Bombshell Report Reveals Up To 30% Of Federal Inmates Are Illegal Immigrants

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released its findings on the immigration status of federal prison inmates, as mandated in a controversial Executive Order signed during the President Trump"s first week in the White House.  The report reveals that of the 37,557 confirmed immigrants in the federal prison system, 35,334 (94%) of them are in the United States illegally - which means out of a total of 185,507, federally incarcerated individuals, over 19% are confirmed illegal immigrants - which, in 2014, cost U.S. taxpayers $1.87 billion to house.

It should be noted that the 19% figure is based on known illegals in federal prison - while 58,766 individuals are "known or suspected" to be illegal. If we apply the 94% confirmed illegal rate to the "known or suspected" population, it brings the total number of potential incarcerated illegal immigrants to 55,240 - or 30% of federal incarcerations. 

(DHS Alien Incarceration Report , Q4 2017)

The report also points out that the federal prison population is roughly 10%, with state and local facilities containing the vast majority of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. 

"The American people deserve a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest," said Attorney General Jeff Sessions, adding "But at the border and in communities across America, our citizens are being victimized by illegal aliens who commit crimes. Nearly 95 percent of confirmed aliens in our federal prisons are here illegally.  We know based on sentencing data that non-citizens commit a substantially disproportionate number of drug-related offenses, which contributes to our national drug abuse crisis. The simple fact is that any offense committed by a criminal alien is ultimately preventable."

Immigrant rights groups predictably had a major problem with the report, claiming racism and manipulated data. 

"The report proves one thing only: The administration will take any opportunity possible to twist facts to demonize immigrants," said Tom Jawetz, VP for immigration policy at the very liberal Center for American Progress, adding "The vast majority of immigrants in federal prison are there for crimes that only immigrants can be charged with - illegal entry and illegal entry after removal. When you cook the books you shouldn"t pretend to be surprised by the results." 

The January 25th Executive Order, 13768; "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States," was designed to use all available resources to deport incarcerated illegals and enforce existing immigration laws. The order states "We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. The purpose of this order is to direct executive departments and agencies (agencies) to employ all lawful means to enforce the immigration laws of the United States."

The order calls for the hire of 10,000 additional immigration officers, allows for issuing fines and penalties to unlawful aliens, allows State and local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration officers, and yanks Federal grant money from sanctuary cities - which was later reversed nationwide by a Chicago judge and ruled unconstitutional by Santa Clara County, CA  judge William Orrick III. 

What wasn"t killed by activist judges, however, was the Executive Order"s mandate to provide quarterly reports on incarcerated immigrants. The EO reads: 

To promote the transparency and situational awareness of criminal aliens in the United States, the Secretary and the Attorney General are hereby directed to collect relevant data and provide quarterly reports on the following:

 

(a) the immigration status of all aliens incarcerated under the supervision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons;

 

(b) the immigration status of all aliens incarcerated as Federal pretrial detainees under the supervision of the United States Marshals Service; and

 

(c) the immigration status of all convicted aliens incarcerated in State prisons and local detention centers throughout the United States.

The Order also sets out enforcement actions, which "shall prioritize for removal those aliens described by the Congress... ...removable aliens who: 

(a) Have been convicted of any criminal offense;

 

(b) Have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved;

 

(c) Have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense;

 

(d) Have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency;

 

(e) Have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits;

 

(f) Are subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or

 

(g) In the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.

One oustanding question now is what will a seemingly sleepwalking Jeff Sessions do about it?

In May, Sessions announced the expansion and modernization of the Justice Department"s Institutional Hearing Program, which is responsible for deportation hearings of incarcerated individuals. The measures are intended to fast-track the deportation of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, which according to Sessions, will speed up the process by removing the criminal immigrant as soon as their sentence is complete - as opposed to sending them to another facility to await deportation. 

"We owe it to the American people to ensure that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in our federal prisons are expeditiously removed from our country as the law requires," Sessions said in a statement.

Sessions" May proposal established 14 federal prisons and six contract facilities for deportation proceedings, which the Attorney General says is a top priority going forward.

New Austrian Gov"t Promises "Sanctions" Against Migrants Who Don"t Integrate

Authored by Jacob Boejesson via The Daily Caller,

Austria’s incoming conservative government is taking a hard line on immigration by promising “sanctions” against those “refusing to integrate.”

Sebastian Kurz, 31, is set to become the world’s youngest leader after winning the parliamentary election in October with his People’s Party. Kurz will serve as chancellor with support from the populist Freedom Party.

A new platform unveiled Monday calls for faster deportations and a halt to illegal immigration. The main emphasis for migrants will be put on integrating to Austrian society by adopting local values.

Monthly payments to migrants will be cut to 365 euros ($432 USD) with the possibility of earning an “integration bonus” of 155 euros ($184 USD).

“We want to protect our homeland Austria as a liveable place with all its cultural assets,” the new government’s platform reads, according to The Local.

 

“This includes deciding for ourselves who can immigrate and live with us and ending illegal immigration.”

The new government has also proposed reforms that would allow authorities to access migrants’ cell phones to verify their identity and travel routes. Migrants may also be asked to hand over any cash and belongings as they enter the country to help fund their welfare.

An estimated 5,500 people marched against the new government Monday in the capital of Vienna.

Protestors shouted “Nazis out” and “Refugees welcome” in response to the Freedom Party’s role in the new administration. The protests were small compared to the last time the Freedom Party entered government in 2000, when an estimated 150,000 participated in demonstrations.

Considering Faking Your Own Death? Then The Philippines Is The Place For You

The technical term is pseudocide - a fancy word that means, essentially, “faking your own death."

Hundreds of thousands of Americans - some struggling with seemingly insurmountable debt burdens or are being hounded by the IRS after stiffing the tax man - have probably fantasized about faking their own deaths. But few understand just how easy it is to - um - execute such an ambitious, if legally precarious, plan.

That’s where purveyors of so-called “death kits” come in. Few westerners are aware of its existence, but there’s actually a thriving cottage industry based in the Philippines, where investors can purchase all the tools they need to fake their own deaths for the surprisingly low price of about 350 pounds (about $500).

Of course, the scheme has several macabre elements. The process involves buying an unclaimed corpse from one of the many morgues in the Philippines where the bodies of John and Jane Does are stored.

According to the Telegraph, many customers who choose this route are desperate Wall Street bankers seeking to escape debt, and men having affairs who want to leave their families.

