From Reason:
Because the continued federal prohibition of marijuana makes banks and payment processors leery of serving state-licensed cannabis suppliers, many of those businesses rely heavily on cash, which exposes them to a heightened risk of robbery. As a new federal lawsuit shows, that danger is not limited to garden-variety criminals. It includes cops who use federal civil forfeiture laws to steal money earned by state-legal marijuana businesses.
Five times since last May, sheriff's deputies in Kansas and California have stopped armored cars operated by Empyreal Logistics, a Pennsylvania-based company that serves marijuana businesses and financial institutions that work with them. The cops made off with cash after three of those stops, seizing a total of $1.2 million, but did not issue any citations or file any criminal charges, which are not necessary to confiscate property through civil forfeiture. That process allows police to pad their budgets by seizing assets they allege are connected to criminal activity, even when the owner is never charged, let alone convicted.
Read the whole thing. It’s completely disgusting.
Doesn't really bother me. People can avoid problematic counties. Our real issues are at the federal level, where nobody can escape.
Here is a related matter that I hope, but doubt, will lend creditability to this. Today I first head of a ESG score. Environmental, Social Justice and Governmental score. It was argued as the reason companies are going woke. If a company has a bad score, banks will not do business with them out of fear of earning a bad ESG score themselves. If I learned of this ten years ago I would have just thought it was the rantings of a paranoid conspiracy freak. But it is not ten years ago and I have since learned of FATCA. This is precisely how FATCA works. What is FATCA? I invite you to research this but be warned that what you can easily find about is no more accurate that the reporting on Covid.
A brief synopsis should serve as a warning of where all this is going. FATCA requires every single Financial Institution (FI) on the planet to report all the information they have on US Persons who have over a certain amount in deposit. The details of the law and the realities of it are quite different and too detailed for this discussion. The methods the US uses to force Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) to comply is, however, of interest. Any FFI that does not comply is subject to a noncompliance fee equal to 30% of US derived income. For FFIs that do not have US derived income, those that do and do business with them are forced to act as the unpaid enforcers of FATCA and collect from these clients les they are forced to pay the noncompliance fee. Another route is the SWIFT system, which was hijacked by the Obama administration as a route to enforce FATCA. That is the stick.
The result for individuals is best described by the FATCA letter I received around 5 years ago.
(Found that I can not post scans of the actual letter so instead I will quotes parts of it.”
“Reporting to the U.S. Tax Authorities”
“If you treated as a U.S. person, we are required to periodically report your information such as name, address, account number, tax identification number, account balance, interest income, etc., to the U.S. tax authorities.”
To open the account I had to consent by signature to the following.
“I herby express my consent to the Bank that the Bank report information about myself (name, address, TIN, transaction records (accounts balance, change in amounts, etc.) to the Internal Revenue Service of the U.S. and to the Japanese Tax Agency for the p “
Since receiving my FATCA letter, more has transpired. I have long used International Postal Money Orders (IPMO) to send and receive money to/from outside Japan. In recent years, this became more and more troublesome. I will spare you the step by step increase in difficulty but will share how it ended. After decades of experience using IPMOs to send money to and from Japan, I was suddenly forced to provide my US SSN# (to the post office in Japan.) and eventually had to wait for the IPMO to be approved and return to the PO once notified it was approved. This was not for a large amount of money, merely $30., yes thirty USD sent by my parents for my son’s birthday. The IPMO service has since been discontinued.
That details a fraction of the difficulties I have faced as a US citizen (USC) living abroad, difficulties born not in my country of residence but the US. The difficulties, costs and threats borne by FFIs has resulted in something the US Congress did not anticipate and for which after all these years, a solution has not been found. So called “accidental Americans”, people born in the US of Non USCs who were brought home at a young age and those like my kids, born of one USC parent abroad are having their bank accounts closed or worse, frozen. FFIs do not want to deal with clients that FATCA has made toxic.
The carrot FATCA offered other nations is US FIs would spy on their clients from abroad. Many argued that we need not be concerned because Congress would not approve such a measure. True, Congress would not. Untrue that this provision was not of concern. The Treasury dept. simply issued regulations providing for US FIs to provide some of the data FATCA requires of FFIs. Challenges to this by the Bankers Associations of Florida and Texas were thrown out due to lack of standing.
When I hear of the fuss that transactions of $600. or more being automatically reported to the US government all I can say, well I tried to warn ya, but ya, just wouldn’t listen. Called me all sorts of bad names. Which is among the reasons I am not at all optimistic that this problem will be dealt with. No one cares until it affects them and no one will help because nit is not, at that point of time affecting them. Folks, we are decades behind all this and unless we wake the fuck up fast like last decade fast …well enjoy ending your existence in a state of servitude.