Eminent Domain: We're All Indians Now (Expanded, 7/6)

Less destructive than corporatist politics: A funnel cloud looms menacingly over Peotone, Illinois.

Prior to the closing of the frontier in 1890, "Manifest Destiny" was the incantation used by the government when it gave itself permission to steal property it coveted. Today, the preferred conjuration is "eminent domain."

The phrase "eminent domain"reflects an assumption Karl Marx would find congenial: government is the default owner of everything, and that private ownership, however extensive, is merely a contingent arrangement.

Seizure of property through eminent domain is facilitated by one of several Hamiltonian-mercantilist Easter eggs covertly embedded in the Constitution -- specifically, the Fifth Amendment provision specifying that private property can be taken for "public use" when the government offers what it considers "just compensation."

The familiar civics class platitude describes this provision as necessary for the construction of bridges, hospitals, and other amenities that are supposedly "public goods" only government can provide. The inescapable reality is that eminent domain is a particularly vulgar form of plunder used to enrich the political class and their corporate cronies at the expense of the rest of us.

In his recent book Government Pirates (which is a useful read despite its tautological title), former real estate developer Don Corace offers a concise description of eminent domain operated prior to the onset of the current depression: 

"Arrogant and corrupt city and county official -- with near limitless legal budgets ... align themselves with well-heeled developers,  political cronies, and major corporations to prey on the politically less powerful and disenfranchised, particularly minority communities."

Owing to ongoing economic collapse, municipal and county governments no longer command "limitless" budgets for any purpose. They still wield the power of eminent domain, and still have large constituencies of parasites to tend -- and with real estate values bottoming out, the temptation to seize property at a vastly reduced "fair market price" may be irresistible. This is already being done by the government afflicting the State of Illinois, a junta legendary for its corruption. 

Propaganda for a boondoggle.

In recent weeks, the Illinois state government has begun the legal process of seizing a huge amount private property in and around Peotone, a small town in Will County, about forty miles south of Chicago. The land is being taken for the supposed purpose of building a third Chicago-area airport to complement O'Hare and Midway -- a project that has been discussed, studied, and debated since 1968. 


The proposed "South Suburban Airport" -- which would be three times the size of O'Hare International --  is impractical, unwanted, and unnecessary. It doesn't enjoy the support of any major airline or the approval of the FAA. 

Congestion at O'Hare is often cited as a rationale for a third airport. However, last year, O'Hare's traffic rate was the lowest it had been in 15 years -- a trend that will continue, given the ongoing economic contraction and the ongoing expansion of the nearby international airport in Gary, Indiana. 

Expanding the small international airport in depressed Rockford would provide additional runway space at a fraction of what would be spent on a third Chicago-area airport. But this would deprive the state's patronage pimps of an opportunity to lavish plundered wealth on their favored constituents. 


In the circulatory system of graft that sustains the "pay to play" political system in Illinois, the state department of transportation (IDOT) is the aorta. Last September, IDOT announced that it was filing condemnation suits against the owners of three parcels of land in the proposed Peotone airport site. This was done despite the fact that there is no existing plan to build an airport, and the proposal has not been approved by the FAA. 


Referring to the lawsuits, Susan Shea, IDOT's commissarina for aeronautics matters, declared: "It sends a message, a clear message." 


"It certainly does send a message," wrote local activist and sometime state legislative candidate George Ochsenfeld: "Our out-of-control government will use intimidation tactics to frighten citizens into giving up their property prior to being able to take it `legally.'"


Willis and Vivian Bramstaedt received Shea's "message" last April, in the form of a piece of paper disfigured with official graffiti announcing that the state government intended to take the land they have farmed since the 1950s. 

Peotone residents protest the corporatist landgrab.

"Our schools are failing, our health system is falling apart, the state is out of money, and this is what they're doing?" exclaims 72-year-old Vivian. 

"They" -- the corporatist interests served by the Illinois political class -- are moving as quickly as possible to condemn land around Peotone in order to capitalize on the town's depressed property values. 

Commissarina admits as much, commenting to the Chicago Tribune that (as paraphrased by the paper) "the timing couldn't be better for the state" to carry out condemnation efforts, now that "land values [are] in a historic slump."

