Tag: police state

Amish Farm Fined $250,000, Facing Jail Time For Humanely Raising & Selling Food To Willing Customers

Amos Miller and his family has been running Miller’s Organic Farm for over a century, providing willing and highly satisfied customers with milk, chicken, beef, and eggs. All of the food coming from Miller’s farm is beyond organic, humanely raised in a non-factory setting and the animals treated with dignity as they spend their entire lives naturally and stress-free out on pasture. By any moral standard, Miller’s farm is the leading example of what farming in America should look like.

Unfortunately, because Miller uses humane techniques and treats his animals well, this has put a government target on his back. Recently, federal Judge Edward G. Smith, imposed sanctions on his farm, ordering the family farm to pay over $250,000 in fines or go to jail. Because the Millers don’t use the USDA factory farm methods, this makes them non-compliant and thus an enemy of the state.

“In order to effect defendants’ future compliance, by making them aware of the seriousness of their violations and the consequences for future violations, defendants are ordered to pay to the United States, within 30 days of the date of entry of this Order — and pursuant to written instructions that the United States will provide to defendants—a fine of $250,000, or face further monetary and other penalties, possibly including imprisonment of Amos Miller,” the order says.

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How Whitney Duan became China’s richest woman, then vanished without a trace

Once upon a time, Weihong “Whitney” Duan was the poster woman for the Chinese dream. 

After growing up poor, she wheeled and dealed her way to a billion-dollar fortune, making her name as China’s most successful female entrepreneur. 

Then, on Sept. 5, 2017, at age 50, she simply disappeared from the streets of Beijing. 

As her ex-husband Desmond Shum recounts in his new book, “Red Roulette,” (Scribner), out now, “she was last seen the day before in her sprawling office at Genesis Beijing, a $2.5 billion development project that she and I had built. There, Whitney had masterminded real estate projects worth billions more. And now suddenly she was gone.” 

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9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

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Biden Adviser Says Administration Will ‘Run Over’ GOP Governors Who Resist Vaccine Mandates

White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond said President Joe Biden is willing to “run over” any Republican governors who attempt to fight back against federal vaccine mandates.

After Biden unveiled a plan to impose either vaccination or frequent testing on over 80 million workers who are employed at companies that have 100 employees or more, Richmond told CNN that the White House is ready for GOP opposition.

“The one thing I admire about this president is the fact that we are always going to put people above politics. And we’re going to fight for those who really need our help,” Richmond, a former Democrat congressman from Louisiana, said in response to a question about governors resisting the mandate.

“And those governors that stand in the way, I think, it was very clear from the president’s tone today that he will run over them,” he said. “And it is important. It’s not for political purposes. It’s to save the lives of American people. And so, we won’t let one or two individuals stand in the way. We will always err on the side of protecting the American people.”

Richmond’s comment, however, raises questions about how the federal government plans to “run over” states, as the United States government is federalist and combines the central government with state and local governments.

A number of Republican governors on Thursday, following Biden’s speech, said they would resist the vaccine mandate. Should the federal government direct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to impose testing or vaccine mandates on private employees, Biden will face an avalanche of lawsuits.

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Groups push back against Biden’s plan to grant IRS access to your bank account (and PayPal) transaction data

Banking industry officials and other financial services firms are bracing for a long fight over a bill that will require banks to share consumer account information with the Internal Revenue Service to boost federal tax revenue.

This notion originally gained traction this spring within the American Families Plan by the Biden administration. But bankers and even some consumer groups have slammed it as a compliance concern and a privacy issue. Financial institutions already provide the IRS with large quantities of data.

As part of the 3.5 trillion dollar budget reconciliation package proposed by the Biden administration, legislators are considering this invasive proposal as an income source to fund the massive budget.

The Biden administration argued that bank surveillance would prevent tax evasion, but many are obviously concerned that it’s a breach of the Fourth Amendment (which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government) and would also favor those who are embracing the move towards decentralized finance and cryptocurrencies, as well as those that use off-shore accounts.

The proposals would force banks to report every deposit and withdrawal related to a bank account and would also include centralized companies such as PayPal, Venmo, (owned by PayPal), CashApp, and cryptocurrency exchanges.

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Meet Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of

This past Sunday, an investigation into the global abuse of spyware developed by veterans of Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 gained widespread attention, as it was revealed that the software – sold to democratic and authoritarian governments alike – had been used to illegally spy on an estimated 50,000 individuals. Among those who had their communications and devices spied on by the software, known as Pegasus, were journalists, human rights activists, business executives, academics and prominent political leaders. Among those targeted political leaders, per reports, were the current leaders of France, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.

The abuse of Pegasus software in this very way has been known for several years, though these latest revelations appear to have gained such traction in the mainstream owing to the high number of civilians who have reportedly been surveilled through its use. The continuation of the now-years-long scandal surrounding the abuse of Pegasus has also brought considerable controversy and notoriety to the Israeli company that developed it, the NSO Group.

While the NSO Group has become infamous, other Israeli companies with even deeper ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus have been selling software that not only provides the exact same services to governments and intelligence agencies but purports to go even farther.

Originally founded by former Israeli Prime Minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak, one of these companies’ wares are being used by countries around the world, including in developing countries with the direct facilitation of global financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. In addition, the software is only made available to governments that are “trusted” by Israel’s government, which “works closely” with the company.

Despite the fact that this firm has been around since 2018 and was covered in detail by this author for MintPress News in January 2020, no mainstream outlet – including those that have extensively covered the NSO Group – has bothered to examine the implications of this story.

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