Supreme Court Nails Local Cops For Stealing Stuff

The Notorious RBG wrote Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court
decision restricting civil forfeiture. 

I've complained before in this here blog thingy about something called "civil forfeiture."

It's been increasingly popular among some local law enforcement agencies across the country. It's basically "legal" theft.

Though as of Wednesday, it wasn't so legal anymore. The U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimiously that the Constitution's ban on excessive fines applies to individual states as well. That makes total sense to me and should be obvious.

Nonetheless, if you can get the most conservative and the most liberal Supreme Court justices to agree on something, that probably means they want to get rid of something that's terribly wrong.

There's no doubt about it. Civil forfeiture is indeed wrong.

Civil forfeiture essentially occurs outside the court system. It started as a pretty good idea: Civil forfeiture targeted large criminal enterprises by siphoning their money and supplies and resources away. No money supply and the cartel or whatever shrivels.

But then, many police departments discovered forfeiture was a way to boost their budgets. They would seize money and goods from people they arrested, which might be OK if the people involved were actually convicted of a crime and the amount of stuff taken was in line what the fines and such would have been anyway.

However, local law enforcement in some jurisdictions got into the habit of seizing cash, cars, real estate and other property from people who were not convicted of a crime, or in many cases, not even charged with a criminal offense. Then, these law enforcement agencies would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for people to get their property and cash back.

It's gotten so bad that some police departments have taken to randomly pulling over people with out of state license plates over for trumped up traffic violations. The police would then take any cash that was in the vehicle and that's it. To me, that's theft. To these corrupt police department, they called it "law enforcement."

Yeah, right.

A lot of people besides the nine members of the Supreme Court are saying good riddance to civil forfeiture, although I'm sure it wil continue in some form as crafty law enforcement agencies find loopholes around the ruling.

Again, forfeiture opposition makes strange bedfellows. I mean, the ACLU and the conservative Cato Institute are against civil forfeiture. If you can get those two groups to agree, that's something.

There are countless horror stories out there about civil forfeiture. One of them was the case the Supreme Court decided on Wednesday, Timbs v. Indiana. Police confiscated Tyson Timbs' $40,000 Land Rover after he was caught selling $400 worth of heroin.

Nobody questioned the fact that Timbs needed to bear consequences for his crime.  But Timbs had purchased the Land Rover legally: He used a life insurance settlement from his father's estate.

As the Huffington Post describes the case, Indiana law says people convicted of crimes like Timbs' should pay no more than $10,000 in fines. The Land Rover the cops seized was worth four times that.

One Indiana judge said the seizing the car was disproportionate to the crime. But Indiana's highest court overruled that lower court judge, saying the U.S. Supreme Court has never said that the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines applies to states as well as the federal government.

So, the U.S. Supreme Court had to state the obvious today, in a ruling written by the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That the Constitution - not just parts of it, but all of it, applies to the states.

The Supremes also based their decision in large part on the 14th Amendment, which says "no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

Well, again, duh!

I guess Supreme Court watchers could see this decision coming since November, when the Supremes had oral arguments in the case. Justic Neil Gorsuch scoffed at Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who was arguing that it how the 8th and 14th amendment had supposedly never been tested this way. "Here we are in 2018 still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights... Come on, General," Gorsuch said.

Indeed!

Even before Wednesday's Supreme Court decision, states had been feeling the heat and beginning to at least consider cracking down on civil forfeiture.  Frankly, I think the only people who liked this grifting was corrupt so-called law enforcement agencies.

In South Carolina, the Greenville News recently published the results of a two-year investigation it conducted with other news organizations regarding civil forfeiture in that state. The Greenville News reported that South Carolina police collected $17 million in forfeiture money and property between 2014 and 2016.

In almost a fifth of those South Carolina seizures, people whose property was taken by police were never even charged with a crime, never mind convicted. One South Carolina example that Reason cited was of an elderly woman whose house was nearly taken away by the cops because a few small-time drug deals were conducted on her property.

The woman had nothing to do with the drug deals, and any time she became aware of somebody dealing drugs on or near her property, she tried to shoo them away. (Which is brave of an old lady. You never know what these drug dealers can do.)

The Greenville news investigation results were so odious that the conservate law-and-order South Carolina legislature began considering a bill that would require a criminal conviction before any property could be seized from someone.

That legislative effort might have something to do with something that Jarrod Bruder realizes now that he shouldn't have said out loud, but it is what everybody assumes.

Bruder is the Executive Director of the South Carolina Sheriff's Association.  As the Greenville News reported: 

"(Bruder) said without the incentive of profit from civil forfeiture, officers probably wouldn't pursue drug dealers and their cash as hard as they do now. If police don't get to keep the money from forfeiture, 'what is the incentive to go out and make a special effort?' Bruder said. 'What is the incentive for interdiction.'"

Um, maybe police incentive to enforce laws is because it's their job? Wild suggestion, I know.

Reason said three states had already passed similar laws and 29 states had passed some sort of civil forfeiture reform, so you know this was getting pretty unpopular.  Still law enforcement is still  resisting the trend, and many of them will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to comply.

New Mexico passed a law last year in which civil forfeiture could only take place if there is a criminal conviction. Incredibly, some New Mexico cities ignored the law, saying the municipalites could opt in to the law if they wished, but didn't have to.

Nope. New Mexico courts said, again, being a version of Captain Obvious, that a law was a law and everybody had to obey it.

In Oakland, California, the FBI cracked down on a crooked landlord who was illegally trying to evict residents so he could make a lot more money on rent. So far, so good. But then, says KQUED, U.S. Marshalls seized the property.

They now want to evict the residents so they can have an empty building that would sell for a huge profit in the Bay Area's tight housing market. Who cares if they make people homeless if there's profit to be made, right?

The residents, and Oakland, and California officials are fighting this.

All this means that the Supreme Court ruling was a victory, but local, state and federal jurisdictions better keep an eye on rogue law enforcement agencies out there.  They're supposed to enforce the law, but some of them are stealing just as boldly as a guy with a gun holding up a liquor store.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is At Least Good At Explaining Washington Corruption.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pretending to be a "bad guy" at a
Congressional hearing, vividly illustrated how corrupt
campaign finance "laws" are 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now both a celebrity and a newly minted member of Congress

She's attracting lots of buzz, that's for sure. She's new in Congress. So like every new member of Congress, I haven't decided yet if I like the job she's doing in Washington. Time will tell.

I have to hand it to her, though. She's very good at explaining what she think's is wrong with our government, our system, our rules.

She does it in a way that doesn't insult our intelligence but also doesn't talk down to us. Love her or hate her, she's pretty real. A viral video, which you can see at the bottom of this post, proves the point.

