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posted by n1 on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the criminal-class dept.

Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.

Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.” It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. “In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” says Greenwald. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:29PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:29PM (#191735) Journal

    It used to be you paid taxes on what you put IN the bank, and nobody cared what you did with the money after that.

    This is just flagrantly untrue. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. It's not true within anyone who could possibly be posts here's lifetime.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:44PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:44PM (#191741) Journal

    Go educate yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report [wikipedia.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crimes_Enforcement_Network [wikipedia.org]

    Prior to 1986 none of this was ever tracked tracked.
    If you are going to make such grandiose pronouncements, maybe it would behoove you to wait till you are at least out of highschool and have spent some time in the actual world.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:23PM (#191758)

      > Prior to 1986 none of this was ever tracked

      You win with facts.

      > it would behoove you to wait till you are at least out of highschool and have spent some time in the actual world.

      You lose with pointless insults.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:41PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:41PM (#191764) Journal

      "Go educate yourself"

      By flagrantly ignoring the:
      Bank secrecy act of 1970 [wikipedia.org]

      Or the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956

      Monitoring transactions has just gotten more complicated, and if you cherry pick the electronic oriented acts, you're going to be stuck with ones from the information age.

      Whoop. De. Fucking. Do.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday June 03 2015, @09:06PM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @09:06PM (#191774)

    It was true until recently in many, many countries outside the US which had specific laws prohibiting their governments obtaining banking information. Then the US comes on the scene and bribes (yes bribes - I mean, you do want those extra million dollars to "fight the war on drugs" don't you?) governments to change the laws, and coerces banks to change their policies (or we'll do to you what we did to HSBC and friends), and now guess who can have a nice long look into any bank account in the world? And now - get this - they want to go after tax avoidance. Not evasion - they catch those right away. Avoidance. Which is not even illegal. But they have the media engine working overtime to convince Johnny Q Public that he deserves his "fair share" of that money (which he'll never see).

    Honestly the banking sector as a whole has morphed into something else. Banks no longer have privacy. Banks no longer pay interest. Banks now only offer marginal security (ask the people of Cyprus how happy they are with their banks and their "haircut"). Banks have their very own sales tax - a percentage of every single transaction and every single card swipe, which can be as much as a not insignificant 2%. And on top of that they nickel and dime you to death with fees.

    It's understandable that people want to come up with currency alternatives like Bitcoin, etc. Ahh but those present their very own special problems, not the least of which being (lack of) trust. I guess when you can trust banks less than random people on the internet, virtual currencies will be a huge hit.

    • (Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday June 03 2015, @10:59PM

      by pnkwarhall (4558) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @10:59PM (#191812)

      Honestly the banking sector as a whole has morphed into something else.

      This was a curiosity-piquing statement. Care to explain more?

      --
      Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:21AM

        by deimtee (3272) on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:21AM (#191829) Journal

        Banks used to be a safe place to keep your money for later use. One of the meanings of the word "bank" is exactly that - to put away for future use.
        They have changed into transaction facilitators who collect fees on each transaction.
        Keeping a large amount of money in a bank is now suspicious behaviour, exactly the opposite of what it used to be.

        --
        If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:56AM

          by Dunbal (3515) on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:56AM (#191848)

          Couldn't have put it better myself. Banks used to collect capital and keep it safe, or at least safer than under your mattress. They paid you interest for the privilege of holding your capital, and they invested part of it judiciously in loans and other investments, keeping the profit after paying out your interest for themselves. It was a win win. Win for you because you got an interest "reward" for lending them your money, and a win for them if they were smart enough to make even more money with your money. Now it's a win lose, where the bank makes money regardless, be it a service fee, or a transaction charge, or an account use fee, or a fee for not using your account, or a fee for not having enough money, or a fee for having too much money, or a fee for making too many transactions, etc. Once they've collected their fees from you (which always exceed any interest you might hope to get in a given year because let's be honest, if you have any real amount of money the last place you will put it is in a bank), it's a clear "fuck off" from the bank because oops they lost your money on bad bets on the derivatives markets so let's make the government force you to pay for them on top of that.

          • (Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday June 15 2015, @10:02PM

            by pnkwarhall (4558) on Monday June 15 2015, @10:02PM (#196666)

            thank you both for your insight.

            --
            Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:03AM

      by JNCF (4317) on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:03AM (#191906) Journal

      It's understandable that people want to come up with currency alternatives like Bitcoin, etc. Ahh but those present their very own special problems, not the least of which being (lack of) trust. I guess when you can trust banks less than random people on the internet, virtual currencies will be a huge hit.

      A lack of trust is Bitcoin's strong point. It doesn't require trust (it does have other problems).

    • (Score: 1) by DutchUncle on Friday June 05 2015, @03:26AM

      by DutchUncle (5370) on Friday June 05 2015, @03:26AM (#192357)

      Just a second here - the banks skimming a percentage off transactions has ALWAYS happened; card swipes just makes it more obvious. Banks advertised themselves as making money from the clever use of pooled customer money to invest at a profit; basically they are lending out the money that was "lent" to them (though the customers were told that it was "deposited" for safekeeping) . (Remember the scene in 1946's "It's a Wonderful Life" in which our hero has to explain that people's money isn't just sitting in the vault, it's been lent out again - nobody paid attention then or since.) But their BIG advantage was always charging for "safekeeping" transactions, like checks and money orders and bank drafts, and then electronic transfers. You can't move money without a bank, and you can't use a bank without incurring fees and lending them your money for no interest.