianism Today

George Orwell, born 110 years ago as Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), was an English novelist and journalist, his works marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.  

Pursuant to arriving at an ethical practice of politics and economics also leads to explore, with forethought, constituent factors that may derail truthful manifestation, identifying the points of frailty where deceit and exploitation may deflect from honest engagement and foster predation and degeneracy from the wellbeing of all.  Recognizing the hypocrisy of Stalin, and the plethora if predators rampant in the socialist and communist movements in Europe, Orwell penned the iconic novel 1984, published in 1947, as a clarion call to the world to beware the tides of neo-exploitation from the bold new movements of socialism and communism running astray of concerns for the wellbeing of humanity.  

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE

Abby Martin remarks on the 110th birthday of British visionary George Orwell, highlighting 1984's nightmarish prophecy of a dystopian future, in the context of the modern day surveillance state.  

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous when Economic Democracy is established. Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE http://gotoplus.me/ProgressiveSustainability

Watch the first movie, featuring Edmund O'Brien and Michael Redgrave, 1956, in full.  

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Farmer Faces Over 2 Years Jail, $10K Fines for Feeding Community

Guest article

Things are heating up in Baraboo, Wisconsin as a long awaited food rights trial approaches.  

Raw milk drinkers are outraged that Wisconsin DATCP is bringing criminal charges against a farmer who serves a private buying club.  Do citizens have a right to contract with a producer and grow food to their own standards? That is what is at stake in this case. – Kimberly Hartke, Publicist Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

Customers and Other Supporters to Attend Court with Farmer

Food rights activists from around North America will meet at the Sauk County Courthouse in this tiny town on May 20 to support Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger and food sovereignty.  Hershberger, whose trial begins that day, is charged with four criminal misdemeanors that could land this husband and father in county jail for up to 30 months with fines of over $10,000…  

The Wisconsin Department of Agricultural Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) targeted Hershberger for supplying a private buying club with fresh milk and other farm products.  

DATCP has charged Hershberger with, among other things, operating a retail food establishment without a license.  Hershberger repeatedly rejects this, citing that he provides foods only to paid members in a private buying club and is not subject to state food regulations.  

Hershberger says:

There is more at stake here than just a farmer and his few customers — this is about the fundamental right of farmers and consumers to engage in peaceful, private, mutually consenting agreements for food, without additional oversight.  

A little more than a year ago, food rights activists from around the country stood in support of Hershberger at a pre-trial hearing.  They read and signed a “Declaration of Food Independence” that asserts inherent rights in food choice.  This month after the trial each day, many of the same food rights activists plus others will gather at the Al Ringling Theater across the street from the courthouse and hear presentations by leaders in the food rights movement.  Notable speakers include Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, Mountain Man show star Eustace Conway, and food rights organizer from Maine, Deborah Evans.  

Hershberger, and other farmers around the country, are facing state or federal charges against them for providing fresh foods to wanting individuals.  In recent months the FDA has conducted several long undercover sting operations and raids against peaceful farmers and buying clubs that have resulted in farms shutting down and consumers without access to the food they depend on.  

Vernon has faced a lot of pre-hearings and postponements already.  Legal concerns are mounting.  Printable flyers and an account from his May 7th hearing appear here.  

This is a landmark precedent-setting case that could forever change food access rights.  In addition, did you know that a Wisconsin judge who declared that we have no inherent right to the healthy foods of our choice retired and went to work for Monsanto?  

Watch for more info and a recap on the battle:  

Information about farm raids:  http://www.FarmFoodFreedom.org  

For additional information on raw milk:  http://www.westonaprice.org  

URL for Event:  http://www.farmfoodfreedom.org/event/vernon-hershberger-trial  

Press Release:  http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/news_wp/?p=8172  

See Activist Posts’s running story:  

Pre-Trial Hearing Begins For Farmer Targeted by Raw Milk Police; Legal Concerns Begin to Mount  

This article originally appeared here  

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE

http://gotoplus.me/ProgressiveSustainability

Senator Warren Demands to Know Why Criminal Bankers Aren’t Being Locked Up

Fascism: n. the incestuous fornication between government and companies in jackalsome mockery of the public of whom they rape, pillage, and cannibalize.  

By Stephen C. Webster via Raw Story 

In a letter (PDF) sent to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Attorney General Eric Holder and SEC Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demanded to know why the government keeps accepting financial settlements from criminal bankers when they could instead be taken to trial, convicted and locked up.  

In six short paragraphs, Warren requested that each institution turn over copies of any internal research “on the trade-offs to the public” between letting big financial firms pay a fine and walk “without admission of guilt” versus moving forward with full-scale prosecutions.  

The letter was sent as a follow-up to a similar question she asked of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Feb. 14.  Warren noted that the OCC replied last week denying the existence of any such research.  In her letter sent Tuesday, she went on to add:  

…I believe very strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.

The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations.  If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.  

There’s been a rash of mega-settlements between the government and the nation’s largest banks in recent years over allegations of foreclosing on people without just cause, knowingly making bad loans and reselling the debt, making false statements to rob from retired pensioners, laundering money for drug cartels, repressive regimes and terrorists, and agreeing to settlements and then ignoring them, to name a few.  

“The problem is the banks have overwhelming confidence that law enforcement is not taking this seriously,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said last Monday, appearing on MSNBC.  “They have overwhelming confidence that whatever the rules are, they won’t be followed up on.”

