Quantum of Suffering: Economic Hitmen Target Main Street

You should know something about me, and the people I work with. 

We deal with the left and the right, dictators or liberators. If the current president had been more agreeable, I wouldn't be talking to you.

So if you decide not to sign, you'll wake up with your balls in your mouth, and your willing replacement standing over you. 

If you doubt that, then shoot me, take the money, and have a good night's sleep.

Dominic Greene, political acquisitions specialist for the secretive Quantum criminal oligarchy, explains to Gen. Medrano -- the organization's new pet Bolivian dictator -- how the world really works, as seen in the film Quantum of Solace.

If we were to suture a toupee -- preferably in a procedure not involving anesthetic -- to the scalp of Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs commissar would strongly resemble Dominic Greene, the reptilian villain of the most recent James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Blankfein already resembles Greene in ways that transcend mere aesthetics. The same can be said regarding the fictional Quantum criminal syndicate and the corrupt real-life oligarchy to which Blankfein belongs.

Although it was hampered with an undercooked script and an editing style that makes the action sequences all but impossible to follow (think of what Michael Bay would do in the editing bay following a two-day Red Bull jag), Quantum of Solace is the only Bond film to feature an entirely believable villain, and a surprisingly credible Evil Plot.

Dominic Greene is a composite of several real-life oligarchs. In addition to his resemblance to Blankfein, Greene -- an ersatz conservationist who plunders countries and overthrows governments behind a facade of environmental philanthropy -- also somewhat resembles Maurice Strong and George Soros.

Quantum itself is a tenebrous, Bilderberg-like Power Elite fraternity seeking control over the global economy. To that end, the group finances terrorism and revolution (which played a significant role in the previous -- and much superior -- Bond film, Casino Royale) with utter indifference to the ideology of its allies. It is the objective -- the consolidation of power -- that matters, rather than the doctrine used to recruit and motivate the cannon fodder.

At least one of the four people responsible for the Quantum of Solace screenplay appears to be at least superficially familiar with the writings of Carroll Quigley and C. Wright Mills.

A steer, not a bull: Gen. Medrano (Joaquin Cosio).

Dominic Greene's little lecture to Quantum's Bolivian rent-a-thug, General Medrano, brings to mind the following observation by Quigley:

"There does exist an international Anglophile network which operates in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists and frequently does so."

In the film, Greene and Quantum have recruited General Medrano to overthrow the leftist government of Bolivia. All the cabal seeks in return is a large tract of barren desert.

When the CIA starts sniffing around the scheme, Greene buys them off with a side deal: He promises Washington an oil concession if the Company permits the coup to proceed.

By infiltrating a Quantum teleconference, Bond learns of a plot to control "one of the world's most precious resources." In Bolivia he discovers that Greene -- working under the cover of his "Greene Planet" land acquisition corporation -- is planning to monopolize Bolivia's water supply.

Medrano initially balks when told to sign an agreement giving Quantum control over the country's water utility (which would double the price Bolivians were paying for the service), but he grudgingly scribbles his signature when he's reminded how easily he could be replaced.

In addition to the writings of Quigley and Mills, John Perkins' 2005 memoir-expose Confessions of an Economic Hit Man appears to have inspired at least some aspects of the Quantum of Solace storyline.

According to Perkins, the organs of international finance, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, engage in what is essentially a global loan-sharking scheme.
As an economic forecaster covertly recruited by U.S. intelligence in the 1960s, Perkins was dispatched to various countries — including Indonesia and Panama — as an "economic hit man," or EHM. His role was to help induce national leaders to take out huge World Bank loans to fund mammoth infrastructure programs.

Perkins claims that he was was just one EHM among thousands plying the same trade worldwide. If an EHM is successful, writes Perkins, "the [World Bank] loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources…. Of course, the debtor still owes us money — and another country is added to our global empire."

Vulcan's Forge: Civic symbol of Birmingham, Ala.

Economic Hit Men aren’t the only weapons in the Power Elite's arsenal. Perkins also refers to "Jackals," who are sent to deal with the most refractory foreign leaders by fomenting revolutions, or staging assassinations. 

