Addicted to the Warfare State

La Reconquista? BLM travel advisory in AZ.

(See corrections and clarifications below, 7/12)


 (Updated below, 7/10)

Which is the more serious threat to life, liberty and property: The illicit violence practiced by a handful of furtive armed drug smugglers in the Arizona desert, or the increasingly brazen militarization of U.S. law enforcement in the "war on drugs"?  

According to some hyperventilating commentators, drug smugglers -- with the guilty acquiescence of Barack Obama -- have seized control of a huge swath of Arizona, thereby asserting alien sovereignty over what was once American soil. If this were true, points out libertarian journalist (and Arizona resident) J.D. Tuccille, the Narcotics lords would preside over a kingdom "populated by rattlesnakes and cholla."

What has actually happened is a minor but politically exploitable increase in criminal activity in one of the many drug smuggling corridors that have long existed in the southwest, channels of illicit commerce created in order to serve a huge market that persists despite decades of prohibition.

While Mexican bandits supposedly exercise dominion over reptiles and cacti, National Guard units throughout the country are actively involved in transforming nominally civilian law enforcement agencies into a full-blown domestic army of occupation. Last year, according to Albany, New York Fox affiliate WXXA, the New York State National Guard "assisted in more than 2,000 arrests ... and had almost $150 million in drug, property and weapon seizures."

While they do engage in the occasional isolated shoot-out, the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids. Nor are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints. They're not plundering people in roadside shakedowns.  Criminal violence of that kind is carried out every day by police -- often with hands-on military assistance -- as part of the "war on drugs."

According to Col. Alden Saddlemire of the New York National Guard, the martial language used to describe this domestic campaign is literal, not metaphorical. "The war on drugs is an ongoing war," Saddlemire told WXXA. "It's a domestic fight [we] firmly believe in."

Occupying Army: No, these guys aren't Mexican narco-terrorists.

Prohibition always results in the criminalization of markets. Thus it's hardly surprising that America's vast market for prohibited mood-altering substances is being served by violent and ruthless people.

That violence, however, is mostly self-contained. The same cannot be said for the violence -- both implicit and overt -- carried out in the name of drug enforcement, which in practical terms is little more than a price support program for the narcotics cartels. 

According to official propaganda, the National Guard Counterdrug Program (NGCDP)  "operates in all 54 states and territories to support local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies..... [The program] currently operates 125 OH-58 Kiowa helicopters to support federal, state and local Law Enforcement Agencies' demand for aviation support in Counterdrug operations."

Guard pilots and support personnel are actively involved in "area surveillance and reconnaissance; vehicle/fugitive surveillance and tracking, cover/force protection during RAID/Sweeps" and cannabis eradication operations.  

One must hack through a dense thicket of acronyms in order to uncover what's really happening here. The  NGCDP -- that's National Guard Counterdrug Program -- "recently realigned CD RAID Detachments into Security and Support Battalions," the mystified reader is told without being informed that "CD RAID" refers to Counter-Drug Recon and Aerial Interdiction Detachments.

We're not in Mayberry anymore.

We then learn that although "mission focus" remains on "LEA support to CD operations" -- that is, assisting Law Enforcement Agencies carry out Counter-Drug programs -- "HLS/HLD missions will take on a larger role than before." That singularly opaque clause refers to Homeland Security/Homeland Defense operations. 

Deprived of semantic camouflage this is an admission that the escalation of the military's role in the "war on drugs" will segue into larger, and increasingly overt, domestic military role in "homeland security." 

The NGCDP is eager to dispense all kinds of military hardware -- complete with "technical support" personnel -- on any "civilian" law enforcement agency that puts in a request.

You want night vision goggles? Forward-Looking Infrared gear (which was used to such dramatic effect in the murderous final assault on the Branch Davidians)? Thermal imagers, surveillance aircraft, mobile gamma-ray automobile inspection units? Just give the National Guard a holler, and they'll be happy to help.

Wish list: A National Guard menu for police militarization.

Sure, this means some swivel-hipping around that pesky Posse Comitatus Act, but it's pretty much a dead letter anyway.

