Don't rob banks, rob the poor

Please, no matter what you do, no matter how much debt you have or how many student loans you have, do not rob a bank.

I know “Point Break” makes it seem easy, but as soon as you actually do commit the crime, you’ll see it’s less Swayze with surfboard and more like the film “Life.”

If you rob a bank, the bank and the entire force of the U.S. media and government will make sure that your name is plastered on every post office wall, every TV and that every move you make is followed.

And it’s not because, despite what some may tell you, when someone robs a bank, they’re taking YOUR money. It’s because they are taking the bank’s money. And our government takes the theft of wealth from the rich very seriously. Bernie Madoff is proof positive of that. He took money from the haves of this country and is now facing multiple life sentences for it.

But when Dennis Kozlowski along with a couple associates took hundreds of millions of dollars from Tyco, in a situation where it hurt investors more than the company, they got about the same amount of time as the guys who rob banks for a few thousand dollars.

It took the near shutdown of an entire state’s electricity and the disruption of our largest state economy, thanks to the antics of Ken Lay, the former CEO of Enron, with the complicity of Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, for Lay to face prison time.

And thanks to his oh-so-tragic death, not only did he not have to face a maximum of 30 years in prison, but it became even harder for those he defrauded to even attempt to regain the funds that he stole.

Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld (a man, ironically, on the Robin Hood Foundation board) was one of the major characters in the securities fraud that led to our current precarious situation. Despite being investigated for securities fraud and being sued by the state of New Jersey for this fraud, he was still able to sell a mansion he had bought less than four years ago for $13.5 million to his wife for $100.

For less than is charged to every IU student for transportation and rec center fees each year, his wife has a beach-front mansion in south Florida. And there’s most likely nothing you can do about that. The wife of a crooked con artist who helped run this nation to the ground will sit on tropical beaches while you wave your American flag you had to put on a credit card.

Al-Qaeda only wishes they could screw over as many Americans as these atrocities of human flesh have. The destruction of millions of Americans lives slowly, and without blood, attracts less media attention than the tale of two untalented people with too many kids.

Instead of taking action against these people, their friends in media, with the help of “populists” like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have distracted you to worry about government health care, when we all know it should be run by the same for-profit friends that helped steer us in this direction.

Every minute these men are free, every minute they, their wives and their children have anything that can be called an asset, is an affront to justice, freedom and the United States.

These men are nothing more than modern day robber barons, and every minute they face nothing more than a slap on the wrist is our complicity in their actions.