Hissing on Holder – The Solari Library

By Catherine Austin Fitts

They have a name for men who round up innocent children and send them to prisons where they make uniforms for the military at great expense to the taxpayer. I am not going to use that name here. I leave it to your imagination to describe my assessment of Eric Holder, currently Attorney General of the United States.

Holder just announced that the Sheriff of Nottingham business of sharing asset forfeiture profits with local and state police has been “limited”. According to the Washington Post, “Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing”. Since the practice started long before 2008, I wonder how much of the US economy the Sheriff of Nottingham and his sidekicks have claimed.

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In 1998, I hired the former DOJ attorney who drafted the statute which authorized the Asset Forfeiture fund at the Department of Justice. Said attorney gave me quite an education on what was happening. Asset forfeiture was part of a wave of legislation that included a wealth of authorizations for federal enforcement personnel from scores of agencies to bear arms and to extract civil and criminal money penalties that put the enforcement arm of the US government in the “for profit” business. The appropriations committees were clear – the more revenues you generate, the more money you get.

Cut in the state and local guys, and enforcement became the latest hustle, the latest scam.

Holder announced that there were going to limit sharing with the state and local guys. Note they did not say the Feds were going to stop and they did not say they were going to give back the money that they stole.

Over the last month we put up three stories here on the Solari Report blog. One was about Carole Hinders who owned and operated a restaurant in Iowa. The Federal government had seized her bank accounts, with deposits of $33,000. Her sin? Depositing cash. They had no proof of wrongdoing. The second was from the Chairman of Gallup pointing out that more small businesses are closing than are starting and that if this trend continues America will be economic toast. The last was an editorial from The Economist warning that America’s enforcement apparatus is destroying the trust which is the basis of the economy. Those three stories are part of the same story.

The Economist is right (albeit 20 years overdue) Let’s take it a step further. America’s enforcement apparatus – indeed major parts of the US government and corporate establishment – make money by destroying productive people and businesses in America. Severely limiting asset forfeiture is a first step. However it is less than 1% of 1% of what needs to be done if we want an economy that rewards the saver, the law abiding and the productive and shifts capital away from the thief, the lawless and the unproductive.

The good news is that there is indeed a way to rebuild the economy. Step one is returning our “lawyers per capita” to the global average. Step two is increasing our “engineers per capita” to the highest of any nation globally. Step three is to teach every child in America how to make things – make cars, make houses, make gardens.

Then maybe we could build lots of things worth seizing – like high speed trains and space ships – rather than fiat currency and drugs.