America’s Top Prosecutors Used to Go After Top Executives. What Changed? (2017)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The thing is, the "regulatory revolving door", where ex-regulators are appointed to private industry, gives at least a strong proxy measure of intertwined interests of business and US government. It's always hard to be sure what a few even important cases mean.
Real power is of course to write the laws so what you're doing is not a crime to begin with. Ideally it's even subsidized by the government.
That doesn't make sense.
Cases from the past 10 years should be easier to remember, because "historical" or not (this is a needless distinction here), they are (a) more recent, (b) more likely to have been written about in the news/social media/shows/etc one reads than older cases.
The use of "historical" here is a distinction that confuses more than illuminates. Even if "it's hard to remember historical cases from the past 10 years.. because they are not historical yet", it should be easier to remember big cases from the past 10 years, period.
I think the point was events always looks better at a distance..
The usual term for that is “Regulatory capture”.
And quite a few might be further surprised that even in an enterprise which needs to do some illegal things to make money, those at the top insulate themselves from any potential illegal acts and merely hire people to "do the impossible" and are simply happy when money pours in, "as if by magic" not asking exactly how this happens and even accepting assurances that nothing illegal has been done.
Senators are a very integral and powerful part of our current government, and have a far larger per pound effect than food on the politcal environment.
Your argument seems quite disingenuous.
The result is clear: politics in The Netherlands are a factor less toxic than in the UK. This is because there is actually a chance to choose the party who represent you. They don't? Small parties are still an option. In the end a coalition is created and all of the crazy ideas (muslim ban, communism) are quickly lost in the first round..
So far I've voted for VVD (Republican/Tory), D66 (Democrats/Libdems) and Green (doesn't exist in UK/US; the one party who get results on climate change).
So basically full proportional representation would be the best single change you could make in the US and UK systems.
For a smaller change to the rules (but still a big impact), consider approval voting or range voting.
Range voting works like judging figure skating in the Olympics: every voter can give scores between eg 0 to 100 to the candidates, the candidate with the highest average score wins the district.
The first time, it lead to a million dead Iraqis, the second time we are living through right now.
That's b.s. vote shaming. If you lose it's because you failed to convince enough voters in enough places to make you win.
> usually you don't see third party conservative alternatives. and the small third parties don't get any political power in the us system.
Libertarians are considered by many to be closer to conservatives than liberals and even with terrible candidates like Gary Johnson they got three times as many votes as the Green party in 2016.
Gary Johnson Libertarian 4,489,341 3.28%
Jill Stein Green 1,457,218 1.07%Republicans don't bitch that Libertarians exist. For example, if you take the logical conclusion that if all Green voters voted Democrat and all Libertarian voters voted Republican in the last presidential election, then Trump would have won the popular vote.
Democrats don't get to have it both ways.
green party voters are generally thought to be very democratic if they weren't green. i've voted for green party candidates myself, otherwise i'm very likely to vote dem. libertairan voters seem to be more mixed between dem and r but lean r. Here's a washington post article that considers this issue. There are many other articles that looked into it and came to similar results, that green party voting cost hrc. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/green-party-votes-ma...
Even if you want to quibble with a particular article's analysis, with our system it's clear that in close races not voting for a primary party (d or r) could cost them the election.
It was a culture shock coming here: suddenly politics matter, your vote matters. There is actual reasonable debate about the issues. Not the strawman stuff you see in the UK/US. There is a natural limit to the toxicity in politics; if you want to take part in ruling the country you have to be reasonable..
Wouldn't you chose the anti establishment candidate at that point? Yea, he'll probably be just as shitty, but at least there's a chance? I'm against Trump but I'm not surprised at all that large swathes of America voted for him. You can't tell people to follow a system that garuntees their life will be worse in the future and be surprised when they lash out for any sort of improvement
It's entirely a PR thing, which is something we talk about every day on HN. Your actual plan, while somewhat important, is dwarfed by how much people like and believe you. And the credibility of HRC regarding the welfare of people who hate the establishment was low to begin with and collapsed over the length of the election, mostly due to self-inflicted wounds, but also due to Trump being somewhat savvy in that regard.
