How was he found guilty of concealed money when he reported it to begin with? Then could still serve prison time for it.
But I'd be a little skeptical of Reason's handwave "properly reported to the government". Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial?
One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.
They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they're generally factually reliable and hardly "incredibly slanted".
So what looks centrist or right leaning on a 2D scale is actually heavily biased in a different political direction.
edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:
That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.
It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political...
So, traditional left/right split may not make much sense anymore and each country could have their own split for left and right sides.
The split that's now the norm in most western countries AFAICT is liberal on the left and conservative on the right.
On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.
Voters in low population states have outsized political power and therefore get handouts. Same deal with elderly voters because they vote more often and everyone expects to get old Meanwhile groups who vote less often like 18-24 year olds get fucked over.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-rate-by-age...
Detailed data on 2022: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-individu...
In Nebraska 14% of 18-24 year olds voted vs 63% of 60+ year olds. Wow I wonder who elected officials pay attention to.
The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.
This is as factual as rain is dry.
>This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.
What is traditional left? Marxism-Leninism? Socialism is and has been a wide spectrum since before the Russian revolution. Right now we're seeing an uptick in extreme right tendencies in Europe but top 20 economy countries such as the UK, France, Brazil and Germany do have solid leftist parties.
Initially it was an offshoot of the abolitionist movement which took a hard look at property rights in a broader context but very much still wanted to abolish slavery and even serfdom. They also wanted social security style safety nets with pensions and compensation for injured workers and their families etc. Western democracies essentially adopted most of those standards to the point where they became invisible in modern politics.
FDR for example really gutted the socialist movement in the US with the “New Deal” to the point where it largely stopped being a talking point. More recently having gutted unions, with the gig economy sidestepping many worker protections, and 401k replacing pensions, etc has started to reawaken some of the west’s latent socialist tendencies.
There definitely are academics, in organizations like the DSA. But there's practical folks too.
You can’t have a workable left-wing movement that prioritizes social libertarianism because workers invariably will be more traditional than elites. You can’t tell factory workers they can’t say this or that and that they need to learn to like foreigners. You can think it, but you can't say it, and you certainly can't call them "racist, sexist, and homophobic." If your platform morally reforming workers and their manners becomes core to your platform, then it's not a workable left-wing platform. All you'll do is split the workers and push them away: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/postcard-from-the-hispanic-....
What you'll end up with is a coalition where economic left-wingers are the rump of a neoliberal party. The neoliberals will never give the left-wingers anything, because they don't have to. Neoliberals have no reason to do anything other than pay lip service to leftists who can't actually unify and rally the mass of workers.
So, when they present facts, they surround them with emotional words to try to sway opinion.
Happy Reason subscriber here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz
>Gaetz has self-identified as a "libertarian populist".[102] Observers have described his views as far right.[2] Gaetz was an early supporter of Donald Trump and his appeal to the Republican Party base, echoing his talking points. In several commercials during his 2016 congressional campaign, Gaetz promised to "kill Muslim terrorists and build the wall".[103]
Trouble for Matt Gaetz: Witness Says She Was Paid for Sex Parties With Him:
https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house...
>The House Ethics Committee is now weighing that evidence to determine whether or not the MAGA politician paid for sex with women and an underage teenager.
1) Taxation is theft
2) Legalize weed
3) The age of consent should be lower
I'm not sure if the US - or the world - has any of those. But the generic "there is a slant" point is useless. What matters is what the slant leads people to do, what information the slant is omitting and whether said slant is a good one on balance. If calling a media organisations "slanted" doesn't imply "slanted [in a way I think is potentially bad and relevant]" then the word is useless and shouldn't be used.
I think you'll find that literally every media organisations thinks it's doing exactly that — the issue is that people have _wildly_ different conceits of what "best outcome" for them is.
All companies "serve" their customers, including news organizations, and inevitably have subjective ways of organizing their efforts.
But there is a big difference between ones that have a mission geared to a positive society outcome, a commitment to customer well being, and respect for facts, with profits following from that service, vs. a mission to print whatever they can legally afford to, to maximize profits. And of course, that difference is a continuum.
Some companies take value creation seriously. Others optimize for opportunities to extract value and prey on dysfunction.
My rule of thumb is to go read what any politician actually said, because I've only seen it reported accurately by a journalist in rare cases. That rule simply isn't something a productive reporting slant would require.
Are there media organizations that don't believe they are doing this?
