May 2010 archive

From the description of the relevant laws, it ain’t that hard to do.

Asset forfeiture is a term used to describe the confiscation of assets, by the state, which are either (a) the proceeds of crime or (b) the instrumentalities of crime, and more recently, terrorism. Instrumentalities of crime are property that was used to facilitate crime, for example cars used to transport illegal narcotics. The terminology used in different jurisdictions varies. Some jurisdictions use the term “confiscation” instead of forfeiture. In recent years there has been a growing trend for countries to introduce civil forfeiture. Such proceedings may be brought in the USA, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, various Canadian Provinces and Antigua.

There are two types of forfeiture cases, criminal and civil. Almost all forfeiture cases today are civil.[citation needed] In civil forfeiture cases, the US Government sues the item of property, not the person; the owner is effectively a third party claimant. Before the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act was enacted in 2000, the government only had to establish probable cause that the property was subject to forfeiture; the owner had to prove on a “preponderance of the evidence” that it was not. The new law holds the government to the “preponderance of evidence” standard and shifts the burden of proof to the federal government instead of the property owner.[1] The property owner still need not be found guilty of any crime. In contrast, criminal forfeiture is usually carried out in a sentence following a conviction and is a punitive act against the offender. Since the government can choose the type of case, a civil case is almost always chosen. The costs of such cases is high for the owner, usually totaling around $10,000 and can take up to three years.

The justification for doing so would be easy: We have, by now, massive evidence that crimes were committed, in the case of Goldman Sachs, outright fraud, in the case of BP, negligence.

A preponderance of the evidence that crimes were committed would be all that would be required; the purpose of the civil asset forfeiture law is to make it possible to enforce laws against organized crime.

I would argue that, in the methodology Goldman Sachs and similar banks have used to shield themselves from all accountability would be to all intents and purposes similar to the actions of organized crime: no one saw nothin’, no one “remembers” anything, and all the criminal fraud, negligence and malfeasance is contained in house and shielded by a misuse of the law – binding legal confidentiality agreements and conflict of interest waivers.

The law, make no mistake, is a bad law, in my opinion.  It has been used in the past to prosecute the ill conceived “war on drugs”, to take the property of perceived drug runners in violation of due process.

Why not use a bad law, though, to accomplish something to uphold the rule of law?

But this makes it even more of a good idea to use civil asset forfeiture to attack the assets of the criminal corporate enterprises.  Either the suits would be successful, in which, it’s a victory for the People, or the Goldman Sachs, BP, et. al, would win, in which case, a threat to due process under the Constitution would be removed.  IT WOULD STILL BE A VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE.

It makes sense to use a wedge to both make life a living hell for the criminal enterprises operating in our country and also use any potential constitutional blowback to otherwise uphold the constitution and the rule of law.

In the previous installment of this growing May ’70 retrospective (criminy, can this be installment four already?) I wrote about being at the New Haven rally for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale on May Day and the call that the assembled demonstrators issued for a national student strike in the wake of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia.

Thus armed, the NYU Uptown contingent headed back to campus on Saturday, May 2, to start organizing the strike. Imagine our surprise–half delight and half chagrin–when we found out that the despised campus liberals (like the student government types headed for law school and a career in the Democratic Party) already had it taped!  

A guy walks into a bar with a handful of shit,

This was so totally fitting for today, as the President gave a short on details and lackluster speech down in Louisiana, during day 12 of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill blowout.  

SIX ARRESTED AT WHITE HOUSE PROTEST  5/2/2010 The Advocate

http://www.advocate.com/News/D…

Choi, who has twice been arrested after handcuffing himself to the White House gates and has now been court ordered not to enter a certain perimeter around the White House, was joined by a handful of other speakers, including former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, Servicemembers United executive director Alex Nicholson, and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network executive director Aubrey Sarvis.

The protest came on the heels of a letter leaked late Friday afternoon in which Department of Defense secretary Robert Gates urged House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton “in the strongest possible terms” to delay legislative action on repeal until the Pentagon completes its assessment of how to implement repeal.

The New York Times ran this story in two slightly different versions, on March 26, 2010…

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year.

And then on April 12, 2010…

“However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

I don’t know exactly what to think about General McChrystal’s amazing confession, and it quickly disappeared in the usual hurricane of media noise about nothing…

But it somehow reminded me of another summation which was almost entirely overlooked by American media.

US forces were reported to have killed 106 Afghan civilians when they dropped bombs on the village of Qalaye Naizi, in eastern Afghanistan.

And of course…

Military authorities denied having mistakenly bombed a village, and said the warplanes had targeted a compound used by al-Qaeda.

And it would have been just another story like so many others, except that was the day when…

The number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs has surpassed the death toll of the 11 September attacks.

We passed that milestone on January 2, 2002.

A student with one of the trees

Never underestimate the power of a small but committed group of people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

This is another update of a the original piece Save the Trees.  The first update was DK Greenroots:  Saving the trees…and maybe the bats.

Here in West Orange, NJ, past home of Thomas Alva Edison and present home of Whoopi Goldberg, a small but committed group of people is fighting the powers that be…in this case the West Orange Zoning Commission and Seton Hall Prep (and through it, the Archdiocese of Newark) in order to prevent the demolition of McClellan Old-Growth Forest in order to build sports fields.

I’m posting tonight in order to provide a conduit between those local voices and a larger community of activists.  At least I hope so.

By Dan Swenson,  New Orleans Times-Picayune

This animation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was created using actual overflight information and forecast models from the NOAA and Unified Command.

The red dot is the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil well, which exploded on April 20, releasing oil into the Gulf near the Louisiana coast that has yet to be contained. Eleven rig workers are missing and are presumed to have died in the explosion.

The animation begins April 22, the day the first image of the spill via flyover was released.

All Antemedius stories about BP’s Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico spill are here.