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The Coming Corporate "Crime Wave"
Submitted by William L Anderson via The Mises Institute,
In a recent appearance before Congress, Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates declared that the US Department of Justice is going to ratchet up its prosecution of individuals employed in corporations as part of a larger push against “white collar crime.” There is no doubt that such prosecutions will be very popular to a large section of voters, given that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O’Malley, along with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren pretty much have declared that nearly all American businesses are part of a massive criminal conspiracy that must be brought down by federal authorities.
Within the next year, we should expect to see mid-level business and finance executives doing “perp walks” in front of the news media, as federal prosecutors will charge them with various “economic crimes” in hopes that they will implicate their superiors. All of us by now know the drill and in a time of anemic economic growth complete with business failures, it won’t be hard to find scapegoats.
Everyone Is “Guilty”
When famed civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate published his now-famous book, Three Felonies a Day, it caused quite a stir. Going through a number of very disturbing cases, Silverglate made clear that if federal prosecutors want to target an individual, it is very easy to fashion criminal charges against them.
To prove his point, he noted how the federal prosecutors in New York when Rudy Giuliani was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York regularly played a game in which they would see if various celebrities and others, including Mother Theresa, had broken federal criminal law. The result, unfortunately, was that for each person no matter how good his or her public character, a federal statue existed that would place them in prison.
Being that Giuliani’s prosecutors — and Giuliani himself — regularly committed felonies by selectively leaking grand jury information to favored journalists in order to damage the ability of accused people to defend themselves. He also did it to stoke the fires of the anti-business mobs, and these prosecutors were quite familiar with how to fashion the ever-malleable federal statutes to turn ordinary acts into crimes. During the 1980s, when Giuliani was at DOJ, the New York office engaged in a massive show of force against Wall Street firms and other business enterprises in large part to enhance the coming political careers of Giuliani and others who worked under him, and to appease the anti-business Democrats and Republicans who were anxious to declare to roll back what they called the “Decade of Greed.”
Is a New Wave of Crackdowns Coming?
Federal prosecution of business figures tend to come in waves. During the Great Depression, prosecutors tried to claim criminal behavior by businessmen was responsible for the lengthy economic downturn. During the 1980s, Wall Street rivals of Michael Milken and others who challenged the established financial firms were the quiet-but-effective engine of prosecution, combining their political connections with Giuliani’s ambition to nearly destroy the alternative capital funding machine that was overturning the corporate status quo with new startups and shakeups of existing firms.
Because Milken had become wealthy through his financial dealings, he became the symbol of “greed” by the Democratic Left, which at that time was facing a loss of influence during the Ronald Reagan years and was desperate to regain its former status of America’s “conscience.” Going after Milken mollified both the Left and the Republican establishment on Wall Street, as the “old money” firms were happy to see Giuliani eliminate the competition.
After the spectacular failure of Enron and other firms that depended upon Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve System policies of easy money, policies that ended in the Tech Bubble meltdown in 2000 and 2001, the George W. Bush administration went after people like Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and others who had high-profile CEO jobs. In the lynch-mob atmosphere that inevitably follows the bust cycle of Fed-induced business cycles, it was not hard to convince Americans that the corporate bankruptcies and the subsequent recession were the handiwork of criminal executives.
I have written about federal criminal law and its abuses for more than a decade and have not changed my viewpoint. No matter how often writers and activists expose the consequences of expanding federal criminal law, the law expands anyway. People are elected to Congress on platforms of “being tough on crime,” and large crowds heartily approve when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren call for more business executives to be thrown into prison for unspecified “crimes.” (They demand the Beria approach. Beria, who was the head of the original KGB, famously stated: “You bring me the man, I'll find you the crime.”)
A Winning Political Strategy
The current public mood is ugly, and perhaps for good reason. Although the official rates of unemployment are relatively low, statistics clearly show that huge numbers of potentially-employable people have left the job market altogether because they know that finding meaningful employment is highly unlikely. We know that in percentage terms, labor participation in the workplace is at near-record lows. We also know that, economically speaking, the economy is stagnating and that individuals continue to be squeezed as real pay fails to keep up with creeping-but-real inflation. In short, people are angry, and they want someone to pay.
