All Men Are Equal Before The Law

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( Unless you are the 1% )

Mortgage CEO Gets 40-Month Sentence for $3 Billion Fraud, Homeless Man Gets 15 Years for Taking $100

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews...taking_%24100/

and remember the financial guy who hit-and-run but the law said "we don't want him to lose earnings ability"?

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Why Is the Elite Class Protected Under America's Justice System?

central theme is that law is no longer what it was intended to be - a set of rules equally binding everyone to ensure that outcome inequalities are at least legitimate - and instead has become the opposite: a tool used by the politically and financially powerful to entrench their own power and control the society. That's how and why the law now destroys equality and protects the powerful.

What we see with the protests demonstrates exactly how that works. The police force - the instrument of law enforcement - is being used to protect powerful criminals who have suffered no consequences for their crimes. It is simultaneously used to coerce and punish the powerless: those who are protesting and who have done nothing wrong, yet are subjected to an array of punishment ranging from arrest to pepper spray and other forms of abuse.

That's what the two-tiered justice system is: elites are immunized for egregious crimes while ordinary Americans are subjected to merciless punishment for trivial transgressions.

A November, 2008 New York Times article was incredibly telling in this regard. It reported on Obama's opposition to investigations into Bush crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping - opposition revealed only after he was safely elected - and it explained that "because every President eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor's tenure." As I wrote in the book about this article: "In other words, by letting criminal bygones be bygones within the executive branch, presidents uphold a gentleman's agreement to shield either other from accountability for any crimes they might want to commit in office."

The Iran-contra travesty was the first time the template of elite immunity - solidified by Ford's pardon of Nixon - was applied to a new case. Basically, just a month before he was to leave office after being defeated by Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush pardoned his Defense Secretary, Casper Weinberger, and four other defendants, just as they were about to go on trial. What made that so remarkable was not only, as you say, that the case against them was so airtight: Weinberger got caught red-handed telling multiple lies to investigators in order to protect himself and Reagan when a diary he never turned over was found. Far worse was that Bush himself was implicated in many of these crimes, so these pardons were really a way of ending the investigation and thus protecting himself.

etc etc

http://www.truth-out.org/why-elite-c...tem/1319566022

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[Wild Cobra]

Do you ever research the tripe you post?

Allen was convicted of aiding-and-abetting. This could be as simple as him having knowledge, and not being a whistle blower. The man responsible is Lee Farkas, who was found guilty of the fraud, was sentenced to 30 years.

Please... do a little research before posting your tripe.

[Halberto]

Tripe.

[SA210]

[RandomGuy]

Do you ever research the tripe you post?

Allen was convicted of aiding-and-abetting. This could be as simple as him having knowledge, and not being a whistle blower. The man responsible is Lee Farkas, who was found guilty of the fraud, was sentenced to 30 years.

Please... do a little research before posting your tripe.

He said the sentencing sent a "strong message that corporate fraud by senior executives will not be tolerated," but also showed that plea deals like Allen's -- under which he provided "substantial assistance" to government investigators -- would be taken into account at sentencing.

According to court do ents and information presented at trial, Allen and Ragland distributed materially false do ents to investors in Ocala Funding, a TBW multi-billion dollar lending facility, from early 2005 through August 2009.

As a result, investors in Ocala Funding lost more than $1.5 billion, while Colonial Bank lost $900 million.

Court do ents also showed that Allen played a key role in submitting material false information about Colonial Bank when it sought more than $500 million in funds from the federal bank bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...75K22V20110621


Sigh. Do I need to point out the irony of you, of all people, admonishing someone for not reading background material, Mr. Its-really-obvious-you-don't-bother-reading-links-before-shooting-your-mouth-off?

A much better point you could have made is that the thin sentence had more to do with the guy cooperating with the Feds, something the lone homeless guy stealing $100 didn't have a chance to do, making the comparison fairly weak. Making that point would have required something complicated, say like finding a news article.

[Wild Cobra]

Random, my point was over what the conviction was on. Sentencing is based on what one is found guilty of. The OP says compares fraud vs. stealing, when the convictions were aiding-and-abetting vs. stealing. The man who masterminded the fraud got double the conviction of the man stealing the $100. For whatever reason, he only got 30 years. Likely be in for life because of how old he is already. If I recall, the prosecutor asked for 335 years.

