The contemporary model of civil forfeiture in the US was introduced as part of the “war on drugs”. Under terms of this law, which varies across US jurisdictions, law enforcement officers can seize property involved in unlawful, or suspected unlawful activity, such as drug dealing. In some jurisdictions, law enforcement organisations are allowed to keep some or all of the assets seized. This has led to some notable abuse, notoriously in Tenaha, Texas, but in other jurisdictions too.
See
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman
Why post this to IBS? Just an interesting aside on the “culture” of confiscation in the US.
“In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.
“One result is the rise of improbable case names such as United States v. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins. (Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s forfeiture was slugged State of Texas v. $6,037. [their story earlier in the article – Northernshrike]) “The protections our Constitution usually affords are out the window,” Louis Rulli, a clinical law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading forfeiture expert, observes. A piece of property does not share the rights of a person. There’s no right to an attorney and, in most states, no presumption of innocence. Owners who wish to contest often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods. Washington, D.C., charges up to twenty-five hundred dollars simply for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, which can take months or even years to resolve.”
…..
“…But civil-forfeiture statutes continued to proliferate, and at the state and local level controls have often been lax. Many states, facing fiscal crises, have expanded the reach of their forfeiture statutes, and made it easier for law enforcement to use the revenue however they see fit. In some Texas counties, nearly forty per cent of police budgets comes from forfeiture.”
The typical victims are poor, often black or Hispanic, i.e. individuals without the means to contest what’s been done to them.
It is a very good article. It shows the corruption and entitlement and racism some of America has shrunk too. This is not new news. I read of this happening a few years ago.
This has been going on for a long, long time but it’s so widespread now that you should really be very, very careful when you are traveling in the rural areas especially.
About 10 years ago, my younger brother was visiting from Nevada with his two little girls. We drove from my house to our parents about three hours plus away. My brother has a bit of a lead foot and was miles ahead of me and my daughter and when I caught up with them, they’d been pulled over and the two cops were tossing the trunk of his rental and had my nieces “under guard”,wouldn’t allow my brother near them.
My ex-sister in law is from Columbia and the girls favor her more than my red-head, blue-eyed brother, so they didn’t believe the kids were his.
I pulled in ahead of them and got out. Stormed up to my brother with my own baby on my hip because I was sure he’d done something stupid. Cop says,
“You know him?”
“Yeah, this is my brother and those are my nieces and we are on our way to see our parents.”
It was the exact same story he’d told them and the cops looked a bit sheepish to have it confirmed. And, I have to admit that I have little patience with clearly harassing behavior and was more than a bit scathing in my tone when I discovered what had transpired.
“Why are you emptying the trunk for a speeding violation?” I asked. “You never see a father taking his kids to see their grandparents before?”
They wrote him a ticket and let us go, but had I not shown up when I did – and been a respectable white lady with baby – it probably would have ended differently. My brother had actually said just about the same thing I did but for some reason, it worked better coming from me. Oh and I may have mentioned we had family in the tiny little town the two officers haled from.
My sister has a county sheriff and a small town police chief for brothers in law in the tiny rural area she calls home. And we have two cousins on the force in our hometown. She never hesitates to mention this when she feels an officer of the law has “over-stepped”. It pays to be local. It’s bad to be from out of town, state, or country.
This is shocking.
The term “daylight robbery” comes to mind.
What the **** is going on over there?
All I can say after reading the article is, wow!
I really had no clue it was to that extent!.
Here’s a pdf that was published in March of 2010 in more detail. Its actually pretty frightening.
Policing for Profit>Policing for Profit
Glad you posted this. I read the article a couple of days ago and was horrified and immediately thought it could be relevant to IBS. If that sort of thing is happening within the US then things truly are out of line there.
It is very good to bring up this issue again, which I brought up already in May 2012:
Civil forfeiture and boiled frogs
It is a profound violation of the Constitution, namely the Fifth Amendment provision that no one should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
I have to laugh, however, at the conclusion that minorities and poor suffer more from this than others. The classic joke is that the New York Times had a headline: “The world ends tomorrow: women and minorities to be hardest hit”. The fact of the matter is that it is not the poor who are hardest hit by this kind of crap but the middle class, whose money or property the police steals, but for whom it is less expense to suffer the loss than to try to get back using the court system. If you are poor and have nothing, the police aren’t going to seize it. In the examples of the previous article, it would be an independent hotel owner loses his hotel because of a drug bust on his property–clients who unbeknownst to the owner were dealing on his premises. A woman loses her suburban home because her son brings drugs into the house. Or some white guy driving to another state with $23,000 cash to make a purchase of a used car.