"When the Jackals fail," Perkins continues, "young Americans are sent in to kill and die."

These depredations aren't confined to the Third World, at least as that designation is conventionally understood. 


During the early years of the 21st Century, just before the Federal Reserve's most recent debt bubble collapsed, the EHMs preyed on municipal and county governments across the United States. 

Among their victims are the residents of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has been bankrupted and ruined as the result of a plot eerily similar in some ways to the one depicted in Quantum of Solace.

In 1996, Birmingham was forced to sign a federal consent decree requiring it to reconstruct its municipal sewer system. The initial estimated cost was roughly $250 million. However, that initial cost estimate was like a tiny grain of sand lodged inside the mantle of an oyster.  The Jefferson County political establishment quickly turned that grain of sand into an immense pearl of civic corruption, inflating the cost of the project to $3 billion. 

Sharp-dressed sellout: Larry Langford, JP Morgan's whore.

When the County Commission sought lenders to refinance its sewer bonds, JP Morgan dispatched a low-grade EHM named Charles E. LeCroy. In 2002, Larry P. Langford, a man with a troubled financial background and a weakness for expensive clothes, was appointed president of the Jefferson County Commission -- and LeCroy had his General Medrano. 

LeCroy compromised Langford with the clinical precision of a practiced seducer. Plying him with expensive clothes, jewelry, and cash payouts, LeCroy induced Langford to sign off on a series of esoteric "synthetic debt swaps" that eventually inflated the county's debt -- for rebuilding a sewer system, remember -- to $5.4 billion. 

The mechanics of these instruments are deliberately convoluted; the agreements were cluttered with recondite language designed to obstruct understanding, and conceal trip-wires and trap-doors. 

"I needed somebody to tell me what all that stuff was," Langford would testify in a June 2008 deposition. "And even when they told me, I still don't understand 99 percent of it."


Seeking an "independent" adviser to vet JP Morgan's proposals, Langford turned to William Blount, who ran the local investment firm of Blount Parrish & Company. It's entirely possible that Langford honestly didn't know -- at first -- that Blount had also been compromised by Quantum -- er, make that JP Morgan. In fact, Blount's $300,000 side-deal with LeCroy was roughly double the size of Langford's price tag. 


In Quantum of Solace, Bond discovers that Greene and his cohorts had managed to buy off dozens of officials in both the U.S. and British governments with promises of lucrative oil concessions. As Mr. White, a bagman for Quantum who had been introduced in Casino Royale, tells Bond: "The first thing you need to know about us is that we have people everywhere" -- including supposed allies in key positions within U.S. and British intelligence.

As mentioned earlier, Dominic Greene was able to get the CIA to butt out of Bolivia in exchange for a bogus oil deal. It cost LeCroy, JP Morgan's EHM in Birmingham, $3 million to persuade Goldman Sachs to avert its gaze from the opportunities for plunder in Jefferson County.


When queried by a comrade at JP Morgan, LeCroy explained that the money was the price of Goldman "not messing with us. It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal." 


As the irreplaceable Matt Taibbi pointed out in his definitive journalistic autopsy of Jefferson County, just about everybody in the Banking Cartel sought a piece of the action: Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blunt in their scramble to do business with the county. 

In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 `arranger's fee.' At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners." 


Dozens of local businessmen and political officials -- including Langford, who was elected Birmingham Mayor in 2007,  and Blount -- have been convicted on charges of bribery and other forms of corruption. LeCroy was eventually convicted and sent to prison for three months -- yes, three months -- for his role in a similar criminal enterprise in Philadelphia.


Some of those responsible for pillaging Jefferson County are behind bars, but nothing they will experience will compare to the suffering they have left in their wake. 

A chilling scene near the end of Quantum of Solace shows Indian peasants looking on in frustration and alarm as their local water pumps suddenly run dry in (temporary) consummation of Greene's plan. More than a few residents of Jefferson County have lived through very similar privations.


