How was he found guilty of concealed money when he reported it to begin with? Then could still serve prison time for it.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
So, when they present facts, they surround them with emotional words to try to sway opinion.
Happy Reason subscriber here.
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.
Channeling legal money into illegal activities qualifies as well. Not clear either is applicable to this case however.
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
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".
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?
that's what mobsters get nabbed on, corrupt gvt officials etc. it's not difficult to prove anyone has tax evaded.
In your example, the $9k deposits are perfectly fine. Although if you really always deposit $9k you’ll probably get some questions.
This has years of history. I worked in a similar industry to backpage for 11 years.
This has long been written about.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/michael-lacey-jim-larki...
Nepo-wife. And they were saying the Soviets were a decrepit society at the top, the US from today is not much better.
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.
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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.