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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

It used to be possible. [1]

Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron CEO is serving 24 years.

However, there is a strong argument to be made that ever since Enron, the SEC has been defanged.

Taking a brief look at their list of accomplishments, it seems that these days, they just levy fines, instead of jailing criminals. [2][3] (Contrast the punishments for the financial crisis, vs low-level insider trading. The companies involved in the former pay fines, the people involved in the latter go to jail.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

[2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/enf-actions-fc.shtml

[3] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml

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Good example, but minor correction: Skilling is serving 14 years, resentenced from the original 24 years.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-enron-ceo-jeffrey-skil...

It's not just the SEC. McDonnell v United States has basically made official corruption impossible to prosecute unless the participants are paint-drinkingly stupid in how they go about it.

The charges against Samsung and Enron CEOs are completely different.

Former, it's bribery. Latter, some insane level of securities fraud / book cooking.

Judges would come down harder on the latter.

But it's an interesting question.

Basically this is equivalent a major U.S. company like Boeing or Disney indirectly bribing close friends of Trump to gain political favor.

I'm not exactly a Trump fan, but why is Clinton's daughter rolling into a $600.000 job at NBC straight out of college not considered 'bribing close friends for political favor'? The US is so fucked up politically..

Are you talking about Chelsea Clinton? According to Wikipedia, she didn't exactly get that NBC job "right out of college". She graduated from Stanford in 2001, got a masters degree at Oxford in 2003, did some consulting work, went back to school to get another masters degree at Columbia in 2010, and then she got hired by NBC for $600k in late 2011. So yeah, if by "right out of college" you mean "a year after getting her second master's degree" you are correct.

Oh, and while she was working at NBC she also got her PhD in international relations from Oxford. That's not really relevant to your claim, I just found it very impressive.

A better parallel is a USA Vice President's son getting a Board of Directors' slot in a foreign oil company[0].

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27403003

Regarding Chelsea Clinton: in reading her various writings from the email leaks, she strikes me as both highly intelligent and insightful (speaking as no fan of her parents).

Chelsea Clinton's job was payment so that access could be retained to her parents and would have paid incredible dividends if Mrs Clinton had one. I also seriously doubt anyone would call for her to leave her post if that had happened, heck they would probably have her interview her mother.

The simple fact is that children of political power centers get special favor because those interests want access to the parents

She only worked that job from 2011-2014...

What kind of things did she write that made that impression on you?

If I'm remembering correctly (I'm not the person you asked), she wrote some insightful commentary about what was going on in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

Having the Clinton's connections does more to open doors at Stanford and Oxford than any combination of grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities.

And coming from a family with money makes it a lot easier to spend years in school without working.

Elite schools exist to help the ruling class maintain their position from generation to generation.

Yes. Giving more people elite educations used to generate more elites but we are well past that point now. There's a real jam in the system where qualifications are not getting people the anticipated positions.

I'm not really sure what your point is. Jay Lee of Samsung also did his graduate work in business in Japan and later PhD at Harvard -- though he dropped out without finishing it.

So what explains her lucrative employment at NBC and McKinsey at eye-popping salary for someone did done nothing, but go to school and sit pretty as a daughter of influential politicians?

Yah, I mean, the Clintons are interesting. Bill is a Rhodes Scholar, Hillary is Wellesley & Yale. Nothing to brush off for sure. Chelsea and a PhD, again, no small feat.

I dunno, on one hand I really respect that level of commitment to learning, especially at an entire immediate family level.

What sorta boggles my mind is Hillary's complete fuck up of the election. And maybe this is because either: A. She's still a novice compared to how far the right wing will go to bury her (I guess they hate her more than no other - a driven woman) B. Her hubris is bigger than Trump's (doubtful)

My wife was really bummed she lost. She even took pics with my 3yr old daughter on a 'historic' day.

We'll see a woman president soon I think and hopefully she's more in touch than Hillary was. Who knows, maybe Chelsea (altho I think the Clinton name is prob done in the whitehouse).

There are plenty of driven women in the Republican Party. Hyperbolic attacks like that at best distract from any good points you may have made and simply serve to further divide us. Trump got the republican vote that Bush and Romney got. Hillary lost because a large number of Obamas voters didn't turn up to vote for her.

This. Trump did not win because he is in any way better than Hillary. He won because the people who supported Hillary never showed up to vote. As close to a win by default that one could get.

Seems to me like they did show up. A 3 million popular vote spread is pretty significant. Of course, the popular vote isn't what wins an election, but those people certainly showed up.

The popular vote is irrelevant to US politics. Hillary clearly lost because the voting base that normally shows up for Dems did not show up for her. Trump did no better than previous Republican candidates.

http://www.politicususa.com/2016/11/09/graph-shows-hillary-c...

This graph is deliberately misleading, especially for the point you're trying to make. Starting the Y axis at 52k creates a visual exaggeration of the difference between turnouts, and omitting elections prior to Obama obfuscates the fact that Obama's election turnout was a historic and unprecedented outlier. If you include previous elections, it will show that Hillary Clinton received more votes than any other candidate in history besides Obama.

Obama's record breaking turnout does not represent "the voting base that normally shows up for Dems".

Even people with two masters degrees don't get $600k jobs. There is an unexplainable 5x multiplier here.

I know people who make 600k with zero masters degrees and whose parents weren't the President. This sort of income is almost enough to buy a house in New York City and have a couple kids!

What I meant was "someone whose qualifications is solely having two masters degress, especially in a non-technical area", and "$600k at media company, not investment banking et al".

Yeah, I just want to temper people's expectations with the reality that the dollar is worth way less now than it was when people were establishing their intuition about it. My parents 2500 sq ft house that I grew up in was less than $200,000. These days, a studio apartment is one million dollars. (Not an apples to apples comparison, we lived in the suburbs of Chicago and my apartment pricing is for places like NYC and SF, but still... Chelsea Clinton can save an entire year's salary and not own a place to live. It sounds like a ton of money, but it's really not.)

Given that (national) networks routinely pay 7 digit salaries for the most minor talking head celebrities, on and off camera, I wouldn't say this was particularly "shocking".

There's definitely a line between unfairly misusing your name and not being allowed to profit from it, but nonetheless.

"...why is Clinton's daughter rolling into a $600.000 job at NBC straight out of college not considered 'bribing close friends for political favor"

Because you have not shown any evidence that NBC is treated favourable by the Clintons for this favour.

She's famous and has unique insight, that has quite a bit of value.

It would be great if you could provide evidence that this occurred, and that it was bribery in particular. There are many possible reasons it could have occurred; I feel that we don't benefit from more speculation about politics.

There are allegations going around that Trump has been bribed with a 19% stake in Rosneft.

More substantively, Trump has businesses around the world which he's refused to put at arms-length. It's almost impossible for him not to be accused of gaining personal benefit from political decisions, as there's no way of disproving or dissociating the results.

It's almost like they formed a commitee to ensure such a terrible thing would never happen again.

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