For example structuring cash deposits. If you have a pile of legitimate cash, say through a cash business (you pay all taxes), but you intentionally make multiple $9,000 deposits to avoid generating a CTR (currency transaction report for cash deposits over $10,000), congrats, you violated money laundering laws.
Are you supposed to risk keeping it on premises until enough adds up, or you should tell the bank to file a CTR, or something else?
In your example, the $9k deposits are perfectly fine. Although if you really always deposit $9k you’ll probably get some questions.
that's what mobsters get nabbed on, corrupt gvt officials etc. it's not difficult to prove anyone has tax evaded.
It doesn't fit the metaphor of money laundering, of turning dirty money into clean, but it's usually prosecuted under the same statutes.
Notably, it is not money laundering to obscure the source of funds when they didn't come from an illicit source. Nor is it money laundering to simply obscure the source of funds, so they don't come from any apparent source. If that were money laundering, it would be illegal to withdraw cash from an ATM, which is obviously absurd.
A relevant statute in the US is the USA PATRIOT Act [0], specifically Title III, which deals with "International money laundering abatement and terrorist financing". It absolutely does restrict transmission of clean money to non-favoured political entities, often in the same breath as it forbids actual money laundering. It does not forbid withdrawing cash from an ATM, but it does forbid a bank from issuing you an ATM card if they should have guessed you would use the money for the wrong purposes.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm
Channeling legal money into illegal activities qualifies as well. Not clear either is applicable to this case however.
money laundering - the federal crime - relies, absolutely relies on their being an illicit origin. it cannot be charged independently and relies on discovering there was an illicit origin and moving to prosecute that.
think harder about it and successful money laundering is impossible to be convicted of as an illicit origin is never discovered and probable cause is never established to get the subpoenas.
seems that nobody ever imagined that the jury convicts someone on the money laundering charge and the judge acquits on the illicit origin charge amongst others. this does seem to require an appeal to rectify and everyone agrees he has a big chance of this getting dropped on appeal too, since its just dangling disconnected from its requirements.
the other things you’re talking about would be prosecuted under different laws.
There are money laundering laws that require it be illicit funds.
But there are also transaction reporting requirements - like generating a currency transaction report (CTR) - that don't require the funds to be illicit. It just requires that you attempt to circumvent them.
"The transaction is designed to evade any regulations promulgated under the Bank Secrecy Act"
I can see the categorization of "AML" - anti-money laundering law. I think then that the context hasn't been made clear, when we are discussing the actual criminal charge of money laundering, versus the criminal charge of structuring or avoiding a transaction reporting threshold.
"Man guilty of violating laws in place to prevent money laundering" becomes "Man guilty of money laundering".
This has years of history. I worked in a similar industry to backpage for 11 years.
The defendants are precluded from using or mentioning any of this information even though it shows that the case is being wrongfully prosecuted because it is the state's attorney client privileged material which was released by mistake.
That would have been a nice constitutional / Bill of Rights principle. Or a Supreme Court standard.
Instead many ways in which clearly innocent (or very likely innocent) people have been convicted or had appeals denied have been upheld, at the alter of not just due process, but at having no principle or procedure of adjusting due process in these cases.
In this case, how can there be information that was not submitted directly to the court given its relevance to the case? Who had that information and withheld it? That should itself be criminal. (Some information may be sensitive - but courts already deal with that in other circumstances.)
Due process adjustments for an "innocence protection principle" would still be reviewed by higher courts, so this could be a standard but rare practice with its own due process, without being a Wild West.
--
No system for any large organization should provide no process for exceptions to accepted practice at the ground level to be escalated.
Corporations, governments, social media sites, banks, etc. all end up crushing powerless people when they provide no recourse for unanticipated or ignored harm by the organization's current rules.
Individual humans do not have a legal pass to say, "well I have these rules for myself, and they don't include effective review or action on information about my unjustly harming you." If an individual is notified of harm, their culpability starts then. Courts would consider systematically ignoring such communication to imply a significant increase in culpability - for an individual. Throwing away such communication would be interpreted as a conscious intention to continue harming.
This has long been written about.
Nepo-wife. And they were saying the Soviets were a decrepit society at the top, the US from today is not much better.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/michael-lacey-jim-larki...
Thats always been my take on the backpage case, but I didnt feel comfortable talking about it because people are too emotionally invested in curbing sex trafficking
We’d be better off just treating it as labor trafficking, and not bothering with the non-trafficked people just like the rest of the job market.
Same with sex work it seems.
Which is why, in almost every jurisdiction, prostitution is illegal.
