Coincidence? Military Industrial Complex Hit Highest Stock Prices Ever as Govt Hypes North Korea War

By Claire Bernish

Feckless boasts of military might and icy vows to annihilate one another might not necessarily prove war between the U.S., North Korea, and their allies is nigh, but the monumental increase in stocks of weapons and defense manufacturers — the economic fingerprints a preparation for a colossal military endeavor — just might.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” President Trump railed yesterday. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

If, as legendary author John Steinbeck posited, “all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal,” than the altogether avoidable rush for violent, physical confrontation with North Korea — currently unfolding by the hour — could easily be deemed foolishness of the highest order.

After all, when nations resort to verbal sparring over the size and force of one another’s … militaries, it’s difficult not to picture world leaders as children hurling insults in a sandbox — a disturbing mental image only worsened by the fact Trump and perhaps Kim hold keys to arsenals with nuclear capabilities never before seen on Earth.

Horrifying recollections of bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in World War II precisely 72 years ago — the latter, to the day — paint a cold if prescient portent of the need for defense.

Keen to shore up defenses amid the latest iterations of political tumult between the cloistered totalitarian regime and the supposed Land of the Free, a number of Lockheed Martin’s customer nations are snatching up missile defense systems in preparation for what some analysts contend may be the next world war.

After many years of failure,countries are coming together to finally address the dangers posed by North Korea. We must be tough & decisive!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 8, 2017

Fear has infected the planet — so the fraught business of national defense is booming.

“The level of dialogue around missile defense is now at the prime minister and minister of defense level,” vice president of Lockheed’s Air and Missile Defense business, Tom Cahill, noted in an interview with Reuters, which added,

Some countries are putting missile defense at the top of their list of desired capabilities, Cahill said. Interest has increased over the last 12 to 18 months, as have threats, he said.

Shares of Lockheed are up nearly 8 percent, to $300.10, since North Korea’s first long-range missile test on July 4. The stock is up 20 percent year-to-date.

Of course, that was yesterday. Today, Lockheed Martin stocks continue to rise — just prior to publication, stocks hovered around $305 per share — and show no indications of falling to levels typical of a less charged global atmosphere.

U.S. government business comprised 70 percent of Lockheed Martin’s total revenue last year; international clientele, 27 percent — a figure the company seeks to grow.

Indeed, while North Korean President Kim Jong-un certainly tends toward the hyperbolic, Pyongyang’s repeated missile tests have frayed the nerves of neighbors — particularly those of U.S. allies, South Korea and Japan.

Recent long-range missile tests from obdurately belligerent North Korea shocked the United Nations Security Council into a unanimous vote to impose severe sanctions — an action putatively slated to evaporate a breathtaking $1 billion annually in losses on the nation’s most lucrative exports.

Critics of Trump’s needless provocation of the Korean regime and Washington’s apparent insistence the public believe Pyongyang somehow acquired a veritable stockpile of nuclear warheads conjure the specter of President George W. Bush’s storied, nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction — and the resulting entanglement the U.S. still fights there, despite the claim having been proven false.

It was U.S. sanctions and missile defense system presence just inside the South Korean border which have groused Kim into a sharply bellicose tone, some say, and any threat from the North comes courtesy of Western provocation.

Given North Korea’s extreme isolationism, proving nukes sit ready to destroy the West — oddly, an admonition used by both parties — would be a Herculean task.

But not everyone in the Trump administration is willing to paint Pyongyang as formidable as it paints itself. Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka scoffed in an interview Tuesday morning with FOX Business, terming North Korea a “Lilliputian flea.”

“North Korea is a Stalinist regime,” Gorka noted, “but it can’t even feed its own people.”

No matter the facts, apparently, the military-industrial machine’s cogs won’t rest until international customers have their weapons of mass destruction — cementing a bright future for Lockheed Martin and its ilk, alone — particularly when the latest Number One Threat constitutes little more than a phantom menace.

Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

Image Credit: Pixabay

EU Proposes Freezing Bank Accounts to Bailout Megabanks

By Claire Bernish

After nervous customers panicked and drained their accounts, ultimately causing the collapse of Spanish bank, Banco Popular, equally jittery European Union officials are debating the merits of freezing access — preventing anyone from withdrawing any money — at the first sign of a bank run.

Proponents claim measures to halt a rush of withdrawals would prevent the downfall of floundering financial institutions at their most vulnerable point — in hopes of staving off a catastrophe at least as harrowing as that of 2008 — while detractors admonish the move might have precisely the opposite effect, with investors rushing to yank funds at the slightest indication of trouble.

“The desire is to prevent a bank run, so that when a bank is in a critical situation it is not pushed over the edge,” ‘a person familiar with German government’s thinking’ told Reuters.

“Giving supervisors the power to temporarily block bank accounts at ailing lenders is ‘a feasible option,’ a paper prepared by the Estonian presidency of the EU said, acknowledging that member states were divided on the issue,” Reuters reports.

“EU countries which already allow a moratorium on bank payouts in insolvency procedures at national level, like Germany, support the measure, officials said.”

A cursory autopsy of last month’s Banco Popular failure had economic officials scrambling to figure out how best to prevent a similar financial debacle; but the idea of cutting customers’ access to their own funds when conditions warrant, blasts apart a Pandora’s Box of potentialities — all, favoring the State and banking industry over individual customers.

While officials contend cutting off account access would theoretically prevent a bank already in distress from going under, when scores of people withdraw money at once, the proposal toes a fraught but sacrosanct line blocking government overreach from private, individual finance.

According to the Estonian paper perused by Reuters, an additional measure proposed the development of a mechanism whereby customers in such a situation could withdraw “at least a limited amount of funds.”

“We strongly believe that this would incentivize depositors to run from a bank at an early stage,” Charlie Bannister of the banking lobby group, Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), told Reuters, alluding to the possible whiplash effect described above.

Envoys of the European Union originally discussed these withdrawal restrictions on July 13, with further talks set for September, but lawmakers would have to concur before any variant of the plan could be put in place. Continues Reuters:

The plan, if agreed, would contrast with legislative proposals made by the European Commission in November that aimed to strengthen supervisors’ powers to suspend withdrawals, but excluded from the moratorium insured depositors, which under EU rules are those below 100,000 euros ($117,000).

Under the plan discussed by EU states, pay-outs could be suspended for five working days and the block could be extended to a maximum of 20 days in exceptional circumstances, the Estonian document said.

Existing EU rules allow a two-day suspension of some payouts by failing banks, but the moratorium does not include deposits.

In fact, only just now have insured deposits debuted as a target for the withdrawal moratorium, as authorities previously felt such a move “may have a negative impact on market confidence.”

Nevertheless, economic and banking troubles have hit several European nations in recent years, such as the Cyprus fiasco, as described by Bitcoinist,

Back in 2013, Cyprus’ banking crisis was a hair’s breadth away from a total economic collapse. Cypriot banks were desperate for a bailout from the EU and IMF and many account holders feared that their deposits would vanish. This fear caused a classic bank run and people were rushing to banks and ATMs in order to withdraw as much money as they could.

Inevitably, cash became scarce and the ATMs stopped working. Many saw Bitcoin as the last option to secure their funds.

With severely curtailed faith in Western and central banking institutions, that European Union insiders would look first to penalize customers for a bank’s poor planning and management in the midst of a theoretical future crisis typifies the impetus for throngs of people riding the tumultuous cryptocurrency wave as far away from Big Banks as possible.

Considering officials now hope to revoke access to bank accounts at perhaps the time customers would most need it, the marriage of State and finance obviates how insignificant the needs of the so-called little guy when the government sees only green.

Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

War on Cash: Desperate VISA Begs Merchants With $10,000 Bribe to Go Cashless

By Claire Bernish

A war on cash has surreptitiously and duplicitously come to pass, as Big Banks and Big Credit attempt to convince their millions of oft-captive customers to make the leap away from currency and into plastic — a surefire means of gaining access to more of your funds through repressive policies and monstrous fees.

Writing a check as payment has been difficult for years, but the move away from currency to digitally-tracked plastic and online pay options has recently taken off — despite reluctance from customers and smaller businesses already wary of being bilked by guileless banks and slithery credit institutions.

Given the sizable snub to the cashless utopia, touted as such by those who stand to profit handily, some credit card companies have opted to amplify pressure on merchants.

Reports the Wall Street Journal,

Visa Inc. has a new offer for small merchants: take thousands of dollars from the card giant to upgrade their payment technology. In return, the businesses must stop accepting cash.

The company unveiled the initiative on Wednesday as part of a broader effort to steer Americans away from using old-fashioned paper money. Visa says it is planning to give $10,000 apiece to up to 50 restaurants and food vendors to pay for their technology and marketing costs, as long as the businesses pledge to start what Visa executive Jack Forestell calls a ‘journey to cashless.’

That relatively marginal incentive to businesses — from a company incidentally reaping billions each year in interest rates and an interminable list of astronomical fees — reeks of both insult and disingenuity.

Businesses will generally choose the simplicity of cash and convenience for customers over unnecessarily meticulous tracking inherent to cashless transactions — which, additionally, don’t pass the litmus test of their advertised speed and ease.

Senate Bill: Travelers Must Register Cash and Digital Amounts Over $10K or Face 10 Years in Prison and Full Asset Seizure

By Claire Bernish

A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000.

Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and imposes other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture.

All of this under the farcically broad umbrella of fighting terrorism.

Civil forfeiture grants the government robbery writ large: your cash, property, and assets can be stolen completely sans due process, your guilt — frequently pertaining to drug ‘crimes’ — matters not.

A court verdict of not guilty doesn’t even guarantee the return of State-thefted property.

In fact, the government can seize virtually whatever it wants if it so much as suspects some of your assets might have been acquired through or used in the commission of even lesser crimes.

For some time, a war on cash has been brewing behind the closed doors of government, and — although officials prefer to claim counterfeiting, terrorism, and money laundering as the impetus for asset tracking — in actuality, physical currency facilitates black market and untaxed transactions, and, most imperatively to the U.S., cannot be thefted under civil asset forfeiture laws as easily as money exchanged digitally.

Characterized as an effort to “to improve the prohibitions on money laundering, and for other purposes,” the bill severely curtails the right to travel freely, without undue hindrance, as travelers with more than $10,000 in assets — including those held digitally, like Bitcoin — must file a report with the U.S. government.

Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years.

To be clear, the State wants to write a permission slip to seize all of your assets — bank accounts, including, specifically, “safety deposit boxes,” prepaid cards, gift cards, prepaid phones, prepaid coupons, cryptocurrencies, all of it — even for being remiss in reporting what you’re traveling with.

Considering one’s digital assets veritably follow wherever that travel takes them, a cryptocurrency portfolio would theoretically have to be reported each time that person travels outside the confines of the U.S.

Of course, the legislation in actuality just amends laws pertaining to assets and travel already considered dictatorial — right now, failure to fill out the form carries not just the penalty of seizure, but a sentence of up to five years behind bars.

“And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments,’” Simon Black of SovereignMan.com reports.

“Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc.

“Now we can add cash to that list.”

But it wouldn’t just be the government hawkishly surveilling your every transaction, as, essentially, all retailers would be roped into becoming State spies — any business selling gift or prepaid cards would be required to report those, too.

Worse — and in defiance of current structures pertaining to digital currency — the government wishes to somehow require issuers of cryptocurrencies into its abhorrent, ostensible money-laundering police spy ring.

According to the legislation, reports Smaulgold.com, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection must, within 18 months of the legislation’s passage, devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy […]

“The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.”

