Article
12-Ending Class Bias in the Law
“1.
All crimes must be punished. No president may pardon or give clemency
to any in their own administration, or the administration of other
presidents of their party, and all such previous pardons are
overturned. The guilty shall never be allowed to profit from their
crimes. The guilty must pay back all wealth from their crimes and pay
for all damage done to others.”
Class
bias, as much as racial bias, does great harm to American society and
persons. But unlike racism, class bias is rarely addressed in
America. It is far too often invisible or unspoken, an enormous
pretense made that classism does not exist or can easily be overcome.
There
is an enormous class bias in the legal system. A criminal (even an
unarmed one) who steals five hundred dollars from a convenience store
is far more harshly punished than a bank president embezzling
millions. White collar crime is far less punished than “street
crime.” Not only far shorter sentences, but white collar prisons
have a notorious reputation for soft treatment, just country clubs
with high fences where the well off do their time by working on their
tennis game.
Such
bias goes all the way to the top. Corrupt presidents have only rarely
been punished, and far more often, false charges of corruption are
only used as a smear by the opposition. Nixon and Reagan were never
punished for their crimes, while dozens of faux scandals were
invented to smear Clinton and Obama. One Clinton administration
member was actually forced to resign over a single pair of low value
football game tickets. Notably, the worst
thing each president did, Clinton choosing to not halt genocide in
Rwanda and Obama's drone assassination program, were not objected to
by most members of either party.
Presidents
have also misused their pardon power to prevent officials of their
own party and even own administration from being punished. Ford
pardoned Nixon, the man who appointed him, in what was widely
regarded by most as a corrupt deal that cost Ford the next election.
George Bush Sr. pardoned those convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal
for lawbreaking that later evidence showed he himself took part in.
Clinton pardoned wealthy campaign donors, de facto bribery in every
way but name. GW Bush gave leniency to “Scooter” Libby for his
part in leaking the name of a CIA agent, when some evidence points to
Bush himself leaking the agent’s name. This abuse must be ended.
Presidents should always be barred from pardoning their own party and
administration members, since it's a clear conflict of interest and a
way to protect their own criminal actions and associates.
Wealthy
criminals are rarely punished equal to the crimes they commit. Bank
presidents and CEOs who embezzle or defraud routinely negotiate deals
allowing them to walk away with most of what they have stolen. The
list of scandals of the last 30 years is disturbingly long: The
Savings and Loan Scandals, BCCI, Worldcom, subprime loans, underwater
mortages, Enron, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi schemes, Lehman Brothers,
Cendant, MF Global, Fannie Mae, HealthSouth, Tyco, Allen Stanford,
Qwest, Arthur Andersen, Bear Stearns, IMClone, and Adelphia.
All
the scandals named involved billions of dollars, sometimes tens of
billions. Punishment has been limited and rare. Only Madoff received
any substantial prison time, and that is because his victims were all
wealthy elites like Steven Spielberg. A good illustration of the
double standard was Martha Stewart, who got only a few months in a
cushy “prison” for insider trading that gained her about $45,000.
Her business also did not suffer, nor did most of her customers or
the public condemn her the way they would a petty thief, much less
one stealing $45,000. By contrast, most ex-convicts guilty of minor
“street” crimes have a hard time even finding minimum wage work.
Many are barred from some workplaces.
The principle this nation and society should follow is
simple: No one should benefit from crime. Any
punishment should at least be equal to what was stolen or gained,
plus the harm done to victims. Full restitution should be standard
practice. That is even more important than prison sentences.
The prospect of instant poverty will deter millionaire and
billionaire serial criminals. It will also end much of the worship of
wealth, the Mammon so common in mainstream America, a sickness that
in its most extreme form is no different from admiring gangsters just
because they are wealthy.
“2.
All fees, fines, and taxes must be progressive, based on ability to
pay. Regressive taxes, where the wealthy pay a proportionately
smaller amount, are expressly forbidden and must be immediately made
progressive.”
Social
Security is one of the great accomplishments of American society and
government. It changed seniors from the poorest age group to the
wealthiest. But the way it was enacted and maintained is striking. To
keep the wealthy from opposing it, the Social
Security tax is among the most regressive in America. Only the first
$110,000 is taxed. Someone making $110,000 and Bill Gates, worth over
$60 billion, pay the same amount.
Sales
tax, compared to taxes on sales of stocks, is regressive as well. The
single mother buying groceries to feed her family pays higher taxes
on most of her food, up to 10%, than the speculator who pays only
0.0034% when buying stocks. Until transaction taxes and sales tax
match, this is a formula for class warfare, wealth redistributed
upwards from workers to elites. Ideally, the transaction tax would be
between 0.5 and 1%, and so would sales tax. A great intended side
benefit would be its reducing speculation in the stock market, one of
the biggest reasons for instability in the economy since the start of
the century.
Fines
for lawbreaking should also be tailored to income and wealth. A fine
of $500 devastates someone on minimum wage, and the unemployed have
no choice but to serve jail time. But to the wealthy, such a fine is
not even pocket change. In essence, many of the poorest go to jail
for lack of money, while the wealthy are not deterred from
lawbreaking. Were fines made progressive, on a sliding scale as
income tax is, the average cost of fines would decline for most.
Far better to make all fines a percentage of combined
income and wealth, say 0.5% of one’s annual income from all sources
and value of all property and other wealth for a traffic fine, or
one year's income and wealth for a fine handed down for a felony
conviction. Thus (in addition to prison time) someone making the
minimum wage with no other real assets would pay a $10,000 fine for a
felony, while someone making $1 million a year with $2 million in
property would pay $3 million in fines.
Both suffer the same just and equal fate, being reduced
to zero financially for their crime. An added bonus would be that the
law now has far more incentive to go after wealthy lawbreakers, when
now the reverse is true. Thus all the extremely wealthy lawbreakers
in the scandals listed before would have paid billions or tens of
billions in fines, exactly what they deserved, not a single penny of
profit from their crimes.
