Interlude: A Merry Depression Sing-Along (Updated, 10/20)

The Last "Worst Hard Time": Rural farms in the Great Plains come under assault by a dust storm. The economic clouds gathering over our heads are pregnant with even greater devastation -- so, hey, how about a nice little musical interlude to cheer us up while the collapse accelerates?



C'mon -- you know the melody:


Chorus:

Super-complex col-lat-er-al-ized debt obligations

Can be seen dis-int-eg-rating all across the nation!

And now the suf-fring middle class confronts annihilation --

Super-complex col-lat-er-al-ized debt obligations!



Hum-diddle-liddle-liddle, hum-diddle-LIE,


Hum-diddle-liddle-liddle, hum-diddle-FRAUD....



First Verse


Because the local sports mogul who owns the football team


Demanded a new stadium, or else he'd up and leave


We formed a sports authority to collect subsidies,


And now the bursting debt bubble has brought us to our knees (repeat chorus)

















Second Verse




The town fathers of Hardin said, "Hey, let's go build a jail,


to boost our sick economy" -- but 'twas an epic fail.


In waltzed a Serbian con-man who said he'd run the place;


But "Captain Michael's" scheme exploded right in Hardin's face. (repeat chorus)





Third Verse


For ninety years the Fed has told us debt's as good as cash,


Thanks to the jerks in Washington, the U.S. dollar's trash.


The "public sector" grows apace, while capital depletes,


We'll watch our wealth evaporate while grass grows in our streets. (repeat chorus)


















Third Verse


The Beast from Jekyll Island makes a profit from our woes;


Its assets and expenditures -- secrets it won't disclose.


The Banksters live in luxury while workers drown in Red;


Our kids will live as feudal serfs unless we End the Fed! (repeat chorus)




(My apologies to Robert and Richard Sherman, and anybody who -- like myself -- doesn't really care for show tunes. I had an idea for an original tune, but unfortunately "Dancing in the Ruins" was already taken.)



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Dum spiro, pugno!

How "Justice" Operates Under A Criminal Regime

Thieves for their robbery have authority when judges steal themselves. --

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, scene 2



It's time to play that time-honored children's game, "One of These Things is Not Like the Others." In this case we're going to examine three case histories of people accused of a supposed offense called "tax evasion."

"It's all in the wrist": Treasury Secretary and Goldman-Sachs bagman Timothy Geithner demonstrates his technique for picking the taxpayer's pocket.



Our first example involves Mr. Timothy Geithner, who refused to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes for several years -- despite the fact that his employer would have reimbursed him for the tax expenditures. A 2006 audit revealed other irregularities in Mr. Geithner's tax history, including dubious dependent-child deductions.



Despite these, ah, irregularities, Geithner was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, which collects tax revenues for -- among other things -- redistribution to Geithner's colleagues and former co-workers on Wall Street.


Sure, tax revenues are spent on other purposes, such as interest payments on the federal debt and killing harmless foreigners. But since the Congress made the Treasury Secretary the de facto economic dictator a year ago, servicing politically connected Wall Street criminals has become that department's primary mission, one that has devoured trillions of dollars in wealth.


*Burp* Taxes are for other people: Tax-feeder Charles Rangel briefly lifts his snout from the congressional trough to pose for a photo.


Next, we turn to the case of Mr. Charles Rangel, a resident of New York, who refused to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from properties he owns in the Caribbean.



Rangel's first impulse was to share -- no, to give outright -- most of the blame for his tax evasion to his wife, Alma, who manages the family finances.


With equal generosity he tried to cut in the Spanish-speaking tenants of the property for a slice of the blame as well: "Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they'd start speaking Spanish," he insisted.



Rangel's problems continued to accumulate when it was pointed out that his tax evasion was undertaken in order to facilitate other forms of fraud: He couldn't accurately report his Caribbean income and qualify for "hardship"-case rent controls on properties he maintained in New York City, or the special "homestead" tax exemption he claimed on his property in Washington, D.C.



Despite those infractions, and others involving congressional financial disclosure rules, Rangel has retained his job as a New York Congressman and, more importantly, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is where tax laws that govern other people are written.



The third case we'll examine is that of New Hampshire residents Ed and Elaine Brown. Convicted of "tax evasion" and "resisting arrest," Mrs. Brown, 68, has been sentenced to thirtyfive years in federal prison -- an effective life sentence.


Her husband's sentencing has been deferred until he has undergone a "psychiatric evaluation": As was the case with political prisoners in the former Soviet Union, Mr. Brown is suspected by state authorities of being clinically deranged because of his eccentric political views. Chances are pretty good that if he avoids prison, Ed Brown may be institutionalized for the rest of his life.



