Court Rules Motorists Can Be Detained For Paying By Cash at Toll Booths

Using cash increasingly seen as suspicious activity

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
September 24, 2012

The Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals has ruled that private contractors operating toll roads on behalf of the state have the power to detain and store records on motorists who pay by cash at toll booths – another example of how using cash is increasingly being treated as a suspicious activity.

Having been held hostage by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and the private contractor in charge of the state’s toll road, Faneuil, Inc. at a toll booth last year for paying cash and refusing to have a report filled out on them and their vehicle, Joel, Deborah and Robert Chandler filed suit.

“Under FDOT policies in place at the time, motorists who paid with $50 bills, and occasionally even $5 bills, were not given permission to proceed until the toll collector filled out a “Bill Detection Report” with data about the motorist’s vehicle and details from his driver’s license. Many of those who chose to pay cash did so to avoid the privacy implications of installing a SunPass transponder that recorded their driving habits,” reports TheNewspaper.

“They were likewise unwilling to provide personal information to the toll collector, but they had no alternative because the toll barrier would not be raised without compliance. FDOT policy does not allow passengers to exit their vehicle, and backing up is illegal and usually impossible while other cars wait behind.”

The three-judge panel dismissed the suit, ruling that detaining motorists in order to record details about people who paid by cash was not a constitutional violation and that the state and the contractor could subject motorists to such treatment because, “In Florida, a person’s right and liberty to use a highway is not absolute.”

This is merely the latest example in a growing trend of authorities treating people who use cash to pay for goods, bills or services as suspicious. Given that the use of cash cannot be used to track purchases or movements of individuals, extra layers of bureaucracy and intimidation are becoming institutionalized in order to dissuade people from using hard currency as part of the move towards a cashless society.

• A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Earlier this year we reported on how the FBI was telling businesses to treat people who use cash to pay for a cup of coffee as potential terrorists.

The flyer, issued under the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism (CAT) program, lists examples of “suspicious activity” and then encourages businesses to gather information about individuals and report them to the authorities.

The flyer aimed at Internet Cafe owners characterizes customers who “always pay cash” as potential terrorists. Given that some retail outlets don’t even accept card payments for amounts lower than $10 dollars, this would put millions of innocent people under the spotlight.

We also recently highlighted the case of Texas resident Julia Garcia, who was falsely imprisoned and harassed by Wal-Mart employees for attempting to buy goods with a $100 dollar bill the Wal-Mart cashiers erroneously claimed was fake.

The Wal-Mart cashier ripped the $100 dollar bill in half before taking another in Garcia’s possession and doing the same. Despite a counterfeit detection test proving the bills were genuine, the Wal-Mart employees tried to hide the fact and told Garcia they were keeping the money. Only after police were called was the Wal-Mart store ordered to replace the stolen bills.

Wal-Mart is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s See Something Say Something campaign, which encourages shoppers and Wal-Mart employees to report suspicious activity. In a PSA for its snitch program, the DHS characterizes using cash as a suspicious activity and a potential indication of terrorism.

Earlier this year a Tennessee man was charged and jailed by police after using an old $50 bill to pay for goods at a Quik Mart store. Two banks analyzed the bill and confirmed it was genuine. Police apologized to Lorenzo Gaspar and he was subsequently released from prison.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Romney’s New Health Plan: Go to the ER

• Jonathan Cohn

• September 24, 2012 | 10:12 am
• 2 comments
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Fifty million Americans have no health insurance. Does government have an obligation to help them? The answer is no,Mitt Romney suggested during a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday, in part because people can already get care through emergency rooms:

We do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people—we—if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care.

That statement isn’t untrue. But it leaves out an awful lot. ERs are great if you need urgent help with a major medical problem: You’ve had a heart attack, you’ve been in an accident, whatever. And, yes, hospitals will generally treat you regardless of insurance status, if only because the law requires it. As a condition of accepting Medicare money, hospitals must provide stabilizing or life-saving treatment. But they will not provide basic, ongoing care. They will charge a lot of money for their services. In many cases they will do their best to collect on outstanding bills, even if that means using techniques that even the retail industry eschews as overly harsh. And sometimes, as Sarah Kliff notes today, hospitals find ways to avoid providing care in the first place.

Romney is not the first conservative to make this argument. George W. Bush did it all the time. But Romney, of all people, knows better. While he was governor of Massachusetts, promoting his plan to make health insurance available to all residents, he argued that ERs were a lousy way to provide care—not just because they were expensive and necessarily episodic, but also because taxpayers and payers of private insurance premiums ended up paying indirectly for those services. Here was Romney on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” less than two years ago, speaking to Mike Barnicle:

BARNICLE: Do you believe in universal coverage?

ROMNEY: Oh sure. Look, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which you have no responsibility. Particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.

(h/t Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein of Huffington Post)

The two statements are not contradictory. It’s possible to believe simultaneously that ERs provide care to everybody who needs it and that they are an inefficient, expensive way to do that. But the Romney who made that statement in 2010 was making the case for having government do more to cover the uninsured, while the Romney who made that statement yesterday was making the case for having government do less.

