An Iowa woman has been arrested in Sioux Falls for stealing.I guess she knew Santa was going to put switches and a lump of coal in her stocking, so she felt the need to go out and get the necessary stuff to put under her tree.
Sioux Falls police say Becky Jean Altena, who's 51 and from Sioux Center, was caught shop-lifting at the Lewis Drug Store on Tenth and Cliff. But the woman didn't just pick-pocket a few items. Authorities say she was taking bags of merchandise out of the store. Officers say they found 418 stolen items in her car, ranging from cards and books to games and jewelry.
Sam Clemens, SF Police Department says, “She had already been in the store, took stuff, went out, put it in the car, and then came back in and was getting more.”
The stolen items are valued at $2,200 dollars. Altena is charged with grand theft, which is a class four felony.
What would it be like to live in a society where the average person figures 'working and paying for stuff is for schmucks, clever people like me just go take what we need!'. I think Hobbes spelled it out in his book Leviathan: the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I don't buy Hobbes' social contract theory, but his experiences during the English Civil War made him pretty pessimistic about human nature. This woman has the same effect on me.
The updated, more scientific version of this viewpoint is derived from the work by Robert Hare on psychopaths. He points out that there are creatures among us like this woman who think the world is their oyster, there for the taking. No need to contribute. Just take and take and take. Hare sees the world of corporate culture to be rife with psychopaths. Their book Snakes in Suits gives you an understanding of the evil that walks the land. (The books is not that readable or informative. I prefer Hare's book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us.
One thing I find funny and very sad: This woman will probably have more written about her and be punished more harshly than any Wall Street banker. She has done about $2000 in damage. The bankers did about $2 trillion in damage, i.e. a billion times worse. But since the nature of her act and the scope of her crime is so much more understandable, people will read about it. The financial crimes of Wall Street are so much bigger, so much worse, so much more incomprehensible, they won't get written about with a billion times more words and they certainly won't get a billion times as much punishment. The moral of the story? If you steal, steal big. If you want to be a criminal, be a white collar criminal. Your chances of being caught are less and the punishment will be much, much less.
The legal system is nearly topsy-turvy. Here's an example, from the Seattle Times, of the "legal" thinking in the United States where the IRS goes after the poor while ignoring cheats like Bernie Madoff who "made off" with billions:
$10 an hour with 2 kids? IRS pouncesGo read the whole story by Danny Westneat. It is an incredible tale of bureaucratic idiocy and a dysfunctional legal system. The article goes into the "line of reasoning" the IRS uses. It has an Alice in Wonderland feel to it.
Rachel Porcaro knows she's hardly rich. When you're a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don't need government experts to tell you how broke you are.
But that's what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.
It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.
She couldn't believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.
"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "
The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.
"They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."
"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."
So... on the one hand you have people like Becky Jean Altena, Bernie Madoff, and the Wall Street Bankers who will get a rap on the knuckles for their greed and indifference. On the other hand you have a society where the Rachel Porcaro's will be put through a Kafkaesque legal system for a non-existent crime. I contend that this happens because psychopaths have taken over the system. This is all high entertainment for them.
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