On the heels of President Trump passing criminal justice reform, freeing thousands of non-violent criminals from unfair lives of imprisonment, Democrats are calling for MORE caging of non-violent offenders of laws that only the ruling class thinks are that important.
President Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of avoiding taxes in an illegal way, and for that, he is going to be locked in a cage for 3.9 years. Democrats, instead of calling this sentencing for the unreasonable exercise of government power that it is, are calling it ‘disrespectful,’ ‘lenient,’ ‘an outrage’.
Specifically, Manafort was convicted last August on eight felony counts, including filing false tax returns, failure to register foreign bank accounts and, related to that non-registration maneuver – bank fraud. So basically, he tried to keep more of his money than the State wanted to confiscate from him, got caught, and now has to spend several years of his life in a cell.
The headline to the NBC News post I linked to above has as its byline the commentary of one unnamed observer saying “If you rob a bank you’re going to spend twice as long in prison as someone who steals millions otherwise,” – completely ignoring that bank robberies involve the threat of death and violence to abscond with money, but more importantly – the fact that Manafort didn’t steal from anyone, he just didn’t “comply with the law” that dictates how much the government can steal from him. This is the sort of thing that could be both fixed and punished by a fine – but the sadistic opposition doesn’t want to enforce a law or see a financial deficit filled – they want people associated with Donald Trump to suffer.
Appreciate the gravity of that totalitarianism: This person is going to spend years in a cage – not because he took what wasn’t his – but because he kept what was his. Cool…
Jurors deadlocked on 10 other counts they tried to snag him with, and Investigator Mueller eventually agreed to not retry those charges as part of the plea bargain stuck with prosecutors.
The state could have sentenced the 69-year old Manafort to up to 24 years in federal prison, so the 3+ years he will get now was a let down to those licking their chops to see him thrown away longer. How can elected servants of the people justify such a ghoulish desire for harsher punishment of people who didn’t physically or even financially endanger anyone? Just tack-on some sort of Social Justice meme to the case of course…
Conjuring imagery to illustrate the divide between street crime and financial impropriety crime, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said on Twitter “Crimes committed in an office building should be treated as seriously as crimes committed on a street corner”, but how does she know Manafort was in an office building when he failed to inform the state about money he had in certain bank accounts? Because she’s trying to make the ludicrous claim that assaults, robberies, and murders are morally the same as not paying as much taxes and the government wants you to, without sounding precisely as ludicrous as that actually is of course.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez follows the same goofy logic, tweeting that Manafort somehow bought his way into “only” spending almost 4 years of his life in federal prison…
The dishonesty of this comparison of course bypasses the reality that people with low incomes, by definition aren’t getting large portions of that income stolen by the government and thus don’t commit the crimes of “bank fraud” to evade that theft. Rather, people of low income who receive higher prison sentences aren’t results of a judge looking at their yearly earnings and giving longer sentences to lower earners nor is their sentencing a result of not having enough money to buy a bunch of fancy lawyers to argue in a more articulate way for lighter jail time. People typically get longer prison sentences for having lots of prior convictions, usually that involve violence or the threat of violence. If they can’t control themselves to the degree that they are repeatedly caught by the state harming or threatening to harm other citizens, then yea – they get typically harsher time in punitive cages. If Cortez wanted to be honest about such a comparison, she would have compared Manafort to other first-time-offenders with no violence or threats of violence in their crime, but then she wouldnt have an excuse to call his sentencing “light”, nor have an excuse to rally her supporters about an alleged injustice that they need people like her to advocate against, so… truth goes out the window for dishonest emotional appeals while 70 year old men sit in prison for not surrendering enough of their money to the State.
Cool.