Category: Corruption Corner

Eric Holder Found in Contempt

At least there was some good news yesterday:

US Attorney General Eric Holder has been held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over a set of documents on a failed sting operation.

In a 255-66 vote, some Democrats joined with the House of Representatives’ Republican majority.

Mr Holder is the first sitting attorney general to be held in contempt.

Congratulations go to Mr. Holder for being the first sitting attorney general to be found in contempt, that’s quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately for the American people this vote will likely result in nothing of consequence. Even while condemning each other statists have a habit of ensuring no real punishment befalls their fellow comrades. Holder probably won’t even receive a slap on the wrist and whether or not the public will ever see the documents being concealed by him is unknown.

Zimmerman’s Prosecutor is Nuts

When Zimmerman was charged I put forth the fact that this case could make Angela Corey’s career:

My fear that a fair trial may be impossible considering the strong emotions felt by the public regarding this case still hold. It could make Corey’s career if she successfully prosecutes Zimmerman because nothing builds a career like ruling in favor of public opinion in a high profile case.

It appears as though she was a little too anxious to forward her career and got caught effectively lying in her affidavit:

The special prosecutor handling the case is Florida State Attorney Angela Corey. Dershowitz says that he believes she submitted documents that withheld all of the truth in the Trayvon Martin case.

“She was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. The New York Times has reported that the police had ‘a full face picture’ of Zimmerman, before paramedics treated him, that showed ‘a bloodied nose.’ The prosecutor also had photographic evidence of bruises to the back of his head.”

Like most politicians caught with their fingers in the cookie jar, Corey then lashed out against Dershowitz:

State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions.

She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40-minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.

[…]

Her beef was that I criticized her for filing a misleading affidavit that willfully omitted all information about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained during the “struggle” it described. She denied that she had any obligation to include in the affidavit truthful material that was favorable to the defense.

While Zimmerman shot his credibility by lying about the amount of money he had available to him, Corey just shot her credibility by filing an affidavit that left out key pieces of evidence in the case. She claims that such evidence need not be addressed in her affidavit but by not addressing it she leads one to believe she didn’t think her affidavit would hold up with the included evidence. In other words it appears as though her case was on shaky ground from the beginning.

Regardless of her intentions I believe it is, at least, entirely unprofessional to not only omit evidence in an affidavit but to then threaten somebody who pointed out your omission.

This case is a never ending legal soap opera.

Explain to Me Again How We Don’t Live in a Police State

People keep telling me that I’m living in the freest country on Earth. If that’s the case then the rest of the world must be one giant supermax prison:

Police in Aurora, Colo., searching for suspected bank robbers stopped every car at an intersection, handcuffed all the adults and searched the cars, one of which they believed was carrying the suspect.

[…]

Police in Aurora, Colo., searching for suspected bank robbers stopped every car at an intersection, handcuffed all the adults and searched the cars, one of which they believed was carrying the suspect.
Police said they had received what they called a “reliable” tip that the culprit in an armed robbery at a Wells Fargo bank committed earlier was stopped at the red light.

“We didn’t have a description, didn’t know race or gender or anything, so a split-second decision was made to stop all the cars at that intersection, and search for the armed robber,” Aurora police Officer Frank Fania told ABC News.

Officers barricaded the area, halting 19 cars.

“Cops came in from every direction and just threw their car in front of my car,” Sonya Romero, one of the drivers who was handcuffed, told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver.

People were removed from their vehicles and handcuffed with no probably cause, no reasonable suspicion, and no warrant. The only thing the police had to go on was a “reliable” tip. That’s not even the worst part of this story:

“Most of the adults were handcuffed, then were told what was going on and were asked for permission to search the car,” Fania said. “They all granted permission, and once nothing was found in their cars, they were un-handcuffed.”

