Corruption Corner – Page 21

The State Has Redundancies To Protect Itself

There’s a sentiment that the proper place to fight the State’s illegal activities is in the courtroom. Sometimes this strategy seems to play out but more often than not if one court rules against the State’s power another court will reverse the decision. In this way the court system acts as a redundancy for the State to preserve its power while maintaining the illusion the people hold the power. Take the National Security Agency’s (NSA) illegal domestic spying operating as an example. In 2013 its actions were ruled illegal by a court but after a lengthy appeal process a higher court has overruled that decision:

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has overturned an injunction against the US government’s phone surveillance program. Today, the court handed down a decision in Klayman v. Obama, a lawsuit arguing that the NSA’s mass collection of phone records is unconstitutional. It found that there was not enough evidence that the lawsuit’s subjects were actually under surveillance, reversing a decision made in late 2013.

The court didn’t address whether the surveillance program was legal or constitutional. Instead, it concluded that the case’s subjects lacked standing to bring a complaint at all, because they were unable to demonstrate that they’d suffered harm. The secrecy of US surveillance programs has made it almost impossible to prove that a specific person or organization was subject to them, so Klayman and other recent cases have relied on leaked documents from Edward Snowden, particularly a court order requiring Verizon Business Services to hand over metadata on all its customers’ calls.

Isn’t it interesting how this court ruled that the plaintiff didn’t have a case because there wasn’t enough evidence to show they weren’t be spied on by a nationwide domestic surveillance apparatus? That’s a twist of logic if ever one existed. Let this be another lesson though. The state protects itself even against itself.

Service To The State Is Rewarded

When an elected official does wrong people respond by saying, “Vote him out!” If the offender is an appointed official people say, “Fire him!” These people have mistaken voting out or firing government officials as a form of punishment. It’s not. In fact getting voted out or fired is often what unlocks lucrative opportunities for the ousted official:

Four-star General Ray Odierno retired from his position as U.S. Army chief of staff on Friday. Now, less than a week after mustering out, he’s cashing in. The former general has taken a job as a senior adviser to the investment firm JPMorgan Chase.

In a press release posted on JPMorgan’s website on Thursday, the firm announced that Odierno is joining the company in “a senior advisory capacity,” providing “strategic advice and global insights” to CEO Jamie Dimon as well as the company’s board of directors. The announcement also said Odierno “will represent JPMorgan Chase through engagement with clients, government officials and policy makers in the U.S. and internationally.”

In this case the official retired but is enjoying the same treatment as most former government officials. Former government officials are valuable commodities for corporations. They come with a lot of contacts and influence. For a corporation wanting to manipulated the regulatory environment to favor itself at the expense of its competition people with political contacts and influence are very desirable.

This is why elections are meaningless. When a politician is ousted they merely move to the private sector to rake in even more cash. And when their replacement sees what benefits await them if they play the same game as their predecessor any prices they made during their campaign fly out the window.

Go ahead and vote out bad politicians and demand elected officials fire bad appointed government stooges. You’re only setting up the stage for them to get a big payout and another person to set themselves up for a future payout.

Public-Private Partnerships

When I first tell people I’m a libertarian their reaction is often to accuse me of being a corporate shill. Many people believe there is some separate between corporations and governments. Depending on what side of the political spectrum they fall on corporations are entirely good and governments are entirely evil or vice versa. In reality corporations and governments depend on one another, which is why governments created the idea of limited legal liability, what we call incorporation, in the first place.

Today corporations and governments work hand in hand. I like to refer to this relationship as a private-public partnership. They’re extremely common and almost always bad for you and me. Case in point, the private-public partnership that has greatly expanded the surveillance state:

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that U.S. telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to trillions of e-mails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters.

Establishing a massive surveillance state from scratch is expensive so the National Security Agency (NSA) tries to partner with companies that already have access to data. Back in 2006 we learned that AT&T was operating an interception facility for the NSA so it shouldn’t surprise anybody to see that partnership has expanded. The NSA doesn’t want to foot the expense of intercepting traffic and AT&T is more than happy to sell data that crosses its lines to the NSA.

A big issue here is that the government, with its monopoly on justice, can create separate rules for itself and private entities. This is a legal reality few people spend enough time considering. While the state may pass a law that prevents it from collecting data on domestic individuals to make the commoners feel good it won’t write a rule preventing private entities from doing the same. Through these separate rule systems the state can still access data through private corporations and be honest when claiming it isn’t collecting the data. And since the state pays well these corporations are more than happy to collect and sell the data.

Surveillance Is For Me, Not For Thee

Law enforcers always want more power to surveil. If they had it their way they would have cameras on every street corner and in very house and every form of communications could be easily tapped whenever they saw fit. They tend to be a bit hypocritical here because they don’t want to be spied up themselves. Santa Ana police officers are coming under fire for a raid they performed on an illegal cannabis dispensary. During the raid surveillance footage shows officers making derogatory comments towards a disabled woman and scarfing down an edible. The dispensary is unhappy with the officers’ conduct and the officers are unhappy that they were recorded:

SANTA ANA – Three Santa Ana police officers want to quash a surveillance video that shows officers making derogatory comments about a disabled woman and possibly snacking on pot edibles during a recent raid of a medical marijuana dispensary.