Travelers possessing assets, precious metals, and accounts in excess of $10,000 held outside the United States, however, would not be required to declare those to the government — perhaps leaving an albeit sketchy option for those wary of unscrupulous authorities.

While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release.

Welcome to America, where your assets are literally the government’s business, and freedom is anything but free.

Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared here at The Free Thought Project.

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War On Cash ALERT — EU Now Pushing “Restrictions On Payments In Cash”

By Claire Bernish

In the most far-reaching move toward a cashless society to date, the European Commission proposed enforcing “restrictions on payments in cash” under an all-too-familiar premise — because terrorism.

“Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities,” the Commission’s proposal states. “In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold.”

On the heels of the European Central Bank’s discontinuation of the €500 note, the Commission’s plan would drastically scale back civilians’ ability to conduct transactions using currency — and, by default, will allow banks and the State further means to track individuals via bank cards.

According to the Commission’s Inception Impact Assessment,

Cash has the important feature of offering anonymity to transactions. Such anonymity may be desired for legitimate reason (e.g. protection of privacy). But, such anonymity can also be misused for money laundering and terrorist financing purposes. The possibility to conduct large cash payments facilitates money laundering and terrorist financing activities because of the difficulty to control cash payment transactions.

In other words, because criminals and terrorists use paper currency, the ability for law-abiding citizens to conduct anonymous transactions with cash must be curtailed. For any number of reasons — not the least of which is the laughable presumption terrorists would just walk into a store and purchase big ticket tools of the trade — this assessment fails the sniff test.

In actuality, moving away from the use of physical currency constitutes a veritable jackpot for the West’s Surveillance State, and presents myriad possibilities for abuse by the European Commission and member governments. How long will it be, after all, before such restrictions extend to transactions of lesser sums?

“Potential restrictions to cash payments would be a means to fight criminal activities entailing large payment transactions in cash by organised criminal networks,” the plan states. “Restricting large payments in cash, in addition to cash declarations and other AML obligations, would hamper the operation of terrorist networks, and other criminal activities, i.e. have a preventive effect. It would also facilitate further investigations to track financial transactions in the course of terrorist activities.”

Notably, though the proposal repeatedly proffers the preventive effect made possible through prohibitions on large cash transactions, evidence supporting that theory is glaringly absent. It continues:

Effective investigations are hindered as cash payments transactions are anonymous. Thus restrictions on cash payments would facilitate investigations. However, as cash transactions are moved to the financial system, it is essential that financial institutions have adequate controls and procedures in place that enable them to know the person with whom they are dealing. Adequate due diligence on new and existing customers is a key part of these controls in, line with the AMLD [Anti-Money Laundering Directive].

Terrorists use cash to sustain their illegal activities, not only for illegal transactions (e.g. the acquisition of explosives) but also for payments which are in appearance legal (e.g. transactions for accommodation or transport). While a restriction on payments in cash would certainly be ignored for transactions that are in any case already illegal, the restriction could create a significant hindrance to the conduct of transactions that are ancillary to terrorist activities.

The Commission’s own language evinces a degree of doubt as to whether such a plan would work, saying only “the restriction could create a significant hindrance” to terrorist operations.

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Indeed, as pointed out by Sovereign Man’s, Simon Black, restricting large-sum cash dealings might have the opposite effect on crime:

If you examine countries with very low denominations of cash, the opposite holds true: crime rates, and in particular organized crime rates, are extremely high.

Consider Venezuela, Nigeria, Brazil, South Africa, etc. Organized crime is prevalent. Yet each of these has a currency whose maximum denomination is less than $30.

The same trend holds true when looking at corruption and tax evasion.

Yet the European Commission still asserts, “Organised crime and terrorism financing rely on cash for payments for carrying out their illegal activities and benefitting from them. By restricting the possibilities to use cash, the proposal would contribute to disrupt the financing of terrorism, as the need to use non anonymous means of payment would either deter the activity or contribute to its easier detection and investigation.”

