Municipalities Grabbing and Holding Cars for Ransom

The infractions that can get your car impounded are becoming increasingly frivolous, presenting cash-strapped towns with new sources of revenue. In truth, impounding cars and then charging “fees” for their release is nothing but theft and extortion committed by city governments.

Welcome to a new era in Chicagoland policing, where municipalities are turning traffic stops into big money.

A Tribune investigation has found that more than 100 area communities have created laws to seize vehicles as punishment for a growing list of offenses, from drunken driving to loud radios to littering. Car owners must then pay “administrative” fees to get their vehicles back, even if the owners had nothing to do with the crime.

If the owners don’t pay — and can’t convince municipal officials that the tow was unfair — their vehicles are taken away for good.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune.

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Federally Sanctioned Insurers Profiting from Dead Soldiers

Any time a financial institution gives you an incentive to park a chunk of cash somewhere, you may take it to the bank, so to speak, that they are playing the spread between the rate at which they borrow money and the rate and which they pay it out.

Lohman, a public health nurse who helps special-needs children, says she had always believed that her son’s life insurance funds were in a bank insured by the FDIC. That money — like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by insurers — wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.

It was being held in Prudential’s general corporate account, earning investment income for the insurer. Prudential paid survivors like Lohman 1 percent interest in 2008 on their Alliance Accounts, while it earned a 4.8 percent return on its corporate funds, according to regulatory filings.

“I’m shocked,” says Lohman, breaking into tears as she learns how the Alliance Account works. “It’s a betrayal. It saddens me as an American that a company would stoop so low as to make a profit on the death of a soldier. Is there anything lower than that?”

Read more at Bloomberg.com.

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Congress Considers Bill for Universal Conscription

The Universal National Service Act, H.R. 5741, is currently in committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill’s purpose reads as follows:

“To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.”

Read more at govtrack.us.

As a refresher, here’s Section 1 of Amendment XIII of the U.S. Constitution:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The bill’s sponsor is Rep. Charles Rangel of New York. His Washington office’s phone number is (202) 225-4365.

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A British Look at the American Imprisonment Industry

Part of the inventory within California's booming imprisonment industry.

Not all industries in the U.S. are suffering economically. The war and surveillance industries are doing just fine. So is the highly profitable imprisonment industry.

Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.

Read more at The Economist.

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Lawmen Raid California Organic Store over Raw Milk

Now we know why the southern border of the U.S. is unguarded and vicious battles between drug lords are spilling over into Arizona: The Feds are busy protecting us against the threat of raw milk.

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid’s target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

“I still can’t believe they took our yogurt,” said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. “There’s a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they’re raiding us because we’re selling raw dairy products?”

Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities — the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

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Black Slave Labor Being Used in Gulf Cleanup

When does prison labor become slave labor? When you have a system of for-profit prisons and draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent or victimless crimes, and then you hire out that prison population for involuntary servitude that profits corporations. When does slave labor become black servitude? When a disproportionate number of inmates pressed into service are African-American.

In other words, when you have a system like the one in the U.S., which imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other nation in the world and whose prison population is disproportionately black.

On the Gulf Coast, the authority of a multinational corporation now supersedes the authority of state and even federal law, and cheap prison slave labor is being used to clean up the mess.

Keep in mind that for a time, these workers were prohibited from wearing masks or respirators, and that workers cleaning up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill suffered an extreme mortality rate, as we explained here. (Workers are now being permitted to wear their own personal masks “if they choose,” reports CNN.)

The magazine The Nation explains the emergence of black involuntary servitude on the Gulf Coast:

In the first few days after BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words “Inmate Labor” printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear, expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The outfits disappeared overnight.

Work crews in Grand Isle, Louisiana, still stand out. In a region where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African-American men. The racialized nature of the cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, sent a public letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people were over-represented in “the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins.”

Read more at The Nation.

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Border Security Agents Sexually Humiliate Canadian Woman

From innocently using a payphone to squatting naked in a back room, probed by perverted and sadistic government parasites.

