Month: September 2017

NEW YORK — Fist fights broke out between opponents and supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan today at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, where Erdoğan addressed a reception in his honor.

Erdoğan carried on with a speech condemning terrorists and other enemies of Turkey, and calling for Muslim unity, the crowd erupting with each disruption, his supporters cursing at the protesters or attempting to drown them out shouting Turkish nationalist slogans.

A small crowd of demonstrators on Wednesday outside the United Nations building protested the Turkish leader’s address at the annual UN General Debate, in which world leaders gather in Manhattan to discuss issues of international importance. The protests, however, were peaceful.

Erdoğan’s speech to the UN touched on the PKK alongside ISIS, praising Turkey’s “intensive fight against the bloody terrorist organizations in the region.” Additionally, he called for an increase in aid for Syrian and Iraqi refugees living in Turkey, and denounced a referendum on secession planned by Iraqi Kurds for September 25.

Thursday’s clash is the third time in two years a visit to the U.S. by the leader of the Republic of Turkey, was marred by violence. It was unclear as of this writing whether anyone was injured or arrested.

The hosts, the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC), describes itself as “a District of Columbia non-profit organization that helps coordinate the efforts of the nation’s leading Turkish American organizations.” Its website features quotes from historians criticizing the use of the term “genocide” for the massacre of Armenians and Syriacs during World War I.

A crowd of American admirers carrying Turkish and American flags greeted the polarizing Erdoğan, who had come to the Broadway Ballroom to talk about human rights around the world. The crowd included nervous-looking officials in suits with Turkish flag pins as well as New York Police Department (NYPD) and Secret Service officers.

As he entered, Erdoğan was welcomed with chants in Turkish, as well as the religious phrases “in the name of God” and “God is great” in Arabic. A speaker from TASC mentioned several nationalities in the audience, and an introductory video lauded Turkey’s humanitarian efforts in Burma and Syria.

Muhammad, a Bengali-American New Yorker, excitedly called Mr. Erdoğan the “true Sultan of the Muslim community,” declaring that the Turkish president is the only world leader to speak about the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in the southeast Asian nation of Burma, and that people of many nationalities came with him to see the speech.

In his speech, the Turkish president singled out ISIS, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Gülen movement as “terrorists.”

An angry man pushed over Meghan Bodette, yanking the flag of the SDF women’s unit from her hand before security rushed to restrain him. Nearby, another man shouted misogynistic slurs at her. “They barely touched me,” Bodette, an organizer for the North American Kurdish Alliance, said.

Hotel security escorted the protesters out, but were often unable to stop brawls from erupting. Often the Turkish president’s supporters had already begun beating the demonstrators before security arrived, forcing them to wade through a thick crowd to find the source of the commotion.

Afterwards, NYPD officers patrolled the hallways. Hotel security glanced around nervously, unable to distinguish which shouts in Turkish were outpourings of support and which were attempts to disrupt. Indeed, the size and volume of the crowd made it difficult for even a Turkish speaker.

Erdoğan met with President Donald Trump May 16. Returning from that meeting, Erdoğan was greeted by a crowd near the Turkish ambassador’s residence chanting “baby killer Erdoğan!” His security detail broke through a Washington, DC police line, assaulting protesters and injuring 11.

Despite a unanimous House of Representatives resolution condemning the violence and a Senate decision to block arms sales to Mr. Erdoğan’s security team, President Trump has not spoken out publicly about the incident.

In a Tuesday interview with PBS, President Erdoğan claimed that President Trump personally apologized to him. The White House denied the report, but did say that the issue was discussed during a call between the two heads of state.

The few dozen who gathered outside the UN headquarters on Wednesday were cordoned off alongside two unrelated demonstrations. However, the May clashes were fresh on the protesters’ minds. Rojhat Amed of Boston had been at some of the May 16 protests, but was not present when the clashes happened.

“My friends were attacked by Erdoğan’s bodyguards, even the children. They kicked the children,” the New England Kurdish Association member said. “One of us stayed in a hospital for months. The entire world witnessed this.”

Turkish authorities have been criticized for arresting Kurdish politicians and imposing military rule on Kurdish-majority areas. Bodette says she knows several people who have lost loved ones in the conflict. Erdoğan defends the crackdown as a counter-terrorist response to the PKK and other Kurdish rebel groups.

In addition to his foreign policy and treatment of ethnic minorities, Erdoğan has also been criticized for his religious conservatism and populist strongman style.

A constitutional referendum in April, which passed with 51.5% of the vote, extended the power of the Turkish presidency over the courts, military, and parliament. President Trump called his Turkish counterpart soon after to congratulate him.

