Briefly Considered: Scrimp and Save, Make Your Payments ... And Lose Your Home Anyway

We're going to see a lot more of this: Iraq War vet Shawn Howell worked two jobs but still couldn't keep up with his ARM payments and had to sell the house to avoid foreclosure. Thousands of families who made payments on time stand to lose their homes as their mortgage lenders go bankrupt.




Just for a minute imagine that you're a thrifty, responsible homeowner. Unlike many people, you've been conscientious in protecting your credit. Your mortgage payments have always been on time, and your property tax payments have been made through the mortgage company. With price inflation steadily worsening and your household income remaining stagnant, things are tight but manageable.

But then your mortgage lender goes bankrupt after being mortally wounded by the bursting housing bubble. As a result, the property tax checks issued by the lender start to bounce -- and now you stand to lose your home to tax foreclosure as a result.

This is the situation facing thousands of home "owners" whose mortgages were financed through American Home Mortgage Corporation Inc. (AHMC), which filed for bankruptcy in August. Like most mortgage companies, AHMC issued thousands of loans backed by Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, which are "government-sponsored" lending agencies.

When the company filed for bankruptcy, AHMC's corporate leaders hoped to auction its loans to other private investors in order to raise money to pay its creditors. But just before the company went under on August 6, Freddie Mac obtained a judicial order permitting it to seize the files on some 4,547 mortgage loans, as well as $7 million in escrowed "custodial account funds" that had been sent by home "owners" for mortgage, insurance, and property tax payments. A subsequent agreement between AHMC and Freddie Mac allows the mortgage company to continue "servicing a crucial portfolio of $5.2 billion in government-backed mortgage loans," which is just fine for both parties in that arrangement.

Meanwhile, thousands of home "owners" face economic ruin. Late mortgage insurance payments will cause their premiums to skyrocket. Late tax payments will result in late fees and penalties. The Wall Street Journal (sub. required -- but see here) reports that "Thousands of homeowners face an `imminent risk' of losing their homes" because property taxes are going unpaid."

With the clinical detachment to human suffering that typifies the bureaucratic mind, Freddie Mac's commissars note that while the agency remains in control of the contested mortgage loans, it can't sort out the details to make the required insurance and tax payments. "Therefore, there is the imminent risk that borrowers' insurance policies may lapse for nonpayment, subjecting the borrowers to a risk of loss of their mortgaged properties," observed a statement from the agency. Likewise, the non-payment of property taxes will result "in increased tax liabilities and possible tax-foreclosure sales."

Some of the affected home "owners" are fortunate enough to live in counties with relatively accommodating treasurers. A dozen residents of Frederick County, Maryland, for instance, have been told that they can make partial tax payments until the checks arrive from AHMC. As if they would.

Freddie Mac's corporate motto asserts that the federally-created agency "makes home possible." The agency boasts of financing some 50 million homes since 1970. I have no idea how many American households today have been "helped" by Freddie: In my home state of Idaho, one of the more thinly populated states of the Union, Freddie has helped to finance over 160,000 homes over the last ten years. (.pdf)

Given the extent of Freddie's entanglement in the housing market, it's reasonable to believe that the predicament faced by the 4,547 households caught in the AHMC bankruptcy is just a foretaste of sorrows to come.

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The Untouchables (Updated)

Of course, what they don't tell you is that "combative or resistant behavior" can include a word, glance, or momentary hesitation that a State-employed thug doesn't like.


I know little about the political views of the Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the "Hip Hop Caucus," and I care even less. For all I know he is a devoted left-wing agitator who keeps a copy of Marx's 18th Brumaire, or perhaps Carlos Marighella's Mini-Manual for the Urban Guerrilla, concealed within the covers of his Bible.

If so, I don't care.

What I do know, from the video below and eyewitness testimony, is that Rev. Yearwood, a U.S. citizen, waited patiently and peacefully in line to be part of the audience at a public congressional hearing, and was denied access while others behind him in the queue were admitted. I know that this was done because a strict and patently unconstitutional quota was imposed by Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Missouri), the presiding chairman, on "peace people" in the audience.

And it's clear from the video below that Yearwood did nothing to justify his arrest, let alone being the victim of an act of gang violence by a pack of cowards in uniform who promptly charged him with "assault on a police officer":



Spectacles of this sort offer what I call a "shibboleth/sibbolet" bright-line test of one's principles and moral orientation: When you see a group of six large armed "men" swarming an unarmed, peaceful person, whose side do you take?

This wasn't the street arrest of Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit that put innocent lives at risk. Whatever one thinks of that notorious episode from a decade and a half ago, it was a manifestly different thing from what we see in the video above.

This incident brings to the forefront a point I have made before: "Resisting arrest" should not be a crime. Indeed, for much of our nation's history it was considered perfectly legal and appropriate for a citizen to resist arrest -- to the point of using lethal violence, if necessary -- where probable cause didn't exist.

As attorney Roger Roots points out in an essay published by the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal:

"Under the common law, there was no difference whatsoever between the privileges, immunities, and powers of constables and those of private citizens. Constables were literally and figuratively clothed in the same garments as everyone else and faced the same liabilities — civil and criminal — as everyone else under identical circumstances.... Nothing illustrates the modern disparity between the rights and powers of police and citizen as much as the modern law of resisting arrest. At the time of the nation's founding, any citizen was privileged to resist arrest if, for example, probable cause for arrest did not exist or the arresting person could not produce a valid arrest warrant where one was needed. As recently as one hundred years ago, but with a tone that seems as if from some other, more distant age, the United States Supreme Court held that it was permissible (or at least defensible) to shoot an officer who displays a gun with intent to commit a warrantless arrest based on insufficient cause. Officers who executed an arrest without proper warrant were themselves considered trespassers, and any trespassee had a right to violently resist (or even assault and batter) an officer to evade such arrest."

This is exactly how it should be.

If resistance is put up by a legitimate criminal suspect, he's doing pretty much what we expect him to. If it is offered by a genuinely innocent person, it's not a crime of any sort, merely the understandable and quite commendable act of a free person exercising his God-given right to self-defense against the single biggest threat to life and individual liberty we confront: The State's armed agents of coercion.

Yet it's not uncommon for people to be arrested for resisting arrest; this reminds me of the East German government's practice of suppressing the speech of those who accused that regime of suppressing free speech.

And we've reached a point in our descent into despotism where the mere act of "resistant" physical contact between a civilian and a State-employed thug wearing a gun and body armor is prosecuted as felony assault.

As agents of the State, the police are literally untouchable -- licensed to dispense violence at whim, and empowered to treat any resistance by word or gesture as an attack.


These guys can kick in your door, kill your pets, trash your home, throw you to the floor and put a boot on your neck, and kill you with impunity -- but if you utter a syllable of protest you can be prosecuted for "assaulting an officer."


