Who Does It Serve?

A friend of mine posted this to Facebook tonight, and I wonder if someone has written a dissertation or book on this already:

I'm curious, why do people have blood lust over very rare outbursts of theft during angry, chaotic moments? Why are they calling for people to be shot, when no one I've ever heard has asked for embezzlers stealing from a business or worse, stealing from public organizations or charities, to be shot, denied due process or any such thing?

Also, embezzlers often avoid any jail time, often do home arrest and make money online working from home while doing their time.

During the worst of the great recession, the small company I work for laid off nearly half of the staff, and the owners were plowing their own money back in to meet payroll for people who had to work to keep business going. Right then, one of my coworkers decided to steal at least $150k over a couple of years because the accounting dept was too trusting of him.

He was sales manager and made good money already, didn't have any mental health issues or addictions, just wanted a higher lifestyle. He never spent a minute in jail other than getting charged.

We were all really angry but no one wanted him shot.

Her point highlights the way white-collar crime is treated lightly in sentencing, relative to petty theft or burglary. Mafia Mulligan's guys' sentences are good examples of this.

Conversely, I've seen comparisons of our recent physical looting to the Republicans' tax law or the wealth gains of the rich since the pandemic (i.e., which one is the real looting?), but the reason that comparison gets your attention is because it's startling: we aren't used to thinking of those things as looting. Looting is a person carrying away a television set, not a rich person squirreling away another billion in the Cayman Islands.

Which is exactly my friend's point, and she's even more so pointing to the violent reaction to physical looting, vs. the ho-hum reaction to the much larger problem of white-collar theft of money. Not to mention wage theft, which as I've noted before, dwarfs all the other theft in this country, though you'd never know it from crime stats or news coverage. Poor people who steal are the ones we hear about, not rich people, not corporations.

As Hari Kondabolu put it on Twitter right around the same I was thinking of writing this post,

Apparently, it's only looting if you steal less than $500 worth of goods and actually put in some physical labor. Rich people are just doing "capitalism."