Pass the Popcorn

I've always felt that the whole Russia hysteria is primarily about those who screwed the pooch in 2016 finding a scapegoat upon which they would attach the blame.

At best, the underlying criminal act is a violation of campaign finance law, and given the current dysfunctional nature of the Federal Elections Commission mitigates against even that.

That being said, in this sort of situation, it's frequently not the crime, it's the coverup, and when the FBI executes a predawn raid on one of the principals in the matter, it's starting to get really interesting:

FBI agents raided the home in Alexandria, Va., of President Trump’s former campaign chairman, arriving in the pre-dawn hours late last month and seizing documents and other materials related to the special counsel investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The raid, which occurred without warning on July 26, signaled an aggressive new approach by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team in dealing with a key figure in the Russia inquiry. Manafort has been under increasing pressure as the Mueller team looked into his personal finances and his professional career as a highly paid foreign political consultant.

Using a search warrant, agents appeared the day Manafort was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and a day after he met voluntarily with Senate Intelligence Committee staff members.

The search warrant requested documents related to tax, banking and other matters. People familiar with the search said agents departed the Manafort residence with a trove of material, including binders prepared ahead of Manafort’s congressional testimony.

Investigators in the Russia inquiry have previously sought documents with subpoenas, which are less intrusive and confrontational than a search warrant. With a warrant, agents can inspect a physical location and seize any useful information. To get a judge to sign off on a search warrant, prosecutors must show that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed

This must have rattled their cages.

Our IP System in One Profoundly Dysfunctional Nutshell

It turns out that American farmers are being forced to use software from Ukrainian hackers to repair their own tractors:

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

"If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."

"What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market," he added.

The affection we have in our society for rent seeking through things like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and it serves no one but parasites.

In fact, it creates a society based on this parasitism, which crowds out productive activities, and leads to inequality,

We have created a society of Martin Shkrelis, and this is not a good way to be.

Quote of the Day

If those are largely rhetorical questions, they do identify the core contradiction that frames human rights law: that human rights is used to guarantee that corporate profiteering continues without interruption.

—Stefanie Khoury & David Whyte On how there has been a concerted attempt to grant a right to profit to corporations under human rights law while largely indemnifying them from human rights abuses that they conduct.

Corporations are not people, and there should be no right to profit. 

Profit is not property, at best it is a possibility of accumulating property at some point in the future.

Cyber Currencies' Fatal flaw

You can never be sure that someone won't come after your assets via the blockchain.

When you realize that almost every square inch of the earth (Antarctica excepted) was stolen at some point, and the same applies to most assets in the modern world.

With Bitcoin and its ilk, there is no statute of limitations:

An interesting little observation by Izzy Kaminska over in the FT about a problem that Bitcoin faces. It’s a legal problem that leads to an economic one. And the problem Bitcoin faces is one that is based upon the very existence of the blockchain itself. There’s a good reason that all functioning economic systems have something akin to a market ouvert rule, or something like squatters’ rights. Note that I say something like, not exactly either of those rules. For example, if you find money in the street then you can’t and shouldn’t just keep it. But if you hand it in to the police, no one then claims if for some period of time, then it does become yours. No, you can’t just move into someone elses’ house and insist that it belongs to you. But move in for long enough (the time period varies) and no one complains or does anything and it becomes yours. You don’t get title when you buy stolen goods. But something you bought in good faith, in an open marketplace, does become yours eventually. Even if it had been stolen some point further down the ownership chain.

The reason for these rules, and yes they vary across places and concerning different specific items, is that at some point we’ve got to give up on historic unfairnesses and or illegalities and just get on with the current allocation of scarce resources. We just don’t want to wall off something that may or may not have been stolen in, say, 1820, from being put to use today. We almost certainly would want to make sure that something stolen yesterday was returned to its rightful owner. But at some point between those two dates we’ve got to have a cut off point.

………

And that’s where Bitcoin has the problem, in that very existence of the blockchain:

The first relates to the ongoing legal recourse rights of Bitfinex victims. Even though they may have lost their right to pursue Bitfinex for compensation, they are still going to be entitled to track the funds across the blockchain to seek recourse from whomsoever receives the bitcoins in their accounts. That’s good news for victims, but mostly likely very bad news for bitcoin’s fungible state and thus its status as a medium of exchange.

Just one successful claim by a victim who tracks his funds to an identifiable third party, and the precedent is set. Any exchanges dealing with bitcoin in a legitimate capacity would from then on be inclined to do much stronger due diligence on whether the bitcoins being deposited in their system were connected to ill-gotten gains. This in turn would open the door to the black-listing of funds that can not prove they were originated honestly via legitimate earnings.