In the incident displayed above, it was the "assailant" who ended up, however briefly, beneath a crushing, suffocating scrum of armed goons (reportedly suffering a broken leg ). The only contact that occurred took place when the armed hirelings grabbed Rev. Yearwood, tackled him to the floor, and then piled on top of him, thus displaying the sacrificial courage for which our constabulary is famous in the era of the Homeland Security State.

Note as well how at least one of the heroes did what he could to impede the view of the witness who was recording the assault.

The District of Columbia ordinance under which Rev. Yearwood has been charged offers five elements of the offense of "assault on [a] police officer," the second of which is that the defendant "assaulted" -- well, duh; a tautology is always so helpful -- "resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, or interfered with" an officer.

Under that language, Rev. Yearwood was liable to be charged with "assault" merely for demanding an explanation from the police who denied him access to the committee room, or for exclaiming "I won't be arrested today!" as the officers moved to take him into custody.

Some might contend that this kind of treatment is exceptional, given that the assailants were the Capitol Police and that security standards are necessarily higher on Capitol Hill. But Rev. Yearwood's exclusion was apparently not based on security concerns; it was dictated entirely by his political views.

And it's worth noting that one of the assailants told Yearwood he was being arrested for "defying an officer's order" -- the kind of spurious charge routinely used to justify arrests not only in Mordor-on-the-Potomac, but elsewhere across this once-relatively-free land.

What could be a better illustration of the reality that we live in a regimented, militarized police state -- patrolled by armed enforcers, rather than peace officers -- than the fact that any citizen can be arrested anytime for refusing to follow "an officer's order"?

UPDATE

Assault victim Lennox Yearwood gives an account of the crime committed against him by rented thugs at the U.S. Capitol:



(h/t Scott Watson)

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UPDATED -- Briefly Considered: Gen. Petraeus -- US Security Not An "Objective" in Iraq

[The following transcribed excerpts have been updated and corrected from the first version, thanks to a suggestion from a reader -- WNG.]

Senator John Warner: "[I]f we continue what you have laid before the Congress here as a strategy [to continue the war in Iraq], do you feel that that is making America safer?"

General David Petraeus: "Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

Warner: "Does that make America safer?"

Petraeus: "Sir, I, I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind. What I have focused on, and been riveted on, is how to accomplish the mission...."

Notes David Corn of The Nation: "Warner did not press the general any further on this point. The senator's time was up. That was quite a statement from the fellow who is supposed to save Bush's war. He advocates pursuing Bush's course of action in Iraq but he cannot attest that this effort is crucial for America's safety. Is that being a good soldier?"

Bear in mind that David Petraeus -- the Bush Regime's military messiah du jour -- wasn't in danger of a perjury charge, since the Regime refused to permit the General to testify under oath. (This is standard operating procedure for the Bu'ushists, incidentally.) Yet even under those conditions, Petraeus wasn't willing to claim that the continuing "war of choice" in Iraq is making the United States safer and more secure.

The unalloyed truth is that the war is radically undermining our national security:

*It has abetted the growth of Jihadist radicalism;
*It has provided Jihadis-in-training with an invaluable training ground;
*It is rapidly depleting our wealth (the plunder of domestic wealth through taxes and inflation is the chief war aim of any regime, of course);
*The Regime's ineptly disguised grab for Middle East energy resources has provoked the creation of new and potentially dangerous anti-US coalitions -- something that may lead to a painful illustration of how subjects inevitably get the worst of fights their rulers pick on their behalf;
*It has left the military depleted and over-committed -- a good thing, in the sense that an overtaxed military is less suitable as an instrument of domestic tyranny, a bad thing in the event the coalitions referred to above decide they want a piece of us.


Custom poster courtesy of William Wallace Grigg, age 9.


Outside of the ranks of those who have succumbed to the self-inflicted handicap called "Hannitization" -- you know, mouth-breathing neo-Brownshirts of the sort gathered today for the last of this year's Cornpone Nuremberg Rallies -- nobody believes that the Iraq war is anything other than a world-historic strategic catastrophe. Only a few have the honesty and character to admit as much, and urge an end to the needless bloodshed. The rest are willing to abide additional thousands of deaths in order to save the prestige of the Regime that led our nation into this disaster.

Well, thanks to Gen. Petraeus, we now have a perfect argument to throw in the face of anyone who's willing to listen:

By the tacit admission of the general in command, the war has nothing to do with the safety and security of the United States.

So ending the war is not a defeat.

Q.E.D.


UPDATE, 9/12

Four years ago, as noted in this story from the utterly indispensable McClatchy Newspapers service (the only wire service that specializes in journalism, rather than stenography, where the Iraq war is concerned), Gen. Petraeus was willing to express open skepticism regarding the wisdom of, and strategy behind, the invasion of Iraq. Today, as our military desperately tries to tread quicksand, Petraeus is choking down the key questions he was willing to ask back then, if only in rhetorical fashion.

At yesterday's Capitol Hill hearing, "there was one question that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, couldn't, or wouldn't, answer. It was the question that Petraeus himself posed rhetorically back in 2003 when he led the Army's 101st Airborne Division into Iraq: `Tell me how this ends.'"

As noted above, that wasn't the only question Petraeus (and Crocker, who may as well have been an animatronic mannequin) refused to answer. The combination of the two ducked questions leaves us with this: The military in Iraq is pursuing a course unrelated to our national security, under civilian and military leadership with no idea of how to end the war.


Obiter Dicta

This time I mean it! My new book, Liberty In Eclipse: The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State, is about to go to press. I'll let you know as soon as it's available.

Meanwhile, I'm about three chapters into my contribution to another book project (I just finished the draft of a chapter today), about which I'll have more to say later.

Please stay abreast of critical stories at The Right Source, and check out the Liberty Minute archives.

Power vs. Authority (UPDATED, 9/11)

“Power is the ability to force compliance with one’s demands; authority is the ability to command voluntary obedience.” -- Hannah Arendt


Hannah Arendt was a diligent and widely respected student of totalitarianism. It is not necessary to agree with all, or even most, of her assumptions and conclusions to appreciate the critical distinction she draws between power -- "the capacity to transform a living person into a corpse, which is to say, a thing," as Simone Weil put it -- and authority.

In a free society, power is used only to protect the persons, property, and rights of the innocent, and then only as a last resort after an appeal to authority fails.

The aspirational premise of the republic we have lost was that power would be transmuted into authority through the "consent of the governed," and that the authority thus conferred on governing institutions was revocable -- to the extent that the government itself could be altered or even abolished when necessary to protect individual rights.

It didn't work out that way. Given the history of the singular plague called government, this outcome was hardly surprising. The entire project begun by the Founders was based on the right to revoke consent -- a right they exercised in withdrawing from the British Empire. The exercise of that right is also known as "secession," and the entire point of the event commonly called the Civil War was to abolish that right through the exercise of State power in its most elemental sense: More than a half-million human beings were turned into the things called "corpses" not to free slaves from bondage, but rather to reconquer communities that had chosen to leave a supposedly free union.

