“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:
Lawsuits over cash seizures settled in Nevada
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?…..”
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