But since approx. 49% of the population ‘wins’, it is also why it still happens, just where it isn’t obvious.
I'm not understand what is unsaid here or is being assumed to have a shared understanding.
51% of most populations are women, 49% are men.
Seems pretty obvious?
yes, the market for sex work is primarily men. of them, the vast majority are interested in heterosexual pairings from women providers.
can you finish articulating why women would be losing from cheap sex work? which women, the sex workers? a different group? what are each group losing specifically?
have you talked to any sex workers? many of them say they've gained something and I'm waiting to compare that with what you are trying to articulate
And as long as it isn't too big of a hot button topic at the moment, no one does anything about it either. There will be an occasional 'whack a mole' action when it does become a hot button, then it goes back to being ignored.
Since homeowners and businesses 'win' and low value blue collar labor 'loses', not likely to change either until Labor starts getting organized again.
In any trade, someone always gets something for something. Market effects, who gets what for how much, etc. are what I’m talking about.
What was the common attribute? Can you finish articulating what was asked?
Is it difficult for you to talk about sex work and women? Because I would like to have that conversation, it was an interesting prompt
You’re better off just reading some of the existing studies and materials though, there are a ton, if you’re curious. Plenty of blogs from sex workers near as I can tell too.
Also, near as I can tell, plenty of blue collar workers who wished they could get away with working in that industry!
It isn’t just ‘sex work and women’ after all.
amusing “default US” moment
which I disagree with
Sometimes it seems like prosecutors brought a reasonable case given the evidence and tried it fairly. In this case, I believe acquittal is the right call. Other times it seems like a case that shouldn't have been brought and you should be compensated for that and/or the prosecutor should be punished.
Most criminal cases are open-and-shut deals where the defendant is clearly guilty, so this wouldn't change much on average. But it would ensure that 1) prosecutors only prosecute what they can actually prove, 2) innocent peoples' lives aren't destroyed.
It would incentivize prosecution to avoid court at all costs. Which means de facto immunity for wealthy people who can easily afford to go to court. And it will probably make law enforcement even worse about railroading people who can't afford any legal representation.
Their job is to prosecute. Their only option is to pick cases that can be won. Which isn't hard, as the average person who is charged with some criminal act is not only guilty, but clearly guilty.
> Which means de facto immunity for wealthy people who can easily afford to go to court.
Money can't make a guilty man innocent. If you've actually done something wrong and there is evidence against you, the prosecution should have no qualms about prosecuting. In rare cases bad luck might lead to a payout due to a botched case or other unusual circumstance. But governments have enough money to self-insure for rare cases like that. It probably wouldn't even be a once-in-a-career event for the average prosecutor.
> And it will probably make law enforcement even worse about railroading people who can't afford any legal representation.
Rather the opposite: since full compensation is guaranteed if you win, it would be much easier to get a lawyer to work on contingency if you can convince them you are innocent. Right now that is very hard because even if you win, it's quite difficult to get the state to pay your legal bills so lawyers have no incentive to help you.
I don’t even know why we have all this stuff like lawyers judges, prosecutors, hierarchy of courts, appeals. It could all be automated with kiosk at the police station.
I am not sure you are not just trolling :)
> Money can't make a guilty man innocent.
Spend thousands going to court and possible spending 5 years in jail vs. plead out for probation. The fact that going to court and winning might see you get legal fees plus a bit of money back doesn't change the calculus -- the worst case outcome is still prison.
Of course, in practice what really would happen is it would be far less common for prosecutors to prosecute people when there isn't a solid case against them. If what I'm suggesting was how criminal cases worked, I doubt that Backpage would have been charged at all.
Note that I also think that plea deals should be much less common, or even totally banned.
If we do, then my suggestion should be easy to implement and will only impact a tiny minority of cases.
Of course, in this case it's pretty clear that the prosecution made up a bunch of charges that they knew they'd lose on to try to drain the resources of the people they were charging, as well as punish them pre-emptively. The prosecution also clearly broke the rules in other ways, eg by getting a mistrial when they kept on bringing up sex trafficking, a crime the Backpage founders simply weren't charged with.
There are plenty of actual criminals in the world that need to be prosecuted. This case is clearly a politically motivated exception.
As someone who was a lawyer for years, and who has served on a jury, I have seen the ways that things can evolve in unexpected ways. IMO the vast majority of cases could go either way, depending on how rulings and jury composition turn out. Any system that doles out taxpayer money whenever the prosecution doesn't run the table is utterly naive. It would result in less prosecution, more criminals going free, and more victimization by people we didn't lock up.