Since 1865, as historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has pointed out, there have been no permanent victories for individual liberty over power.

Today, the malign influence of the Regime ruling us contaminates practically every social institution, through “laws” regulating behavior, speech, and even individual attitudes.
And the behavior of the Regime's armed enforcers -- still called "Police," even though their behavior is now indistinguishable from that of an army of occupation -- is increasingly defined by Lenin's totalitarian formula of exercising "power without limit, resting directly on force.


Back in the Good Old Days, many law-and-order conservatives insisted that the chief domestic threat to liberty came from the efforts of Communist and other subversive groups to undermine the police. In the era of the federalized, militarized, monolithic Homeland Security State, the police themselves are the single most potent threat to individual liberty.

This is not necessarily because their ranks have been filled with degenerates, although the decline in recruiting and performance standards certainly plays a role in our predicament. Rather, it is because law enforcement at every level has embraced the power-centered worldview, in which the role of police is to ensure that people submit to the State.

A spectacular example of this has been captured by 20-year-old Brett Darrow. Last Friday, Darrow captured, on video, an arrogant, abusive, foul-mouthed, illiterate, cretinous, power-intoxicated simian by the name of Sgt. Kenline [actually, Kuehnlein -- see update and correction below] threatening to perjure himself to justify arresting the motorist -- simply because Darrow wasn't properly submissive to somebody wearing a State-issued costume.

"Try and talk back ... to me again," snarled Kenline, who took offense when Darrow politely and compliantly asked what violation justified his detention: Merely asking an agent of the State to justify such an action, you see, is grounds for arrest. And Kenline understands that he has the power -- not the authority, mind you, the power -- to commit acts of violence against Darrow to deprive him of his freedom, and then lie about the circumstances afterward.

"I bet I could say you resisted arrest or something," boasted the officer. "You want to come up with something? I come up with nine things.... You already start your f*****g problems with your attitude. Did we have a bad night boy? Huh? Answer me or I'll lock you up for failure to imply [sic] with a police officer's commands.... You want me to show you? You want me to lock you up to show you I'm right and you're wrong?.... You want me to show you the f*****g law."

Kenline's contrived objection was that Darrow failed to use a turn signal. As Darrow's video record documents, this was a lie: The driver had signaled properly. Kenline also claimed that Darrow had been "swerving back and forth within the roadway" -- another documented lie. Without the video record, Kenline's lies would have held up in court, since -- in defiance of Common Law principles and common sense -- the uncorroborated word of a police officer is considered self-ratifying in court.

Darrow behaved with commendable composure during this entire ordeal, and was released after a few minutes -- and following a nauseatingly paternalistic lecture from a uniformed goon who badly needs to get his back dirty. As Darrow comments, "Looking into this guy's eyes, he was crazy. I was really scared he was going to assault me. I just wonder how many other people have been arrested on these charges

In what passes for Sgt. Kenline's mind, he doesn't need the authority of the law, because as someone exercising power, he is the law. (Go here for a video and transcript of the encounter.)

This isn't the first time Darrow (who is a hero in the cause of civil liberties, but who needs to be a bit more judicious if he wants to avoid becoming a martyr) has experienced and documented the totalitarian mindset that increasingly typifies the police.

The power to treat others as objects inevitably gives rise to sadism. Those who work in law enforcement are hardly immune to this tendency; indeed, there's reason to believe that this profession selects for that personality type.

Witness the comments of a Multnomah, Oregon Sheriff's Deputy (brought to my attention by Radley Balko) who described the sensual thrill he experiences when killing a suspect, or subjecting him to electric torture through the use of a Taser: “Seeing someone get Tasered is second only to pulling the trigger. That is money – puts a smile on your face.”

There are other perks to be enjoyed, apart from sending hot lead or 50,000 volts into a human body.

Didn't like your hamburger? If you're wearing a State-issued costume, you can arrest the short-order cook on a fabricated charge of "reckless conduct."

That's what happened to 20-year-old Kendra Bull of Union City, Georgia, who spent a night in jail and was bailed out on $1,000 bond because an officious pr*ck in uniform wasn't smart enough to complain about his hamburger after the first bite.

(Thanks to The Smoking Gun, we know that the soon-to-be-changed home phone number of Wendell Adams, the aforementioned officious pr*ck in a uniform, is 770-964-1333. Why don't you give the guy a call. Be polite, if that suits you.)

Can't keep track of your money or count your change correctly? If you're a cop, you can throw a conniption fit, assault and pepper-spray the young woman working at the register, and drag her away to jail on fraudulent charges:




The assailant in this video, a rented thug from Dayton Ohio named Michael McDonald (no, not that Michael McDonald), "was cleared of all wrongdoing." Although the city touched up the taxpayers to buy off McDonald's victim, the officer apparently behaved according to department policy.

Don't they all?

UPDATE

Sgt. James Kuehnlein, the foul-mouthed bully in uniform whose demented rant was captured on video by Brett Darrow, has been put on unpaid suspension after Police Chief Scott Uhrig received hundreds of outraged phone calls.

After reviewing the video, Chief Uhrig said "the officer acted inappropriately when he threatened to make up charges, and used a disrespectful tone and inappropriate language," reported STLtoday.com.

"We don't do that," Uhrig said. "Someone either violated the law or they didn't. You don't say, I'll lock you up and then come up with why afterward."

Chief Uhrig is describing the proper conduct and demeanor of a peace officer, as understood a generation ago. Sgt. Kuehnlein modeled the tactics and behavior of the contemporary Homeland Security thug. It is Kuehnlein, not Uhrig (who -- despite his criticism of the abusive cop -- still made a point of questioning Darrow's motives) who represents the wave of the future.


Please be sure to follow the unfolding economic Armageddon at The Right Source, and to check out the Liberty Minute archives.

Huckabee Hound: The Face of the GOP "Honor-Killing" Cult

Christian statesman Ron Paul confronts Mike Huckabee, the War Party's Elmer Gantry.


"The word `honor' in the mouth of Daniel Webster is like the word `love' in the mouth of a whore." -- John Randolph

Despite the commendable achievement of losing roughly one hundred pounds of bodyfat, Mike Huckabee retains enough butter in his veins to ooze out oleaginous platitudes at will. Perhaps this trait, which he shares with another former Governor of Arkansas, is a prerequisite for holding that, ahem, august office. It certainly endears him to the sort of people who perceive high-viscosity insincerity as a form of charisma.

Huckabee Hound displayed this dubious skill to memorable effect the other night when he unwisely confronted Ron Paul about the Texas statesman's principled opposition to the war in Iraq.

