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!

"Civil Rights" and Total War

State Terrorism: Sherman's Army of the West burns Atlanta.

"The Vendee is no more, my republican comrades.... The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids. Mass shootings are taking place in Savenay because there brigands keep turning up to surrender.... [P]ity is incompatible with the spirit of revolution."

-- General Fracois-Joseph Westermann, commander of the "infernal column" that slaughtered tens of thousands of Vendean secessionists during the French Revolution

Westermann: Butcher of La Vendee.

"[F]or five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists."

-- Union General William T. Sherman, reporting on the federal destruction of Meridian, Mississippi in 1862 


 "We must kill three hundred thousand [as] I have told you so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them...."

"I was satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory...."

-- William T. Sherman, the Union Army's General Westermann, in separate letters to his wife Ellen and to General Philip Sheridan, as quoted in The Soul of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson

Sherman: America's first "civil rights" crusader.

William Sherman's march to the sea, writes Victor Davis Hanson approvingly, was a war of "terror" intended to destroy an aristocratic Southern culture he hated because of its impudence in resisting the central government's authority.

Although rarely acknowledged as such, Sherman could be considered America's first "civil rights" crusader. This isn't an endorsement of Sherman; it's an indictment of contemporary "civil rights" ideology.


 While it's true that Sherman never descended to the depths of mass-murdering depravity plumbed by Westermann and his army of berserkers, he was prepared, by his own repeated admissions, to annihilate civilians by the hundreds of thousands in order to vindicate Washington's supposed authority.

Those who didn't render immediate and unqualified submission, he warned, would be "crushed like flies on a wheel."

Following Appomattox, Sherman's genocidal skill-set proved useful to the corporatist federal railroad combine, which required the removal of the Plains Indians from land that it coveted but couldn't be troubled to purchase on honest terms. In carrying out that task Sherman abandoned what little restraint he had exercised in dealing with white southerners. In the meantime, the war of federal consolidation and cultural liquidation against the South continued by way of what was euphemistically called "Reconstruction."

In theory, "Reconstruction" was the process of re-integrating the rebellious states into the One Holy Eternal Union. In practice, it was a reign of terror and plunder swaddled in the rhetoric of righteousness and carried out through the apparatus of military dictatorship.


"After the Civil War, radical Republicans sought to drastically alter the social and political structures of the states of the former Confederacy," notes historian Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University in his book The Fatal Embrace. "The sought to establish a regime that would break the political power of the planter class that had ruled the region prior to the war."

The "radical Republicans" to whom Ginsberg refers were Jacobins, not Jeffersonians. The most powerful figure in that cohort was the detestable Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Congressman who, the words of historian Paul Leland Haworth, "possessed much of the sternness of the old Puritans, without their morality."

Pitiless, power-mad, vindictive: Thaddeus Stevens

Rep. Stevens hated the pre-Lincoln Constitution with a passion eclipsed only by that he nurtured toward the South; the document produced by the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, Stevens once told an associate, was nothing but "a worthless bit of old parchment." 

As co-chairman, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, of the Joint Committee for Reconstruction, Stevens adapted Cromwell's schematic for military dictatorship in England for use in administering the conquered Confederacy.

"Where Cromwell had divided England up into eleven military districts, each governed by a major general with wide-ranging powers, [Stevens and the radical Republicans] divided the South into five districts, each ruled by a military governor under the overall direction of General Grant," explains Daniel Lazare in his book The Frozen Republic:

 "The military authorities banned veterans' organizations and other groups deemed threatening to the new order, fired thousands of local officials and half a dozen governors, and purged state legislatures of pro-Confederate elements as well. A twenty-thousand-strong army of occupation, aided by a black militia, enforced order.... Political rights were withdrawn from thousands of Confederates who had been granted executive clemency by the President, and all told some one hundred thousand white voters were stricken from the rolls."

As Dr. Haworth observed in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union,  military governors on the occupied South "proceeded to create a new electorate and through it new civil governments." Those "civil governments," predictably, used patronage and officially sanctioned plunder to entrench themselves.

When federal subsidies and confiscation of private wealth proved inadequate, the Reconstruction governments turned to deficit financing, driving the states they misruled into even deeper economic misery.

The Reconstruction regime, writes Haworth, was built on a "sinister alliance" between military governors, their political satraps, and state-allied secret societies within the "Union League" (also known as the "Loyalty League"). Those criminal cabals were used to enforce political discipline and carry out covert acts of terrorism against dissenters. For example, notes Haworth, League members "resorted to whipping or otherwise maltreating Negroes who became Democrats."

Robber Oligarch: Reconstruction-era Governor Franklin Moses

In South Carolina governor Franklin Moses, a "scalawag" (that is, southern Quisling) sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of junk state securities while he and his cronies pilfered everything of value.

Moses, who became known as the "Robber Governor," enforced his will through a 14,000-man militia "composed mainly of black troops ... led by white officers," recounts Dr. Ginsberg. That Praetorian Guard protected Moses against enforcement of legal judgments and was deployed to harass, intimidate, and threaten potential political rivals in the 1870 election.

Similar conditions prevailed elsewhere in the prostrate South. In Louisiana, for instance, "wholesale corruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands, political assassinations, riots, revolutions -- all of these were the order of the day," records Dr. Haworth.

State-sponsored terrorism in the occupied South precipitated the creation of the Ku Klux Klan -- a development that could be considered the first recorded example of "blowback."