Besides, what do ents showed (maybe only implied) was possibly not evidence the jury considered. I wasn't there. Were you?

[101A]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...75K22V20110621


Sigh. Do I need to point out the irony of you, of all people, admonishing someone for not reading background material, Mr. Its-really-obvious-you-don't-bother-reading-links-before-shooting-your-mouth-off?

A much better point you could have made is that the thin sentence had more to do with the guy cooperating with the Feds, something the lone homeless guy stealing $100 didn't have a chance to do, making the comparison fairly weak. Making that point would have required something complicated, say like finding a news article.

Also, the homeless guy robbed a bank - bad choice.

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With Liberty and Justice for Some

As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I’ve long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system. The rich enjoy superior legal representation and therefore much better prospects for success in court than the poor.

The powerful are treated with far more deference by judges than the powerless. The same cultural, socioeconomic, and demographic biases that plague society generally also infect the legal process. Few people who have had any interaction with the justice system would dispute this.

Still, only when I began regularly writing about politics did I realize that the problem extends well beyond such inequities. The issue isn’t just that those with political influence and financial power have some advantages in our judicial system. It is much worse than that. Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. Often they need not even exploit their access to superior lawyers because they don’t see the inside of a courtroom in the first place—not even when they get caught in the most egregious criminality. The criminal justice system is now almost exclusively reserved for ordinary Americans, who are routinely subjected to harsh punishments even for the pettiest of offenses.

he central promise of the American founding—that all would stand equal before the rule of law no matter what other political and economic inequality was allowed—has been abandoned. Two features of contemporary American political life are particularly significant in this regard. First, the elites’ exemption from the rule of law has been strengthened at exactly the same time that the law has become an increasingly draconian instrument of punishment for the rest of Americans—particularly the poor and racial minorities. Not only does the law fail to equalize the playing field; it perpetuates and even generates tremendous social inequality.

Second, though unequal application of the law has always been pervasive in American society, until recently such inequality was regarded as a problem: something to be deplored and, if possible, corrected. Today, however, substantial factions in our political culture explicitly renounce the principle of legal equality itself. It is now quite common for American political discourse to include arguments expressly justifying the elites’ legal impunity and openly calling for radically different treatment under the law for various classes of people based on their power, status, and wealth.

Historically, our collective insistence on the principle of equality under law has been principally responsible for our forward progress, our ability to identify and eliminate major and minor transgressions. Conversely, our abandonment of that principle precludes such progress and, worse, shields legal inequality from reform. A society that demands equality under the law will move inexorably toward it. A society that renounces this virtue will move in the opposite direction. We have, manifestly, become a society that no longer even rhetorically affirms the necessity for this equality, and the outcome is exactly as dangerous, oppressive, and antidemocratic as the American founders warned it would be.

http://www.truth-out.org/print/7764

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How many Wachovia people now in jail or even prosecuted?

Drug War Profiteers: Book Exposes How Wachovia Bank Laundered Millions for Mexican Cartels

one bank, Wachovia, made millions in the Mexican drug war. At the time, Wachovia was the nation’s fourth-largest bank. It has since been taken over by Wells Fargo. "You can’t drive around Mexico with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash in a semi-artic truck. It has to be banked," Vulliamy said. "What I found was that it is coming into the United States, into the banking system."

There was a settlement in the district court of Miami. And the settlement said—and it was a deferred prosecution, which means no one goes to jail, constructively, and you have to sort of behave for a year, and if you do so, the whole thing is dropped.

But what was found was that $110 million—small change—was directly connected to four drug deals in Mexico involving the Sinaloa Cartel, but that the staggering figure of $378 billion—that’s a lot of money—was insufficiently monitored. Now, we don’t know how much of that was connected to drug deals. It could be anything between naught and $378 billion. But it gives us a glimpse of the size, of the volume, the quan y of the money involved. These were coming through things called casas de cambio, holes in the wall, basically, exchange houses, not even a proper banking system. So we have a medium-sized bank, that kind of money.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/...ok_exposes_how

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Woman Gets Jail for Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of government generosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi's debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs.

Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave back every penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now going to do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!

Here's another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

This is the reason why all of these settlements allowing banks to walk away without "admissions of wrongdoing" are particularly insidious. A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction, immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...louts-20111117

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Wealthy Corporate-Americans fraudsters are different from poor Human-American fraudsters.

When will TX and GA start executing Corporate-Americans?