“[Erdoğan] is looking for an excuse to criminalize people standing up against his war crimes, because that’s how he treats opposition in Turkey,” Bodette had told me a few days before Erdoğan’s visit, “but this is the United States, and that’s not how it works here.”

Republican health care reform is, once again, a disappointing mess. After seven years of howling for repeal, Senate conservatives have sidestepped any fundamental reform and are instead just shuffling regulations around.

Reason’s Peter Suderman, who knows about this stuff, thinks the latest Graham-Cassidy bill is a risky dud. He similarly dismissed the last GOP bill, which by my lights appeared to be something Department of HHS Secretary Tom Price scribbled onto the back of a cocktail napkin, rolled up and tossed into the Senate.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had some interesting proposals to dismantle our awful employer-based insurance system, but any legislative creativity he brought to the table appears to have been left out of GOP leadership meetings. I rather like using states as a laboratory of democracy, but those looking for market-based reforms are going to have a tough time implimenting them under this new scheme.

Given the low bar, I thought I would offer a few of my own badass Republican health care ideas:

1. Replace individual mandate with tax rebate for people who eat at Cracker Barrel.

2. Legally change everyone’s blood type to O+ to streamline paperwork.

3. Change Virginia’s motto to “Virginia is for Orthopedic Specialists.”

4. Ban heart attacks.

5. Declare that all actors who play doctors are now real, actual doctors.

6. Replace complicated healthcare insurance subsidies with lottery tickets.

7. Subsidize Patch Adams to use laughter as medicine in hospitals.

8. Design a new line of lab coats with built-in holsters.

9. Declare “War on Vampires.” Just in case.

10. Provide Surgeon General with deadly strike force to neutralize negative World Health Organization reports.

11. Rifle through Ron Paul’s old desk for ideas, spare change.

12. Build a wall.

Asset forfeiture laws don’t just allow the police to seize property they claim is connected to criminal activity; they often let the cops keep the proceeds from what they take. This profit incentive is one of the biggest problems with the practice, since it gives police an incentive to pursue petty and indefensible seizures to pad out their own budgets.

Worse yet, there’s not nearly enough transparency in how police and prosecutors spend those funds. Due to weak or absent reporting requirements, forfeiture expenditures and budgets are often hidden from public view—unless intrepid reporters pry them loose.

That’s exactly what happened this week in two different cities, thanks to the Philadelphia Weekly and the Cincinnati City Beat.

Philadelphia Weekly reported Wednesday that the local D.A.’s office had spent $7 million in asset forfeiture funds over the last five years, including “at least one contract that appears to have violated city ethics guidelines—construction work awarded to a company linked to one of the DA’s own staff detectives.” Among the other findings:

With little concern for public scrutiny, the clandestine revenue stream also paid for much more: $30,000 worth of submachine guns (equipped with military-grade laser sights valued at $15,000) for police tactical units; a $16,000 website development contract; custom uniform embroidery; a $76 parking ticket; $1,000 in raccoon-removal services; a push lawn mower; a pair of outboard motors; and tens of thousands in mysterious cash withdrawals—along with thousands of other expenses.

While the DA liquidates many of the assets it seizes, other records obtained by City & State PA and Philly Weekly reveal the DA has long been loaning out forfeited cars to its office personnel. Cars…are routinely doled out to top deputies for work use, as take-home cars and, in one case, even as a plaything for the district attorney himself.

Defenders of asset forfeiture—police unions, prosecutor associations, and other law-enforcement boosters—often waive away misuse of forfeiture funds as unfortunate indiscretions in an otherwise commendable crimefighting program. But the more we learn about how these funds operate, the more clear it becomes that the incentives created by forfeiture are simply too tempting for police to regulate themselves.

Meanwhile, City Beat published a similar investigation into Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters’ forfeiture piggy bank. City Beat found that the prosecutor office’s $1.7 million forfeiture fund “has been tapped regularly for mundane purchases and, on two occasions, sketchy consulting contracts that Deters won’t discuss.” In addition,

Since the beginning of 2015, the prosecutor’s office has spent about $200,000 on real estate consulting by a local man with a history of financial problems—and has no records of his consulting contributions.

In 2015, the office spent almost $15,000 on “briefcases for attorneys” and nearly the same amount on furniture for a grand jury office.

Since 2014, the office has spent $3,800 toward the personal dues of Deters in three bar associations and a local police group.

And as CityBeat reported in June, the office spent $2.2 million over 12 years on information technology contracts with a former employee—a friend of Deters—without seeking competitive bids.

The investigations back up what other outlets have found when they dug into forfeiture expenditures.

