“The root cause of this debacle is the way the eurozone is designed. We don’t have a mutualisation of the risks. That is why this is escalating,” said Mr Guglielmi…
Mr Guglielmi said the mood is starting to feel like the panic in the summer of 2012, just before Mario Draghi vowed to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro – a shift made possible when Berlin lifted its veto on emergency action to backstop Italian and Spanish bonds.…The Telegraph
Europe's 'doom-loop' returns as credit markets seize up
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
3 comments:
Seen this Tom. I've been looking up civil forfeiture.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman
"Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes."
"We all know the way things are right now—budgets are tight,” Steve Westbrook, the executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, says. “It’s definitely a valuable asset to law enforcement, for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.” Many officers contend that their departments would collapse if the practice were too heavily regulated, and that a valuable public-safety measure would be lost."
"In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone."
"In Oklahoma, a Caddo County district attorney hired a private company, Desert Snow L.L.C., to train a local drug-interdiction task force. Although the company’s contractors were not certified law officers, they reportedly interrogated drivers and took up to twenty-five per cent of the seized cash, even in cases where no contraband was present."
"In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary."
The common feature is that the victims usually are poor brown or dark skinned working class (white skinned middle class people are almost never touched) and that fines, fees, forfeitures are almost always used to boost police budgets and to fund cutting taxes on white property owners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
"Civil forfeiture in the United States, sometimes called civil judicial forfeiture,[1] is a controversial legal process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing. While civil procedure, as opposed to criminal procedure, generally involves a dispute between two private citizens, civil forfeiture involves a dispute between law enforcement and property such as a gold crucifix, a pile of cash, a house or a boat, such that the thing is suspected of being involved in a crime. To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity. Sometimes it can mean a threat to seize property as well as the act of seizure itself.[2]"
More links:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025
That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101342970
In Stockton,when then city manager Bob Deis warned in 2011 that police layoffs might benecessary, the police union bought the house next to his and immediately began noisy renovations.
The police union had also erected a giant billboard welcoming visitors to the ``2nd most dangerous city in California'' with Deis's phone number on it.
http://autos.aol.com/article/police-usa-traffic-ticket-quotas-budgets/
The TV news team obtained an email sent from the police union chief Ken Allen to his members in the Atlanta Police Department explaining that future raises will be funded through ticket revenue based on the most recent city budget.
In Bethel Heights, Ark., last month, Officer Timothy Brasuell recorded his police chief pushing him to manufacture reasons to make more traffic stops and get his ticket numbers up. Brasuell, reported NBC TV affiliate KNWA, played the recording for the county prosecutor and mayor who dismissed the officer's concerns "as an internal matter."
Right. The US is turning into a banana republic fast.
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