And that’s really the most important point of all. Remember, Romney doesn’t simply want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, effectively taking health insurance away from 30 million people who, starting in 2014, are likely to get it from the law. He also wants to end Medicaid, making cuts that would leave between 14 and 27 million additional people without insurance. And he wants to change the tax treatment of employer health benefits, in ways that could make coverage more expensive or harder to get.

Romney’s strategy for health care isn’t “repeal and replace,” as he sometimes likes to say. It’s “repeal and reverse,” as my colleague Ed Kilgore has called it. And it'd leave the ERs even more inundated than they are now.

follow me on twitter @CitizenCohn

Tickerguy's Guide To Florida Constitutional Amendments #florida #election

Karl ‏@tickerguy

http://market-ticker.org/post=211908 Tickerguy's Guide To Florida Constitutional Amendments #florida #election

FDIC, CFPB order Discover Bank to pay $200 million consumer refund for deceptive marketing

Reuters Top News ‏@Reuters

FDIC, CFPB order Discover Bank to pay $200 million consumer refund for deceptive marketing

TV Viewers 'Left in the Dark' About Flood of Political Ads

TV Viewers 'Left in the Dark' About Flood of Political Ads

Free Press report finds TV news stations in key battleground markets fail to cover political advertising

September 24, 2012

Contact Info: 

Jenn Ettinger, 202-265-1490 ext. 35

WASHINGTON – On Monday, Free Press released Left in the Dark, an analysis of political advertising and local news coverage in five cities — Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Tampa — where ad spending has skyrocketed this year.

With fewer than 45 days left until Election Day, Americans across the country are facing an unprecedented increase in political advertising on local stations. Media analysts project that $3.3 billion — money that pads the bank accounts of station owners — will be spent on television ads by Nov. 6. Left in the Dark investigates whether stations airing political ads are balancing out their often deceptive messages with local coverage of the role this money is playing in the 2012 elections.

Free Press examined the political files of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates in Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Tampa to determine the Super PACs and other political groups that were most actively purchasing ad time. We then analyzed hundreds of hours of local news coverage to see whether these stations were reporting on the groups or fact-checking their ads.

In all five of these markets, Free Press found that local newscasts ignored the deluge of political ads broadcast on their stations.

“Election-year profiteering may explain broadcasters’ reluctance to cover political ad spending in their markets,” said Timothy Karr, Free Press senior director of strategy and author of Left in the Dark. “In exchange for this massive influx of political cash, broadcasters must do a better job of exposing the groups and individuals funding political ads in their markets, and addressing the falsehoods presented in many of these spots.”

According to Left in the Dark:

• The hundreds of hours of local news that aired in the two weeks prior to Wisconsin’s June 5 recall election included no stories on the 17 groups most actively buying time on Milwaukee’s ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates. While these stations were ignoring the impact of political ads,they found time to air 53 local news segments on Justin Bieber.  
• Affiliate broadcasters in Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas and Milwaukee did not fact-check the claims made in political ads placed locally by the top four Super PACs and independent groups spending tens of millions of dollars on ads in those markets.  
• Cleveland’s four affiliate stations provided no coverage of the Koch brothers-funded group Americans for Prosperity, despite airing the group’s anti-Obama attack ads more than 500 times. Americans for Prosperity has reportedly spent more than $1.5 million to place ads on Cleveland television stations.  
• Charlotte’s four affiliate stations provided no local reporting on the three top-spending political groups, the anti-Obama American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity and Restore Our Future. From Jan. 1–Aug. 31, 2012, these three groups cumulatively spent more than $4 million to place ads on Charlotte stations.  
• Affiliate stations in Tampa were airing on average more than 200 political ads a day throughout August. Yet only one station, WTSP, devoted news time to fact-checking any of the most prominent groups buying these ads. In a single segment running less than 3 minutes they rated an Americans for Prosperity ad as false, a finding that didn’t stop WTSP from running the group’s anti-Obama ads more than 150 times that month.

“Democracy requires an informed public. But Americans aren’t getting the political news they need from local TV,” said Karr. “The lack of reporting on the ads or the groups behind this spending spree is egregious given the thousands of paid spots that stations are airing.”

To read Left in the Dark, go to: http://www.freepress.net/left-in-the-dark.

Hey, Internet Users: Register to Vote!

http://www.freepress.net/blog/2012/09/21/hey-internet-users-register-vote

September 23, 2012

Liking It or Not, States Prepare for Health Law

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

PHOENIX — Like many Republican governors, Jan Brewer of Arizona is a stinging critic of President Obama’s health care law. When theSupreme Court upheld it in June, she called the ruling “an overreaching and unaffordable assault on states’ rights and individual liberty.”

Yet the Brewer administration is quietly designing an insurance exchange — one of the most essential and controversial requirements of the law. Officials in a handful of other Republican-led states say they are also working to have a framework ready by Nov. 16, the deadline for states to commit to running an exchange or leave it to the federal government to run it for them. That is just 10 days after Election Day, which is likely to decide the future of the law.