The Philippines has long been cited in official statistics as the foreign location with the highest number of American tourist deaths. But many of these fatalities are actually fraudulent, the result of desperate westerners faking their own deaths.

Take Elizabeth Greenwood, who “died” as a tourist in the Philippines in 2013. Multiple spectators witnessed her crash her rental car into another vehicle on a busy road in Manila, and doctors at the local hospital pronounced Greenwood dead on arrival - or so her death certificate would have you believe...

Greenwood, who was inspired to fake her own death by her ballooning student debt, is now working as a journalist in New York City after deciding at the last minute that she didn’t want to go through with the scheme.

She first stumbled upon the idea during lunch with a friend who joked about it after she finished ranting about the colossal size of her student debt. But the joke got her thinking. So she started Googling.

“I began poking around online and discovered that death fraud truly is an industry with a whole host of experts and consultants to help you go through with it, and that there are far more people than you might imagine who had done it themselves, with varying degrees of success,” Greenwood explains.

She eventually stumbled on a Wall Street Journal article from the 1980s that referenced “a southeast Asian country” where morgues pick up the bodies of derelicts and freeze them to help customers commit death fraud for insurance purposes.

Greenwood then discovered two elite private investigators, Steven Rambam and Richard Marquez, who consult for life insurance companies seeking to stamp out death fraud.

“Again and again, they named the Philippines as a hotbed for the kind of theatrical death fraud that involves false corpses,” she adds. “They sniff out life insurance fraud all over the globe - it is attempted everywhere - but they told me some memorable stories about cases they’d worked on in the Philippines, so I wanted to check it out myself."

The cost of death fraud can vary widely. A fake death certificate from the Philippines generally costs anywhere in the region of £100 to £350. Some will pay upwards of £20,000 to hire a professional fixer who will help them scratch their trail as they move forward with a new identity.

During a week-long stay in the Philippines, Greenwood found a pair of locals there who obtained a fake death certificate for her from a mole working inside a government agency. All the witness accounts were fake, and there was never a fatal traffic accident as outlined on the papers.

She never crossed the line and actually filed the documents with the US embassy.

“My death certificate sits encased in a plastic sheath at the bottom of my filing cabinet,” Greenwood states.

The difficulty of feigning one’s death depends on the purpose of the fraud. If one is trying to cash in a life insurance policy, then the fraud will require a body and an accomplice, since, without a body, most insurers will wait seven years before paying out a claim. This is why the cottage industry of fake morgues has sprung up.

Some fraudsters might go to the lengths of staging a funeral for their dummy corpse and filming it to submit to the insurance company, she adds, but in most cases, this is an unnecessary flourish.

If insurance fraud isn’t your ultimate aim, then the process of faking your death will be exponentially easier.

“If you’re not committing life insurance fraud, you needn’t go to all the extra trouble,” Greenwood told the Telegraph. “Staging a more open-ended, elegant escape, like disappearing while on a hike, usually looks more believable to investigators."

While insurance companies typically hire private investigators to sniff out death fraud, few cases are ever prosecuted, particularly if they were committed on foreign soil. Often, the only punishment for death fraudsters is their insurance claim being denied.

Greenwood cites one example of a German woman who faked her death and whose fraud remained undiscovered for two decades.

When German authorities discovered she was alive in 2015, after being presumed dead since 1985, the only penalty she shouldered was the trouble of filling out the paperwork necessary to declare herself still alive.

Death fraud happens “constantly”, Greenwood said adding that she detected a spike in cases around the financial crisis.

But while faking one’s death on foreign soil is easier than many believe, the reasons people get caught are also simpler than many might assume.

Particularly if an accomplice is battling it out with an insurance company, fraudsters are typically caught when they try to reach out to loved ones or their parents.

As it turns out, even if they’re dead on paper, many people just can’t cut the ties to their old lives.
 

"Give Us The Man, We Will Make The Case": Civil Forfeiture, RussiaGate, And The Police State

Authored by Jim Jatras via TheDuran.com,

When do we realize we’re already living in a police state?

Maybe one clue is when our betters make a point of assuring us that we aren’t. Here’s Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testifying before a House Judiciary Committee inquiry into political bias in the Robert Mueller “Russia-gate” investigation:

Department of Justice employees are united by a shared understanding that our mission is to pursue justice, protect public safety, preserve government property, defend civil rights, and promote the rule of law.

Rosenstein’s contempt for his interlocutors’ intelligence was unconcealed. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Rod’s on the job! Americans can certainly sleep peacefully tonight.

Or maybe not. Besides cracking down on states’ playing fast and loose with federal marijuana laws, one of the first enforcement actions ordered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R-Recused) was to step up use of civil forfeiture, which is a fancy way of saying “taking the property of people who have not been convicted of anything, or even accused of anything, with little recourse.”

But no sweat, there are “safeguards” to assure that property seizures only impact drug kingpins and gangsters – right?

Sessions’s order . . .  resuscitates a practice known as “federal adoption,” which allows police and prosecutors to circumvent state restrictions on asset seizures by collaborating with federal authorities. Through this partnership, state and local authorities turn their seizures over to federal colleagues, who “adopt” them for prosecution—ultimately returning up to eighty per cent of the assets to the originating cops or prosecutors to keep. One result, often unaddressed in critiques of forfeiture, is the tacit encouragement of racial profiling and targeting of property owners of color, who remain prime targets of the practice in much of the country.

 

A seventy-three-year-old Amtrak retiree named Elizabeth Young understands what’s at stake in Sessions’s civil-forfeiture endorsement. In 2009, she was resting in her West Philadelphia home, recovering from a hospitalization for two blood clots in her lungs, when suddenly she felt her house begin to shake. “I really thought we’d had one of those landslides, like they have in California,” Young told me recently. “I said, ‘What in the world is happening?’ ” She poked her head out into the hallway from her second-floor bedroom, and that’s when she saw them: “a bunch of cops in fatigues,” storming her stairs in a swat-style raid; down below, they were ransacking rooms. The Narcotics North Division was tearing up the house in pursuit of Young’s son, whom they later alleged had sold some hundred and forty dollars’ worth of pot from the residence and from his mom’s 1997 Chevrolet. Nearly a year after the raid, Ms. Young got another round of alarming news: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had filed a petition to seize her house and car, by way of civil forfeiture. [ . . . ]

 

Sessions sees a different picture. “Four out of five administrative civil-asset forfeitures filed by federal law enforcement agencies were never challenged in court,” he said recently, implying that a lack of legal challenge is proof of guilt. But if hiring a lawyer to fight your civil-forfeiture case costs more than your property is worth, the math prevails. Unlike a criminal defendant, Young’s 1997 Chevrolet had no right to a public defender.