Many angry people have found a political home with candidates like Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom speak to voter frustrations and who also find perfect scapegoats for vengeful Americans. Bernie Sanders blames businesses and entrepreneurs for “greed,” while Trump blames immigrants. Economically speaking, neither Sanders nor Trump is correct, but it doesn’t matter; angry voters don’t want facts, they want scalps.
Ever since sociologist Edwin Sutherland during the 1930s came up with the term, “white collar crime,” politicians and the media have claimed that businesses often are little more than criminal enterprises. Certainly the current political climate reflects that sentiment and more. Furthermore, politicians are appealing to voters with proposals that would destroy capital formation, criminalize much of entrepreneurship, and make it much more difficult for business firms to engage in normal activities.
In a recent campaign speech, Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton declared, “We’re going to go back to enforcing labor laws. I’m going to make sure that some employers go to jail for wage theft and all the other abuses that they engage in.” Few candidates of either party are willing to stand up for businesses and entrepreneurs, and as the campaign rhetoric becomes more inflammatory, federal prosecutors are going to find it increasingly easier to charge business owners and employers for law “violations” that might be called “criminal” even if they never were intentional, according to law professor John Baker.
Selective and Politically-Motivated Prosecution
Because there are so many business owners and executives, and because federal prosecutors cannot go after everyone, it will be a crapshoot as to whom prosecutors select for “the treatment.” For the most part, those targeted will not have political connections (such as many Wall Street executives), nor will they be people involved in “green energy” ventures, such as those businesses tied to people like Al Gore.
When people think of so-called business crimes, they think of embezzlement, firms falsifying information, tax evasion, or to engage in fraud while performing services under contract with the government. For example, say that Ajax Company is supposed to build tanks for the US Army and is paid on a cost-plus basis. The company then bills the army for a number of tanks it did not build or for phantom services, with the company CEO and his mistress putting the fraudulently-obtained money in a Swiss bank account.
This certainly would fall under anyone’s fraud statute, and if the government were to prosecute just those kinds of cases, few people would object. However, government fraud statutes are incredibly malleable and can apply to conduct that would seem to be legal. In an article I wrote for Regulation six years ago, I point out Enron’s practice of placing “non-earning assets” into “special purpose entities” was legal and also was made known to Enron stockholders, yet federal prosecutors decided to include those actions under the umbrella of “Honest Services Fraud.”
Prosecutors wanted jurors to believe that even though Enron’s activities met federal laws and regulations, nonetheless the company undertook those actions in order to present the company to stockholders and others in a false light, making the company’s financial condition seem better than it really was. Thus, it was left to the jurors to determine whether or not this action truly was a violation of the law, even though the original act did fall within the letter of federal statutes and regulations.
One can see immediately where there is a problem. Under most state laws governing crime, there often is no doubt that an actual crime was committed. The question is not whether someone broke the law, but rather who broke it, the defendant or someone else.
Federal Law Is Ambiguous Enough to Allow Prosecution of Nearly Anyone
In the federal system, however, jurors often are asked to decide whether or not someone actually broke the law and, thus, broke federal statutes. Jurors, who usually have no legal training, then are asked to determine whether or not a highly-complex deed that they may not understand was a legal violation, and more often than not, if jurors don’t understand it, or if they deem the defendants to be less-than-savory, they will vote guilty as a default position.
Furthermore, federal prosecutors have such leeway that they are able to pile on numerous charges that might be based from a single endeavor, thus creating a situation for defendants in which they either can chance going to prison for decades (and federal prosecutors almost always win at trial) or plead guilty. (I have a well-known friend who was charged with “Honest Services Fraud,” because the US attorney believed that the fees he negotiated with his clients were higher than they should have been. The prosecutor did not allege that he had defrauded his clients per se, since he charged the clients the fees upon which both parties agreed, but that because the fees were higher than fees other lobbyists charged their clients, then they simply had to be illegal. So, according to federal prosecutors, one can negotiate fees in daylight with all parties agreeing and still be breaking the law.)
