Rather than deal forthrightly with the
reality that unrealistic promises made to their employees cannot be
honored, local government has pursued a strategy of legalizing
looting.
The gradual erosion of civil liberties,
legal rights and government ethics are connected: our rights
don’t just vanish into thin air, they are expropriated by
government: Federal, state and local. Though much is written about
the loss of civil liberties at the Federal level, many of the most
blatantly illegal power grabs are occurring in local government.
This expropriation is under the radar of the
average citizen because the process slowly chips away the
fundamentals of legality and justice: bit by bit, due
process and the rights of the individual have been eroded by state
and local governments until the fundamental Constitutional
protections simply cease to exist.
When local government looting is legalized,
the entire system is illegal. Here are three recent examples
of blatantly illegal looting by local governments.
First up: privatizing the collection of
traffic fines and probation to create a modernized debtor’s
prison. We turn to The Nation for the
story:
The
Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence Most
states shut down their debtors’ prisons more than 100 years ago; in
2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.
What happened to Ford in the small town of
Harpersville was tangled and unconstitutional– but hardly unique.
Similar tales have been playing out in more than 1,000 courts across
the country, from Georgia to Idaho. In the face of strained budgets
and cuts to public services, state and local governments have been
stepping up their efforts to ensure that the criminal justice system
pays for itself. They have increased fines and court costs,
intensified law enforcement efforts, and passed so-called
“pay-to-stay” laws that charge offenders daily jail fees. They
have also begun contracting with “offender-funded” probation
companies like JCS, which offer a particularly attractive
solution—collection, at no cost to the court.Harpersville’s
experiment with private probation began nearly ten years ago. In
Alabama, people know Harpersville best as a speed trap, the stretch
of country highway where the speed limit changes six times in roughly
as many miles. Indeed, traffic is by far the biggest business in the
town of 1,600, where there is little more than Big Man’s BBQ, the
Sudden Impact Collision Center and a dollar store.
In 2005, the court’s revenue was
nearly three times the amount that the town received from a sales
tax, Harpersville’s second-largest source of income. Fines
had become key to Harpersville’s development, but it proved
difficult to chase down those who did not pay. So, that year,
Harpersville decided to follow in the footsteps of other Alabama
cities and hire JCS to help collect.
It was a system of extraction and coercion so
flagrant that Alabama Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington likened it
to a modern-day “debtors’ prison.”
Her fines for the three charges added up to
$2,922, court papers show. Ward sentenced her–and others who said
they couldn’t pay their full fines that day– to probation. Once a
means of allowing convicted offenders to stay out of jail on the
condition of good behavior, probation had now become a
court-sanctioned tool for debt collection.
Burdette reported to the JCS office in nearby
Childersburg, where she paid her probation officer $100. Of that, $45
went toward her fine, $10 toward a one-time “start-up fee,” and
the last $45 went to JCS as a monthly fee for service.
Next up: illegal search and seizure under
the pretext of traffic violations. As if “driving while
black” isn’t bad enough, now “driving with cash” is pretext
enough to be stripped of your rights and your property stolen by
local government:
Tan Nguyen of Newport, Calif., and Michael Lee
of Denver said in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Reno they
were stopped last year on U.S. Interstate 80 near Winnemucca about
165 miles east of Reno under the pretext of speeding. They said they
were subjected to illegal searches and told they wouldn’t be
released with their vehicles unless they forfeited their cash.The
lawsuits claimed the cash seizures were part of a pattern of stopping
drivers for speeding as a pretext for drug busts in violation of the
Constitution.
Nguyen was given a written warning for
speeding but wasn’t cited. As a condition of release, he signed a
“property for safekeeping receipt,” which indicated the money was
abandoned or seized and not returnable. But the lawsuit says he did
so only because Dove threatened to seize his vehicle unless he “got
in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened.”
“He wasn’t charged with anything. He had no
drugs in his car. The pretext for stopping him was he was doing 78 in
a 75,” John Ohlson told KRNV-TV. “It’s like Jesse James or
Black Bart,” he told AP in an interview last week.
The district attorney’s statement said both
men were stopped legally and that “every asset that was seized
pursuant to those stops was lawfully seized.”
Exhibit # 3: guilty until proven innocent:
State of California seizes cash from “suspected” tax evaders with
no evidence, no court action, no recourse. I have documented
in detail how the jackboot of the State of California has pressed on
the necks of thousands of law-abiding citizens whose only
crime was moving out of California.
The State of California presumes anyone moving
out of the state who still has a source of income in California–for
example, a few dollars of interest earned on a bank account–owes
California income tax on all their
presumed income, even if they have filed income tax returns in
another state.
If this isn’t the acme of illegal seizure and
denial of basic rights, i.e. presumed innocent until proven guilty,
then what is?