Or consider the global move toward what is euphemistically called international financial “transparency.” I mean, who can be opposed to a certified doubleplusgood concept like transparency?

But it depends on who’s being transparent about what. Take Ken Silverstein’s examination of the International Consortium of Independent (sic) Journalists: why do hardly any Americans get transparency-ed in the Panama Papers but so many folks with connections with Russia do? Why so little transparency about who’s lavishly paying the ICIJ piper and for what purpose? Why does a law like FATCA (“Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act”) catch so few actual “fat cat” tax cheats and recover so little revenue, but pours tons of private financial data of innocent middle class people into the maw of the intelligence agencies?

Why? For the same reason James Clapper perjured himself telling Senator Rand Paul that the NSA doesn’t collect our cell phone metadata:

Inquiring minds want to know.

 

If you have nothing to hide, why would you object.

 

Big Brother Is Watching You (and listening, and compiling your data, etc)…

 

…but it’s all for your own protection.

This is literally the opposite of genuine transparency: “It is a practice of good government for institutions to be transparent and open to the people. It is a practice of tyranny for individuals to be made transparent to the government.”

Police state? We hardly need mention the feds’ zeal to protect our virgin eyes and ears from “Russian propaganda” or any American media that betrays its disloyalty by carrying any news or opinion that allegedly resembles it.

Or take the guilty pleas of former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and peripheral Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for the non-crime of “lying to the FBI.” Both detractors and defenders of the Trump administration have gleefully piled on the hapless Flynn and Papadopoulos. They lied! They lied! They lied!

But did they lie? Are we that naïve about how our diligent organs of state security work? Take the case of Flynn:

Russia-gate enthusiasts are thrilled over the guilty plea of President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador, but the case should alarm true civil libertarians.

 

What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency.

 

In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.

Keep in mind that when these “interviews” take place –

…the federal agent is typically well-informed about the facts of the case, but plays dumb in order to instill a false sense of confidence in the interview subject. And, unlike you, the agent has had time to examine all relevant documents. (It also bears noting that the FBI will usually not tape record the interview and that the only official interview report will be an FBI 302, which is the agent’s own dictated version of the conversation. Agents usually work in pairs as well, so in any later dispute over what was said in the interview, guess whose version is likely to prevail? Yours, or the two FBI agents who dictated the 302?)

Good grief! You’re better off not saying anything at all. Except that’s not an option either:

If you are not in custody, your total silence, especially in the face of an accusation, can very possibly be used against you as an adoptive admission under the Federal Rules of Evidence.

This means you are subjected to questioning on a matter where you have done nothing wrong, your responses are being compared (without your knowledge) to detailed records (which you haven’t consulted) and to the agent’s subjective notes (to which you are not privy). Even though you’re not under oath every discrepancy of date, time, name, sequence, or other detail becomes a separate felony charge, each one of which is punishable by years in prison: Alright, Mr. or Ms. X. We’re prepared to charge you with 14 felony counts, which will put you in prison for the rest of your life. Or you can plead guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, with a light or possibly suspended sentence. Which will it be?

Your other option is to go to trial before a jury of sheep your peers, where the feds have a 90 percent-plus conviction rate. Or you can try to fight the charges until you’ve utterly bankrupted yourself, you’ve gone into debt you can never pay back, and your marriage has broken up – they can afford to wait — and still be in the same pickle. The mystery is that everyone doesn’t take the plea offer right away.

In short, if they want to nail you, they can. Like the boychiks used to say in the good ol’ NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; ???????? ??????????? ?????????? ???): “Give Us the Man, and We Will Make the Case.” (I guess nowadays, we should say “person.”)

Oh come on! What hyperbole! We don’t torture or shoot people like the NKVD did! We don’t work people to death in concentration camps!

That’s right, we – or rather, they – don’t have to resort to that kind of thing. In fact, during the late Soviet period they hardly shot anyone and didn’t even lock that many people up. For most, it was enough to know that they could lock you up.

That’s more than sufficient for the sort of weaklings today’s Americans are.

There you have it. Your property can be seized at any time. Your “private” information, isn’t. We are told what media to believe and what not. You can be put in jail if someone decides you need to be put in jail.

"What The Hell Is Going On?": Trey Gowdy Absolutely Destroys Farcical Mueller Probe In Epic Monologue

If there is any remaining doubt in your mind that Special Counsel Mueller"s probe is anything but a farcical, politically-motivated witch hunt, then you"ll be summarily relieved of those doubts after watching the following exchange from earlier this morning between Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.  

Presented with no further comment for your viewing pleasure...

California Is Running Out Of Prisoners To Fight Its Deadly Wildfires

While many on the left have celebrated California’s push to legalize marijuana as a victory for a progressive, harm-reduction approach to combating addiction and crime, the pullback in the number of low-level prisoners entering the state’s penal system is leaving the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Court mandates to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons – combined with the legalization of marijuana, the most commonly used drug in America (aside from alcohol, of course) – have led to a sharp drop in the number of prisoners housed at state facilities in recent years. Interestingly, one byproduct of this trend is it’s creating headaches for the state officials who are responsible for coordinating the emergency wildfire response just as California Gov. Jerry Brown is warning that the severe fires witnessed this year – the most destructive in the state’s history – could become the new status quo.

To wit, since 2008, the number of prisoner-firemen has fallen 13%.

As the Atlantic reports, California has relied on inmates to help combat its annual wildfires since World War II, when a paucity of able-bodied men due to the war effort forced the state to turn to the penal system for help. More than 1,700 convicted felons fought on the front lines of the destructive wildfires that raged across Northern California in October.

While communities from Sonoma to Mendocino evacuated in the firestorm’s path, these inmates worked shifts of up to 72 straight hours to contain the blaze and protect the property residents left behind, clearing brush and other potential fuel and digging containment lines often just feet away from the flames. Hundreds more are on the fire line now, combatting the inferno spreading across Southern California.

