The New Homeless: Formerly Middle Class People Sleeping in Their Cars
May 16th, 2008Maybe those SUV purchases weren’t stupid choices after all—people are living in them now.
This is a CNN video report: The New Homeless.
Research Credit: PD
Texas: U.S. Citizenship to be Checked During Emergency Evacuation
May 16th, 2008I knew there were going to be different camps. Look back at, Texas: Background Check Required Before Evacuation; Different Buses for “Criminals”:
What do you want to bet that the thought criminals will wind up on the buses with the wanted felons, and that those buses will go to different camps. Surely, if there are going to be different buses for “criminals,” there are going to be different camps. Right? Of course, the article doesn’t get into that.
Well, They admit it now. Different camps for illegals.
Sadly, even now, some Cryptogon readers are thinking, “I’m not an illegal alien, I’ll get to go to the ‘nice’ camp.”
Be VERY VERY careful about getting herded into a situation where Homeland Security is sending one group of people to one set of camps and another group of people to another set of camps. I hope people reading this are smart enough to know how that’s going to wind up.
Via: Houston Chronicle:
Ending speculation about the fate of the Rio Grande Valley’s undocumented immigrants during a hurricane evacuation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed it will check the citizenship both of people boarding buses to leave the Valley and at inland traffic checkpoints.
Those determined to be in the country illegally will be taken to detention centers away from the hurricane’s path and later processed for deportation.
“It’s business as usual at the checkpoints,” said Dan Doty, spokesman for CBP’s Rio Grande Valley sector. “We’ll still check everybody.”
Locals responded with predictions of humanitarian disaster.
U.S. Government Hiding True Unemployment Rate in Statistics
May 16th, 2008Via: Daily Reckoning / Mogambo:
In fact, there are now more people on Government Payrolls (22,385,000) than Goods Producing payrolls (21,618,000)! Hahaha! We are so freaking doomed! What makes it So Damned Funny (SDF) is that a conceited, self-absorbed nation like America, that boasts how smart we are, cannot possibly realize the utter, utter stupidity of this! Hahaha! And yet, here it is!
Documents Link Wind Farm Foes to International Energy Conglomerate
May 16th, 2008Imagine my shock.
Via: Boston Globe:
A new lobbying firm for the group opposing a wind farm off Cape Cod filed a federal document last month reporting that its work for the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound is partially funded and shaped by an international energy conglomerate.
The disclosure represents the first documented financial connection between the group opposing the wind farm and Oxbow Corp., which mines and markets energy and commodities, including coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound immediately decried the filing as a mistake, and the lobbying firm later amended it in the US Senate Office of Public Records to eliminate the reference to Oxbow.
Oxbow’s founder, Osterville yachtsman William I. Koch, has been a cochairman of the alliance since 2005, a year that saw a flurry of congressional attempts to kill the wind farm. While Oxbow maintains that its lobbyists monitor Cape Wind because of the corporation’s interest in energy and shipping, Cape Wind proponents assert that Oxbow’s lobbyists have been doing far more to fight the wind farm.
“Bill Koch is using his company to significantly augment the already substantial amount of lobbying that the opposition group is doing by using his fossil fuel company to fight this wind farm,” said Cape Wind communications director Mark Rodgers.
After seven years of review by various governmental agencies, Cape Wind recently received a federal draft environmental review that did not identify any major environmental impediments to building the wind farm in Nantucket Sound.
Bush’s ‘Appeasement’ Speech in Israel
May 16th, 2008Useful Context: How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitler’s Rise to Power
Perhaps an Amnesia category would be useful.
Via: Independent:
President George Bush lavished anniversary praise on Israel yesterday, as Palestinians commemorated the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” when 700,000 were forced from or fled their homes 60 years ago.
In a special address to the Israeli Knesset, Mr Bush declared that the US was proud to be the “closest ally and best friend in the world” of a nation that was a “homeland for the chosen people” and had “worked tirelessly for peace and… fought valiantly for freedom.”
And in a speech that linked together Hamas, Hizbollah and al-Qa’ida, the President likened those – including “good and decent” people – who urged negotiations with “terrorists and radicals”, with supporters of appeasing the Nazis before the Second World War.
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
May 16th, 2008Thank you.
