End of the road for civil asset forfeiture?

I have written repeatedly about the abuse of the so-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ provisions in the law that many government authorities use to seize the assets of people simply because of the suspicion that they may have been involved in a crime. The government holds on to these assets even if the person is not even charged with the crime. It should not be surprising that it is mostly low-income people who are at the receiving end. The people whose assets are seized have to sue the government to get them back, a complicated and expensive process, and many of the affected people simply do not have the resources to do so, so they end up losing their homes and their cars, which are often the only assets they have.
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The center is where politics goes to die

So says faux journalist Jonathan Pie, in response to the attempts of defenders of the status quo to marginalize anyone who challenges the dominance of the oligarchy and constantly urge political leaders to move to the so-called ‘center’. Although he was speaking in the context of the Brexit debacle where there were defections from both the Conservative and Labour parties, his message applies to the US too. (Language advisory)

The problem with tainted money

The exposure of the Sackler family as the owners of the company Purdue Pharma that is responsible for creating much of the opioid epidemic by aggressively marketing those drugs has resulted in many of the institutions wondering what to do with the gifts that the Sacklers gave to them. Professor of law Terri Lynn Hegee looks at the legal issues faced by these institutions involved in distancing themselves from disgraced donors.
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Deliberately making tax preparation complicated

The US does not adopt two simple practices that are standard in many countries: the first is to provide free tax filing software to all people and the second is that the government could calculate the first draft of your taxes for you and let you know and you sign off if you agree. Right now in the US, you have to use commercial tax preparation software that offers it free only to people who have income below a certain threshold but do not advertise that service so few take advantage of it.
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The origin of the word boycott

We live in an age when there are calls to boycott businesses and nations that indulge in practices that are deemed to be unjust or discriminatory or otherwise unsavory. The radio program Reveal produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting had two interesting reports, one on the boycotts targeting Israel and the other on the origin of the word ‘boycott’. The word comes from Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott, an Englishman working as a landlord in Ireland enforcing high rents at a time when the country was suffering from a famine, and evicting people from their homes if they could not pay. This was in the late 19th century when that entire island was being ruled by the English and the fight for Irish independence was going on.
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IRS questioned on its audit practices

Following the series of articles from ProPublica that I discussed earlier, members of Congress have questioned the IRS commissioner Charles Rettig as to why its audits are increasingly being directed away from the very wealthy and more towards the poor.

“How can the Congress stand by a tax-enforcement system that punishes working people and gives the wealthy a green light to cheat?” asked Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, during his opening statement on Wednesday.
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Wyden demanded that Rettig produce a plan within 30 days on how his agency will change a system that is “stacked in favor of the wealthy” and “against the most vulnerable.” Rettig promised to do so.

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Netherlands backtracking on sex workers?

Sex work has long been legal in countries like the Netherlands. But now a petition has been launched to change the law and adopt the so-called ‘Nordic model’ of Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland and France that makes it an offense for people to buy the services of sex workers. The petitioners claim that legal sex work leads to exploitation and human trafficking. What is surprising is that the 42,000 young people have signed the petition. What is not surprising is that many of these young people are religious.
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A final Brexit deadline – until the next one?

The 27 other leaders of the EU offered the UK’s prime minister Theresa May, and she accepted, a new deadline of October 31, 2019 to pass a Brexit plan. She has told parliament that if they pass a plan earlier, they can withdraw earlier. She also had to face the humiliation of promising “sincere cooperation” while still in the EU and imploring the EU to ignore the threats from some of her backbenchers that while in the EU, they would disrupt its workings, threats that resulted in France urging language that would summarily expel Britain if they misbehaved. The French proposal was deemed to be illegal but that it was raised showed how fed up some countries are with the UK.
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The problem of Trump’s mental state

I suspect that many readers of this blog also read Marcus Ranum over at stderr but just in case you don’t, I want to refer you to a post he made today that deals with something I too have been mulling over, and that is whether we are dealing with a president who is slowly, before our very eyes, showing signs of a cognitive degeneration and if so how best we should respond to it.

It is not recommended even for professionals in the field of mental health to make remote diagnoses of the cognitive state of people. It is hard to say when a person’s brain is malfunctioning because that would imply that we know what ‘normal’ brain functioning looks like. How do we distinguish between words and actions that are deliberately malevolent and those that are inadvertent, since all actions are the result of brain functions? This is the problem that confronts judges and juries when a defendant raises the insanity defense.

And of course, even if Trump has degenerative brain problem, it should not prevent us from harshly criticizing and mocking the actual policies he is setting in motion. But as Marcus says, it perhaps should make us more cautious about mocking his verbal misstatements. This is not easy to do since his actions are so hateful that one wants to throw the kitchen sink at him.

I do not listen to Donald Trump’s speeches or even his press conferences. The only glimpses I have of his speech are when short clips of them appear on the news or the comedy shows so the disturbing patterns that Marcus describes were not noticed by me.