When IDOT announced its intention to seize the Bramstaedts' land last April, they offered $9,500 an acre for roughly half of the family's 160-acre corn and soybean farm. This was "50 percent less than waht the state purchased neighboring land for two years ago and a quarter of the price some land sold for when a private company bought parcels there to build an intermodal site in 2006," notes the Tribune. 

Four Peotone-area condemnation cases are already working their way through the court system. Unless the land owners are successful in getting the cases dismissed outright, they will face a lengthy, protracted legal struggle in which their opponent -- the criminal junta dominating Springfield and Chicago -- will use money extorted from them as taxes to underwrite the effort to drive them from their land. 

What distinguishes the Peotone Landgrab from others like it is the fact that the underlying project is a palpable fraud.

 

"The irony is that the Peotone airport has never been deader," contents George Ochsenfeld. "There is no funding for building the airport or for the massive infrastructure -- roads, water, sewer, etc. All major airlines have said that they will not use Peotone." 

The most recently coined rationale is that the facility would be a cargo airport, but this would also be gratuitous, Ochsenfeld observes: "O'Hare is adding 750,000 square feet of cargo space and 18 additional parking spaces for freighter aircraft." (That expansion project, predictably, has become bogged down in graft and cost-overruns, prompting Mayor Daley to request a $15 billion federal bailout.) D.C. Velocity, an aviation trade journal, asked Gary Schultheis, vice president of air freight, North America for Deutsche Post DHL if another Chicago-area cargo airport is necessary. "Not really," he replied. 

Opposing the expropriators: Will Township Commissioner Bruce Hamman (left) and activist George Ochsenfeld protest eminent domain as the state demolishes a home on "condemned" land. (Courtesy of Carol Henrichs.)

 Dan Muscatello, managing director of cargo and logistics for Landrum & Brown -- a Cincinnati-based airport development firm -- told D.C. Velocity that the proposed Peotone cargo airport would find it very difficult to persuade airlines and freight companies to "pull up stakes and move down the road. He also believes that international airlines with all-cargo operations would be reluctant to divide their passenger and cargo flights between two airports. And it shouldn't be forgotten that both passenger and cargo volume will continue to decline as the economic slump deepens and accelerates. 

But it shouldn't be forgotten that the airport is merely a pretext -- and that seizing the land at a pittance is the point of the whole exercise. 

"Since the late 1980s, Illinois officials and their agents have tried every available means to push a huge public works project to fruition, with a keen eye toward ensuring their own political futures and continuing [the] cycle of self-enrichment," relates Peotone resident Carol Henrichs, former editor of the Peotone Vedette and long-time critic of the airport project.  

"Tax dollars have funded a multitude of government lobbyists who make regular trips to Washington, D.C. and Springfield ... to guarantee that despite its inability to gain traction of its own, this is the project that will not die," Henrichs continues. "Airport supporters have left tracks on campaign contribution lists and at political fundraisers for years."

The Peotone project "is the most `studied' airport project in America," explains Henrichs. "The word `study' intimates an investigation into factual learning. It is more accurate to say that reports have been written and rewritten -- massaged until they at least meet minimal federal requirements." 

To keep the process untainted by input from the taxpayers and property owners who would suffer the most, the deliberations leading to creation of the airport development district were confined to a handful of political insiders selected from Will County's tax-consuming class.

Between 1985 and 2002, three successive Republican state administrations in Illinois spent more than $100 million on "studies"; it has been an inexhaustible well of "study money." This liturgical exercise in public graft began as a Republican project, but also attracted the interest of Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Tony Rezko, Barack Obama's imprisoned pay-for-play patron.

In March 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, one of the most adept practitioners of Chicago-style civic Keynesianism, dispatched bulldozers in the middle of the night to tear up a runway at Meigs Field, a 55-year-old commuter airport in the center of Chicago.

Daley insisted that destroying the runway -- for which his administration later was hit with an FAA fine and required to pay back $1,000,000 in misappropriated airport funds -- was a counter-terrorism measure, since Meigs was a general aviation facility "a second's flight time" from the supposedly imperiled Sears Tower. "We did it for public safety," maintained Daley after bulldozers had gouged out the runway.

This was a risibly transparent pretext. Daley's midnight airport raid was carried out in the interest of a separate landgrab: He and his cronies had targeted the property to build a park, another highly lucrative civil engineering project.

