Topic: Another freedom lost. Gone. Poof. Thanks alot, Obama DOJ.

[trapeze]

So what's next?

I guess a dozen or more (very likely quite a few more after those initially charged try to reduce their jail time by cutting a deal) will go to prison and lose everything they own.

Meanwhile guess who will be going into the online poker business? That's right, the federal government. They will soon begin to issue godawful expensive online poker site licenses (renewable as frequently as possible) to their friends (crony capitalism). Then they will institute new rules so that the players get taxed to the max. I imagine that it will go something like this:

I will be taxed on every poker hand that I win. There will be no credit for losing. It will not matter if I have a net losing session. If I win a hundred hands and then lose it all on the last hand I will be out my losses plus all of the taxes previously assessed for the winning hands. The house always wins. The feds always win. Me? Not so much.

I would also expect the feds to take the approach with online poker that they have taken with tobacco  for decades. They will start out with very small and "reasonable" taxes. And then gradually they will increase the taxes, for the children. Keep it legal because they like the revenue but make it so pricey that it hurts everyone but the rich to play 'cause gambling is bad.

Meanwhile, those who used to play for pennies because it was fun, cheap and harmless will be forced to visit a brick and mortar casino (or a private game) to get their poker fix. Their losses (because most people suck at poker...it's a game of skill, not gambling. If it was gambling then everyone would have an even chance at winning. You don't play against the house in poker like you do with other games.) would be bigger.  Much bigger. That's because "live" operations can't spread penny ante play...you can't afford the brick and mortar overhead with anything less than $200 buy-in games.

So bottom line here is the feds are going to be getting into the poker business and everyone else involved will be the poorer for it.

I really hate the federal government.

[RickZ]

So bottom line here is the feds are going to be getting into the poker business and everyone else involved will be the poorer for it.

Why not?  State governments are already involved in lotteries.

[IronDioPriest]

The UIGEA made all of the previously legal transactions between consenting adults illegal.

That's what pisses me off most about the government, that they can make formerly legal acts illegal with the stoke of a pen.  I'm pretty sure the Founders didn't envision that.

Time to trot out my favorite Ayn Rand quote:

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris.  "We WANT them broken.  You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against--then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures.  We're after power and we mean it.  You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it.  There's no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one MAKES them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.  Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?  What's there in that for anyone?  But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt.  Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
--Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957)

This justice department already has the selective enforcement aspect of this dynamic fully in play. We truly are at a place where just about everyone breaks one law or another in the course of a given day. With a government willingly prosecuting some and not others - willing to pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore - we are literally under a totalitarian thumb, and the loss of liberty is just a matter of degree. The only thing missing is people disappearing in the middle of the night and never being heard from again. If that is not a next step in the evolution of selective justice where an all-powerful federal government is the arbiter, then I am hard-pressed to define what the next step would be.

[charlesoakwood]

The UIGEA made all of the previously legal transactions between consenting adults illegal.

That's what pisses me off most about the government, that they can make formerly legal acts illegal with the stoke of a pen.  I'm pretty sure the Founders didn't envision that.
...

[/quote]

The Bass brothers "silver scam" is another example. They were making too much money and the gov wanted it.

Thank you Trap for recalling another good reason to remember Bill Frist and to remember his friends, John McCain and Fred Thompson.

[Pandora]

...the DOJ can basically skirt constitutional law at will...

Exactly my point.  However "law-abiding" one may be, once the laws exceed the authority by which the government was loaned from the people to make them, "law-abiding" becomes a senseless concept.

[charlesoakwood]

...the DOJ can basically skirt constitutional law at will...

Exactly my point.  However "law-abiding" one may be, once the laws exceed the authority by which the government was loaned from the people to make them, "law-abiding" becomes a senseless concept.

It's a post-modern third world kind of a thing.

[trapeze]

And they most definitely pick winners.

The UIGEA specifically allows online horse race bets. Gee, I wonder why?

Also allowed are "state run" lotteries.

Fantasy sports leagues area also exempted.

[trapeze]

One more thing...

Obama and Holder have made a bit of strategic mistake here. When you are oppressing the peasants you are supposed to provide bread and circuses. Online poker was most definitely a circus-like distraction for millions of bitter clingers.

Now that it's gone a lot of people are going to be forced to do other things...like talk more with the wife.

This is really gonna piss a lot of people off.

So a strategic error by Toonces.

[Glock32]

This also goes to show you what "justice" is about to the State. Every day we see examples of true subhuman scumbags getting off on technicalities, paroled early, or given light sentences. But you do anything to disrupt the State's sense of entitlement to ever-expanding revenues? They drop the Hammer of Thor on your ass.

That's, in short, what is wrong with our country. The government has long since forgotten about some notional "consent of the governed" or "to protect and serve" ideas. It exists for the sake of furthering its existence. I'm not sure where the study was done, but there is a fascinating examination of how large organizations -- governments, businesses, non-profit groups -- inevitably evolve into being more about the furtherance of the organization itself than the original mission that provoked its founding in the first place.

The government has become a malignancy in the body of the country. Just as the cells of your body differentiate, group together into specialized tissues that perform important functions (organs), they can eventually grow unchecked and further their own differentiated tissue at the expense of the organic bodily whole. When that happens we call it cancer. Our government is a cancerous malignancy.

[trapeze]

Finally found the names of the indicted...

[blockquote]The indictment lists five founders of the poker companies: Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate of PokerStars, Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick of Full Tilt Poker and Scott Tom and Brent Beckley of Absolute Poker.