Obviously, the case of Ed and Elaine Brown is different from those of Geithner and Rangel, since they're not part of that sanctified stratum of society entitled to live at the expense of the rest of us. They, like most of us, belong to that class of people whom the law fails to protect, rather than the class that the law fails to restrain.



Unlike Timothy Geithner, the Browns aren't involved in stealing huge sums of money. Unlike Charlie Rangel, they're not involving in imposing "laws" that justify the pilferage of privately earned wealth.


The Browns stole from nobody, inflicted no harm on anybody, and spent most of their lives (with the exception of one matter discussed below) providing honest services to other people in mutually beneficial transactions. None of this is true of the likes of Geithner and Rangel, for whom plunder has proven to be a lucrative and respectable career.



Like Geithner and Rangel, Ed Brown -- as a very young man -- once tried to enrich himself through theft, only to be caught, tried, and imprisoned for that crime. In 1976, Brown was given an unqualified pardon for that crime, which he committed as an 18-year-old. He then built a business as an exterminator.



For her part, Elaine built a large and successful practice as a dentist. Neither one of them lived at the expense of other people; they were producers, not parasites. In 1996, the Browns decided that they wouldn't permit the likes of Geithner and Rangel to continue stealing from them in order to enrich political favored cronies and constituents. So, like Geithner and Rangel, the Browns stopped paying their taxes.

Armed robbery: "Law enforcement" agents steal Elaine Brown's dental practice, June 7, 2007.


In January 2007, the Browns were "convicted" of the supposed crime of tax evasion and invited to turn themselves in for imprisonment. They impudently scorned that generous invitation, choosing instead to barricade themselves inside the home the Feds planned to steal from them and letting it be known that they would use lethal force to defend themselves against any federal aggression.


The Browns' Plainfield, New Hampshire home -- invariably referred to as a "compound," the preferred description of any dwelling in which live people the government intends to kill -- was surrounded by paramilitary troops from the U.S. Marshals Service.


In short order the home also became a focal point for armed private citizens who intended to support the Browns in the event of an armed assault and, more importantly, to be on-scene witnesses to help deter any potentially murderous aggression by the Feds.



While the Browns were occupied at their home, a small army of heavily armed federal agents seized Elaine Brown's dental office -- an act of felonious armed robbery. Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- the throng of Brown supporters was seeded with paid federal informants, two of whom, posing as supporters, gained access to the home and arrested the middle-aged couple without incident.


Put on trial for eleven felony weapons and "conspiracy" charges, the Browns were found "guilty." That is to say, the court demonstrated that the Browns threatened to use the same means to defend their lives and property that were to be employed by those seeking to deprive them of the same.


The Browns had assembled an enviable arsenal of firearms, ammunition, bullet-resistant clothing, and homemade explosives (or, as the federal prosecution insisted on describing the pipe bombs, "improvised explosive devices" -- a term intended to evoke the image of "terrorists" detonating hidden weapons while fighting U.S. troops in Iraq).



Assistant U.S. Attorney Arnold Huftalen, who presided over the prosecution, initially sought a prison sentence of up to 44 years for the Browns. Holding aloft one of Elaine's handguns, Huftalen simpered that "This was not a small, dainty, self-defense handgun," describing it instead as a heavy weapon "designed to kill 17 people without reloading."


Given the indignation with which Huftalen invested every lisping syllable of his presentation, one might think that the weapons possessed by the armed federal agents surrounding the Brown home were designed to tickle people. But Huftalen, as a servant of a criminal regime, assumes that only the state has the right to use or threaten lethal force, and that its victims commit some variety of terrorism when they arm themselves with implements of self-defense more effective than Q-tips or Nerf balls.



"Mr. and Mrs. Brown did not engage in a principled dissent against laws they felt to be unjust," pronounced federal Judge George Singal as he imposed the sentence. "Let us not be fooled. The conduct engaged in by Mrs. Brown was purely criminal."


To be "criminal," conduct has to inflict demonstrable harm against an identifiable victim.
Neither Huftalen nor Singal can describe a single instance of palpable harm that resulted from the refusal of the Browns to pay income taxes, or from their acquisition of the means to defend themselves and their home from the criminal syndicate bent on stealing their property and, if necessary, murdering them.


Even if we were to accept the premise that tax "evaders" injure the "public good" by withholding their wealth from the public fisc, how can it possibly be a greater crime for the Browns to deprive the Feds of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, while the unpunished tax "evader" Timothy Geithner shovels out hundreds of billions of dollars to con artists on Wall Street?


