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The Golden Age of White Collar Crime

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
I came across a rather interesting, in-depth article about the corruption and moral rot at the elite levels in society: We're In A Golden Age Of White Collar Crime

OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.

And why wouldn’t they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Even within the dwindling number of prosecutions, most are cases against low-level con artists and small-fry financial schemes.

With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites. Pharma frat boy Martin Shkreli, to pick just one example, wasn’t prosecuted for hiking the price of a drug used to treat HIV from $13.50 to $750 per pill. He went to prison for scamming investors in a hedge fund scheme years before. Meanwhile, in 2016, the CEO whose company experienced the deadliest mining disaster since 1970 served less than one year in prison and paid a fine of 1.4 percent of his salary and stock bonuses the previous year. Why? Because overseeing a company that ignores warnings and causes the deaths of workers, even 29 of them, is a misdemeanor.

The people aren't unaware of this, as the article notes:

Perhaps the greatest myth about white-collar crime is that Americans struggle to understand it—as if chemical companies toxifying rivers or insurance executives gouging their customers fail to stimulate our moral intuitions. In fact, surveys consistently show that the vast majority of the population considers white-collar crime more harmful than street crime and powerful offenders more odious than common criminals.

Those intuitions are correct: An entrenched, unfettered class of superpredators is wreaking havoc on American society. And in the process, they've broken the only systems capable of stopping them.

As the article mentions, corporate criminality is rather widespread, and it appears the only solution is a tougher crackdown:

“If you follow a company over its life cycle, studies have found that most of them engage in some kind of lawbreaking and almost all of them reoffend,” said Sally Simpson, a University of Maryland professor and the author of “Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective.” “The way you get deterrence is by showing them they’re being watched.”

In a 2016 review of dozens of studies on corporate crime and deterrence, researchers found that nearly every individual strategy for punishing companies and executives had little to no deterrent effect on its own. The only thing that consistently worked was to combine them— warnings from government agencies, surveillance of the worst actors, harsher punishments for repeat offenders and, yes, at the top of the ladder, criminal prosecutions for corporations that refused to shape up.

This is hardly some exotic, untested concept. When it comes to every other form of crime, law enforcement agencies are perfectly comfortable cracking down on offenses at every level. This is the country that invented three-strikes laws and “broken windows” policing. When it comes to street gangs and drug distribution networks, the criminal justice system has no problem simplifying complex criminal liability questions into four simple words: You should have known.

I'll probably have more to say later on when I have time, but I thought the points raised in this article might be an interesting topic of discussion.
 

Howard Is

Lucky Mud
I remember a statistic from Australia a few decades ago...white collar workers committed 90% of crimes that can result in a prison sentence, but only made up 10% of the prison population.
 

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
The Law is supposed to be equal for all.
In any Italian courtroom the sentence "the law is equal for all" is in big letters...
But ....not always.
 
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joe1776

Well-Known Member
I came across a rather interesting, in-depth article about the corruption and moral rot at the elite levels in society: We're In A Golden Age Of White Collar Crime





The people aren't unaware of this, as the article notes:



As the article mentions, corporate criminality is rather widespread, and it appears the only solution is a tougher crackdown:



I'll probably have more to say later on when I have time, but I thought the points raised in this article might be an interesting topic of discussion.
In the past couple of decades the media has been reporting far more cases involving child and spousal abuse than it did say 100 years ago. That is not because child and spousal abuse are increasing. That is because, in 1920, those cases were not reported as crimes. They weren't reported because they weren't punished. In that era, the law supported the notion that "a man's home is his castle." The king could get away with anything short of murder.

There is probably less fraud per-person now than at anytime in our history. It just doesn't seem so because of population growth, better investigative methods and better reporting by the media.

This is not to say that fraud isn't a major problem. It always has been and always will be in a competitive economy because cheaters win if they can get away with it.
 
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Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
The Law is supposed to be equal for all.
In any Italian courtroom the sentence "the law is equal for all" is in big letters...
But ....not always.

That's what it's supposed to be in America. "Equal rights before the law" is the slogan commonly used here.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
In the past couple of decades the media has been reporting far more cases involving child and spousal abuse than it did say 100 years ago. That is not because child and spousal abuse are increasing. That is because, in 1920, those cases were not reported as crimes. They weren't reported because they weren't punished. In that era, the law supported the notion that "a man's home is his castle." The king could get away with anything short of murder.

I don't know the stats on this or whether child and spousal abuse were even considered crimes back then. If they were not in the statutes or considered crimes, then they obviously wouldn't be reported as crimes.

But crimes like stealing, embezzlement, bribery, tax evasion, fraud - these were always considered crimes.

So, I don't think your analogy here works, unless there is a disparity between rich and poor in terms of arrests/convictions of spousal or child abuse.

There is probably less fraud per-person now than at anytime in our history. It just doesn't seem so because of population growth, better investigative methods and better reporting by the media.

We're not talking about "per person," but about the crimes of the ultra-wealthy.

An excerpt from the article:

The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Even within the dwindling number of prosecutions, most are cases against low-level con artists and small-fry financial schemes. Since 2015, criminal penalties levied by the Justice Department have fallen from $3.6 billion to roughly $110 million. Illicit profits seized by the Securities and Exchange Commission have reportedly dropped by more than half. In 2018, a year when nearly 19,000 people were sentenced in federal court for drug crimes alone, prosecutors convicted just 37 corporate criminals who worked at firms with more than 50 employees.

This is not to say that fraud isn't a major problem. It always has been and always will be in a competitive economy because cheaters win if they can get away with it.

In my opinion, they are encouraged and enabled to do so by Americans' blind devotion to a certain ideology which is predominant in the U.S. and other countries.
 

Shad

Veteran Member
I remember a statistic from Australia a few decades ago...white collar workers committed 90% of crimes that can result in a prison sentence, but only made up 10% of the prison population.

A lot of white collar crimes are non-violent and grounded in the corporation, legal entity, which has liability not the owners/shareholders. Prison reform thus reduction of prison population focuses on non-violent crimes first. Ergo a lot of white collar criminals are released. For the corporation often the company is charged not a person thus a person can not serve time when it is a corporate crime. This is why corporations are fined or lose a license instead of having the whole corporate board landing in jail. Toss in direct harm becomes hard to prove as damage to people can take years to build up and/or become known in the case of chemical dumping. Murdering someone has a direct victim. Direct harm is easier to prove than projected (estimated) harm
 

Mock Turtle

Oh my, did I say that!
Premium Member
Here's a chappie who has the right idea:

Thomas Piketty: “There will be another economic crash”

As part of what he calls “participatory socialism”, Piketty advocates policies including income and property tax rates of up to 90 per cent, a public inheritance of €120,000 (£102,000) for every 25-year-old, and a cap of 10 per cent on shareholder voting power. In the postwar Keynesian era, Piketty writes, when the US and the UK levied tax rates of up to 98 per cent, economic growth was higher and income inequality lower. Are such policies feasible in an age of globalisation and hypermobile capital? Piketty’s response was to reject the status quo. “Well, that’s a choice, whether we organise capital controls or not. Some governments, including in the US and the UK, propose to control the movement of people, to control immigration. I prefer to control capital than to control people.” He added: “The view that you can make a fortune in a country by using the public education system and the public infrastructure, and then you have a sacralised right to click a button and transfer the wealth somewhere else, and nobody can track you down, there is nothing natural in this process. It’s a very sophisticated legal system that made this possible.”
 
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