Small Fry

I'm going to share with you two snippets from different articles. Their subject matter is related, though not the same, but both draw out a point I want to highlight.

This headline-grabbing Inquisition is a waste of time and resources. If prosecutors are sitting around with nothing to do, why don’t they go after the remorseless profiteers who nearly wrecked the global financial system? Why not shut down a human trafficking ring or two?
~ from Lance Armstrong Inquisition Is a Waste by Eugene Robinson ~

The U.S. government won convictions against 23,506 drug traffickers nationwide during 2010, sending 96 percent of the offenders to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.

Yet one of the biggest entities busted by the feds for involvement in drug trafficking last year received just a wrist-slap deal from federal prosecutors with nobody getting prison time.

During 2010, the U.S. government also won convictions against 806 persons involved in smaller-time drug-related money laundering, sending nearly 77 percent of those offenders to prison.

Yet when it came to a case involving billions of dollars in illegal drug profits, the federal government gave the same unusual wrist-slap to the same entity caught giving greed-blinded assistance to Mexican drug cartels by laundering billions of dollars in illegal profits for them.

So, what is this entity that federal prosecutors found worthy of big breaks for its laundering of billions of dollars, and for its blatant facilitating or tons of smuggled cocaine?

Meet Wachovia – once the nation’s sixth largest bank by assets and now a part of Wells Fargo Bank… a too-big-to-fail bank that for the feds is apparently too-big-to jail.
~ from Too Big to Do Time?: Fed Wrist-slap for Wachovia Bank Makes a Farce of the Drug War by Linn Washington, Jr. ~

We often hear federal, state and local officials talk tough when it comes to the War on Drugs or several other criminal and/or civil offenses. Yet, too often, the police and prosecutors target the small fry and let off or slap the wrists of the kingpins.

In some parts of the country, a big deal is made about voter fraud, an almost nonexistent problem. But almost no one has gone after the corporations who manufacture vote tabulation machines -- even in areas where it is rampantly obvious that something nefarious is afoot.

Scores of homeowners across the country are dragged into court each week for foreclosure hearings, yet virtually no law enforcement is being applied to the banks and mortgage servicers who are foreclosing on folks without the legal paperwork.

Illegal immigrants regularly are rounded up to be jailed or deported, but few of the individuals, companies and corporations that knowingly hire them are subject to anything more than a slap on the wrist.

On issue after issue, it is the small fry and middlemen who bear the brunt of our criminal justice system, while the big fish generally are allowed to swim free or only slightly impeded. In other words, while the laws of this land apply to all equally on paper, it rarely works that way in practice.

In fact, the bigger you are, the greater the chance that you will be let off scot free with little more than a wink and a nod...if anyone in power even notices at all.