Ocasio-Cortez is making it plain that there's plenty of room for reform.  She did a great job the other day by turning a Congressional hearing into a bit of a game, a lightining round of questioning, as she put it.

She took the role of a "bad guy," figuring half the room has long since decided she's a "bad guy" anyway. She asked a panel of experts, if she were indeed a "bad guy,"  about whether she could legally get away with some bad stuff to get elected. "I want to get away with as much bad things as possible, ideally to enrich myself and advance my interests," she said.

So, if she wanted to run a campaign entirely fumded by corporate poltical action committees, could she do that?

The answer is yes.

If the "bad guy" candidate had skeletons in his or her closet that needed to be covered up, are hush funds to witnesses legal?

The answer is yes.

Say tbe bad guy is elected. Is there any limits on what legislation he or she can work on in behalf of industry?

The answer is no.

The whole exchange at this Congressional hearing is incredibly instructive and worth the watch. Here it is:

Alabama Town Obviously Not Happy About Trainloads Of (Literal) Crap In Their Town

Trainloads of human poop are rotting in an Alabama rail yard, and nobody
seems interested in moving it away from people.

Train loads of poop - shit, crap, whatever you want to call it - 10 million pounds of it - are sitting in a railyard in Parrish, Alabama.

The fine 982 residents of Parrish are not happy about this. You can imagine why.

The whole situation just goes to show you what happens when a small town, or a person, or a business without a lot of money and without regulations in place can become the victim of aloof businesses, and neighboring communities that have more resources.

The crap has been sitting there for two months, and smells like rotting animal carcasses. By the way, this is mostly human crap. Not produced by the people of Parrish, but by residents of New York and New Jersey.

Summer is rapidly approaching Alabama. When it gets hot the extreme stench will only get worse.

Apparently, nobody gives a, um, shit about this except the people in Parrish.

Here's how Parrish got here, according to CNN.

The companies that handle this call the shit biowaste, I guess to make it sound better, but it's shit. For the past year, waste management facilities in New York and New Jersey have been shipping tons of this crap to Big Sky Environmental, a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama.

The town of West Jefferson, right near Adamsville, filed an injunction to keep this sludge from being stored in a nearby rail yard. So, Big Sky decided to park it in Parrish.

Obviously, Parrish doesn't like this, as noted above, but they don't have many resources. Big Sky is "solving" the problem by not returning phone calls from the mayor of Parrish, or local news media outlets, or CNN for that matter.

The crap in Parrish was parked there because it was already in transit when West Jefferson got the injunction. But couldn't Big Sky send it back where it came from. Not literally, because you can't insert it back into people, but maybe store it where nobody lives?

Parrish Mayor Heather Hall says she's trying to get the shit train out of town. Hall said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and other lawmakers are trying to sort it out, but so far, no luck.

The smell from the train is permeating the town. "It greatly reduces the quality of life. You can't sit out on your porch. Kids can't go outside and play and God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out there," Hall said.

Officials are telling the town's residents that this isn't a health hazard, but come on! If it smells that bad, and people are breathing it, it can't be good.

And it's warming up down there. Temperatures around Parrish are supposed to be around 80 degrees on Friday.

Corrupt Louisiana School District Arrests Teacher For Criticizing Superintendent's Pay

Photo shows a Louisiana teacher about to be arrested for
the high crime of asking why a superintendent is getting a
pay raise but not teachers. 

What seems to be a corrupt school district in Louisiana really stepped in it last week, and as always, that created its own even more intense firestorm on social media.

Let's back up here.

Recently, the school board in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana agreed to renew Superintendent Jerome Puyau's contract for three years. So far so good. But the school board also decided to give Puyau a pay raise, which didn't necessarily go over terrifically with everyone.

The trouble began when Deyshia Hargrave, a middle school English teacher spoke up during the public comment section of the meeting and asked why Puyau was getting a pay raise while teachers were not. 

Well, you'd think Hargrave was making some sort of terrorist threat by asking that simple question. I guess the question did strike terror into the hearts of the school board because they promptly had her arrested.

Just for asking questions and speaking up at a public meeting. She made no threats, she didn't yell, she didn't get violent.

I guess the public comment section a Vermillion Parish school board meeting can only involve opinions that the school board endorses.

School Board President Anthony Fontana is having none of the outcry. He says you're only supposed to express an opinion during the public comment section, not ask questions. (Every public comment period I've been at during public meetings, and I've been to a lot ot them, often involve lots of people asking lots of questions, so I don't know where Fontana is getting that.)

By the way, when ordered to do so, Hargrave left the room, but was still arrested and tackled to the floor outside the room. The school board later decided not to press charges against her.

Says Fontana "This is not about the board, it's about the teacher and everybody wants to side on the poor little woman who got thrown out.... Well, she made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened."

Yep, she could have walked out, and not ask any embarrasing questions of the school board, because really, why should a public school board be held accountable? I guess he thinks they should do whatever they want, huh?

I have a feeling that Fontana won't stick to his guns for long. This story took the familiar arc when it went viral. Many of the nation's major news media picked up the story, and it's been rocketing back and forth through social media for a few days now. 

Public opinion, unsurprisingly, has come down with the teacher and not the school board. What most people seem to object to, including me, is this apparent trend among people that have any power to freak out and overreact when somebody questions authority, like Hargrave did.

As Isaac Bailey wrote for CNN:

"She wasn't screaming hysterically or uttering a rapid-fire succession of four letter words. She didn't pull out a gun or knife. She didn't rush the board members or threaten them with bodily harm. In their eyes, and in the eyes of a police officer providing security, she did something worse -- she questioned the rightness of their decision making and the morality of their authority to their faces, for all to see. 

That willingness to question authority, more than anything else, seems to put fear in the hearts of those in power."

As Bailey points out, there's other examples of this mentality as well, the kind in which you question authority and they swat you down like somebody trying to kill a mosquito with a bazooka.

For instance, there was that case in Utah last year when a cop arrested and dragged out of a hospital a nurse who refused to draw blood from an unconscious patient. The cop was demanding it to see if there were drugs or alcohol in the patient's blood. The nurse was following the law, and hospital protocol by not drawing the blood without a warrant. But the cop took that as ignoring his authority, so he cuffed her.

Charges were later dropped, and thankfully, the cop was fired.

With every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, so they say. About as ridiculous as public officials objecting to being held accountable by the, um, public, there's also what some people in the public do when they hear about the latest outrage.

