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A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#121

Post by jsjohnst »

> Erald Kazazi said the ordeal has affected his father's health and turned their lives upside down. But, he said, his father's high opinion of the United States has not changed.

> “He's not going to let the actions of some employees that made a mistake in their duties change his opinion of the country,” he said.

I wish people wouldn’t put the USA on high pedestals and realize this (among other things) are very serious issues that will ultimately be our downfall if not addressed. Do people think the countries they fled from got bad overnight? No, it’s a pattern of ambivalence to corruption that led to the ultimately shitty state they are in now and we will be there faster than we think.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#122

Post by jstarfish »

arcticbull wrote: post #98
wetpaws wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer being harrased and bullied rather than having to live in a country that has a legal power to punish me for what I say.

You can absolutely get punished for what you say in the US -- freedom of speech was long ago recognized as anything but absolute. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Obscenity (as defined in Miller v. California) is not protected by the constitution. You can't lie under oath. You can't deliberately tell lies about people (Libel). The First Amendment doesn’t protect the speech of people plotting to overthrow the…

Not to mention the myriad of other nonsense charges they'll get you with ("loitering", "soliciting", etc) if they can't find anything specifically against your speech.

You can shout grammatically correct, sensible and lawful speech from the public street corner ("eat right! exercise! wash behind your ears!"), but if a cop simply tells you to move along and you refuse, you're still looking at being jailed.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#124

Post by custos »

jbob2000 wrote: post #89

Why would you risk carrying around that kind of money? What’s wrong with doing a wire transfer? Or just writing yourself a cheque? Failing to see an honest use case for moving that much cash by hand.

The article explains why. In Albanaia, where he was going, there have been issues with people pulling money out of the bank and then being robbed shortly after.

Sounds like an organized crime problem, where bank tellers are tipping off criminals about good targets.

His solution was to take it out here, where it's safe...or so he thought.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#125

Post by whack »

core-questions wrote: post #65
3pt14159 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not last. Not first. Not all powerful. Not feckless. Americans act like their government is representative of governments. It isn't. They act like everything needs to be invented there. It doesn't. They believe that America is the greatest country in the world. It isn't. If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada,…

> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement. One big problem with this approach is that it basically pretends that the American citizenry is interchangeable with those of the countries you mentioned. It's not. Identity politics…

> Identity politics problems, legacies of slavery and of the colonial / revolutionary mindset are still big issues.

> The people of Detroit and of Baltimore ... are not the same as the people of Norway or of Japan.

> The solutions that work in high-intelligence, high-trust, coherent communities with strong traditions of work ethic won't work in every environment.

I've seen Donald Trump make more subtle references to Blacks and Latinos.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#126

Post by orf »

hdifhidhr wrote: post #107
orf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the vile idiot who potentially ruined an ongoing trial by broadcasting sensitive details all over facebook directly outside the court , which was widely and thoroughly reported by the UK press? I would check where you are getting your facts from.

Of course people will defend big brother, that's not especially surprising just disheartening. Meanwhile a man goes to jail for 13 months for speaking about potential child grooming, rapist gang. He was sent to jail in the period of 6 hours all during a government enforced media blackout. So what you think him vile, speaking about a public trial doesn't send any Americans to jail for 13 months. I would check where yo…

No, he went to jail for directly disobeying a judge in the most direct and absolute way possible. Twice. The subject of the court case does not matter.

Also a chunk of those 13 months was from the previous suspended sentence for doing pretty much the same thing.

So yeah, I would definitely check where you get your facts from.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#127

Post by Turing_Machine »

woolvalley wrote: post #32
refurb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I get it, the US being a superpower is under a microscope and every imperfection is called out so other countries can look down their nose at it. That's fine. But what are you talking about? What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better? And as a Canadian, saying the gov't run their is better is purely laughable.

Go live in the USA, and you'll see the multiple ways it's more broken than Canada. Many other friends who have moved over from other developed countries collaborate the experience. I'm in the bay area, maybe it's just a special kind of broken that you don't see in other places in the USA, but things like flint, michigan also exist in the USA.

Canadians as a whole apparently disagree.

There are about ~700,000 Americans living in Canada, and also about ~700,000 Canadians living in the U.S. (see links below)

However, the U.S. population is more than 8x that of Canada. That means that on a proportional basis, Canadians are about 8x more likely to move to the U.S. than Americans are to move to Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#128

Post by jakelazaroff »

ra1n85 wrote: post #94
orf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand times this. I'm not saying the UK is some shining beacon of how to run a country but I do think overall our governmental systems are pretty sensible . I think being sensible might be a stereotypical English trait, but it's true. For example you have to comply with the spirit of a law, not the exact text. Also our QC's are pretty level headed and the same goes for our police force. Nobody is overly nitpicky…

I don't consider arresting and immediately sentencing an individual to 13 months in prison for broadcasting outside of a public trial to be sensible in the least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/05/29...

Your source doesn't support your allegations.

> It’s illegal in Britain to report the details of some trials before they conclude

> Robinson was convicted of breaking that law last year

> He showed up with his cameraman again Friday — this time outside a restricted child-sex-abuse trial at Leeds Crown Court, for what he inaccurately announced was the verdict.

So not only was he not arrested for broadcasting generally (rather for breaking a law forbidding reporting on of trials before they conclude) but this trial was also not "public".

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#130

Post by maxxxxx »

cf498 wrote: post #91
lewis500 wrote: post #55

Only as I get older do I realize how incredibly bad elements of law enforcement in the US can be, and legally so. Few cops and agents are bad, but it is a system with little filtering, personally or institutionally, of the bad elements. Civil asset forfeiture is overwhelmingly unpopular, but when states try to reform it the law enforcement groups rally around it mightily. Essentially they want the right to steal mone…

As an outside perspective, how do you quantify, that only "Few cops and agents are bad". If your job contains robbing people, I would rationally word it the other way around. Hopefully there are quite a few cops who dont follow the rules and subvert the system of organized theft. But if you take policies like civil forfeiture or for example police union cards for family members this sounds like organized crime to qui…

"Hopefully there are quite a few cops who dont follow the rules and subvert the system of organized theft"

There is no rule that says they have to do asset forfeiture. It's a choice. One of the biggest problems in the US is that laws are not very clear and clarification is left up to the courts.

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