"Yes, I do want a park at Meigs Field," Daley admitted after the runway had been reduced to rubble. This was a dual-purpose demolition: In addition to clearing the way for a park, it was broadly comparable to New Deal-era initiatives intended to create artificial scarcity by plowing under crops -- or, in this case, runways. All the better to create a "need" to build the much-discussed third airport -- seizing as much land as "necessary" to do so.

Even though the money for pork-laden public works projects may soon evaporate, the Peotone Landgrab will leave the political class in possession of thousands of acres of prime farmland -- which, as Jim Rogers points out, may soon be the most valuable commodity on the planet.

There's nothing going on here that would be unfamiliar to a Lakota Indian facing expropriation in the late 1880s. And there's every reason to believe that the Peotone Landgrab -- if it's successful -- would be a template for similar acts of official larceny wherever fertile tracts can be seized by the political class at depressed "fair market value."

(Note: The original version of this essay did not include the material about Daley's demolition of Meigs Field. My sincere thanks to commenter "Mark" for bringing that facet of the story to my attention.)

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Amnesty for the Banksters, Debtor's Prison for the Serfs

Evicted and "served": A Sheriff's deputy presents Vicki Valentine with a "writ of possession" that supposedly entitles a private investor to confiscate her home. That investor acquired the alleged right to foreclose on Valentine's home by purchasing a "tax lien" involving an unpaid $362 municipal water bill. The bill grew ten-fold after fees and interest, an amount the unemployed mother couldn't pay.

  

Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, attorney and real estate mogul Harvey M. Nusbaum had a long and lucrative career in officially sanctioned crime as an IRS agent. 

In 2002, Nusbaum grew weary of robbing people on behalf of the state. Rather than repenting in sackcloth and ashes, as any decent person would, he hired out as a privateer -- a freelance buyer and collector of tax debts.  

This form of retail fascism -- a public-private partnership in plunder -- was immensely profitable for Nusbaum. Had he exercised even the slightest restraint on his corrupt appetite, Nusbaum most likely wouldn't be headed for prison. 


Maryland is one of 29 states that permit city governments to raise money by selling tax debts to investors. Each year, Baltimore's municipal government bundles up tax liens against properties whose owners haven't paid local taxes or utility bills (such as water and sewage fees) and sells them at auction. 

In the most recent auction, Baltimore sold liens on 12,689 properties -- ranging from rotting shells of long-abandoned homes to office buildings in the downtown business district. Purchasers assume responsibility for collecting the debts, and the opportunity to foreclose on properties whose owners can't pay them off. 

According to a study conducted by the Baltimore Sun, twenty percent of those liens involved amounts smaller than $1,000. Financial necromancers employed by collection agencies can transmute a trivial amount --  a delinquent utility bill or an unpaid and long-forgotten municipal citation -- into a budget-crippling debt of several thousand dollars. 


"You will pay," one of Nusbaum's minions told a victim who called to complain after a tiny unpaid water bill had metastasized into a $4,000 extortion demand. "Everybody does." 

Nusbaum and his cronies filed over 6,000 lawsuits, raking in an estimated $11.5  million in legal fees, title search fees, and interest. This inevitably attracted the attention of the "Justice" Department's antitrust division, which discovered that Nusbaum, his partner Jack W. Stollof,  and other as-yet unnamed investors engaged in collusive bidding in a dozen tax auctions conducted in Baltimore and five other Maryland jurisdictions.


According to federal prosecutors, the actions of Nusbaum and his colleagues were a criminal conspiracy to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Once in possession of the liens, the conspirators "used the court system to threaten homeowners with seizure of their properties unless they paid legal fees, interest, and other charges ... [that] often totaled 10 times the original debt," observed the Sun.


The real crime here, according to the Feds, was not the use of government-aided extortion to wring hugely inflated sums from struggling, debt-plagued citizens, but rather the use of collusion to enhance the cabal's profits at the expense of local governments.  You see, the entire point of the tax auction racket, in the Sun's eminently suitable phrase, is "feeding the public treasury."

Ancient artifact, or foreshadowing of the future?

During a rigged auction in 2006, Nusbaum and his comrades bought a bundle of liens containing Vicki Valentine's unpaid $362 municipal water bill. 

