As witnessed in footage of the event filmed by fellow activists, Kokesh appears to have been arrested for the victimless crime of exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. … Read More
BART system starts issuing bans against passengers
Effective Monday, BART riders cited for any number of offenses can be banned from boarding the 700-or-so train cars that regularly transverse the San Francisco/Oakland area as part of one of the largest mass-transit systems in the United States. As RT reported last week, policies enacted under the recently passed State Assembly Bill 716 let BART cops issue “prohibition orders” to passengers merely accused of breaking even minor transit rules.Any passenger cited or arrested on BART property for a felony act including lewd and violent behavior can be issued a prohibition order on the spot that strips them of their riding privileges for anywhere from 30 days to an entire year. Lesser offenses carry penalties too, though, and passengers cited three times in just as many months for minor crimes can be banned from the BART as well.Because three citations in three months can warrant a prohibition order, RT noted last week that political protesters cited with “Willfully disturbing others on or in a system facility or vehicle by engaging in boisterous or unruly behavior” and “Willfully blocking the free movement of another person in a system facility or vehicle” could be subjected to the ban.“AB 716 won’t only target violent behavior,” local ABC affiliate KGNO News acknowledged last week. “It can be applied to protestors who have been arrested during free-speech movements.”The San Francisco Weekly has also divulged some of the other acts deemed inappropriate by BART officials. “Assembly Bill 716, which passed last year, allows BART to issue a ‘prohibition order,’ meaning it can (and will) ban anyone who commits a criminal offense on BART property,” SF Weekly’s Erin Sherbert wrote on Monday. “In other words, if you are busted holding up trains, assaulting workers or commuters, being lewd and lascivious (masturbating), selling drugs, scrawling missives on BART property, or just bothering others, then you’ll be walking home.”Sherbert first warned of AB 716 in an article published back in January, and at the time acknowledged that authorities hoped to reverse a recent trend of escalating violent in BART stations with the law. “BART has become a breeding ground for violence and bad behavior,” she wrote. “In one recent case, a man pushed his way into a booth and beat the station agent severely, according to BART.”Because the new law broadly allows authorities to issue probation orders for comparably meager activity, though, opponents are concerned that the slippery slope will carry protesters, the homeless and other undesirables off the train, perhaps with somewhat solid legal backing. BART has revealed an appeals process to help people who may be wrongly issued prohibition orders and is standing by their new policy despite concerns over possible discrimination. On the topic of profiling, BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey told NFO News, “As a person of color, I’m certainly sensitive to those types of issues.”"Race is not an issue in this and it should not be one, nor is geographic location of the BART stations. Again, this is system wide,” added Amalgamated Transit Union President Antonette Bryant. … Read More
Bay area ‘lewd behavior’ ban on pooping or peeing on subways goes into effect
Starting Monday, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) riders will have to think twice before using trains or train platforms as public bathrooms, or risk losing the ability to use them at all. SF Weekly reported on Monday that transit police will now be able to issue “prohibition orders”…
New law will ban protesters from riding mass transit in California
Starting next week, law enforcement officers policing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland and other cities can issue bus and subway bans for unruly passengers — and according to one local news report, that power could be used to prevent political protesters from getting to demonstrations or essentially going anywhere.Under the recently passed State Assembly Bill 716, BART can issue “prohibition” orders to any passenger cited or arrested for certain offenses, essentially blacklisting some people from boarding public transit vehicles if they’ve been charged with certain crimes.BART Board President Tom Radulovich told Bay City News the law is “an important safety initiative to keep our employees and riders safe,” adding, “We’re very concerned that for the past few years folks have been assaulting our station agents.””We are really wanting to send the message that if you are going to come onto our system and be unruly or violent, there are going to be consequences,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told local ABC affiliate KGNO News.But while the new bill will provide BART police the authority to immediately revoke riding privileges for persons arrested or convicted of acts involving violence, threats of violence, lewd or lascivious behavior or possession or sale of drugs on area transit, those charged with minor infractions could be targeted too. “AB 716 won’t only target violent behavior,” KGNO reported. “It can be applied to protestors who have been arrested during free-speech movements.”The law will allow for prohibition orders to be issued on-the-spot if a person is just once arrested or convicted for a misdemeanor or felony involving lewd, violent or drug-related acts in a BART zone, but passengers cited three or more times for minor infractions in just as many months are subject to the ban as well.Under the bill, a transit district may issue a prohibition order to any person charged with violating a number of local statutes, including Section 640 of state Penal Code — the law that goes after riders accused of “Willfully disturbing others on or in a system facility or vehicle by engaging in boisterous or