Perhaps the most astonishing and erroneous assumption in the plan is that terrorists and criminals will suddenly abide the law — as if malicious groups would surmise, ‘Well, damn, large cash transactions aren’t possible, so I guess we’ll have to find another line of work.’

Black presents several examples of countries who have taken the leap away from paper currency only to be hit with soaring crime rates.

In short, banning or severely limiting paper currency is ineffective at what governments claim such programs are intended to do, as Black continues,

Bottom line, the political and financial establishments want you to willingly get on board with the idea of abolishing, or at least reducing, cash […]

Simply put, the data doesn’t support their assertion. It’s just another hoax that will give them more power at the expense of your privacy and freedom.

Freedom to spend, as one desires, on what one chooses comprises such a basic right, governments have had to propagate a massive campaign to conflate physical money with the criminal element — because the reality is, everyone uses paper currency — even if the Commission disagrees:

While being allowed to pay in cash does not constitute a fundamental right, the objective of the initiative, which is to prevent the anonymity that cash payments allow, might be viewed as an infringement of the right to privacy enshrined in Article 7 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights […] It should also be observed that national restrictions to cash payments were never successfully challenged based on an infringement to fundamental rights.

It might seem convenient to gradually abolish paper currency in favor of, for instance, a bank or other card for all transactions, but the brutal truth of a cashless society is the heaviest hand of the State in our private lives.

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

Elderly Couple Evicted, Thrown Out On The Street, For Failing To Pay Property Taxes On Their Home

By Claire Bernish

Albion, ME — Maine Governor Paul LePage wants to rewrite the law after becoming incensed at the plight of an elderly, disabled couple — one of whom is a veteran — who were evicted from their home of 33 years because they are too impoverished to pay taxes.

According to the Portland Press Herald, in December 2015, the town of Albion moved to foreclose on the “rundown camp” of National Guard and Marine veteran Richard Sukeforth and his wife, Leonette, when taxes went unpaid.

Then, the town put the couple’s home up for auction — it sold for just $6,500 — and the new owner, Jason Marks, kicked the two 80-year-olds to the curb last week.

LePage is irate — and wants to ensure this can never happen again.

“He’s living in poverty,” he said of Richard in an interview with the Morning Sentinel. “Now, we’re throwing him out on the street. That’s just awful.”

“I’m livid about it,” LePage asserted of the ‘legal’ but seemingly unscrupulous eviction, “and I think we have to have laws to protect our most vulnerable.”

LePage appealed to nonprofit Pine Tree Legal — an advocacy group providing free legal advice for Maine residents with limited income — but, it turns out, the eviction followed the letter of the law.

As the Sentinel reports,

LePage said he thinks it is immoral that a veteran and his sick, bedridden wife, who are at the end of their lives, were kicked out of their home and he is going to fight to ensure the practice is prohibited in the future.

As he explained in the interview,

I’m going to ask for an ombudsman to mediate disputes between communities and taxpayers, not just elderly. I want to change the foreclosure law as it relates to poverty, and one of the things I want to do is force them (communities) to sell property at market value and any revenues above taxes and revenue and foreclosure fees go back to the original owner.

Typically, Maine communities work with disadvantaged citizens to solve tax difficulties — through tax abatement and reverse mortgages, for example — in order to avoid evictions like the Sukeforths experienced.

“As mayor of Waterville,” LePage explained of his position prior to becoming governor of Maine, “whenever we had an issue of poverty, we never threw people out.”

While the town of Albion indeed followed the law, as far as morals are concerned, LePage remarked, “What they did is unbelievable. It’s just not the way it’s done.”

Before the Sukeforths were evicted from their property, located on Lovejoy Pond, Leonette — a retired nurse with diabetes — had been confined to a hospital bed under doctor’s orders. Now, the elderly pair has been forced to live with daughter, Yvette Ingalls, in a trailer park in Holden, where a nurse attends Leonette on a daily basis.

