UK Family Living Off-the-Grid Facing Prison Over Faux Environmental Issues

Injunction to move by the end the of month

Dinah and Stig Mason to be evicted from their own land

Devon Gazette

A COUPLE living an "off-grid" lifestyle say they face prison unless they move from their own land in Willand and return to an existence in the benefits trap.

Stig and Dinah Mason bought Muxbeare Orchard after a sudden windfall allowed them to quit their impoverished lives on a Hertfordshire council estate two years ago.

The Masons have transformed what they described as a derelict four-acre plot into a haven of self-sufficiency boasting a 400 sq m allotment, a polytunnel and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables, chickens for egg production and an orchard they have regenerated by planting around 14 new apple trees of various species.

The couple, who have two boys, aged eight and nine, say because they moved onto the site in order to work the land, Mid Devon District Council is turfing them off as officers do not consider them to be conserving an agricultural area.

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America for Sale: Is Goldman Sachs Buying Your City?

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Dylan Ratigan
Huffington Post

In Chicago, it's the sale of parking meters to the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. In Indiana, it's the sale of the northern toll road to a Spanish and Australian joint venture. In Wisconsin it's public health and food programs, in California it's libraries. It's water treatment plants, schools, toll roads, airports, and power plants. It's Amtrak. There are revolving doors of corrupt politicians, big banks, and rating agencies. There are conflicts of interest. It's bipartisan.

And it's coming to a city near you -- it may already be there. We're talking about the sale of public assets to private investors. You may have heard of one-off deals, but what we'll be exploring with the Huffington Post is the scale and scope of what is a national and organized campaign to shift the way we govern ourselves. In an era of increasingly stretched local and state budgets, privatization of public assets may be so tempting to local politicians that the trend seems unstoppable. Yet, public outrage has stopped and slowed a number of initiatives.

Private Property ASSAULT: City Government demands all keys to properties (Video)

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Ordinance #2740 (An unfunded city-wide mandate) was passed with a resounding 6 to 1 vote, and it allows for the citizens of Cedar Falls to forcefully give the government keys to their comercial properties through universal 'lock boxes'. The intent of the program is to provide increased safety and protection to personal, private property which include businesses, apartments and some rental houses-- which by the way-- comes at the expense of furthering wayward erosion of fundamental constitutional rights.

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CA Officials say man must tear down ‘Phonehenge’ house or face jail

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Liz Goodwin
Yahoo

Los Angeles county officials are demanding that a creative homeowner tear down a 20,000-square-foot domicile he calls "Phonehenge West"--or face up to seven years in jail.

Former telephone technician Alan Kimble Fahey began building the structure three decades ago in Acton, the Los Angeles Times reports. Fahey, who christened the project "Phonehenge" because it sits atop pilings modified from phone utility poles, says he intends to turn the compound into a museum.

The labyrinthine network of buildings where Fahey, his wife, and teenage son live even includes a 70-foot tower covered in Italian stained-glass windows, and a barn. Fahey uses a "motorized cart" to get between buildings, an earlier report said.

The paper describes the compound as "a hodgepodge of reddish buildings braced with scores of utility poles and steel beams and connected by bridges and ramps." Inside, the castle is filled with more than 20,000 books, and a yurt--though Fahey and his wife sleep on a single-sized water bed and cook on a tiny stove. Tourists come from all over to gaze at the creation, Fahey says, and Glamour magazine even staged a photo shoot there.

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Madison County Man Being Evicted Off His Own Land for Living Too Simply

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Madison County officials are forcing a man out of his home — a recreational trailer — because they say he's breaking several ordinances.

If you would like to contact the Madison County officials to express your outrage please click here.

To contact Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels office, please click here.

Phone Contact:

Madison County Community "Justice" Center at  765-649-7341

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels  1-317-232-4567

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The New Private Tax Man From Ancient Rome

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William Alden
Huffington Post

Sheila Rice, who sold her Maryland home to avoid foreclosure, was surprised to learn JPMorgan Chase was her property tax collector. But the bank can't claim to be the first private company to play the role of tax man: It's taken part in a more than 2,000-year-old tradition that, from its very start, has been tainted by abuse.

As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported this week, big banks and hedge funds in the U.S. have been quietly collecting taxes on hundreds of thousands of homes. The process, called "tax farming," is simple: A company goes to a local government and reimburses it for taxes that citizens aren't paying. In return, the company gets to act like an old-fashioned tax thug -- the kind rabbis condemn in the Bible -- charging up to 18 percent interest and thousands of dollars in legal fees, simply because it can. As the District of Columbia attorney general told the HuffPost Investigative Fund, there's "no oversight at all."

Like many great American traditions, the tax farming game was perfected by the ancient Romans. Provincial governors, and later Rome itself, sold tax-collection rights to private companies called publicani. As in modern America, this was a speculative bet -- a company paid a local government's tax debt, and then tried its own hand at recouping the loss. The Roman version was plainly brutal. In ours, the brutality is subtle. But in the estimation of one expert in ancient finance, it's just as bad: In our own way, we're sliding toward the conditions of ancient Rome, where private tax collectors employed soldiers to wring excessive amounts of cash from debtors.

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US Debt Woes Expose Hidden Austerity and Looting of Public Assets
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Property Rights Gone Wrong

Dylan Ratigan
Huffington Post

Most mortgages in America are now backed by our government. And in order for a bank to get that backing from our government it must fill two criteria:

1. The borrowers must be verified by the banks and their agents as qualified.

2. Lenders must fill out paperwork accurately and make sure that when the home's title changes hands, so does the documentation.

But in the past two decades, a whole lot of the time, that never happened.

Why?

For banks and servicers, the motive was money. Banks profited by packaging and selling those toxic home loans. Then they profited again by betting against those same securities. A bet, in essence, that a fraudulent loan wouldn't be paid back.

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