Big thanks to the cool cats who joined the conversation! This here audio production is a conversation between Gard, Furb, Stephen Smith and Mark Canney (who is about one of the coolest freedom fighters around!)

We hope you enjoy the conversation, which concentrates on things like the reach of the tax man, escaping the US, the anti-immigration zealots, and baseball’s tie to the US government!

All here, and at www.libertyconspiracy.com!

Be Seeing You!

Enjoy this analysis of the Arizona anti-immigration law, SB 1070, as we look a bit deeper than some people might do in the pop media. In this case, El G Grande studies some of the history of immigration laws in the US, what the Constitution says, what the AZ law says, how it breaks the US Constitution, how current federal immigration law breaks the Constitution, and how open borders HELP people better their lives.

It’s very much COUNTER to the pop psychology prevalent today, and it’s only through www.libertyconspiracy.com!

Be Seeing You!

Welcome to the Conspiracy, where we study all the factors that lead to a freer society: economics, politics, history, theory, and culture. In this production, take a listen to Gardner Goldsmith exploring the fact that the nominee to head the TSA has used his former post at the FBI to snoop into, yeah, you got it, someone’s private information… Nice to know the Obamites are so interested in privacy, huh?

But what about those nasty immigrants? Did you know that an eeeeevil woman has organized a group of Arizonans to alert each other to immoral and actions made by cops who want to arrest “illegal immigrants”? She must be evil. Right? We’ll look at the moral and economic arguments, as well as the Constitutional arguments (for those who want them). Check it out!

Be Seeing you!

Last July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted a raid of a home allegedly looking for a fugitive alien. Instead, they found a Customs and Border Protection officer.

K-9 officer Jim Slaughter, a seven year veteran of CBP who works at the San Luis, Ariz., border crossing, told KSWT-TV that five ICE agents entered his home without a warrant, but immediately backed off when he told them he was a CBP officer.

His wife, Sheila, asks the important questions:

“Here they invaded my home, think of this, my children weren’t home. What if my husband hadn’t of been home? What would they have done to me?” says Sheila. — KSWT-TV

The Slaughters now believe that ICE agents simply had the wrong address, but he is suing the Department of Homeland Security because, he says, ICE refused to apologize or even explain the incident.

Unfortunately I’m afraid the suit, which cites the Fourth Amendment, isn’t likely to go anywhere. Courts have repeatedly ruled that when police raid the wrong house, citizens have no recourse, as long as the police simply made an “honest” mistake. Police being honest? When does that happen? And this bizarre miscarriage of justice is a direct result (you might say unintended consequence) of Richard Nixon’s war on drugs.

It’s that time again, time for outgoing government bureaucrats to make room for fresh new faces and to say goodbye. Today, outgoing Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said goodbye to the country in a video. Of course, the government can’t seem to do anything right, and now we can add making simple videos to that list.

“I’m here at the Freedom Center, one of the many facilities created after the Sept. 11th attacks to protect our country from terrorist threats and to improve coordination during major disasters and emergencies,” Chertoff says to introduce himself. “In this case, threats to our aviation system.”

Formerly known as the Transportation Security Operations Center, it was renamed last year to the Freedom Center. The operations center is responsible for virtually all of the Transportation Security Administration’s day to day activities, including preventing infants and Congressmen from boarding planes and responding to other threats to aviation security.

You may as well just watch the video. I’ll warn you now, it’s rather poor quality. It’s not YouTube’s fault; this is how it was received from DHS. Apparently even Windows Movie Maker is beyond them.

Someone get this man a glass of water!

Chertoff says we are “far better protected and far better equipped to deal with 21st-century threats” than before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Of course this says absolutely nothing about whether the American people are actually any safer, and it can be argued that we are not.

“We’ve completely overhauled our aviation security system,” Chertoff reminds us, as if we hadn’t noticed. “Today, more than 20 layers of security protect air travelers, from hardened cockpit doors and Federal Air Marshals to 100 percent screening of passengers and bags.”