Valentine had inherited a home in West Baltimore from her father, who died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer's, in 2003. The house was free and clear, but many of the utility bills had been left unpaid. 

Struggling with chronic depression after taking care of her dying father, Vicki was soon dealing with unemployment as well. In 2006, Vicki he paid $100 on an outstanding water bill of $462.28. By year's end, that figure shot up to more than $700, after the city added interest, processing charges, and property taxes. 

Under severe financial strain, Vicki filed several legal challenges, which delighted the firm that had purchased the lien, since this permitted them to tack on additional legal costs. On September 19, 2008, a judge ordered Vicki to pay $3,603.41, or lose a home that was already bought and paid for. She didn't have the money.  So last February, the local sheriff's department seized Vicki's home on behalf of Montego Bay Properties, the entity that held the lien following at least two post-auction transfers of ownership.


In a desperate letter written a year before her house was seized, Vicki pleaded with Baltimore City Circuit Court to extend the payment period. 


"For now, this is the roof over my son's and my head," she observed, pointing out that she was unemployed and frantically looking for work. "I am trying to get the money together to catch up on my delinquent bills. Please allow more time to pay all bills connected with the foreclosure...."


Vicki didn't understand that in the corporate socialist system that now exists, mercy is a gift conferred only on the powerful and politically connected. This is illustrated by the fact that the presiding officers of DRT Fund, which was listed as a co-conspirator in Nusbaum's bid-rigging scheme, were granted amnesty -- that is, official forgiveness -- in exchange for admitting that they had done wrong and facile promises to pay restitution "to any person or entity injured as a result of the bid-rigging activity ... in which [the investment firm] was a participant."


Here's the curious thing about that promise of "restitution": The only party "injured" by the bid-rigging scheme, according to the Feds, was the Municipal Government of Baltimore. 

The specific terms of the settlement remained sealed, and DRT Fund's owners aren't discussing the particulars in public. However, we can be sure that Vicki Valentine isn't listed among those "injured" by DRT, whose co-owners, Anthony De Laurentis and John Rieff, are now in possession of her home. 


Two years ago, Milwaukee resident Peter Tubic nearly lost his home to foreclosure as a result of an unpaid $50 citation for parking an inoperable van on his own property. A government that arrogates to itself the supposed authority to regulate such matters won't scruple to add extortionate penalties to the original citation; thus it's not surprising that the City of Milwaukee eventually demanded $2,645 from Tubic as ransom to prevent the seizure of his home. Eventually a local judge succumbed to an unprofessional fit of common sense and dismissed the citation outright. 

Confiscation of a home to collect small debts remains uncommon. However, "people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts," reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. As is the case in Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, and other states, the Land of 10,000 Lakes is infested with agents of "well-funded, aggressive and centralized collection firms, in many cases run by attorneys, that buy up unpaid debt and use the courts to collect." 

As a result, it's increasingly common for people who owe small amounts to find themselves being confronted by police -- in the streets, at home or work, while driving, or even while recovering from surgery -- and hauled away in handcuffs. Warrants have been issued over outstanding debts as small as $85, which is "less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight."

After a brief but robustly unpleasant interlude behind bars, debtors are brought before a judge and compelled to sign documents permitting the collection firms to garnish their wages or extract money from their bank accounts. Refusal can lead to a "indefinite incarceration," a sentence recently imposed, without trial, on a debtor from Kenney, Illinois. "Bail" consists of paying the amount demanded by the collection firm, which is the amount of the purchased debt plus whatever enhancements the firm can devise. 


"A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs," points out the Star-Tribune. "Anything beyond that is profit." Successful debt-buying firms enjoy very impressive profit margins. Portfolio Recovery Associates, a Virginia debt buyer, reported a 16 percent net margin last year; for Encore Capital Group of San Diego, last year brought a 10 percent net profit. By way of contrast, Wal-Mart's profit margin last year was 3.5 percent.

The "distressed receivables" market is immense, and bundled debts are constantly repackaged and re-sold. It's quite common for people to be contacted by multiple collection agencies demanding payment on the same long-forgotten debt, which may have been sold and repackaged several times after being written off by the original creditor. 

Ohio-based Unifund CCR Partners, one of the most aggressive debt-buying firms, "feasts on the famine of others," explained a 2003 profile of its founder, Turkish-born David Rosenberg, in the Cincinnati Enquirer. 

