Tag: law

Why “your” bank account isn’t yours

The difference between “depositor” and “unsecured creditor”, and the legal implications therein, is explained at Zerohedge:

The law has been in existence for hundreds of years and was established in England by the House of Lords in the case Foley v Hill in 1848.

When a customer deposits money with his banker, the relationship that arises is one of creditor and debtor, with the banker liable to repay the money deposited when demanded by the customer. Once money has been paid to the banker, it belongs to the banker and he is free to use the money for his own purpose.

I will now quote the relevant portion of the judgment of #3b4d81;”>the House of Lords handed down by Lord Cottenham, the Lord Chancellor. He stated thus:

“Money when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal… it is then the money of the banker, who is bound to return an equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with him when he is asked for it.

The money paid into the banker’s, is money known by the principal to be placed there for the purpose of being under the control of the banker; it is then the banker’s money; he is known to deal with it as his own; he makes what profit of it he can, which profit he retains himself,…

The money placed in the custody of the banker is, to all intent and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not answerable TO THE PRINCIPAL IF HE PUTS IT INTO JEOPARDY, IF HE ENGAGES IN A HAZARDOUS SPECULATION; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of the principal, but he is of course answerable for the amount, because he has contracted, having received that money, to repay to the principal, when demanded, a sum equivalent to that paid into his hands.” (quoted in UK Law Essays,  #3b4d81;”>Relationship Between A Banker And Customer,That Of A Creditor/Debtor, emphasis added,)”

Holding that the relationship between a banker and his customer was one of debtor and creditor and not one of trusteeship, #3b4d81;”>Lord Brougham said:

“This trade of a banker is to receive money, and use it as if it were his own, he becoming debtor to the person who has lent or deposited with him the money to use as his own, and for which money he is accountable as a debtor. I cannot at all confound the situation of a banker with that of a trustee, and conclude that the banker is a debtor with a fiduciary character.”

In plain simple English – bankers cannot be prosecuted for breach of trust, because it owes no fiduciary duty to the depositor / customer, as he is deemed to be using his own money to speculate etc. There is absolutely no criminal liability.

Now, English law is not U.S. law, but being that this decision derives from the Common Law, it should be understood, given recent US court decisions, the same is true in the USA.

Impeach Obama

It won’t happen due to his all-important carte noire.  But as George Will points out, by past standards, there is little question that Obama now merits impeachment on the basis of the IRS actions:

George Will joined the chorus talking about the prospect of impeachment for President Barack Obama after last week’s admission from the Internal Revenue Service that it had targeted groups with the phrases “tea party” or “patriot” in their tax-exempt applications for extra audits….

Will noted that one of the items in the 1973 impeachment articles of then-President Richard Nixon, which ultimately led to his resignation, described the Nixon administration’s use of the power of income tax audits in a “discriminatory matter.”

“This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer here in Washington,” Will said. “’He has, through his subordinated and agents, endeavored…to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner,’ — Section 1, Article 2, the impeachment articles of Richard Nixon.

Now, I very much doubt Obama knew anything about the audits; I doubt he knows very much about what is going on under the aegis of “his” administration.  He has never been anything more than a tool for certain Chicago interests and their allies.  But he is still nominally in charge, he is still the man sitting in the Oval Office, and he is therefore responsible for the actions of the administration.

Health evaders and the B Ark

I wonder what they’re going to call the millions of Americans who refuse to turn over their health information to the IRS next year?  Health evaders?  Health protesters?

When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans
who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form. The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer’s personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. As confirmed by IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, “taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment”.

Whatever they call them, I tend to imagine there are going to be a fair amount of them.  Honestly, I don’t see how this whole creaky system is going to survive much longer.  History shows that there is a lot of ruin in a nation, but at this rate, the entire business activity of the USA is soon going to be computers trading stocks with other computers and people filling out forms for the IRS and other government agencies.

Welcome to the B Ark economy.

The irony is thick indeed

Karl Denninger points to Attorney General Eric Holder’s deeply ironic posturing:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has told Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback that a new state law attempting to block federal regulation of some guns is unconstitutional and that the federal government is willing to go to court over the issue.