A lawsuit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court by three unidentified police officers and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, seeks to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal affairs investigators from using the video as they sort out what happened during the May 26 raid of Sky High Collective.

[…]

The lawsuit argues that the video doesn’t paint a fair version of events. The suit also claims the video shouldn’t be used as evidence because, among other things, the police didn’t know they were on camera.

“All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit.

The dispensary also did not obtain consent of any officer to record them, the suit says.

“Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” the suit says.

Pappas counters that the suit is baseless because the officers were aware the dispensary had video cameras and managed to disable most of them.

As far as arguments go that one is downright laughable. Places that use security cameras usually have a sign indicating the premise is under surveillance so it’s difficult to claim that you don’t know you’re being recorded. Furthermore the officers disabled most of the cameras so they knew the premise was under surveillance. With that knowledge the officers should have expected that they would miss a camera or two.

But the officers’ lawyer seems to be arguing that the officers had a reasonable expectation of privacy because they disabled most of the cameras. Somehow that makes the footage illegal, or something.

You have to hand it to law enforcers, they can twist logic to its absolute limits to justify their surveillance while arguing against being surveilled.

You Have To Pay To Play

Every year people from around the world gather in the Nevada desert to show off art, demonstrate their self-sufficiency, and just generally have a good time. This even is called Burning Man and it has been going on since 1986. Because all property is owned by the federal government the organizers of Burning Man have to beg for permission from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in order to host the event in the middle of nowhere. Anytime you have to beg the government for permission there’s a payoff involved. Usually this payoff is wrapped in bureaucratic paperwork and terminology such as permit and license. Seldom is the government blatant about what it wants and why it wants it. But this year the BLM decided toss off the thin veil of officialdom and just demand the luxury air conditioned trailer and unlimited ice cream for some of its agents:

Lavish requests by federal authorities for flush toilets and 24-hour access to soft-serve ice cream at Burning Man are putting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Nevada Republicans on the same side as hippies.

The Bureau of Land Management is denying a permit to hold the music and cultural festival on public land unless organizers pay more than $1 million to house “VIP” agents in an air-conditioned compound with couches and hot water, reported the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Why do federal agents need 24-hour access to soft-serve ice cream, flush toilets, and air conditioned trailers to keep an eye on a bunch of hippies who have managed to host a yearly event since 1986 without nuking a portion of the Nevada desert? Because it’s not about ensuring safety, enforcing environmental protections, or preventing the violation of federal decrees. The BLM’s involvement, like all government involvement, is about transferring wealth from the people to the state and stroking the egos of state agents. State agents often receive inferior pay to people who hold similar jobs in the private sector. In exchange for lesser pay they demand certain benefits such as pensions and obedience from serfs. All of these demands by the BLM are about forcing serfs to kowtow to the king and his knights. But it does give us a rare glimpse of the state outright demonstrating its true intentions instead of trying to make them more palatable by wrapping them in bureaucratic nonsense.

Like You and Me, Only Better

I don’t consider myself anti-union per se. There’s nothing wrong in my book with workers coming together to support one another. But most unions today aren’t really groups of workers fighting for better pay and benefits. Instead they’re a few well paid individuals who agitated relationships between employers and employees to ensure an environment exists where their six figure salary can continue to be justified. In fact I’d argue that most unions today don’t give two shits about the workers they supposedly represent. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Los Angeles:

Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces.

The push to include an exception to the mandated wage increase for companies that let their employees collectively bargain was the latest unexpected detour as the city nears approval of its landmark legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.

The union heads have been pushing for these $15.00 per hour minimum wage laws in various municipalities under the guise of fighting for the workers. But now they’re turning around and exempting the very employees they supposedly represent from the new minimum wage increases. I guess they feel that union laborers aren’t as good as non-union laborers, which is a strange attitude for a union boss to have.

This move does make sense though. If union shops are allowed to pay less than $15.00 per hour it encourages more companies to utilize union labor. More union labor means more employees giving a percentage of their paycheck to the union itself and that means the higher ups can bump up their six figure salary. These unions aren’t fighting for workers, they’re fighting for union executives.

Record Any Police Interactions You Come Across

Many people believe that police departments have only recently become corrupt cesspools. Others believe police departments have always been violent cesspools but pervasive cameras have allowed individuals to raise awareness of the problem. Either way it’s apparently that recording police interactions is absolutely necessary. To this end many departments have started mandating officers to wear body cameras when on duty. Although this could be a nice step in the right direction the two major problems with body cameras is that the officer wearing them can turn them off (and claim it malfunctioned) and the recorded footage remains under the control of the department. Even if every officer in the country wears a body camera I will still advocate what I’m going to advocate in this post: everybody should record every police interaction they come across.