Unifund, which serves clients such as Citibank, "isn't in the embarrassment business," insisted Rosenberg seven years ago. Either there are odd gaps in Rosenberg's vocabulary or his priorities have changed: Today, Unifund routinely seeks arrest warrants for those unable or unwilling to pay off old debts. 


Rosenberg created Unifund as a 20-year-old high school dropout in 1986. Originally the company bought and collected on bad checks written to supermarkets. The company paid 75-80 percent of the dollar value of each check, and reaped 115-125 percent of its face value by imposing insufficient-funds fees. 


As bank failures accumulated in the late 1980s, Unifund began to buy and collect on batches of bad bank loans sold by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for pennies on the dollar. By 1990 it had sufficient capital to buy up a series of bad debt portfolios from Manufacturers Hanover Trust with face values of up to $50 million apiece, according to the Enquirer. 


Rosenberg, who profited handsomely on the debts of others, is no stranger to bad debt himself. "Over the past decade," reported the Enquirer in 2003, "Rosenberg's name has appeared on Ohio income tax liens, an overdue notice for Vermont real estate tax, and a lawsuit for an unpaid auto loan." 

Unlike many of his victims, Rosenberg has never felt the cold steel of handcuffs biting into his wrists. Given the pervasive perversity of our times it doesn't come as a surprise that Unifund, which is able so suborn police and courts into doing its bidding, is a criminal enterprise. 

During the past decade, Unifund has settled several class-action lawsuits asserting that the firm routinely engages in illegal practices -- such as imposing bogus legal fees and collecting on debts beyond the statute of limitations.  In one settlement, Unifund was forced to pay Queens resident Jose Luis Muniz an undisclosed sum after it fraudulently attempted to collect on a $21,000 credit card debt Muniz had paid off ten years earlier. 

Rosenberg goes clubbing with Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons and celebrity trollop Kim Kardashian.

Suits filed in Texas and Illinois claimed that Unifund defrauded credit reporting agencies by "freshening up" credit card delinquency dates on old debts the firm had purchased. 
 
The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that delinquent credit card accounts be expunged after seven years of dormancy. Plaintiffs accused Unifund of "rolling back to odometer" on the debts they had purchased by moving up the delinquency dates by as much as six years. This damaged the credit ratings of the victims and made them vulnerable to the other abusive collection practices in Unifund's arsenal.

In the mid-1990s, Unifund was bought by ZB Limited Partners. "ZB" refers to the Zises Brothers -- Jay, Seymour, and Selig. In the mid-1980s, the Zises Brothers created an immense pyramid scheme-cum-tax shelter called Integrated Resources, which funded its operations by issuing high-yield or "junk" bonds. 

Seymour Zises (left) at a 2008 social function.

In early 1989, the brothers "managed to sell most of their holdings at $21 a share -- far above the market price -- to the ICH Corporation, a highly leveraged insurance company," observed the New York Times. 
 
The company defaulted on its bonds and commercial notes in June 1989. A few years later, the Zises Brothers -- who cultivated some very useful political ties with the neo-conservative establishment -- reached a settlement in which they were permitted to pay their creditors a small fraction of what they owed. 

The brothers had enough cash on hand to buy Unifund and get involved in several other ventures, such as Family Management Corporation -- an investment firm that reportedly funneled millions of dollars into Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. 


It's not likely that the Zises Brothers are  haunted by the thought that the investors whose money they've pissed away will someday arrange for them to be arrested and humiliated in front of their friends, families, and children.


Unifund is just one of dozens or scores of similar firms that are flourishing in the aftermath of the debt bubble's collapse. The mechanism at work here is the mirror image of the one that operated while the bubble was being inflated. 

In the early 2000s, with the Federal Reserve pumping huge amounts of "liquidity" into the economy, it was immensely profitable for lenders to entice borrowers of dubious credit-worthiness into mortgages and other loans they weren't really able to pay. Before the collapse, bundling and re-selling bad debts to investment banks was a lucrative enterprise for Goldman Sachs and other major powers on Wall Street. Now that the bubble has burst, the titans of Wall Street are bailed out by the same taxpayers who often face the prospect of arrest and incarceration for their own bad debts. 