Sure, it's OK to react. I sure as heck don't mind the outcry against this Louisiana  school board, it's totally warranted. What I don't like is, every time somebody does something stupid, or rude, or illegal or tasteless, the perpetrator gets death threats. As if every transgression deserves death. It happens every time. Somebody does something stupid. The response is a bunch of idiotic death threats.

People screw up all the time. Sometimes in small ways. Sometimes in big ways. But if we all deserved death for the times we've screwed up, there would be nobody left on Earth. Logic and proportion, of course, are lost on the legions of death threat trolls on this here internet thingy.

Could somebody explain what the thrill is of issuing death threats against somebody you don't like?  Because I surely don't get it. Maybe I'll get death threats for not understanding the logic of death threats? God forbid.

This school board in Lousiana definitely needs to be held to account. Wouldn't it be cool if for once, we did so without going nuts on the internet?

Can't we just all calm down? The answer to that question, in these divided and stupid times, is definitely not.

Flint Water Crisis: City Threatens To Evictions Of People Who Wouldn't Pay For Undrinkable Water

The water has been undrinkable in
Flint, Michigan for three years now,
but people there are being told to pay
their water bills, or else.

For years now, Flint, Michigan has been struggling with a water crisis, in which people unwittingly drank water highly contaminated with lead. 

The water crisis was caused by a series of boneheaded moves by state officials, who wanted to prove their "conservative" cost saving ways by switching water systems to something cheap and unsafe.

Who cares if a bunch of kids get sick if the move proves your conservative GOP credentials, right?

While Flint has been slowly working on a fix for this problem, the city also did something horrible, but again, state GOP officials have culpability here too:

The city is threatening to foreclose on and evict up to 8,000 residents because they refused to pay their water bills. Why pay for something you can't use and is unsafe, right?

According to NBC 25 in Flint:

"City leaders say they are in a bind and need the cash.

'We have to have revenue coming in, so we can't give people revenue, I mean excuse me, give people water at the tap and not get revenue coming in to pay those bills,' said Al Mooney, City of Flint Treasury Department."

If people do not pay up by May 19, their water bills go to the tax department, which starts the process of putting properties up for tax sales, and eventual foreclosures."

Got that? Pay for something dangerous and pay for a service that was not provided or lose your homes. Ain't America great?

The state of Michigan had been offering credits up until February, when the state decided the water was fine in Flint now, so everything's totally back to normal.

Except it isn't, of course.

Thousands of homes still have aging pipes that put people at risk for lead poisoning and those pipes have to be replaced. Expensive job for sure.

Few of the residents who received the tax liens expected them, and people have little time to save money to pay the bills or prepare for the notices. If people don't pay within nine months, they risk losing their homes.

Some politicians are still on Flint residents' side. "Flint families should not have to pay for water that they still cannot drink, and they certainly should not lose their homes over the ongoing water crisis that was caused by the callous decisions of state government," said Rep. Daniel Kildee in a written statement.

But, corrupt people who poison the citizenry have got to get their money from somewhere. Let's just soak people they've victimized even more, I guess.

Barring Unfriendly Media From White House Press Event Backfiring Spectacularly

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer really stepped in it
when he barred some media from a press briefing Friday.

The news media and fans of the First Amendment were appalled yesterday when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer barred the New York Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, Politico and the Los Angeles Times from a news briefing.

Those news organizations have been among the most aggressive in covering Donald Trump's wide and growing range of scandals, not the least of which the administration's ties to Russia.

The move was widely seen as retaliation, but what did it accomplish?

Does anyone in the real world actually know what Spicer told the other media that went into the press briefing? They all reported it, but I don't even know what Spicer's message was, and I'm an avid news junkie.

That's because whatever Spicer had to say was completely lost in the outrage and commentary and yakking and consternation about the press being barred.

All Spicer - and by extension Trump - did was call more attention to the possibly impeachable stuff that's been going on with Russia.

Donald Trump said he would create jobs and in one respect, he's right. CNN says "The Trump White House is a full-employment program for investigative reporters, and they are building an impressive, devastating body of work, thanks to a President who routinely invents facts and utters or tweets outright falsehoods almost daily."

CNN goes on, and I'm in full agreement with this:

"As any seasoned reporter knows, that kind of squealing, with pointless insults, is the sound made by politicians when the truth makes them feel cornered and uncomfortable. Their bleating, in fact, signals that it's time to turn up the heat."

Oh, and that heat is coming on much stronger than the actual meteorological record heat the nation is experiencing.  We, the news consumers, will have to be careful, because in the rush to nail Trump, some media outlets will get it wrong.

But the true facts are slowly emerging, and will continue to do so.

It even seems like Republicans in Congress are starting to get fed up, even though many of them are still kissing Trump's butt.

Still, it was very telling that last night, the very conservative Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, was on "Real Time With Bill Maher" last night saying that Congress should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Russian influence.

Issa also said that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is a friend of Issa's, should recuse himself from an investigation, since he's part of the Trump administration.

This of course, is going to get even messier. Trump's true believers - perhaps one quarter of the nation's voting adults - believe Trump's whines that the drumbeat of reports of his corruption is all "fake news"

If the so-called "fake news" leads to Trump's downfall, I worry there will be violence. People are that fired up.

And if anything terrible happens, it will be all Trump's fault, since he's the one who caused this disaster to begin with.

Trump is perhaps the only president that doesn't understand the presidential phrase, "The buck stops here."

Which is ironic, because everything about Trump is about money and status. Boy, is he heading toward a fall.

Today's Overreaction: Cop Has Ex-Wife Jailed For Griping About Him On Facebook

The Facebook post that got Anne King arrested by
her vengeful ex-husband cop. He's now being sued

There's a strange lawsuit bubbling down in Georgia that started with this Facebook post by Anne King, griping about her ex-husband.

"That moment when everyone in your house has the flu and you ask your kids' dad to ge them (not me) more Motrin and Tylenol and he refuses."

OK, so that doesn't put the ex-husband in the best light possible, but hey, everybody complains on Facebook right?

Well, if the allegations in a lawsuit are correct, the ex-husband now looks much, much worse.

The ex-husband is Washington County sheriff deputy Corey King, who, according to the lawsuit filed  Anne King, had her arrested and jailed for posting the complaint. He also had Anne King's friend Susan Hines, who posted a response in support on the Facebook message.

All Hines said was "POS. Give me an hour and check your mailbox. I'll be GLAD to pick up the slack."

A local magistrate called the comments a criminal defamation case and threatened to an Mrs. King from Facebook says television station WRDW.

The case finally went to a more professional state court judge, who told the women, "I don't even know why you're here," as he promptly dismissed the charges, as Popehat notes.

Small town "justice" being what it is sometimes, Corey King and a local magistrate didn't seem to have a firm grasp of the niceties of First Amendent law.