County residents now pay an estimated $750 a year for municipal services, more than twice the national average. Sewer costs are now 300 percent higher than they were when the reconstruction project began in 1996. These ruinous increases reflect the fact that those sentenced to live in Jefferson County are being taxed to pay the service on the debts created by JP Morgan's Economic Hit Man and his seraglio of civic servants. 

Birmingham resident Dora Bonner, a woman in her 70s who lives on a Social Security check and shares her home with four grandchildren, was among those forced to choose between paying a $250 water bill or keeping the furnace running in wintertime.  "I couldn't afford the water, so they shut it off," Bonner told Bloomberg News. 

Jefferson County residents draw nearer to bankruptcy every time they shower or flush the toilet. JP Morgan, the architects of this misery, received $25 billion in TARP bailout money and unspecified tens of billions more from indirect subsidies. Last year it dished out more than $11 billion in management bonuses. 


After the Economic Hit Men have done their work, John Perkins informs us, those who employ them send in first the jackals, then the troops. The destruction of Alabama's most populous county suggests that, at least where domestic operations are concerned, Quantum's real-life counterparts might simply skip the second stage and go directly to martial law. 

First Hit Men, then Jackals, then troops.

Last fall, a "kind of civil legal civil war broke out" in Jefferson County "when three county agencies -- the sheriff's department, an indigent-care hospital and the tax-assessor's office -- sued the county commission to stop ... budget cuts on the grounds that they posed a danger to public safety," reported Bloomberg News last October. 


Maintaining that budget cuts would make it impossible to provide law enforcement coverage for Jefferson County, Sheriff Mike Hale suggested that it would be necessary to call in the National Guard to serve as a police force. In fact, as AlterNet's Mike Ames observes, martial law is "a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America."


In March 2009, following a shooting rampage in which 27-year-old Samson, Alabama resident Michael McClendon murdered ten people before killing himself, troops from Fort Rucker "were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets," reported Ames. "This was a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare." 

A subsequent investigation by the Army confirmed that it was illegal to dispatch soldiers to patrol the streets and man roadblocks, but no effort was made to identify, let alone punish, those responsible. As Ames points out, the damage done in Alabama by Wall Street's Economic Hit Men was hardly confined to Jefferson County: Pilgrim's Pride, one of the state's largest private employers, was seduced into leveraging itself into bankruptcy. 


"Now you can see why Alabamans are loading up on so many weapons," concludes Ames. For the same reason, it's not surprising that some statewide political campaigns in Alabama this year have an insurrectionary tone -- not that this is necessarily a bad thing, of course. The problem, predictably enough, is that the understandable rage and frustration are likely to be skillfully misdirected in the service of the same people who have all but reduced the state to Third World status. 


Those of us who don't live in Alabama need not feel left out, since -- as Quantum's Mr. White might put it -- Wall Street's taxpayer-subsidized oligarchy has people everywhere. Their fingerprints will most likely be found wherever a municipal or county government is suffocating in debt and wringing whatever revenue it can from tax victims who have nothing left to give.


Yes, I know: Quantum of Solace is a silly movie, full of implausible action gags and dodgy dialogue. And yet....

Video Extra: Your Moment of Wish Fulfillment

Be sure to join me each Saturday evening at 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

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!

Join me each Saturday night (8:00-11:00 Mountain Time) for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network. 

The "Tax Mahal": A Shrine to Corporate Socialism

According to architect Jonathan Levi,
the renovation of the IRS regional headquarters in Andover, Massachusetts
is a "visionary" project that "will be relevant 50 years from now."

This is true  in exactly the same sense that the Soviet-era monuments that still disfigure the Russian countryside remain relevant reminders of that omnivorous state. 

Our descendants would be exceptionally fortunate if the Andover IRS "service center" were among the institutional tombstones marking the demise of history's most profligate kleptocracy.

This morning's headlines bring fresh evidence that the Regime may implode far sooner than many expect: The Federal Government's debt will exceed the gross domestic product no later than 2012, a development that will most likely initiate a "debt super cycle" in which we will experience both hyperinflation and extortionate interest rates. 