“These defendants, knowing full well that their business with U.S. customers and U.S. banks was illegal, tried to stack the deck,” said Janice Fedarcyk, assistant director-in-charge at the FBI. “The defendants bet the house that they could continue their scheme, and they lost."

The U.S. also charged “highly compensated payment processors,” including Ryan Lang, Ira Rubin, Bradley Franzen and Chad Elie.

According to the indictment, these individuals obtained accounts at U.S. banks for the poker companies by lying about the nature of the transactions and covering up those lies by creating phone corporations and Web sites.

[/blockquote]

From FNC.

[trapeze]

Well, I cashed out at PokerStars. I have no idea if it will actually result in my money returning to my bank account but time will tell. A few minutes ago I received this email notiifcation:

Cashout request time: 2011/04/16 17:55 ET

Cashout amount: USD $*****

USD $***** will be submitted for processing to your ECHECK account (1***************6*9*).
Credit transaction #*******89

Please allow 72 hours for processing of ECHECK cashouts and another 3-10 business days for the funds to be available in your ECHECK account balance.

It wasn't very much money and it wouldn't have killed me to lose it but I decided that I would rather have it than let the Toonces mob get it. Which is what will eventually happen if things move along their present course.

On the other hand there are a great number of players that play online for a living. No kidding. They make several thousand a month just like a real job. Most of them even file legitimate tax returns on their earnings...the smart ones do anyway. If their money gets tied up now some of them may not be able to pay their taxes. Irony. And stupidity (Obama's). And of course they will now join the ranks of the jobless with little to no hope of replacing their online income. Even if they happen to live next to a brick and mortar casino they will not be able to play enough hands/hr to equal what they did online.

Professional online players will play 8+ hours a day...usually 12 or more...from the comfort of their homes. They will play four or more games simultaneously and will go through 75 to 100 hands per hour per game. That is simply not possible to match in the real world where cards have to be physically shuffled and dealt, where live players are allowed much more latitude in time to make decisions but most importantly, where you can only sit at one table.

[trapeze]

From the 2+2 Poker Forum site here is an excerpt from what is billed as the "Cliff Notes" version of the 9 count indictment...

- Count 8 is probably the most problematic for the sites, since it's the only one that doesn't appear to be anchored to the question of whether online poker is unlawful internet gambling. In other words, even if the DOJ were to concede as much, I'm not sure it exonerates any of the defendants from the charge that they fraudulently opened bank accounts and disguised the nature of gambling transactions, which is a clear violation of the law, no matter how the 'unlawful internet gambling' part comes out.

- re: Count 8, I don't know what the poker sites' defense strategy will be, but I would *guess* it will be trying to distance themselves from the 3rd party payment processors ("PPs"). They'll probably claim that they merely worked with PPs who promised them that they could process transactions with US banks/customers, and that they (the sites) didn't know anything about how the PPs accomplished that: i.e. "Hey, we had a contract with the PPs to process the transactions, but we had no idea that they were lying to US banks to get it done." Unfortunately, that strategy seems to be substantially undercut by the nature of internal poker site docs, which the DOJ appears to have in their hands. One of them is an internal PokerStars doc acknowledging that the transaction descriptors associated with US customer-transactions "are often vague and rarely reflect the nature of the transaction in any way. In fact most descriptors strongly imply the transaction has nothing to do with PokerStars....it's all too easy for a player to say to their bank 'I've never made a purchase at bicyclebigshop.com'. As a result chargebacks (Not Auth & Stop Payments) are increasing which in turn jeopardizes the relationship with the processor and their banks." In short, the poker sites weren't completely oblivious as to what was going on. Whether that absolves them of any legal liability I don't know.

- Interestingly, in 2009, a lot of the PP arrangements collapsed and bank accounts were closed/seized by the US gov. After that happened, the DOJ indictment alleges that FTP and Stars embarked on a new strategy called "transparent processing": they set about to find a method of getting payments processed that did not involve any lying to banks. In a nutshell, it appears that they approached various US banks, and essentially told them straight-up what they wanted to do (and also probably argued to them that it was NOT illegal because online poker wasn't covered by the UIGEA since it wasn't, in a strict sense, unlawful internet gambling). It appears that the sites also "incentivized" these banks by paying them lucrative processing fees, and in at least one case, investing heavily in the financially troubled bank. The DOJ says that these were basically bribes. But it was an interesting strategy that may allow the sites to argue that (at least when it came to this "transparent processing"), they did not do anything fraudulent, since they told the truth at every stage, and if there was illegal activity, it was by the bank itself.

[Libertas]

Leftists are by definition joyless people, and anything that provides joy must either be heavily taxed to take most of the fun out of it, or destroyed outright as not beneficial to the state.  These bastards willnever stop...the them or us situation approaches ever faster!  Next, kicking in doors to punish people gong back to old fashioned poker nights with buddies can't be too far behind for this bunch, eh?

[ToddF]

That's the conservative law and order side of me talking.

The Libertarian side of me is all for breaking laws that are only there because others have paid protection money.  People in the United States have no problem with gambling, morality wise.  If we did we wouldn't have taxation of the stupid lotteries or bricks and morter casinos.  Because, and only because the bribes paid by Indians and Big Casino to politicians, is the only reason internet poker is illegal.

Yes, this should be a major opportunity for any tea party candidate who can connect the dots, between bribe money and millions having their past time taken away.

[ToddF]

According to the indictment, these individuals obtained accounts at U.S. banks for the poker companies by lying about the nature of the transactions and covering up those lies by creating phone corporations and Web sites.

That was probably their fatal mistake.  When you move offshore, you have to really move offshore.  You can't try sneaking back into the US and that's what they did.  Dumb Dumb!