But over the course of the last decade, their ranks have begun to thin. As drought and heat have fueled some of the worst fires in California’s history, the state has faced a court mandate to reduce overcrowding in its prisons. State officials, caught between an increasing risk of wildfires and a decreasing number of prisoners eligible to fight them, have striven to safeguard the valuable labor inmates provide by scrambling to recruit more of them to join the force. Still, these efforts have been limited by the courts, public opinion, and how far corrections officials and elected leaders have been willing to go...

With dry conditions expected to persist for the foreseeable future, California will need to adjust to this new reality. Meanwhile, the fate of the inmate-firefighting program lies in the balance between two trends: the increasing need for cheap labor, and the pending decline in incarceration.

The push to reduce overcrowding is a reaction to the rising incarceration rates of the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton declared gangsters and criminals “superpredators” and authorized stiff penalties for relatively minor drug offenses.

For inmates, the reduction in state prison populations that first nudged that balance was long overdue. In the 1990s and 2000s, increasingly severe overcrowding in California prisons compromised medical services for prisoners and led to roughly one preventable death each week. A federal court ruled in 2009 that the inadequate health care violated the Eighth Amendment’s embargo against cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the state to reduce its prison population by just shy of 27 percent - a cut of nearly 40,000 prisoners at the time of the ruling. California appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court upheld it in May 2011.

As one might expect, the push to reduce overcrowding has had the greatest impact on the population of inmates in minimum security prisons. Typically, state officials prefer to recruit minimum security inmates who are already serving relatively light sentences and thus have the most incentive to cooperate and not cause problems (like disappearing into the wilderness).

Also, state guidelines prohibit the recruitment of certain violent criminals and, of course, sex offenders.

The pool of potential recruits was limited long before the courts’ mandate. It comprises only inmates who earn a minimum-custody status through good behavior behind bars and excludes arsonists, kidnappers, sex offenders, gang affiliates, and those serving life sentences. To join the squad, inmates must meet high physical standards and complete a demanding course of training. They also have to volunteer.

 

“But,” cautioned David Fathi, the director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, “you have to understand the uniquely coercive prison environment, where few things are clearly voluntary.” In the eyes of criminal-justice reformers, corrections officials recruit inmates under duress. “In light of the vast power inequality between prisoners and those who employ them,” Fathi continued, “there is a real potential for exploitation and abuse."

Aside from the shrinking inmate population, a handful of inmate deaths this year while battling the NorCal wildfires is causing some low-level offenders to reconsider whether the incentives being offered by the state – credit toward parole, and a generous wage (at least by prison standards) – are really worth the risks.

Many inmates join the force to escape unpalatable prison conditions. In doing so they take on great personal risk, performing tasks that put them in greater danger than most of their civilian counterparts, who work farther from the flames driving water trucks and flying helicopters, among other activities. By contrast, inmates are often the first line of defense against fires’ spread, as they’re trained specifically to cut firebreaks—trenches or other spaces cleared of combustible material—to stop or redirect advancing flames. The work can be fatal: So far this year, two inmates have died in the line of duty, along with one civilian wildland-firefighter. The first, 26-year-old Matthew Beck, was crushed by a falling tree; the second, 22-year-old Frank Anaya, was fatally wounded by a chainsaw.

 

“Obviously this is not something that everyone is willing to volunteer for,” said Bill Sessa, a CDCR spokesman. “We’ve always been limited by the number of inmates who were willing to volunteer for the project.” Even when state prisons were at their most crowded, the camps where inmate firefighters live weren’t filled to capacity. And as the pool of qualified prisoners has contracted, he said, corrections officials have had to “work harder now than we did before to bring the camp to the inmates’ attention."

In an effort to entice more recruits to join up, state officials are trying to emphasize the benefits of volunteering to fight the blazes: Volunteer firefighters can receive visits from family out in the open, instead of behind a thick pane of glass. It also allows them to escape the confines of the prison – for a brief time at least.

But with legal marijuana rapidly draining the ranks of low level offenders, a sizable shortfall will likely to persist in the years to come.

And after the death and devastation wrought by this year’s fires, many inmates have good reason to reconsider.

After all, you can’t enjoy visits with family and friends when you’re dead.
 

Chicago Woman Who Filmed Brutal Kidnapping And Torture Of Disabled Teen Sentenced To Community Service

A 19 year old Chicago woman who live-streamed the racially charged kidnapping, torture and mutilation of a mentaly disabled teen was given 200 hours of community service and four years of probation on Friday.

Brittany Herring Covington - who went by "Herring" on Social Media before her arreest, and "Covington" in recent reports, avoided a possible 33 years in prison on multiple counts, including a hate crime, aggravated battery and aggravated kidnapping - a charge which was dropped along with several others as part of a plea agreement. 

Brittany Herring (Covington) mugshot

Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks handed down the slap on the wrist to Covington, who pleaded guilty to a hate crime, aggravated battery and intimidation charges - telling the teen that he could have sent her to prison, but told her "I"m not sure if I did that you"d be coming out any better."

Hooks warned Covington that should she violate the terms of her probation - which includes a ban from social media for four years, she would face prison time. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to drop additional charges including kidnapping. 

Judge William Hooks, Cook County IL

"Do not mess this up," Judge Hooks said to Covington, who stood in front of him in a blue jumpsuit. Hooks is notably the first African-American president of Chicago"s Federal Bar Association, a past president of the Cook County Bar Association, and a member of the Muslim Bar Association of Chicago. 

Tanisha Covington, Tesfaye Cooper, Brittany Herring Covington, Jordan Hill and victim

The brutal attack took place in early January, after four black Chicago teens kidnapped the mentally disabled white teen and held him captive for nearly two days - binding his hands and feet with duct tape and gagging him with a sock, before using a knife to cut and stab the victim while laughing, shouting racial slurs and issuing death threats. In one segment of the livestreamed attack, one of the females can be seen laughing as she punches the victim. At another point, one of the male attackers wraps a cord around the victim"s neck while he groaned in pain, and in another a male approaches the victim with a knife and asks the others "Should I shank his ass?" Other notable quotes include: 

“Fuck Donald Trump, Fuck white people”

 

“There’s gonna be a murder. Pop pop pop”

 

“We gonna put this bitch in the trunk, put a brick on the gas, like aaaaaaaaah”

 

“Pistol whip his ass, fool“

After nearly 48 hours, the kidnapped teen escaped after the kidnappers left the apartment to confront a neighbor who had called 911 to complain about the noise coming out of their apartment where the torture was taking place. 

