Found at: https://peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint/A_Red_look_at_White-_and_Blue-Collar_law_and_order.html
A Red look at White- and Blue-Collar law and order
(The following article is from the July 1-31, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
Compiled from the news services by David Tymoschuk
WHITE COLLAR
Rodney Arnold Barton stole over $1 million from the Bank of Nova Scotia. As reported in The Chronicle-Herald, the National Parole Board says that Barton could potentially reoffend. Yet he was approved for parole five months into his three year jail sentence. You see, Rodney Barton was a former manager with the bank. Things would be different if he was a blue collar worker who held up a gas bar.
Jeffery Skilling, the CEO of Enron, was sentenced to 24 years in jail back in October 2006. Let's not forget the fact that $2 billion in pensions were wiped out. Skilling's actions ruined many lives.
Dennis Koslowski, former head of Tyco, is serving up to 25 years for stealing $1 billion from the corporation. But his minimum prison term is just over eight years. Taking money from a corporation can be good news, but Koslowski was no Robin Hood, just a greedy boss. His wife, who still enjoys the good life, wants a divorce. So much for love.
A few such scapegoats were sent to prison, but after September 11, prosecutors in the United States slacked off on white collar crooks, as reported by the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor last September. Why? Maybe too busy jailing suspicious "terrorist looking" types?
Here's another case. A person placed print ads for loans: "bad credit no problem." Those who phoned and took the bait had to pay a fee of a couple hundred dollars to get their loan. The poor became poorer, because they never received a thing. The operator of the loan company picked up $1.1 million. He was sentenced to just two years probation and a $1000 fine.
BLUE COLLAR
Here's a serious crime: building a cabin.
Roberta Keesick, a Grassy Narrows hunter, clan mother, blockader, mother, and grandmother, is engaged in building two cabins on her people's traditional hunting grounds. These cabins are used for shelter and storage during the cold winter season, and as a base from which to hunt, fish, and pick berries and medicines to provide for her family and live the Anishnabe way of life.
Recently, Roberta received a summons indicating that she is being charged with three offenses for building on public land without a work permit. Her response: "I got permission from the creator who put us here and made our people a part of the land. I can't bring myself to ask for permit. We have always been here and we have never needed permission." Funny how homesteaders could build on "free" land, yet a Clan Mother cannot build on her own traditional territory. Public land - except for people from Grassy Narrows. Her court case is coming up soon.
As reported recently in People's Voice, Elder Harriet Nahanee passed away one month after she was sent to jail on January 24, 2007. Madame Justice Brenda Brown sentenced Nahanee, age 72, to fourteen days incarceration for contempt of court for disobeying the Eagle Ridge Bluff injunction. Jailed under unacceptable conditions at Surrey Pre-Trial Center, held in a cell with tens of other inmates and subject to racist treatment, Harriet Nahanee contracted pneumonia. She was hospitalized within a week of her release, and passed away within another week.
An extreme example in Leandro Andrade, who is serving 50 years in a California jail for stealing nine VHS cassettes. Whose life did he ruin except his own? And did he ruin his own life? No, the justice system, part of the capitalist state, helped Leandro along in ruining his life. The draconian "three strikes" law is clearly a mockery of justice.
In Avon Park, Florida, kindergarten student Desre'e Watson was arrested last April and charged with a felony. What charges? Battery on a school official, and resisting a police officer. Does a six-year old really deserve a criminal record?
In 2000, the St. Petersburg Times reported that charging children is normal in Florida: "Kids as young as seven spend the night in detention centers. Kids as young as 10 are sent away for a year or more. And in a very few cases, children enter the justice system at even younger ages, such as a 5-year-old St. Petersburg boy charged this year with burglary; and incredibly, a preschool arson suspect who went through a pretrial diversion program in South Florida at age 3."
Freedom of movement? On April 24th, Immigration officers armed with M-16 rifles raided a shopping mall in Chicago. The entire mall was closed while officers forced shoppers and workers to sit on the floor.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been conducting Operation Return to Sender and Operation Wagon Train, signs of growing xenophobia and intolerance by the U.S. government. During a raid in March at the Michael Bianco company in New Bedford, Mass., a factory that makes leather military gear, officers forcefully separated babies from nursing mothers before any undocumented workers were arrested. Last December, raids at six Swift meatpacking plants arrested more than 1200 workers. In some cases children were left to fend for themselves for varying lengths of time after parents were picked up in the raids.
Two police officers in Atlanta plea bargained in the 2006 murder of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. The murder charges were dropped, and the officers will get 10 and 12 years in prison. A raid on Johnston's address occurred when an informant lied to police about cocaine being inside. Obtaining a no-knock warrant, officers busted into the home with no advance warning. Johnston was armed (this is the U.S.), and seeing armed people in plainclothes, she fired one shot in defence, inflicting no injuries. Police returned fire (39 shots), handcuffed the bleeding woman (shot 6 times), then conducted a search of the premises while she died. No drugs were found, so they were planted.
An informer tipped off reporters who broke the story. The informer was picked up by the police officers, who then attempted to force the informer to confess to purchasing drugs at Johnston's address. The mere idea of a 92-year-old drug kingpin is a good case to not cut old age pensions! Having to sell street drugs to pay for prescription medication is not too far off.
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