Which of those layers of security actually works? Fake boarding passes, guns and bombs — real ones — getting onto planes, rigged internal tests, and more show that aviation security remains as fragile as ever. Your kids could probably hijack a plane, if it ever entered their mind.

And then there’s the border. Chertoff boasts about the hundreds of miles of new border fencing, a few spots of which he welded himself as a publicity stunt, the new surveillance technology, thousands of new Border Patrol agents, and hundreds of thousands deported. Yet the border remains porous since it’s easy enough to go over, under, through — or most frequently, around — the few spots where fences exist. And it’s easy enough for at least some people to evade thousands of Border Patrol agents, too.

Not to mention what is bound to happen when illegal immigrants build sections of the fence.

“There’s a transformation taking place in border towns and communities that were once plagued by drug smuggling and overrun with illegal immigrants,” Chertoff says. The transformation, of course, is that different border towns and communities are now overrun with illegal immigrants. Sort of.

It seems that over the last year, fewer people have been immigrating to the U.S. illegally. “This is a direct result of heightened security and enforcement,” according to Chertoff. According to the illegal immigrants, it’s a direct result of the U.S. economy going straight to hell. With so many people out of work, we need those jobs to go to Americans, right?

“We’ve cracked down on employers who blatantly violate immigration laws,” Chertoff says, “while giving businesses better tools, like E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce.” After all, those millions of people in Michigan who need a job are going to travel halfway across the country to work in a meat packing plant, right? Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Of course, to ensure the workforce is legal, the workforce has to be identified. “We’ve implemented new standards for secure driver’s licenses across the United States to prevent the use of fraudulent or stolen documents,” Chertoff says. That’s the much-maligned REAL ID Act.

Nobody is required by law to have an ID in this country. Unless they want to do things like open a bank account, or get a job, or travel. It’s a distinction without a difference, since virtually everyone is thereby forced to carry their papers just to live from day to day, and in most circumstances, forced to show them on demand. And the requirement to show your ID at the airport doesn’t even make you any safer. Chertoff even admitted as much.

Chertoff goes on to mention new regulations on chemical facilities and transportation of chemicals by rail, as well as deployment of “early-warning surveillance systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under our BioWatch program” to warn of a biological attack. In 2005, those sensors went off in Washington, D.C., right in the middle of an anti-war protest. It appears to have been a malfunction.

“Finally,” Chertoff saves the best for last, “we’ve integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is fully prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during a major disaster.” Chertoff says he’s given FEMA more power, improved emergency communications somewhat, and improved coordination with other government agencies and the private sector. It remains to be seen what the results will be, but if you’re in an area that has natural disasters, I wouldn’t place my bets on the government being there to save you. Government is, after all, the world’s largest man-made disaster.

Chertoff is clearly proud of what his department has accomplished over the four years he has been at its head. He’s managed to spend countless billions of dollars creating and growing a bureaucracy the sole purpose of which is to take Americans’ essential liberties and trade them in for a false sense of security, all the while maintaining almost the lowest morale of any government agency through poor — or nonexistent — management.

To give credit where credit is due, Homeland Security actually has managed to do some things right. I just can’t think of what they are right now.

A three-week trial program where illegal immigrants could voluntarily leave the country without being arrested has ended with only eight people signing up.

Under the program, Operation Scheduled Departure, which ran from August 5 through Friday, illegal immigrants without criminal records who had been ordered deported could turn themselves in at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Ill., Phoenix, Ariz., San Diego and Santa Ana, Calif., agree to leave the country within 90 days, and in some cases receive assistance in paying for transportation.

Jim Hayes, acting director of the ICE Office of Detention and Removal Operations, said that none of the eight people, an Estonian, two Indians, two Guatemalans, a Lebanese, a Mexican and a Salvadoran, have yet left the country.