Once the Guard is seamlessly integrated into the domestic counter-drug effort, they'll be ready to carry out whatever other homeland security missions that arise:  mass arrests of protesters and perfectly harmless civilians during political conventions, confiscation of firearms during disasters or other emergencies, or even -- as Gen. George S. Patton once recommended -- the use of total war tactics (summary mass detentions, summary executions of conspicuous troublemakers, the use of toxic gas and white phosphorous munitions) against organized dissident groups.

All of this has been done already, on a limited scale and in specific circumstances. Because of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror," the infrastructure is now in place to institutionalize those once-exceptional abuses, if -- make that "when" -- our self-appointed rulers choose to do so.

Some who are properly alarmed over all of this have invested their hopes in Sheriff Richard Mack's campaign to educate and mobilize county sheriffs to resist federal usurpation of state and local authority. Sheriff Mack is an admirable man, and his campaign is worthwhile -- but too many sheriffs have already been bought off by the Feds.

One example among many is Sheriff Tom Bosenko of California's  Shasta County, who allocated $340,000 to create a special marijuana suppression unitlargesse.

Paul Babeu, the Sheriff of Arizona's Pinal County, has pioneered a new approach to federalizing local law enforcement: He has actually invited the Feds to occupy Arizona on the pretext of defending the state from the illegal immigrant "invasion."

Sheriff Babeu -- a PR-fixated political ally of arch-neocon John McCain -- is consciously carving out a media-friendly persona as the heir to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It was Babeu who induced a paroxysm of populist outrage by declaring that the Obama administration had effectively surrendered a swath of Arizona to Mexico.

“It’s literally out of control,” Babeu insisted in an interview with Fox News. “We stood with Senator McCain and literally demanded support for 3,000 soldiers to be deployed to Arizona to get this under control and finally secure our border with Mexico."

Pinal County -- Sheriff Babeu's jurisdiction -- is well inside the border with Mexico.  Pima County, which actually shares a border with Mexico, is the responsibility of

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who also takes a hard line on immigration enforcement but doesn't share Babeu's siege mentality or appetite for media attention.

Sheriff Dupnik is one of several Arizona law enforcement veterans who believe that the problems associated with illegal immigration are being inflated into a politically useful "crisis."

Retired Mesa police officer Bill Richardson, who worked in counter-narcotics task forces in several Arizona counties, believes that Babeu -- like Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (chief sponsor of SB 1070) -- is "fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not."

Whether or not this assessment is accurate, both immigration (legal and illegal) and violent crime have been steadily decreasing in Arizona over the past decade -- a period encompassing Babeu's entire law enforcement career.

Richardson, a long-time Arizona resident with decades of law enforcement experience, points out that Babeu -- who relocated to Arizona after losing a mayoral race in North Adams, Massachusetts in 2001 -- was a police officer in Chandler for just 5 1/2 years (during which time he served as head of the local police union) before being elected Pima County Sheriff.

Two of those years were spent in National Guard deployments -- one of them in Iraq, the other on the southern border as part of a joint effort with the Border Patrol called "Operation Jump Start."

Babeu, who enlisted at 21 and currently holds the rank of Major in the National Guard, often campaigned in uniform as a perennial Republican political candidate in Massachusetts. He was successful once, winning a spot on the Berkshire County Commission and a leadership role in the County GOP.

After three unsuccessful bids for higher office, Babeu followed his parents (long-time Republican activists themselves) to Arizona, which had a more congenial political climate. (Joe Arpaio, interestingly, is likewise a transplanted Massachusetts native.)

Babeu, who refers to McCain as his "hero,"  is hard-wired into the neo-con-dominated Republican media apparatus, and he clearly has aspirations above and beyond his current position.

Just as importantly, 41-year-old Babeu -- who is both a county sheriff and a National Guard major -- literally embodies the ongoing merger of the military and law enforcement. He is the fons et origo of the notion that Obama, in an act of high treason, surrendered sacred American soil to Mexican drug gangs -- which isn't strictly true, of course, but is irresistibly potent to political opportunists.

Immigration, Babeu insists, "is the number one issue that faces Arizona." This could be considered the truth in the sense that it is the most useful issue for candidates looking to build a political career, and opportunistic incumbents -- including Senator McCain, who once supported amnesty for illegal immigrants but has re-cast himself as a flint-eyed border guardian in his ongoing re-election campaign.