But Brownback replied in a letter Thursday that Kansans hold dear their right to bear arms and are protecting the state’s sovereignty. Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a former law professor who helped draft the law, accused the nation’s top law enforcement official of “blustering” over the issue.

“The people of Kansas have clearly expressed their sovereign will,” Brownback said at the conclusion of his letter. “It is my hope that upon further review, you will see their right to do so.”

To summarize:  The Executive Branch official responsible for upholding U.S. law is appealing to the U.S. Constitution in order to overturn a Kansas law meant to protect the people of Kansas from the federal government’s violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

One can only conclude that the Red Americans aren’t merely lawless, they’re humorless and delusional

Incestuous homogamy

Jeremy Irons identifies one of the many problems with legal homogamy:

Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons was today embroiled in an extraordinary row after he suggested that same sex marriage could lead to fathers marrying their own sons to avoid inheritance tax. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mr Irons made a series of highly inflammatory statements and even denied that such a union would be viewed as incestuous as ‘men don’t breed.’

Hey, if nothing makes God happier than when two individuals – as we were informed with great emphasis, ANY two individuals – love each other, then they should be able to “marry”, right?  Are a man and his son somehow not included in “any”?  Or a mother and her daughter? Grandfather and grandson?  I’d always assumed that the primary problem was that once it is decided that marriage could not longer be limited by sex, obviously it could not justly be limited by quantity either.  But, as Irons has correctly perceived, merely removing the sex limit is sufficient to produce a truly perverse set of incentives. 

After all, if we are to accept the idea that homosexuality is no longer immoral, what grounds do we have for not similarly declaring incest to be morally acceptable as well. The homosexual lobby has not answered this question with anything but rhetoric and faux outrage, mostly because they have no answer for it.

The fact is that two men or two women cannot ever marry because marriage is a particular relationship between a man and one or more women.  The various governments can pass all the laws declaring fish to be fowl they like, but the chromosomes remain. Government didn’t create marriage. Government doesn’t define marriage.

The state is going to have to get out of the marriage business if it doesn’t wish to impair the institution entirely.  I note that already, in British Columbia, the government has resorted to imposing marriage on the cohabitating because so many men are now actively avoiding it thanks to previous state interventions.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the more intelligent homosexuals, especially of the male variety, eventually come to regret their campaign to mock the institution when they find themselves being “married” against their will by the state.

In fact, under the BC law, many college roommates would find themselves inadvertently married, having passed the required two-year cohabitation limit.

Still too big to jail

The banks are still above the law:

Money laundering by large international banks has reached epidemic proportions, and U.S. authorities are supposedly looking into Citigroup Inc. (C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system.

To be on the safe side, though, miscreants should be sure to use a really large global bank for all their money-laundering needs.

There may be fines, but the largest financial companies are unlikely to face criminal actions or meaningful sanctions. The Department of Justice has decided that these banks are too big to prosecute to the full extent of the law, though why this also gets employees and executives off the hook remains a mystery. And the Federal Reserve refuses to rescind bank licenses, undermining the credibility, legitimacy and stability of the financial system.

Considering that the banks can get away with laundering drug money and committing large scale mortgage and deed fraud with impunity, what makes you think they won’t get away with taking as much of their depositors’petty creditors’ money as they decide they need?

First Sale doctrine lives

Capitalism and private property aren’t entirely dead in the West, not yet, anyway:

The Supreme Court has sided with a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher’s permission, a decision with important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores.

The justices, in a 6-3 vote Tuesday, threw out a copyright infringement award to publisher John Wiley & Sons. Thai graduate student Supap Kirtsaeng used eBay to resell copies of the publisher’s copyrighted books that his relatives first bought abroad at cut-rate prices.

Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion for the court that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad.

This will be interesting because the battle over used electronic items, such as ebooks, is only just beginning.  But at least those who are trying to expand copyright to subsume private property rights will have to change the law first.  Of course, the current life+70 Disneyright tends to indicate that there is a reasonable chance they’ll be able to do it.

Too big to jail

Karl Denninger considers the Attorney General’s recent admission that the big banks are above the law:

The Rule of Law works and guides a just society only because it applies to everyone.  Nobody gets to rape, rob, pillage or murder.  If you do, no matter who you are, you face the same punishment, the same process, the same sentence.

