Tag: slavery

Oregon mom, daughter indicted for trafficking Haitians in ‘indentured servitude’ at adult care home: DOJ

An Oregon mom and daughter have been indicted by the Department of Justice on human trafficking and forced labor charges. The pair allegedly put three Haitians, including a minor, in “indentured servitude” at an adult care home they owned and operated in Tigard, a city located southwest of Portland, according to a press release from the Justice Department.

Marie Gertrude Jean Valmont, 66, and Yolandita Marie Andre, 30, are accused of using violence and threats to force their victims to work long hours for little or no pay. The seven-count indictment charges both of them with conspiring with one another to commit forced labor, committing forced labor, and benefitting from forced labor.

Court documents state that Valmont and Andre, the owners and operators of Velida’s Care Home in Tigard, began their human trafficking scheme in Sept. 2023, when they convinced two adults and a child from Haiti to travel to the United States to work at their care home.

After arriving in the Portland area, the victims were immediately taken to Velida’s where they were allegedly forced to work long, arduous 17-hour days for little or no pay. Valmont and Andre are alleged to have taken the victims’ immigration paperwork and forbade them from leaving Velida’s under any circumstances. Additionally, Valmont is alleged to have thrown items at the victims, threatened to send them back to Haiti and have them killed, and threatened to call police to make false theft allegations against them, according to the indictment.

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‘White Fragility’ author slams conservative podcaster Matt Walsh, who duped her into giving black producer reparations in new documentary

“White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo slammed well-known conservative podcaster Matt Walsh, who posed as an anti-racist activist and duped her into giving a black producer reparations in an upcoming flick that she called a “Borat-style mockumentary.”

DiAngelo vowed in a statement on Thursday not to watch the film she argued is “designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists,” and addressed the uncomfortable scene that played out between her and right-wing personality Matt Walsh in the documentary “Am I Racist?”

Walsh, 38, went undercover when he sat down with DiAngelo and claimed to be interested in anti-racist sentiments before asking his producer, Ben, who is black, to join them.

Walsh, who works at conservative outlet the Daily Wire, convinced her to give Ben some cash in the form of reparations after Walsh also doled out some of his own dough in the awkward moment.

DiAngelo, 68, said in her lengthy statement that when she was contacted by a group about the doc in 2023, it was supposed to be named “Shades of Justice” and about efforts to combat racism in the US.

She was paid $15,000 (that she later donated) to participate, but when she showed up for the interview, “a few things felt off,” including the “ill-fitting wig” Walsh had on as a man bun.

But she said Walsh seemed “earnest” about anti-racist work and his questions were not adversarial until “things got weird” at the end in which she delved into the cringeworthy reparations scene that left DiAngelo visibly bewildered.

“I was so unsettled by the way Matt manipulated this last scene that I emailed the contact person – who went by the name of ‘Lee Hampton’ – to explain that this scene was not an example of reparations and could mislead viewers,” DiAngelo explained.

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Understanding the Real Costs of Slavery: It’s Not Cheap labor

Slavery has existed throughout history in all places and cultures. It was not introduced by the political state yet, as with many things, slavery could not have had the scope or extent that it did in human history absent the coercive apparatus of the political state. Through cronyism, slaveholders consistently had to seek assistance from the legal system in order to socialize and enforce slavery. The enforcement costs for keeping slaves slaves would have been too high for the minority slaveholding elite to maintain slavery, beyond their own strength or what they could afford to hire.

Lord Mansfield, a British judge, argued the following in a case called Somerset v Stewart (1772), which involved his refusal to forcibly send an enslaved person on English soil over to Jamaica to be sold,

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. (emphasis added)

Positive law, according to Mansfield, was the only thing that could be said to maintain slavery. Slavery, of course, would still exist to an extent without positive law enforcing it, but it is much-weakened without the force of positive law from the state (at taxpayer expense). Besides examining the policies that socialized, enforced, and maintained slavery, we can also—with the help of Mises—come to understand the praxeology involved in slavery and why slaveholders are prone to seek the help of the state.