The welfare queens of Wall Street, cushioned by subsidizes extracted from taxpayers at gunpoint, are ill-disposed to liquidate bad debts through negotiation. This helps explain why an increasing number of people who find themselves "upside down" on their home mortgages are practicing "strategic default": With lenders unwilling to negotiate reasonable terms, the debtors simply stop making payments. This has inspired Wall Street's tax-subsidized deadbeats to begin a PR campaign to demonize "ruthless borrowers" as uniquely depraved. 

"Having been deadbeats and strategic defaulters of the first order," writes economic analyst Yves Smith, the major banks "continue to manifest their characteristic unmitigated gall [by] hectoring the public about honorable behavior." Smith predicts that ere long we will witness the return of debtor's prison, which was supposedly abolished in the 19th century. 


A cynic once said that while a petty thief will find himself behind bars or dangling from the end of a rope, the most powerful criminals are those who run the jails and operate the gallows. The corporatist plutocracy controlling our country is determined to make a prophet of that anonymous cynic. 

*In the original version of this essay  I mistakenly referred to Russell Simmons as Jay-Z. My thanks to commenter thebigbus for correcting my error.

Dum spiro, pugno!

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Building a Better Beast : "Homeland Security" in the US and the PRC

Made in the USA: When Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested by the KGB about 40 years ago, his guards told him the handcuffs he was wearing were made in America. US investment capital is helping China's thuggish gerontocracy keep its rising entrepreneurial population under surveillance.


Let it not be said that the disastrous and unjustifiable Iraq war has failed to yield commercial spin-offs.

Just as the first Gulf War famously prompted the Chinese General Staff to begin a crash modernization of the People's Liberation Army, the garrison state technology on display in the ongoing occupation of Iraq has inspired Lin Jianghuai, the 38-year-old tech tycoon heading China Public Security Technology, Inc -- a key contractor for the Ministry of Public Security (MSP), Beijing's version of the Department of Homeland Security.

Lin amassed a considerable fortune manufacturing a key component for DVD players. As he followed the progress of the Iraq war, Lin was impressed with the police-oriented hardware deployed by occupation troops, such as the HIIDE (Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) system, which is simiar to the Mobilisa "Sentry" identity check device described in this space some months ago.

"I really felt strongly that the police [in China] would absolutely benefit from such technology," Lin recalls. "Bush helped me get my vision."

That's our Bush: Inspiring tyrants from Harare to Beijing.

In pursuit of that "vision," Lin purchased an undistinguished e-commerce business, fused it to a minuscule publicly traded Florida printing company via a "reverse merger," and then renamed the consolidated enterprise "China Public Security," or CPS. Currently traded only in limited fashion, CPS will be traded on the NASDAQ next year, if Lin's ambitions come to fruition. There's no denying that it is a growth stock.

Within a very short time of its creation, CPS attracted capital from two large investment funds in Plano, Texas: Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Also on board were Roth Capital Partners of Newport Beach, California, New York's Oppenheimer & Company, and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong.

China's Ministry of Public Security then awarded Lin's company a contract for developing and deploying a pilot hi-tech surveillance program in Shenzen, a city next to Hong Kong that serves as a computer manufacturing center. At the center of CPS's surveillance system is a "residency card," which is very close kindred to the emerging REAL ID system here in the US.

The computer-readable chip in the Shenzen identity card, reports the New York Times, "will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial `one child' policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card."

If the State objects to any element of the individual's life and background, as documented in the card, that individual will not be able to earn a living or participate in the economy.

This system is being described by Chinese authorities as a "pilot program" for a future nation-wide human inventory control apparatus. I can't help but suspect that it's likewise intended to provide a shakedown for the deployment of a very similar system in our own Homeland Security State.

The Pinnacle Fund, as it happens, is a significant investor in US Homeland Security contractors, among them GVI Security Solutions, Inc, which specializes in large-scale surveillance. Not long ago, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson was named to the GVIS board of directors, joining such dubious luminaries as former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir and Nazzareno Paciotti, formerly of Pinkerton Investigations.

GVIS is just one of numerous corporatist entities looking for easy and secure subsidized profits by building the garrison state both at home and abroad. There will be plenty of work to go around as the Regime builds its own version of the Shenzen Residence Card Information Management System.

