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Tuesday, 06 June 2006 13:15 |
| Roland Martin
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CHICAGO ?? Comedian Dave Chappelle has a hilarious skit on the DVD, ?®Chappelle??s Show: Season 2 Uncensored,?∆ that reverses the way violent criminals are treated compared to their white-collar counterparts.
Instead of being hauled down to jail, possibly tortured and mistreated by the criminal justice system, the drug-dealing murderer gets the white-glove treatment from the cops, while the corporate exec is treated like a hood rat.
That was the first thing that popped into my mind when the guilty verdicts of Enron??s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling came in.
If
those two fats cats, who spent $38 million combined on their defense,
were looking for any sympathy from this corner, they better keep on
moving.
The
idea that two high-flying corporate executives, used to hobknobbing
with presidents and other world leaders, are going to be spending a lot
of years in jail makes me feel great. What a way to start a holiday
weekend.
Oh,
yeah, we??re supposed to not relish in someone else??s misfortunes, but
after years of watching corporate robbers get away easy, it??s about
time for them to do some hard time.
For
far too long, we have been tolerant about white-collar crimes. If a man
walks into a supermarket and steals a pack of hamburger meat with a
gun, we say, ?®Throw the book at ?¥em!?∆ But when a thief with a Harvard
MBA rips off millions, causes the company to file for bankruptcy and
thousands lose their jobs, then we are supposed to say they lost their
moral compass and offer them a shoulder to cry on.
Not here, and not anymore.
Our
politicians get elected by demanding more prisons be built and more
money spent on fighting crime, but are eerily quiet when it comes to
taking down these corporate criminals. Why? Because they don??t want the
big campaign checks to stop.
When
he was in Congress, Craig Washington sponsored a wonderful bill that
would impose a lifetime prison sentence without parole for any banker
who laundered drug money. The banking lobby worked their tails off to
prevent it from getting passed, and members of Congress didn??t have the
guts to pass it. Of course, they were in a hurry to pass laws creating
federal sentencing guidelines and giving harsher penalties for people
who sell crack cocaine rather than powder cocaine. But to think that
they would go after the people who handle the banking for these thugs
seemed to be too much for them to handle.
Now
that we have seen execs from Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom and now Enron go
down, let??s see how many politicians have the political will to
campaign on going after these crooks who take your money by inflating
stocks, reap huge bonuses, and then jet off with their millions while
you??re left trying to figure out how to pay for college for your
children and grandchildren, and circulate your resume in the
marketplace when you??re supposed to be retired.
Am
I glad Lay and Skilling were found guilty? Hell, yeah. But let??s not
stop with them. Prosecutors, keep up the pressure. Now is not the time
to say we??ve sent a message and stop. No, the right thing to do is to
toss these punks into jail and let them worry about not dropping the
bar of soap in the shower.
When
you get your campaign literature in the mail, find out who wants to get
tough on corporate crime. Go to town hall meetings and grill your
local, state and national leaders on federal sentencing guidelines for
these chumps. Let??s come up with the Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling Fraud
Act that forces judges to hand down longer jail sentences for these
creeps.
If
doing the crime and doing the hard time is good enough for Julio,
Lakeisha and Jimmy, then it might as well be the case for these
corporate kingpins like Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Dennis Kozlowski,
Bernard Ebbers, John Regis and the next guy who wants to dip his hand
into the company cookie jar.
?ÿ
Roland S. Martin, editor of The Chicago Defender newspaper, is author of ?®Speak, Brother! A Black Man??s View of America.?∆
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