Shame on every person who gave the police permission to search their vehicle. Each and every one of you demonstrated one of the worst aspects of modern American society, mindless subservience. If a costume-clad thug pulls you out of your vehicle, handcuffs you, and asks for permission to search your vehicle the only correct response is, “Go fuck yourself.” Seriously. At such a point you should say, “Officer, I don’t consent to a search of my person or property.”

I would be livid if the police did that to me. In fact I would likely lose my typical professional demeanor and go straight to the stereotypical anarchist mode of yelling, “Fuck you pig!” When the police are acting like this they’re no longer deserving of well-mannered responses. In fact every police officer involved in this stunt should be tossed in the slammer for kidnapping and every person who granted the police permission to search their vehicle should attend a course on Constitutional protections.

We need to stop kowtowing the state and its thugs and rekindle the American tradition of rebelliousness.

Cooking the Books

Yesterday I mentioned a long New York Times article that tried to make Obama look like a man who can make the tough decision. It was eight pages so I didn’t read it word for word but I did miss a rather interesting fact:

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined “militant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”

From the article:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Wow… I’m really at a loss for words. This is absolutely twisted. In order to make people think the war is going better and America holds some kind of moral high ground Obama is counting any military-age males in a strike zone as militants. If a hellfire missile is launched from a drone and kills five 18 year-old males who were entirely uninvolved in hostilities with out country Obama will strut around and brag about the five militants he put in the ground.

Read the last line of the excerpt, any military-age male is considered guilty until proven innocent. What kind of double standard is that? Haven’t we always been told people are assume innocent until proven guilty in America? Isn’t that supposed to be one of the pillars of our so-called justice system? Suddenly the rules are changed simply because a person was blown up by a hellfire missile instead of arrested by police and tried?

This is the kind of twisted shit the state does to propagandize its people into supporting war. The current administration isn’t stupid, they remember how things went once word got out about the number of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War. People stopped believing the bullshit being fed to them by the state and started demanding the war end.

We were never at war with Eurasia, we were always at war with Eastasia.

Rigging the Game

The Republican Party wants Romney and they’re going to rather sickening extents to get the man nominated. First we had the Republican National Convention (RNC) outright threaten to disallow any delegates from Nevada to be seated if they sent “too many” Paul delegates and now local Republican Party shills are working to invalidate caucus results in Massachusetts:

A month after Mitt Romney’s loyalists were trounced by supporters of Ron Paul in the former governor’s home state caucuses, the Massachusetts Republican Party is trying to invalidate some ballots.

The move, some say, could oust Paul backers and send more Romney representatives to the GOP nominating convention in Tampa in August. It has infuriated rank-and-file Republicans who accuse establishment insiders of bending the rules to their own benefit.

“Just because you didn’t like the outcome of an election doesn’t mean you overturn it because you have the power to,’’ said a state committeeman, Stephen Zykofsky.

Related
Notebook: Giuliani, Gingrich come to Romney’s defense

Much of the ire is directed at a challenge in the Fifth Congressional District – where Romney lives and where all six of his selected delegates and alternates lost. A member of Romney’s slate contends the results should be thrown out because the caucus chairman failed to get all the participants to sign in.

A 14-member GOP committee is expected to consider whether the results should be counted this week.

Romney is so worthless he could even win a delegate seat in his own district. This fact has irked members of the Republican Party who are now moving the fix team in in an attempt to prevent Paul from getting any chance at the nomination.

If you pay attention to the political process, and I mean really pay attention to it, you learn pretty quickly that we don’t live in a democracy, republic, or any other form of government of the people. The United States system is just as corrupt as any other political system, we just manage to brainwash people into believing otherwise more effectively than most other countries.

It’s for the Children

One thing that appears to be universal is that any legislation can be passed so long as you can tie to to preventing terrorist or child pornography. I’m not sure if a majority of people have a built-in kill switch and disengages their ability to critically think when they hear either term but that appears to be the fact. This is the reason the copyright lobby loves child pornography:

The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen). He was speaking in front of an audience where the press had not been invited; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only. It wasn’t. Christian Engström, who’s now a Pirate Member of the European Parliament, net activist Oscar Swartz, and I were also there.