The embryo of the U.S. version of that program is the proposed Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS) or E-Verify. Adam Thomas of Press Esc offers a tidy summation of how this initiative -- highlighted in a recent White House press release -- will work:

"[E-Verify] will initially require more than 200,000 companies doing Federal business to use the system to establish employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security Numbers. Later this system will be expanded to cover all companies and will include photo screening features through agreements to allow E-Verify access to the repository of photographs in the State Department of Motor Vehicles databases."

At the risk of making myself obnoxious on this point as on so many others, I'm constrained to observe that the envisioned role in this scheme played by the State DMVs illustrates yet again that local, independent police agencies have gone the way of the vinyl LP: They're not quite extinct, but might as well be.

Much as it grieves me to do so, I must quote the ACLU's analysis of EEVS/E-Verify: "Under this already flawed program no one would be able to work in the U.S. without DHS [Department of Homeland Security] approval -- creating a `No Work List' similar to the government's `No Fly List.'"



This is being done, of course, as an immigration control measure, and it's propelled by the kind of people -- such as these charming folks -- whose determination to keep Mexicans out of the country is on par with their indifference to the emergence of a garrison state within our country.
Oh, and that's hardly the end of the undertakings outlined by the White House:


*“The Department of Homeland Security will continue to explore effective and cost-efficient means of establishing biometric exit requirements at land border crossings.” (Emphasis added.) As I warned about a year ago, the real point of "border security" under the Homeland Security Regime is to keep us in, not to keep "them" out.

*“Starting January 31, 2008, DHS will phase in a requirement for passports or other secure documents for sea and land ports of entry.” The most tacit but unmistakable intent here is to compel any American who leaves the country for any reason to obtain a "secure" federal ID document; as others have pointed out, this is a necessary step toward the eventual creation of a Soviet-style system of internal passports and checkpoints.

*“The Administration is training hundreds of state and local law enforcement officers to address illegal immigration in their communities.” Wonderful! Allow me to find a bucket to hold my joy. This underscores, yet again, the fact that the entire immigration "crisis" has been exploited as a way to build a police state, with the support -- sometimes grudging, but often enthusiastic -- of the very people who would ordinarily put up at least some resistance.

Following the defeat of the immigration "reform" bill in the Senate last June, Michael Savage -- who helped himself to a large portion of the credit for that result -- shared a provocative thought with his audience. Dr. Savage reported that his evening walks regularly take him by a branch office of the Department of Homeland Security, a facility that includes a large motor pool. Recently, he continued, he has seen row after row of newly painted black buses with blacked-out windows. Those buses, Savage gleefully predicted, are being prepared for the day when illegal immigrants will be gathered by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and forcibly deported.

Wanna bet?


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Highway Robbery

Anybody old enough to have lived through the 70s, and who avoided the vices that would make remembering that decade difficult, can probably recall the 1975 populist anthem “Convoy” (and perhaps even the 1978 Kris Kristofferson/Ali McGraw film of the same title).

The C.W. McCall ballad described the spontaneous rebellion of long-haul truckers against the national 55 mile-per-hour speed limit. Determined to cross the continental United States without stopping, the truckers collaborated via Citizens Band Radio to warn each other about speed traps and other snares laid by the “Smokies” -- State Police and other revenue-hungry lawmen.

It is an illustration of the perversity of our times that at least some truck drivers are now collaborating with the revenue farmers.

“Some semi-trucks in Kansas are carrying something new – a highway patrol trooper,” reports the Topeka Capital-Journal (free reg. req.) “Troopers are riding in the cab with professional truck drivers as part of the new Trucks on Patrol for Safety [TOPS] program in which troopers witness and report violations of the law by police radio to other troopers on patrol in the area who can stop the vehicle involved...."

The program, modeled after a pilot program in Washington State, will run for six weeks and is expected to harvest hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Each truck will be fitted with a five-camera system intended to record purported violations. The trucking companies who have decided to “partner” in this effort donate the vehicles and drivers free of charge, no doubt in consideration of certain non-monetary political or regulatory favors to be named later (and behind the scenes).

The first of the corporate Quislings to offer such services was the appropriately named Yellow Transportation of Wichita.

Sniff, sniff -- do we discern the rancid odor of federal pork emanating from this initiative?

