rule of law

Land of the Unfree – Police and Prosecutors Fight Aggressively to Retain Barbaric Right of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

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Efforts to limit seizures of money, homes and other property from people who may never be convicted of a crime are stalling out amid a wave of pressure from prosecutors and police.

Their effort, at least at the state level, appears to be working. At least a dozen states considered bills restricting or even abolishing forfeiture that isn’t accompanied by a conviction or gives law enforcement less control over forfeited proceeds. But most measures failed to pass.

– From the Wall Street Journal article: Efforts to Curb Asset Seizures by Law Enforcement Hit Headwinds

The fact that civil asset forfeiture continues to exist across the American landscape despite outrage and considerable media attention, is as good an example as any as to how far fallen and uncivilized our so-called “society” has become. It also proves the point demonstrated in a Princeton University study that the U.S. is not a democracy, and the desires of the people have no impact on how the country is governed.

Civil asset forfeiture was first highlighted on these pages in the 2013 post, Why You Should Never, Ever Drive Through Tenaha, Texas, in which I explained:

In a nutshell, civil forfeiture is the practice of confiscating items from people, ranging from cash, cars, even homes based on no criminal conviction or charges, merely suspicion. This practice first became widespread for use against pirates, as a way to take possession of contraband goods despite the fact that the ships’ owners in many cases were located thousands of miles away and couldn’t easily be prosecuted. As is often the case, what starts out reasonable becomes a gigantic organized crime ring of criminality, particularly in a society where the rule of law no longer exists for the “elite,” yet anything goes when it comes to pillaging the average citizen.

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Florida Man Faces 15 Years in Jail for Having Sex on the Beach (Still No Bankers in Jail)

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A jury Monday found a couple guilty of having sex on Bradenton Beach after only 15 minutes of deliberation.

The convictions carry a maximum prison sentence of 15 years.

Both Caballero and Alvarez will now have to register as sex offenders.

Ronald Kurpiers, defense attorney for the couple, said his clients were “devastated,” by the verdict. Though Dafonseca hinted that they’d be speaking with the judge about whether or not 15 years was appropriate for Caballero, Kurpiers said the judge would have no discretion.

“That’s what he’ll get,” Kurpiers said.

– From the Miami Herald article: Couple Found Guilty of Having Sex on Florida Beach

This is what “justice” looks like in the Oligarch States of America. If you’re a pleb who gets caught having consensual sex on the beach, you’re immediately convicted and face up to 15 years in the gulag. Meanwhile, if you’re a banking executive responsible for crashing the global economy, you’re rewarded with trillions in taxpayer bailouts and backstops and given free reign to continue your crime spree. Criminal charges are never considered, despite the extreme negative impact your actions have on society at large, and you’re always given a slap on the wrist via deferred prosecution agreements, or DPAs. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at an excerpt from last year’s post titled, The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally:

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TSA Agents Caught Gaming System so Male Screener Could Grope Attractive Passengers; No Criminal Charges Filed

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Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Benjamin Franklin

When a society becomes sufficiently afraid of an outside enemy, it can be manipulated into irrational responses that are then easily abused by those in power. This has been the sad story of America in the decade and a half since 9/11 (for more, see: How I Remember September 11, 2001).

The TSA is just one of many shady and generally useless government agencies (and private companies) involved in a massive money and power grab since the kickoff of the endless, Orwellian “war on terror.” Rather than preventing any terrorist attacks, the TSA is engaged in security theatre. This has become very obvious to me during my many trips between Denver and New York City over the past five years.

As someone who has never gone through a naked body scanner, I am particularly sensitive to where they are positioned and where they are not. In Denver, they are basically everywhere, yet interestingly, in the terminal serving Frontier Airlines at La Guardia in NYC there are none. This seems incredible to me given how big of a terrorist target it is. Somehow New York City is able to screen passengers just fine without the naked body scanners, yet Denver can’t? How is that the case? It’s the case because the expensive new screeners are nothing more than security theatre. Security theater that pays very, very well for the device manufacturers.

Yet, it is much more dangerous than this. Whenever you give bureaucracies absurd powers “to protect you,” what you’ll invariably end up with is egregious abuse in the name of “for your own good.” The latest evidence of this was recently revealed in the emergence of a scheme by two TSA employees at Denver International Airport to allow a male screener to grope specific passengers that he found attractive. Importantly, this scam couldn’t have occurred if metal detectors were used.

We learn from CBS4 News that:

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U.S. Police Kill More Civilians in March than UK Police Killed in 100 Years

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The following statistics seem impossible to believe. While I wonder how accurately the UK has been tracking these numbers historically, the enormous spread seems much too large to ignore, and is a national embarrassment that should be dealt with immediately.

From the Free Thought Project:

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57-Year-Old Michigan Man Beaten to a Bloody Pulp by Police Officer Known as “RoboCop” for Running a Red Light

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Dent opened his door and was dragged out of his Cadillac; almost immediately, Melendez put him in a chokehold. Melendez then proceeded to deliver 16 blows to Dent’s temple. This all took place in about 15 seconds. Another officer arrived moments later and proceeded to use a taser stun gun against Dent, three times. In the video, Dent, with blood dripping from his forehead and cheek, appears not to be resisting Melendez’s efforts to arrest him.