That is why invariably the people who suffer from the US extraterritorial taxation are “middle class” (however, even the idea that there are “classes” is objectionable to me)–wealthy enough for the IRS to have them in its cross hairs but too poor to comply without the risk of ruination by the effort. Very few of those whom I have met or talked to at Isaac Brock are poor, but none are rich either.
If you’re poor, then the only thing that the police can ‘seize’ is your freedom. However, given that the US has more prisoners per capita than anywhere else in the world, it would suggest that they have no problem at all with taking someone’s freedom. I wouldn’t be too shocked to hear the occasional story about some poor fellow driving alone, (and not just stories like that) being pulled over on some back country road out in Jerkwater, USA, and be ‘disturbing the peace’ and ‘resisting arrest’ simply for questioning an officer’s assertion on a broken taillight that may or may not even exist. Even if the judge was fair, which can be about 50/50 at it is, it’s that poor guy’s word vs. the cop’s. He’s screwed.
It’s not just the cops that are bent in the legal system, I’ve heard all to many times where people get sued, and the only time they get to hear about it is after they get the default judgement in the mail, and it’s too late to defend themselves. Even my parents were victims of that at one point. But, I guess having process servers that actually do their jobs is just too much these days.
Nope. If you’re middle class, they’ll kick you until you’re down, and then they’ll keep on kicking you afterwards. They don’t give a shit. It’s not just the US government that does that, state and local governments, corporations, and either other people with power will do that, too. Now, I know that there are people that say, ‘love your country, hate your government’, However, when it’s all of those players that are taking a piece out of you, it gets really hard to have love for country.
I also think it’s amazing that for a ‘classless’ society, they LOVE to bleet nonstop about the plight of the middle class like they give a shit, even though they don’t, and anyone that has enough brains to see through the bullshit knows it.
I don’t know whether it is very fruitful to get into a debate on who is most hurt, poor or middle class, by the practices described in the article. I expect we agree that it reflects a culture of confiscation. Just to point out that someone who is poor is not necessarily penniless, and someone buying a $4000 used car might be low income. The difference between middle class and poor in these instances is that middle class people may find it costs more to fight than to swallow the loss, while the poor simply lack the resources to fight.
Insofar as I brought up the issue of impact upon the poor, I was trying to draw a parallel between the poor, who lack voice by virtue of their poverty, and “Americans” abroad, who lack voice because they are not represented in the American political system.
@Northernshrike, if a person lacks the resources to fight the powers that be, then perhaps they should all be considered poor, even if at some other point they would be considered “middle class”. The poor brockers here are people with savings to be sure, but certainly not sufficiently wealthy to launch a challenge against any of the laws that violate their constitutional rights, and the same applies to the majority of those who lose their constitutional rights through civil forfeiture. I think the least bad scenario for many here would be that they escape this threat without losing their savings. They are, thus, one bad government’s operational manual away from poverty.
I agree with Petros in large part here.
If you don’t have the resources to fight back against injustice, then you are still in poverty despite whatever your net worth is.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong. Might makes right. In this case, financial might. If either the poor, or the middle class, or both groups combined, actually had a voice? Perhaps the rich and powerful might not get away with so much shit? However, they’re either too wrapped up in their own situations, or are too apathetic to even bother as a group. Anybody that acts out against the system individually? They just get singled out for ridicule, or else get the shrug of ‘oh well’, by cowards that are too afraid to stand up themselves. (as I would argue) Again. Real hard to love a country like that.
Also, it is real unnerving to learn after the fact, that the money I had for moving to my last place in the US, along with the vehicle that I had, and all of my crap that was in it, could’ve been seized by some ‘profiteering pig with a badge and a gun’ on basically a whim. (As that’s what it really is in the end. To hell with my being PC about it.) God, I don’t know what I would’ve done in that case. I don’t even want to think about it!
@Northernshrike
Yes. Definitely a culture of confiscation. :^(
If you don’t want to listen to this complete video, pick it up at the 9:00 minute market and listen to the last 3 minutes.
http://youtu.be/a9YGIbypYSk
I watched the video in it’s entirety – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9YGIbypYSk done by NewJerseyMinuteman…I thought it sounded like my NJ Bubba Brother did this…especially at part 5:56 when I saw Obama youth supporters over a bottome section of Nazi youth supporters.. You could miss the Nazi flags….
I thought that we were not going to do this…Nazi stuff. I am guilty of feeling like a Jew in the 30s and 40s saying I would be wearing an AP sign on me like the star they wore. I have a Jewish Isralie daughter in law and my partner live with is Jewish. I did love Obama when he was running.. He has disappointed me greatly but he is not a Nazi. and he is far greater than Romney.. In this film I saw Obama and his administration but not W… FATCA IS evil but it is not Nazi Germany. I am so upset with this film being on IBS. I am a social democratic Canadian …not a teabagger.