The local magistrate, Ralph O. Todd, who is not a lawyer, somehow got elected to be that local judge, but boy does he seem to relish the role.

According to Popehat, Todd's criminal complaint against the women said, "Subject did, without privilege to do so ad with intent to defame another, communicate false matter which tends to expose one who is alive to hatred, contempt or ridicule, ad which tends to provoke a breach of the peace, specifically subject did make derogatory and degrading comments directed at and about Corey King, for the purpose of providing a breach of the peace."

Them there's some hifalutin' words, but of course, sometimes people who don't worry all that much about what's legal when they get into petty feuds over an insult.

Anne King could well get the last laugh with her lawsuit. She had the constitutional right to her opinion, expressed on Facebook, and her sheriff deputy ex might himself end up on the wrong end of the law after all.

Pettiness boomerangs sometimes, doesn't it?

Trump, Putin Star In Last Nights Hysterical, Terrifying SNL Cold Opening

"Vladimir Putin" and "Donald Trump" on
Saturday Night Livv last night. 

In case you haven't seen it, you have to check out last night's Saturday Night Live cold opening, which features, well, the usual suspects.

These include Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and a few other familiar characters.

The real Donald Trump is going to HATE this, and I'm sure we'll hear about it via his Twitter account.

The other day, Trump blasted on Twitter a Vanity Fair magazine for an unfavorable restaurant review on one of his hotels. The result was that new Vanity Fair subscriptions skyrocketed.

I think SNL keeps getting Alec Baldwin to poke fun at Trump to ensure it stays on the air forever, with the help of Trump's Twitter feed.

This is definitely worth the watch, though. I laughed out loud:

Maybe Trump Isn't My President

I admit I was a little annoyed by some people who kept at the mantra "Trump is not my president" just after the election.   

This was coming from people I normally agree with on politics. But Trump won, despite the obvious flaws with the Electoral College, and the flaws in the media, the candidates, some voters and a multitude of other factors.

So, we had to come together as a nation, and those of us who can't stand Trump would be the loyal opposition, holding his feet to the fire through his administration.

After the revelations over the past few days, and Trumps reaction to them, maybe the "Trump is not my president" crowd was right.

Of course I'm referring to the additional news that's been coming out about Russian meddling in our election.

As the Washington Post told us late last week, people with connections to the Russian government and Wikileaks used thousands of hacked Democratic National Committee emails to boost Trump's chances.

"'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. Senators told the Washington Post on Friday. 'That's the consensus view.'"

That report is a bombshell, even if we don't have firm evidence the Trump campaign directly coordinated with Russia during the election campaign.

The more disturbing part of the news was Trump's reaction to it.

According to the Washington Post:

 "'I think it's ridiculous,' Trump said in an interview with 'Fox News Sunday,' his first Sunday show appearance since the election last month. 'I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it.....No I don't believe it all.'"

Trump also said that the CIA was wrong about Iraq weapons of mass destruction during the Bush adminstration. In his mind, if the intelligence officials were wrong once, they're always wrong.

Think about this: He's siding with Russia over us. Yes, assess and judge CIA reports as president-elect, but to just dismiss it out of hand and cozy up to his pal Vladimir Putin in the process?

Ugh.

Trump is apparently too full of himself to get legit intelligence briefings anyway. He said: "I get it whe I need it....I'm like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years."

Ookey Dokey!

Then you add in all the other factors that seem to delegitimize Trump. He won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote by more than 2.5 million people. Not exactly a mandate.

His fascination with Russia seems to keep going on and on like the Energizer Bunny, too. I'm not sure if he's actually going to pick ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, like news reports suggest.

If he does, though, Tillerson has lots of close ties to Russia, which isn't such a great thing for a Secretary of State, is it?

The Trump and Russia conundrum is making strange bedfellows, that's for sure. South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, a Republican, usually drives me crazy with what he says. But he's right when he called for a Congressional investigation into the matter.

A real pleasant surprise was Joe Walsh, the former Congressman from Illinois, a reactionary right winger whose ever word he ever uttered I disagreed with.

Until now.

Walsh went on an epic tweetstorm over the weekend, outraged that most fellow Republicans are not itching for an investigation.

Sample Walsh tweets:

"I'm a Trump supporter. But if Russia messed with our election to help Hilary lose, I'd be pissed and I'd demand something be done about it."

And:

"Republican silence will be tantamount to treason. Call 4 an investigation. Foreign governments can't pick our President #RussianHackers."

The fact that Trump continues to attack any hint of anybody calling for an investigation is suspicious to me, big time.

I don't know if there's anything there, but he's acting like a five year old trying to lie his way out his parents learning he had his hands in the cookie jar.

Except the five year old's lies are more nuanced and clever than Trump's.

God help us all. I really don't think Trump's our president. Maybe he's Russia's, and he is turning the United States into a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia.

Ugh.

Wells Fargo Scam Is Ugly Look Inside Big Banks

Wells Fargo bank got fined big time for widespread
corruption and hijinks, including opening
bank accounts with fees for customers who did
not ask for the accounts or want them.  

Maybe we should be putting our money under mattresses after all and avoiding banks, given the news about Wells Fargo this week.

Wells Fargo Bank is paying  $185 million in fines to various agencies for opening up millions of phony accounts for unwitting customers.

This wasn't just a few bad apples at Wells Fargo doing this. About 5,300 employees have been sacked for doing this, which means it was part of the bank's culture for doing this.

It looks like the trouble started when Wells Fargo brass instituted, shall we say, aggressive sales targets for its employees.

So aggressive that most of them figured they'd never make it to their goals. So they created fake email addresses to sign up customers for online banking services. Apparently, there were about 1.5 million - yes million - such accounts opened.

The emails were fake, but the customers were real. And these customers did not know they were being signed up. Or would be subjected to fees and such that would help make Wells Fargo big, fat, rich and happy. (Wells Fargo will have to repay these customers fees they paid for their unwitting accounts.)

About $100 million of the settlement went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren's favorite consumer protection agency which was created half a decade ago.

"Wells Fargo built an incentive-compensation program that made it possible for its employees to pursue underhanded sales practices, and it appears the bank did not monitor the program carefully," said CFPB Director Richard Cordway, as NBC news quoted.

I'm glad Wells Fargo is being called on their misdeeds, but as is usually the case when big banks or big businesses are up to no good, the top brass that condoned it are totally getting away with it.

It looks like the 5,300 or so people who were fired were pretty low level people. Maybe they deserved to be fired. But with that many people involved, Wells Fargo must have had a culture in which they did bad things to make profits.

