Quote:
Originally Posted by Stewart G. Griffin
Just saw this on BBC news here in the UK.
Absolutely unbelievable that this little bastard got off with what amounts to no punishment of any kind.
I'm pretty sure if he was from a poor background or shall we say, was a darker shade on the paint chart, he would be serving more years than he's lived in that place where life's less privileged get sent to when they kill several innocent people.
I also wonder if daddy has a country club in common with the judge...
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Since you're in England, you may not be grasping the subtleties of this case. Fred Couch is President and Founder
(if my sources are correct) of a sheet metal/roofing company. The company has maybe 40 full-time employees. There would also be subcontractors, part-time laborers, and 'contract labor', who would not be on the 'employees' role. Their total yearly revenue is between ten and twenty million Dollars per year. I'm going to guess that maybe one million per year has been after-tax income, in recent years, for the family.
Since the company was founded about the time Ethan was born, and profits would have grown over the years, I'm going to guess that
(beyond whatever wealth is stored within Fred's ownership of the company), the family's aggregate worth
(generously assuming that half of that million-per-year made it into one form of wealth-storage or another), and that wealth accumulation has occurred at that rate, for a very optimistic ten years. That would give the family an aggregate worth of five million Dollars, plus the worth of
their stake in the company. I'm going to guess a total net worth of twenty five million.
The Couch's hideous greaseball of a Defense Attorney doesn't look like he'd cost much. But legal fees have probably already run into the hundreds of thousands. Poor little Ethan has already spent months in expensive "rehab" facilities. This, apparently, has already cost a couple-hundred-thou.
But the real bleeding has only begun. The civil suits from those injured, and from the families of the deceased, will drag on for years, and will consume MILLIONS of Dollars in legal fees. The actual settlements, given the publicity the case has received, and the publicity it WILL receive, will be in the millions
(but we'll probably never know the exact figures).
The aftermath of the accident will
(according to my estimates) will eat up more than half of the family's total aggregate worth. And if I'm
overestimating their worth
(and I probably am), and
underestimating the legal fees and the amounts of the settlements
(or judgements), then
the accident may prove to have cost the Couch Family everything they own.
In my opinion, that's a pretty hefty punishment for a
child, whose primary crimes were drugging/drinking/having an apparently rather
iffy peer group.
Now, regarding the Couch Family's social standing.... I'm sure they do belong to a 'country club'. They may even live
within a 'country club'. Lots of clubs have housing developments within them. Most of those clubs have
no admissions standards at all, beyond a an ability to pay. The Judge may well be a customer - I mean 'member' - of the came club. One can no longer assume that a Judge comes from a 'fine old family'.
My guess is that Fred Couch, the Father, is from a family of blue-collar tradesmen who simply 'made good'. That's the American Dream, after all, and was particularly true of Texas. Having a lot of money, for someone actively involved in construction, would probably not have altered what frequently is a hard-working/hard-playing/big-spending/reckless way of life.
Going from '
Journeyman Carpenter' to
'Construction Company President' is not like going from
'Starving-Law-Student-from-a-poor-family' to
'Partner-in-a-Really-Big-Law-Firm'. I don't think that a person becomes transmogrified in the former process, in the way that one does in the latter. It is doubtful that the Couch Family became
Upper Class, or even
Upper Middle Class, in the process of becoming affluent. They merely became affluent. Where I'm from, their
probable social class is called,
"Rich White Trash".
Ethan's Mother is
still named Tonya. Generally, women in the South with that name
(particularly in Texas, where there was a heavier immigration from Central and Eastern Europe) are descended from Serfs, and are from Pentecostal
(or Pentecostal-like) backgrounds. Today
(in Texas) you'll find them going to gargantuan mega-churches, whose services and edifices resemble football games in football stadiums, rather than the sedate Anglican services in lovely old churches to which you are no-doubt accustomed. Hysteria, rather than rationality, is the 'product' of these religious institutions.
My original name was even worse than 'Tonya'. Our last names were even uglier than 'Couch'. But we legally changed all of that, when we pulled ourselves out of the gutter. When we left college, I'd gone from being (and I'm making these names up...)
'Gooney-Mae Cuppy' to
'Gloria Alstott vanSnootenberg'. And we emerged having gone through hundreds of hours of self-administered speech therapy
(using the audio/video capabilities of our University's Speech Lab), losing our scummy accents... and had learned the intricacies of
Healthy Living,
Prudent Living,
Upper Middle Class Dress and
Genteel Behavior (including enough Child Psychology to successfully raise our brood). From what I can discover about them,
Fred and Tonya Couch did none of that. They just got rich.
Their social class remained unchanged, with the attainment of wealth. If you've read about Elizabeth Taylor's construction worker 'Stallion', Larry Fortensky, then you'll understand the sort of reckless, extravagant, self-destructive lifestyle enjoyed by many in Construction-related industries in America. This, apparently was the world from which the Couch Family came, and the world in which they had remained.
So, this is less a story about
'The Precious Few' (the truly privileged) than it is one of those
'Rags-to-Riches-to-Rags' stories.
As for anti-brown bias in the courts... I don't think so. Anti-poor, maybe: but only because, as has been repeatedly noted here, expensive attorneys get results, and money talks. But here's another case in which a piece of what my friends called
"Rich White Trash" got close to the maximum sentence when she, like poor little Ethan, drunkenly drove 70 in a 40mph zone, and incinerated two resident physicians
(there's a week's good reading here):
Jackson Jambalaya: Karen Irby case She actually went to prison, despite being married to a man whose family are near-billionaires, and among the most powerful and prominent in the state... and
despite being white.
Plenty of people following that trial noted black and brown people in the area, convicted for similar-or-worse vehicular homicides, receiving far
less time. And following the LOCAL news in the Deep South will yield a wealth of daily crimes committed by blacks and browns, which, while equally tragic and depraved, and involving just as many victims as the Couch trajedy, do not make it into International News... or even National News. The sentences are similar to those given Couch. Sometimes they are less. There's no money to be gotten, and there's the
Disparate Impact thing hanging over the heads of the 'authorities'. Too many brown convictions... too harsh sentences given to brown people... You can get into big trouble for that. You have to
over-sentence whites, just to balance the picture. Plenty of black and brown people are put right back out onto the streets, following horrendous crimes.
Poor whites are relentlessly and ruthlessly railroaded in America's Justice System, because they're the wrong color, and because they can't
buy Justice like Ethan's parents did.
I think you should be aware of the
Frankfurt School's nature and agenda, and that America's Mainstream Media seem to follow the objectives of the Frankfurt School. They tend to over-report crimes which help paint a certain picture of world
(Quite Orwellian - and who's to say that Orwell hasn't become a template for them?). That picture shows whites as evil, demonic exploiters, and brown people as noble, innocent victims. Couch's story makes a nice little brushstroke to add to that big picture, doesn't it? Fits the script... Fits the agenda...
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