Hayes blamed immigration advocacy groups for the low response to the program, saying they urged people not to participate in protest of immigration laws. But the advocacy groups say there was no organized effort to undermine the program and that it was doomed from the start.

“Plenty of us said it was a silly idea and not going to work, that the undocumented may be illegal but they are not stupid,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Mr. Hoyt suggested that the agency used the program to justify more hard-line tactics.

“A cynic would say they are going to say, ‘See, we tried to be nice,’” he said. “‘We don’t abuse people. Now we’re going to get tough because they didn’t come forward when we tried to be nice, so now we’re going to be mean.’” — New York Times

Don’t be upset at the program’s $41,000 price tag, though. Hayes said it actually saved the $13,000 the government would have spent detaining those eight people. He also made a few other crazy statements, such as suggesting that allowing immigrants to stay in the country would lead to “anarchy.”

Meanwhile, illegal immigrants are leaving on their own in droves, without even waiting for a government raid, because of the faltering economy. When they find it better to leave the U.S. and go elsewhere, you have to stop and take a hard look at where your country is going, and consider whether that’s a direction you really want it to go in.

The federal government has tried almost everything in its various bids to get undocumented immigrants out of the country. Now it’s trying something simple and unusual: just asking them to please leave.

Under “Operation Scheduled Departure,” a pilot program set to run tomorrow through August 22 in Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Ill., Phoenix, Ariz., San Diego and Santa Ana, Calif., illegal immigrants who have been ordered deported and who have no criminal records will be able to turn themselves in at local Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in those cities.

Anyone who does so, ICE officials say, will not be arrested and will be given 90 days to wrap up their affairs and leave the country. In some cases, they may be required to wear electronic tracking bracelets. Such individuals would be able to avoid the risk of being picked up in a raid and going through the government’s convoluted, time-consuming, often unjust excuse for a justice system while their families starve.

[ICE director Julie Myers] said the idea derived from a common complaint voiced by immigrant detainees: If given the opportunity, they’d rather just go home than be holed up in immigration prisons. . . .

“It’s pure fantasy,” said Doug Rivlin, spokesman for the National Immigration Forum in Washington. “An attempt to entice people to sign away their rights and get out of the country as quickly as possible before even talking to a lawyer.”

If people truly wanted to leave on their own, they’d buy their own bus or plane ticket home without checking in with ICE first, Rivlin said.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the country’s largest anti-illegal-immigration lobby group based in Washington, said he’d have to concede that point.

The government would have to offer some kind of incentive to entice immigrants to sign up, such as telling them that by leaving voluntarily they would be allowed to apply to come back legally, Mehlman said. — San Antonio Express-News

Interestingly, this plan might actually work. Word has certainly gotten around by now about the injustice perpetrated on the immigrants picked up in the May 12 Agriprocessors raid in Postville, Iowa, where hundreds of illegal immigrants were railroaded into pleading guilty to trumped-up charges in an on-site temporary court which resembled an assembly line.

This may be part of the reason why illegal immigrants are now leaving the country on their own in droves. From August 2007 to May, the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country dropped from 12.5 million to 11.2 million according to the Center for Immigration Studies. CIS “seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted,” according to its Web site.

Another part of the reason may be economic. Despite claims to the contrary, the U.S. economy was already headed south in mid-2007 and the pace of decline is only accelerating now. And when jobs leave, the workers must follow.

“The problem is it’s difficult to know what’s causing a change like this,” says Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organization of employers nationwide lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform. “But the one thing we know for sure is that the country is in a deep economic downturn, if not a recession, which means there’s much less need for workers, especially those providing services for the middle class.”

“Immigration is a market-driven phenomenon and that’s why immigration is beneficial to the economy,” she says. “When we need them, they come; and when we don’t, they go home. Has enforcement had some effect? Perhaps. But there’s no question that the economic downturn would in and of itself have a huge effect in attracting fewer [illegal immigrants] and sending more home.” — Christian Science Monitor

ImmigrationWorks USA, a federation of pro-immigration business coalitions, lobbies against anti-immigration legislation which it says hurts small business owners.