Of course, people should not steal things. And yet for a currency to work it has to be possible to take the currency at its face value. Thus it may well be that the bank robber paid you for his beer with stolen money but you got it fair and square and thus the bank doesn’t get it back as and when they find out. Another way to put this is that the crime dies with the criminal. And yet the blockchain upends all of that. Because every transaction which any one bitcoin has been involved in is traceable.

The problem with cyber currencies and the rest of the internet enabled Libertarian-Utopian is that they believe that computer code developed over a few months can somehow trump contract law and record keeping that has been developed over the past 1000+ years.

Ask yourself, what happens if you have a fruit tree with branches that cross a property line.  Who owns the fruit on those branches?

It is very complicated.

In some places, the branches, and fruit, belong to the property owner over whose property it extends.

In others, it belongs to the property owner of the location of the trunk, but  the owner of the property can prune branches over their yard and dig up roots under the yard.

In some places, it belongs to one person when it on the branch, and another when the fruit falls.

In some places, a landowner can sue for trespass for branches over their yard.

This is just a fruit tree.

Recording property transactions are far more significant, and potentially far more complex, and we saw what happened when the banks decided to create MERS to "streamline" fraud real estate transactions.

I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit, ^* but is clear to me that the people behind these efforts have only the vaguest idea of how society works, and how long it took to get society works.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Yes, Making You Pay to Access Laws is Such a Good Idea (Not)

There are a number of lawsuits trying to enforce copyright on laws and the standards that they reference:

You would think that "the law" is obviously part of the public domain. It seems particularly crazy to think that any part of the law itself might be covered by copyright, or (worse) locked up behind some sort of paywall where you cannot read it. Carl Malamud has spent many years working to make sure the law is freely accessible... and he's been sued a bunch of times and is still in the middle of many lawsuits, including one from the State of Georgia for publishing its official annotated code (the state claims the annotations are covered by copyright).

But there's another area that he's fought over for many years: the idea that standards that are "incorporated by reference" into the law should also be public. The issue is that many lawmakers, when creating regulations will often cite private industry "standards" as part of the regulations. So, things like building codes may cite standards for, say, sheet metal and air conditioning that were put together by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association (SMACNA), and say that buildings need to follow SMACNA's standards. And those standards may be great -- but if you can't actually read t

he standards, how can you obey the law. At one point SMACNA went after Malamud for publishing its standards. And while they eventually backed down, others are still in court against Malamud -- including the American Society for Testing & Materials (ASTM), whose case against Malamud is set to go to trial in the fall.

In the midst of all of this, various standards making bodies, along with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), have been working over time to get the American Bar Association to adopt a proposal that limits publication of standards that are incorporated by reference. ANSI has pushed for a solution it prefers called "reasonable availability," in which the standard-makers decide by themselves how best to make the standards "available." ANSI, for example, hosts a bunch of incorporated by reference standards on its website -- but the only way to read them is to install a special kind of DRM (Windows and Mac only) that makes the documents purely read only. You are not allowed to save them. You are not allowed to download them permanently. You are not allowed to print them. And it's not all standards that are incorporated by reference. Why do they do this? Well, most of them sell their standards to professionals who need to buy them, and they don't want to give up on that revenue source (especially once those standards are incorporated by reference because at that point they become mandatory).

The technical term for this, "Nucking Futs."

BTW, it does not just occur in law, it is common among international standards bodies for contributors to insert their IP into those standards, and then extract rents.

Our IP system is seriously broken.

Legal Exchange of the Day

If someone threatens me with a libel suit, I have to remember to cite Arkell v. Pressdram.

It involved an English magazine, Private Eye, which had a uncovered that a man named James Arkell had been taking kickbacks to throw debt collection business to some firms.

Arkell's solicitor demanded a retraction:

9th April 1971

Dear Sir,

We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter.

Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Yours,

(Signed)

Goodman Derrick & Co.

Private Eye, published by Pressdram, Ltd., made this response:

Dear Sirs,

We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr. J. Arkell.

We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: f%$# off.

Yours,

Private Eye

(%$# mine)

I'm going to have to remember the legal citation.

Son of a Bitch! They Actually Got a Conviction!

A high frequency trader has been convicted of stock fraud for spoofing:

Panther Energy trader Michael Coscia has been found guilty in a high-profile market-manipulation trial in Chicago.

His crime? Spoofing.