Eileen $125
ED $25
SB $10
Land of the Free: Police Arrest Man without Any Probable Cause, Give Him Knock Out Drugs, Insert Camera into His Rectum, Force Him to Vomit, Take His Blood, X-Ray Him; No Illegal Drugs Found
May 16th, 2008The U.S. is starting to make Darkness at Noon look like a walk in the park.
Via: Times Union:
Two years ago, Tunde Clement stepped off a bus at the city’s main terminal downtown.
Clement, a black man, was carrying a backpack and coming from New York City. That may have been enough to pique the interest of undercover sheriff’s investigators scanning the crowd with their eyes.
They cornered Clement and began peppering him with questions.
He was quickly handcuffed and falsely arrested. He was taken to a station to be strip-searched and then to a hospital, where doctors forcibly sedated him with a cocktail of powerful drugs, including one that clouded his memory of the incident.
A camera was inserted in his rectum, he was forced to vomit and his blood and urine were tested for drugs and alcohol. Scans of his digestive system were performed using X-ray machines, according to hospital records obtained by the Times Union.
The search, conducted without a search warrant, came up empty.
In all, Clement spent more than 10 hours in custody before being released with nothing more than an appearance ticket for resisting arrest — a charge that was later dismissed.
Securing Your Notebook Against U.S. Customs
May 15th, 2008Via: Guardian:
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it’s a fact. So how do you protect yourself?
Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won’t work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a “please type in your password”. Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.
You’re going to have to hide your data. Set a portion of your hard drive to be encrypted with a different key – even if you also encrypt your entire hard drive – and keep your sensitive data there. Lots of programs allow you to do this. I use PGP Disk (from pgp.com). TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org) is also good, and free.
While customs agents might poke around on your laptop, they’re unlikely to find the encrypted partition. (You can make the icon invisible, for some added protection.) And if they download the contents of your hard drive to examine later, you won’t care.
Not-So-Safe-Deposit Boxes: States Seize Citizens’ Property to Balance Their Budgets
May 15th, 2008Via: ABC News:
The 50 U.S. states are holding more than $32 billion worth of unclaimed property that they’re supposed to safeguard for their citizens. But a “Good Morning America” investigation found some states aggressively seize property that isn’t really unclaimed and then use the money — your money — to balance their budgets.
Unclaimed property consists of things like forgotten apartment security deposits, uncashed dividend checks and safe-deposit boxes abandoned when an elderly relative dies.
Banks and other businesses are required to turn that property over to the state for safekeeping. The problem is that the states return less than a quarter of unclaimed property to the rightful owners.
…
California law used to say property was unclaimed if the rightful owner had had no contact with the business for 15 years. But during various state budget crises, the waiting period was reduced to seven years, and then five, and then three. Legislators even tried for one year. Why? Because the state wanted to use that free money.
“That’s absolutely correct,” said California State Controller John Chiang, who inherited the situation when he came into office. “What we’ve done here over the last two decades has been dead wrong. We’ve kept the property and not provided owners with the opportunities — the best opportunities — to get their property back.”
Chiang now faces the daunting task of returning $5.1 billion worth of unclaimed property to people. Some states keep their unclaimed property in a special trust fund and only tap into the interest they earn on it. But California dumps the money into the general fund — and spends it.
Violence in Mexico Spills Across U.S. Border
May 15th, 2008State authority is breaking down in Mexico—even by Mexican standards.
I know what you’re thinking: Mexico has been collapsing for decades.
That’s true, but I don’t ever recall top police officials running for their lives, while others are gunned down.
Via: AP:
Three Mexican police chiefs have requested political asylum in the U.S. as violence escalates in the Mexican drug wars and spills across the U.S. border, a top Homeland Security official told The Associated Press.
In the past few months, the police officials have shown up at the U.S. border, fearing for their lives, according to Jayson Ahern, the deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.
“They’re basically abandoned by their police officers or police departments in many cases,” Ahern told AP.
Ahern said the Mexican officials — whom he didn’t name — are being interviewed and their cases are under review for possible asylum.
In the most recent high-level assassination, a top-ranking official on a local Mexican police force was shot more than 50 times and killed. Drug-related violence killed more than 2,500 people last year alone in Mexico.
“It’s almost like a military fight,” Ahern said Tuesday. “I don’t think that generally the American public has any sense of the level of violence that occurs on the border.”