Company culture usually comes down from the top. So why aren't the executives who had to know about this and did nothing still collecting nice big salaries at Wells Fargo?

It's not just envy of the fat cats that are getting away with this. We are all victims of this weird money making system.

As Douglas Rushkoff noted on CNN:

".......We are watching what we might call 'extreme capitalism' at work. Banks don't make money by creating value; they make money by extracting funds from anyone who wants to build a business or even just make transactions."

Rushkoff went on to explain that when the economy was growing vigorously, shareholders in banks were happy because the banks were making money through business loans and general commerce.

In the past decade, things have been slower, so to keep shareholders happy with every rising profits, banks like Wells Fargo try to make more money by issuing more credit cards with high fees and new loans with high origination costs.

So we're screwed. Because banks aren't really creating anything or helping anybody. They're just finding creative ways to transfer more wealth away from most of us, and concentrate it in their pockets.

I don't know if I agree with Rushkoff in the following or not, but his idea is intriguing:

"The only real solution here is for banks, like any business, not be required to grow. Banks, particularly savings banks, are more like utilities than businesses. With their monopoly power on the ability to issue currency, they are in a unique role to enable business of every other kind. This makes them at least as responsible to the public good as their shareholders.

By seeking to extract a higher percentage of our economic activity to pay for their financial services, they don't help anyone. Rather than promoting business, they serve as a drag."

Many conservatives and business types hate the CFPB, the consumer protection agency that is collecting fines from Wells Fargo and want to abolish it.

It's the agency I noted Elizabeth Warren loves.

The fines show that CFPB can help rein in the excesses of the banking industry.  Paying $185 million isn't a big deal for a behemoth like Wells Fargo. But the publicity sullies its reputation. The CFPB basically shamed Wells Fargo into behaving.

Sometimes a little public shaming is the best way to make people - and businesses behave.

If that doesn't work, maybe we should all withdraw our money and stow it under mattresses, I don't know.

DEA, Like Other Law Enforcement Shakes Down Airline, Train Passengers

Is the DEA enforcing drug laws, or or
they just shaking down people for cash. USAToday
raised the question.  

Asset forfeiture, the habit of law enforcement of taking money from people they "suspect" of a crime, whether these people actually committed a crime or not, keeps getting more widespread, we find out.

It's basically larceny by law enforcement, but shhhh! We're suppose to call it, "Cracking down on the drug trade."

Or whatever.

According to a USA Today report last week, federal DEA agents routinely mine data on airline and Amtrak passengers to find supposedly suspicious activity, then seize large quantities of money from some of these passengers, then often let them go.

The point of this, says the DEA, is to stop the flow of cash in the drug trade. And I'm sure some or even many of the cash seizures involve drug curriers or other people involved in the illicit drug industry.

But as I've complained about regarding other police agencies, is it really OK for law enforcement to just grab money for fun and profit without due process?

Technically, it's legal in a lot of places, but doesn't seem to follow the spirit of the Constitution for me. But hey! If we can just steal money from stupid schlubs who get in our way, we don't have to go through the pain in the neck process of bothering law-abiding taxpayers.

And you keep those anti-tax and spend politicians happy.

Never mind that some of the people law enforcement steals money from are also law abiding. It's just easier this way, apparently.

Based on the USA Today report, you probably shouldn't travel one-way, pay for your ticket with cash, have checked baggage or give the ticket agent a phone number for you that's not working.

The DEA could well mine that data on you, then take your money at your next stop.

The danger of this pervasive practice, which so far nobody has really put a stop to, is that we lose more and more confidence in law enforcement. They're written off as just another part of the corrupt system.

If people come to that conclusion, what's to stop them from really breaking the law. Hey, the cops do it, why shouldn't I,? goes the logic.

But, people running these law enforcement shakedowns don't think in those terms. They just want to rake in the cash.

International Olympic Committee Is Hopeless Bunch Of Divas So Nobody Wants To Host The Games

Apparentlu, the International Olympic Committe consists
of a bunch of divas.  

We've heard the runup to this summer's Olympic Games in Rio are a mess

What with the zika virus, toxic pollution in the water, high crime, construction delays, corruption and a Brazilian government in disarray, things aren't looking too hopeful.

In the future, it would be nice if the Games were hosted in a nice, stable country, like Norway.

But Norway, who had considered bidding for the 2022 Olympic Games, is out. Part of it is people in Norway sensibly wondered whether it was a good idea to build a whole bunch of sporting venues that would be used for a couple weeks and largely abandoned.'

The International Olympic Committee didn't help their case with Norway because members of that panel are the worst divas in the world.

Yes, that's right. The committee blew with hilarious demands that would make the most narcisstic rock band or politician blush. Donald Trump wouldn't even go this far.

Here, according to Slate, is how Norway would have to treat the International Olympic Committee members if the 2022 event had occured in Norway:

--- They demand to meet the king prior to the opening ceremony. Afterwards, there shall be a cocktail reception. Drinks shall be paid for by the Royal Palace or the local organizing committee.

--- Separate lanes should be created on all roads where IOC members will travel, which are not to be used by regular people or public transportation.

--- A welcome greeting from the local Olympic boss and the hotel manager should be presented in IOC members' rooms, along with fruit and cakes of the season. (Seasonal fruit in Oslo in February is a challenge...)

----  The hotel bar at the hotel should extend its hours 'extra late' and the minibars must stock Coke products.

---  The IOC president shall be welcomed ceremoniously on the runway when he arrives.

--- The IOC members should have separate entrances and exits to and from the airport.

--- During the opening and closing ceremonies a fully stocked bar shall be available. During competition days, wine and beer will do at the stadium lounge.

--- IOC members shall be greeted with a smile when arriving at their hotel

--- Meeting rooms shall be kept at exactly 20 degrees Celsius at all times.

--- The hot food offered in the lounges at venues should be replaced at regular intervals, as IOC members might 'risk' have to east several meals at the same lounge during the Olympics.

Gosh, these demands are especially heavy on the booze, aren't they?  The International Olympic Committee seems to be an incredible gang of lushes.

It also turns out that many members of the International Olympic Committee are members of hereditary royal families from various countries, so of course they want to be treated at all times like super special kings and queens and fragile (but boozing!) princesses.

Really, between the expense of setting up the Olympics and the obnoxiousness of the Olympic Committee, nobody wants to host the games.

As Yahoo Sports notes, the 2022 games will either be held in Beijing, China, which is at least 120 miles from the nearest ski mountain, and Kazakhstan, which is well, Kazakhstan.

Other cities, like Oslo, keep taking themselves out of the running for the Olympics, especially in countries where the citizenry gets a say in the matter.

