Tag: police state

Prohibitionist Group Narcs On Wells Fargo And Maryland Officials Over Accounting Of Marijuana Tax Revenue

An anti-marijuana advocacy group is taking aim at a banking arrangement between Wells Fargo and the state of Maryland that allows officials to receive and process tax revenue generated by state-legal cannabis businesses, calling the scheme “an active effort to protect the banks who are breaking federal law” and making an attempt to alert federal officials about it.

The state, for its part, has said it “complies with applicable laws and regulations.”

Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), which opposes marijuana legalization, made the allegations in a press release late last month following media reports of the banking arrangement, including in Marijuana Moment.

The also group sent an open letter to Maryland officials and Wells Fargo, while CCing several federal officials, requesting that “Wells Fargo cease working with Maryland state officials to circumvent federal laws and regulations.”

“The workaround by the Maryland government reported on in the media is a clear attempt to protect banks from thoughtfully crafted federal regulations,” the prohibitionist group’s letter says.

Among those copied on the letter are Erek L. Barron, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, whose office would oversee any potential federal prosecutions in the state, as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

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The End of Airbnb in New York

THOUSANDS OF AIRBNBS and short-term rentals are about to be wiped off the map in New York City.

Local Law 18, which came into force Tuesday, is so strict it doesn’t just limit how Airbnb operates in the city—it almost bans it entirely for many guests and hosts. From now on, all short-term rental hosts in New York must register with the city, and only those who live in the place they’re renting—and are present when someone is staying—can qualify. And people can only have two guests.

Gone are the days of sleek downtown apartments outfitted for bachelorette parties, cozy two- and three-bedroom apartments near museums for families, and even the option for people to rent out their apartment on weekends when they’re away. While Airbnb, Vrbo, and others can continue to operate in New York, the new rules are so tight that Airbnb sees it as a “de facto ban” on its business.

Short-term rentals can bring noise, trash, and danger, and they can price local residents out of their own neighborhoods. Some landlords in New York are prolific and have hundreds of Airbnb listings. But other New Yorkers who have listings on Airbnb are trying to make ends meet, either leasing their place while they’re out of town or renting half of a duplex to help cover their mortgage costs.

Airbnb is also popular with some of the 66 million visitors a year looking for accommodations that are cheaper and sometimes larger than hotels. In 2022 alone, short-term rental listings made $85 million in New York. The city might be a relatively small slice of Airbnb’s global market, but the new rules show how local governments can effectively stamp out short-term rentals overnight and lessen their impact on dense residential areas. And New York is just one of many cities around the world trying to calm the short-term rental gold-rush.

And everyone is taking a different approach. Dallas has limited short-term rentals to specific neighborhoods to avoid disruptive and dangerous parties. Elsewhere, the Canadian province of Quebec and Memphis, Tennessee, among others, now require licenses for short-term rentals. In San Francisco, the amount of time someone can list their entire residence for rent on Airbnb is limited to 90 days each year; Amsterdam puts that limit at 30 nights per year, Paris at 120 days. Berlin previously banned nearly all Airbnbs but walked the decision back in 2018.

Airbnb’s attempts to fight back against the new law have, to date, been unsuccessful. The company sued New York City in June, but a judge dismissed the case in August, ruling that the restrictions were “entirely rational.” Airbnb did not comment on whether it would appeal the decision. Hosts are also fighting for the right to list their apartments as short-term stays by meeting with city officials to try to change the law.

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UNLOCKING THE BLACK BOX OF IN-CUSTODY DEATHS

Arrest and incarceration are uniquely dangerous experiences, regardless of where they take place. People die every day in law enforcement custody. In jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers. On sidewalks, city streets, and in their homes. From violence, neglect, and suicide. Despite the frequency of in-custody deaths, their exact scope remains unknown and data is often intentionally obfuscated by the refusal of states to comply with federally mandated reporting requirements.

More than two decades ago, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), requiring states to report the number of people who die in custody or during arrest. But authorities have resisted implementing the DCRA, resulting in incomplete data that likely drastically undercounts the actual figures. Although the DCRA authorized the federal government to financially penalize states that fail to meet reporting requirements, enforcement has been lax.

In a recently released book, Death In Custody: How America Ignores The Truth and What We Can Do About It, authors Roger A. Mitchell Jr. and Jay D. Aronson argue that deaths in law enforcement custody amount to a public health emergency. Their work ties in high-profile examples and shows how journalists have long done the work of tracking in-custody deaths—from Ida B. Wells famously investigating extrajudicial lynchings in the late 19th century, to the Washington Post’s comprehensive database of police shooting deaths beginning in 2015.

