Back to Basics

While many Americans are still festering over the security measures that the Department of Homeland Security‘s Transportation Security Administration has implemented at airports, the next draconian step is about to be taken affecting citizens’ very livelihoods.

Many Americans are about to be blindsided by two vastly under-reported measures the DHS is about to spring on them: TWIC is an acronym for

Transportation Worker Identification Credential and SWAC stands for Secure Worker Access Consortium, and for some unsuspecting innocents hell is about to come to Earth—or at least the American workplace.

Under TWIC and SWAC many millions of Americans will be rquired by law to apply to the DHS and prove to the government’s satisfaction that they are not terrorists. If the government—fallible people who are mostly nameless and faceless to the public, and unaccountable to the public—is satisfied the will be “granted permission” to work!

The new ‘No work” list being cobbled together in the name of state security is similar to the TSA’s infamous “No fly” list—a secret list compiled by security bureaucrats. And like the “No fly” list, people will be unable to discover why their namea are on it if they’re unlucky enough to appear on it. Worse, it will be virtually impossible to have it removed.

While it’s bad enough to have one’s name on the “No fly” list, that cannot destroy your life.

But the “No work” list can.

Any American whose name appears on the list will be denied employment in the U.S. The federal government will enforce a Kafkaesque system that will find some hapless innocents losing everything and wandering homeless on the streets picking through city dumpsters and the daily refuse tossed out by grocers and fast food chains.

How the freest country came to this state of affairs in the name of protecting its citizens from identity thieves and terrorists can only illustrate the moral bankruptcy of the centralized government and the short-sighted individuals that have been handed the reigns of power.

TWIC

TWIC “is a biometric credential that ensures only vetted workers are eligible to enter a secure construction site, unescorted,” Ironworkers Local 361 in Ozone Park, New York, explains in a new publication for its members. “Before issuing a TWIC, TSA must conduct a security threat assessment on the TWIC applicant. An applicant going through certification who, as a result of the assessment, is determined to not pose a security threat, will be issued a TWIC card.”

Those who do not pass muster for any reason are denied a private sector job.

Suddenly, the federal government has discovered the invisible ink between the lines of the United States Constitution that gives it the power and authority to regulate who can and cannot get employment in the private sector.

In the example of the union statement to its members, New York construction workers will have to seek and obtain federal permission to earn a living. If blessings to not come forth from the unseen bureaucrats at DHS and TSA, the worker is out of luck.