Krakow, Poland is out for winter, 2022, too. Boston said no to the summer Olympics in 2024.

No wonder the International Olympic Committee seems so intent on drinking so much. Nobody likes or wants them anymore.

Oklahoma Taking Roadside Asset Seizures To A New, Chilling Level

Republican Oklahoma State Senator Kyle Loveless
wisely distrusts asset forfeitures and new devices
that read prepaid gift cards to seize those, too.  

I've always hated the idea of asset seizures, the ability of police and prosecutors to seize money and other valuables from people without first determining through the justice system whether said people are guilty.  

Oklahoma is taking it to a whole new level.

They now have card readers that can take assets from pre-paid cards, you know, those gift credit cards or those things from Walgreens or whatever that you can use to buy stuff there.

So far, they can't read regular debit or credit cards, but I'm afraid that day will come soon, since the techology seems to be there.

According to Oklahoma's News9, the devices are called Electronic Recovery and Access Devices, or ERADS. These devices read prepaid cards and allows police to seize money from the cards without getting a warrant from a judge and without filing criminal charges.

The motivation behind using ERADS is fine: Apparently, drug runners use pre-paid cards to conduct their business and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol sees ERADS as a way to thwart this activity.

But you can see how a corrupt cop and just stop people randomly and get rich quick. Who would know?

Already, people are becoming wary of driving into Oklahoma because of these ERADS. For instance, News9 said a company called Peak Power Manufacturing of Lake Park, Florida sent a letter saying it's banning its employees from travelilng to or through Oklahoma because their employees use these cards for business travel.

"We simply cannot risk seizure of our employee's and our company's assets based upon the whims of an honorable, dedicated and well-intentioned Oklahoma State Patrol Officer," company officials wrote

Not all lawmakers in Oklahoma are on board with this idea, either. News9 said State Senator Kyle Loveless, R-Oklahoma City, wants to shelve these ERADS, at least temporarily.

"So we're going to be able to tell their balance, tell their records, tell those other things without a warrant, without charges, and without an arrest and without a conviction. That's un-American," Loveless said.

Asset forfeiture has become big business for police agencies. For example, in Oklahoma, law enforcement agencies can keep all of what they take. In the fourteen years ending in 2014, Oklahoma got almost $99 million from seizing cash or selling off seized property, ThinkProgress reports. 

Loveless, the Oklahoma state lawmaker, says he doesn't like asset forfeiture at all, whether its from prepaid cards or other sources.

"We've see single mom's stuff be taken, a cancer survivor his drugs taken, we saw a Christian band being taken.....We've seen innocent people's stuff being taken. We've seen where the money goes and how it's misspent."

It's true people can appeal to get their assets back. But its hard. Largely because the burden of proof is on the victim of the asset forfeiture to prove the stuff is theirs. Whcih is hard.

A lot of the people who have their assets seized are innocent. In five years ending in 2015, Oklahoma seized about $6 million from motorists along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma, and $4 million of that was taken from people who were never charged with a crime.

As I noted last year, in 2014 U.S. Attorneys sized $4.5 billion in assets, more than burglars reportedly took from victims that year.

Asset forfeiture reduces public confidence in law enforcement. It seems outside the rule of law, and it smells of corruption. As I also said last year, we don't need more mistrust in our instititions.

So let's make asset forfeiture harder, not easier, like with the ERADs Oklahoma is using.

Virginia Ticketing/Municipal Revenue Generating Scam Being Broken Up

This cop in Fairfax County, Virginia spent
a lot of time ticketing cars in auto repair shop
parking lots for expired inspection stickers.
The cars were in these parking lots
because their owners were trying to get
these cars inspected.  

One of my pet peeves is municipalities who derive revenue from fines against people in ways that are total scams.

I highlighted one of these last year, when it turned out Fairfax County, Virginia were ticketing cars that had expired inspection stickers.

Ticketing people for expired inspection stickers is fine by me, except when the cars they were ticketing were in repair shop parking lots, awaiting required state inspections. 

In a rare dose of common sense, the Virginia legislature has stepped in and banned this practice.

Says the Washington Post:

"State Det. James M. LeMunyon (R-Fairfax) investigated the situation after reading about it in the Washington Post in October. He introduced a bill in December to prohibit ticketing cars awaiting state inspection, and it passed both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly unanimously. 

On Wednesday, Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed the bill into law, his spokesman said."

I'm certainly glad Virginia lawmakers did this, but the whole thing still smells like a scam between the industrial park condo association where the repair shops were being targeted, and local police.

Nobody has formally accused these parties of doing this, and I have no proof that I'm right. Still, the whole thing  stinks to high heaven.

The industrial park management and board gave Fairfax police a letter about seven years ago giving police permission to enforce traffic and vehicle ordinances on their private property.

So, police had a field day ticketing the cars there awaiting inspection. I'm pretty sure that the police department reaped oodles of money on fines, and maybe, just maybe kicked back some of these profits to the property managers and condo board.

No proof of that, but what else could it be?

Tellingly, the condo board is not talking to the press.

Fairfax police said they were merely responding to calls for service in the area

Riiiiggght.

A particular parking enforcement officer, Jacqueln Hogue, would always show up and start ticketing like crazy. (Bet there were bonuses in her paycheck!)

Shop owners would hastily move cars inside repair shops whe they saw Hogue.

Hogue one day had the balls to go inside a shop owned by Bruce Redwine to write a ticket on a car in the buidling.

Redwine snatched the ticket out of Hogues hand and admitted using colorful words to describe her. Who wouldn't?

She brought Redwine up on trumped up felony assault charges, but after several court appeals and such a jury took a grand total of 20 minutes to acquit him.

But the legal proceedings cost Redwine thousands of dollars in attorneys fees. That was the message from Hogue, and Fairfax County Police and the condo association. Mess with us, interfere with our scam and it'll cost you big time.

Here's why I care so much about this local case: Corruption like that exhibited by Fairfax, Virginia county police, with the collaboration of the rich guys in the condo association, is why faith in government has collapsed.

Corruption is rampant, people are pissed, and they turn to whoever  can channel their anger. The people who are best able to channel this anger are strongmen, fascists, and in their own right corrupt.

In other words, people like Donald Trump.

In their big get rich quick scheme, Fairfax police and the people around them contributed to this dangerous shift in American government toward more crookedness.

Which makes me doubly grateful to the Virginia legislature and governor for putting a stop to this mess.

Here's a quote from the Washington Post:

"One would think you don't need to legislate common sense, said Dickson Young, Redwine's attorney who won his acquital. "If the Fairfax police had exercised common sense, legislation wouldn't have been necessary."