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Why Military Conscription Is Worse Than Slavery

Libertarians understand — or should understand — that military conscription is a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. In fact, everyone should understand this. And yet conscription has been employed by the U.S. government for the past 161 years, ever since Abraham Lincoln signed the first federal conscription act into law in March 1863, enslaving thousands of American men.

For those who are killed in battle or executed for desertion, conscription is worse than slavery because it robs them of their very lives. To this day, one of the penalties for desertion in wartime is death. At various times in history the U.S. government has shot deserters in firing squads, and it has even imprisoned or shot civilian conscription protesters.

Even if one volunteers for the military, one immediately becomes a slave to the state because it is illegal to leave. The penalties for desertion apply to both volunteer recruits and conscripts. In “Desertion During the Civil War” historian Ella Lonn writes that after the conscription law was passed, draftees were held like “veritable prisoners … so as to prevent their untimely departure.” And there were many, many “untimely departures” from Lincoln’s army.

Examining “The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Lonn documented that some 200,000 Northern men deserted from the Union army in 1862, about 14% of the entire army. More than 90,000 Northern men deserted on the eve of the Battle of Antietam, she wrote, and there were over 100,000 more deserters the rest of the year.

According to Lonn, a policy of mass execution of deserters was implemented after a Feb. 3, 1863, cabinet meeting because Gen. George Meade asked why the executions took so long. Lonn describes the execution method, which is documented in the “Official Records,” as follows: “A gallows and shooting ground were provided in each corps and scarcely a Friday passed during the winter of 1863–64 that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the Army of the Potomac.”

Soldiers were forced to watch the daily executions of their friends and comrades: “The condemned men marched out between the two ranks of the regiment, preceded by the musicians, playing a funeral march. … The victim was conducted to the edge of the grave, which had already been dug. … He was seated, blindfolded, and placed upon a board at the foot of the open coffin, into which he fell backwards when the firing squad had discharged its duty.” Lonn adds that deserters were sometimes hanged, although shooting was the most common execution method.

Hence in the Civil War the precedent was established that all military personnel are slaves to the state in wartime and that death is the penalty for trying to escape from this form of slavery. Deserters weren’t physically punished for running away as chattel slaves were. They were killed.

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Resurfaced Video Shows Kamala Harris Promising Race Grifter Al Sharpton She Will Sign Reparations Bill

Newly surfaced video has shown Kamala Harris promising to sign a reparations bill into law if she is elected president.

In what is reported to have been an appearance with notorious race grifter Al Sharpton during the 2020 presidential campaign, in which she polled so bad she pulled out before the primaries, Harris promised she would support the radical plan to take money from ordinary Americans and give it to black people.

“In the area of reparations of for descendants of Africans enslaved: If you’re elected president would you sign that bill [Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act proposed by Representative Shelia Jackson Lee] if it came across your desk?” Sharpton asks Harris during the event.

“When I am elected president I will sign that bill,” she responds to the delight of the audience.

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‘Realists’ Think We Need To Prepare for a Draft So We Can Win a War With China

Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.

First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.

The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.

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Summer of the Draft: What Government and Think Tanks Are Planning and Why

How did this suddenly become the summer of “the draft”?

There are a number of proposals in the annual defense policy bill (National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA) that deal with the subject. There is one to expand Selective Service registration to women. Another that would make Selective Service registration for American men “automatic.”

Still another proposed amendment to the NDAA, which has also been introduced as a freestanding bill, S. 4881, would repeal the Military Selective Service Act entirely. Meanwhile, the Center for a New American Security just published an exhaustive blueprint for modernizing mobilization, including readiness to activate conscription.

All this talk has compelled “fact checkers” to insist that no, the U.S. government isn’t suddenly “laying the groundwork” for a draft.

But saying the U.S. isn’t preparing for a draft is like saying it isn’t preparing for nuclear war. Just as the Department of Defense is tasked with maintaining readiness to initiate nuclear strikes whenever the Commander-In-Chief so orders, the Selective Service System has the sole mission of maintaining readiness to hold a draft lottery within five days and start selecting draftees and sending out notices to report for induction whenever Congress and the President so order.