The video, which can be seen here, or here immediately went viral. After the teens were arrested, Chicago PD initially said it was not racially motivated, despite it clearly being a hate crime. Jordan Hill, 18, of Carpentersville; Tesfaye Cooper, 18, of Chicago; and Brittany Herring"s sister Tanishia, 24, were each charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crimes, aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. 

After her arrest, Brittany Herring Covington bragged on Facebook from a smart phone she was able to sneak into jail, posting "yall mad?" and "Sittin in dis cell on my celly talking to yall trippin. Erbody got phones in her these day," and typing "Tfse" which stands for "The Funniest Shit Ever." 

And for her participation in the brutal crime, Herring-Covington only received 200 hours of community service and four years of probation. Meanwhile, a Broward County, Florida man who vandalized a Mosque and left bacon inside was sentenced to 15 years in prison last week. 

The three other kidnappers charged along with Herring-Covington are still awaiting trial. Perhaps Judge Hooks will give them the key to the city. 

 

"Rotten To The Core" OSI Shares Plunge 15% After Muddy Waters Unveils Short Position

Muddy Waters" founder Carson Block unveiled his latest short play Wednesday morning. And instead of being another obviously fraudulent Chinese company, Block"s target is OSI Systems, an American firm that manufactures security equipment x-ray machines and metal detectors. The company is best known as the owner of Rapiscan Systems - a division that manufacturers scanning machines used at airports.

In a 13-minute video, Block lays out his research, explaining how he suspects OSI’s executives are guilty of multiple violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for paying kickbacks to local officials who in turn rewarded it lucrative contracts. But as if corruption weren"t enough, Block explains how roughly half of the company’s EBITDA is tied to turnkey contract in Mexico that could disappear as soon as next month.

The company is "rotten to the core" warns Block, "we have smoking gun evidence" as the importance of the contract to the company’s bottom line has been obscured by the fact that it represents only 15% of total revenues.

Tracing the threads of corruption led Block to Albania, Mexico and Puerto Rico, three locations where OSI has won lucrative concessions by offering kickbacks to local government officials - kickbacks that were readily accepted.

“I know this will sound crazy - but Albania is a pretty corrupt place," Block says, before explaining that it was practically "an open secret" that OSI benefited from bribing local officials.

For one of OSI’s concessions in Albania, the company turned over half of the contract to a local shell company for roughly $4.50, according to official documents.

As is typical when Block announces a short, OSI - which has a market cap of about $1.3 billion - was down about 15%.

In a statement provided to Zero Hedge, Block said he’s short OSI because he feels it’s “rotten to the core."

“We are short OSI Systems, Inc. because we think it is rotten to the core. We believe it obtained a major turnkey contract in Albania through corruption. It is likely that OSIS’s accounts are misstated as a result.

 

We believe the pricing of its Mexico turnkey contract does not stand up to scrutiny. This contract is up for renewal in 2018, and we estimate that it accounted for more than 50% of OSIS’s FY2017 EBITDA.

 

Non-renewal or a material reduction in pricing of the Mexico contract would seemingly have a significant impact on OSIS’s profits. Former employees’ statements support our view that OSIS is rotting from the inside."

Block’s latest bet comes on the heels of a stunning victory for his firm. Last month, Huishan Dairy entered provisional liquidation, validating Block’s call - made about 10 months earlier - that the company’s shares would go to zero.

Now, the question is: Will he do it again?
 

The Legal System Is Failing America When It Comes To Immigration

Authored by Scott Greer via The Daily Caller,

The illegal immigrant who fired the gun shot that killed Kate Steinle was able to beat a murder charge this week.

Jose Garcia Zarate, a five-time deportee from Mexico and convicted felon, walked away with only a gun conviction after his legal team convinced the jury their client accidentally fired a gun three times and had no intent of killing anyone.

The Steinle case has attracted national attention ever since her murder occurred in 2015 in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. The murder became the focal point in the debate over illegal immigration, showing the dangers of sanctuary city policies and how America can’t secure its borders from convicted felons with multiple deportations.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump highlighted the murder several times on the campaign trail for why America needs to get tough on illegal immigration and eliminate sanctuary city policies.

There was always a political element to the case, and that comes into play as to why a San Francisco jury sought fit to let Zarate go free without even an involuntary manslaughter charge.

The prosecution team does warrant some of the blame for why that occurred. As RedState’s Sarah Rumpf argued, prosecutorial overreach trying to get a harder to prove first-degree murder charge bears some responsibility for the exoneration of Zarate for Kate’s killing.

However, that factor can’t be solely responsible for the not guilty verdict for an illegal immigrant who somehow accidentally fired off a gun three times with no malicious intent in mind.

San Francisco is a very liberal area and jury selection, according to Zarate’s defense team, was ensured to better benefit their client.

“We are very pleased with the jury,” said Matt Gonzalez, the lead defense lawyer for Zarate, upon the completion of jury selection.

 

“We have such great diversity built in in San Francisco and I think we have a jury that understands a lot of the concerns about the defendant receiving a fair trial.”

That diversity was reflected in the jury consisting of three immigrants, at least one of whom’s primary language was Spanish. Potential jurors were quizzed about their thoughts on immigration, Latinos, guns and crime when being taken into consideration.

Gonzalez also asked them how they would be fine with a verdict that came out contrary to President Trump’s wishes.

While the judge presiding over the case urged the jury to leave aside their opinions on immigration and guns and focus on the facts, it was always hard for this case to escape from politics.

Juries don’t always make the right decision, as anyone who is still upset by O.J. Simpson walking free can attest. The Steinle case seems to be emblematic for how America’s legal system seems incapable of adequately dealing with immigration issues.

Zarate should’ve never been in the country to begin with, yet a San Francisco prison let him go free while under a sixth deportation order three months before Steinle’s murder. All thanks to sanctuary city policies.

And this isn’t the only case where the legal system failed to find justice for illegal immigrant crime.

In October, a Texas woman who lost her husband and two children to a car crash caused by an illegal immigrant expressed outrage that the man responsible only received a two-year sentence for the crime.

In May, an Oregon circuit court overturned the conviction for an illegal immigrant who ran over and killed two girls playing in a leaf pile. The court bought the driver’s story that she didn’t realize she ran over anything as she drove away from the scene of the killing.

That reversed conviction was not for vehicular homicide, but for the driver being found guilty of failing to perform her duties as a driver. The courts also managed to dismiss her deportation case over the incident.