However svelte he's become, Huckabee -- in an intellectual sense -- resembles a can of Spam, which is mostly fat. The whippet-thin Ron Paul, by way of contrast, is sharper than a Ginsu knife. The result of Huckabee's imprudent decision to take on Dr. Paul was as predictable as a clash between a ring bologna and a freshly sharpened slicer.



















Want Herr Huckabee to address your Bund meeting, but he's over-booked? This potted "meat" product will make a suitable substitute.

The Huckster got off to a bad start by committing an act of rhetorical larceny -- trying to steal some of the prestige John McCain enjoys because of his war wounds (which he received, I hasten to point out, in the course of an earlier illegal, immoral, undeclared and useless war).

Figuratively wrapping himself in the robes of McCain the Martyr, Huckabee insisted that we can't leave Iraq "until we've left with honor.... [W]hether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion that historians can have, but we're there. We bought it because we broke it. We've got a responsibility to the honor of this country and to the honor of every man and woman who has served in Iraq and ever served in our military to not leave them with anything less than the honor that they deserve."

Rep. Paul -- who, unlike Huckabee, has served honorably in the military -- correctly pointed out that the "honor" of our nation would not be injured by withdrawal, since American people never committed themselves to the war in the only constitutionally legitimate fashion: A formal congressional declaration of war. With scalpel-like incisiveness, Dr. Paul likewise laid bare the fundamental obscenity at the heart of Huckabee's bromide-laden pronouncement:

"How many more [lives] do you want to lose? How long are we going to be there? How long -- what do we have to pay to save face? That's all we're doing is saving face. It's time we came home!"

Like Bill Clinton, the original "Man from Hope" -- who was actually born in Hot Springs, which Mafia defector Joe Valachi identified as a key spot in the Mob's southern network-- Huckabee is adept at disguising a huge, malodorous lie inside a bouquet of pleasant-smelling platitudes. (Once again I find myself wondering if such a facility is a mandatory prerequisite for those seeking to occupy the large, tacky building at 1800 Center Street in Little Rock.) The lie in this instance was that Huckabee is zealous to uphold our nation's "honor," when he is clearly and obviously concerned about the prestige of the ruling elite.

When one has been caught committing a crime, honor requires that he desist and pay the appropriate penalty.

The invasion of Iraq was essentially an act of armed robbery carried out by a rogue regime.

That crime is compounded by mass murder -- the death through state-sanctioned violence of American troops, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi civilian non-combatants, and those legitimate resistance fighters who have taken up arms against the foreign invaders illegally occupying their country.

Honor requires, at the very least, an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It may also require that Washington pay reparations to the people of that nation, although this would pose some serious constitutional problems. Rehabilitating our national honor definitely requires the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neo-Trotskyite retinue, for crimes against our Constitution and what that document refers to (see Article I, sec. 8, clause 10) as the "law of nations."

But Herr Huckabee, like nearly everyone in the political caste, is a stranger in the house of honor. Rather than confronting the unyielding moral realities of the Iraq war, Huckabee takes refuge in the notion that the acquiescence of a deceived public in an illegal war constitutes a morally binding act of consent, while insisting that neither the public nor its elected representatives can withdraw their consent once the deception becomes unambiguous.

We are "one nation," presumably under one quasi-divine Decider, maintains Huckabee. The subtext here is that the Grand and Glorious Decider (peace be upon him) had his "accountability moment" in 2004, and thus can be said to embody the common will. And he has decided to let the killing continue in Iraq for the cynical, self-serving purpose of avoiding an injury to his personal prestige: He wants his successor to deal with the mess Iraq has become, and preside over the withdrawal that inevitably must come. And Bush is supported by like-minded people from across the narrow partisan divide who wish to preserve the grotesquely bloated powers of the imperial presidency.

This is "honor" in the lexicon of the fascist cult that runs the Republican Party.

Apologists for the envisioned "Long War" against the Islamic world occasionally invoke the genuinely repellent spectacle of "honor killings" sometimes carried out by Muslim males against female relatives accused of disgracing the family name.

















Above, below: Iraqi civilians confront the threat from the Bush-bot "honor-killing" cult.

The Bush regime and its supporters, however, are engaged in an immeasurably larger and bloodier version of the same depraved exercise. They claim the right -- nay, the duty -- to kill thousands, or tens of thousands, of Americans and Iraqis simply to "save face."


Preserving the Regime's prestige an objective not worth so much as a papercut's worth of human blood, let alone the life of a single human being. One would expect that an individual like Mike Huckabee who professes to be "pro-life" would understand and act on that professed conviction by ending a useless war in order to save innocent lives.

If he did, however, he wouldn't be Mike Huckabee. He'd be Ron Paul.


Please visit The Right Source for frequent updates on the unfolding "Economic Armageddon," and the Liberty Minute archive for audio commentaries about the Larry Craig scandal, the recent anniversary of the massacre at Ruby Ridge, and other important topics.

Ron Paul: This Is A Man. Take Notes.

Courtesy of the indispensable Scott Horton, here are the key excerpts from Ron Paul's performance at the New Hampshire Republican "debate":



By now it should be obvious even to the most insensate observer that the Republican Party -- with the heroic exception of Ron Paul and a few over whom he's had a healthy influence -- is a fascist cult. Witness Herr Huckabee's invocation of "ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer" as a riposte to Paul's irrefutable logic. (The same purported Christian, incidentally, is down with the Mark of the Beast, calling for a human inventory control system to track people like packages.)

Here's the Fox "News" account of the key exchange between Paul and Huckabee:

"Texas Rep. Ron Paul stirred much of the excitement of the evening, repeating his anti-war stance and getting into a sparring match with Huckabee over whether it's time for the United States to leave Iraq.

`Going into Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening Iran is the worst thing we can do for our national security. I am less safe, the American people are less safe for this. It's the policy that is wrong,' Paul said, adding that he disagrees with war supporters who warn against leaving prematurely.

`The people who say there will be a bloodbath are the ones who said it will be a cakewalk or it will be a slam dunk, and that it will be paid for by oil. Why believe them?' he asked.

In response, Huckabee said that the United States agreed before the war started that if they break Iraq, it must buy it.

`Congressman, whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there. We bought it because we broke it. We've got a responsibility to the honor of this country and to the honor of every man and woman who has served in Iraq and ever served in our military to not leave them with anything less than the honor that they deserve,' Huckabee said.

Paul then responded: `The American people didn't go in. A few people advising this administration, a small number of people called the neoconservatives hijacked our foreign policy. They're responsible, not the American people.'

Huckabee retorted that the United States is one nation. `We can't be divided. We have to be one nation, under God. That means if we make a mistake, we make it as a single country: the United States of America, not the divided states of America,' he said.

`No, when we make a mistake — when we make a mistake, it is the obligation of the people, through their representatives, to correct the mistake, not to continue the mistake,' Paul replied."