No we wouldn't.
Or we wouldn't utilize the plea deal in 93% of criminal cases. And we use it with little-to-no oversight. Unless what a prosecutor offers is so -utterly egregiously inappropriate- that it causes a judge to double take, they can pretty much do as they like.
Which is why we use it more than 60x more per capita than any other country on earth, in those countries that even allow it (it's not even officially sanctioned in the UK, though it has happened - fun fact, nearly 40% of the cases appealed as a "miscarriage of justice" in the UK involved plea deals).
> A government spokesperson said: “Ensuring defendants plead guilty at the earliest possible opportunity means victims and witnesses do not have to relive their potentially traumatic experiences in court."
What? Not one word of innocence or presumption. Just "plead guilty early, we know you did it".
Even in countries that do use plea deals more often, there's strict oversight into what the deals entail and understanding of outcome.
Here, there's no incentive to rock the boat. Prosecutors push plea deals HEAVILY, innocence be damned, threatening the costs and risks of a trial (and the US over-charges people heavily) with a quick plea (that ever so conveniently allows our elected prosecutors to point to high conviction rates every re-election).
> it wouldn’t make sense to assume anyone who is not convicted on even one count is actually innocent
Oof. Not only is it "possible" you're not actually innocent, your attitude is "it doesn't even make sense to assume that". Screw it, why do we need a justice system? You were arrested, let's just take you straight to prison.
Of course it's possible. But if someone is charged with 5 crimes and convicted of 4, why should we reimburse their legal fees? That is what GP proposed, and it would be nuts. If the prosecution struck out and went 0 for 5, that might make sense. But requiring them to run the table makes no sense.
But yes, while not meeting the legal bar, you can as a private individual draw your own inferences - sometimes - about someone being convicted of 80% of charges... however, note still my comment on prosecution heavily over-charging people to improve conviction rates, either directly, or by contributing to fear/stress (cost of defense, consequences, risk) to bludgeon someone into a plea deal regardless of factual guilt.
If prosecutors aren't certain they can win on all 5 counts, bring 4. Or 3. Or even 1.
Most crimes should have pretty serious consequences. So convicting on one well-proven count should be enough.
- "frifunnet på grunn av bevisets stilling" (~"acquitted because of the situation with the evidence" my best translation at 00:02 in the night) which I think in practice means it wasn't proven that the person did it and so (s)he is acquitted.
- "henlagt som intet straffbart forhold" (~"acquitted as no punishable offense" my best translation at 00:04 in the night) which I think means the investigation not only failed to prove guilt but also proved that a person was not guilty.
I tried to find better translations but wasn't able to. Feel free to fill in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven
> Under Scots law, a criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction ("guilty") and two of acquittal ("not proven" and "not guilty").
This looks like prosecutorial abuse to me.
Wrongful convictions in the US are way too common. With that many chargers and cascading retrials like this, I'd expect at least one false conviction regardless of who is on trial.
If the guy's guilty, fine. They should have charged him with things that were supported by solid evidence instead of stuffing charges so they can keep trying him for the same things over and over until they get a guilty verdict.
This sort of case is the reason double jeopardy is supposed to be illegal in the US.
Of the xx counts, some were acquitted, some convicted, some both, and some neither. Of the convictions the lower court had sometimes given prison term y in the upper part of the judgment, but prison term z lower down in the text.
And so on. The higher court dryly wrote that special care has to be given when dealing with many counts.
https://frontpageconfidential.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04...
Dear people flagging this, please stop perceiving my statements through your domestic political lenses. I am not talking politics here. Just because your team is currently pro-FBI or against-FBI doesn't mean I am talking about how the FBI interacts with your team. I am not.
Most criminal cases are open-and-shut deals where someone is clearly guilty of something, so for typical cases this policy wouldn't change much. But it would significantly reduce the power of government to harass innocent people.
Again, this won't change anything in the typical case, because the typical criminal case involves something who is clearly guilty. But it'll keep innocent people out of jail.
Ah yes, the ol' reliable 'everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi' approach
It should be added that while typical evangelical Christian voters are sought by right-leaning political parties, voters of the second largest faith is generally sought by left-leaning political parties. This is currently very noticeable given the a specific conflict in the world. Religious voters and political parties that want to cater to those voters are no longer limited to left or right.
Sex work is legal and more-or-less regulated in most of the UK and Europe even where Le Pen-flavor nationalism is ascending in prevalence.
