by Barry Goldman
Rich and powerful people commit a vast amount of crime. According to Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, by law professor Jennifer Taub:
White collar crime in America, such as fraud and embezzlement, costs victims an estimated $300 billion to $800 billion per year. Yet street-level “property” crimes including burglary, larceny, and theft, cost us far less – around $16 billion annually, according to the FBI.
But rich and powerful people do not go to prison. There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. None of them are members of the Sackler family, despite Purdue Pharma being responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Sacklers have had to pay out billions of dollars for pushing OxyContin, but they have been able to keep billions more. And none of them has done any time.
This week Martin Winterkorn, formerly the head of Volkswagen and Germany’s highest-paid executive, went on trial. He led the company when it manufactured 9 million vehicles designed to cheat on emissions tests. Readers will recall that the cars and trucks were equipped with “defeat devices” that switched on pollution controls only when the vehicles were being tested. When they were out on the road the vehicles spewed many times the allowable amounts of pollutants and caused unknown damage to public health around the world. Winterkorn’s trial is starting nine years after he resigned from Volkswagen. He is not expected to serve any prison time.
None of the greedy bastards actually responsible for the 2008 financial crisis went to prison. According to the New York Times:
the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution.
If you pay any attention to the news you can supply your own examples of this pattern. Wells Fargo and ExxonMobil come immediately to mind, but the list is very long. Read more »