Think of it: Herr Huckabee's position is that Americans literally have a moral obligation to kill and die on behalf of a mistake: "Honor" requires no less. As an anti-Vietnam War activist in the early 1970s, John Kerry once asked: Who will be the last to die for a mistake? Huckabee's position, shared by the Red State Fascists in the audience and the GOP leadership, is essentially that it is the duty of Americans to kill and die for as long as their rulers decree -- even after the foolishness, corruption, and dishonesty of the policy is obvious.

This is pure, unfiltered cultism of an authentically fascist variety. Clearly, Ron Paul was the only sane man on the stage, which is why his statements were greeted with nervous laughter -- as demented as it was derisive -- by one of the cretinous fiends sharing that platform with him.

He's on the wrong side of the biblical threescore-and-ten, his demeanor is as mild as buttermilk, and his physique is wraith-like, but Ron Paul is a steel-spined ass-kicker with dangling anatomy made of solid brass. He is a man in full.

In his honor, I offer the following Tom Petty video featuring my unofficial Ron Paul theme song:



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Jury Rights Day

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?" wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1849. "I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

Thoreau's assessment was inspired by his disgust over Washington's war of aggression against Mexico, and -- what was much the same thing -- the entrenchment and expansion of chattel slavery.

He would almost certainly reach the same conclusion regarding the proper relationship between people who cherish justice and the ever-growing malignancy we could call the Homeland Security State. Thoreau's comments about the servility on which the State depends have likewise been vindicated by time.

"The mass of men serve the state ... not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies," he lamented. "In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well."

Thoreau allowed that there are a handful of people --"heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men" -- who distinguish themselves by serving the government "with their consciences," which unavoidably means that they "necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."

Although he declared "war with the State, after my fashion," Thoreau was not a pure anarchist, explaining that where it was possible and compatible with his principles he would "still make use and get what advantages of her I can...."

One form of association with the State that liberty activists should embrace and should exploit -- without fear of disgrace -- is jury duty.

"Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison," insisted Thoreau in one of the numerous radiant epigrams adorning his masterful essay. As a matter of lamentable history, he's right. But as a matter of principle, the true place for just people in such circumstances is the jury box, where they will interpose themselves between the State and its innocent victims. This principle was elucidated in compelling detail by Thoreau's fellow abolitionist Lysander Spooner.

The fact that juries possess plenary power to judge both facts and law -- the latter giving a jury the power to nullify the enforcement of bad laws -- is perhaps the most carefully guarded secret of our current legal system. For the first century of our existence, it was commonplace for juries to be informed of that fact before being sent to deliberate. Today, a defense attorney who mentions that fact in open court can often expect to be censured by the presiding judge or even hit with a contempt-of-court charge.

Rescuing this fundamental check on government power is the mission of the Fully Informed Jury Association, which commemorates this date (September 5) as "Jury Rights Day." This observance is held in remembrance of the 1670 acquittal -- through jury nullification -- of Quaker leader William Penn on the charge of preaching an "illegal" sermon in London. The heroic holdout jurors, led by Edward Bushell, were imprisoned and tortured by the presiding judge (through what today's practitioners would call a "restricted diet" -- others call it deliberate starvation and dehydration), and set free when England's highest court upheld the right of jury nullification.

"Trials are too important to be left to juries," insisted high-octane jury consultant Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman) in the legal potboiler The Runaway Jury. In fact, in many cases the only worthwhile jury is a "runaway" jury.

One very telling measure of the Regime's fear of jury nullification is found in the efforts expended by prosecutors -- who have become a veritable human pestilence -- to prevent cases from going to trial.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who masterfully dissected the contemporary "justice" system in his 1998 book (co-written with Lawrence M. Stratton) The Tyranny of Good Intentions, points out that "the vast majority of felony cases are settled with a plea bargain...."

Most conservatives made aware of this would react with a snort and complain about excessive leniency, ignorant of another important fact: Many, perhaps most, "felonies" today involve no offenses against persons or property, no criminal intent, and are usually a product of an opportunistic prosecutor's malicious creativity in confecting a criminal offense.

It is common for prosecutors to multiply charges as a way of terrorizing an innocent defendant into accepting a plea. Very rarely do we see a defendant with the means to defend himself in such circumstances. An exception that proves the rule is the wealthy Republican Senator Larry Craig, who was manipulated into a guilty plea on a ridiculous charge, and has tardily decided to put up a fight.

But for the average citizen who finds himself targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, a plea bargain usually seems like the only relatively palatable alternative to the expense of a trial and the possibility of a long time in prison. At the bargaining table, "I'm all in" for the prosecutor means that, should he lose, he would sacrifice a little prestige, with the taxpayers absorbing all of the expenses; the defendant stands to lose everything and faces the prospect of utter ruin.

This is why so many innocent people are willing to deal. For the State, the most attractive feature of such arrangements is the fact that it keeps such cases away from juries. And we're left with a "justice" apparatus that functions, in the words of legal scholar John Langbein, like "the ancient system of judicial torture," which relied on self-incrimination through duress, rather than conviction on the basis of sound evidence.

The ardent desire of our rulers to minimize the jury system -- with the ultimate objective of abolishing it -- underscores the importance of rehabilitating the only government institution worthy of unqualified support: The fully-informed citizen jury.

Video bonus

The following three-part program, produced roughly two decades ago, offers additional background and insights regarding the need for, and critical importance of, jury nullification as a check on government power:

Part One:



Part Two:



Part Three




Be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute Archive.

Treason

Behold the face of a traitor: David Addington, Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney, who spoke of collaborating with terrorists in an assault on the United States Constitution. He deserves the long, lonely drop to the end of a hangman's rope* -- along with several others we should compel him to name.


"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."

U.S. Constitution, Article III, Sec. 3.

"We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court." --

David Addington, chief of staff to "vice" President Dick Cheney.


Absent a congressional declaration of war, it is extremely difficult for private citizens to commit acts that meet the statutory and constitutional definition of treason. The same cannot be said of executive branch officials, however -- as the statement from David Addington quoted above illustrates.

Clearly, Addington -- like lesser figures among the Bushcisti -- lusted for a dramatic terrorist attack that would vindicate the administration's accumulation of dictatorial powers. Unlike such reprobates as Rick Santorum, Dennis Milligan, and Dana Rohrabacher, however, Addington clearly believed that the administration was covertly collaborating with terrorists in an assault on the other constitutionally designated branches of the federal government -- the Congress and the judiciary.

How else are reasonable people supposed to interpret Addington's use of the collective pronoun "we" when referring to a terrorist attack that would upend the balance of power?

This is, simply and unambiguously, treason. Were we still living in a republic, Addington would be arraigned on the charge, assuming that a second witness can be found to his quasi-confession.


Jack Goldsmith, who briefly served as head of the Justice (sic) Department's Office of Legal Counsel, testifies that Addington made that remark to him in January 2004 during a debate over the merits of Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping program. (As conservative legal analyst Bruce Fein points out, by authorizing and carrying out that program, Bush committed numerous federal felonies as well as impeachable offenses.)

