PETTY CRIMINALS SHOULD LEARN FROM D.C. LEADERSHIP
While the country boils up hate and anger towards our president, his administration and their most recent royal fuck-up, I can’t help but give them some credit for their ability to get away with committing what any sober mindset would be called crime. But in my own city, I watch the future criminals of the country only get dumber and get caught more often.
I want to tell some dumb criminals to start learning from politicians—specifically people like the 18-year-old arrested last week after crashing his getaway car for robbery, assault, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a loaded weapon and receiving stolen property, according to the San Francisco Chronicle account.
According to the article, this youngster and a buddy spent an evening robbing random people at gunpoint. Slick Rick’s voice sang through my head as I counted their evening’s victims: first, two guys walking down a street, then some guy at a bus stop, and then a couple guys in the Mission.
I was waiting to read that they tried to rob a DT undercover… but instead, one of the victims wrote down the license plate number of the getaway car and one of the fellas got caught. The other guy was apparently smart enough to call it quits.
But I just want to ask this kid how much he got from his evenings’ heists. It wasn’t even the week of the first or the 15th. This kid, and many like him, needs to take a lesson from our leaders in the Fed if he wants to actually get away with his crimes and start adding a little more value to the end result.
I figure all criminals are rational. Meaning, I believe they conduct a cost and benefit analysis before they make the final decision to commit a crime. It’s just that some criminals are less informed or pettier than others and therefore we get to see dumber crimes based on relatively worthless reasons.
If this 18-year-old waited a few years and invested a little more in himself, he could have at the least made an impressive accumulation of other people’s property as in the case of SF State alumnus Joseph Hokkai Tang, who in a period of four years bilked almost $400,000 worth from violin collectors around the world.
Now that is a crime one can appreciate. There was even a rumor going around that there could possibly be a movie about the story. Yes, Tang was caught in the end, but even then he was apprehended at a concert, and only after he finished his violin set, according to the Chronicle.
If an SF State education raises the potential of Tang’s criminal activities to succeed through a four-year and $400,000-span, then there should be no surprise that a degree from Harvard and Yale could get someone like Bush and his buddies an eight-year free-for-all access to all the wealth and resources this country has to offer.
Two wars, trillions of dollars in debt, thousands of Americans sent to die, millions of Iraqis and who knows how many Afghans also sentenced to death, and last but not least, billions in bailouts, rising inflation and recession in the economy at home.
Bush and his buddies come out fine (surprisingly) and we little people are pinned with the bill. We Americans still don’t even know what hit us. Now that is a jack move.
Congressman Peter DeFazio chewed out Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson last week for the $700 billion bailout plan that the administration probably would have gotten away with if it weren’t for the fact that no one in the House wanted to explain supporting it on the campaign trail these coming weeks.
“Paulson himself has got a $50 million bonus, for one year. The same year Wall Street rewarded itself with $60 billion in bonuses… in 2006,” DeFazio said. “We should not be rolled by our Wall Street exec who’s masquerading as Secretary of the Treasury.”
I suppose we have to wait a month or two before they go after that $700 billion. And if American history tells me anything, it’s that these guys are totally going to get away with it in the end.
So a suggestion to future criminals: expand your horizons and stop settling for less. Go to school; get involved with politics or even business. Make lots of trustworthy friends and become a respectable criminal, something the criminal kids can really look up to.
If you are going to go for others’ loot, go for the big booty and collaborate. Conspiracy is not just a loaded word; it’s a way of crime that can save you a lot of time.