Mitchell and Aronson argue that collecting accurate data is the first step toward addressing this crisis. To do this, they propose amending U.S. death certificates to begin accounting for in-custody deaths. “The government’s ultimate responsibility is to protect and preserve life, so any government system that causes death requires an immediate response—especially when those deaths are justified as serving ‘public safety,’” the authors write.

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Direct Government Censorship Of The Internet Is Here

Censorship of the Internet has been getting worse for years, but we just crossed a threshold which is going to take things to a whole new level. 

On August 25th, a new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union.  Under this new law, European bureaucrats will be able to order big tech companies to censor any content that is considered to be “illegal”, “disinformation” or “hate speech”.  That includes content that is posted by users outside of the European Union, because someone that lives in the European Union might see it.  I wrote about this a few days ago, but I don’t think that people are really understanding the implications of this new law.  In the past, there have been times when governments have requested that big tech companies take down certain material, but now this new law will give government officials the power to force big tech companies to take down any content that they do not like. 

Any big tech companies that choose not to comply will be hit with extremely harsh penalties.

Of course mainstream news outlets such as the Washington Post are attempting to put a positive spin on this new law.  We are being told that it will “safeguard” us from “illegal content” and “disinformation”…

New rules meant to safeguard people from illegal content, targeted ads, unwanted algorithmic feeds and disinformation online are finally in force, thanks to new regulation in the European Union that took effect this month.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

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The Global War on Thought Crime

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.

In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.

In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”

One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.

The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.

The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.

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Alabama Set To Try New, Untested Execution Method

Alabama wants to execute a man so badly that they’re likely to become the first state in the nation to kill someone by nitrogen hypoxia. 

Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, who was sentenced to death for a 1988 murder-for-hire killing, has already survived one execution attempt from the state. Last November, he won a court case allowing him to demand to be executed specifically by nitrogen hypoxia, a method that has been approved in Alabama since 2018 but has remained untested.

Nonetheless, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall still asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for Smith last week, with plans to use the method.

While four states in addition to Alabama have approved execution by lethal gas, no one has been executed using this method since 1999. While 20th-century gas chambers typically killed inmates using cyanide gas, death by nitrogen hypoxia is a completely untested method. Under the proposed process, an inmate would be placed in a gas chamber, where they would be forced to breathe pure nitrogen, ultimately causing death by suffocation due to the lack of oxygen.

After long arguing that they should be allowed to kill Smith by lethal injection because the state had not yet developed a nitrogen hypoxia protocol, state officials unveiled a formal nitrogen hypoxia process in conjunction with their motion to set Smith’s execution date. Under the process, the inmate will wear a mask, which will force them to breathe pure nitrogen gas “for 15 minutes, or five minutes following a flatline indication on the EKG, whichever is longer,” resulting in death by suffocation.

Smith won the right to be executed by this method in a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit last November. Smith argued that a lethal injection attempt would expose him to “an intolerable risk of torture, cruelty, or substantial pain,” citing the state’s previous botched executions.

The same day as the 11th Circuit’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution for Smith. Alabama officials attempted to kill him by lethal injection that day, but they abandoned their attempt after they tried unsuccessfully for several hours to place IV needles in Smith’s arms.

While nitrogen hypoxia has been touted as a more humane method for killing death-row inmates—it’s simply unknown how much suffering death by nitrogen hypoxia causes.

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Rescheduling Won’t End The War On Cannabis, But Could Open A New Battlefront If We’re Not Careful

Contrary to decades of reefer madness propagated by our federal government, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now admits that marijuana does have accepted medical use. However, reports of the death of cannabis prohibition are exaggerated. No doubt, the conclusion of FDA’s scientific review of marijuana’s current Schedule I status is a welcome milestone in federal cannabis policy.

But while the Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) August 29, 2023 recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reschedule marijuana based on FDA’s review will finally bring relief from the federal gross receipts tax levied on struggling state-licensed cannabis businesses, it also underscores the urgent need to both (1) continue pressing forward on descheduling efforts before critical momentum evaporates and certain industry stakeholders effectively settle for rescheduling without full decriminalization, and (2) demand that marijuana be exempted from existing categories of FDA-regulated products to preserve state medical and adult use cannabis markets.

Before proceeding, it’s important to remember that rescheduling would not apply the federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) to marijuana for the first time—it applies right now, and like the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), would continue to apply after rescheduling. But absent any statutory authority permitting FDA to do otherwise, the FDCA would continue to apply after descheduling too, just as it does to hemp products. I previously noted this in “Cannabis Cannibalism: How Federal Rescheduling Could Consume the State-Licensed Industry Without Safe Harbors Under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” available here.

However, moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III will shift enforcement priorities (and the incentives to vigorously pursue these priorities) at both DEA and FDA. Indeed this has been the experience after the CSA’s prohibitions on hemp were relaxed beginning with the 2014 Farm Bill, and then scrapped under the 2018 Farm Bill which descheduled hemp by carving it out of the federal CSA’s definitions of “marijuana” and “THC.” Soon after, purveyors of hemp CBD products began receiving FDA cease-and-desist letters citing prohibited product claims and numerous grounds under the FDCA for prohibiting the interstate commerce in such cannabis products.

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Marijuana Should Be De‐​Scheduled, Not Re‐​Scheduled

Bloomberg News is reporting that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine has sent a letter to Drug Enforcement Administrator Anne Milgram asking her agency to reclassify marijuana (cannabis) as a Schedule III drug. The DEA defines Schedule III drugs as “drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” The agency currently classifies marijuana as Schedule I: a drug “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Of course, that definition begs the question, “Currently accepted by whom?” But an even more important question is, “Why should a plant people have been growing and using recreationally for millennia be scheduled as a drug when alcohol is not?”

When Congress authorized the law enforcement agency to judge the clinical applications, efficacy, and potential dangers of drugs, it authorized cops to practice medicine. And they have been engaging in malpractice. For example, no serious person would argue that marijuana has “no currently accepted medical use.” As far back as 1916, Sir William Osler, the so‐​called “father of modern medicine,” recommended cannabis as the “drug of choice” for treating migraines. But cannabis’s history of “accepted medical use” dates back to at least 2800 B.C.

The DEA also schedules diamorphine (brand‐​named “heroin” by Bayer, its manufacturer in the 19th century) Schedule I even though it is legally used in the U.K. and much of the developed world to treat pain and is employed for medication‐​assisted treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, the U.K, Denmark, and Spain.

And even though a bipartisan consensus is emerging that psychedelics may be extremely helpful in treating post‐​traumatic stress disorder, depression, addiction, and compulsive disorders, and in end‐​of‐​life care, the DEA placed them on Schedule I, depriving researchers, clinicians, and patients of these tools for 50 years.

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Did Banks Hand Private Financial Data to the FBI Without Legal Process?

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating banks for sharing Americans’ financial information with the FBI without regard for privacy concerns. In fact, there’s no doubt about the threat to civil liberties posed by the government’s leverage over the financial industry; that’s long established. At question in this investigation is whether the danger to our freedom inherent in that cozy relationship is being wielded in political warfare between the country’s political factions. But the larger problem should be fixed no matter what lawmakers discover.

“Today, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Citibank for documents and communications related to the Judiciary Committee’s and Weaponization Select Subcommittee’s investigation into major banks sharing Americans’ private financial data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) without legal process for transactions made in the Washington, D.C., area around Jan. 6, 2021,” the House Judiciary Committee announced August 17.

The subpoena followed June 12 queries to Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Company, PNC Financial Services, Truist, U.S. Bankcorp, and Wells Fargo after testimony by FBI whistleblowers that Bank of America voluntarily handed the FBI records on people who had used its services in the Washington, D.C. area around the time of the January 6 Capitol riot. “Individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA product were reportedly elevated to the top of the list,” according to a May report.

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‘They’re everywhere!’ Residents complain as their Texas town of 250 people employs 50 cops

The tiny Texas town of Coffee City is taking the concept of “over-policing” to a whole new level.

Local news station CBS 19 reports that Coffee City, with a population of just under 250 people, employs 50 full-time and reserve officers – that’s one police officer for every five residents.

And these officers appear to be very busy as well, as CBS 19 has found that they issued a whopping 5,100 citations last year that generated more than $1 million in revenue for the town budget.

This has left many residents questioning why such a small town needs an overwhelming number of police officers.

“They’re everywhere, literally everywhere,” complained one woman to CBS 19 who asked not to be publicly identified.

And that’s not all.

Local news station KHOU 11 Investigates found that a surprisingly large percentage of police employed by the town had been fired from previous law enforcement jobs.

In particular, KHOU 11’s investigation found that “more than half of the department’s 50 officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs” for actions including “excessive force, public drunkenness, untruthfulness and association with known criminals.”

Greg Fremin, a retired Houston Police Department captain who is now a lecturer at the Sam Houston State University College of Criminal Justice, tells CBS 19 that he’s “astounded” by the tiny town’s massive collection of rogue cops.

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