The Russiagate scandal is a hilariously, fact-less conspiracy theory. But it serves a purpose of distracting people away from outright government stealing on a scale comparable to feudal robber barons.

Civil asset forfeiture was always an idea open to abuse, and abuse it they have done.

It has the very same conflict of interests (Policing for profit) that private prisons do (Kids for cash).



The forfeiture system is self-perpetuating.



It’s also a lucrative tactic for law-enforcement agencies in an era of tight budgets: A Justice Department inspector general’s report in April found that federal forfeiture programs had taken in almost $28 billion over the past decade...

In its report, the inspector general’s office also raised concerns about how federal agencies take funds, after it found almost half of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s seizures in a random sample weren’t tied to any broader law-enforcement purpose. “When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution,” the report concluded.

Polls have shown 80 percent of Americans oppose the practice. Even Republicans hate it.

Civil asset forfeiture is unjust and unconstitutional. It's a big-government scheme to take people's property without due process. End it. https://t.co/6Y2yEtfs8e — Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 19, 2017

In 2015, the Obama administration ended the Equitable Sharing program, which allowed local law enforcement to seize assets and then transfer them to the federal government, with the federal government passing back part of the proceeds to the local department. It was a very modest half-step at reform.

For the Trump Administration even that modest reform was too much.



In April, 2015, New Mexico’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, signed into law a sweeping forfeiture-reform bill abolishing the practice in the state altogether. Connecticut, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and other states have, to different extents, followed suit.

But Sessions’s order bucks this trend. In particular, it resuscitates a practice known as “federal adoption,” which allows police and prosecutors to circumvent state restrictions on asset seizures by collaborating with federal authorities. Through this partnership, state and local authorities turn their seizures over to federal colleagues, who “adopt” them for prosecution—ultimately returning up to eighty per cent of the assets to the originating cops or prosecutors to keep. One result, often unaddressed in critiques of forfeiture, is the tacit encouragement of racial profiling and targeting of property owners of color, who remain prime targets of the practice in much of the country.

This is bad, but it's no worse than a return to pre-2015.

That is until this week, when the Trump Administration decided to extend asset forfeiture to a global scale.

Like domestic civil asset forfeiture, the idea behind the executive order is sound and just, but with one big, familiar exception - it doesn't require a legal conviction.

Which makes one wonder, how are we different from Saudi Arabia?

The United States has set itself up as the judge and jury of the world.

But it's a "Do as I say, not as I do" world.

For instance, remember all those stories about overseas tax havens? We've wagged so many fingers at those darn corrupt foreigners.



Last September, at a law firm overlooking San Francisco Bay, Andrew Penney, a managing director at Rothschild & Co., gave a talk on how the world’s wealthy elite can avoid paying taxes. His message was clear: You can help your clients move their fortunes to the United States, free of taxes and hidden from their governments. Some are calling it the new Switzerland.

After years of lambasting other countries for helping rich Americans hide their money offshore, the U.S. is emerging as a leading tax and secrecy haven for rich foreigners.

Wait a second. How is this possible?

What happened is that, like an organized crime boss, we shut down the competing crime bosses.



Under threat of losing access to the U.S. financial system, more than 100 countries -- including such traditional havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands -- are complying or have agreed to comply. The U.S. was expected to reciprocate, by sharing data on the accounts of foreign taxpayers with their respective governments. Yet Congress rejected the Obama administration’s repeated requests to make the necessary changes to the tax code. As a result, the Treasury cannot compel U.S. banks to reveal information such as account balances and names of beneficial owners. The U.S. has also failed to adopt the so-called Common Reporting Standard, a global agreement under which more than 100 countries will automatically provide each other with even more data than FATCA requires.

...

New York lawyers are actively marketing the country as a place to park assets. A Russian billionaire, for example, can put real-estate assets in a U.S. trust and rest assured that neither the U.S. tax authorities nor his home-country government will know anything about it. That’s a level of secrecy that not even Vanuatu can offer. From a certain perspective, all this might look pretty smart: Shut down foreign tax havens and then steal their business. That would be the kind of thinking that’s undermining America’s standing in so many areas, from trade to climate change. Instead of using its power to establish an equitable system of global governance, it’s demanding a standard from the rest of the world that it refuses to apply to itself.

This makes perfect sense as long as you cast off any morals and common decency.

It's SOP for, say, a casino owner.

However, why would anyone ever want to do business with you if they had any other choice?

The United States cannot be shut out, but this duplicity has left us with no diplomatic "leverage".

Our word counts for nothing, as it should be when your nation is run by mobsters.