The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
Legalizing has other benefits though, like increasing scrutiny into human- and arms-trafficking, a legitimized drug business will need to shed that part somehow and hide it.
It's not just Mexicans. Cartels don't respect borders.
Do you keep giving her the $100?
Absolutely not! This isn't even a real question.
If you directly enable a person or group of people or country to harm themselves and others, you have a duty to stop doing it.
If US remittances are directly fueling the cartel which beats, rapes, murders and even engages in torture, then not only may the US cease that but it is plainly ethically bound to do so.
Yes, this will make it hard for Grandma to buy a car.
You can't fund the people who torture and rape random Mexican farmers so Grandma can buy a car.
> If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
While murdering drug users with their own money may seem like a clever solution, you are in fact still doing murder just in long form.
If you have paid taxes, or participated in the United States of Americas economy, you have directly funded the rape of indigenous Americans, the bombing of Venezuelan fisherman and Iranian schoolgirls.
How do you think the rest of the world should react to this? Total economic embargo towards the US? Leveling the continent? How should Americans who oppose rape and murder of children (like you seem to be) react to the fact that they fund rapes and murders?
You ever buy a phone? You are directly enabling a chain of groups to harm people (in the name of creating that phone).
You ever give a dollar to a homeless man? You might be directly contributing to them harming themselves (or possibly just letting them buy food/drink).
Heck even your example about your sister, I think some people would argue that it's still the moral choice.
Clearly there's a spectrum here. Black and white thinking and statements aren't helping and shouldn't be the basis for policy decisions.
You should not buy phones connected to the mistreatment of the Uighur population - and that is doable.
If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You should not cast your money as to do harm. If your money is the difference between your sister being homeless or not, then stop giving her money and pay her rent. Buy her grocery cards.
But if you directly contribute to harm, knowably, you are enabling that harm. This is not some weird novel part of ethics. It is in fact black and white.
Well, no, you aren't necessarily without paying a special additional tax to the US government, so it doesn't really solve the problem of believing that paying US taxes is active participation in morally intolerable actions.
Actually, I have heard that it’s very hard, if possible at all, to surrender American citizenship. It’s a real problem for some people who had the misfortune of being born on American soil.
1. Move to a new country
2. Present proof you have a new citizenship (you can't generally be "nationless" by international law or you end up remaining a citizen of whatever country you were last a citizen of)
3. Fill out the paperwork and pay $450. The consulate will assist you if you need help.
If you can follow the instructions to bake a cake, you can surrender your US citizenship. It's neither difficult nor expensive.
You maintain this despite all the research showing that this is the most effective way to help people?
Insufficient. Avocados are already legal in the US and yet the cartels have moved into that business. Cartels follow money. They are not going to just roll over when drug money dries up.
See the documentary series Rotten on Netflix or see https://www.npr.org/2022/02/19/1081948884/mexican-drug-carte...
Stop Americans buying drugs from them. Even invading Mexico won't get rid of the cartels.
Even the weird state based legalization has caused the cartels to pivot into things like avocado farming and mining.
Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use. Probably shifting them towards lower risk choices (pot, ketamine) and aggressively crack down on dealers is a winning combo.
(A lot of low level dealers are just graduated drug users but the line between buying and selling is a large one and dealers do immense harm while also shielding more dangerous criminals. Incentives against dealing incl aggressive enforcement are powerful at dissuading low level dealers, which in turn starves the criminal organizations.)
What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".
Most users were exposed to fentanyl unknowingly through buying other tainted drugs, often expecting percocet or even ecstasy.
Some of these users do require methodone treatment, but you can't give drug users unregulated access to opiates. That is just not gonna work out. Either they are going to self taper ("stretching" their tail of their stash) or they are going to end up in a hospital and get tapered by a professional.
Indeed, it is not.
But not for lack of trying. The biggest migration in history is the 10% of Mexico that has moved to the US since 1970. <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1trqnn8/he...>
As of 2024, 11 million Mexican-born people live in the US. <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>
At that time, the scare was about the Chinese, as opposed to brown people from South of the border.
... and which, in turn, led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave the US 40 years of relief from the influx to integrate the existing population. We need another such.
The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
Like, the "eating the cats and dogs" line, specifically targeted at Haitians, wasn't enough for you to think that maybe this guy didn't have your best interest at heart? Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
These people will see whatever they want to see until they get hit, so unless you're in a position to provide the hit, or somehow impart discernment that most elementary school kids have, they can only be contained and we should be happy if they pay their taxes and don't vote.