As such, there are currently ten thousand draft board members who have been appointed and trained to adjudicate claims for deferment or exemption. As recently as this month, states have been openly seeking volunteers to fill empty slots. And both the SSS and hawkish think-tanks have been war-gaming the government’s contingency plans to activate a draft.

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Senate Joins House in Proposal for ‘Automatic’ Draft Registration

Contrary to earlier reports, the U.S. Senate has joined the House of Representatives in moving toward a foolhardy attempt to ‘automatically’ register all draft-eligible U.S. citizens and residents for a possible military draft, by extracting and aggregating information obtained from other Federal agencies.

The proposal for “automatic” draft registration is among several previously-undisclosed provisions related to Selective Service in the newly-release version of the National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025 approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and to be considered by the full Senate.

The 1,197-page SASC proposal for this year’s NDAA was approved by the committee in closed session last month, and only a summary was released. At the time, a spokesperson for the SASC told me that if “automatic” Selective Service registration had been included in the bill, it would have been included in the summary. That proves to have been incorrect: The proposal for “automatic” draft registration was included in the SASC version of the bill, but not in the summary.

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Americans Are More Likely To Go to War With the Government Than Submit to the Draft

In a national poll last month Americans were asked if they believed a new civil war was likely to happen within their lifetime. The establishment media was shocked to report that 47% of the population said yes. Those of us in the liberty media were not so surprised; I believe according to the evidence that we were already a short step away from civil war in 2021-2022.

There were A LOT of guys (millions) getting ready for the possibility of vaccine passport enforcement. Gun ownership in the US hit record highs during that time period and conservative/patriot groups saw a spike in public interest. As it turned out, the “conspiracy theorists” were right all along, there really was an organized agenda to eliminate constitutional protections…

If we had allowed the vax passport policy to take hold, our liberties would have been officially erased forever. Economic freedoms would be abolished. Access to the jobs market and trade would be impossible for anyone refusing the vaccine. Real-time tracking of the population along with a social credit system would have become the norm using mandatory cell phone apps. After that, America would essentially turn into a Chinese-style concentration camp.

A lot of people woke up during that period and realized that an attempt at a totalitarian state in the US was not only possible, it was happening right in front of them. Luckily, anti-mandate conservatives were loud enough and the majority of red states passed legislation to block lockdowns and vax passport efforts. The Biden Administration, the CDC, the WHO and globalist groups like the WEF abruptly backed away from their draconian programs and gave up on the mandates by the end of 2022.  And to anyone who actually believes the CDC numbers on total vaccinations are accurate, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you…

That said, the same people are still in power today and those people are looking for another avenue to institute sweeping controls on the populace. One tried and true method for them to achieve that goal is to start a global war and then use the inevitable chaos and fear to bring in authoritarian measures. In other words, WWIII might be Plan B.

The signs of this plan are everywhere, but perhaps most disconcerting is the growing discussion among western nations about military conscription (the draft).

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‘We’d rather die than enlist’: Haredi Jews vow to defy conscription

On Sunday evening, thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrated in Jerusalem against last week’s landmark High Court ruling, which mandates the conscription of Haredi youth into the Israeli army. The largest anti-draft rally in a decade united several Haredi factions, whose adherents carried signs that read “We will not enlist in an enemy army,” “We would rather live as Jews than die as Zionists,” “To jail and not to the army,” “Zionism uses Jews as human shields,” and other critical slogans in Hebrew and English. 

Protesters attacked cars transporting two Haredi political leaders, burned garbage cans, and tried to rip fences and traffic signs out of the ground. Police attempted to forcibly disperse them using mounted officers, batons, and a water cannon loaded with “skunk” — though many of the remaining demonstrators, including young children, jubilantly endured powerful jets of the foul-smelling liquid. A handful of protesters were arrested.

Since the Israeli state was founded, the ultra-Orthodox have been exempt from mandatory military service — yet this policy has long been a controversial political and legal issue. With Haredi men devoting their lives to Torah study, the community sees conscription as an attack on their way of life. For the more staunchly anti-Zionist sects, which have spearheaded the recent protests, serving in the Israeli army is incompatible with their view of the state as illegitimate for having been established before the return of the messiah. 

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