As documented in a New York Times Magazine interview, Goldsmith supports the aggrandizement of presidential power. "I'm not a civil libertarian," he told the Times' Jeffrey Rosen, a remark that is difficult to construe as a revelation. He offered no principled objection to the creation of a presidential dictatorship, complete with proto-totalitarian powers of surveillance, detention, and interrogation. But he parted company with his comrades -- Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and the others -- over matters of "means, not ends," seeking political support and institutional security by winning congressional support for the revolution. It was his Goldsmith's belief that a Republican-dominated Congress would enact the administration's entire program if asked to, and that this "wartime" legislative ratification would protect the new presidential powers from the Supreme Court's scrutiny.

Goldsmith professes to be alarmed to learn that his comrades were "highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts." And there was none so expansively contemptuous of the constitutional separation of powers than Addington, who ascribed to the president a nearly messianic status.

In October 2003, Goldsmith, at the request of the White House, examined the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention to see if they applied to Iraqi civilians accused of "terrorist" attacks on US occupation forces. Reading the text and history of the agreement honestly, Goldsmith concluded that civilian insurgents were covered by the Convention, and reported as much to Gonzalez and Addington.

The latter became "livid" at Goldsmith's report. "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections," proclaimed Addington. "You cannot question his decision."

As with so many other Bush Regime pronouncements, that statement should be rendered in the original German in order for us to savor its totalitarian tang.

A few months later, Goldsmith again committed the unpardonable sin of questioning a presidential decision, thereby prompting Adddington to warn that a lack of faith in the Grand and Glorious Decider's omniscience undermines his ability to hold the Evil-Doers at bay: "If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."

Of course, as Addington admitted on another occasion, the death of innocent Americans would be a good and useful thing, provided that they die ad majorem gloria Bush.


"Treason," as defined by the Bushcisti, captured in an uncannily perceptive satire.


Decorum prevents me from using suitable language to limn the utter depravity of David Addington and people of his ilk. As a key architect of the aggressive war in Iraq, Addington -- as well as Cheney, the ambulatory wad of unfiltered evil whose servant he is -- could properly be put on trial as a war criminal.

And for cheerfully predicting the death of Americans in the expectation that their innocent blood would baptize a presidential dictatorship, he deserves to be put on trial for treason.

He won't, of course, because the republic is as dead as the surface of Mars.




Make sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.



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*I hasten to point out that while Addington may be deserving of capital punishment, as an opponent of the death penalty I don't support inflicting it upon him, should he be found guilty by a jury of his peers -- y'know, people like you and me, whose lives he considers disposable. Life imprisonment would be a suitable alternative.

Free Larry Craig!

Jose Luis Vela of Alton, Texas stands accused of sexually assaulting two men during parties at his house. On the strength of criminal complaints from the two alleged victims, Vela was arrested, and investigators from the Sheriff's Department "searched his home and office for evidence that would corroborate witness statements," reported local television affiliate KGBT.

As it happens, Vela is Alton's chief of police, and the alleged victims are his employees. The latter claim that they were assaulted during parties at Vela's home that involved the use of alcohol and drugs taken from the property room at the police station.

This squalid affair -- which, unfortunately, seems typical of the troubled Alton municipal government -- offers a pretty good example of how a criminal investigation should unfold. There is the accusation of a specific crime (and a pretty horrific one) against individuals. A criminal complaint was sworn out, an arrest made on the basis of multiple witnesses, and once the suspect was taken into custody police began canvassing for evidence to substantiate the charges.

None of those elements can be found in the incident that led to Senator Larry Craig's guilty plea on charges of lewd and disorderly conduct.

As I have previously established, I offer no brief on behalf of either soon-to-be-ex-Senator Craig or homosexual conduct of any sort. One reason for my disenchantment with Craig has been the suspicion that his much-discussed moral weaknesses left him compromised, and this appears to be true of the incident leading to his arrest in Minneapolis last June and his subsequent guilty plea.

Had be not been so concerned with image maintenance and damage control, Craig most likely would have fought the charge in court, as he should have -- not only on his own behalf, but also as part of the fight against the relentless growth of pre-emptive law enforcement.

The only evidence against Craig is the unsupported word of the police officer who arrested him. This isn't enough to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly in a case involving conduct that is not, on its face, illegal. The conduct in question is (I'll be charitable) eccentric and unsettling, but only by supplying a subtext of dubious reliability can it be called "lewd."

It is significant that Craig told a consistent story during his interrogation. It is just as significant that the officer's clear strategy was to maneuver Craig into a guilty plea by using a solo version of the legendary "Good Cop/Bad Cop" dialectic. And there may be some justification to Craig's anguished claim that the cop "solicited" and thereby entrapped him.


"Trust me -- I know what I'm doing": Actually, Detective "Sledge" Hammer rarely did. He also generally forgot to yell "Freeze!" before shooting. Clearly, the star of that mid-80s sitcom was a man ahead of his time.


Consider a couple of critical statements from Sgt. Dave Karsnia, who has the utterly thankless assignment of patrolling the restrooms at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport:


*"I am trained in this, and I know what I am doing." (Am I the only one to hear an echo of Sledge Hammer's frequently uttered assertion of misplaced self-assurance, "Trust me -- I know what I'm doing"?)

*"I see it happen [the semaphore used to arrange homosexual bathroom trysts] every day out here now."

Like most people, I am gratefully unfamiliar with the covert signals used to conduct sexual transactions in public restrooms. I'd imagine that the same would be true of most jurors had Craig's case gone to trial, and those jurors would probably be inclined to defer to Karsnia as an expert witness. But he would be the only witness, as well as the sole accuser, regarding all of these charges.

A reasonably adept defense attorney could persuade a jury that someone as immersed as Karsina in the arcana of "cruising" can easily misinterpret innocuous behavior. Consider: A weary traveler of unusual physical stature, enters a restroom after a long flight and finds the stalls occupied. Understandably impatient, he peers into the stalls to see if one user is winding up his business.

Is this creepy and intrusive? Yes. Is it a prelude to a sexual overture? Not necessarily.

Once a stall becomes vacant, the traveler gratefully takes occupancy and -- wary of contaminating the slacks of his expensive suit on the bathroom floor -- assumes a "wide stance" that causes one of his feet to trespass in the adjoining stall.

Is this odd and unsettling? Sure. Is it a covert signal that means, "Come and get it"? Again, not necessarily.

But given Karsnia's background, an innocent action of that sort would likely be interpreted as a signal that the guy in the next stall over is cruising. That perception would color Karsnia's recollections of the encounter. And since Karsnia's recollections of what happened, and his "expert" analysis of those purported events, are all that the prosecution would have had if Craig had fought the charge in court, the Senator may well have been exonerated -- and should have. In fact, had Craig been willing to fight the charge, it may well have been dropped.

