Irony of Ironies?

Cops with plastic handcuffs on their belts stood ready to arrest protesters if they took to the street at the start of Wednesday's march, the biggest yet in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

“Stay on the sidewalk! Stay on the sidewalk!” a police supervisor with a megaphone ordered.

What the protesters call the banksters of Wall Street nearly wrecked the American economy and nobody got arrested. But try blocking traffic and you will be hauled off to jail.

...Goldman Sachs got not so much as a summons when it sold investors $250 million in bundled mortgages it had to know were likely to go bad.

Nor did Fannie Mae, when it faked its earnings so that its top people could pocket more than $200 million in bonuses.

Nor did Standard & Poor's and Moody's, after they gave their highest ratings to risky mortgages out of fear they might lose the business of the banks that were peddling the toxic stuff.

“I knew it was wrong at the time,” an S&P managing director named Richard Gugliada has been quoted saying. “It was either that or skip the business.”

The list of greed-driven outrages went on and on, but nary a soul got cuffed.
~ from Arrests for Protesters, Not Bankers by Michael Daly ~

In some ways, it's gosh darn ironic that the people protesting against criminality are far more likely to be arrested than the criminals themselves. In truth, unfortunately, it really isn't ironic at all.

For the most part, this is how our system works.

Sell somebody a dime bag and you go to jail. Mastermind the syndicate which distributes the dime bags to street pushers -- you easily can buy off a good number of the police, judges and politicians -- and you get to live a life of extravagant splendor.

Sell your body for sex to earn some money and you go to jail. "Manage" a harem of streetwalkers and somehow the police rarely get around to arresting you.

Risk your life traveling over the border to the US to make a better life for yourself and your family and, if you get caught anywhere along the way, you go to jail and/or get deported. But, far too often, if you knowingly hire illegal immigrants, you might get off scot-free or pay a negligible fine. Oh, and you get to keep almost ALL of the profits you gained from knowingly hiring the illegals.

Kill someone you don't like and, if you're poor and/or a person of color, you go to jail and, possibly, get executed. But if you lead a big corporation that engages in unsafe activities which lead to the deaths and injury of hundreds or thousands, your chances of going to jail are minimal.

On and on and on it goes...