The IRS's "Tax Mahal"

Like their antecedents in the Gorbachev-era Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the American nomenklatura is preparing for the impending implosion by siphoning away whatever wealth they can find. This is why maintaining and enhancing the State's instruments of coercion and wealth extraction is the Regime's most urgent priority. 

The $92 million "stimulus" -funded expansion and renovation of the Andover IRS "service center" is a tangible illustration of that fact. But as with so many other things, it's the backstory here that is most significant. 

Until two years ago, the IRS planned to shut down the Andover outpost no later than 2009. At the time, the facility -- which processed paper tax returns -- was already obsolete, since a majority of tax victims now fill out and file those documents on-line. This development -- which had been anticipated since 2002 -- would have left roughly 1,400 tax-subsidized chair-moisteners without employment.

It's quite common for private businesses to undergo workforce reductions as a result of changing technology and market demands. For example, just last week Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be shedding 9,000 jobs as a result of what it described as "consolidation" and "streamlining" of its operations. 

An earlier monument to state profligacy. 

Despite the best efforts by the IRS to mimic the behavior of productive people -- calling those it plunders "customers," for instance, a term that applies to tax victims in the same way the word "lover" could be used to describe a victim of prison rape, and for exactly the same reason -- the IRS is, unalterably, a government entity. 

Since it doesn't conduct "business," it cannot go out of business, and its employees receive special solicitude from the political class. 

In April 2008, six New England Congressbeings, led by Massachusetts Rep. Niki Tsongas, began to pressure IRS commissar Douglas Shulman and the Treasury Department to find some way to keep the 1,400 surplus cubicle-dwellers on the public payroll. The pressure campaign grew increasingly shrill and insistent as the June 30, 2009 deadline for closing down the Andover office drew closer. 

Beginning in early 2009, many of the Andover functionaries were given sinecures distributing "stimulus" checks to other appendages of the Leviathan. But this simply wasn't enough to keep the trough filled. Displaying a certain depraved creativity, Rep. Tsongas and her comrades suggested that IRS employees be given another make-"work" position courtesy of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the corporate socialist centerpiece of the October Revolution of 2008. 


Tsongas and her crew fired off a letter to TARP Special Inspector General Neil M. Barofsky urging him to guarantee a "preference" for Andover IRS employees in handing out pork-barrel positions. This is because, as every dutiful collectivist will tell you, prosperity is a product of government control over the economy.

"The creation and preservation of jobs within the federal government are paramount toward rebuilding and strengthening America's economy," insisted Tsongas and her colleagues. "Keeping America's workforce working is key to rebuilding our broken economy." (Emphasis added.) 

Commissar Barofsky, Special IG for the TARP rip-off

Note well that "America's workforce" as defined in that letter consists entirely of people in the tax-consuming class, rather than the wealth-producing sector. Note also that keeping the parasites firmly attached to the dying host is of "paramount" concern. 

All of these efforts to save IRS jobs in Andover are delaying actions intended to keep the payroll swollen with tax-engorged apparatchiks until the Tax Mahal is complete. 

The IRS was permitted to keep $92 million in confiscated wealth -- an amount designated as "stimulus" funds -- to expand and "modernize" its Andover "campus." Supposedly justified in the name of reducing the regional office's "carbon footprint," the funding is actually being used to pimp out the facility in Cadillac fashion. 

Among the new appointments and appurtenances, reports the Boston Herald, will be a reflecting pool, an art gallery, indoor gardens, a 7,000-square-foot cafeteria and an ampitheater.” The objective, explains architect Jonathan Levi, is to turn the IRS facility into “a comfortable, collaborative environment. It will be welcoming for the people who use it.” 

The "comforts," of course, are for the benefits of the government-employed predators who will staff the office. Visitors who find themselves on the receiving end of the IRS’s malign attentions won’t find any consolation in the extravagant appointments and ornamental touches. 

This is how the Regime ruling us defines economic "recovery": 

Two years ago, that building was scheduled to be shut down, with a corresponding reduction in the wealth-devouring population. Now it's being expensively renovated, and plans are being finalized to expand the ranks of tax-gatherers and paper-polluters stationed therein. 


