$670,000 Fine for Illegal Downloading

No country can possibly survive with a “justice” system this lopsided.  I guess it goes hand in hand with CEOs paying a lower tax rate than janitors.

Joel Tenenbaum, a former Boston University student, was fined $670,000 for the heinous crime of downloading and sharing thirty songs.  Off with his head!  And the Corporate Arm of the Republican Party — formerly known as the Supreme Court — has refused to even review this case.  Who’s this Tenenbaum fellow think he is, anyway — a corporation?

It’s not what you ripped off, it’s WHO you ripped off.  Now if this college punk had stolen billions of dollars from shareholders and bank depositors, he’d be getting a promotion and a larger bonus next year.

Stealing about $45 worth of songs from the all-powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on the other hand, is a much more serious crime.

There are too many examples of America’s huge sentencing disparity.  Here are just a few:

Set a fatal booby trap along a popular hiking trail — which by a roll of the dice didn’t ensnare anybody — and you get charged with misdemeanor Reckless Endangerment.

This column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. has some incredible — as in “you can’t make this shit up” — reports of absurd crime sentences.  Thirty years to life for stealing a VCR.  A woman shoots a gun into the air in order to scare off her enraged husband who had been strangling her — twenty years.  (The husband wasn’t charged with a crime.)  Another woman finally shot and killed her husband after he had been beating and kicking her for three days straight — fifty years.  What happened to that “Stand Your Ground” meme that conservatives have been spewing out en masse?

In the case of Joel Tenenbaum’s $670,000 fine, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Supreme Court isn’t interested.  A lowly individual versus the RIAA — in mean, come on.  Not that the Supreme Court has a pro-corporate bias or anything like that.  Just because Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto, and Scalia’s son is a Wall Street lawyer fighting on behalf of bank CEOs…

Supreme Court to Big Business: “We’ve Got Your Back”

Give us your poor industrial polluters, your huddled corporate conglomerates yearning to breathe free…

The Supreme Court has struck two more blows for Freedom and Liberty. Hardworking Americans will no longer be oppressed by femi-nazis, class warriors or treehugging environmentalists.

Wal-Mart can keep on discriminating against women without any further whining from them women’s libbers or meddling government bureaucrats. And this time the Corporate Arm of the Republican Party ruled unanimously. There weren’t any token dissenters pretending to care about the riffraff.

In another unanimous ruling — might as well drop the pretenses and the crocodile tears — the Politburo ruled in favor of greenhouse gas emissions and against the ozone layer.

Several state governments and conservation groups had filed a federal lawsuit to force reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The Court ruled that only the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to reduce emissions. Well, that boxes the compass, since Congressional Republicans are determined to withhold the funding that would allow the EPA to do its job.

Now THAT’S teamwork.