It's a funny-sounding term for the practice of making and cancelling bets in a way that can push prices around.

It's what alleged "Flash Crash" trader Navinder Singh Sarao was accused of earlier this year.
Spoofing investigations have actually become quite a trend at the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other regulators.

But Coscia is the first person to be found guilty of spoofing since it was forbidden under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, and his conviction shows that a key defense against the charge may not be effective.

Coscia was indicted last year and charged with multiple counts of commodities fraud and spoofing. Prosecutors say the Chicago-based high-frequency commodities trader defrauded the market to make some $1.6 million in illegal profits.

His lawyers tried to prove that the anti-spoofing law is "hopelessly vague, and its criminal enforcement would violate Michael Coscia's right to due process of law."

They didn't succeed.

………

The tactic was outlawed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank regulation, but, as with other forms of fraud, it's hard to prove the trader's intent — in this case, the intent to cancel the order. Prosecutors must prove the trader didn't change his or her mind for legitimate reasons after placing the trade.

High-frequency-trading technology has made it even easier than before.

"They are truly done in the blink of an eye, and it's designed to take advantage of the algorithms that look for price disparities in the market," said Henning. "Spoofing is signaling. I put in a small order and then a real big one, and I'm hoping the big one attracts you, and then you'll throw my small one. And then I just dump the big one."

Spoofing is when a trader puts in an order for a massive trade, and then they bet on the other side of the market move that it generates, and then they cancel the bid, making a small profit. ……… over ……… and over ……… and over again.

One does wonder why it has taken them 5 years to actually convict someone under the "new" law.

My guess is that the fact that Eric "Place" Holder is no longer attorney general might have something to do with the five years of inaction.

Sanders Faces a Rat F%$#ing in the New York Primary

Ballot access laws for candidates are among the most restrictive in the nation, and it appears that Bernie Sanders could be kept off the ballot in New York State:

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, will face a significant legal barrier if he attempts to run in next year's New York primary while remaining unaffiliated with a party.

A section of state election law commonly known as Wilson-Pakula prohibits candidates from appearing on the ballot in a party’s primary unless they are either enrolled members or receive the approval of the party’s committee.

Sanders, of Vermont, is an independent and so would need the approval of the state’s Democrats to get his name on the ballot. But the state's two major parties have historically granted Wilson-Pakulas only in rare circumstances. Several longtime political observers contacted by Capital could not recall a single instance in which either party has granted one to a candidate in a statewide race. Clinton’s deep political connections to New York make the likelihood of them doing so even less.

“Hadn’t thought about it, but my initial answer would be no,” Assemblyman Keith Wright said when asked if he thought Sanders should be allowed on the ballot for New York’s Democratic primary.

Let's be clear here.  This is a classical rat f%$#ing, to paraphrase former Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone. though it is not one directly tied to the 2016 campaign.

New York has been rat f%$#ing the electoral process with Wilson-Pakula for almost 70 years.

It was intended to keep communists and socialists off the ballot, and was a product of red scare hysteria.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

We now learn that you can go to jail for clearing your browser history, even if you are unaware of any law enforcement investigation:

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’ photos on the Internet, lied about whether Tamerlan lived with his wife and daughter, and lied about when he and Tamerlan had last prayed together. Matanov likely lied to distance himself from the brothers or to cover up his own jihadist sympathies—or maybe he was just confused.

Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history.

Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. During this time the FBI tracked him with a drone-like surveillance plane that made loops around Quincy, disturbing residents. The feds finally arrested and indicted him in May 2014. They never alleged that Matanov was involved in the bombings or that he knew about them beforehand, but they charged him with four counts of obstruction of justice. There were three counts for making false statements based on the aforementioned lies and—remarkably—one count for destroying “any record, document or tangible object” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation. This last charge was for deleting videos on his computer that may have demonstrated his own terrorist sympathies and for clearing his browser history.

Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone.

Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities. A police officer in Colorado who falsified a report to cover up a brutality case was convicted under the act, as was a woman in Illinois who destroyed her boyfriend’s child pornography.

Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer’s number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana. The application of the law to digital data has been particularly far-reaching because this type of information is so easy to delete. Deleting digital data can inadvertently occur in normal computer use, and often does.

How the F%$# are they using Sarbanes f%$#ing Oxley on this?

The practice of overcharging by prosecutors by "innovative" application of the law is a cancer on the justice system.

