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Philly wages a $300 “business privilege tax” on bloggers, even if they make no profit

Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.

This $300 “business privilege license” is for all local bloggers - even the ones that make no money off their words.

The city doesn’t stop there. In addition to the $300 for the license to write on the World Wide Web, bloggers must pay city wage taxes, business privilege taxes and taxes on any net profits — on top of state and federal taxes — even if the blogger only made $11 over two years, reports the City Paper.

Blogger Marilyn Bess, whose Ms. Philly Organic Blog has made her a whopping $50 over the past few years, went to the city’s tax amnesty program to explain that she makes pennies on her hobby. They told her to hire an accountant, she told the City Paper.

In an economy where jobs are sparse and people try to make ends meet with part-time jobs, taxing the independent, scrappy freelancers and bloggers seems counterproductive.

But the emptying of bloggers’ wallets may not be the worst result of these taxes. With the city’s charge being more than what most bloggers make, their voices could be silenced, as the extra expense is enough to discourage many from even having a blog.

“To say that these kinds of draconian measures are detrimental to the public discourse would be an understatement,” writes the Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway.

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Tags: 1984, Bloggers, Blogs, George Orwell, Government, Internet, New World Order, Philadelphia, Politics, Society, Taxes, U.S.

Added: 1. April 2010

- Robert D. Steele’s at Wikipedia

Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Central Bank, CIA, Congress, Constitution, Dollar, FBI, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Government, John F. Kennedy, Military, New World Order, Paul Wolfowitz, Politics, Robert Steele, Society, U.S.

This is a follow up montage to those who say Bloggers and making videos (Vloggers) and those who comment, are not making a difference.

Added: 26. March 2010

Just look how your government attacks WikiLeaks:

- The War on WikiLeaks … and Why It Matters

- US Must Stop Spying on WikiLeaks

- Pentagon Targets WikiLeaks Whistleblowers

- US Army considered attack on Wikileaks

Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Government, Politics, Society, U.S.

Russian blogger Alexander Malyutin as he speaks in his office in Moscow in 2009

MOSCOW — It started with a golden bed and African drummers and led to Russia’s latest, surprising, political duel pitting tenacious bloggers against bureaucrats whose excesses went a step too far.

Russians typically shrug their shoulders at the lavish lifestyles of government officials, assuming nothing can be done about bureaucrats who take bribes and pocket state funds.

But when Russia’s interior ministry announced plans to buy a golden bed, it raised an outcry — and revealed the potential of the Internet for stirring up outrage against entrenched corruption.

While the docile, state-dominated media looks the other way, a small but determined group of Russian bloggers is challenging corrupt bureaucrats, rallying public opinion and goading prosecutors into action.

Their blogs have attracted unanticipated popularity, reflecting deep-seated anger at the high-handed behavior of officials in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s government.

“I didn’t expect the blog to become so popular,” said Alexander Malyutin, who runs a blog devoted to exposing suspicious government tenders, including the interior ministry’s infamous golden bed purchase.

Last August, the ministry announced plans to buy 24 million rubles (800,000 dollars) worth of furniture, including a bed “covered with a thin layer of 24-carat gold,” according to the official tender documents.

The documents were posted deep within a website where all the government’s purchases must be published, under a law passed in 2005 during one of the Kremlin’s periodic efforts to root out corruption.

After bloggers and journalists exposed the plans, the ministry defended itself from ridicule by saying the bed was needed for a special VIP guesthouse in Moscow where it hosts foreign officials. Continue reading »

Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Corruption, Government, Internet, Politics, Russia, Society

TSA Special Agent John Enright, left, speaks to Steven Frischling outside the blogger’s home in Niantic, Connecticut, after returning Frischling’s laptop Wednesday.
Photo: Thomas Cain/Wired.com

Special agents from the TSA’s Office of Inspection interrogated two U.S. bloggers, one of them an established travel columnist, and served them each with a civil subpoena demanding information on the anonymous source that provided the TSA document.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites.