Yeah, but common sense flies out the window when there's money to be made through a municipally run scam, right Fairfax County, Virginia police?

Airlines And Congress Hate Us And Love Money. So We'll Keep Suffering

The way things are going, I think airliners will
look like this pretty soon.  

I'm a big guy. I stand six feet tall and weigh 200 pounds.

I suppose I could make the airlines a tad bit happier and me a lot healthier if I lost 30 pounds or so.

But meanwhile, thanks to the airlines and money hungry Congress creatures, I and millions of others will continue to be totally uncomfortable and cramped when we fly somewhere.

According to The Economist, people did try to work with the airlines and Congress for relief. Of course, that was totally naive.

An outfit called FlyersRights.org, a nonprofit that represents air travelers, sent a petition to Congress demanding new guidelines for a minimum distance between rows in planes, said the Economist.

Things looked good at first. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee, recently introduced an amendment to a Federal Aviation Administration funding bill that would have mandated a certain amount of legroom for airline passengers, the Economist reported.

Cohen said the average distance between seat rows dropped from 35 inches before airlines were deregulated in the 1970s to 31 inches today. Average seat width has declined from 18 inches to 16.5 inches.

Cohen drafted his amendment, sensibly, on public safety grounds. He said the FAA requires planes to be evacuated within 90 seconds in an emergency, and no studies have been done on whether this can be accomplished now that planes are so cramped.

He and other backers also worried about the health effects of people being in such restricted environments for too long. This arrangement can cause dangerous blood clots.

But, the House Transportation Committee shot down the measure.

I wonder if campaign donations had anything to do with this vote.

According to the Intercept:

"The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa, urged his members to vote against the amendment, and every member of the party did, except Rep. Don Young R-Alaska. 

Air transport PACS (political action committees) are Shusters largest source of campaign funding, with backing from major airlines such as American, Alaskan, Continental, Delta, Haaiian, JetBlue and Southwest. Air transportation PACS have given $92,000 to Shuster this cycle."

I wonder, then, if the airlines will keep shrinking space in the planes, because they do have cover from Congress. No, I don't want to overregulate industry, but I don't want industry to overregulatethe public either.

But I guess they have free reign to do so. I guess the airlines will eventually start stacking us on flights like cordwood.

Michigan City, State Officials Thought Giving Children Lead Poisoning Is OK If It Saves Money

The nation's worst scandal, lead poisoning due
to Michigan government ineptitude or worse,
is not getting enough attention

UPDATE:

Under mounting pressure MIchigan Gov. Rick Snyder requested the Obama administration declare a federal state of emergency in Flint over the poisoned water crisis.

Obama quickly made that declaration Saturday.

Of course, it was the Snyder administration's actions that ultimately led to the mass lead poisoning of Flint's children because of the bad water, as Snyder and his minions were trying to save money.

Of course, "saving money" led to this tragic and expensive disaster.

The emergency declaration will free up $5 million to federal aid, which would go toward trucking clean water into town and distributing water filters in the hopes that will help.

Obama was forced to deny Snyder's request for a disaster declaration which would have freed up more money to rescue Flint from its bad water.

However, disaster declarations can only be made if there was a natural disaster. This was man made. Flint would have been better off, in one sense, had a big tornado trashed the city. Instead, conservative politics trashed the city, with Ma Nature havng nothing to do with it

I'm all for Obama's decision to declare a federal emergency in Flint, The people there need all the help they can get. But as a taxpayer, I resent the politicians who, in trying to demonstrate how "fiscally conservative " there are, ended up costing taxpayers like me and you all this money to help Fiint.

Meanwhile, Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders said Snyder should resign from his position as governor because of the Flint Water Crisis.

Said Sanders in a statement: "There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint's water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign."

The nationwide anger at Snyder is really - finally - building now. This has become a national story, and the pressure on the Snyder administration is intensifying, which is great.

Saturday, when Sanders first Tweeted his desire for Snyder to resign, I retweeted and responded. "...or face criminal charges."

I don't think I've ever gotten so many retweets and likes from any comment I've ever made on Twitter.  This is out of about 17,500 Tweets I've posted since June, 2011.

I do think there will be a lot of investigations into Snyder and the managers he appointed to ruin run Flint.

I hope justice is served, and if there was indeed criminal wrongdoing by Snyder or anyone in his administration, they go to jail for a long, long time.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION FROM JAN. 7:

There's been an unfolding scandal in Flint, Michigan that I can't believe hasn't gotten more attention than it has.

An unknown number of children have suffered lead poisoning due to apparent incompetence and a potentional cover up by the ironically named Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

This bad acting might go up all the way to the Michigan Governor's office.

Luckily, the media - and the nation - are finally paying more and more attention to this crisis and scandal, but still not enough is being done.

They were involved in what was to be a money saving move to stop buying expensive drinking water from Detroit and take the water from the Flint River instead.

The only problem is the Flint River is wicked polluted and those pollutants are corrosive. So the corrosive water wore down lead pipes in the Flint water system, and people were drinking water heavily laced with lead for months.

The basic questions are: Did politicians know that kids and families in Flint, Michigan were being poisoned by high levels of lead in drinking water? And did they do nothing because it would have cost money to fix the problem? And would spending money ruin their conservative bonafides? And were those conservative bonafides more important than the health of Flint's children?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder finally apologized for the fiasco over the New Year's holiday, but was he culpable in this, too?

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into this, and Dan Wyant, the head of the Michigan Department of Environment Quality (MDEQ) has resigned. The federal Environmental Protetion agency is also investigating.

The MDEQ continuously denied there was a problem for most of 2015 even as evidence mounted that there was a dangerous problem with Flint's drinking water.

None of this would have come to light had it not been for some dogged heroes. One was the Flint Journal and its parent media company, MLive, which pursued the story relentlessly. (Pulitzer Prize for them?)

MLive has a handy dandy chart that cuts through the complexity of this thing and gives you a flow chart of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys here.

There were major heroes to this story as well.  Michigan Public Radio kept at this, too.

A huge assist came from ACLU of Michigan, which kept hammering away to get documents proving the problem. Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards got involved and proved there was indeed a crisis with lead and contaminated water.

Other hereoes include Erin Brockovich, who used her fame to try to broadcast the problem to a larger audience. There were Flint residents like Melissa Mays who would talk about this to anyone who would listen.

Unfortunately, there were also a large number of villians here that covered up the problem as long as they could.

From 2011 to April, 2015, Flint city government was under the control of an emergency manager appointed by Snyder, rather than local government. This was because Flint's city budget had ballooned to $19 million.

No matter what the reason for the budget deficit - local incompetence, circumstances beyond anyone's control or a combination - the emergency managers were pretty undemocratic.