Here Are Some Great Suggestions to Fix Our Criminal Justice System

Ian Welsh makes a number of cogent suggestions, including eliminating forfeiture laws, drug criminalization, RICO laws, etc., but there is one suggestion that stands out and shines like the sun:

If you really want to make the system work, make all private lawyers for criminal charges illegal, and use only public defenders, chosen by lot. I guarantee that the pay and competence of public defenders would soar and their case load would drop as soon as rich people realized that they could be the one being defended by an overworked and underpaid lawyer.

This is f%$#ing brilliant.

Read the rest.

It Figures that Texas Would Go Further than the NRA Could Tolerate

What could possibly go wrong with serving alcohol at gun shows?

The National Rifle Association sent out an alert to its members late Monday warning that an initiative in Texas to allow alcohol at gun shows could backfire and have a "devastating impact" on NRA events.

The warning came after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission proposed a new set of rules last week that would allow alcohol to be served at gun shows across the state. The catch was that organizers of the events had to disable all firearms on display, ban live ammunition, and prohibit buyers from taking possession of their weapons on site.

The changes would override the current protocol, in which alcohol-serving venues are made to suspend the sale of alcohol throughout the preparation and duration of a gun show.

But what might appear to be a relaxation of regulations on the gun show industry has not been well-received by the NRA. In an alert posted Monday by the organization's lobbying arm, the NRA asked its members to take action because the changes “could actually end these events as we know them”.

If there was a place that was too deep in the crazy for the NRA, it would be Texas.

Not Enough Bullets………

To no one's surprise, this involves real estate developers, a scurvy lot who depend on the kindness of taxpayers while extolling the virtue of "free market heroes" like themselves.

Case in point, Seattle developers are suing because they think that the city is charging too much for them to break zoning laws:

A coalition of several developers filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court on January 15 that would make Seattle, already booming with construction cranes, more friendly for developers. Their issue? One of the city's affordable-housing programs.

Since 2006, the city has struck a deal with developers in the downtown core: In exchange for setting aside a few modestly affordable units or paying fees toward a city housing fund, developers get to build taller buildings. For example, developers could build a 400-foot tower where they'd otherwise have to keep it under 300 feet. The Seattle City Council raised those fees by about one-third in December 2013. In their lawsuit, which cites three Supreme Court decisions, the developers claim that fee hike is "an out-and-out extortion."

So they're asking a judge to invalidate that higher fee, making it cheaper and easier to build the tallest buildings allowed downtown—while throwing even fewer scraps to the city's growing affordable-housing needs.

"This just shows developers are not willing to do their fair share," says Rebecca Saldaña of Puget Sound Sage, an affordable-housing advocacy group. She says Seattle's taxpayers fund a housing levy, and politicians have eased other development requirements. This latest uptick in fees, Saldaña says, is "really just asking developers to come up to speed."

………

For example, Smith's Second and Pike project is a proposed 400-foot tower, with 290 residential units above retail and restaurant space. Normally, the height limit there is 290 feet. Under the new fee regulations, in exchange for that extra height, Smith would have to pay a one-time fee of around $2.5 million into the city's housing fund. The lawsuit says the city should revert to the former requirements, which require paying only $1.8 million. (In an odd twist, Smith will pay the $1.8 million either way, because he applied for a permit under the old rules.)

"My hope is that most people won't actually pay the fees," says O'Brien. "They'll just provide the housing" inside the new construction. In Smith's building, that would mean setting aside 20 or so moderately affordable units—around $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

Clearly, even that isn't particularly affordable, and 20 apartments don't amount to much housing. And the city knows its program isn't good enough. Which is why housing advocates, developers, and lawmakers have been meeting since last summer to overhaul the program.

$1300/month.

If you figure that 25% of pre-tax income should go to housing, that translated to about $62K a year.

For a one bedroom apartment.

And this is too much for the developers to tolerate.

You know, when Mao came to power in China, he executed the landlords, basically the real estate developers of China of the time.

I've always found it hard to condemn this act.

Clearly, Answer is More Money to the NSA Contractors for Cyberdefense

Did you hear about the attack on a power plant in California?

No, it was not a cyber attack, it was guys with guns:

When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid--from attackers who come in with guns blazing.

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks -- or groups of transformers -- were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.

………

"These were not amateurs taking potshots," Mark Johnson, a former vice president for transmission operations at PG&E, said last month at a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia. "My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal" for future attacks.

I am inclined to agree with Mr. Johnson.

We've spent billions on cyber defense for an attack on the grid which has never occurred, anywhere in the world, but physical attacks on power stations by insurgents have been occurring since power plants first existed.

