Government larceny and criminality just never ends, it seems to be increasing, especially against those who can least to afford to defend themselves against it:
Another Way to Kill Small U.S. Farmers: Seize Their Bank Accounts on Phony Charges
The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000. Now they are being accused of “structuring,” a violation of federal currency reporting requirements, as the feds are accusing them of deliberately depositing money in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade Currency Transaction Reporting requirements. The dairy farmer's “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers' markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They'd reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime. The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. The raid on the Sowers was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals. The agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it's interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers.
But small business people are not the only targets of government and corporate predators. Poor people are too, as evidenced in this Mother Jones article:
How Corporations and Local Governments Use the Poor As Piggy Banks
Continue reading “Owl: US Government Criminality from Local to National”