Federal prosecutors also are notorious for appealing to the prejudices of juries. When the late Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were on trial in Houston, Texas, prosecutors appealed to the fact that when Enron collapsed, a lot of people lost money. (That Skilling and Lay also lost most of their income and wealth in the same collapse apparently was irrelevant, and prosecutors claimed that any act of Lay and Skilling diversifying their own personal financial portfolios — although both men held most of their wealth in Enron stock — was an attempt to knowingly bail out of a sinking ship.) Because the trial judge also was openly hostile to the defendants, prosecutors pretty much were able to do and say what they wanted without fear of legal repercussions.
Rudy Giuliani once noted with amusement that people charged with “white-collar crime” were more likely to “roll over” than were hardened criminals. Part of the reason is that most people, and especially business owners and executives who do try to obey the law, are horrified at the prospect of being charged criminally and going to prison. Because federal prosecutors can easily fashion charges that often defy defense, it is not hard to understand why business people plead guilty.
If Barack Obama and US Attorney Loretta Lynch decide to target business people, prosecutors will find plenty of targets. Because violation of regulations can be rolled into the “fraud” and “conspiracy” statutes — even if the violations were unintentional or the “targets” were unaware of their existence — it is not hard to find subjects to prosecute. Being charged in such conditions is more like “winning” an “unlucky lottery” than engaging in actual criminal behavior.
That turning the business community into a wreckage of criminal charges will have long-term effects on the willingness of entrepreneurs to risk their own assets will be no deterrent to people like Obama and Lynch. Neither of them have a minute of business experience, and they truly believe that businesses themselves probably at best are unethical entities or at worst caverns of criminality, so they most likely believe they are doing Americans a favor by throwing more people into prison. One only can feel sympathy for people and their families who at the present time have no idea that someone from the US Department of Justice is planning to wreck their lives over at worst what might be a legal technicality.
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Please start with Dimon..
Let's see if they start with the actual criminals. The fed and their banker ilk always walk free.
Really, "...it won't be difficult to find scapegoats."
Fuck me runnin', it won't be difficult to find criminals. Start with the banksters.
Fucking JEW propaganda for Kardashian followers.
Hank the corrupt fucking thief Paulson will never spend time with Bubba. Or Jamie, or Lloyd, or Corzine, or any of the other myriad of scumbags government handlers.
none of this is really necessary. Prosecute the fed for counterfitinng. It all flows from there, and much, if not most, of it will be gone once the fed is abolished
Corporate power and government power are two heads of the same corrupted beast. No way in hell the people in government will actually go after the ones who are feathering their nests. If people believe government has the moral authority to judge corporate misdeeds, we are not paying attention. Look at the blood (literally, hundreds of thousands now) on government's hands. Many of those at the top of corporate America are guilty, absolutely. But the government is in zero moral position to be the judge of anything at this point.
As Hillary has always said:
@richard chesler re jew propaganda; and re: "...if federal prosecutors want to target an individual, it is very easy to fashion criminal charges against them"
it's an oldie but goodie:proto #15 para 15:
credits: proto #15 para 15: http://tinyurl.com/qxjztmn
@richard chesler re ""Fucking JEW propaganda for Kardashian followers"
again, oldie but goodie: proto #13, para 3:
credits: proto #13, para 3: http://tinyurl.com/qxjztmn
Toss up with Blankfiend.
Corzine first...then blankfein, then Dimon....and onward. Let banks loan money and pay interest and stop manipulating markets
Yates is just another press whore trying to get headlines before she joins a white shoe law firm as a partner. Many of the crimes the USDOJ prosecutes now as criminal offenses used to be civil crimes where there was no jail time attached. The white collar defendant had to return illegal profits, pay a fine and, if a broker, get banished from Wall Street. Thanks to the threat of jail, white collar defense lawyers became multi-millionaires from the enormous fees they now could charge. Congress passed laws making every securities violation subject to ten or twenty year prison sentences, federal judges imposed those higher sentences and law firms raked in the profits. In a lot of ways, the USDOJ is run like a Mafia protection racket shaking down corporations. The USDOJ now fits the definition of a Mafia RICO enterprise. Complete with paid hitmen.
Free Corzine
Wonder how much the author was paid by the Banksters for this attempt at an article.