Of course, it's not the current business model for the for-profit portion of out state security apparatus, so not a whole bunch of money there.

The Libertarian Paradise in Just One Story

A couple in Utah was billed $3500.00 for a negative review of a vendor who never shipped what they ordered:

A Utah couple is facing an uphill legal battle after being slapped with a $3,500 fine by an online retailer for posting a negative review of the company years after it failed to ship the products they ordered.

CNN reported on Friday that John and Jen Palmer’s problems with Klear Gear began in 2008, when John canceled a purchase he made through the company after it failed to deliver his order within 30 days. The Palmers then panned the company in a review on the consumer-complaint site Ripoff Review, saying, in part, that it was impossible to reach someone at Klear Gear by phone.

But earlier this year, Klear Gear contacted the Palmers in writing, saying they violated the company’s “non-disparagement clause” and threatening them with the fine if they did not remove the negative review.

“This is fraud,” Jen Palmer told KUTV-TV. “They’re blackmailing us for telling the truth.”

KUTV also reported that the company’s terms of service stated, “To prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts Kleargear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees.”

However, Yahoo News reported that the clause seemingly only went into effect this year, only for the language to be removed from the website.

When Ripoff Report refused to remove the review, Klear Gear contacted major credit agencies and listed the $3,500 fine as a “failure to pay,” hampering the couples’ credit rating. The company told KUTV via email that its request that the Palmers erase their negative comment was “a diligent effort to help them avoid the fine.”

So, first, the provision of the contract is illegal, second, it wasn't in force at the time that they made an order, and all the private entities involved, Klear Gear, Ripoff Report (which demanded a large payment to pull the post), and the credit rating agencies ('nuff said), have decided to f%$# the customer.

This is what happens when the contracts achieve primacy over basic human rights.

My only suggestion to the Palmers would be four letters, RICO, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!<sup>*



*</sup>I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

This is Repulsive

Norristown, PA has a policy of trying to evict victims of domestic violence:

Gosh. Norristown, Pennsylvania seems like it must be a real nice place to live what with its strict schoolmarm rule against “disorderly behavior.” In order to be fair, however, the rule applies not only to those who perpetrate “disorderly behavior” but also to those who might happen to be victims of it. Best legal system in the world! Watch and learn, America: The Norristown police notified a woman whose boyfriend assaulted her that she was being evicted for the crime of disturbing the peace by being assaulted too many times.

From the ACLU:

Last year in Norristown, Pa., Lakisha Briggs’ boyfriend physically assaulted her, and the police arrested him. But in a cruel turn of events, a police officer then told Ms. Briggs, “You are on three strikes. We’re gonna have your landlord evict you.”

Yes, that’s right. The police threatened Ms. Briggs with eviction because she had received their assistance for domestic violence. Under Norristown’s “disorderly behavior ordinance,” the city penalizes landlords and tenants when the police respond to three instances of “disorderly behavior” within a four-month period. The ordinance specifically includes “domestic disturbances” as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.

Oh, well, that certainly makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, the poor police officers wouldn’t want to be dragged away from their donuts and coffee just because some broad got in a fight with her man because he didn’t load the dishwasher right or something, and then she called the 5-O on him just ’cause bitches, man, sometimes they’re like that.

After her first “strike,” Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police. She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But both times, someone else did call the police. Based on these “strikes,” the city pressured her landlord to evict.

Seriously.  How about arresting her psycho ex-boyfriend?

BTW, if you go the the ACLU link you will find that Norristown is not alone in this.

Any number of municipalities have a policy of punishing the victim, because it is inconvenient.

Quote of the Day

If All Science Were Run Like Marijuana Research, Creationists Would Control Paleontology

—John Henry Schwarz, Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech

Interestingly enough, this guy one of the giants in the creation of string theory, which I'm not sure helps his credibility.

Why Unions are In Decline

Kris Warner compares union penetration of the labor market in the United States, and compares it to that of Canada, and rather observes that there are some real reasons for this, and that they exist because labor rights have been under legislative assault in the United States since the passage of Taft-Hartley:

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.

It’s conventional wisdom that the post-industrial workforce doesn’t want to be unionized. But survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity. So if workers want unions, why is unionization falling?

Commentators have also blamed the decline on everything from globalization to technological advances to the hollowing-out of American manufacturing. But those factors are only part of the story.

Canada’s experience offers another answer. Canada has gone through many of the same economic and social changes as the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, yet it hasn’t seen the same precipitous decline in unionization. The unionization rate in the U.S. and Canada followed fairly similar paths from 1920 to the mid-1960s, at which point they began to diverge drastically.