The US has a special kind of polarized infighting and much more variance in rights and restrictions that the rest of the world. For example, if I were to say "I'm pro conceal carry guns for people who continue to show demonstrably sane and stable residents." this wouldn't fly in most of Europe or Australia, regardless of right or left party across the way except for perhaps the fringe far-right. That is to say: norms in America differ significantly from the rest of the world in sometimes disquieting ways to outsiders, due to enduring historical roots and political interests. Perhaps a compromise to placate the majority of Americans would be: "don't touch the right to bear arms in exchange for bodily autonomy and healthcare."
The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing didn't happen in a vacuum. It was 100% homegrown terrorism that thrived and came to pass in a culture of government conspiracy theories, Waco, white nationalism, and failure to care for and reintegrate Gulf War vets. Chris Hedges wrote a book on the topic: American Fascists (2008). Excluding Jan 6th as different kind of event, that there hasn't been another domestic terrorism mass casualty event due to diligent work by law enforcement combined with a tinge of dumb luck.
There was also Ruby Ridge, which was absolutely disgusting policing.
And most of the "domestic terrorism" today involves FBI agents trying to bait people into committing offences such as in the Whitmer "kidnapping".
> Perhaps a compromise to placate the majority of Americans would be: "don't touch the right to bear arms in exchange for bodily autonomy and healthcare."
Most of the leftists I know are extremely strong opponents to gun control. Marx was pretty clear on the importance of an armed working class, and leftists tend to take that to heart ime.
And something tells me Muslims, practicing Jews, etc. aren’t a fan of prostitution either.
So really you could just say “religious people,” and it’d be far more accurate.
It's my unpopular and minority opinion that the world would be better without some or most religions but would be better off with the trappings of what churches provide: community, friend networks, singing together, reflecting on philosophy, and mutual aid. Although, I'm absolutely sure the world would be better without the cult of Scientology. https://www.scientology-austin.org/about-us/grand-opening.ht...
There are much more pressing, self-interested reasons to advocate veganism:
1. Meat ag and bushmeat lead to pandemics: bovine tuberculosis, "Spanish" flu, Nipah, SARS, H7N7, H1N1, MERS, COVID. There are others.
2. Meat ag abuses the same antibiotics humans take (but manufactured in the veterinary supply chain) for purely economic reasons (mostly, to make animals grow faster) leading to the evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes and making antibiotic medications in humans less effective.
3. Climate change. It contributes 1/6 of all human GHG activity.
4. Air, soil, and water pollution are the result of mega grain farms, large pig farms, and CAFOs.
5. It's resource intensive and drives up the cost of all food by shunting more water, diesel fuel, arable land, etc. to less output.
6. Along with palm kernel oil, it's a leading driver of old growth deforestation.
7. And it hurts both the cute and the ugly critters.
Well it’s conditionally persuasive depending on the animal and people’s priors. Dogs vs horses vs pigs, etc.
Agreed on all your points though.
In other news, Moolec is developing GMO "Piggy Sooy" to taste like pork by inserting pork genes into beans. (I'm wondering: will it be Halal or Kosher?) Impossible Foods' "beef" relies on heme from GMO yeast, while Moolec plans to have GMO "beef" too.
I actually prefer the taste of such microwaved unleavened bread that I make myself and I also prefer the fact that due to its higher density and cohesiveness (in comparison with bread leavened with yeast) it requires more vigorous and more prolonged chewing, which is healthy for the teeth (and for dental implants) and it causes greater satiety.
Therefore I spare the life of yeast :-)
apparently sex workers like decriminalized, because non-compliance with the regulated regimes have so far been a parallel illegal system
but I cant think of any industry we would listen to who answered “how about just a completely hands off decriminalized approach” if asked to choose between illegal, unregulated, legal and regulated
I don’t think decriminalized comes with adequate consumer protection, and the problems with legalized systems can be addressed by fixing how non-compliance is penalized, and by providing incentives to join the regulated system instead of just penalties for not
regarding trafficking, well keep prosecuting that. as labor trafficking. make more avenues of support for the laborer which is far easier with labor rights. what people find hardest to reconcile is the idea of giving up on preventing trafficking, nothing they support right now is doing that or capable of doing that while burdening everyone else.
Not sure what your comment HIV has to do with anything either when it comes to that case.
Please expand acronyms: we're not all in your context.
CRISPR personalized approaches are more promising by precisely excising vDNA.
There is no panacea here.
Thanks, but don't need it. (Actually a platelet donor.) I couldn't fit a whole AC/DC title into hn's restrictions, and it originally had something to do with electricity.