Five years on from a financial crisis that nearly froze the flow of credit in the United States and sparked a multi-trillion dollar bailing-out of the global financial industry, few American bankers and big finance executives have faced criminal charges.  

There is, however, one notable exception:  Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff, who defrauded mainly wealthy clients to the tune of $64.8 billion.  He said from jail in 2011 that many of his former colleagues on Wall Street engage in criminal insider trading on a regular basis, much like he did.  

“It’s unbelievable, Goldman … no one has any criminal convictions,” Madoff told New York Magazine earlier that year.  “The whole new regulatory reform is a joke.  The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.”  
——

Photo:  Screenshot via YouTube.

Taxed by the Boss: Brutal Corporate Gouging of State Coffers

Taxed by the Boss 

By David Cay Johnston

(Reuters) - Across the country more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers - and are keeping the money with the states' approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers' paychecks.  None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.
General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and AMC Theatres enjoy deals to keep state taxes deducted from their workers' paychecks, the report shows.  Foreign companies also enjoy such arrangements, including Electrolux, Nissan, Toyota and a host of Canadian, Japanese and European banks, Good Jobs First says.

Why do state governments do this?  Public records show that large companies often pay little or no state income tax in states where they have large operations, as this column has documented.  Some companies get discounts on property, sales and other taxes.  So how to provide even more subsidies without writing a check?  Simple.  Let corporations keep the state income taxes deducted from their workers' paychecks for up to 25 years.
It was not always this way.  Letting companies keep their workers' state taxes apparently began in Kentucky two decades ago as a way to retain jobs.

Last July when I wrote about six big companies that pocket Illinois state taxes (r.reuters.com/zux57s) I knew there was more to this.  But I had no idea how pervasive these diversions were until I read an advance copy of the 39-page report by Good Jobs First.

CORPORATE SOCIALISM

Deals cut with the states over the past two decades diverted $5.5 billion from public purposes to private gain, the report says.  Close to $700 million more was diverted last year, Good Jobs First estimates.

New Jersey approved $73.2 million in new deals in 2011 on top of $178 million diverted that year alone under previous deals.  I calculate that at nearly $80 per household in corporate welfare based on New Jersey's 3.1 million households.

These deals typify corporate socialism, in which business gains are privatized and costs socialized.  They also mean government picks winners and losers, interfering with competitive markets.  Leaders in both parties embrace these giveaways because they draw campaign donations from corporate interests and votes from people who do not understand that they are subsidizing huge companies.

Michael Press, a Connecticut consultant on tax incentives, says such deals, however troubling, are an inevitable result of the U. S. Constitution setting up competition between the states.

"In an ideal world we would not provide any corporate subsidies," Press told me.  "It looks like corruption.  But if you do it right, if you only target those companies whose behavior you change to create jobs or keep jobs in your state then these targeted temporary arrangements are cheaper - much cheaper - and can be more effective than an overall reduction in tax rates."

The mission of Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst.org) is making economic development subsidies accountable and effective.  In years of working with their data I have always found it sound.  While Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First's founder, has rooted out all sorts of hidden subsidies over the years, he emphasizes that he is not inherently hostile to them, only to secrecy, waste and what he calls job piracy and job blackmail.

"Job piracy" occurs when one state diverts taxes to lure an employer across state lines.  AMC Entertainment announced a deal last year to move its corporate headquarters from Kansas City, Mo., to a nearby Kansas suburb.  In return, Good Jobs First said, Kansas will let the multiplex chain keep $47 million of state income taxes withheld from its workers' paychecks, a drain on public finances that did not create any jobs, but does enrich the Wall Street firms that own AMC including arms of J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group.  AMC declined to answer my questions.

"Job blackmail" occurs when a company threatens to close a plant unless it gets tax money.

In Illinois, the law requires companies to threaten to leave before they can keep taxes withheld from paychecks.  Motorola Mobility, now being acquired by Google; the truck maker Navistar; the German manufacturer Continental Tire, and three auto makers - Chrysler, Ford and Mitsubishi - get to keep $346.8 million in taxes over 10 years because they threatened to leave Illinois.  Navistar can pocket $62.1 million even if it fires a quarter of its Illinois workforce, its contract shows.  A recent deal gives Sears $150 million, Good Jobs First reported.

PROMISES OF JOBS

Promising to retain jobs can be lucrative.  General Electric invested $126 million updating part of its Ohio operations.  In return, GE gets a tax credit equal to $115.3 million of its worker taxes, recovering 92 percent of its investment.  A sweet deal for GE, but not its competitors.

Gary Sheffer, GE's top spokesman, said the company told its workers about the deal.  In all, he said, GE is investing around $300 million in Ohio and "the resulting taxes the state will receive will far exceed the tax credits provided to GE."

That response, I think, misses the point - GE should pay its own bills without taking welfare.

Many figures in the Good Jobs First report are from disclosure reports some states make.  Others come from news accounts and company announcements.

Total revenue losses are higher than the report states.  First, some states hide the costs.  Phil Mattera, the research director at Good Jobs First, said he lists the cost as zero for states that hide the numbers.

Good Jobs First wants to end these diversions, but failing that recommends mandatory disclosure to the workers as the first reform.  I concur.  It's the first step in ending corporate welfare as we know it.

(The author is a Reuters columnist.  The opinions expressed are his own.  Corrects $346.8 to $346.8 million in paragraph 15)

(Editing by Howard Goller and Amy Stevens)

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