According to the Sentinel, daughter-in-law Rachel Sukeforth and son Rick had to essentially rescue the ailing couple in the middle of a snowstorm on the night the new owner kicked them off the property. They’ve had to temporarily house the couple’s beloved Jack Russell terrier and black cat since the trailer park does not allow dogs.

Richard questions the morality of the eviction, telling the outlet in a phone interview,

That deal was very underhanded. I don’t care what anybody says. It weren’t right. They came down and evicted us when my wife was right in a hospital bed. We’re both 80 years old, so they done it and got away with it and they’re happy.

An attorney for LePage attempted to negotiate with Marks, the new owner, but was told it would have to take place in his own lawyer’s office with his attorney present. LePage says he prefers to combat corruption as directly as possible, and did not want attorneys involved in such a discussion.

“I never meet with lawyers,” he explained, adding he’d planned to ask Marks to allow the Sukeforths to live out their lives on the property they’d inhabited for over three decades. “When I ask for a meeting, it’s me, alone. When I go after corruption, I go after corruption head-on. I don’t need any help.”

Marks agreed to allow the Sukeforths to continue to reside at the camp as long as they paid rent — but says they never did. He explained he had no choice but to force them out, and is being unfairly portrayed as the bad guy in this controversy.

Town officials stand by the eviction — saying they attempted to work with Richard for several years and that the back taxes were minimal. Albion Selectwoman Beverly Bradstreet owed $4,000 in property taxes for the dilapidated building and the land more accurately described as a camp.

“It’s three years before we foreclose, and we paid his taxes, like two different years to avoid foreclosure,” Bradstreet told the Sentinel, “but then he just let it go. He knew that we were going to do it. He would come in the Town Office, but he did not pay. I don’t know why. He just waited until it was too late. We foreclosed last December, 2015. We gave him six months to still pay it off and he made no effort to pay it off. He didn’t try, and there were other people in town that could use some help, too.”

While that seems a justifiable reason for the town to act, Rachel says no one in the Sukeforth family was aware her father-in-law — who has begun to suffer from dementia — had failed to pay. In fact, when asked, the veteran had affirmed he’d visited the Town Office and paid the bill.

A notice printed in a local paper announcing the auction of the property first alerted family members to the dubious situation.

“As soon as we found this out, we called the Town Office,” Rachel told the Sentinel. “My husband and siblings and our neighbor all tried to pay the taxes up to date, and they refused payment. This wasn’t sitting well with any one of us. Every town has the right to refuse payment, but can also accept the payment as well. When we tried to pay selectmen, they said when an auction is posted in the newspaper, they can no longer accept payment, but that wasn’t true.”

That refusal to accept payment from other parties doesn’t sit well with the family and concerned neighbors — nor does it with the governor.

“It’s never too late until the deed transfers, and the deed had not transferred,” said LePage, who has even offered to take the couple’s dog, Pee-wee, if they are unable to have the canine designated as a service animal to allow the dog to reside the trailer park.

“Richard Sukeforth said he and his wife receive $1,252 a month in Social Security payments. He worked in construction during the summer for many years, operated a snowplow for the Maine Turnpike in winter and later worked for Bath Iron Works until he was injured when he fell off a crane boom in 1982, he said,” the Sentinel reports.

Neighbors, family, and friends took umbrage at the seemingly callous eviction of such a frail and kind family from the property they loved — particularly given Richard’s mental state and that several people tried in vain to make good on the taxes owed.

“He is a … vet. There’s just so many reasons this shouldn’t be able to happen,” said part-time neighbor MaryAnn Sawlan-Neiman, who alerted the governor to the tragic situation after exhausting all other options.

“Every day, he would come down, stay a couple of hours, and I’d go to his house,” Sawlan-Neiman said of Richard. “We just became really good friends. Another neighbor told me in July they were going to foreclose for taxes. I went to the town hall and I said, ‘What does he owe? I’ll pay for it right now.’”

But by that time, Albion officials said, the public announcement meant the tax bill could not be addressed by anyone —  and the town refused to work with even Governor LePage, himself, to halt the eviction.