If he was as innocent as he now insists, Craig had a moral duty, as both a citizen and a self-described public servant, to fight the charge against him. Every innocent citizen has a moral duty not to reward abuses of state power by refusing to submit to unjust prosecution without a fight. That duty is even more pronounced on the part of those who call themselves our representatives.

On the same day he was pleaded guilty to the lewd and disorderly conduct charge, ironically, Craig volubly denounced the "Gestapo-like" tactics of the FBI in conducting a raid on the home of Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, the GOP's paladin of pork.

He had a chance to do combat the police state, and flinched from the battle -- in all likelihood because he knew the charge would end his political career, even if he had been completely innocent.

That career was mortally wounded when Sgt. Karsnia flashed his shield beneath the partition separating him from Larry Craig. Since his career was over anyway, Craig had nothing more to lose if he had chosen to fight on behalf of principle. But he is a politician, and therefore not made of the stuff that inspires people to fight for principle.

The principle at the center of this sordid mess is alluded to in the thirty-eighth paragraph of the Magna Carta:

"No bailiff, on his own simple assertion, shall henceforth any one to his law, without producing faithful witnesses in evidence."

Agents of the state should not be able to convict citizens of crimes on the basis of their uncorroborated testimony. In our increasingly degenerate, authoritarian society, this kind of thing happens all the time, particularly when police are deployed to enforce "laws" that criminalize vices.

Had Craig fought the charges in court and won, I would have been the first to applaud him -- and then to demand his resignation.

Be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Illegal Immigration, Past and Present: An Exercise in Thinking Out Loud

A Border Patrol Agent detains 12 Mexican nationals apprehended near Sells, Arizona. Smuggled into the U.S. by a Coyote, the Mexicans shared a single canteen.


"Wherever there's a prohibition, there's a bootlegger" -- James Burnham, "Burnham's Laws," No. 5.

Indifferent to borders, the invaders swarmed over a rich and cherished land. Many of them were hungry and desperate, and the lure of economic opportunity was irresistible. Others were comfortable, and driven by vulgar greed. But every one of them crossed the border in defiance of laws and solemn agreements. From the perspective of those whose land they now occupied, each of them became a criminal the moment his foot touched their soil.

Because the invaders were covertly supported by their government -- including supposedly rogue elements of the military -- the first tentative trickle of illegal immigrants quickly grew into a deluge.

Protests over the invasion were met with solemn and dishonest assurances that the border would be enforced. But the government issuing those assurances was playing for time, waiting for the invaders to establish a foothold. It had gone so far as to create a highway -- the "Robber's Road" -- to facilitate the invasion. Elements of the government likewise secretly provided the squatters with food, water, and other necessities.

Some of the land's long-time residents, convinced that their nation was being quietly dispossessed, protested to their government. When that proved unavailing, they began to harass the illegal immigrants directly, sometimes to the point of bloodshed.

Once the squatters had firmly established themselves, all pretense was dispelled. A summit meeting was held; territorial demands were made to, and rejected by, the nation whose territory was under assault. Failing to secure the territory after which it lusted on terms it considered appropriate, the aggressor government prepared for war. And once "this machinery of government began moving, it became an inexorable force, mindless and uncontrollable," wrote Dee Brown in his classic study of the dispossession of the Plains Indians.



















The Familiar Ritual of Dispossession: William T. Sherman presides over the signing of the Ft. Laramie Treaty.


The history of Washington's war on the Indians is a narrative of cupidity and corruption, aggression and avarice, deceit and dishonor. In examining the case of Washington's seizure of the Black Hills, however, I am struck by the cynical use of illegal immigration as an instrument of territorial conquest.


General George Armstrong Custer, who has a prominent place on my list of people I would kill if they weren't already dead,* was sort of a Coyote-in-Chief for the white settlers who flowed into the Black Hills. Despite the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty that solemnly promised the lands to the Sioux in perpetuity, Custer led what Evan S. Connell called "a creaking, jingling, clanking train of canvas-topped wagons and malodorous cavalrymen" into Sioux territory in search of gold.



Well-known as a mass murderer, he was also one of history's most consequential advocates of illegal immigration.

Of the Black Hills, the Laramie Treaty specified that "no persons except those designated herein ... shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory...." Ah, contended advocates of white settlement, that was before our gold was discovered on their lands, and this changes everything. Decrying the treaty as an "abominable compact," the Yankton (South Dakota) Press and Dakotanian complained: "What shall be done with these Indian dogs in our manger? They will not dig gold or let others do it."

In such frustrating circumstances, if you're the government, or interests wedded to it, the answer is obvious: You steal the land.

It was Custer who established the "Robber's Road." It was Custer who was ultimately tasked by the execrable Philip Sheridan to carry out "total war" against the Sioux when they refused to ratify the results of white illegal immigration by repudiating their rights under the Laramie Treaty in exchange for a mere fraction of what the land was worth.

Reading some contemporaneous newspaper editorials unearthed by Connell, I'm struck by how they resemble some of the themes embraced by the Mexican "reconquista" movement. Take, for example, this specimen from the Bismarck Tribune, which was published as Custer "reconnoitered" the Black Hills:

"This is God's country. He peopled it with red men, and planted it with wild grasses, and permitted the white man to gain a foothold; and as the wild grasses disappear when the white clover gains a footing, so the Indian disappears before the advances of the white man. Humanitarians may weep [for the Indian], and tell the wrongs he has suffered, but he is passing away. Their prayers, their entreaties, can not change the law of nature; can not arrest the causes which are carrying them on to their ultimate destiny -- extinction. The American people need the country the Indians now occupy; many of our people are out of employment; the masses need some new excitement. The war is over, and the era of railroad building has been brought to a termination ... and depression prevails on every hand. An Indian war would do no harm, for it must come, sooner or later...."

Isn't this more or less the same game being played by the Mexican government -- using illegal immigration as an economic "safety valve" by exporting surplus workers? The chief difference here, and it's not one that reflects well on the US Government of the time, is that the 19th century version of demographic warfare was actually intended to cultivate bloodshed.

When the Sioux tried to "crack down" on illegal immigrants, its actions were portrayed in the press as a terrorist campaign. As Connell writes, it had been widely anticipated that the "stampede of whites through Dakota Territory would bring war," and as the editorial quoted above indicates, most Yankees thought this would be a good thing. And obviously, the U.S. Government was capable of doing far deadlier damage to the Plains Indians than anything the Mexican Government could do to us. Yes, the Feds lost at the Little Bighorn, but this proved to be merely a setback on the road to Wounded Knee.

Amid the apocalyptic rhetoric generated by the immigration "crisis" (I write as someone who has made his own contribution), I find myself musing that perhaps the only people in this country who really have standing to complain about the problem are descendants of the Plains Indians.