Last year, the Chicago Reader published previously unreleased details of how the Chicago Police Department’s narcotics unit uses the department’s forfeiture fund as an off-the-books revenue stream, spending millions on surveillance technology and other gear without any oversight from city council.

Elsewhere in Illinois, a county prosecutor was indicted this month on 17 counts of official misconduct, including misappropriating forfeiture funds. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in June that LaSalle County State’s Attorney Brian Towne had created an illegal unit of special investigators within his office to carry out drug interdictions and asset seizures, exceeding his authority as a prosecutor.

“The unit seized vehicles, cash and other assets that amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “The indictment alleges that Towne used money from those forfeitures to pay for a GMC Yukon and Internet service for his personal use, as well as for private business expenses.”

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning law firm that has challenged forfeiture laws in several states, released a report this year that found 26 states have little or no transparency requirements for asset forfeiture. Furthermore, 14 of those states “do not appear to require any form of property tracking, leaving in doubt even such basic questions as what was seized and how much it was worth, who seized it, when it was seized, where it was seized, and why it was seized.”

Even in places with spending and transparency guidelines, some officials have found creative ways to avoid scrutiny. In Arizona, for example, a grand jury is investigating former Pinal County sheriff Paul Babeu for allegedly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in forfeiture funds to the Arizona Public Safety Foundation, a nonprofit that supports local law enforcement and is closely tied to Babeu.

A lawsuit filed in 2015 by the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Perkins Coie said, “At a minimum, it seems that by funneling money to a private group which buys things for him and his department, Defendant Babeu is able to avoid procurement laws and other transparency regulations which usually apply to government purchasing.” Babeu also used forfeiture funds to pay for a public safety newsletter sent to Pinal County voters. He was running for Congress at the same time.

Corruption is pervasive in all other arenas of public life—politics, media, education, sports— yet the defenders of asset forfeiture ask us to believe that the criminal justice system is staffed by angels. When investigations manage to overcome the lax reporting requirements that protect these agencies, it only strengthens the case for making police and prosecutors more accountable for how they use money seized from citizens.

Today The Hill published a story about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and then tweeted it out.

Here’s the tweet:

DeVos uses private jet for work-related travel https://t.co/xvdnGmDo2c http://pic.twitter.com/f5kDumORJR

— The Hill (@thehill) September 21, 2017

I get it; stories about government officials abusing the public funds for travel are hot right now. After all, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was just caught trying to snag a military jet for his European honeymoon. And Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price is in trouble for chartering five flights last week alone. Rightly so.

But wait! Clicking on the Hill story yields some highly relevant info:

Education Department Press Secretary Liz Hill told the Associated Press on Thursday that DeVos travels completely on her own dime, accepting no government reimbursement for flights or other expenses.

Of course government officials have special needs, but they are too often used to justify status-oriented extravagance. In Mnuchin’s case, the request for a government jet was initially claimed as a necessity for a member of the National Security Council. But as The New York Times dryly explained: “Treasury officials withdrew the request after finding an alternative way to communicate about government matters securely.”

As for Price, an HHS spokesman said “when commercial aircraft cannot reasonably accommodate travel requirements, charter aircraft can be used for official travel.” Which sounds sort of ok-ish until you realize one of those flights was Price was traveling from D.C. to Philadelphia. As Politico noted when it broke the story:

On one leg of the trip—a sprint from Dulles International Airport to Philadelphia International Airport, a distance of 135 miles—there was a commercial flight that departed at roughly the same time: Price’s charter left Dulles at 8:27 a.m., and a United Airlines flight departed for Philadelphia at 8:22 a.m., according to airport records….

In addition, Amtrak ran four trains starting at 7 a.m. that left Washington’s Union Station and arrived at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station no later than 9:58 a.m. The least-expensive ticket, on the 7:25 a.m. train, costs $72 when booked in advance. It is just a 125-mile drive from HHS headquarters in downtown Washington to the Mirmont Treatment Center outside of Philadelphia, where Price spoke. Google Maps estimates the drive as about 2½ hours. A one-way trip was estimated by travel planners to be about $30 in gasoline per SUV plus no more than $16 in tolls.

DeVos is lucky enough to be a very rich woman. But you needn’t be wealthy to be a good steward of taxpayer money—luckily, domestic and international commercial flights are numerous, reliable, and relatively cheap (though not as numerous, reliable, and relatively cheap as they could be—read all about it in the next issue of Reason). Chartered jets from D.C. Philly are absurd, but so is trying to lump DeVos in with Price and Mnuchin.

After all, as The Hill reported:

During her time in office…DeVos has charged travel expenses to the government just once: $184 to the Department of Education for round-trip Amtrak ticket between D.C. and Philadelphia.