The Bigger The Theft, The Lighter The Sentence?

This meme is technically based on real cases, but it’s wildly misleading by design. Paul Allen wasn’t the mastermind behind the $3 billion mortgage fraud; he was a relatively small player who cooperated with prosecutors and received 40 months. The primary perpetrator, Lee Farkas, was convicted of orchestrating the scheme and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

And the other guy wasn’t sentenced to 15 years for simply “stealing $100.” He robbed a bank, threatened the teller, and was convicted of first-degree robbery. The $100 amount is basically irrelevant to the nature of the offense.

So yes, both cases happened, but presenting them as “rich guy steals $3 billion, gets 40 months / homeless guy steals $100, gets 15 years” deliberately strips away the facts to manufacture outrage. That’s not an honest comparison; it’s meme propaganda.

I also love how absolutely nobody bothered to verify the information and just automatically started hating the rich person, which is fine. They can eat themselves alive for all I care. I’m not here to defend the rich. I’m simply pointing out that this meme is only “factually correct” in the most technically superficial sense. It deliberately removes important context and presents the information in a way designed to elicit a specific emotional response. There’s a difference between presenting facts and selectively presenting facts to manufacture outrage.

One of the voices in my head is my FIL who's an ardent capitalist who's not afraid to say really horrid shit, so I always run these things by that voice.

He said the rich guy has to take more risks (to create the jobs we all depend on to survive and eat) so over time, he's more likely to take financial risks that might be less than black and white. He doesn't think it was really fraud anyway. This guy might just have been swept up in Biden's crazy red-tape bonanza, like all the financial regulations that well-meaning Democrats implemented that will destroy our economy. Meanwhile the homeless guy has slipped through the cracks so many times, arrested and walking free the next day, at taxpayer expense - committing a crime every other day in the process, also at our expense - and that these homeless guys, when you count up how many there are in every city in town, cost us far more than the white collar crime in total anyway - so getting him off the street into a correctional facility where he can get sober and learn some occupational skills is really a kindness to everyone involved. Anyway some bleeding heart judge will let him out after a few months, like they always do, so it doesn't really matter. But if you REALLY want to get thinking, if that homeless man hadn't been the victim of a public school system that taught him to be lazy, and society reinforced that by giving him enough welfare that he never had to have a job, but took taxes when he did... Well, would he be homeless today?

And that's why I don't hang out with my inlaws.

Rich people have class solidarity. They're not going to go for the throat on one of their own.

The fraud/theft sentencing disparity is pretty fucked, but if you pretend to not know that's what's causing it, we'll never get it fixed.

There's two tiers of justice in this country: The rich and everyone else

Kill one man and you're a murder. Kill a thousand and we'll crown you king.

some are more equal than others

If you steal even more it goes down to zero and you can become president

So the homeless need to get into crypto?

Insurance companies all have estimates for the value of a generic human life, i think it's around $10M, not super sure.

So all we have to do is prorate theft/fraud cases based on that. If you steal $10M (or whatever the right number is), that's life, end of story.

I mean, Bernie Madoff, the creator of the largest ponzi scheme in history, got 150 years.

let's see Paul Allen's card.

Go big or and go home.

Paul Allen? THE Paul Allen?

If I had to guess. Probably violent crime vs non-violent crime. The government probably fined the CEO to pay back everything and he'll have to work to do it.

Not saying this is fair, but prison could be better then prison the streets. Dont know the details, obviously.

Edit: should have read what I wrote before posting