This doesn't mean I think our nation should dissolve itself as an act of penance for the sins of our forebears. But I do believe we could profit from re-examining some of the premises and assumptions behind the immigration issue, the first being that Americans living today are uniquely besieged innocents facing an unprecedented invasion.

There are Americans living along the border whose lands and homes are under siege from Coyotes and drug smugglers. The question I pose is: Should we perceive such crimes as the unique product of illegal immigration, or as an illustration of the universal truth of Burnham's Fifth Law (see above)?

The logic of Burnham's observation is that wherever prohibitionist policies are enforced, criminal behavior -- including occasional violence to persons and property -- will result. If this is true of immigration from Mexico, then the way to reduce the violence would be to end the relevant prohibition. One way to end the siege of ranch properties along the southern border would be to announce that we would accept all of the immigrants Mexico is willing to send our way. This would put the Coyotes out of business immediately.

Would this be a good idea? I don't know, but it might not be any worse than what we're doing right now, which creates a thriving immigration black market while doing little to prevent illegal immigration. In this respect the prohibition on non-government-sanctioned immigration from Mexico makes exactly as much sense as prohibitionist policies toward alcohol, narcotics, and opioids. Which is to say, none at all.

As in so much else, the key to solving the immigration problem is to define the problem correctly, while bearing in mind another of Burnham's Laws: Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

Among the problems commonly attributed to illegal immigration are the dilution of our public culture through multilingualism, the expansion of the prison population, and the huge costs of welfare subsidies for illegal immigrants.

The question of a common language may be the easiest to deal with: There is no reason why governments cannot be compelled to conduct official business in English, and every reason to insist that they should. Government has no business dictating the language in which we conduct our private affairs. Most immigrants, absent government intervention to prevent assimilation, will learn English out of social and economic necessity.

















A "Reconquista" Protest: Radicalized Mexican activists are theatrical, obnoxious, and sometimes violent -- but are they typical?

Recent studies of incarceration rates for immigrants and native Americans demonstrate that immigrants are not the source of a significant spike in crime; in fact, the findings suggest that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than are native-born citizens. Granted, there are plenty of criminal syndicates -- some of them shockingly violent -- that draw from the immigrant population. The question, once again, is if enhancing the current prohibitionist approach is the most intelligent way of dealing with the specific problem of crimes committed by immigrants. And, once again, given the existing track record, I'm inclined to think it's about time to try something else, such as focusing law enforcement efforts solely and exclusively on prosecuting those who commit crimes against persons and property.

Where welfare subsidies for illegal immigrants are concerned, I earnestly believe that the focus is excessively narrow and entirely misdirected: Why make the immigrants the issue, as opposed to the welfare programs themselves? As Sheldon Richman points out, one would expect conservatives to cite immigrant welfare services in order "to convince the American people to dump the welfare state [by showing them] it is financially unsustainable." Rather than doing so, most conservatives profess anguished outrage that outsiders are an impermissible burden on our system of institutionalized plunder.

What is even worse, and more perplexing, than this unwonted conservative desire to preserve the sanctity of the welfare state is the way that many of them want to expand the role of the State in what remains of the private economy in the name of immigration control.

Consider the "No Gravy Train For Illegals" model legislation being promoted by some organizations as a way to address the "crisis." The proposal is built around two sets of recommendations, the first dealing with the public sector, the other with the private economy. Under the model, each state, county, and municipality would be urged "to pass a law that makes it illegal to provide anything whatsoever to an illegal alien":

From the government sector:

• It shall be illegal, by STATE LAW, to provide anything at all to illegal aliens including, but not limited to: welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, driver's license, business license, government housing, tax supported education, or any other assistance.
• There will be no state tax deductions for payments to illegal aliens.
• All government transactions will be done in English only (i.e. voter registration, employment applications, permits, etc).

From the private sector:

• It shall be illegal, by STATE LAW, to do anything at all for an illegal alien including, but not limited to: rent housing, sell real estate, sell vehicles or mobile homes, make loans, sell insurance, provide employment, provide indigent care, cash checks, enroll students, or provide transportation other than back to their country of origin.

The recommendations concerning government policy are sound. The ones dealing with the private sector are abhorrent -- and, frankly, totalitarian: They would effectively deputize every merchant and businessman as an informant and enforcer, or turn him into a criminal for providing a legal product or service to a customer of whom the government disapproves. It would be the duty of the businessman (or health care professional) to demand identity papers.

Laws of this kind have been passed in Oklahoma and Georgia, and are being considered elsewhere. An individual I respect who works as a spokesman for the organization that once employed me writes that "prosecuting either the American citizen or the illegal alien [under such a law] would deter the transaction, but prosecuting both the American citizen and the illegal alien would be best. Illegal aliens would find that they have nothing that they could do here: except to go home and get back in line with those seeking to legally immigrate."

Two problems with that assessment leap immediately to mind. The first of which is that my friend is assuming that quasi-totalitarian laws of this sort would eventually be enacted nation-wide; otherwise immigrants would simply migrate to states where such laws don't exist. The other problem is that this approach would actually expand the size and expense of the welfare state, since it would leave the existing structure intact while using access to it as an incentive for additional legal immigration.

By following this approach, we would end up with a larger, more expensive, and dramatically more intrusive version of the corrupt Leviathan State that presently rules us. Perhaps the government would succeed in keeping at least some brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people out of the country, and for some people that seems to be a suitable trade-off.

In the current issue of The American Spectator, Tom Bethell -- a naturalized U.S. citizen and an authentic conservative -- suggests a radically different approach to immigration.

"Let those who want to work come," writes Bethell. "Pay them their wages, give them raises where necessary. Let them send money back home to Mexico, El Salvador, and the rest. But let's also discourage [better yet, abolish outright -- W.N.G.] government handouts, and keep them out of the embrace of union organizers. Let's also make sure that they don't vote."

The last recommendation is critical: The franchise is a red-letter distinction between citizen and non-citizen. And voting in a republic is a defensive exercise intended to keep the state at bay, rather than the ritual of participatory plunder it has become under our regime.

The desire to cultivate new client-constituencies is one reason both branches of the Establishment Party favor a larger immigrant population. It is also the reason why nothing will be done to limit immigration as long as we live under the current political system -- an authoritarian corporatist state supported by a degenerate mass democracy.

There is another possible outcome, however, one that is becoming increasingly likely. Should America finish its descent into an undisguised garrison state -- a process that is aided considerably by the immigration restriction movement -- our problems with both immigration and emigration will evaporate. All of us will live in a vast gulag as blighted as any Indian reservation -- which is where Washington deposited the Indians while it re-settled their lands with illegal immigrants.

A quick note --

As the title of this essay indicates, my opinions about immigration is in flux, and the foregoing represents an honest effort to think through the issue and some of its permutations. While I'm always interested to hear other points of view, in this instance I'm particularly eager to read what you think.
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*I'm only kidding, sort of.

Be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.