Shileen Flynn, 29, had already missed one flight and lost her luggage when she says she found herself in a room at the Vancouver airport, naked and squatting, while two crude border agents strip-searched her.

It was December, 2009, days after a suspected al-Qaida member tried to ignite an explosive device aboard a Detroit-bound flight. Flynn had just returned home to Vancouver from a trip to Seattle, and was on her way to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to start a new job as a public relations officer.

She was a day behind schedule, having missed her flight from the U.S. the night before, and had to catch the next plane to Germany so she could then catch a flight to Spain and start work the next morning. Somewhere along the way, the airline lost her luggage.

She was talking to her mom on a pay phone when a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officer approached her.

“All of a sudden, the guy comes over to me and says, ‘Can I talk to you?’ I said, ‘Of course, why not?’” said Flynn.

She said he asked her where she was travelling and why she was using a pay phone. He told her to take off her sunglasses so he could see her eyes. She slipped them off, looked at the officer, and then pushed them back down.

His tone became aggressive, she said.

“He said, ‘No take your sunglasses off!’” said Flynn.

It all went downhill from there.

Read more at The Toronto Sun.

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FOIA Requesters Were Politically Investigated

Who do you think you are, seeking information about the control class?

WASHINGTON — For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.

The department abandoned the practice after AP investigated. Inspectors from the department’s Office of Inspector General quietly conducted interviews with employees last week to determine whether political advisers acted improperly.

The Freedom of Information Act, the main tool forcing the government to be more open, is designed to be insulated from political considerations. But in July 2009, Homeland Security introduced a directive requiring a wide range of information to be vetted by political appointees for “awareness purposes,” no matter who requested it.

Read more at the Associated Press.

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Competing Currencies Being Used in Michigan

Some good people in Michigan have said the hell with Federal Reserve notes and have begun using alternatives, including—gasp!—gold and silver coins. At the end of the newscast, the reporter says that yes, gold and silver coins may actually be used for buying things. Then viewers are invited to answer the question: “Would you consider using precious metals as currency?” How quickly Americans have forgotten that until not long ago, gold and silver coins—along with Treasury notes backed by gold and silver—were the only currencies considered lawful!

New types of money are popping up across Mid-Michigan and supporters say, it’s not counterfeit, but rather a competing currency.

Right now, you can buy a meal or visit a chiropractor without using actual U.S. legal tender.

They sound like real money and look like real money. But you can’t take them to the bank because they’re not made at a government mint. They’re made at private mints.

“I sell three or four every single day and then I get one or two back a week,” said Dave Gillie, owner of Gillies Coney Island Restaurant in Genesee Township.

Gillie also accepts silver, gold, copper and other precious metals to pay for food.

He says, if he wanted to, he could accept marbles.

“Do people have to accept dollars or money? No, they don’t,” Gillie said. “They can accept anything they want or they can refuse to accept anything.”

He’s absolutely right.

Read more at ConnectMichigan.com.

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Slaves Rise up against Parasites Raking in Big Bucks

News flash to the residents of Bell: There is an economic war being waged by the public sector against the private sector. They are seizing your wealth and assets. You in the private sector, doing real work and producing real goods and services, are merely “blood bags,” allowed to work and live for the sole purpose of feeding the parasites.

This is not hyperbole.

Congratulations for having the guts to stand up to them.

Hundreds of residents of one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County shouted in protest last night as tensions rose over a report that the city’s manager earns an annual salary of almost $800,000.

An overflow crowd packed a City Council meeting in Bell, a mostly Hispanic city of 38,000 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, to call for the resignation of Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other city officials. Residents left standing outside the chamber banged on the doors and shouted “fuera,” or “get out” in Spanish.

It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work.

City Attorney Edward Lee said the council members couldn’t discuss salaries in public without advance notice. The council then adjourned for a private session. About an hour later, the council members returned, and Hernandez read a statement saying the city would prepare a report on the salaries and seek public comment at the next council meeting, scheduled for Aug. 16.

Read more at Bloomberg.com.

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