It doesn’t matter if the police are interacting with you or you just happen to come across police interacting with other individuals; if you see cops interacting with people pull out your camera phone and start recording because that’s the only way shit like this gets noticed:

A Minneapolis police officer has been relieved of duty while his department investigates a profanity-laced video in which he apparently threatens to break the legs of a suspect if he attempts to escape.

The March incident was recorded on a camera phone by one of the young men being arrested in south Minneapolis. In the video, the unidentified officer can be heard telling the suspect: “Plain and simple, if you [expletive] with me, I’m gonna break your legs before you get a chance to run.”

Had the young man not recorded the interaction this claim would be nothing more than his word against the officer’s and we know courts tend to side with officers in such cases. The officer may not receive any punishment for his threat of violence, since officers usually get off scot-free, but the public now knows how this officer chooses to interact with people and that can help them better defend themselves against him. Videos like this are also important to raise awareness of the violence inherent in modern policing. Unless there is public outrage the problem will never be fixed and there won’t be public outrage so long as the public can keep lying to itself about the nature of modern policing.

If you come across a police interaction or are being threatened by police yourself make sure you record everything.

Why Pay More? Save Money with Slave Labor Today!

Slavery never ended in the United States, the rulers were just altered slightly. Instead of declaring people slaves based on their ancestry the United States now declares it based on being labeled a criminal. That’s quite convenient since we’re all criminals. In addition to changing the criteria on who is and isn’t a slave the state also changed the rules on who gets the money. Under the previous rules the slave owners received the profits gained through slave labor but now the state gets it all! Hoping to boost profits the state has been advertising its slave labor service to people interested in outsourcing:

Searching for the “best kept secret in outsourcing,” one that can “provide you with all the advantages” of domestic workers, but with “offshore prices”? Try prison labor!

That’s the message of Unicor, also known as Federal Prison Industries, a government-owned corporation that employs federal workers for as little as 23 cents an hour to manufacture military uniforms, furniture, electronics and other products.

The “best kept secret in outsourcing” is literally slavery. And the slave owner in this case gets to create as many slaves as it wants by voting amongst itself to create new crimes. Talk about a win-win situation.

Many people point out that Chinese labor is practically slave labor. But Chinese laborers can demand higher wages and even leave their job if their demands aren’t met. Slave laborers in American prisons can’t demand higher wages because they can’t quit and go elsewhere. Their options are either to work for a quarter an hour or rot in a cell all day long.

Welcome to the freest goddamn country on Earth.

Thousands Stopped By Minneapolis Police Department with No Cause

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has quite a reputation. From its program of picking up people on the street and getting them high on illegal drugs to the corrupt Gang Strike Force there has been little good to say about the integrity of the agency. Now it appears that there is yet another scandal to add to the department’s pile. Thousands of people have been stopped by MPD officers for no reason whatsoever:

Minneapolis police officers rarely record details of their encounters with people they detain but ultimately don’t arrest.

That’s the key finding of a civilian review board draft report that examined 385 “suspicious person” stops conducted by officers in 2014. In nearly 70 percent of those stops, officers provided no documentation of the interaction, other than noting how the call was resolved.

The draft (.pdf) released this week by the Police Conduct Oversight Commission, a unit of the Minneapolis civil rights department, could lead to changes in how police document stops of suspicious people.

I say they were stopped for no reason whatsoever because if there was a reason you can rest assured the officer would have recorded it. Unfortunately this is looking like yet another case where the officers involved will go unpunished. The Police Conduct Oversight Commission is merely looking for changes to how police document stops, it’s not attempting to have the officers charged or even fired.

Since no documentation regarding most of these stops exists it’s hard to tell if MPD was targeting people of certain races. Perhaps MPD is learning form the mistakes of other agencies and simply not keeping detailed records that could be used to make a case of discrimination against the department.

Touching Your Junk for Freedom

What’s to prevent sexual predators from getting a job with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) so they can feel up people? Not a damn thing as people flying through the Denver International Airport found out firsthand:

DENVER (CBS4) – A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.

It happened roughly a dozen times, according to information gathered by CBS4.

According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.

“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

A major problem with a state is that it reserves for itself the right to violate anybody at any time. This is the nasty habit of attracting people who want to violate other human beings. Because of this you get enforcement agencies packed with people most would consider undesirable.

Compounding that problem is the problem of monopoly. When the state declares a monopoly on something and its power is used to violate people there are no alternatives. In the case of the TSA the only alternative to getting sexually assaulted by a TSA agent is not to fly since the state has granted itself a monopoly on airplane security.

Making matters even worse is that the state usually shields its agents from liability (which it can do because it has granted itself a monopoly on legal matters). Nobody was arrested or charged over this incident. Two TSA agents were fired and the Denver District Attorney’s Office decided not to file charges:

Earlier this month a prosecutor from the Denver District Attorney’s Office was asked to review the case but she declined to press charges because there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction and no victim had been identified.

I hope you continue to enjoy living in the freest goddamn country on Earth!