As the current issue of Harper's magazine documents, the most serious problems besetting Arizona have little if anything to do with immigration, and everything to do with the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered depression.

J.D. Tuccille points out that concern over immigration is most pronounced in Phoenix, rather than in the southern part of the state. Phoenix somehow survived the immigrant onslaught, but it may be doomed as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble.

Ken Silverstein of Harper's points out that 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater," and unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent or higher. The latter figure can't be explained as a case of immigrants "stealing" jobs from natives, since the housing implosion led to a dramatic contraction of the immigrant labor pool.

Forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix there's a town called Maricopa that didn't exist ten years ago: It was created at the height of the Fed-induced housing frenzy. It's entirely possible that Maricopa won't exist a decade from now: It was a town built entirely on fraud.

"They weren't building homes," explains the consistently quotable Jay Butler, an associate professor of real estate at Arizona State University. "They were building mortgages that they could put into mortgage-backed securities in order to sell them to investors in China and France." Amid a pervasive atmosphere of moral hazard, mortgage loans were extended to practically anybody with a pulse and the ability sign the necessary documents. The results were utterly predictable.
 
Four years ago in Maricopa, speculators were buying whole tracts of houses and builders were demanding a 12-hour turnaround on building permits in order to meet existing demand. Today, that future ghost town registers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash."

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which are in de facto default, sitting on more than $4 trillion worth of bad debts.)  

When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors in are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. Given the dim prospects for an economic rebound, it's profoundly doubtful that many of those homes will ever be re-sold. And the coming commercial real estate crash will be at least as devastating for Arizona, a "branch office" state with little local industry apart from agriculture. 

As her state descends into economic ruin, Governor Jan Brewer -- hailed by Republican conservatives nation-wide as a heroine for signing SB 1070 -- is working diligently to impose a drastic sales tax increase on the state. Borrowing a familiar leftist trope, Brewer has claimed that people will "die" unless the regressive tax increase is enacted in the midst of a deepening economic contraction. 

As Governor, Brewer (who, like Babeu, is allied with McCain) has done nothing to reduce the size and expense of the state government. The timely and welcome distraction provided by the controversy over SB 1070, notes Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, saved Brewer "from a nasty primary challenge" arising from her $3 billion sales tax increase. 

Now, however, some opinion polls place her just five points behind President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 match-up -- solely on the strength of her perceived role as a proponent of "secure borders." 

Brewer's reputation was enhanced by an open letter to Obama in which Brewer demanded a "border surge" involving at least 6,000 troops. And it wasn't noticeably injured when she made the risible claim that the "majority" of illegal immigrants are working as "mules" in the employ of drug cartels -- a claim immediately and decisively shot down by T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council. 


Displaying gallantry through heroic understatement, Bonner said that Brewer's demented claim "doesn't comport with reality." This isn't surprising, given that Brewer and her allies aren't in the reality business. Like narcotics pushers, they're in the business of promoting altered states of consciousness for profit -- such as the perception that Arizona is about to be devoured in a Mexican anschluss. 

Brewer persisted in her reality-aversive treatment of the immigration issue by repeatedly making the horrifying and entirely unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants had committed "beheadings" in Arizona.

"We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings," stated Brewer in an interview with Fox News. While it's true that some drug-related murders in Mexico have involved beheading, there's not been a single documented case of that kind in Arizona. This didn't deter Brewer from reiterating that claim -- citing unspecified "law enforcement agencies" as sources -- in a subsequent interview.

Following up on those interviews, the Arizona Guardian reported that six county medical examiners, including four from border counties, "say they have never heard of such attacks." Which is to say that this is another terrifying claim that doesn't "comport with reality."It is, however, extremely useful for Brewer's brand of what Mencken described as "practical politics" -- "keep[ing] the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

If Brewer and her allies were interested in reality-based solutions to narcotics-related violent crime, Brewer and her ilk would agitate for the repeal of drug prohibition and an end to the subsidies and military aid to Mexico that are fueling the narcotics wars in that country. Instead, they're doing their considerable best to keep their constituents hopelessly addicted to the domestic warfare state. 

