[Corruption]Foxnews: The Obama Administration's secret DOJ slush fund

If anyone needs a laugh, I highly recommend clicking on the article in the OP and checking out the comments.

 

Corruption and Fox News, horse and carriage, peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and Costello, macaroni and cheese,...

 

Both the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Service have concluded that the settlement agreements do not violate Congress’ power of the purse.

Outrage! GRR!

I love how Fox News carries water for the GOP. Any kind of bull**** they want to get out to distract from their own scandals, Fox News is there to oblige. Wingnut News is a more appropriate name for their organization.

 

In case anyone's wondering about the specifics, the story first came about in late '15 and apparently is good enough for a spin right now.

Congress finds a slush fund in money marked for crime victims

Americans in 2014 were 75 percent less likely to be victims of violent crime than in 1993, and 66 percent less likely to be victims of property crime. These figures, from a Justice Department survey, do not include homicide — but murder, too, is down significantly despite a recent uptick in some cities.

So if there are fewer and fewer victims, why is the Justice Department setting aside more and more money for their exclusive benefit? Between 2000 and 2014, the Crime Victims Fund’s balance grew from zero to $11.8 billion, about equal to Nicaragua’s entire economic output last year.

This incongruity is the subject for today’s lesson in How Washington Really Works. Along the way, you’ll also learn why the Republican Congress and President Obama slapped together their budget deal as they did.

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Mass incarceration is our criminal justice issue du jour. In the tough-on-crime days of 30 years ago, however, “victims’ rights” was all the rage.

In 1984, a Democratic Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, a law that assigned federal criminal fines to a fund to compensate and otherwise assist crime victims, rather than to the Treasury, as before. No thought was given, apparently, to raising taxes or cutting other spending to pay for this worthy purpose.


To the contrary, a federal task force opined that, in view of federal aid to prisoners, it would be “only just that the same federal government not shrink from aiding the innocent taxpaying citizens victimized by those very prisoners” — using money wrung from the wrongdoers themselves.

At first, the law limited the amount of fines that could go into the Crime Victims Fund, up to $150 million per year in 1992. All of the money got spent.

Then two changes, unanticipated by the law’s authors, occurred. In the high-crime year of 1993, Congress eliminated the cap on payments into the fund, so that all fines would flow into it. And federal prosecutors settled a number of white-collar criminal cases against big corporations, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines — which, under the 1984 law, had to go into the fund.

What to do with the windfall? In 1999, the fund managed to spend only half of the billion dollars it took in. Congress tried to smooth the cash flow, capping annual spending — $500 million at first — with any leftover money to revolve back into the fund.

That worked okay until the Obama administration’s aggressive prosecution of banks and drug companies brought the fund nearly $9 billion in negotiated fines between 2009 and 2014, far more money than the fund could legally spend. An additional $5 billion will pour in by 2015’s end, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Americans might be surprised to learn that negotiated fines on the white-collar likes of Citigroup or Barclays do not replenish government’s coffers on behalf of everyone. Rather, they’re earmarked for the shrinking portion of the population that got burglarized or assaulted. (Lately, the money’s also been double-counted by government budgeteers as a gimmicky “offset” for other Justice Department spending, but that’s another story.)

Of course, crime victims, especially the abused children and women whose medical and counseling needs the fund often meets, have a legitimate claim on public resources.


It’s also true, though, that the definitions of “victim,” and of “victim services,” expanded as the fund’s grantees in social service agencies multiplied and organized politically. Last year, they won a tripling in the annual amount the fund can spend, from $745 million to $2.4 billion.

Given today’s lower crime rates and difficult budget constraints, it’s not clear that crime victims, or agencies that aid them, should enjoy preferential access to so much money, rather than, say, medical researchers, poor children or the military.

Apparently, the authors of the bipartisan budget agreement agreed. They took $1.5 billion of the crime victim allotment for next year to help pay for spending that would have otherwise been restrained by sequestration.

That left $1 billion to spend on crime victims — a quarter-billion more than in 2014 — but advocates still decry a threat to the “integrity” of their program.

