Billionaire Arrested and refuses Public Defender!

I used to have a buddy who was on Death Row in Indiana. His main arguement against the penal system that delivered him to where he was, was that rich people NEVER end up on Death Row. Never, ever. And yet capitalism arrested one of their own this week. Hedge Fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam got nailed for insider trading. I couldn't tell if they he had the plastic handcuffs on him or the old fashioned ones. It must have been, at the very least, embarassing for him. We all know he's not going to rot in jail or even be put in the General Population in prison. He will not come out with tattoos illustrating his life-time allegience to the gang he joined inside.

But if you read the Wall Street Journal, voice-piece of US Capitalism, you would think that this guy's arrest is the greatest injustice of the century. Their editorials and articles on our Billionaire criminal warn, "given the public's anti-Wall Street mood" will our friend get a fair trial? Mmmm. I think he can afford a fricking extremely expensive lawyer, the kind that isn't in the phone book. The further shriek, "when Wall Street and business are as politically unpopular as they are now, the media temptation is to chalk up every indictment to greed."

Of course, that's not the Wall Street Journal's temptation. And what's GREED got to do with it, anyway? Well, maybe the fact that he is a billionaire (ie he owns over 1,000 million dollars) and he inside traded for a mere 20 million dollars, is a sign that he is in fact a greedy bastard.

Me, I'm not too concerned about a witchunt here or calls that everyone should be innocent until proven guilty. I have heard more than once from my unemployed sisters and brothers that if they needed to turn to crime to survive that they would. Now if one of us stole $20 million, even without a gun, what kind of sentance would we get and where would our Justice Now! friends on the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal be?

Because of the institutional greed of capitalism more than a few of my friends are suffering. Saturday night I got a midnight call from a friend who's facing foreclosure, he was down at the San Francisco Cow Palace for 22 hours, attempting to save his home, along with possibly 10,000 others in trouble. They're having a loan modification conference there. Another friend said her husband was down there in line till late at night. They are losing their homes (not a currently a crime) because of finance capitalists like Rajaratnam.

I may be helping a neighbor who is fighting for his unemployment benefit after being laid-off as a Hotel desk clerk. The new owners kept postponing everyone's pay check. He complained, they fired him and replaced him with someone cheaper. Now the greedy bastards are fighting his unemployment claim. His sister is on disability and they're also in house trouble.

To really make these billionaires pay, we need to take away their power, take away the system that keeps them in power and democratize from the bottom up, making this world in the image of what working people need not what these greedy swine want.