The truth is likely to lie somewhere in between. Rats jump off a sinking ship before the captain even knows anything is wrong. Immigrants leaving the country on their own is either a sign of hard economic times ahead, or stepped-up worksite enforcement, or perhaps some of both.

How many of the estimated 572,000 illegal immigrants who qualify for Operation Scheduled Departure actually leave will give a good indicator as to which is the major cause of illegal immigrants heading south. Though I’ll predict in advance that, as someone once said, it’s the economy, stupid.

Go Brooklyn. A jury in that fair borough has found Emmanuel “Toto” Constant guilty of mortgage fraud and grand larceny. Emmanuel Constant is the former founder and leader of FRAPH, the Haitian paramilitary group that in the early 90′s systematically tortured and murdered thousands of supporters of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Gang rapes and mutilation by ax were FRAPH specialties. The majority of victims lived in Haiti’s slums. Aristide, a Catholic priest enamored of liberation theology, was prone to totalitarian temptation. Some say he dabbled in drug traffic. Still, he was democratically elected by a desperately poor populace.

Try telling that to the CIA.

During the Clinton years Toto Constant got CIA jack. When Aristide returned to power (briefly) Toto snuck out the back. Entering the USA through Puerto Rico on a tourist visa. When Toto’s stateside presence was discovered it was kinda embarrassing for the Clinton admin. Threats of deportation were made. Supposedly Toto beat that rap by offering to reveal the details of his CIA deal on TV. Whatever. The Bloody One settled down in a lovely home on a quiet street in Queens. Though his residence in the USA remained legally dicey neither Clinton nor Bush deported him.

Eventually Toto became a licensed Realtor and mortgage broker. (In New York State having a rep for paramilitary excess doesn’t disqualify a person from becoming a real estate pro.) By the beginning of the new millennium Toto’s mortgage fraud career was flourishing. He was working with several overlapping groups of organized white collar criminals based in New Jersey and New York — zeroing in on low-income and/or Caribbean immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. Toto also flipped out on Long Island, a regional hot spot of the national mortgage biz. Constant & crew employed all the tricks the FBI has been hollering about for years. Straw buyers, collusive bank officers, phony appraisers, forged docs, invisible rehabs, etc. One player bragged that their fraudulent appraisals had inflated the values of an entire down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Turning it into a pair of Manolo Blahniks. On paper.

Some of the biggest names in the mortgage game went for paper cranked out by Toto and his twisted business associates. One prime example: EMC Mortgage, son of Bear Stearns.

You can read all about Bloody Toto in Mortgage Fraud Land at Blogger News Network or NowPublic. Detailed trial coverage can be found at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Incidentally, Toto was warned about intimidating witnesses. He’d been making creepy phone calls. You can take the boy out of FRAPH but –

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

“Se bon ki ra”
Good is rare
Haitian proverb

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

You check in at the airline ticket counter. But instead of a boarding pass, you get shackled with an electronic bracelet which tracks your every move, contains all your personal information, and can shock you senseless. This vision of the future of air security is being floated around the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development office.

According to a video promoting the so-called EMD Safety Bracelet, all airline passengers would be required to wear it “until they disembark the flight at their destination.”

The device, in addition to storing all of your sensitive personal information and tracking you with GPS, would allow someone to activate it remotely and immobilize the wearer for several minutes. This is EMD, or electro-muscular disruption.

And the Department of Homeland Security is interested in buying them.

According to a letter from Paul S. Ruwaldt of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the department is interested in using them to control illegal immigrants as well as “prisoner transportation, detainee control and . . . to improve air security, on passenger planes.”

Would every paying airline passenger flying on a commercial airplane be mandated to wear one of these devices? I cringe at the thought. Not only could it be used as a physical restraining device, but also as a method of interrogation, according to the same aforementioned letter from Mr. Ruwaldt.