Indeed we do: It is funded through the Transportation Department's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, by way of taxes collected at the gas pump.

It is not widely understood that federal “highway safety” bills have been larded with millions of dollars for schemes like TOPS – putative public safety campaigns that actually have the dual purpose of knitting “local” and “state” police to their federal masters, and giving those affiliates of the national Homeland Security State a taste for the easy money to be made through highway robbery.

The August 2005 (take a deep breath) "Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users" law, for example, contained huge caches of federal cash for promoting sobriety checkpoints and roadblocks and for impounding or confiscating vehicles as countermeasures to alcohol-impaired driving. As the watchdogs over at TheNewspaper.com observe, this approach “allows states to fund driving under the influence (DUI)-related confiscation efforts entirely with federal dollars."

The vigilant and principled Karen DeCoster points out another way the Feds have used our gas taxes to build their highway surveillance network.

A June 2005 seat belt use survey was conducted in New Mexico by the Preusser Research Group, under a contract from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Previous studies found lower nighttime seat belt use rates in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania,” reported the NHTSA.(.pdf) “This study sought to confirm those findings, using military-grade night-vision technology to collect nighttime belt use data, measuring day and night belt use in both densely and sparsely populated locations throughout New Mexico. AutoGated brand night vision goggles (XR5 image-enhancing tube) were used in tandem with an infrared spotlight to provide adequate illumination of the vehicle occupants without affecting the occupants of the
vehicle....”

According to the AP, as of June 2005, some 13,000 police agencies nationwide were using military-issue night vision goggles to catch seat belt "violators." (No government has the right or constitutional authority to compel drivers or passengers to buckle up.)


This militarization of traffic enforcement – the use of battlefield hardware and surveillance tactics – is carried out in the name of public safety, natch. Would anybody care to bet that it will also be used to identify vehicles suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, as well?

I use that formulation for a specific reason: In the “war on drugs,” it is often the property of a suspect – his car, cash, or other assets – that is found “guilty” and seized by the police. This is called enforcement in rem (“against the thing”), and the process is called “asset forfeiture.”

Here's how this could work:

A late-model SUV with out-of-state license plates is spotted passing a semi-truck on a stretch of I-80 in Dallas County, Iowa. The driver of that vehicle did nothing improper, and gave no indication that he was intoxicated – but the State Trooper in the semi noted that he fit the “profile” of a suspected drug courier. Accordingly, he radios ahead to the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, which intercepts the SUV.

After the officer cites some manufactured rationale for the stop (they can always “find a reason”), the driver is bullied into a “consent search” of the vehicle that finds no narcotics but does uncover a substantial quantity of cash – say, tens of thousands of dollars. The car is impounded, as is the cash.

The driver insists that he's not a drug dealer, but he's not in a position to fight the charge. He is presented with a waiver permitting the Sheriff's Department to declare that the vehicle is “abandoned property”; without much recourse, the driver signs the document. A legal notice is published in the paper inviting people to claim the “abandoned” automobile; if nobody does so within a month, the Department claims the vehicle and can sell it at auction.

I grant that this sounds entirely implausible. And yet between 2002 and 2006, Iowa's Dallas County Sheriff's Department hauled in $1.75 million in cash and vehicles, most of it seized from black and Latino drivers, using the method described above – except for the innovative use of semi trucks as mobile spotter platforms for this scam.

According to the Des Moines Register, the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, along with the Iowa State Patrol and eight local police departments, “have taken in $2.4 million in cash and property from accused criminals in Dallas County [since 2002]. Nearly 90 percent came from a 24-mile stretch of I-80." The figure might be higher, since the details of various seizures don't become public until after court proceedings are finished.



Brian "Light Fingers" Gilbert

Last week, former Dallas County Sheriff Brian Gilbert was found guilty of stealing a duffel bag containing $120,000 in cash “forfeited” from motorists detained at traffic stops. Gilbert declined to testify in his own defense, and the jury took just six hours to convict him. Gilbert's theft was relatively petty, given the federally abetted grand larceny routinely committed along that stretch of I-80.

This is exactly the kind of localized police revenue trap (albeit one created with federal assistance) the fictional truckers immortalized in “Convoy” would have sabotaged. And Gilbert is precisely the kind of wretchedly corrupt lawman one finds enshrined in trucker mythology.

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