This is doublspeak for prosecuting YOU for taking your money out of the bank and hiding it under your mattress.
Until Dimon, Blankfein, et al are walked it's merely kabuki theater.
Exactly.
And why can't those toadies at the D.O.J. find Jon Fucking Corzine?
The theater is dead, long live the theater.
During the financial fraud crisis of the 1980's the DOJs and AGs indicted over 700 financial criminals. This time, Eric "Fast & Furious" Holder zero.
They make a mockery of our so-called "justice" system.
Corzine, Mozillo, etc walk the streets free while some poor slob going for a harmles joy ride will get minimum 5 years for Grand Larceny.
It's hypocritical to keep bashing countries like China for their corruption ... it's almost a case of 'the pot calling the kettle black.'
i have a list but the doj wouldn't be interested in those criminals because they are fellow maggots.
Oh perfect, we'll have the largest criminal gang prosecuting smaller gangs. Law is a form of art to the criminal mind, representing no more than an end to their means.
As soon as they bring up charges on federal politicians for writing bad checks, someone please let me know ;-)
"Within the next year, we should expect to see mid-level business and finance executives doing “perp walks” in front of the news media, as federal prosecutors will charge them with various “economic crimes” in hopes that they will implicate their superiors."
Why not just go after the superiors? This sounds like yet another chicken-shit way for the federal prosecutors to let the big guys go free and the little guy ends up serving the time.
Have the superiors do the "perp walk", then offer immunity to the minions in exchange for their implication of the boss and watch all those little fuckers line up to get their drop of blood...
They'll crack down on the little guys and run them out of business so the TBTF's can get absorb them like the Blob.
Pretty much.
Go after, prosecute, then jail the ones who wrote loans. Then turn with a sneering smile and appoint the one who "knows all about CDO's inside & out and can fix this mess!"...as the fucking Treasury Secretary.
Yes...I'm talking about Little Timmy Geithner ;-)
So things are going to be THAT bad they are already planning public appeasement?
Situation in Germany is getting worse by day. Communities now report every empty house. If a house is empty, they have to take 'refugees'. German people in community houses are kicked out. Some of them rented for 22 years.
The interior minister of the Saarland says: We don't know the real numbers anymore. There is chaos in Germany today. The state has lost control.
His state - the smallest state in Germany with 2,000 km² will take 40,000 refugees (this and next year) alone. 5 Percent of the entire population. Half of what America (with 9 million km²) gets within year.
He talks to other German interior ministers every day. The situation is dire. Some of them don't even know if they have 250,000 or 200,000 refugees.
THEY ARE NOT MEXICANS. THEY ARE MUSLIM.
In his words: They don't want to touch the hands of German DRK woman (German Red Cross) - because they are not pure. The refugees have strong demands and get angry very abrupt. Weapons were found near refugee camps.
Some camps were built for 500 people. They now house 5,000 people. Mood is - understandably - aggressive. About 1 toilet for a hundred people.
They also did the first mass theft - Zalando - a big German shoe seller - reported a theft of over 600 shoes. Some of these refugees have never seen a good doctor in their entire life. I am talking about Afghans.
They have all sorts of illnesses - some of them not seen in Germany in a long, long time. Forced prostitution, drug deals, illegal weapons, etc. are common - according to Germanys top police commander.
100,000 Afghans leave Afghanistan per month right now. Many changed their destination from Iran to Germany. From Syria to Germany - some families did the journey within a month.
Lighten up. Soon they will be able to go home!
NWO: Communism by the back door
Exposing Khazars (15 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4FgrJpfNTU
Published on Sep 29, 2015"The Khazars, The Greater Israel Plan, Know your enemy""
Irreversible. Civil war imminent. And yet another civilization "gone with the wind".Sweden is already lost. Britain and others closing in rapidly.I'll finally admit today that world war is a sure thing now.
These Germans should invest in Shrimp, and then shrimp the fuck out of the place before they leave.
and leave an upper decker for good measure.
First Corzine. If he is not on the DOJ list its all a sham and they can kiss my ass. Is that someone knocking at the door?
I'm not buying any of this. Show me ONE - just one - CEO or president of one of the too big to fail banks with handcuffs on and doing a perp walk then I might have to reconsider but not until that happens.