(Note: This essay is an expanded version of the original.)  


                                                        Comments, Corrections, and Clarifications, 7/12

"As a resident of Arizona for more than forty years, I assure you that Maricopa did exist more than ten years ago, as did many other small `intersection communities' on the outskirts of the Phoenix Metro area that became developers and mortgage brokers havens," writes an accomplished and well-informed reader from Arizona. "`No industries other than agriculture'? I guess that you are not keeping up with the role of copper in the world marketplace. Arizona is the largest source of copper in the western world. Not to mention the thriving aerospace and electronics, banking and IT industries in the state.... Arizona is [also] in the lead exporting not only copper, but also cotton, alfalfa, beef, and computer chips."


"Errors on such basic facts are not acceptable for someone in your position," he concludes. "It does not change the basic correctness of your thesis, but certainly causes one to pause and consider how deeply familiar you actually are with Arizona as it really is...."

I appreciate the corrections, especially with regard to Arizona's copper industry, which was a significant oversight on my part. My intent in describing Arizona as a "branch office" state was not to deny or minimize the current role of IT and other tech-related employers, but rather to underscore the vulnerability of the state to a commercial real estate collapse in the likely event that out-of-state firms are forced to cut back as a result of the ongoing worldwide contraction. And, for what it's worth, I don't regard "banking" as a viable industry, for reasons made vivid in the rapid expansion, and even more rapid catastrophic collapse, of Maricopa. 


Responding to my observation that "the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids.... [n]or are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints.... [or] plundering people in roadside shakedowns," another reader (who didn't specify his place of residence) contends: "Well, yes, as a matter of fact they are. This fact in no way lessens the hideous increase in the growth of the police state, but you shouldn't misrepresent the border crime problem."

 

I've consistently acknowledged the serious problem of violent crime at the U.S.-Mexico border, which I believe is largely driven by the politics of domestic prohibition and Washington's insane subsidy of Mexico's narco-state. Ending those policies, in my view, would help mitigate the problem of violence at the border. It probably wouldn't solve it outright, but problems rooted in human depravity aren't amenable to political solutions. 

                                       UPDATE: A Daring Drive through "Re-conquered" Arizona



Boldly risking certain death by decapitation at the hands of ubiquitous Mexican drug smugglers, "Real News Tucson" drives through the section of southern Arizona supposedly ceded to Mexico. Oddly enough, the only trouble they encounter comes at a Border Patrol checkpoint two dozen miles inside the border, where they are definitively told by a BP agent that the notion part of Arizona has been surrendered to Mexican control -- and are therefore inaccessible to Americans -- is "false information."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Propaganda for a boondoggle.

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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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

Peotone residents protest the corporatist landgrab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Clemency for Wall Street Criminals, Prison for the Powerless

A little help from a passive victim: Why did he hold still?

"Who the hell are these people?"

"I don't know. I used to say they were the same ones we've always had to deal with. Same ones my granddaddy had to deal with. Back then they was russlin' cattle. Now they're running dope. I ain't sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I don't know what to do about 'em even. If you killed 'em all they'd have to build an annex on to hell."

Sheriff Bell, from Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men

  

Johnny Gaskins of Raleigh, North Carolina faces a 30-year prison term -- an effective life sentence --  for the supposed crime of depositing $450,000 in his own bank account. The corporate leaders of Wachovia Bank, a criminal syndicate once headquartered in the same state, won't face prosecution despite admissions that the laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Mexican narcotics cartels. 

Wachovia was deemed "too big to fail," and thus too important to prosecute. In our system, mercy is reserved exclusively for the powerful and corrupt, and Johnny Gaskins -- a criminal defense attorney -- was neither. 

Gaskins had earned his money legitimately. As a dutiful tax victim, he reported his income to the criminal predators running the IRS. His purported offense was to make numerous deposits in amounts just under the $10,000 threshold at which banks are required to report to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.

Punishment without a crime: Gaskins.

Displaying the proprietary blend of depraved creativity and utter dishonesty that typify their caste, federal prosecutors insisted that these innocuous acts constituted the alleged crime of "money structuring." 