Oh and by the way ,, I was stopped in Oklahoma in 2002 by a state trooper, just because I had Canadian plates…I had a thousand dollars on me to travel and credit cards. I was on my way to cross a bucket list entry, The Grand Canyon….. I will never forget that ordeal. The story reminded me of it. and who was president then? W!!!!
@Northernstar
I am with you. Among my friends we have an informal rule: whoever makes a comparison to Hitler loses the argument. Only Hitler was like Hitler. I too am a social democrat in Canada.
@Northernshrike,
Thanks, It is good to know I am not alone, who feels this way.
I would like to make a correction to the time I wrote about the nazi flags in nazi youth rally with the Obama youth rally on top part of the frame . the time is 5:48
AND also note at 5:55 the black youths in Obama shirts, all of them are black young teens , fat and exercising. What is that suppose to mean on a Ronald Reagan speech video?
What I got out of the tape is NOTHING has changed. Dear old Ronnie didn’t change a thing.
@Northernshrike
@Northernstar
@Moderator
@All
The purpose of the inclusion of the video was NOT to make any comparison(s) to any particular group. This is a thread about the “confiscation of assets” and the Reagan speech (particularly the last three minutes) – as a “stand alone speech” bears on this topic. Anybody (including whoever made this particular video) is of course free to take Reagans’s speech and use it to make any argument they want.
The simple fact is that the U.S. government has been on a path of confiscation of lawfully acquired assets. They are not the first government to do this and they will probably not be the last. The conduct of the U.S. government stands alone – and is what it is – without comparison to any other government(s). This is true in relation to both Homelanders (subject of this post) and Americans Abroad (where would we begin).
Examples include:
– FBAR
– PFIC
– OVDI
and a penalty structure which is both punitive and for the purpose of asset confiscation.
The confiscation of assets is the result of a long history of governments including:
Nixon – FBAR
Reagan himself – PFIC
Clinton – Exit Tax 1
Bush – Exit Tax 2
Obama – FATCA
and I am sure more.
Interestingly, President Carter has commented that the U.S. is in violation of a number of its obligations under the UN Declaration of Rights.
In any case, the purpose of including the video was to focus on – the confiscation of assets – and NOT to compare the U.S. government to others.
The conduct of the U.S. government stands alone.
Since, at least some of you feel that the video distracts from the issue of confiscation of assets, I am to quite happily and cheerfully ask the moderators to remove the video.
It would be pointless to have a discussion about asset confiscation derailed by discussion other groups.
(As I recall, a year ago, the IBS got embroiled in this debate.)
So, sure, moderator(s) please take the video down.
@USCitizenAbroad
The video is distracting. I thought you did mean to present the video that this has been happening for a long time but the politicization in the movie was upsetting to me.
@Northernstar
Because you are so upset, I went back and had a good second look at the video.
In your comment at 10:54 you suggest (if I am understanding you correctly) that the video compares the Obama administration to a European government of the 1930s.
I looked at it again and I don’t see that in it. Maybe, I am blind. Maybe misinformed, maybe it is going to fast, but I just don’t see it. I tried to pause it at the 5:56 mark … Even if there is something there (which I either can’t see or am having difficulty seeing) this amounts to 10 seconds in a 12 minute video. There are many repressive governments who have used the young as ideological soldiers to carry on a political war.
What I see in the video is a general juxtaposition/comparison between a certain ideal of freedom and a virulent form of socialism (associated with the confiscation of assets) which has been the hallmark of many governments. Reagan’s speech is certainly an attack on the Democrats – but I don’t see it as an attack on any particular group. I do agree that whoever made the video is attempting to apply the views/ideals of Reagan to the reality/practices of the Obama administration (suggesting that the Obama Democrats fall short of the ideal).
If this is an attack on a particular ethnic, religious or cultural group that’s one thing, but an attack on a particular political party or political ideology?
Anyway …
Just my 2 cents, I encourage the moderators to do what they want with this.
I can suggest you watch the video from You Tube link where you can stop the video and I looked at this better at 5:48 and I did see Obama’s face with stars and stripes superimposed next to Nazi youth on the top part of the video/ You can see their nazi insignia on their shirts or they may be from the bottom part of the frame which has numerous nazi flags. I can stop the video anywhere I want when I watch with the you tube link. Other parts of the video show nazi symbols with Obama”s staff. at 1:18 frame Obama is continously shown through the video. there are no current republicans shown.
Reagan’s speech is obviously not on Obama…but it is on the democrats…the person who made this video IS attacking Obama. The person who made the video is obviously a NJ Teabagger. At 1:15 you can see Obama and his administration. I did not see one frame of the Bush administrations displayed like the Obama adminstration in the film.