Maybe we should stop treating these contradictions with Polyanna level of naivety. What is more likely: a.) these people did not seen the obvious contradictions or b.) these people are giving out publicly palatable sympathetic responses. It is all economic vote, except that conservatives were never good for small businesses.
What if these people are not as dumb as they pretend to be. What if they are actually attracted to the same thing that makes other men attracted to Trump - the male supremacy ideology and the racism against "not them exactly". The fun ugly part of it. The cruelty against homosexuals and trans. Saying that openly will still makes you look bad, so we get the "we had no idea, this was just economic vote" kind of nonsense.
Getting them to stop ignoring information they don't like is the problem.
What if we got proper stats instead of adding slices to the pie chart not knowing how big they are.
"What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
We have plenty of those, we are just ignoring them.
> "What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
There would be absolutely nothing remarkable about distribution of chances here. It is the most plausible and explanation. It is also completely consistent with all the data we have - including the fact that record of abuse never harms republican politicians. Instead, it raises their credit. It is also consistent with philosophies the leadership openly pushes for.
I'd start again using quantifiers and a more complexive analysis.
Retrospectively, looking at the various kinds of concentration camps set up all over the country, that might have been a bad choice to make. But that doesn't make it a less reasonable one at the time.
We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.
Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.
For example, when I was relatively poor and near 0 balance in like 2009 era I’d wait for my direct deposit to come so I could grocery shop and pay bills.
When it deposited, the funds would become available to use even though the transaction wasn’t cleared, pretty normal so far.
So say you pay 2 bills and grocery shop, come back on Monday and you’d see that your pending deposit vanished, 3 transactions cleared for 3 overdrafts, then your deposit cleared afterward.
This is just one that I know about because it happened to me. I wonder how many less blatant scams like this exist that most people aren’t even aware of.
It's a bit of reverse check kiting: The bank changing when your check clears so that you actually don't have the money you think you do.
Now, there were fine print that stated only X dollars worth of your deposit would be "Available immediately", but even that was a lie.
Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.
Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!
Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.
Presumably, because it's hard to get a bank account in a country you aren't supposed to be in.
Someone writes you a check. Can you easily cash that with your bank in another country? Best scenario: they have a check cashing app for your phone, so you don't have to mail anything off or present in person; but will that take an American check?
It's pretty obvious what they're doing.
In the current conversation, the policy could have been based on research about where and how cartels were doing their laundering, and designed in a way that minimized the impact on non-cartel immigrant communities.
In all of those cases, the system is the result of choices that lead to the current outcomes, and I think that's the part that's worth thinking about.
Right, but the original claim wasn't "the purpose of a system is what it can accomplish subject to the political and economic constraints placed on it", it's just "the purpose of the system is what it does".
Law and order is the stated intention. The cops not solving crimes for the poor and them beating the poor is the system's purpose.
Instead of noticing that violence isn't applied equally, or that unequal resources are spent enforcing justice for the rich versus the poor, he compares it to carbon emissions from busses. Wow, how insightful.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
Obviously sarcasm... But in all seriousness, it's scary how many people genuinely believe this.
"Our great leaders are playing 4d civilization in multiple dimensions beyond 4. Most of what they do is carefully planned and executed but there are many unknowns and there are also "unknown unknowns". There are players not sitting at the table who are pulling levers elsewhere. There are unknown players. Most moves' results are beyond our comprehension due to purely complexity and the "fog of war", not necessarily b/c of any (of many different) superficially clever 'supreme master plans'."
It's just the behavior of people who have no new ideas for how to solve a problem.
If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
No, it's not just a matter of alternatives: it is also a matter of principles.
For example: in europe, I am unable to make online purchases with electronic money, as all the payment devices are tracked, matched with a personal identity - they cannot be unidentified as they could be only a few years ago. There existed occasional cards for online shopping - now they ask you a local telephone number, identity tied. This under the excuse of "countering money laundering". So there you have "privacy" vs "financial monitoring" - with immensely disproportionate effects in a farcical manouvre.
sarcasm or typo?
Alcohol is a drug with a huge amount of cultural significance going back millennia. Don't be a robot: it's in a different category and not a double standard.
Buy yeah, one easy solution to crime problems is just to make everything legal. Sure, it totally misses the point, but it seems very clever to the software engineer mind.
If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
No. Frankly, it just means you're being zealous and small-minded: hyper-focusing on little bits (and feeling very self-righteous as a result) without looking at the whole picture. Demanding the world conform to whatever limited understanding you have of it. I see it all the time.
Alcohol is its own category, whether you chose to recognize it or not. That's the truth, so quit whining about it.