Differences in labor law and public policy are at the root of this disparity.

No so-called "right to work" laws in Canada, card check, or elections that are conducted in 1-3 weeks, instead of months, or possibly years, the right to first contract arbitration, so that employers cannot simply stonewall negotiations to a new union for years.

I want us to be more like Canada.

Why Do Americans Want Our Children to be Shot?

I don't just mean the NRA. I just don't mean the sociopathic Talibaptists who say that it's because we do not pray to the right God. I mean all of us.

After every shooting we, and I mean all of us, are told by the Gun Nuts With Small Penises^™ that it's not the time to talk about it, and so some dead kids, mall shoppers, etc. are consigned to the memory hole.

Now it's 28 people, including 20 children at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut.

BTW, there is a special place in hell for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who jumbed with both feet on the "we must not talk about it" meme.

BTW, there was a school attack in China today, 22 people attacked, WITH A KNIFE.

There were no deaths.


I understand that the NRA is a bunch of scary people to your average politician. We need to be even scarier.

Broken Window Theory of Financial Crimes

Bill Black has a very interesting look at the "Broken Window" theory of law enforcement and how, and whether, it might be applied to financial wrongdoing.

For those of who are unfamiliar with the "Broken Window" theory of law enforcement:

James Q. Wilson was a political scientist who often studied the government response to blue collar crime. The public knows him best for his theory called “broken windows.” The metaphor was what happens to a vacant building when broken windows are not promptly repaired. Soon, most of the windows in the abandoned building are broken. The criminals feel little compunction against petty destruction because the building’s owners evince no concern for the integrity of their building. Wilson took social norms, community, and ethics seriously. He argued that as community broke down fewer honest citizens were active in monitoring and policing behavior. The breakdown in community was criminogenic – it led to widespread serious blue collar crime. He urged us to take even minor blue collar crimes and breaches of civility seriously and to demand that they be contained through social pressure and policing.

Wilson got a lot of credit for cleaning up New York City, where crime levels did drop, but they did elsewhere, so perhaps the theory is a bit overrated.

And it should be noted that Mr. Wilson specifically excluded white collar crimes.

I think that the operative word here is "white".

As in pigmentation, and Wilson found "white crime" just fine:

In a book entitled, Thinking About Crime, Wilson argued that criminology should focus overwhelmingly on low-status blue collar criminals.

This book [does not deal] with “white collar crimes”…. Partly this reflects the limits of my own knowledge, but it also reflects my conviction, which I believe is the conviction of most citizens, that predatory street crime is a far more serious matter than consumer fraud [or] antitrust violations … because predatory crime … makes difficult or impossible maintenance of meaningful human communities (1975: xx).

I am rather tolerant of some forms of civic corruption (if a good mayor can stay in office and govern effectively only by making a few deals with highway contractors and insurance agents, I do not get overly alarmed)…. (1975: xix).

Wilson won't say it, and cannot now, because he's dead, and may not admit it to himself, but he's tolerant of white collar, because "Broken Window" enforcement should only be used when it involves cops harassing poor people and/or minorities.\

That's why Wilson created a "get out of jail free" for the crimes of the upper class.

I'm inclined to believe that small crimes beget bigger crimes, and that this problem is worse among the privileged than it is among the poor and minorities.

As Prof. Black illustrates in his article, when the little things are let slide, you end up with things like liars loans, and blacklists of honest home appraisers, with executives engaging in wholesale looting of their own firms.

H/t Yves Smith.

OK, These Are Some Tax Collectors That I Could Love

So, the Italian police have taken to staking out posh neighborhoods and pulling over drivers of expensive cars. They then take their personal information, and send that to the tax bureau to make sure that their lifestyle matches up to their declared income:

Police fanned out across Milan in late January halting more than 350 vehicles, mostly luxury SUVs and Porsches.

At checkpoints, including one adjacent to the fashionable Corso Como, the police got the driver’s license and registration, which they passed on to the national tax agency. The tax authorities will use the data to check if the cars’ owners had declared enough income -- and of course paid the right amount of income taxes -- to justify their lifestyles.

It was at least the fifth raid targeting wealthy Italians since a Dec. 30 sweep at the posh Cortina d’Ampezzo ski resort, where 251 high-end cars were stopped, including Ferrari and Lamborghini supercars, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Feb. 13 issue. Rome, Portofino on the Italian Riviera and Florence have also been targeted.

I'm Matthew Saroff, and I approve of this tactic.