In both its ritualized, oath-bound organizational structure and the terrorist tactics it employed,  the KKK was morally indistinguishable from the terrorists whose depredations inspired the Klan's creation. Unlike the Union League-aligned terrorists, however, the Klan operated without federal sanction. Thus in 1870 and 1871, Congress passed two Enforcement Acts (the second commonly called the "Ku Klux Klan Act") under which President Grant deployed troops to suppress "rebellion" in the occupied South. 

The use of active-duty federal troops as a post-war domestic "peacekeeping" force "represented, from a military standpoint, the darkest days in the history of the Army," writes Professor James J. Schneider of the Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. "The Reconstruction activities of Army units were unprecedented in their time, and they sound remarkably familiar today."

 The occupied South was where Washington field-tested methods later used to "liberate" and "pacify" the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries through mass slaughter and military dictatorship.

By January 1877, embattled southerners had managed to gain sufficient political traction to extract an end to the military occupation as the price of supporting a compromise awarding Rutherford B. Hayes the electoral votes he needed to prevail over Samuel Tilden (whose popular vote tally exceeded that of Hayes by roughly 164,000 votes).

Two months after Hayes was inaugurated, federal troops were withdrawn, and the Reconstruction plunderbund dissolved. A little more than a year later, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the use of the Army as a domestic law enforcement body.

Jim Crow could be considered --at least to some extent -- another example of "blowback" from Reconstruction, which did much more to exacerbate than alleviate racial hostilities in the South. Like all measures intended to restrain the Regime's powers, the Posse Comitatus measure is ignored at the whim of our rulers. Thus on more than one occasion since 1878, troops have been deployed to the South to enforce federal decrees intended to break down systems of government-imposed segregation at the state and local level.

Although the post-war military dictatorship in the South ended in 1877, the 1964 "civil rights" act is a continuation -- and expansion -- of Reconstruction. That act was designed and intended to make every private institution, transaction, and relationship subject to federal scrutiny in the name of abolishing "discrimination."

In principle, and sometimes in practice, the federal "civil rights" apparatus is literally making war upon Americans whose hiring policies, business practices, and private associations don't find favor with the exalted beings who have made themselves the arbiters of acceptable attitudes and social outcomes.

Those numinous creatures -- as wise as the overseers of Plato's ideal Republic, as omniscient as the Guardians of Oa -- are somehow exempt from the prejudices and unworthy passions to which we lesser beings are heir. They are thus suited to the task of micro-managing social affairs and compelling the rest of us to live according to their decrees, lest we be crushed "like flies on a wheel," as their predecessor "Uncle Billy" Sherman put it.

The most candid and compelling summary of this perspective doesn't come from a right-wing revisionist, but rather from Columbia Law School Professor George P. Fletcher, an establishment academic of an unabashedly Marxist bent.

In his valuable book The Secret Constitution, Fletcher  acknowledges that the war waged by Abraham the Annihilator was not an effort to "preserve the Union," much less to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate the united States into a unitary state governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." In the New Order, writes Fletcher, the founding premise is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens."(Emphasis added.)

 There is nothing hypothetical about the federal aggression Fletcher correctly identifies as the central feature of the post-Lincoln Soyuz (the term "union" is inapposite here). Since, from the perspective Fletcher represents, Lincoln's war supposedly settled the question of the central government's "authority" to kill Americans in any quantity necessary to reconfigure society, there are no limits to what it can do in the interest of establishing "social justice."

"Civil rights," as the term is used today, has nothing to do with the rights of individuals apart from the role played by some members of designated classes as a pretext for federal violations of the property rights of others not granted such protected status. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor at Princeton and self-appointed watchdog of the "radical right," makes that point with the eager earnestness of someone who assumes that her political opponents aren't listening. 

Our Enemy, the State in action.

According to Harris-Lacewell, the 1960s civil rights movement was valuable because it was a tool to expand and consolidate federal power.

Because of southern resistance to Washington's demands, the "legitimacy of the central state was challenged," she writes in The Nation. "[This] is why the Civil Rights Movement was so powerful. The overt abuse of state power evidenced by the violence of Southern police called into question their foundational legitimacy. The federal government had to act or risk losing its authority as a state altogether."


This is to say that the chief accomplishment of the civil rights movement was not the validation of the individual rights of those victimized by government-imposed discrimination, but rather the validation and enhancement of federal power.

For Harris-Lacewell and other acolytes of the unitary totalitarian state, Reconstruction continues to this day.  The genuine outrage is not that the South was ruled for a decade by a military kleptocracy, but rather that the military dictatorship was brought to an end through what she calls "the unholy Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877." And the chief task for the forces of "tolerance" today, she insists, is to "guard against the end of our new Reconstruction" -- a system Ronn Neff perceptively describes as "polite totalitarianism," in which the 1964 Civil Rights Act is an indispensable pillar.

That measure, it should be remembered, was enacted by a government that was in the early stages of its war of aggression against Vietnam -- a conflict in which, as Stokely Carmichael aptly put it, "white people [drafted] black people to make war on yellow people [supposedly] to defend land stolen from red people." The government in charge of enforcing that Act today is slaughtering "people of color" in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and (lest we forget) Detroit, and looking for an excuse to inflict its lethal humanitarianism on Iran and North Korea.



And yet, as we see in the contrived controversy over Rand Paul's views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it is a grave civic blasphemy even to suggest that the Regime responsible for such murder and mayhem shouldn't have the power to scrutinize and regulate every aspect of private life.

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