“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said in a statement that security directives “are not for public disclosure.”

“TSA’s Office of Inspections is currently investigating how the recent Security Directives were acquired and published by parties who should not have been privy to this information,” the statement said.

Frischling, a freelance travel writer and photographer in Connecticut who writes a blog for the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, said the two agents who visited him arrived around 7 p.m. Tuesday, were armed and threatened him with a criminal search warrant if he didn’t provide the name of his source. They also threatened to get him fired from his KLM job and indicated they could get him designated a security risk, which would make it difficult for him to travel and do his job.

“They were indicating there would be significant ramifications if I didn’t cooperate,” said Frischling, who was home alone with his three children when the agents arrived. “It’s not hard to intimidate someone when they’re holding a 3-year-old [child] in their hands. My wife works at night. I go to jail, and my kids are here with nobody.”

Frischling, who described some of the details of the visit on his personal blog, told Threat Level that the two agents drove to his house in Connecticut from DHS offices in Massachusetts and New Jersey and didn’t mention a subpoena until an hour into their visit.

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Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Censorship, DHS, Global News, Government, Homeland Security, Politics, TSA, U.S.

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates - even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” - information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step - get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

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Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, CIA, Global News, Government, Internet, New World Order, Police State, Politics, Privacy, Society, Surveillance, Twitter, U.S.

Goldman Sachs is attempting to shut down a dissident blogger who is extremely critical of the investment bank, its board members and its practices.

The New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which has instructed a Wall Street law firm to tell a blogger to stop criticising the bank Photo: Getty Images

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” - the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com - just a few weeks ago.

In that time Mr Morgan, a registered investment adviser, has added a number of posts to the site, including one entitled “Does Goldman Sachs run the world?”. However, many of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues.

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Tags: Banks, Bloggers, Economy, Goldman Sachs, U.S., Wall Street

Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.

The story begins back in May, when a judge in Modica (in Sicily) found local historian and author Carlo Ruta guilty of the crime of “stampa clandestina” - or publishing a “clandestine” newspaper - in respect of his blog. The judge ruled that since the blog had a headline, that made it an online newspaper, and brought it within the law’s remit.

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Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Internet, Law, Politics, Society

Tom Feeley, owner and editor of InformationClearingHouse.info, has endured public harassment, home invasions, death threats and threats to his family simply for running a website.

The operator of a leading alternative news and strongly anti-war website has become the target of nefarious thugs apparently in the employ of the U.S. government who have continually harassed him and ordered him to shut down his website.

Tom Feeley, owner and editor of Information Clearing House.info, has endured public harassment, home invasions, death threats and threats to his family simply for running a website.

Counterpunch writer Mike Whitney has circulated an e mail describing what happened to Feeley in an attempt to draw attention to the matter.

Whitney writes that earlier this week Feeley’s wife was startled to suddenly discover three well dressed men standing in her kitchen who told her that Tom must “Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!”

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Tags: Alex Jones, Bloggers, Blogs, Children, Civil liberties, Civil rights, Counterpunch, FBI, Freedom, Government, Internet, New World Order, Privacy, Truth, U.S., War

Ready for a little shock? Link

A reader has discovered this on Digg: “This is how fucked we are”

That says it all.

Related article: Stressed banks borrow record amount from Fed
What does it mean if you have such a huge “shortage of liquidity in your system”?
Hmmmhhh?!? Oh! Run, run, run.

According to the FDIC I am just another blogger creating fear in the marketplace, so don’ t worry.

You can trust the government on this:

WASHINGTON, July 22 (Xinhua)
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Tuesday that the U.S. banking system is sound and the long-term fundamentals of economy are strong.

December 5, 1929
“The Government’s business is in sound condition.” — Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury

More Quotes from the Great Depression:

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Tags: Banks, Bloggers, Depression, Economy, FDIC, Fed, Federal Reserve, Great Depression, Henry Paulson, Treasury, U.S.