unruly behavior” and those “Willfully blocking the free movement of another person in a system facility or vehicle.”Although the official statute includes a note from the state declaring that Section 640 “shall not be interpreted to affect any lawful activities permitted or First Amendment rights protected under the laws of this state or applicable federal law,” allowing BART officers to ban users even accused by law enforcement of a misdemeanor could disenfranchise a huge percentage of their rider base and has critics already warning of potential authoritarian overreach.”Certain instances have happened over the years that have caused some tragic things to happen, but you got to be careful who your profile,” BART passenger Kadmiel McCrory told KGNO.Indeed, one doesn’t have to look too deep to divulge instances of arguable overreach in not just the Bay Area but on the BART system as well. On the morning of January 1, 2009, BART Officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot an unarmed, 22-year-old passenger, Oscar Grant, on an Oakland train platform. The killing of Grant remains a highly contested issue among Bay Area residents, and has spawned a number of large protests impacting the BART system, including a November 2010 demonstration that led to 152 arrests. Then in July 2011, BART police shot and killed another passenger — a mentally ill homeless man name Charles Blair Hill — who is alleged to have thrown a knife at an officer. The response that occurred as a result can easily be considered a precursor to enacting AB 716.Following the 2011 shooting death of Hill, BART passengers orchestrated a massive protest that made national headlines thanks in part to the involvement of Internet hacktivist group Anonymous. A rally for Hill days after his death began peacefully but ended in violence and at least three dozen arrests. When a second protest was planned the following month, BART officials responded by having cell phone service shut down in four separate train stations to prevent demonstrators from coordinating their actions.”We’re going to take steps to make sure our customers are safe,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said in a statement that August. “The interruption of cell phone service was done Thursday to prevent what could have been a dangerous situation. It’s one of the tactics we have at our disposal. We may use it; we may not. And I’m not sure we would necessarily let anyone know in advance either way.”Although that protest never materialized as planned, Anonymous responded by leaking the names, passwords and other identifying information for more than 2,000 customers of a BART-affiliated website, announcing in a statement, “we will not tolerate censorship.”“Anonymous demands that this activity revolving around censorship cease and desist and we know you are already planning to do this again,” the hacktivists wrote. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union opposed the decision to throttle cell service as well.Now with AB 716 going into effect, protesters may once again find they are unwelcome to ride on the fifth-busiest heavy rail rapid transit system within the United States. Accumulating only three easy-to-obtain infractions in just 90 days can cause a prohibition order to be issues, and when the law goes into effect on Monday, BART officers will actually be provided with the names and photographs of prohibited individuals in order to keep them from riding mass transit, BART police Chief Kenton Rainey told the San Francisco Appeal. According to Rainey, officers’ computers will contain information about active orders, and any persons picked up or cited on the BART system for new crimes can be matched against the database to see their status.Rainey added that BART officers will go through training to work with special-needs riders, including the homeless and mentally ill. Even if one of those passengers is cited with a prohibition order, though, it might take a lengthy appeal process to have their ban rescinded. Prohibition orders restrict passengers from riding for anywhere from 30 days up to one year. … Read More
President Obama’s New Cigarette Tax Will Fuel an Already Booming Black Market in Smokes
Drawing on the old adage, “if you want more
of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it,” politicans
around the country have turned to burdensome tariffs on stuff they
don’t like as a proxy for the hard work of passing formal
prohibitions. Booze, tobacco and ammunition have been popular
targets of late, But maybe politicans need an annotated version of
that adage. As the cigarette market demonstrates, when you wield
revenue collection as a tool of social engineering, what you get is
less of the legal version of the product that you’re
trying to tax the hell out of. As outright prohibitionists
discovered (but ignored) long ago, savvy black marketeers always
stand ready to dodge the law to give people what they want. And
among the things people want are smokes at an affordable price.
That’s an important point to remember just days after the president
called for a
94 cent hike in federal cigarette taxes.
Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy surveys the
cigarette market every two years to see just how it responds to
taxes intended to enforce what it calls “prohibition by price.”
Then the center’s analysts break down, by state, the estimated
percentage of the cigarette market served by
smugglers who bring in goods from lower-taxed jurisdictions, or
even import counterfeit cigarettes from out of the country to the
booming market. With the highest cigarette tax in the country,
overtly passed to discourage smoking, New York has managed to
drive the majority of the cigarette market to smugglers.
As the center’s Michael D. LaFaive and Todd Nesbit, Ph.D. put it:
We find that New York currently holds the top position as the
highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes in 2011, with smuggled
cigarettes totaling a staggering 60.9 percent of the total market.