On April 1 -- the symbolic birthday of anyone who still believes that government is in any sense compatible with civilized living -- Tsongas and 14 other Congressional figures ("representatives" doesn't work)  from Massachusetts and New Hampshire sent another letter to IRS commissar Shulman urging him to exploit "this state-of-the-art resource by expanding the number of employees at the facility." Not surprisingly, one specific personnel recommendation was to expand the number of auditors stationed in Andover. 


Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who enjoys goading gangsters in both the private and public sectors, points out that "last year, 626 streetlights were turned off" in Andover "because the town couldn't afford them anymore."


"Billions are sucked out of what remains of the economy's productive sector to pay ever-more-outrageous salaries and benefits to politically correct layabouts who spend all day e-mailing one [another] and sharpening pencils, assuming they show up at all," observed Carr. "Meanwhile, on Main Street, every week you drive by more empty storefronts, not to mention shuttered factories or car dealerships, and further out of town, dying or abandoned malls."


While contemplating the exertions undertaken by the political class infesting New England to save 1,400 IRS jobs, I was reminded of Bill Clinton's April 1993 "Timber Summit" in Portland, Oregon. 

Fallen Idol: A statue of Lenin is consigned to history's dustbin.

The advertised purpose of that event was to draw together "stakeholders" in the Pacific Northwest to devise a federal management plan that would expand endangered species protection for the spotted owl, while inflicting no "net job loss" for the region. 

 The substantive purpose of that event, of course, was to offer patently insincere gestures of  comfort to the hundreds of thousands of families in the Northwest whose livelihoods were about to be destroyed by a land lockup program that had already been finished behind the scenes. 


Screwing his face into what would become a nauseatingly familiar simulacrum of sympathy, Clinton told the audience at the Timber Summit that although he would try to save their jobs, "I can't repeal the laws of change." Those purported "laws" dictated that millions of acres be locked up by Washington, leaving entire towns destitute and reducing their residents to dependency on federal welfare. 

This wasn't the ineluctable outcome of impersonal historical forces, or a product of market demand; it was a result of deliberate choices imposed on millions of productive Americans by the Regime that presumes to rule them. 

On the other hand, the trends that would have resulted in the closure of the IRS's Andover office reflected natural, organic change, at least in terms of the relevant technology. Yet the same government that ravaged the Northwest's timber industry has spared no expense or effort to spare the paychecks of 1,400 tax-consumers on the IRS's payroll. 

Immunizing the wealth-devouring population from the "laws of change" is just one element of the Regime's full-spectrum lawlessness. It is devoutly to be wished that our descendants will be both wiser and freer than we have been, and will transmit to their heirs the dismal lessons they have learned as they sift through the rubble of the state that presently afflicts us.

Tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each Saturday evening from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

For those who missed last week's installment, here's a link to the archives.







Dum spiro, pugno!

We Bought The Bullets

The bullets used to kill 19-year-old Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American college student born in Troy, New York, were fired by soldiers in a foreign army -- but they were paid for with money extorted from U.S. taxpayers. 

A post-mortem documented that Dogan was shot four times in the head and once in the chest by the commandos of Unit 13, which assaulted the humanitarian flotilla attempting to break the Israeli government's blockade of Gaza. Dogan was one of nine Turkish nationals killed in the attack.

Of the incident in which this young American citizen was murdered, Vice President Biden -- an infinitely self-replenishing Artesian gusher of unfiltered foolishness -- had this to say: "What's the big deal here?"

Although Dogan was the only U.S. citizen to be killed, other Americans who protested the Gaza blockade suffered grievously at the hands of U.S.-subsidized Israeli soldiers.

Paul Larudee, a 64-year-old peace activist who was also involved in the flotilla, was severely beaten and otherwise abused during his two-day detention in Israel because he refused to defer to the "authority" of the Israeli hijackers. Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old from Maryland, lost an eye while taking part in a demonstration in Jerusalem protesting the attack on the flotilla, and the ongoing blockade of Gaza: She was shot in the face with a (U.S.-subsidized) tear gas grenade fired by an Israeli soldier.

