Category Archives: ethics

Forfeiture

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Robert Frommer had a Wall Street Journal article centered on a case in which the FBI confiscated the life savings of his client as they raided a bank’s safe deposit box vault and snatched up the contents of deposit boxes rented by hundreds of customers, including his client’s. The FBI never charged his client with any wrong-doing, and in denying her request to get her stuff back, the FBI simply said “No,” with no explanation.

What drew my attention even more strongly, though, was Frommer’s penultimate sentence:

Courts must demand justice by preventing agencies from forfeiting property without informing owners of what they did wrong.

That’s not enough. Seizing and forfeiting are two different things. If existing statutes don’t permit courts to bar forfeiture altogether prior to actual conviction, than Congress must correct the statutes’ shortfall.

Further, rather than seizing property prior to conviction—the FBI and too many local police departments repeatedly show how difficult it is even to get back seized property—law enforcement agencies should be limited to getting courts to freeze property pending conviction, leaving the frozen property at least nominally, and formally, in the possession of the owner.

At Least There’s One

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One man in DC understands the situation. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee has this radical idea on getting violent crime, at least, back under control:

What we got to do, if we really want to see homicides go down, is keep bad guys with guns in jail. Because when they’re in jail, they can’t be in communities shooting people.

Sadly, that’s a concept that’s too complex for the wonders of the DC City Council, who passed—and overrode the Mayor’s veto to do so—an ordinance that

reduce[s] maximum penalties for violent crimes such as burglaries, robberies, and carjackings, along with abolishing minimum sentences for most crimes.

Contee illustrated the depth of the problem:

Right now, the average homicide suspect has been arrested eleven times prior to them committing a homicide[.]

Sadly, he’s only one in DC governance, though, for whom the simple solution isn’t too complex to understand.

Needs

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In an editorial centered on the travails of a small pharmaceutical company, Novavax Inc, in developing medicines—here, particularly, Novavax’ Wuhan Virus vaccine in alternative to Pfizer’s and Moderna’s—there were these claims by then-NAIAD head Anthony Fauci in explaining the apparently deliberate regulatory delay in getting FDA approval:

We don’t need another vaccine.

And

It just seems rather unusual that people are waiting for something else when you have vaccines that have been given to now nine billion people[.]

This is another instance of Government presuming to dictate to us average Americans what our needs are instead of accepting that we know our needs and how to satisfy them much better than any Government bureaucrat.

Novavax’ alternative vaccine was 90.4% effective against symptomatic infection and offered 100% protection against moderate and severe illness, and now the company is on the verge of bankruptcy due to this governmental arrogance.

So much for medicine innovation.

Negative Inference

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Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg likes to jet around the country and to overseas locations. He claims to do this while flying coach on commercial airlines, but he’s also taken 23 jet rides at taxpayer expense on private Government-owned jets. Now he’s refusing to supply relevant oversight data for these rides.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has turned down repeated requests for information related to the taxpayer costs of 23 flights Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his advisers took on government private jets since taking office.
The DOT and the agency’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office both declined to detail how much each flight cost taxpayers over the course of multiple months and in recent weeks.

It’s illegal for Government agencies to refuse to respond substantively to FOIA requests (clearly saying “No” with a clear explanation of the legality for that “No” would constitute such a substantive response).

It’s a common practice in cases before a court for a judge to advise a jury that when a prosecutor’s witness obfuscates during his testimony, or refuses to answer clearly or at all, the jury is free to attach the most negative interpretation to those witness failures during the jury’s subsequent deliberations.

So it is with the man who sits in the Transportation Secretary’s chair. Pete Buttigieg cannot be taken as anything other than both in over his head and dishonest. His words are useless, and the only conclusion possible concerning those flights is that they were done illegally, and that illegality—repeated 23 times—should be a fireable offense.

Perhaps it’s time for Government officials who stonewall to lose access to their office facilities through those facilities’ loss of funding. And this step, also, although it won’t have immediate effect, even were it to get through the Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate and White House:

House Republicans plan to vote to defund non-complying witnesses in the government when the new fiscal budget takes effect on October 1.

In the present case, that would mean Buttigieg and the head of his FOIA Office would lose their salaries.

Germany Welches Again

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I wrote yesterday, in part, about Germany’s disreputable performance in supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for existence against the Russian barbaric invasion.

Now, Germany has made the apparent decision to walk away altogether in any practical form from Ukraine in that nation’s hour of need, paying only lip service to aiding that nation.

In a landmark speech days after the invasion, [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz promised a Zeitenwende—a turning point—pledging to rebuild Germany’s military, secure alternative energy supplies, and help Ukraine fight off Russia.

Since then, according to Bojan Pancevski, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal article (at the link just above), Germany has

delivered on the latter two pledges, but a year on, Germany’s armed forces are in an even worse condition than when the war started, according to military commanders….

Pancevski is being generous, though. See yesterday’s table (at the first link); Germany’s—which is to say Scholz and his fellows in his government—have been niggardly in their…efforts…with five nations other than Poland, the US, and Great Britain contributing at least 50% more to Ukraine’s war effort on a GDP-normalized basis. Germany is doing next to nothing to help Ukraine. Only Italy and France are more miserly, throwing mere euro pennies, insultingly, at the feet of the Ukrainians.

More of Pancevski’s generosity:

On Ukraine, Mr Scholz discarded the longstanding pacifism underpinning German foreign policy to become the third-largest supplier of weapons to Kyiv after the US and the UK, according to the Kiel Institute for World the Economy. Two days after the invasion Mr Scholz lifted a ban on exporting weapons to war zones.

As yesterday’s table demonstrates, that “third-largest” sum is only in absolute terms. When the totals are normalized to each nation’s GDP—i.e., when the sums are matched to what the nations can afford to commit–Germany’s “generosity” fades to a distant 10th. And the nation further demonstrates its version of generosity by slow-walking on, and excuse-making for, its decision to delay delivery of the Leopard tanks it recently promised Ukraine.

German betrayal extends further.

By disdaining to rebuild Germany’s military establishment, Scholz has only perpetuated (not merely extended) his predecessor Angela Merkel’s perfidy in welching on the German promise to commit 2% of its GDP to military support for NATO.

Here is an outcome of that:

The country has 180,000 active soldiers and just over 300 tanks, half of them not roadworthy, down from 500,000 troops and 5,000 tanks at the height of the Cold War.

Germany had said earlier that it would create a €100 billion ($106 billion) fund with which it would rebuild and rearm its defense establishment. That, though, would need an amendment to its Basic Law, and no one in the German government has made a move toward generating that amendment so it could be put up for debate and passage.

Germany is not only betraying its fellow NATO members with those reneges, that nation is betraying its own citizens in those eastern States that were under Russian Soviet occupation via the fictitious (if narrowly, strictly legal) German Democratic Republic.