Not coincidentally, New York also has the nation’s highest state
cigarette tax at $4.35 per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in New
York City.
The top ten states in terms of smuggled cigarettes as a
percentage of the market for smokes ; are:
New York: 60.9
Arizona 54.4
New Mexico: 53
Washington: 48.5
Rhode Island: 39.8
Wisconsin: 36.4
California: 36.1
Texas: 33.8
Utah: 32.0
Michigan: 29.3
Cigarette smuggling is lucrative. Mike Campbell, a
spokesman for ATF,
told CNN, “We’ve had people trading our undercover agents kilos
of cocaine for cigarettes.”
As heart-warming as it is to see people defying government
nannies to indulge in the vices of their choice, there is a very
real price to be paid when governments try to prohibit things
overtly or by tax, and thereby create a black market. LaFaive and
Nesbit point out that “[t]he destructive consequences of rampant
tobacco smuggling include the corruption of government officials,
violence, theft, counterfeiting and dangerous, adulterated
products.”
Which is to say, the black market in smuggled cigarettes
resembles every other black market that prohibitionists have
managed to conjure into existence. Prohibitions
just don’t work. Well, unless you’re a black marketeer, that
is. … Read More
A Never-Ending Game of Cat and Mouse
Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, by Peter
Andreas, Oxford University Press, 472 pages, $29.95.
Before the Revolution, the British imposed tariffs, quotas, and
regulations on the American people, not to serve the colonists’
interests but to enrich the English. But enforcing these policies
proved much harder than the authorities expected, as resilient
Americans circumvented the laws.
America, in short, has long been a land of smugglers. Peter
Andreas’ fantastic book Smuggler Nation goes so far as to
say that smuggling has shaped the country’s identity and defined
its essence.
Where there’s demand, there’s profit; where there’s profit,
there’s supply; and when the law restricts supply, there will be
smugglers. From tax evasion to the drug trade, many entrepreneurs
see prohibitions and regulations not as a deterrent but as a
potential livelihood. The government’s response, in turn, has had a
significant influence on the size and scope of the state. The
endless game of cat and mouse between prohibitionist and smuggler
has redefined American government.
Smuggler Nation even-handedly identifies both the good
and bad sides of illicit trade. On the bright side, Andreas writes,
“Smuggling helped to create a consumer society in the colonies.” It
even created “a certain amount of respectability by feeding new and
growing consumer tastes, ranging from teas to silks.” Tariffs and
similar taxes tend to help relatively small interest groups at
everyone else’s expense. Smugglers provided consumers with a
remedy, and for that reason consumers often cherished them. During
alcohol prohibition, Andreas notes, bootleggers “enjoyed
considerable local community support on the U.S. side of the river,
so much so that several towns near Detroit situated across from
Canadian export docks were openly hostile toward law
enforcement.”
On a more
intellectual level, the seminal economist Adam Smith found
smugglers admirable. “The smuggler,” he wrote, ;“is a person
who, though no doubt blamable for violating the laws of his
country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural
justice, and would have been in every respect an excellent citizen
had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature
never meant to be so.” Smith was not alone: In my own work on the
economics of smuggling, I have found many 18th and 19th century
economists with positive views of the practice. In 1828 one of
those scholars, Nassau Senior, described the smuggler as “a radical
and judicious reformer.”
But Andreas’ book isn’t simply a story about heroes fighting bad
laws. There is nothing heroic about the slave trade, for example,
and there was a thriving illicit slavery market for much of our
history. Markets are amoral. If there is a demand, there will be
profits, and so slaves will be a supplied. The same is true for any
undesirable commodity. Even in these markets that as a matter of
morality should not exist, supply reduction strategies create
higher profits for smugglers, and increased enforcement means more
profits for those traffickers who have a comparative advantage in
violence, corruption, and the like. As Andreas notes about alcohol
prohibition, “intensified enforcement perversely and
unintentionally helped push the illicit trade into the hands of
those criminal syndicates that had the greatest capacity to adapt
and survive (including through greater use of violence).”
The flipside was the difficulty in enforcing slavery itself, as
slaves ran away from plantations, sympathetic northerners helped
them escape, and, in Andreas’ words, a “hostile local environment”
in the north “made it virtually impossible for slave owners to
recover fugitive slaves in these states.” Slaves could be smuggled
out of captivity, too.