> If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
Because it opiates being legal and freely available was not working? Ignoring your myopia for a minute, what you're really advocating for is a dumb oscillation between the problems of legalized opiates and illegal opiates, because you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Heh. I mean, you're the one who's been refusing to look outside your narrow focus to "look at the whole thing" and rejecting "wider understandings" (e.g. the actual cultural significance of alcohol, the well-understood negative effects of freely available opioids), but whatever. You be you, and twist things however you need to save face.
I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto. It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
If money laundering is not absurd, then electricity laundering for the purpose of a crime must similarly not be absurd. Everyone must be required to provide documentation of their electricity usage and spikes. After all it could be used to conduct a crime, and we can lower crime by having laws against electricity laundering. /s
In truth, many little brains that I am interacting with here seem to be having trouble with letting abstractions be abstractions. A society can be at rest only when it doesn't have to think twice about its abstractions, otherwise it will never know peace. The same people also can't rewind to see how foolish the war on drugs is in the first place.
> I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto.
No you didn't, you totally misunderstood what I meant. I was not talking about an alternative payment system that "bypasses" anti-money laundering regulations, but alternative regulations.
> It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
It doesn't "work." Not wanting to facilitate the transfer of money derived from crime is not a "silly objection."
Also you seem to be confused about the difference between the crime of money laundering and anti-money laundering regulations.
No, I'm seeing it from the perspective of the people, who have a legitimate interest in the suppression of organized crime. And I also realize that most social problems don't have neat and tidy solutions that will satisfy this or that myopic dogmatist, and following the dogma is likely to leave everyone less happy (except the dogmatist).
Making money laundering a crime and going after the people who do it are important tools in fighting organized crime. Now there's legitimate quibbles in the implementation of anti-money laundering regulations, but just from that to the extreme of "money laundering is an absurd concept" is itself absurd and unreasonable.
> You do not serve the people, only the oligarchs. It is why your argument has no merit to the people who seek freedom. This is not a forum for government propaganda.
To put it politely: please pull your head out of your butt. You're talking like you're a hero is some black and white drama, the good guy fighting the evil mooks. You're not, that's just distorted thinking.
Weaponization of the dollar means that the dollar will simply not be used. Russia showed it, and much of the world is starting to show it. It is in contrast trivial to send crypto; it is neat and it is tidy. When you put up unreasonable fences, the people will just route around them. It is no surprise the yuan is gaining favor.
What crime is laundering fighting anyway? It's in large part the war on drugs, which is a silly war to begin with. Why does everyone have to suffer because of this war? True crimes don't require putting up silly fences to fight, for they can be fought directly. Al Capone was doing nothing wrong by fighting the prohibition on alcohol.
Due to your profound brainwashing, it is clear that we will never see eye to eye. The dollar risks losing its status, and the freedom gained will be better for the world.
Generally speaking, it makes sense to me that a society wants to make that difficult.
To use your own words back at you, generally speaking, it makes sense that a society wants to make the lives of its citizens easier, not more convoluted.
The truth about money laundering is a label used by the government to repress innocent individuals by burdening them under regulations.
Sure, but the best way to know there is illegal action is to flag money that comes out of nowhere.
> How many millions of innocents have to suffer for one crook to be caught?
You seem to be under the wrong expression that the article is about money laundering, but it is not, that's just the legal framework used to achieve the goal. If it weren't for money laundering, they works have chosen something else to achieve their goals.
This ignores that taxes are a thing that need enforcement. Its like saying basic necessities should be free, the world should be without pollution, or cancer shouldn't exist.
For taxes, I favor land value tax. Basic necessities can absolutely be free under it, as the super rich hold plenty of land. We can have a world without much pollution if we switch away from fossil fuels, and if we take the lifecycle of chemicals into account. Note that excesss carbon dioxide is pollution too. Regarding cancer, medical science is working toward it.
Assuming you are talking about free basic necessities: I can conceive it fine, I just also understand that conceiving doesn't mean it will work, and history has shown it won't. Me making the statement was itself conception no?
I can conceive of a million different economic systems, but I also understand most of them are infeasible, and the risk of running the experiment is extremely high, with little to gain in a my country, where obesity is a much larger problem than starving.
Define "pie in the sky", because you have described the utopia that every eco-socialist has been chasing for 100 years...
The problem that makes it infeasible isn't the math, or the technology, it's people. Communism would work beautifully... if everyone in the world was different.
A system where the population's wealth disparity keeps getting worse is nothing to be proud of. There have been systems of government in history where the system's total wealth made everyone more equal while preserving the reward for effort.
> Low-dollar cross-border funds transfers have been used to facilitate or commit terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.