Would you let them put one of those on your wrist? Would you allow the airline employees, which would be mandated by the government, to place such a bracelet on any member of your family?

Why are tax dollars being spent on something like this? Is this a police state or is it America? — Washington Times

While you’re celebrating your paid day off work today, government officials are hard at work looking for new and innovative ways to take away your freedom. You thought they were protecting your freedom?

Here’s what will happen if these things ever get used on airplanes. First, a lot of people will simply refuse to fly. Who can blame them? A lot more will refuse to fly when the first reports of how these things get used surface. One “unruly” passenger starts making noise on the plane and the crew, who have this nice shock collar device, aren’t going to spend a few minutes looking up which of the 87 passengers he is, especially if they “feel threatened.” They’re just going to shock everyone on the plane. Including you and your kids.

But, you asked for security and gave up your freedom for it, and now you’re going to get it.

(Via)

Update: DHS spokesman John Verrico denies that these bracelets will be used for air passengers. See his full statement below.

President George W. Bush on Friday signed an executive order requiring federal contractors to verify the employment eligibility status of federal contractors and subcontractors.

The order marks the first time any group of employers has been required to screen their employees using the E-Verify system, formerly known as Basic Pilot, which has been voluntary since 1996. It’s not likely to be the last.

The E-Verify system queries Social Security and immigration databases to determine if a person is authorized to work in the United States. If the system cannot confirm eligibility, for instance due to an error in one of the databases, the employee must rectify the error or risk being fired — or perhaps deported, despite being a citizen.

The excuse given in the executive order is that “contractors that employ illegal aliens . . . inevitably will have a less stable and less dependable workforce than contractors that do not employ such persons.”

Under the order, contractors will have to screen existing employees who work on any new federal contracts and will have to screen any new employees they hire.

Hoping to address concerns about the accuracy of the system, the Department of Homeland Security said Monday that over 99.5 percent of queries through the system have cleared immediately. Over 69,000 employers currently use the program on a voluntary basis, though over 200,000 employers could be covered under the executive order.

“It will have a huge impact,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. “This is the first time the federal government is ensuring that it will not be responsible, directly or indirectly, for hiring illegal aliens.”

Ms. Jenks said concerns about the accuracy of the Social Security database were overblown. She said many errors in the database came from women who had married and failed to notify the Social Security Administration of their name changes, and from immigrants who had become American citizens. These problems could be easily remedied with requests to Social Security or immigration agencies, she said.

But Mike Aitken, director of governmental affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management, a trade association, said the E-Verify system remained vulnerable to cheating by immigrants who used real identity documents belonging to other people. Without new money and more staff members, Mr. Aitken said, the Social Security Administration could be overwhelmed by inquiries from federal contractors. — New York Times

Easily remedied? These people have never dealt with the Social Security Administration or with Citizenship and Immigration Services — or perhaps with any government bureaucracy. Easy is not in their vocabulary. Neither is efficient, nor fast. Getting an error in government records corrected is difficult at best.

This country was built by immigrants, and you have an immigrant to thank for some aspect of everything in your life as you know it. Hard working immigrants who contribute to our economy are not the problem, yet the problem was created by the government not allowing enough immigrants to come in to the country in the first place. This E-Verify system encourages “illegal” immigrants to come here and sign up for welfare benefits rather than working, which compounds the problem. The solution to immigration is simple: allow anyone to come here who wants to work, and get rid of welfare.

Unless and until this is done, the federal government will continue this crackdown on ordinary Americans in the guise of fighting illegal immigration. It’s only going to get worse for you and your family.

This is the first big step on the road to handing the federal government total control over who works and who doesn’t. It’s also a big step toward a national identification system in which your picture and perhaps other biometric data is tied together from your driver license, passport, Social Security card, and other government sources into a giant centralized government database where any federal bureaucrat on a power trip can find out anything he wants about you.

And once that happens, you are as good as dead, and if the government doesn’t kill you, it will enslave you. That’s how it works.