Blinded eyewitness: Emily Henochowicz in the hospital.

By any rational definition, the attack on civilian ships in international waters was an act of criminal aggression.

Apologists for the Israeli government's actions insist that the commandos who invaded the Turkish-flagged ships were forced to defend themselves when they found themselves outnumbered by civilians armed with knives and pipes. But just as pirates and armed robbers have surrendered the right to self-defense, the commandos had no moral or legal right to continue their aggression through violent means once they met resistance.

The commando raid was simple piracy and murder. The blockade it was meant to enforce is a campaign of state terrorism.

Defenders of the Israeli government describe the blockade as (to borrow Charles Krauthammer's expression) a form of "passive defense." It is better described as a policy of collective punishment. Supposedly intended to deprive Hamas of war materiel, the Israeli blockade also interdicts many indispensable foodstuffs, along with building materials, medicines, and such strategically critical items as wheelchairs and children's toys. More importantly, the Gazans themselves are effectively penned in an open-air prison camp. It's doubtful that there is an approach more perfectly calibrated to cultivate terrorism, rather than dissuade it.

It is hyperbole to describe Gaza as a modern equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is no exaggeration, however, to say that the Israeli government is using, on a much larger scale, the same tactics against the 1.5 million Gazans that were used by the FBI against the Branch Davidians. One federal official who disapproved of the 51-day siege at Mt. Carmel -- during which time water and other necessities were cut off -- described it as an exercise in torturing children to force their parents to surrender.

The face of "Terrorism": Ekrem Cetin and his son, Turker Kaan

Appropriately, that tactic reportedly played a role in the assault on the Gaza relief flotilla. Eyewitnesses testify that Israeli troops seeking to commandeer the Mavi Marmara pointed their guns at the one-year-old son of ship engineer Ekrem Cetin, threatening to murder the child unless the captain stopped the ship.


Had the trigger been pulled and the child -- who, I'm constrained to point out, somewhat resembles my own one-year-old son, Justus --  been slaughtered, we would have been treated to another chorus of an increasingly familiar refrain: It wasn't the fault of the Israeli commandos that the child's parents brought him to a war zone.

 During the 2009 Israeli Defense Force "Operation Cast Lead" offensive in Gaza, one sniper platoon expanded that principle of collective responsibility to include pregnant mothers and their unborn children. A souvenir t-shirt distributed to snipers depicted a visibly pregnant Palestinian mother in the targeting scope of a rifle; the illustration bore the caption, "One shot -- two kills." 

The official t-shirt of the Lon Horiuchi Brigade?

Israeli officials insisted that those t-shirts were a product of bad taste, rather than a reflection of official policy. Those assurances are stoutly disputed by numerous Israeli veterans who have served in Gaza, who testify that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are passively encouraged by the IDF, and generally covered up by it after the fact.


In search of a candid description of the doctrine of collective responsibility and indiscriminate warfare that prevails in both Jerusalem and Washington, we turn to the detestable Alan Dershowitz.

Unless he's being paid a sultan's ransom to defend a celebrity murder defendant, Dershowitz is a consistent defender of state power. He supports the institutionalization of torture, and endorses preemptive nuclear war against Iran. Four years ago, in his book Pre-emption, Dershowitz introduced a concept of collective punishment based on what he calls a "continuum of civilianality" in which protected civilian status "is often a matter of degree, rather than a bright line."

During the summer of 2006, Israeli troops invaded Lebanon following terrorist attacks by Hezbollah. In a July 22, 2006 Los Angeles Times column, Dershowitz insisted that those Lebanese who refused to abandon their homes when commanded to do so by an invading foreign army became retroactively "complicit" in Hezbollah's attacks, and were thus fair game. Those who were unable to leave, such as the elderly and infirm, were "innocent victims," he allowed -- but the IDF shouldn't be expected to spare them if doing so detracted from their military objectives.

Two weeks later, Dershowitz abandoned any pretense of proportionality, insisting that the only requirement to be considered a "terrorist" is to be a citizen of a country that has been invaded by the Israeli (or, presumably, the U.S.) Army.