Melendez’s record shows he has faced similar allegations before. At one point, he garnered more citizen complaints than any officer in Detroit, where he started his career in 1993 and served until his resignation in 2009. He entered Inkster’s police force a year later.

Over nearly two decades, Melendez has been named as a defendant in a dozen federal lawsuits, accused of planting evidence, wrongfully killing unarmed civilians, falsifying police reports and conducting illegal arrests. Some suits were settled out of court. Others were dismissed.

In 1996, Melendez, who was known in Detroit as “RoboCop”, and his partner shot and killed Lou Adkins. While Adkins was on the ground, several witnesses said the officers shot him 11 times, according to the Detroit Free Press. The case was settled for $1.05m, court records show.

– From the Guardian article: How a Traffic Stop Left a Michigan Man Beaten, Bloodied and Bitter at Police

Michigan police officer William Melendez has a sordid reputation. Amongst other things, he has come to be known as “Robocop” for his shady and often violent behavior. Additionally, he was “cited as the ringleader of numerous officers indicted by a federal grand jury in 2003 on civil rights violations.”

In contrast, Detroit native Floyd Dent worked at Ford for 37-years, has no criminal record and seems to be a decent and thoughtful citizen. He just happens to be black, driving at night, and had the unfortunate experience of running into William “Robocop” Melendez on the evening of January 28, 2015.

One of these individuals should be behind bars for a very long time, and one of them shouldn’t.

From the Guardian:

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Baby Oligarch Gets a Wrist Slap – Conrad Hilton Cops Plea Deal for Smoking Pot in Plane Restroom and Threatening to Kill Flight Attendants

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Screen Shot 2015-01-22 at 4.42.04 PMLast month, I wrote about the fact that Paris Hilton’s brother had engaged in extraordinarily disruptive and illegal behavior on an international flight. I didn’t cover this story because it was a matter of national importance, but because I knew that he wouldn’t be punished for what he did. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans are imprisoned every day for far less (see: Land of the Free: American Police Make an Arrest Every 2 Seconds in 2012).

I’m not saying that average Americans should be imprisoned for such offenses, rather, I’m pointing out the egregious injustice within the U.S. legal system, and the the fact that when you have as much money as Conrad Hilton, laws simply do not apply to you. Here’s an excerpt from that post, Little Oligarch Gone Wild – Paris Hilton’s Brother Yells: “I Will F*cking Own Anyone on This Flight; They Are F*cking Peasants”:

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The World Comments on Ferguson – Egypt Urges Restraint While China Tells the U.S. to “Stop Pointing Fingers”

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You know you’ve lost the plot when Egypt, Iran, China and the United Nations all feel so comfortable they have the moral high ground that they publicly chastise the U.S. about events in Ferguson.

Indeed, this has been a theme at Liberty Blitzkrieg all year. I have repeatedly discussed the ridiculousness of our political leaders talking about absurd “humanitarian wars” (which coincidentally tend to aggregate in regions with gigantic oil reserves), while strongly supporting some of the most authoritarian and fascist regimes on earth such as Saudi Arabia.

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How Washington D.C. is Sucking the Life Out of America

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The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
– Tacitus

Ever since I started writing about what is happening in the world around me, my primary theme has been that the root cancer at the core of the U.S., and indeed global economy, is cronyism and an absence of the rule of law when it comes to oligarchs. In the U.S., this cronyism is best described as an insidious relationship between large multi-national corporations and big government to funnel all of the wealth and resources of the nation to themselves at the expense of everyone else. In a genuine free market defined by heightened competition and governed by an equal application of the rule of law to all, the 0.1% does not aggregate all of a nation’s wealth. This sort of thing only happens in crony capitalism, which is basically nothing more than complete and total insider deals to aggregate newly created money into the hands of the few.

The following profile of Washington D.C.’s so-called “boom” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pretty much tells you all you need to know. While I think the tone of the article is absurd considering this is no “economic boom,” but merely parasitic wealth extraction on a unprecedented scale, it is still quite telling. It is no coincidence that as D.C. has grown wealthier, the nation has become much, much poorer. Key excerpts below:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

At the same time, big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

Sorry these aren’t “entrepreneurs,” they are parasitic opportunists.

At Cafe Joe, a greasy spoon near the National Security Agency in suburban Maryland, software engineers with top-secret clearances merely have to look at the place mats under their fried eggs to find federal contractors trying to entice them away from their government jobs with six-figure salaries and stock options. The place-mat ads cost $250 a week. They are sold out through 2014.

During the past decade, the region added 21,000 households in the nation’s top 1 percent. No other metro area came close.

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Rep. Steve Cohen Calls Tea Party Republicans “Domestic Enemies” on MSNBC

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The following is a really shocking two minute clip that I am surprised hasn’t gotten more traction, but I suppose after Harry Reid called other members of Congress anarchists, nothing really surprises people anymore. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) starts off by lecturing the Republican Party for its “tea party” members. In no uncertain terms, he proclaims that they have “damaged the GOP brand,” and that if their antics continue, it will surely hand back Congress to the Democrats.

If he is really so sure in his beliefs, why is he so concerned about the movement? Furthermore, why is he offering the opposing party such sage free advice? You’d think he’d just sit back quietly and let the tea party dig its own grave. I find this quite peculiar.

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