We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been.  But there’s a difference between the foibles of mankind — everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless — and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.

The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.

A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people.  When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of “diktat” from which the term “dictatorship” comes.

Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue.  The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law — by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.

I’ve previously pointed out that there is no longer “law” as such, in the United States any more.  Everything about the “nation”, which is no longer, properly speaking, even a nation anymore, is fraudulent, from its “money” to its system of “justice”.  Even something as simple and basic as openly fighting a “war” is now beyond its bloated, cancerous make-believe structure.

I wouldn’t call the present system a dictatorship myself.  Dictatorships are more open and direct.  It is better described as a simulatorship, which is to say, rule by pretense.  It is remniscent of the latter days of the Soviet empire, when the Russian people pretended to work and the Soviet government pretended to pay them.  In the latter days of the US empire, the federal government pretends its actions are within the limits set by the U.S. Constitution and the American people pretend to believe them.

If a corporate entity is too big to fail or too big to jail, then logic dictates it must be cut down to a size that permits both.  Remember, corporations are not capitalism, they are creations of government and if they can’t reasonably be imprisoned, they can certainly be “executed”.  And if real American people can be “legally” executed at the order of the president, then can there really be any doubt that artificial American people are also liable to termination on command as well?

This section of the American Banker article particularly struck home:

Many are still angry about the 2008 bank bailouts, and they now have an
on-the-record confirmation from Justice’s top official that the
department is treating big banks softly just because they are large.
Compare it to how law enforcement typically treats American citizens
when they break the law — often times by throwing the book at them — and
it’s easy to understand how that anger could grow into more popular
support for a big bank breakup.

For example, my father was imprisoned for 12 years after being accused of evading $1.6 million in taxes, penalties, and imaginary “interest” despite having paid something like $75 million in state and federal taxes over the previous 20 years and forcing the State of Minnesota to admit that its agents knowingly lied when they falsely claimed he was a resident and seized his house for not paying taxes he didn’t owe. Meanwhile, Congressional investigators estimate that the big US banks launder about $250 billion in drug money every year in addition to their $12 billion in estimated annual mortgage fraud.  When caught, they occasionally pay a monetary penalty calculated at a rate which, in my father’s case, would have amounted to about a $20,000 fine.

So, I can understand why many Americans support a big bank breakup and seeing corporate criminals treated with the same severity as actual human beings.  But it’s not going to happen, because the entire financial system is already on the verge of collapse and all of the insiders know it.  That is why the banks will continue doing whatever they want and the regulators and politicians will continue to look the other way, until the moment when a critical node fails and the entire system breaks down in a manner that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.

Kicking it old school

I have to admit, I rather like the cut of Paul the Younger’s jib:

In a rare, traditional filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul vowed to speak on the Senate floor “as long as it takes” to draw attention to his concerns about the Obama administration’s policy regarding the targeted killing of American terrorism suspects.

The Kentucky Republican took to the floor before noon Wednesday to block an expected vote on the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA, with aides saying he could continue for hours. Paul, beginning his remarks, said he would continue “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important.”

“Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?” Paul asked. “No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country.”

Paul is absolutely right.  And it does not speak well of the Republican Party that so few of his fellow Senators are joining him in taking what should be the obvious position that the President of the United States cannot simply murder any American he wants whenever he wishes, without trial, sentencing, or even a warrant.

Banning drones

It’s a positive and encouraging first step.  But every city and township in America must follow suit just in case Washington fails to come to its senses:

Charlottesville, Va., has become the first city in the United States to formally pass an anti-drone resolution. The resolution, passed Monday, “calls on the United States Congress
and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt
legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of
drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court,” and
“pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or
borrowed drones.”

I imagine that liberal and conservative Americans can find common ground in not wanting death-dealing, missile-equipped remote-controlled drones flying over their heads.  After all, it could be the likes of (George Bush/Barack Obama) with his evil (Republican/Democrat) on the trigger.

I don’t recall the right to fly drones everywhere being a power granted to the Federal government anywhere in the Constitution.  Not even in the emanations and penumbras.