They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
>They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place? As for the people who are supposed to be here, but are collateral damage (ie. "which is destroying the used car market in latino communities") should we have sympathy for people in such situations? If a local casino is laundering money for drug cartels, but that casino funds the community because it employs workers, should we be against the FBI coming in and busting the casino? What if it's more benign than drug cartels, like run of the mill securities fraud?
Like any other system, the purpose is what the system actually does. Especially a system that's been around for decades.
We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260422
>We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
So if the city/state/federal government lets a drug addict/dealer population to exist for too long (despite their best efforts at cracking down), they'll eventually get grandfathered in, and we can't enforce anti-money laundering regulations or dismantle their crack dens?
Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
Did you get to comparison #3?
>The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
>...
>The purpose of the British government is to govern Britain. But different British people disagree on how they should be governed, and sometimes one or another faction gets more power, so the government sometimes flip-flops about what it wants.
More to the point, the point isn't that POSWID is always false, it's that you can't use it as a thought terminating cliche in place of an actual argument.
Looking at El Paso, since it was the first city mentioned in the article, the entire city is about 25% immigrants (>200,000 people). And of that, more that 75% is here legally. So, 150,000 give or take, that according to your first comment, shouldn't be allowed to do business because there are illegals nearby?
Doesn't seem to be particularly well received nor does it respond to any of the obvious criticisms.
In Europe it's the other way around: the businesses employing folks with no right to work get fined to death, with no direct repercussions on the workers (except they lose that income, which is another discussion)
Except the farm businesses complained, and the Trump Department of Labor rolled back a bunch of the protections. For example, apparently a sticking point was the requirement that vehicles transporting visa holders have seatbelts for all occupants, so that was eliminated. Another was the requirement that workers be allowed to have guests visit them on employer-provided housing; an often-cited example is worship services provided by a priest. Also rolled back, too onerous.
This is all being stressed at historically high levels as immigration crackdowns continue. Essentially, food production in border states is increasingly forced to go through this visa program that has terrible oversight and protections that I consider below-par. It's not a sexy issue to yell about with a megaphone though.
Plus, the drug trade coming in from Mexico is, in fact, a huge problem, not just for the US, but for Mexico itself. Mexico is run by cartels specifically because of how much money is made off selling drugs to Americans. This isn't some non-existent problem they are using as cover.
I can think of a more humane way: Prosecuting the employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers. The prospect of employment is what draws migrants here in the first place.
Don't employers already have to check for authorization to work?
(Let us not feel:) How many innocent economic actors does the regulation hit.
It ensure real checks, ensure that when the immigrant work permit expire, the employer have an incentive to help renew it (that alone ouwld probably solve 70 to 90% of illegal "aliens"
> "people without work visas"
is not the same legal category as
> "they're not supposed to be here"
2. Practically speaking, how many people lack a work visa (or similar documentation), but are supposed to be here?
In fact, did you know, in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests? (This is a free hot tip for anyone wanting to live in Canada. It might be true in some other places too, but I don't know.)
Usually those long term visas (eg. student visas, I guess) require some sort of extra vetting to acquire (ie. they're not the tourist visas that get auto-issued at the border), and therefore are unlikely to be possessed by "people who aren't supposed to be here", so as a practical matter I agree they should be accepted in place of a "work visa".
Source? If you can do that, a Canadian could too. So you're directly competing with "local interests".
See e.g. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
What kind of activities are not considered to be “work”?
...
long distance (by telephone or Internet) work done by a temporary resident whose employer is outside Canada and who is remunerated from outside Canada;
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2002-227...
A foreign national may work in Canada without a work permit (a) as a business visitor to Canada within the meaning of section 187;
187 (1) For the purposes of paragraph 186(a), a business visitor to Canada is a foreign national who ... seeks to engage in international business activities in Canada without directly entering the Canadian labour market.
...
(3) For the purpose of subsection (1), a foreign national seeks to engage in international business activities in Canada without directly entering the Canadian labour market only if
(a) the primary source of remuneration for the business activities is outside Canada; and
(b) the principal place of business and actual place of accrual of profits remain predominately outside Canada.
You may send your letter of complaint to the Government of Canada's department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship.
I'm kidding. :) I guess the interests to which you're referring are just tautologically not the interests I meant. Apologies for the confusion.
1) People get loans against assets literally all the time.
2) People can live and work in different places.
Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income. You have to pay back the loan, after all. Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan, and having such documentation requirements would greatly inconvenience them. All this feels like a fig leaf for allowing workers lacking work visas to live and work in the US, while turning a blind eye.
>2) People can live and work in different places.
