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.
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.