“My friends,” Schlüter said. “We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet.”

Politicians know that censorship is the death knell of a political career, citizens don’t generally like having their speech shut down after all. As no logical argument exists in favor of censorship the politicians wanting to pass such legislation need to resort to ad hominem, setting up a scenario where they can claim any opponents of said legislation must support child pornographers.

The trick for the copyright lobby is to somehow tie copyright offenses to child pornography, which they’ve done:

“We pointed out to [the governor] that there are overlaps between the child porn problem and piracy,” Mr. Sherman [The RIAA president] said, “because all kinds of files, legal and otherwise, are traded on peer-to-peer networks.” (New York Times)

Once the link is established you can ram through any legislation you want, just make sure there is some mention about fighting child pornography mixed in with the hundreds of pages describing how the bill will be used to fight copyright offenses through censorship. This is why the state always ends up thieving rights from people, the people put in charge of the state are corruptible and will force their own desires and the desires of those who make them wealthy onto the populace.

Prioritizing Police Resources

Prioritizing police resources, this chief is doing it wrong:

On Jan. 11, Meehan son, a freshman at Berkeley High School, found that his iPhone, equipped with the Find My iPhone tracking software, was gone from his unlocked gym locker. The boy alerted his father and Meehan pulled out his own cell phone and showed a property crimes detective sergeant the real time movement of the stolen phone.

Given the active signal of the stolen phone, the detective sergeant took his team to try to locate it. As the signal was moving into the city of Oakland, the detective sergeant called the drug task force to ask for some additional assistance and members of that team offered to help, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, department spokeswoman.

Meehan did not respond to a request for comment.

The four sergeants followed the signal to the area of 55th and San Pablo avenues in North Oakland, where they contacted residents at several homes looking for the phone. It was never located.

I’m not sure what the real story is here. Is it the fact a police chief used an great deal of department resources to find his kid’s stolen phone or the fact that said resources couldn’t find the phone even though they had a blue dot on a map telling them where it was?

You also have to love how the drug task force got pulling into this investigation. Perhaps this was done by expanding the interpretation on civil forfeiture laws. If the burdon of proof is placed on citizens to demonstrate anything they own hasn’t been tied to a drug crime then the burdon of proof must be placed on a phone thief to prove it wasn’t stolen in relation to a drug crime. On the upside the drug task force was busy hunting down a stolen phone instead of kicking in the door of some random homehold and shooting any dog they found inside only to find out they were at the wrong address again.

Confiscating Guitars Possibly Going to a New Level

Several years ago Gibson was raided and guitars were seized because they were supposedly using “illegal wood.” Interestingly enough Martin was using the same wood and never go raided. This would indicate a double-standard or some kind of payoff in my rather cynical mind but the state may still step up its game by raiding concert to seize even more guitars:

Lawmakers are scrambling to save the summer concert season from federal agents poised to seize the instruments of rock and country stars because the wood used to make them may have been illegally harvested–and without their knowledge.

“I don’t want the musicians from Nashville who are flying to Canada to perform this summer to worry about the government seizing their guitars,” said Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander.

[…]

“Senator Wyden and I are going to write the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a letter in the next couple of weeks and try to make it clear that wood harvested before 2008 to make musical instruments can’t be seized by the federal government,” Alexander said in a statement. “The Justice Department and Fish and Wildlife have said they have no intention of doing that, but Sen. Wyden and I are going to make it absolutely clear. We hope to get a clear ruling within a few weeks, and if we can’t get a clear ruling, we’ll introduce legislation to change the Lacey Act.”

I wonder if the feds have actually threatened to raid summer concerts or if Senator Alexander and Wyden are simply performing political grandstanding. It’s sad that I have to wonder this but the federal government has become so drunk with power that raiding I wouldn’t put raiding concerts past them. They already stole guitars from Gibson and haven’t even had the decency to charge the company with a crime yet.