"Lebanon has chosen sides -- not all Lebanese, but the democratically chosen Lebanese government," wrote Dershowitz. "When a nation chooses sides in a war ... its civilians pay a price for that choice.... Lebanon has chosen the wrong side and its citizens are paying the price. Maybe next time a democracy must choose between collaborating with terrorism or resisting terrorism, it will choose the right side."

Reading those words I was irresistibly reminded of a conversation I had with a self-described Holocaust skeptic in White Plains, New York during the fall of 2001. During our conversation, this fellow admitted that under Nazi rule German and other European Jews were branded like cattle, deprived of their property, and penned in concentration camps, but insisted that this was necessary because they constituted a "security risk."

Owing to the fact that a portion of the German Jewish population consisted of Marxist radicals who threatened the German state, that entire sub-population had defined itself as the enemy, and could be dealt with in any fashion necessary in order to preserve the Volkish state.

If there is a moral difference between that individual's view of collective punishment, and the one expressed by Dershowitz and other people of his ilk, I've yet to learn of an instrument capable of measuring it.

It's not at all surprising that Dershowitz invoked his concept of the "continuum of civilianality" to justify both the Gaza blockade and the attack on the relief flotilla.

"The act of breaking a military siege is itself a military act," pontificated the love-child of Lazar Kaganovich and Bozo the Clown. "It is a close question whether `civilians' who agree too [sic] participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different than pure, innocent civilians, and perhaps they are also something different from pure armed combatants. "

The place assigned by Dershowitz to such people on his "continuum of civilianality" depends entirely on their response to aggression by people wearing state-issued costumes: If their reaction is anything other than immediate, unconditional submission, then -- according to Dershowitz -- those defending themselves become terrorists, and the costumed aggressors are the victims.

Where the use of aggressive force is concerned, the only serious moral question -- for Dershowitz and other high priests of statism -- is whether those committing it are swaddled in government-approved attire.

As Augustine pointed out, the key difference between a state and any other criminal gang is not the "renouncing of aggression" but rather the "attainment of impunity." Like the behemoth in Washington that lavishly underwrites it, nurtures its worst and most corrupt instincts, and shields its rulers from accountability, the Israeli government is a criminal band that acts with utter impunity -- not to protect its citizens, but to defend and enhance the state's power and the material advantages of those allied to it.


The Israeli government, like the one ruling us, thrives on crises and seems to go to great lengths to cultivate them. As I've pointed out before, there is a sick symbiosis between the Israeli regime and Palestinian terrorist chieftains, a relationship documented by Richard Ben Cramer in his valuable and infuriating book How Israel Lost.

"Things are not as they seem," writes Cramer. "The [Palestinian Authority's] business intersects with Israeli business at the highest levels of Israeli political life." This explains the tacit "arrangement" in which Israeli and Palestinian rulers sustain each other through carefully timed incidents of lethal violence.

Before Yasir Arafat died, he would be regularly "rescued" by Israeli military strikes against Palestinian targets, Cramer observes. The same was true of Arafat's supposed arch-enemy, Ariel Sharon: "If his polls dropped, something terrible happened -- dead Jews all over the TV" -- and Sharon's political fortunes would dramatically improve.

One reason Israeli intelligence helped create Hamas in the first place was to provide a hunting preserve of Palestinian radicals who could be killed in this ongoing charade. Now we're told that the establishment of a Hamas-dominated political regime in Gaza justifies the starvation blockade and the slaughter on the high seas of anyone -- including American citizens -- who tries to run that blockade.

All of this is necessary, we are incessantly told, in order to ensure the survival of the Jewish State. But self-defense is an individual right. No state, Jewish or otherwise, has the "right" to exist, and all of them -- the Israeli state emphatically included -- prosper at the expense of those they supposedly protect.

We can't guarantee Israel's security and have no authority to do so even if we could, but we'd do both ourselves and the inhabitants of that country a tremendous favor if we were to stop paying for the Israeli government's bullets.

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each Saturday night from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!