It is my observation this is an attack on the Obama administration where many a teabagger has compared him to the nazi leader.of the 30s and 40s. …
How did you come across this video?…
I checked out the videos this NJ minuteman has made…I am a socialist….a progressive, a NDP/liberal,, never a PC Harper supporter. I am a person who believes in one payer health care , a Canadian that cares for the poor and less well off and the sick…This minuteman is not a thinker with these values Look at the videos he has made. He shows a lot of hatred of Obama.
I’m not sure what to think of the video, aside from it being an obvious propaganda piece. However, I find statists of all types to be disagreeable.
On a different forum out in cyberspace, relating to US citizenship renunciations and how they’ve gone up in recent years, I’ve ran to a proud statist homelander, (a Vietnam vet, mind you) that was proceeding to call such renunciants cowards and traitors.
I couldn’t resist. I had to tear him apart. I mean, how dare he to try and call me a selfish coward to choosing to live in freedom, and being with my family? And then, he even had the nerve to preach to me what freedom is!
Imagine that? The f—ing nerve of that guy?
He was preaching up and down about the dangers of statist Democrats, but the problem with him, is that the neoconservatives that he chooses to stand behind are rabid statists themselves. Lastly, he called me a selfish libertarian.
Wow!
Yes. I am a libertarian, and I am proud of it. I believe in individual freedom. I also believe in economic freedom, and I believe in political freedom. Tell me that I don’t believe in freedom? I told him that he didn’t even knew what freedom meant as envisioned by our Founding Fathers, and that he was neither qualified to dictate to others what freedom is, nor was he in a position to question why I left the USA. I also told him that if he served in Vietnam, that he served as a tool for the freedom of the state. Not as a solder fighting for the freedom of the American people. It’s the same damn thing with the Iraq invasion, as no one fought for American freedom there. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and the excuses for the invasion were all based on bullshit. Those soldiers died for the state, and its less than noble machinations. Frankly, there is no way that any thinking man of conscience would ever consider enlisting into the army after 9/11, once the so-called free press started talking about Iraq and 9/11 in the same sentence. Meanwhile, to this day, I still believe that the true freedom fighters chose to burn their draft cards and fled to Canada, rather than head to Vietnam and fight.
I also told him that he is welcome to stay behind and fight, but once they lock that place down when the shit hits the fan, that he’ll be sorry that he stayed behind. Yes. He’s going to be one man in a war against the liberals. He hasn’t a f—ing clue who the ‘enemy’ really is. He would essentially have to fight against the entire political apparatus and the powers that be that run things behind the scenes, plus a military machine that is better funded than all of the other nation’s militarys combined, that can kill him with a drone strike and deny him even the opportunity to see the face of his enemy, and would even be full of young, indoctrinated tools, full of programmed anger, that might even see him as a terrorist. Oh, and when they do lock the place down, it will be a bipartisan action, just to let him know that, it is the entire government against him, and not just the liberals. And, if he was hoping that the people will rise up to stand by his side, that he was totally delusional, and that they wouldn’t even bother to get up in order to save themselves.
Lastly, if this is the most that we can expect from the American troops, that they would serve to protect the freedom of the state, rather than the freedom of the American people, then I say, ‘Fuck the troops!’ Because it would be so selfish indeed, that I would have the audacity to expect them to actually defend our freedom, and especially when we pay their salaries through our work via taxes. Nah. In their view, we’re supposed to just sit down, shut up, and never question anything that they do.
Sorry, but I’m not going to accept that! Nobody that truly believes in freedom should ever tolerate that! The fact that even the regular folks can have that attitude, and that nobody will dare question it is further proof that America is totally lost. But yet I’m the coward? Then why am I the one that dares to question the broken system in the first place?
Yes, though I may be a libertarian, even I recognize the value of a caring and compassionate society. One that sees value in taking care of those that can’t take care of themselves. It is a morally and an ethically superior attitude to the attitude of ‘I’ve got mine, f— you!’ Yet I’m the selfish coward to leave a morally bankrupt country to take care of my disabled spouse, whom has MS, and needs home care and someone to wipe her butt, etc….
This is why I don’t have problems with the liberals and the NDP here in Canada, even though I may not necessarily agree philosophically. But as for social conservatives? The neo-cons? I have absolutely no use for those that act all self righteous and question my morals, while acting as though their own morals are beyond reproach. Send them all south as far as I care!
Now that I’ve had more time to digest the video, I find it convenient that one party can accuse the other of ignoring the Constitution, when both parties are guilty of that.
Pure propaganda.
@mjh49783..I
I agree with all you have said.