Dr. William Anderson, an economics professor at Maryland's Frostburg State University, notes that "money structuring" was defined as "an `ancillary crime' to give prosecutors leverage in cases where people had amassed huge amounts of cash via drug sales or other illegal activities and were trying to avoid detection as well as avoid paying taxes on their money."

In Gaskins's case, there was no predicate offense. The money was honestly earned and duly reported. Yet according to Pecksniffian federal prosecutor Randall Galyon, "The point of the law is to make sure we don't have people trying to fool the bank. The fact that he was trying is against the law." 

Gaskins was trying to "fool" the bank about conduct that was not innately criminal.  His violations of technical statutes constituted an offense of a severity comparable to ripping the tag from a mattress.

Yet the sacred majesty of the law requires that Gaskins suffer exemplary, conspicuous punishment. 

As Dr. Anderson observes, there was an unambiguous element of payback behind this vindictive prosecution: "Gaskins had success representing people accused of crimes, and the police and prosecutors paid him back with what can only be a trumped-up charge. Remember, Gaskins was convicted of depositing money in a bank. He did not evade taxes, he did not gain his cash through illegal means, he just put the money in the bank."

For reasons unstated yet deafening in their obviousness, the same corps of federal prosecutors who went after Gaskins hammer and tongs last year displayed little of the same zeal in pursuing Wachovia Bank on charges that involve both deliberate fraud and financial collaboration with Mexican narco-criminal syndicates. 

Wachovia's corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina -- just a three-hour drive from Raleigh. Perhaps the heroes who brought Johnny Gaskins to book were simply too exhausted from that herculean task to grapple with Wachovia, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo in a federally engineered takeover. The details are predictably opaque, but Wells Fargo -- which initially resisted string-laden TARP subsidies -- was given $25 billion by the Feds after it bought out Wachovia, which was collapsing under the accumulated weight of its rotten debts. 

Although it proudly called itself "the nation's fourth-largest bank," Wachovia was actually a federally chartered criminal enterprise. 

Granted, this can accurately be said of the entire fractional-reserve banking system. Wachovia distinguished itself by becoming a full-service institution to swindlers and criminals of many kinds. 



In February 2008 it was revealed that Wachovia's corporate leadership "solicited business from companies it knew had been accused of telemarketing crimes," reported the New York Times. "Internal Wachovia e-mail messages, for example, show that high-ranking employees ... frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through its accounts." 


Wachovia had been given specific warnings from investigators and from other banks regarding the scams, yet "it continued to provide banking services to multiple companies that helped steal as much as $400 million from unsuspecting victims." 

A federal lawsuit against Wachovia accused the bank of accepting "fraudulent, unsigned checks that withdrew funds from the accounts of victims, often elderly," continues the Times. "Wachovia forwarded those checks to other banks that were unaware of the frauds, which in turn sent money to the swindlers." 


One Wachovia executive warned in 2005 that one account being used by swindlers had received 4,500 complaints in the space of two months. "There is more," she wrote, "but nothing more that I want to put in a note." 


Despite that warning and others, Wachovia continued to process the fraudulent transactions "partly because the bank charged fraud artists a large fee every time a victim spotted a bogus transaction and demanded their money back," the Times points out. "One company alone paid Wachovia about $1.5 million over 11 months...." 


"We are making a ton of money from them," admitted Wachovia executive Linda Pera in 2005, referring to a company later accused of stealing $142 million through fraud. 


Rather than doing what it could to stop the swindle, Wachovia profited from it as long as it could. The bank's role in that scam -- as well as mortgage fraud, embezzlement, and other crimes -- was known by federal regulators and prosecutors no later than February 2008. Nobody at Wachovia faced criminal prosecution. Instead, the bank was permitted to buy its way out of trouble through a $144 million settlement -- and taxpayers were forced to make good on that amount, and much more, a few months later in the federally subsidized merger with Wells Fargo. 

Last March, federal prosecutors offered an even more generous deal to the Wachovia cabal in the form of a"deferred prosecution agreement" regarding charges of laundering an estimated $300 billion for Mexican narcotics syndicates. In lieu of prosecution, Wachovia agreed to the criminal forfeiture of $110 million and a $50,000,000 fine; it also promised to "demonstrate its future good conduct and compliance in all material aspects with the Bank Secrecy Act...."