Yes, the Browns threatened to shoot or otherwise kill anybody who tried to harm them. This, coupled with the presence of a large number of witnesses, is probably the only thing that saved their lives.


Thus it is of some interest that Huftalen (as reported by the Nashua Telegraph) chose to seek a life sentence for Elaine Brown -- despite the fact that she had never harmed a living soul, and despite the fact that there was no physical evidence linking her to the explosives in the Brown household -- "in order to deter Brown supporters [and, presumably, other Americans] from engaging in similar conduct."


It's worth remembering that tax evasion, far from being a crime of any sort, is among our nation's oldest and most sacred political traditions. The War for American independence from Great Britain was carried out by people who engaged in exactly the same kind of "criminal" conduct for which Elaine Brown will spend the rest of her life in prison, and for which her husband may end his days in the American equivalent of the Soviet psihuska.


Sure, the government ruling us -- the same one that not only countenances, but promotes, the monumental criminality of Geithner, Rangel, and their ilk -- calls tax evasion a "crime" when it is carried out by people outside of the privileged caste.


Real crimes involve some variety of force and fraud to deprive someone of something to which he is entitled. Nobody is entitled to take the property of another through taxation, even if such pilferage is "authorized" by a majority of 300,000,000 to 1. The course pursued by Ed and Elaine Brown may have been unwise, but it neither picked my pocket nor broke my leg.


Pocket-picking and leg-breaking are the veritable job descriptions of those who seized the Browns' property, kidnapped them, and are preparing to detain them for the rest of their lives. This is how "justice" operates under the Robber State that afflicts us.




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Dum spiro, pugno!

Support Your Global Police?

Oh, joy: The UN wants to build a global police force. It's really difficult to think of a worse idea.


When last we checked in with Ronald K. Noble, he was enjoying a lucrative career as a reward for helping cover up a crime against humanity in which he was deeply implicated.


Interpol's genocidal secretary-general, former U.S. Treasury official Ronald K. Noble.

In 1994, Noble was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury Department, a position that appears to have been created especially for him by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.


A year earlier, both Reno and Noble had been involved in the decision-making process leading to the April 19 holocaust at Mt. Carmel, in which scores of people were immolated as a result of what at very best could be called the depraved indifference of presiding federal officials.

During the hours leading up to that atrocity, FBI-operated tanks filled the Branch Davidian sanctuary (a combination worship space and living area invariably referred to as a "compound" once it came under federal assault on February 28) with a highly combustible variant of CS gas that was banned for battlefield use by an international treaty.


Around noon, something -- an upended Coleman lantern, a badly thrown Molotov cocktail, one of hundreds of "ferret" rounds fired by FBI commandos -- ignited a small fire that was quickly propagated into a blaze by the arid Texas prairie wind. Much of the world watched in horror on live television as the sanctuary burned to the ground, bringing to an agonizing end the lives of scores of people trapped within.


The victims had already endured fifty days of torment and ridicule by a government that had attacked their home without legal cause, killing several of their friends in the process. Firemen and other emergency personnel were prevented from reaching the site before the flames had consummated their awful work. This was supposedly done to protect the emergency workers from attack by the people who were being consumed by the fire.


A more plausible explanation is that the people who had arranged that holocaust were trying to keep independent witnesses away from the scene of their crime. Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) footage of the event provides damning evidence that FBI commandos (and, reportedly, at least a few Delta Force operators) directed automatic weapons fire into the burning sanctuary, cutting off escape routes and cutting down anyone who attempted to flee.


This can't be good.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Davidian survivors and the estates of the victims listed Noble among the "U.S. Treasury officials" who "planned, organized, and or led" the original February 28 assault against Mt. Carmel, despite knowledge that the warrants were obtained "without probable cause and with defects that rendered them illegal."


Those same officials, continued the complaint, permitted the assault to proceed "even though they knew that the Davidians were expecting an assault by law enforcement and, thus, were in a state of mortal terror," and "were so reckless in their preparation for and planning of this assault, that they did not even have a written plan in place prior to conducting the attack."


Noble was thus deeply involved in the decisions that led to the avoidable deaths of six members of the Branch Davidian sect, and four ATF stormtroopers, on February 28. His involvement in the planning and execution of the siege and the final April 19 assault isn't as significant. But he played the definitive role in covering up those crimes by serving as the "lead investigator" in the Clinton administration's internal "inquiry" into the federal atrocities at Waco.


So patently fraudulent was Noble's "investigation" that a second bogus inquiry was necessary: In 2000, Attorney General Reno chose former Missouri Senator John Danforth to preside over an "independent" investigation that was mounted in what proved to be a successful effort to derail the wrongful death lawsuit cited above.