Of course, we could pay to help victims transparently, with tax revenue, rather than play “criminals pay,” with all the unintended consequences that creates. Or, we could give half the fund to the Treasury, and use half to endow a new Crime Victims Aid Foundation, spun off from the Justice Department, that invests and makes grants like a private-sector philanthropy. Future fines would go to the Treasury, just as they did until 1984.

Either would be preferable to what’s probably coming: repetitive fiscal raids on the fund, and exhausting “stakeholder” resistance to them.

In short, we could probably get the same benefits at less cost, financial and political. But that is not the way Washington works.

 

Sounds a lot like how The Trump Organization would use donations from the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his for-profit businesses.

I kinda agree that there is a way that it looks bad. The DOJ sues a company for damages they've caused Americans and some "non-victim" gets the benefit. However, I think this idea that is subverts the power of the purse is dangerous because , if that's true, then lawsuits are a revenue stream of the government, and the DOJ becomes a profit center. That incentivizes all kinds of bad behavior, like we've seen with Ferguson's court fee system. Making a donation part of settlements is a sort of win-win for the parties in a suit -- DOJ is able to make the bad actor pay without becoming addicted to a revenue stream, while the bad actor can at least put a positive PR spin on settling a lawsuit over their misbehavior. I'm fine with not allowing these kinds of settlements, but I don't want it to be replaced with a system where some government function becomes addicted to the revenue stream.

As for the beneficiaries: (1) The DOJ works for the president. So, to whatever extent they favored liberal organizations under Obama, they will undoubtedly favor conservative organizations under Trump. But (2), the beneficiary is negotiated between the settling parties, so the company being sued has a lot of say over who that is going to be. Oftentimes, the beneficiary is going to be someone relevant to the cause of the suit and one that has a relationship with the company so they can maximize the PR benefit. And, (3) since these suits are usually about consumer protection or civil rights, the logical beneficiary is going to be skew liberal. So, it's not even very clear to me that, if liberal organizations benefited more, that it was because the Administration was liberal. The silver lining for conservatives, I suppose, is that Sessions probably won't be suing very many corporations at all, so there will be a lot less money that needs donating for settlements.

 

Russia? We have nothing to do w-- Hey! Look over there! Bright shiny object!

 

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... topics relevant to 2017...

It was in the MSM (the evil, horrible, liberal media) in 2015 when the story broke. I mean, right?
See the WaPo article. They always do pretty good reporting and you can read all about the details.

 

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LOCK HER UP! The thread that is, B-Bob just dropped the mic with authority and exited stage left.

 

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LOCK HER UP! The thread that is, B-Bob just dropped the mic with authority and exited stage left.[/QUOTE]

I think that was me actually dropping endquotes b/c I'm so clumsy with formatting.

 

Fox News is FAUX NEWS.

 

Faux News has no integrity like Jeff Sessions

 

You are becoming unglued.

 

Still blaming Obama? SAD!!!!

 

I admittedly havent read a full Fox news article and comment section in-depth in a long time.

Gosh. Going by all the righteous TONE in the article and people, you'd believe every single person involved are in the infantry outside in the trenches, armed with muskets fighting off the evil foreign adversary who are raiding their townships TAKING their land and liberties away, killing their children, and only AMERICAN JUSTICE can prevail to "send them back!" and protect FREEDOM

I actually CAN SEE how that IS an influential intoxicating IDEALISM to believe in. (Maybe being away from it for so long enables me to see a CLEARER view). The appeal is believing you're in the RIGHT side of ethics, to almost HERIOC lengths. And in believing you're just a simple, humble, modest, honest little person in the world, just minding your own ... then VICTIMIZED by some unprincipled, villianous institute.

Just from that little read, I got all that. If its growing UP in that, and being IMMERSED in that message day after day after day .... can absolutely see how MEDIA can INFLUENCE and DRAW people in. (It even looks like a 'safe space' to me, with just different shared interests)

 

Figures there was more to this story.

 

This is a strange thread. It's 2017. You bring up a story from 2015 that was covered in 2015 by the MSM. It was covered at the time. But now two years later, you're asking where the outrage about it is?

The outrage is still back in 2015 when the story broke via the MSM that covered it at the time.