Again, is this something that actually happens, or is it just a contrived scenario? Is there really a large contingent of people working Mexico and then commuting back and forth to the US? They can't get a loan in Mexico?
You mean that there's a demonstrated ability to repay the loan, which isn't the same thing. I say this as a person who has taken many loans in my life, including ones while not working. Anyway that's up to the lender to sort out isn't it?
> "Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan"
Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows some missing awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else. Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has billions of dollars in outstanding loans that he could repay today if he wanted to. I think a good place to start is to investigate why.
> "All this feels"
I get it. But I think we've established that you haven't considered the way these systems actually work, so your feelings probably aren't fully contextualized.
> "is this something that actually happens"
Given that I said that I did it personally, why is my story more contrived than the imaginary people in your head that you don't know anything about?
> "They can't get a loan in Mexico?"
I think this question is a non-sequitur. On what basis should someone's right to do something in place A have any bearing on their right to do something in place B?
If billionaires who lack work visas can't get an auto loan because of their stock borrowing schemes, that's fine by me. I don't think progressives would have much sympathy for billionaires in the first place anyways.
More to the point people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff probably either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship so that they're not living in the country undocumented, so your counterexample doesn't work.
>Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows either a lack of awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else.
You know, it's pretty ironic how you interpret my lack of ability to imagine a scenario as "lack of awareness", but you can't think of an actual working example either. You do however, seem to have enough time and words to excoriate me, so why you try again and skip the insults?
I gave you the biggest working example in the world, the one where a person definitively has no objective need to take loans and does so anyway because it's deemed advantageous, and what you did in response instead of saying "oh damn, you're right, I did forget that in fact people take loans all the time against assets vs income" was try to rewrite the discussion around how progressives feel about billionaires.
> "people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff ... either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship"
I am not rich enough to buy citizenship anywhere, and yet here I am. Your estimation of how things work is not complete.
> "so that they're not living in the country undocumented"
This is the second time now in this thread that you've replaced lack of right to work with something else entirely.
Are you forgetting the whole context for this conversation was over people who lack authorization to work but somehow need (and can get) auto loans? Bringing up Elon Musk, who is a US citizen only fulfills half of that requirement. Not to mention he'd be getting a portfolio loan on his stock, which gets him cash, obviating the need for an auto loan specifically. Then you pretend that was the entire argument, and trying to dunk on me for not accepting it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
Nobody knows what Melania was doing between the time she arrived and the time she met Trump. She only had a handful of photoshoots shortly after she arrived, and then nothing for 3-4 years until she met Trump at a social event.
Boy, if you really cared about justice and economics, you'd be in a completely different ballpark.
Or is it prodromic to a "stop talking to guts and let us put the factors in a computational framework, where all targets and constraints and consequences are laid out with their demographics"? A Cost/Risk/Benefit for policies?
And it's not new. He is a money launderer. His friends are bad bad bad people. Grift is what he has always done, is the only thing he knows. https://bsky.app/profile/justinschuh.com/post/3msqa7ggcc22p
two sides-ing this can kiss my fucking ass, get right the fuck out. you have nothing. maybe some pathetic little shrivelled complaint. and you know what? i'm fine if "both sides" have to face consequences for their violations. abuse of the state, of state power deserves incredible condemnation and outcry, universally. but this shit? this shit deserves the most stringent strongest response of the state, if it wants to maintain any pretense of law & respect. party of law & order has proven itself to be a sham. RIP congress.
you seem to show up in threads and spit nasty garbage. i recommend not doing that. i recommend positive contributions to humanity that have hope and forward thinking and outlook on what is good, that don't just cast negativity and spread rotten undermining about.
What proof do you have? On what planet would major banks piss off the most capricious and unrestrained president in modern US history? What possible upside could there be for them? Trump (34 time fraud felon known for scamming everyone he can and using his position in government to massively enrich himself) was almost certainly "debanked" because he is doing more of the same shady shit that he's known for and the banks are obligated by the law to treat him like anyone else.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/capital-one-close-trump-ac...
Capital One closed hundreds of Trump's accounts in 2021. Trump is suing them, claiming it's a political debanking. CapOne fighting back because they feel their AML team was correct to close those accounts.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/capital-one-says-it...
Given the type of things vocal people believe, no, posters must know we cannot assume people be joking.
No, if this was serious, it would read "he was definitely debanked for political reasons. He was not laundering money". Or even better, it would have deflected and claimed something unrelated about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton.
Although I have to grudgingly accept that not everybody is fluent in sarcasm.
So I call this "horse puckey"!
But i’m sure being charged an extra dollar at a small store that’s barely getting by (assuming this is true) is the real problem..