If you can't do the time...the priorities of our "justice" system. What a f***ing joke.

Make the time fit the crime, won't you?

A certain man named Douglas Atwell, a civilian contractor working for the US Army, currently is facing 15 years in prison for defrauding the Army of over $1400.00. The invoice in question was ostensibly for ball bearings but in fact the man bought golf balls as he was stationed in Aberdeen and just couldn't resist a trip to the links. The first question that comes to mind, once I've dismissed the notion of how bad a golfer he must be if he needs to buy $1400.00 of golf balls, is how stupid could this guy be?

Didn't be think he'd caught? I mean, this is the US Army, in wartime (supposedly), and he brazenly signs for a shipment of enough Titleists to fill a jumbo pachinko machine??? What a moron, right?

Oh wait, it's been done before, and they got off scott-free. Just not for golf balls. Halliburton and it's evil twin Kellogg, Brown and Root have been over-billing the US Army for years already! Literally millions, probably billions, of dollars have been stolen in all sorts of "accidental" over-billed deliveries and services, repairs and products and managements for the duration of the Iraq conflict, ever since Dick Cheney gave cronies at his old company a friendly yank and a no-bid contract to be the primary civilian contractor and logistical supplier for the war in Iraq. At the moment, when not being swept under the rug (currently the equivalent of trying to sweep an eighteen-wheeler under a bathmat) the news reports tell us that Halliburton is being compelled to repay 8 million dollars for overcharging the taxpayers of the United States of America for failing to deliver food and supplies in a timely manner, over-billing for said services, and a galaxy of other transgressions that range from the shady to the downright fraudulent. Not only was this outright theft but soldiers have gotten sick, been wounded and died from many of Halliburton's careless and greedy failures to meet the standards which they promised to meet and are in fact being paid extremely well to meet. Even if none of it was intentional (hold on, I'm actually choking on my bitter laughter here) it's still a major problem. Just think of how the IRS comes at you hell-for-leather if you make a $12.67 mistake on your tax return!

Of course the Halliburton and KBR legal teams, the best that stolen money can buy, will wage their own little war against the US taxpayers to exonerate their bloody-handed accountants and keep their mitts on every dirty, oil-stained dollar they've stolen. Then the US taxpers will probably be stuck with the bill for that.

So, the news right now says $8,000,000.00 is owed back to the Army. For anyone out there who missed math class or is dyslexic, that's eight million bucks (except on Fox News, where that number changes to $71.05 while Bill O'Reilly starts frothing at the mouth and speaking in tongues as he outlines yet another flow chart pointing all the blame directly at the Clintons). Uh huh. So, we can guess this likely means closer to $25,000,000.00, or maybe even fifty. I'm not kidding. There's no way we're hearing the real number. Even so, let's just toe the line and agree that the real number matches the official tally handed to us by our infotainment media.

$8,000,000.00 dollars, and no one has been charged for a crime. You can bet your own 8 mil that no one from that corporate leviathan will EVER see the inside of a jail cell. Unless it be to visit one of the handful of whistle-blowers who will surely be prosecuted later by KBR & friends under our evolving and draconian set of laws that protect the powerful against the slings and arrows of the weak.

But Douglass Atwell and a co-defendant are almost certainly going to go to jail for bilking the Army for the cost of, say, a pair of Playstation 3's.

$8,000,000.00
- 1,409.00
___________
$7,998,581.00


Umm, someone help me to understand this, because my head is about to implode. To be honest I don't have that much of a problem with prosecuting the guy (though 15 years seems WAY over the top for such a small act of theft...but it's the Army, held sacred by our national conscience, a standard not applied when it comes to super-massive corporations that our gun-happy Vice President once worked for), but if you're going to prosecute a couple of lunkheads for stealing some pocket change, can someone give me a reasonable explanation that doesn't involve a defeatist legal argument why Halliburton shouldn't be held to exactly the same scale?

So, let me do some straight math here...

$1400.00 stolen = 15 years in prison.

...then 1400 goes into eight million roughly 5714 times, so...

5,714 x 15 = 85,710 years.

So, let's send the guys at the top of the Halliburton food chain away for eighty-five thousand years, eh?

Heck, I'm a sympathetic guy. Let's spread that out over, say, 50 people in the company. Aww hell, let's include VP Cheney. So that'll ease the blow a little bit, won't it?

That's 1,681.00 years each.

But you know what? That's not very patriotic. Our country has 52 states, so bearing in mind we left out our fearless leader and the man most visibly responsible for the Iraq deathtrap in the first place, George Herbert Walker Bush, our President, let's add him: That makes a happy 52 defendants and gets those prison sentences down to a manageable...

1,648 years. Each.

One thousand, six hundred and forty-eight years each for the fifty top people at Halliburton/KBR, plus our President and Vice President. Remember, that's the exact same scale at which Mr. Atwell (and friend) is being punished for buying a few cases of Tiger Woods Series balls on the Army's tab. Which I think is pretty damn fair considering that on the one side we're talking about golf balls, and on the other we're talking about hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, billions of dollars wasted, countless millions more stolen in broad daylight from the US taxpayer, and any number of dead, crippled or otherwise blighted soldiers (whom the propaganda machine nevertheless routinely refers to as "Heroes") left in the wake of a few greedy men and women. well, mostly men: remember, the company is in Texas. So they're probably mostly white too.


I think that's fair, don't you?

Anyone know a good lawyer?


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