A tale of two sentences
By Deirdre Griswold
This is a tale of two sentences--one for selling marijuana
worth about $1,000 and the other for facilitating the theft of
millions of dollars in taxes.
One man was sentenced to 55 years in jail with no chance of
parole. He'll get out when he's 80 years old, if he lives that
long, and his two kids will be gray.
The other man will serve 24 months.
Guess which sentence goes with which conviction?
Here are the facts, as reported by the capitalist media
itself.
Weldon Angelos, 25, a rap and hip hop record producer with
no criminal record, was accused of selling marijuana to a
police informant three times in May and June 2002, each time
charging $350 for eight ounces. When he refused a plea bargain
that would have put him behind bars for 15 years, the U.S.
attorney's office in Salt Lake City got really vindictive. They
reindicted him on 20 charges, including having a gun strapped
to his ankle during one sale. He never used or even spoke about
the gun, but adding gun possession to the marijuana charges
made a mandatory sentencing law kick in for this first
offender.
Even U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell, who imposed the
sentence, attacked it as "unjust and cruel and even
irrational," and called on President George W. Bush to grant
Angelos clemency. (Yeah, right.) He pointed out that under the
sentencing laws set by Congress, even a rapist or murderer
would get out of prison earlier.
And then there's the case of Jerome Schneider, described in
the Nov. 18 New York Times as "the nation's best-known seller
of fraudulent offshore banks."
In a special interview with the Times before going to jail,
Schneider said he had helped hundreds of rich people in the
United States evade taxes on incomes ranging from $100,000 to
$40 million a year.
Schneider did take a plea bargain--and why not? For his
crimes, he was offered a sentence of 24 months.
Internal Revenue had known about Schneider for more than 20
years. He sold more than a million copies of his book, "The
Complete Guide to Offshore Money Havens," which he advertised
in the Wall Street Journal and SkyMall, a magazine provided on
many airplanes. One of his clients, he told the Times, was a
media billionaire on the Forbes list of the richest 400 people
in the United States. He worked with prominent accounting and
law firms.
Taxes on the rich are notoriously low--which is one of the
reasons the United States has such woefully underfunded social
programs. But these blood suckers don't think they should pay
anything. And yet they demand "patriotism" from the workers,
sending them to die in colonial wars paid for by workers' taxes
and benefiting only the big corporations and banks.
And if any one of Schneider's rich clients ever gets charged
for defrauding the government, how many days will that crook
spend in jail? One? None?
Welcome to capitalism.
Reprinted from the Dec. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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