The managers reported directly to the governor, and not the people of Flint. The voters of Flint basically couldn't hold anybody accountable for their actions, since the mayor and city council were essentially just there for window dressing.

That lack of accountability helped lead to the debacle, many observers believe, since Flint residents had little ability to demand change or create change in leadership through the ballot box.

Potential villians, then, in this case include Snyder, who only belated came on board to say Flint's water was dangerous. There's Darnell Early, who advocated to switch the water source to the Flint River. He also says it's the Flint City Council's fault, but there's no record of that council deciding to take water fron the Flint River.

Then there's the guy who just resigned from his directorship at MDEQ, who kept saying for months Flint's water was safe, even as evidence mounted that it wasn't. The MDEQ spokesman, Bradley Wurfel, who also recently resigned, kept attacking the credibility of Edwards and his fellow Virginia Tech researchers, even though it turns out they were exactly right.

Were these potential villians just in denial, sticking to their original proposals because they made them and they "had" to be right?  Or was this an attempt at a coverup, trying to prevent word from getting out that the water was unsafe?  Preventing, that is, until they could come up with a Plan B, or figure out a way to shift blame to somebody else?

In any event, documents uncovered showed indications of high levels of lead in the drinking water by July. Yet, this information was suppressed until at least September, and people kept drinking the dangerous water.  Officials tried to poo-poo the situation as a harmless "seasonal change" whatever that is.

Was this situation a "missed opportunity" to release information as one state official said, or was it a coverup?

"Everyting they looked at, they found a problem, and they never told anyone," Edwards said of the MDEQ, according to MLive.

It's certainly not over for soe of Michigan's leaders who might be culpable in this fiasco.

Even celebrities have gotten involved. Filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore is asking U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate Gov. Snyder. 

Cher actually Tweeted that Gov. Snyder should be executed over this, which definitely seems a little over the top.

What's way, WAY more over the top is how elected leaders could know something is wrong with the water, that children were being permanently damaged by lead and possibly other contaminants in the drinking water, and still drag their heels.

Again,  it smells like elected officials, including Snyder, might have made their political futures with a fiscal conservative brand more important than the children of Flint, Michigan.

Snyder is refusing to say what he knew and when he knew it in regards to Flint's water, says NBC News. 

If this isn't a scandal of immense proportions, I don't know what is.

Let's hope the Justice Department investigation actually gets some answers, and here's hoping that MLive, Michigan Public Radio and other media outlets- local, national and international - keep the pressure on to get completely to the bottom of this.

Even worse than all this, Flint's water is still dangerous and nobody is really doing anything about it.

True, they're not taking water from the Flint River. They've switched back to Detroit. But the corrosion in the pipes from the previous Flint River water is still very likely leaching lead into the drinking water supply.

You'd think with an emergency declared, you'd get something like big National Guard tankers full of water in Flint to distribute clean water, Red Cross and other big volunteer groups helping, and people going door to door making sure people were drinking safe water.

But, nope. Flint is full of people who are in and near poverty. The economy has been very rough on Flint. In this nation's political world, poor people don't matter, so the residents of Flint, and their children, are still drinking dangerous water that is injuring them.

It's not like they can afford to drive to a suburban Big Box store and buy cases of bottled water. They have no cars and no money to do this.

I guess Snyder's administration's message to Flint is go screw yourselves.

Police Departments Might Be Taking More Than Burglers

I really hope this cartoon is not reality. 

I don't mean to pile on law enforcement, but can certain jurisdictions please stop just stealing people's money just because they can?

It's true, They can. It's called civil forfeitures.

It invites so much crookedness and corruption that I don't think there's any hope of rescuing any of it.  With people aleady getting more and more skeptical about the police, do we really want the entire populace not trusting them?

I've complained about this before, but it bears repeating, especially with the latest study that came out. More on that in a minute.

Civil forfeiture is the ability of law enforcement and prosecutors to take money or property away from people suspected of committing a crime. This can happen without charging the owners of the cash or property with a crime.

I suppose the original impetus of this arrangement was full of good intentions. It started mostly as a way to stop the drug trade. Authorities could take assets used to promote illegal drug sales. And they could grab the money or property after an arrest but before a conviction.

That way, criminal enterprises wouldn't get a chance to stash the cash away,  out of reach of authorities. Civil forfeiture would help thwart the drug sales by interrupting the assets people had to continue this extremely shady business.

However, in some jurisdictions, it's become a method for quote, unquote law enforcement to shake down innocent people for property. And some of these police and prosecuting agencies take a LOT of money and property for their own use. Kind of like the Mob is famous for doing.

I had no idea how bad this was until an Institute for Justice study came out last week.

Says the Institute for Justice:

"Civil forfeiture laws pose some of the greatest threats to property rights in the nation today, too often making it easy and lucrative for law enforcement to take and keep property - regardless of the owner's guilt or innocence."

Blogger Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics crunched the data in the Institute for Justice report:

"Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time was +19.4 annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by 52.8 percent from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989.

Then by 2014, that number ballooned to roughtly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35 percent of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means the police are now taking more assetts than the criminals."

Here's how the Washington Post described how bad things have gotten with forfeitures in an investigatige report last year:

"An aggressive brand of policing (is spreading) that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes.....

Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal batles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

"A thriving subculture of road officers now competes to see who can seiz the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing "trophy shots' of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities."

In other words, these jurisdictions and governments know that they'll become unpopular with their constituents if they do try the traditional method of using tax dollars to fund law enforcement. So they just shake down people who happen to be passing  through.

I'm really stunned this kind of thing hasn't gotten more publicity. Especially considering how widespread this practice has become. Can you imagine if roving gangs of pirates were shaking down motorists, who, say stopped at a highway rest area?

Noah Smith, writing in Bloomberg View describes the various threats this state of affairs creates succinctly:

"The threat to individual liberty from stop-and-seize is painfully clear. Without requirements for an arrest or for a warrant, the power to confiscate cash is a clear diminution of property rights.

Effectively, the police have been given official sanction to commit literal highway robbery without the threat of punishment. People whose property was seized must pay a lot of monye and spend a long time in court for even the chance of getting it back, and police who seize money with no good reason don't, apparently, suffer any threat of discipline.

But stop-and-seize also presents a danger to public trust. When the cops go around taking money from innocent people to fund their own departments and salaries it understandably decreases trust in the government and the legal system. That is something we can ill-afford at the present time, with trust in the police already at a low ebb over a series of videos and police killings.

If they don't trust the government, people will be less likely to report criminals, and possibly less likely to follow the law themselves."

Just what this country needs. More upheaval.