There’s also the example of San Francisco feeling embolden to continue to defend their sanctuary city policies, which give protection to illegal immigrants from deportation, after the Steinle verdict.

A convicted felon who will apparently fire off guns without thinking isn’t exactly the poster boy you want for your policies, but San Fran seems comfortable with that association.

Then again, the city should feel emboldened by how the courts continue to strike down the immigration orders of the president.

Even more important than the individual cases of leniency given to illegal immigrant criminals is how the courts are presently shaping our country’s immigration policy.

The White House has sought to punish jurisdictions that refuse to follow federal immigration law, yet courts have blocked the administration’s attempt to do so. In November, a U.S. district judge in California ruled the administration could not reduce federal funding to sanctuary cities because it “will cause them constitutional injuries.”

Earlier the same month, another U.S. district court judge argued from the bench that the Department of Justice was wrong to say a city was failing to meet law enforcement requirements by giving protection to illegal aliens.

Even more expansive than these court arguments on sanctuary cities is the legal system’s opinion on who the government can bar from entry into the country.

Increasingly, the courts have inched towards the opinion that the federal government cannot restrict immigration from any part of the world. The various versions of Trump’s travel ban have been knocked down by the courts for the alleged reason they discriminate on the basis “of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.”

In spite of the lengthy legal history of America restricting immigration based on national origin, judges have taken the initiative to make their own interpretation of migration policy. No matter how many times the Trump administration revises the executive order to prove it is not a Muslim ban, the courts still find it too discriminatory to take effect.

By declaring that the government cannot restrict immigration based on national origin, judges are declaring any attempt to limit migration is inherently racist. This thinking operates under the delusion that there is some hidden open borders clause in the Constitution.

We must take in any and all newcomers to the country because the Statue of Liberty poem says so. It doesn’t matter whether they come here legally or illegally, we must unquestionably welcome these immigrants or we are no longer America.

Many Americans find this argument ridiculous, as a large percentage of our country supports immigration reduction. But courts don’t have to answer to the people, and judges have used their power to impose their own will on immigration policy.

From the leniency shown to illegal alien criminals to preventing the president from enforcing immigration law, America’s legal system is proving it cannot be trusted to side with the interests of the nation’s citizens.

Fortunately, Trump is reshaping the federal judiciary with conservative picks and one hopes thatrestores sanity to the courts soon.

Until then, try not to be killed by an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city. A jury may find it’s more important to send a message to the president than find justice for your murder.

"Deadliest Year Ever" - Baltimore Eclipses 2016 Homicide Total

As of 11:20am ET. Thursday morning, the wave of violent crime continued in Baltimore with the death of a 21-year old man by gunfire.

The significance of this latest death in Baltimore’s urban war zone, is that total homicides in 2017 have now topped 2016 levels at 319, and there is still one month to go. 

Homicides in Baltimore have averaged 29 per month, which could indicate Baltimore is now on track for the deadliest year ever to be recorded. The all-time per-capita record was set back in 2015, with 344 homicides, said Fox News.

Throughout the year, we have pointed out Baltimore’s rapid deterioration into chaos (see: America’s Urban War Zone: Baltimore Doubles Chicago’s Homicide Rate In 2017).

 Baltimore is on track to exceed 400 homicides in 2017 for the first time in the city’s history and has more than doubled Chicago’s homicide rate on a per capita basis. 

Baltimore Mayor Catherine E. Pugh has called the city’s gun violence “out of control.” Earlier this year she begged the Federal Government for help as 2017 murders soar to a 20-year high.

“I’m calling on all the assistance we can possibly get because I can’t imagine going into our summer months with our crime rate where it is today, what that’s going to look like by the end of the summer,” says Mayor Catherine Pugh.

 

“Murder is out of control,” says Pugh.

 

“We are looking for all the help that we can get,” she says.

The most recent flare up to draw national attention was the November execution of Sean Suiter, an 18-year veteran of the force, who was fatally shot while on active duty. Shortly after, we reported on the 4-5 day lockdown of one West Baltimore neighborhood by police was described as ‘Martial Law’.

15 @BaltimorePolice vehicles on Schroeder alone and dozens more on surrounding blocks. All the officers are just sitting in their cars. pic.twitter.com/M9zCCltdzK

— Baltimore BLOC (@BmoreBloc) November 19, 2017

Death and despair in Baltimore comes at no surprise since the city has been run by democratic controlled leadership for over 50-years. As the death toll Skyrockets, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan has had enough and said this week that he will be issuing his own crime-fighting strategy, per CBS:WJZ.

Gov. Hogan said no need for the National Guard but ‘will reveal his own plan to stop the violence in Baltimore as soon as next week’. Back in 2015, Hogan declared a state of emergency during the Baltimore riots, where he called in the National guard to restore order in the city.

Developments in the next 30-days for Baltimore will be critical in determining government’s next step in tackling the urban war zone for the 2018 timeframe. As expected, the city is projected to further deteriorate this month and record the most homicides ever. Now it’s Hogan’s turn to offer a crime-fighting plan and what we’ve seen before… He isn’t afraid to use the National Guard.

Baltimore is an urban war zone - it should be treated like one.

Federal Prosecutors Are Running Amok

Authored by William Anderson via The Mises Institute,

It is hard to know where to begin regarding the charges against Paul Manafort, the former campaign director for Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid, but having read the indictments and knowing some background about both the case and the investigation, I cannot say it is exactly a high point of American justice. In fact, when former FBI chief Robert Mueller first was appointed as a special prosecutor to look into the allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia the tilt the election to Trump’s favor, I feared his investigation would turn out to be an assault on the Constitution – and Mueller has done nothing to dispel those fears.

I have included a link to the actual indictment, and while federal indictments can be a bit mind-numbing to read, nonetheless I have found nothing in it that relates to the original reason the Mueller probe was created: alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Instead, it is clear that Mueller engaged in a legal “fishing expedition” against Manafort and found evidence of tax evasion involving income that Manafort made while serving as a lobbyist for the government of Ukraine.

The criminal charges themselves clearly don’t match up to the original purpose of the investigation. Writes Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Both were accused of working as foreign agents and failing to report that status to the federal government, using shell corporations to launder income and obstruction of justice by lying to the federal government.