Given that the health care overhaul remains a lightning rod — just last week, Oklahoma revised a lawsuit against it — even the most tentative discussions about carrying it out in Republican states tend to take place behind closed doors or “underground,” as the leader of a health care advocacy group in the South put it.

In Mississippi, Mike Chaney, the insurance commissioner, who is laying the groundwork for a state-based exchange there, recently learned the difficulties of moving forward in anything but the utmost secrecy. At a luncheon this summer he found himself facing down an opponent of the law in a confrontation that is now circulating on YouTube.

“I was invited to the picnic, and I was the main course,” said Mr. Chaney, a Republican and an elected official.

The law requires all states to have exchanges, which are essentially online marketplaces where small businesses and individuals can shop for private health plans, in place by January 2014, when a requirement takes effect for most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty. If states fail to submit plans for running their own exchanges by the deadline, the law calls for the federal government to set up and run one for them, with or without their help. People with incomes between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level can get federal tax subsidies through exchanges to make the price of coverage more affordable.

“If we have to have one,” said Donald Hughes, Ms. Brewer’s health care policy adviser, “then it would be better for Arizona to do it ourselves rather than defer to the federal government.” He said, however, that Ms. Brewer would not make a final decision on a state-run exchange until after the election.

Only 13 states and the District of Columbia have formally committed to running their own exchanges. All of them but Rhode Island, whose governor, Lincoln Chafee, is an independent, are led by Democrats. The Republican governors in six states — Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, South Carolina and Texas — have said they will not create a state-run exchange, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. So has New Hampshire, where Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, faced opposition from the Republican-controlled legislature.

Most of the remaining states, 22 of them run by Republicans, are exploring their options. Along with Arizona, at least three of them — Mississippi, Nevada and New Mexico — have done enough planning to meet the November deadline should they decide to run their own exchanges, according to officials. Nevada has already created its exchange, appointed its board and hired its executive director. Most Republican governors, including Ms. Brewer, are waiting for the outcome of the presidential race before making a final decision; Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal the law if elected.

But states like Arizona say they want to be prepared in case the law survives. (Even if Mr. Romney wins, repealing the law will require Congressional approval, which will be difficult if Democrats retain control of the Senate.)

Peter Lee, the executive director of the insurance exchange in California, said he had attended meetings with officials from red states who were eager to keep their presence under the radar.

“It’s sort of like A.A.: ‘My name’s Bob, and I can’t tell you the state I’m from,’ ” Mr. Lee said.

Republicans who support state-run exchanges say they are embracing a fundamental conservative belief: that states should make their own decisions rather than cede control to the federal government. But groups that oppose the law have sent emissaries around the country to argue that deferring to the federal government is a shrewder move.

Michael Cannon, a health policy expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group, has visited more than a dozen Republican-led states, pressing them not to set up their own exchanges. Mr. Cannon, the opponent who confronted Mr. Chaney in Mississippi, said he tells states that exchanges will in fact be “an entirely federally controlled enterprise.”

Mr. Cannon says that Republican governors who are moving toward state-run exchanges are bowing to the wishes of insurance companies and health care providers. “They happen to be the interest groups that stand to get billions of dollars in federal subsidies,” he said.

Many Republicans in state legislatures, including in Arizona, do not need convincing: they are against state-run exchanges. That could make the challenge of creating them tough even if the framework is in place by November, because most states need legislative approval to establish them. Another option is a “partnership” exchange, one that is created by the federal government but that the state would have a role in operating.

Mr. Hughes said that if Ms. Brewer decided to move ahead with a state-based exchange after the election, she would ask the Legislature to sign off on creating one early next year. “Opinions can change,” he said.

But Tom Jenney, the Arizona director of the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity, said his group would pressure legislators to resist. Mr. Jenney recently challenged supporters of a state-based exchange to debate Mr. Cannon at an event his group sponsored in Phoenix. When no one accepted the invitation, Mr. Jenney played the role of a supporter himself, wearing devil horns.

“Our mission is to make it as uncomfortable as possible for anyone who has not committed to opposing the exchange,” he said.

Creating an exchange takes significant time and resources: states must build the Web sites and other technological infrastructure, a call center, outreach programs and other pieces. Mr. Hughes said Arizona had set standards for health plans that would compete on its exchange and was seeking a vendor to build some of the technological infrastructure and a call center.

But the state, he said, had “included language in all of our contracts with vendors and consultants that would allow us to cancel them.”

In the meantime, a coalition of business leaders, including many from insurance companies and health care providers, is urging Ms. Brewer to go with the state-based exchange.

Mr. Chaney said that while he faced pressure to abandon plans for a state-run exchange in Mississippi — the Tea Party there is an especially vocal opponent — he would not back down. He said that he would, however, honor a request by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, to wait until after the election to submit a blueprint.

“What we’re doing here is an offensive move, and it’s a defensive move,” Mr. Chaney said. “I’m doing what I think is the best thing to give me some alternatives and what’s in the best interest of my state.”