“It’s just devastating for them,” lamented Sawlan-Neiman of the Sukeforths, adding, of Richard, “He’s just like a lost man now.”

And there you have it. A couple, who owed no one anything, had their home stolen from them by government because they failed to pay the state an extortion fee for their right to live —  and we still call this place the Land of the Free.

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

Secret Corporate Government Merger — Known as the TPP — is Finally Dead

By Claire Bernish

In perhaps the least ceremonious victory for U.S. and international activists, the decidedly abhorrent Trans-Pacific Partnership — a corporate giveaway of phenomenal proportions — effectively died yesterday.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle announced the much-maligned, so-called ‘free trade’ deal — which would have inextricably tied the U.S. to Asia and given corporations unprecedented powers over governments — would not be pursued in the lame duck session before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

President Obama had hoped the massive, 12-nation agreement would come to fruition under a Hillary Clinton presidency, but with her defeat and Trump’s promise to roll back the previous, similarly-modeled North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), all prospects of passage melted away.

Further, the deal’s secreted negotiations and WikiLeaks’ publishing of enormously controversial sections — such as the Intellectual Property chapter — left the American public leery and increasingly contemptuous of what, in essence, constituted a gigantic corporate power-grab. Aware of growing skepticism among voters, Republicans previously supporting the TPP dialed back their enthusiasm in recent months.

As the Wall Street Journal reports,

Winning a majority of votes for the TPP in the House and Senate would have required both a last-minute deal to address Republican priorities and an election result that didn’t show such broad discontent.

Neither occurred. Since the election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) have said no to bringing the TPP to a vote in the lame duck session, despite the strong support of many senators in both parties for freer trade.

Despite going out with just a fizzle, the death of the TPP is no less a victory for the people. Although it will await Trump once he takes the White House in January, it’s doubtful the new president — who may, indeed, tone down previous radical ideas to better attune to the establishment — would revive the abominated deal.

In a statement cited by the WSJ, Rep. Kevin Brady said Wednesday “this important agreement is not ready to be considered during the lame duck and will remain on hold until President Trump decides the path forward.”

Clamoring but failing to be included in the deal in the months leading up to the U.S. election, China could now continue its current path spurning American involvement in its trade and economy. In fact, as nations in the Asia-Pacific region continue to foment an alliance both amongst themselves and with Russia, further tariff-eliminating trade deals aren’t likely to include the U.S. at all.

In the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping will reportedly seek trade arrangements with less strictures than had been included in the TPP, such as environmental restrictions, labor protections, and tightly-constrained rules about intellectual property.

Additionally, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) — which includes ten “members of the Association of South East Asian Nations plus China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand” — also presents direct competition for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Business Insider reports.

“China is always positively advancing work on its own regional free-trade strategy,” said deputy international trade representative, Zhang Xiangchen, quoted by Business Insider. “We, indeed, are continuously and positively advancing RCEP negotiations.”

Beijing feared U.S. protectionism under the TPP would cause economic isolation in the region, but the death of the agreement — and warming alliances with its neighbors — offers a chance for China to fully assert dominance it has been building financially and militarily.

Repercussions from the presidential election echo on the opposite side of the globe as well, as negotiations for the European-focused parallel trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also came to a screeching halt.

Whether or not U.S. officials will begin to switch focus from the international to the domestic in the coming administration has yet to be seen, but the predicted death of the TPP certainly portends that possibility. Trump’s sometimes vitriolic rhetoric apparently did not spark sufficient malaise for voters soured on the TPP and other proposed trade deals once he denounced the plans as special interests attempting to “rape” the country, as the WSJ noted.

As with quickly heightening tensions and utter unpredictability trailing the election of a non-politician to arguably the seat of highest power on the planet, the killing of the TPP only occurred for the odd turn of events. Its abrupt and inelegant demise — however it came about — will undoubtedly be welcome news for many.

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.