You can indict a ham sandwhich - isn't that what they say?
Exactly. And the whole "hoards out for the blood of those good ol' boys that are so misunderstood" is simply ridiculous.
They could have prosecuted any CEO of a bank that was involved in robo signing scandal but they did not.
Any HFT operation is breaking securities laws or regulations....
They do not have to look far or deep.. They chose not to.
"The coming"?
That's like the article the other day of "Rumors" of CIA drug running....
they are talking yhrough their hat. there will be no prosecutions. there will be no rate hike. there will be nothing but more of the same.
Political "dog and pony" show; the least favored corporations will be targeted and IF and only IF necessary, a big corporation could be targeted and perhaps a major high level scapegoat could go to jail with a Presidential pardon in the end. Nothing new here; just political rhetoric to keep the Sheeple distracted.
Why not prosecute every individual in a high position in government? They are all quite clearly guilty of treason, after all. What? Not interested?
Piss off NGO'S, special interest groups, and Clinton Foundation Think tanks. K-street is going to become Detroit.
Laugh now, cry later. Pick up the free whinning magazine.
The Pogroms can't come soon enough.
Why wait on phoney trials, piddly fines, and slap-on-the-wrist convictions which will allow them out on early release anyway?
when there is a firing squad for bankers I will be happy
What great news!
Good thing we've kept it at bay with QE1 - QE4... more ZIRP... the introduction of NIRP... and the current account being $18 trillion in the hole and counting!!!
If you still don't understand..'get it'..?
Genuinely read for the sake of your human dignity- http://archive.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico34.1.html
Could be a sanity test?
This guy would sound more legit if he washed Jamie's nut-oil out of his mouth before implying the injustice of prosecuting corporate mega-criminal shitbags.
But Eric Holder, former Just-Us department head told us if your a big corporation/bank your too big to prosecute.
If your a larger corporation or CEO giving out millions to Obama and other DC politicians your even immune to murder.
Only ones jailed are the small people.
"Will Leroy from janitorial and Delores from accounting please report to HR, someone from the DOJ wants to speak with you."
Until that Corrupt bitch from NC charges the Obamas and Holder the DOJ is a shit joke.
first there's an election year coming up, read articles where the billions in fines the big banks paid holder, a lot of it was divided up amongst democrat candidates.
if they want to put some sunshine on Americas frauds, start with the fed.act in 1913, which dissolved a constitutional america.
in 1930 Americas constitutional federal republic govt was dissolved, and changed during the bankruptcy.
since 1938 we're longer a united states of america, go back and convict the oath takers from back then, in those years, it's all relevant to where we stand financially today, and where your children, and grand- children are headed.
Time to compile a list of activists and alternate media truth-tellers. One by one they may be imprisoned for using pseudonyms online, or having a routers WiFi unencrypted.
Then I'll take Incarcerex: https://youtu.be/LTYl-m-2Zho
So end democracy: to the sound of thunderous applause.
Entertainment and anger management for sheeple who will never see the forest for the trees. The engineers of the system will go unmolested whilst productive scapegoats will provide the supposed pressure relief valve. Should do wonders for whats left of the real economy.
The Apex predators are the criminals at the Federal [sic] Reserve System, Goldman-Sachs, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, J. P. Morgan, other investment banks, the other Too Big To Inconvenience banking and other Too Big To Inconvenience FIRE corporations. It should be a national priority to prosecute the criminals at the Fed. They should be at the top of every Law Unenforcement persecutors wish list.
"Federal Law Is Ambiguous Enough to Allow Prosecution of Nearly Anyone"
That is an undeniable truth, as are the political motives underlying selective prosecution (or Null Pros.) of white collar crooks.
So long as it's not any bankers, right? They don't do perp walks, just pay fines, and don't admit guilt.
Sorry, Dot.Gov, you lost your credibility about 200 years ago. How about you prosecute some politicians, too. Lock those crooks away, and you may have a shred of decency left in you.
The perps will only do the walk when the entire economic system completely fails, and implodes. The masses will be judge, jury, and executioner, plus grave digger.
End of story.