Another dark side to smuggling is the response it provokes from
the government: By creating a new problem for the state to solve,
it opens the door for new abuses of power. Sex trafficking and drug
prohibitions provide examples. During the Progressive Era, there
was a great concern about “white slavery”—the coercive traffic in
prostitutes. This scare was greatly exaggerated, but it led to the
Mann Act, whose language, Andreas writes, “was far more sweeping,
vague, and open-ended.” In the ensuing decades, the law “would be
so broadly interpreted that most arrests had little or nothing to
do with anything resembling white slavery.” Similarly, the War on
Drugs has led to the growth of the state in countless ways, from
the use of the military in civilian law enforcement to an
ever-growing prison system. Call it the Smuggler’s Paradox:
Government restriction lead to smuggling, and that in turn gives
more power to government.
Yet these attempts to stop trade can backfire on the enforcers,
too. I alluded earlier to the government’s attempts to enforce
alcohol prohibition on the Detroit River. When clashes between the
Coast Guard and the rum runners began to affect civilians, the
resulting outcry from Detroit’s citizens was directed at the
government, not the smugglers, and it compelled the state to back
down.
So smuggling does not inevitably lead to a growth in government;
it can also serve as a sort of civil disobedience that shrinks the
state. The battle between smugglers and the state is a continual
one, with gains and losses for both sides. As of yet, it shows no
sign of ending. … Read More
Republican Congressmen Call on Obama to Stop Legal Pot in Colorado and Washington
Three Republican House members called today
for President Obama and the Department of Justice to stop
Washington state and Colorado from implementing tax-and-regulate
schemes for marijuana, which voters approved in November.
“I don’t see the DOJ suing these states for passing laws that
are illegal under federal law,” said Rep. Andrew Harris (R-MD.). “I
don’t see the administration going to the state of Washington or
Colorado and saying, ‘We will see you in federal court because the
federal law preempts the state law and you have passed a law in
clear contradiction to federal law.’”
Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) echoed Harris
during today’s appropriations hearing with DEA Administrator
Michele Leonhart (you
can read her full remarks here). The exchange marks the first
time members of Congress have openly called for the Obama
administration to intervene in Colorado and Washington. Until
today, the only members of Congress who had addressed marijuana
legalization
did so while introducing legislation that would repeal federal
marijuana prohibition and create a federal tax-and-regulate
framework.
Harris led the anti-pot charge, arguing that the Obama
administration’s failure to prosecute marijuana offenders–a claim
contradicted by Obama’s record of cracking down on more medical
marijuana dispensaries than Bush ever did–was leading teenagers to
experiment with harder drugs. ;
“We have watched states preempt federal government on marijuana.
We have decided not to change that at the federal law, and we to
not enforce federal law on marijuana. You know as well as I do why
these pill parties are happening. They’re getting these pills out
of their parents’ medicine cabinets. What are their parents going
to say, These are medicine for me, but bad for you?”
Leonhart denied that her agency had been called off. ;
“My agents are still out in those two states enforcing federal
law,” Leonhart said in response to a claim from Harris that the
Obama administration had decided “to not enforce federal law on
marijuana.”
“People say, ‘What happened? What’s changed since November? And
I say, ‘Nothing,’” Leonhart told Harris. “We’re still enforcing
federal law.” The real problem, she said, is that with only 45 DEA
agents in each state, the DEA is heavily reliant on cooperation
from local law enforcement groups. and those groups have been told
by voters that they need to focus on serious crimes. ;
Wolf, who anticipates that legalization amendments will be
tacked on to the appropriations bill, asked Leonhart what she would
say to parents, legislators, and governors who were perhaps
considering supporting marijuana legalization. “You can tell them
the latest study says a marijuana user who starts at 13 and smokes
into their 20s experiences an 8 percent drop in IQ,” Leonhart said,
blatantly misquoting a single recent study that alleges an 8
point drop.
“Is it a gateway drug? Is there a connection?” Wolf asked.
“There is absolutely a connection,” Leonhart said.
At that point, a visibly shocked Wolf said, “I think the Dr.
Harris is right. I think the Attorney General is really going to
have to speak out on this. He cannot pull a Pontius Pilate, and
wash his hands.”
“It may require the president of the united states to speak
out,” Wolf added. “He’s a good family man. He has a wonderful
family. This has been a fascinating hearing. It really may require
the president to address the nation. He has tremendous moral
authority.”
Wolf then announced his plans to introduce a prison reform bill,
named after Watergate burglar-turned-prison minister Chuck Colson,
that would require every incarcerated drug offender to attend drug
treatment, as well as require every inmate to work.
Work gives them “dignity,” Wolf said, before suggesting that
making license plates, or–better yet–DEA uniforms, would provide
inmates with valuable skills for reentry.
Note: I was transcribing as the hearing happened. Quotes may
not be perfect. … Read More