The Bank Secrecy Act, recall, is the same law Johnny Gaskins "violated" by making small bank deposits of his own honestly-earned, fully reported money. Gaskins wasn't offered a deal in which he would "forfeit" an amount equivalent to pennies on the dollar and be spared additional punishment in exchange for the promise of future "good conduct."


According to the stipulations in the federal "Factual Statement" Wachovia endorsed last March, a Miami branch maintained "correspondent bank accounts" for Mexican currency exchange houses (casas de cambio, or CDCs).


"On numerous occasions, monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug trafficking organization," recounts the "Factual Statement." "Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug trafficking organizations." 


Among the offenses to which Wachovia stipulated are "Structured Wire Transactions" intended to launder drug proceeds. Once again, Gaskins was convicted of "money structuring" despite the fact that there was no underlying criminal act. Wachovia, on the other hand, was deliberately washing drug proceeds and facilitating the purchase of aircraft that were used to smuggle at least 22 tons of cocaine.

In 2006, Martin Woods, a Wachovia compliance officer in London, became suspicious when his branch started to receive a large quantity of traveler's checks issued by Mexican CDCs. The checks -- written for large denominations -- were sequentially numbered and improperly endorsed.

Recognizing this as evidence of money laundering, Woods reported his findings to Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. A year later, Mexican investigators traced those checks to a CDC used by the Sinaloa Cartel. 

Martin's reward for breaking the case, observed the March 9, 2009 issue of Barron's, was to be bullied and demoted by his superiors at Wachovia, who also threw out his reports of similar suspicious activities in eastern Europe. As was the case with the telemarketing fraud, the dirty dealings Martin had uncovered were much too profitable to stop -- and in this case, they were being overseen by people who make Anton Chigurh look like Mr. Rogers.

In September 2007, a U.S. registered Gulfstream II jet carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula. The plane was one of several purchased through a Mexican CDC with "correspondent accounts" held by Wachovia. This particular private jet -- tail number N987SA -- was also an important link between the CIA-abetted international narcotics trade and the CIA's global torture network.

Multi- use asset: A CIA "torture taxi" takes flight...

Until a few weeks before the crash, the plane's registered owner was a Florida-based pilot (and alleged CIA asset) named Greg Smith, who was reportedly involved in a series of federal operations targeting Columbian drug networks from1997-2000. 

Only those so ingenuous as to make Candide look worldly would be surprised to learn that the same individual, and the same aircraft, were involved in smuggling drugs into the United States, or that the CIA found even more repellent uses for the same vehicle.


Mr. "Smith" was the Gulfstream's owner of record between 2003 and 2005, when the plane was used by the CIA for at least three trips between the east coast of the U.S. and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The same plane was part of the CIA's fleet of "torture taxis" used to ferry detainees to foreign dungeons, reported The Independent of London last January. 

"In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard," the Independent recalls. "It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan."

.... wreckage of the same plane, and its cargo of cocaine.

The gentle treatment given to Wachovia testifies of its value as a pass-through to fund criminal syndicates used by the CIA to conduct the business of perpetual war -- whether it's designated the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror."

To cite Bastiat's invaluable formula yet again, both of those "wars" are exercises in creating the poison and the antidote in the same laboratory. 

The "war on drugs" -- which is an exercise in corrupt, murderous foolishness greater, by several orders of magnitude, than Prohibition -- will not end as long as it is profitable to the criminal elite in Washington, their allies in the banking industry, and their largely interchangeable and thoroughly disposable minions in the underworld. 
 
As Hugh O'Shaughnessy of The Independent puts it, decriminalization of drug use would impoverish "the traffickers, large and small, and those who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments -- in the US in particular, where drug offenders -- principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers -- have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000." 

That population will soon include Johnnie Gaskins, a principled but powerless man who committed no crime. The majesty of the law requires nothing less. None of the criminals in Wachovia's corporate leadership will be joining him behind bars, of course, since clemency is a gift the Regime bestows exclusively on its valued accomplices in official crime.

(Note: This essay was originally published under a different title.)

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