Here
is one reader’s account of how this legal looting works: I
wrote about this inWelcome
to the United States of Orwell: Law-Abiding Taxpayers Are Treated as
Criminals While the Real Criminals Go Free (March 27, 2012).
I received a letter last year that we owed the
state of California’s Franchise Tax Board $90,000 for taxes in the
year 2008.We replied to the Franchise Tax board in a similar manner
as RT stating that:
– Did not reside in California in 2008
– Did not file a State income tax return in
California in 2008
– Did not have any outstanding tax issues
with California in 2008
– Did no business in California in 2008
– Owned no property in California in 2008
The CA Franchise Tax board responded by putting
a lien on us in the state – fortunately, our banks and assets have
no business in CA or I am certain our accounts would have been robbed
as well.
After a great deal of uncertainty and angst, I
found an accountant in CA who advised us that we needed to file a
complete CA tax return for 2008 even though we did not owe any tax.
We filed the return and received a response that we owed the state
$625 to cover the State’s collection fees. We paid the fee and
within two weeks received a “refund” check for the $625.
On reflection, we felt as if we had been
“held up” by some powerful gangsters and if it had not been for
an honest tax accountant we would have suffered much financial
damage.
In other words, honest taxpayers are reduced
to begging the predatory state of California to return their own
money. Meanwhile, the bagmen for the local government
thieves, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, among others, get to keep
the $100 fee they charged the taxpayer for stealing their money. If
this isn’t Orwellian, then what do you call it? “Legal”? If
this is legal, legality has lost all meaning.
For more on the blatantly illegal seizures of
cash from people who aren’t even residents of California and who
filed income tax returns in another state, please read:
The
Predatory State of California, Part 2 (March 21, 2012)
Just as pernicious as outright looting is
the growing dependence of local government on fines and related
rip-offs. Correspondent Joel M. recently submitted this
article which features New York City officials whining that the
recent snow storm deprived them of sorely needed revenues from
parking fines.
“If the winter was costly for individuals, it
was even more so for municipalities. The snow triggered repeated
suspensions of New York City’s alternate-side-of-the-street parking
rules, delighting car owners but costing the city an average of
$270,000 a day in potential fines, officials said. That added up to
$4.3 million during a three-week stretch in February alone, money
that would have gone to help pay for city services, including the
fire and police forces, city officials said.”
Everyone who believes local government is
“here to fill potholes and help disadvantaged people” needs to
wake up and ask what kind of government we have when due process has
been replaced with “legal” looting. Is local government
focused on serving citizens or on funding public employee pensions
and healthcare benefits?
The erosion of ethics of those in government
service is as pernicious as the rise of legal looting. Let’s
be honest, shall we? Those in local government tasked with collecting
all these forms of legal looting are “just doing my job,” but how
many protest the process? How many public employee unions are
outraged by the legal looting that fills the coffers of their pension
funds?
For context, government employees constitute
about 15% of the employed workforce in the U.S.: 22 million out of
142 million. Unlike the other 85%, their employer can legalize
looting on their behalf.
Local government spending has soared for
decades.
So has local government debt.
Promises were made to local government
employees by craven, bought-and-paid-for politicos that cannot
possibly be honored in a stagnating economy with widening wealth
inequality. But rather than deal forthrightly with that reality,
local government has pursued a strategy of legalizing looting.
From the point of view of the hapless tax
donkeys and debt-serfs being looted, this strategy boils down to a
stark threat: Pay Our Pensions Or We’ll Throw You in Jail.
Here’s the deal: government is supposed to
serve the people, not the insiders. Please read the above news
stories; can anyone claim that legalized looting is OK because the
“ends” (public services) justify the “means” (legalized
looting)? How many public employees care about where the money that
funds their paycheck, pension and healthcare benefits comes from?
Maybe public employees should start caring
about where the money is coming from, because taxation approved by
elected officials or direct voter approval is one thing, and
legalized looting is another. If you don’t care that your
pay/pension/benefits may be partly funded by legalized looting,
perhaps you should start caring.
Remember that we (the general public) can’t
pull you over and “legally” steal your cash, nor can we order
Wells Fargo to go into your bank account and “legally” steal your
money without court review, evidence of wrongdoing or recourse. We
can’t award private collection agencies the powers reserved for
representative government and rig the probation system into a cash
cow that benefits us.
Please don’t trot out the “good German”
excuse: I only take orders. You’re the ones who are pulling the
levers of the legalized looting machine; us tax donkeys and
debt-serfs are on the receiving end. Given that special interests own
the state legislatures, the tax donkeys and debt-serfs have only
three choices: opt out, move out or stop paying, and fill your modern
debtors’ prisons to the brim.
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