He adds:

The alleged crimes of Manafort and Gates appear to have nothing to do with Trump, nor have they any facial relationship to the Russians. So why were these two indicted by a grand jury hearing evidence about alleged American assistance to Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaign?

One of the worrisome aspects of the indictments, however, has been Mueller’s use of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as filing criminal charges using that law has been done only six times before, according to George Washington University and legal blogger, Jonathan Turley. Manafort’s violation, notes Turley, was retroactively registering as a foreign agent, something that in almost all cases is treated as a regulatory violation and punished with fines (if it even comes to that). For that matter, prominent Democrat lobbying Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, did the same thing and no federal prosecutor cared to make a federal crime out of it.

If anything, I believe that in his quest to rid Washington of Donald Trump, Mueller seems to be taking a page from Rudy Giuliani’s infamous Wall Street prosecutions in which he and his staff found ways to criminalize what at most were regulatory violations (which almost are impossible not to violate, given the voluminous numbers of them promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission). Yes, there are issues of tax evasion, allegedly hiding income, and depositing money in offshore banks, but none of those relates to anything remotely involving alleged Russian involvement in the U.S. presidential election of 2016.

While I have no doubt Manafort will go to federal prison, given the near-unchecked powers of U.S. attorneys, whether or not Mueller and his highly-partisan staff are going to be able to use their probe to remove Trump from office – which clearly is Mueller’s goal – is another matter altogether. What is clear is that Mueller has openly declared war on legal ethics, from his hiring of a prosecutor who has been cited before for skirting the law, to his basing much of the justification for his investigation upon a document secretly funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign which has seriously been questioned for its truthfulness.

Whether or not one approves of Donald Trump’s presidency, when a prosecutor staffs his organization with other known partisans that openly supported Trump’s opponent, he is sending a message that his is a political probe, not a legal one. Furthermore, Mueller’s lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissman, while admired by the New York Times for his lack of legal ethics (the NYT long has openly cheered for prosecutors like Weissman, James Comey, and Rudy Giuliani that regularly have broken the law in their prosecutorial quests), is well-known for scorched-earth prosecutorial tactics that at least one time resulted in a fellow federal prosecutor filing ethics complaints against him.

Not surprisingly, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, well-known for his legal moral compass and support of the rights of the accused, has pointed out that Weissman seems to have no legal scruples whatsoever, essentially filing criminal charges wily-nily and then letting the courts sort out whether or not his actions even were legal. Writes Turley:

Mueller raised some eyebrows early in his tenure as special counsel by hiring prosecutors with controversial reputations for stretching the criminal conduct to the breaking point. His chief aide, Andrew Weissmann, has been widely criticized for a pattern of “prosecutorial overreach” in cases like Enron. Weissmann’s work against the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen is one such example. The convictions that he secured at any cost in that case were unanimously reversed by the Supreme Court. Likewise, Weissmann secured convictions against four executives with Merrill Lynch by stretching the criminal code beyond recognition The Fifth Circuit reversed them. He also resigned from the Enron task force in the midst of complaints over his tactics.

One should recall that the Enron prosecution was characterized by prosecutorial misconduct throughout the case, including subornation of perjury, lying to the judge and jurors (not to mention the public), and withholding exculpatory evidence. That Mueller would reach into that prosecutorial cesspool and pull out the one prosecutor who was deemed even too dishonest for that probe says clearly that Mueller is not going to allow truth to seep into his prosecution.

Indeed, Weissman’s dishonesty and Cheka-like tactics could be the entire subject of this article (which would make it a very long piece of writing, indeed) and I am not surprised that the New York Times and the rest of the political establishment is solidly behind him. The newspaper that covered up the horrendous Ukraine famine of the early 1930s – and still proudly displays the Pulitzer Prize it won for its false reporting – long ago abandoned journalistic integrity to use its pages to chase after progressive causes. Those of us that wrote extensively about the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case also remember how the NYT cheered on one of the most corrupt prosecutors in U.S. history. That Mueller would use a known liar like Weissman as his lead prosecutor is deemed acceptable by the NYT because the ultimate goal in the Mueller campaign is to remove Trump from the White House. While the NYT will not use the term “by any means necessary,” it is clear that the newspaper and the ruling class it represents are willing to accept lawbreaking on behalf of the federal government to accomplish Trump’s outster.

It was Weissman that orchestrated the infamous Gestapo-like pre-dawn raid on Manafort in his home, holding him and his family at gunpoint (although all of them were unarmed and posed no threat to federal agents). While the political establishment and the left cheered the raid, others that are concerned with police and prosecutorial abuse wonder if government agents should be free to engage in such actions of intimidation against people who are simply under investigation.

Mueller himself already has demonstrated his lack of legal ethics, as he once tried to trick the famed civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate into suborning perjury. Mueller’s tactic that Silverglate describes was one that if the courts actually were honorable, it would have resulted in Mueller’s being disbarred, but federal prosecutors are not honest people and the system that supports them only enables outright criminal behavior by those shielded from being subject to the law.

In his well-referenced book Three Felonies a Day, Silverglate documents how federal prosecutors manage to find crimes where there is no criminal behavior, and certainly no intent even to break the law. He also points out that a favorite tactic of federal prosecutors is to charge a lower-level employee or associate of the person actually being targeted, and then offer that person a deal – provided the accused says what prosecutors want to hear. As Silverglate has said, the idea is to get the accused person to “sing,” but all-too-often, what prosecutors actually do is to get the person to “compose” something that is not true. Judge Napolitano concurs:

The ultimate target of Mueller’s investigation is President Trump. It is standard operating procedure when prosecutors have a high-level target to charge those below the target with something just to get them to cooperate. Though the charges against Manafort and Gates need not be related to the Russians or to Trump, they must be real. It’s clear they are, as each is facing more than 20 years in prison. Mueller believes that that prospect is enough to dispatch their lawyers to make deals with him.

The danger of such a deal is that Manafort and Gates may offer to tell Mueller what they think he wants to hear — even if it is not truthful — so that they can have their prison exposure lessened. (Emphasis mine)

In a recent story, NBC News announced that Mueller is likely to indict Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. No doubt, prosecutors will try to get Flynn to implicate Trump on something – or face what would be a life sentence in prison.