By that time, however, Noble -- who had been given the Alexander Hamilton Award by the Treasury Department, as if anything named after that individual could be construed as an honor -- had been given another coveted post with Reno's help: He was nominated to serve as secretary-general of Interpol, a position he occupies to the present day.

Hey, wait a minute: Where have I seen that same sword-through-the-globe motif before?....

On October 12, Noble's agency announced that it would be collaborating with the United Nations by providing technical support -- including access to voluminous, detailed databases -- to UN "peacekeeping" personnel, including those that belong to the world body's police force, UNPOL.

Noble himself said that his organization is pursuing a "visionary model," an "alliance of all nations" under a "global police doctrine." This would, in effect, create the first genuinely planetary police force in human history.

In an address before justice and law enforcement officials from more than 60 nations who had assembled in Singapore, Noble elaborated on that "visionary model": "In the framework of our partnership with the UN, INTERPOL will provide deployed police peacekeepers with access to the world's only secure global police communications system; global police databases including names of criminals, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen passports, and stolen vehicles; and specialized investigative support in key crime areas, including fugitives, drugs, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, and corruption."

....oh, yeah: That's essentially the same symbol used by the totalitarian "Terran Empire" in Star Trek's "Mirror Universe."

Apart from some very serious issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty, the most troubling aspect of INTERPOL's "visionary model" is its potential to help create a UN-directed global panopticon -- a "Your Papers, Please" system of world-wide scope.


It would certainly be of great use to the UN's International Criminal Court, a pseudo-judicial body that claims global jurisdiction.


Significantly, one of the "core" offenses recognized in the ICC Statute is genocide, as that offense is defined in the UN's Genocide Convention. Article II of that instrument describes the offense of genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group":


"(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part...."


Some very serious and sober people contend that this definition is over-broad. No serious person of a constitutionalist bent considers the UN or its treaties a legitimate source of law.


However, it would be expected that Noble, as someone working to provide that body with a rudimentary global constabulary, would be among those who accept the legitimacy of its treaties. But to do so would put Noble in a completely untenable position: He is directly implicated in an assault that resulted in the near-destruction of an entire religious community, which -- by the UN's definition -- qualifies as a form of attempted genocide.


At the very least, he is an accessory after the fact to genocide (once again, as defined by the UN). Given the UN's history, however, that line on Nobel's resume might actually be counted on the asset side of the ledger.


Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who headed the organization's "peacekeeping" division before being appointed to the top post, was censured in the so-called Carlsson Report on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed as many as a million lives.


Annan had received detailed advance intelligence about the impending massacres of the Tutsis from both the on-scene UN commander, Canadian Colonel Romeo Dallaire,* and various informants within the Hutu-led government. He nonetheless continued with the program to disarm the Rwandan civilians and ordered Dallaire to burn his own sources by sharing his intelligence with the same regime that was planning the slaughter.


After the report came out in 1999, a group of Rwandan survivors, working with Australian attorney (and former UN investigator) Michael Hourigan, attempted to file a lawsuit against Annan and others implicated in the Rwandan genocide. But, drat the luck, wouldn't you just know that UN officials are clothed in official immunity for such trivial offenses as aiding and abetting genocide, as long as this is done in an "official capacity."


So rather than being sued or prosecuted, Annan had to settle for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. That was the most offensive selection ever made by the Nobel Committee. Well, at least until this year.


Thanks to the near-ubiquity of inconspicuous digital cameras and the technological blessing of internet file-sharing sites, Americans are just now coming to realize how commonplace criminal abuse by the police has become -- and how difficult it is to hold an abusive police officer accountable for crimes against innocent people. But this is the square root of the problem we would confront in the event that the UN actually created the global police force the foundation of which is being laid by Noble and his comrades.


It's entirely typical of the UN that its secretary general was implicated in what has been called "the first indisputable genocide since the UN Charter was signed," and that a key architect of its "crime-fighting" agenda was involved in planning and covering up a quasi-genocidal massacre here in the United States. This is a useful illustration of the fact that even though abolishing the UN wouldn't solve all or even most of our problems, it's a badly overdue step in the direction of restoring moral sanity.

___
*Despite the fact that Col. Dallaire tried to prevent the genocide, he blamed himself for the tragedy, which included the death of many men under his command. He returned to Canada where he descended into alcoholism and suicidal depression, even as Annan was elevated to the post of secretary general. I interviewed Dallaire by telephone several years ago and discovered, to my amazement, that he still believes in the principle of "collective security," even if he is understandably jaded about the UN as the vessel of that vision.


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Dum spiro, pugno!