This case is very interesting to me because I have no idea what is going on. Did a competing guitar manufacturer sick the feds on Gibson? Did some official in Madagascar do it? Did a local supplier of wood bring in the federal dogs? Did Gibson merely forget or refuse to pay off a state agent? If the state were confiscating goods from the competitor of an obviously politically well-connected company I would already know what the angle was. As far as I know none of Gibson’s competitors are all that well-connected politically, in fact I don’t know if any guitar manufacturer contributes money to political campaigns or hires lobbyists.

The Reason the State Loves Civil Forfeiture Laws

One of the favorite tactics used by police in the war on drugs is civil forfeiture laws. For those who don’t know civil forfeiture laws are the laws that allow the state to steal any private property if the owner can’t prove said property isn’t tied to a crime. It’s a classic case of guilty until proven innocent and the state absolutely loves it because it gives them the legal authority to take whatever they want, including bail money:

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.

She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. “The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.”

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

Drug-sniffing dogs are also favorite tools of the state because nobody can interrogate a dog. K9 officers will often claim a dog “alerted” whenever they desire to check or confiscate property without a warrant or probably cause. They claim the dog “alerting” gives probably cause but a study demonstrated that the dogs aren’t “alerting” to a scent but to their controller:

The performance of drug- and explosives-sniffing dog/handler teams is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional handler cues, a study by researchers at UC Davis has found.

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog/handler teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.

I’m sure the police are well aware of this fact but continue putting forth propaganda stating drug and bomb-sniffing dogs are effective so they don’t have to worry about pesky inconveniences such as warrant or probable cause. What has been setup is a method of confiscating property that the average person won’t oppose. After all most people actually believe the police so when they claim a dog “alerted” to the smell of drugs people just say, “OK, if that guy didn’t want his money stolen he shouldn’t have been dealing drugs.”

Of course civil forfeiture laws can’t actually be laws, right? Wrong. As I’ve shown previously civil forfeiture laws are covered under United States Code 881(a)(6). The state has covered all its bases. They’ve legalized theft, abolished the concept of innocent until proven guilty, have gotten the general populace to believe drug and bomb-sniffing dogs can sniff out drugs and bombs, and convinced people that this power is necessary to fight the war on drugs. Confiscating bail money is a new low though but demonstrates how desperate the state is to lock people away in cages. They’ve created a new twist in the system, now you can’t even get bailed out of jail because the bail money will be confiscated by the state under the claim the persons posting bail can’t prove said money wasn’t tied to a drug crime.

We live in a prison state, unfortunately most of the people can’t seem to wake up and see it.

Incoming Bailouts

All the major media outlets are talking about the “surprise” $2 billion loss reported by JPMorgan:

JPMorgan Chase, the biggest US bank, has revealed a surprise trading loss of $2bn (£1.2bn) on complex investments made by its traders.

Of course anybody who pays attention to the game recognize this play. JPMorgan is basically positioning itself to receive some government cash. It’s no secret that the state likes to give bankers tons of cash in the form of bailouts and the headlines are making sure to point out that JPMorgan is the biggest bank in the United States. If smaller banks qualified for bailouts you know the biggest bank in America is “too big to fail.”

Here’s how the game usually works. A private entity wants to get a large chunk of money from the state and the politicians want cushy jobs when they exit politics. This situation is mutually beneficial because the banks can offer cushy jobs to the politicians in exchange for huge chunks for state money. Politicians also want to maintain their power so they package up the handout in a manner they believe the public will support. In the case of large banks the package is one of economics, they will tell the public that the United States economy will suffer greatly if the bank fails. What the politicians neglect to mention is the fact capitalism requires bad businesses to fail because bad businesses have misallocated resources and those recourse must now be property allocated.

I’m predict JPMorgan will receive some kind of large handout from the state in the coming months. Perhaps they won’t be the only receivers either.