Indeed, given that neither Weissman nor Mueller ever have been bound by ethical constraints, I would not be surprised to see prosecutors and the FBI simply create false testimony out of whole cloth. Ordinarily, using such a tactic against a sitting president would be beyond the pale and not even federal prosecutors in ordinary circumstances would consider doing it. However, these hardly are ordinary times, and the American political establishment is united against Trump and the media and the courts are less likely than usual to apply safeguards to accepting the truth of accusations against him. Just as Rudy Giuliani was able to run roughshod over law in order to indict and ultimately force Wall Street investment banker Michael Milken to plead guilty to what essentially were non-crimes, Mueller and Weissman are looking to do to President Donald Trump.

Not long ago, I would not even have thought of saying things I have written in this article, but that was before I began several years of research of federal criminal law and how prosecutors apply it. I still believe what I wrote seven years ago:

The great English jurist William Blackstone declared that law was to be “a shield for the innocent” and a mechanism to protect people from the predations of others, as well as the predations of the government itself — the very meaning of limited government. This is no longer the case. Ironically, as laws proliferate in Congress, the rule of law is disappearing. The law has become the plaything of federal prosecutors who advance their careers by convicting others.

 

Three Kinds of Theft

Via The Daily Bell

Taxation is theft. But I’ve seen some people defend taxes with typical arguments like, “It’s not theft because you get something for your money.”

Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact that not all thieves act the same. There are at least three different types of theft in which the government engages.

1. The Con

The con artist cheats you out of your money. He makes you think you are getting something of value, or he tricks you into being robbed without your knowledge. Most people are conned into supporting taxation, assuming taxes are the price of civilization. They assume that is the way it has to be, and that taxes are justified because people get government services in return.

So when someone argues that taxes aren’t theft because you are getting something for your money, this is a con. Yes, the government maintains the roads, but both the price and delivery are the con. You must use the government to get the roads, you have no choice. The con artist convinces you roads could be built in no other way, and for no lower cost. The same goes for security, education, food safety, and so on.

And of course sometimes long after the government has taken your money, you realize that they never delivered on whatever promise they made: to keep you safe, to create more jobs, to strengthen the economy, to reduce crime etc. Think you’ll get your money back? Think again, you’ve been conned.

2. Extortion.

Maybe you see the con coming, as many of us do, and refuse to pay taxes. Well, then comes the extortion.

“You’ve got a nice home here, it would be a shame if someone seized it for back taxes. Come on man, don’t make us come back here, we’re not gonna be as nice next time around. You don’t have health insurance? What’s gonna happen if someone breaks your kneecaps? Pony up buddy.”

Those of us who aren’t conned into thinking taxes are necessary or proper generally pay because we don’t want the government to ruin our lives. It’s the classic mafia style, being forced to pay protection money, even though they are your largest threat. Sure they might keep other thugs off the block, but then again, they might not. Either way, you are going to pay, or they will hurt you in any way they can.

Ultimately, all taxes are collected under the threat of violence. Obtaining something through threats or force is extortion.

3. Armed Robbery.

Finally, if you refuse to play into the con, and you refuse to be extorted, you will face a home invasion, which is really the final phase of extortion. When your home is invaded you will either be kidnapped or killed, depending on your reaction to the assault, and the mood of your attackers.

Then they will take everything of value until the original amount they said you owed is paid, plus some extra for not cooperating. If they claimed you owed them an especially high figure, they will keep you caged as an example to others who refused to be extorted.

So yes, taxation is theft, and most people that disagree have been so easily conned that they simply think they haven’t been robbed. But they never bother to think about what would happen next if they didn’t accept the sham products and overprices services!

Being conned is theft: we are tricked into letting go of our money, or having it taken while we aren’t looking (like inflation). Extortion is clearly theft as well: the “alternative” of having your kneecaps broken or business burned down is no alternative at all, it is simply a method of having you turn over your money in order to avoid a violent attack. And armed robbery is clearly theft. You are in the midst of the violence and can no longer avoid it. You must turn over your money, or see the violence escalate until ultimately you are killed.

No matter how you slice it, taxation is theft.

Two Americas

Authored by Michael Owen,

No amount of statistics or facts will sway either side in the gun control debate, because they are all looking for simple solutions to complex problems.

The facts of those complex problems are uncomfortable and nobody really wants to come to grips with them.

For example, we don’t really have a single America with a moderately high rate of gun deaths.

Instead, we have two Americas, one of which has very high rates of gun ownership but very low murder rates, very comparable to the rest of the First World democracies such as those in western & northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, South Korea. The other America has much lower rates of gun ownership but much, much higher murder rates, akin to violent third world countries.

The tough questions are those like, why do we have these two Americas?

But that’s an uncomfortable discussion to have. So instead those on the left favor simple minded restrictions that target first world America, with its high gun ownership but very low murder rate, but don’t address the root causes of third world America’s violence at all. Meanwhile those on the right correctly feel their civil rights are constantly threatened, so they are constantly in a state of “better stock up before they finally ban it” and the guns and ammo fly off the shelves. The left’s constant gun control rhetoric is the greatest thing ever for arms manufacturers.

Meanwhile, over the past 40 years, while the number of guns in private hands has doubled, the murder rate has dropped by half. The left are constantly prattling about “assault weapons” which are almost never used to commit murders (about 1% of gun murders; all rifles combined are around 3%). More murders are committed with baseball bats than “assault rifles”; the vast majority of gun homicides are committed with handguns, but it’s easier to sell restrictions that target “assault weapons”, even though such restrictions, even if 100% effective, would make no detectable change in the murder rate (especially because of substitution effects). They favor ridiculous measures such as bans on “high capacity magazines”, as if magazines weren’t cheap and easily swapped out in a fraction of a second.

The uncomfortable fact is that roughly 80% of the US homicide rate is associated with the drug trade, and the drug trade is violent because the drug war reserves it for violent criminals.

We have a system in place where the government subsidizes poverty in urban areas, imposes economic blight in those same areas through heavy taxes and regulations, renders the residents permanently unemployable via the “criminal justice” (sic) system, and creates a lucrative black market in drugs by restricting supply (not to mention increasing demand as people are desperate to escape their circumstances by getting high), meaning the only game in town is often entering the drug trade. The drug trade is violent because those in it have no access to courts to settle disputes. Powerful industries lobby to keep the drug war going; the top spenders are law enforcement unions, the prison industry, big alcohol, tobacco, and pharma.

Guns are not the proximate cause of gun violence in the US. Childlike magical thinking and simple “fixes” to complex problems will not work. But it is comfortable, and self-righteousness feels so good. So I expect it to continue indefinitely.