It is absurd that we have Trump as president but it's not all that surprising. People shocked by it need to visit the Southeast a bit more and drive around towns.
When Obamacare forced us to drop our healthcare and family doctor, when we were giving up on finding a job because the Obama administration was anti-business, we decided we didn't want any more of the Democratic planning. Choosing a successful business mogul who has had some experience with failure, who has rough edges, who rewards loyalty, and who appreciates "common" people, was only surprising to the uncommon people.
>Say you have the establishment candidate says "tough shit" and you believe them because they are reliable.
Even though I think the Democrats have more to offer, say, the rural communities in WI, than the Republicans, they cannot change the demographic and technological forces that are at the root of such voters disillusionment. The Democrats, for better or worse, attempt to stay tethered to objective reality.
Trump came along with grandiose promises of restoring the status of rural and working class Americans, and (apparently) some voters were so frustrated and angry that they voted for this imbecile.
Whenever I see “man on the street” style reporting on Trump voters, the voters themselves come across as imbeciles. I’ve seriously wondered if this was some kind of editorializing (maybe unconscious) by liberal news editors to make Trump voters look bad.
Really,they got nothing from Trump. Set aside all the culture war baggage, and the core argument of substance that Trump voters offer is that Trump is somehow going to “bring (good) jobs back.”
In reality, Trump has been a political wrecking ball, and is riding in the success of all the workers who actually keep America functioning. (In government and private sector.)
He had made everything worse that he gets his hands on.
Like half the population in the US, I keep wondering when Trump voters will wake up to see the naked buffoon, stomping on everyone he can as he fights for survival. I’m worried now they won’t, and we will see more people succumb to totalistic conspiracy mongering. (Like the Qanon fiasco.)
In the meantime, elite workers with the opportunity to exploit the system to their own benefit, will simply continue to do so.
When has politics ever been about logic?
I'm not saying that he is, but historically there are lots of examples of very rich and powerful people that have been anti-establishment and had fights with the regular elites or the state, etc.
If Hillary had won, then the elites would be thinking that all is well and that the system works. Trump is a loud and clear message that things are not well and they need to change. Communicating that message is totally worth 4 years of bad political leadership.
Paywalled, but excellent paper on this phenomenon: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C10&q=low...
It doesn't even have to be a big percentage, and it ends the revolving door. Let our prosecutors make a fortune by ending criminal corporate behavior. As long as it's decided by a jury, they still won't waste their time with sketchy cases.
If they retire early, so be it - there will be hundreds of people eager to fill the vacant positions.
So incentives are alone not the answer; it needs to also somehow be self-stabilizing, and self-correcting, and also not be wrong (because such a structure would be difficult to fix, as its designed to be difficult to edit in the first place !)
Law enforcement can take any asset you have based on an allegation of criminality: not against you but the item itself! You get to prove the innocence of the item in court if you hope to reclaim it.
Of course those abusing that law know very well that the defense is far dearer than the item itself, resulting in your abandoning any claim to the item and net profit to law enforcement.
Now you want to reward prosecution with more perverse incentives? We used to say the power to tax was the power to destroy. These days the power to prosecute is the same, and sort of like I look at every piece of code with the idea "How will the cyber security red team abuse this?" we need to look at any potential law for abuse by over zealous prosecution.
So then prosecutors will refuse to ever settle cases, even when settling is the best choice for all parties except themselves.
Big business will have no problems shrugging off any legal fuckery mainly because the other side knows how much harder any conviction would be.
No thanks.
Pay them very well and have their ability to bring justice be the key to keeping them in their position.
What you propose will create the harmful incentive to always try a case. People lose years of their life, and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, when defending themselves from criminal charges. So even if the person is ultimately acquitted, they will be still be damaged from the process.
And the government wins 93% of cases brought to trial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#United_States
So anyone caught on the wrong end of a zealous prosecutor will be in big trouble.
The DoJ already creates harmful incentives by tracking how many convictions it gets, and striving to get more. That creates an institutonal culture that rewards aggressive prosecutors.
This has bugged me for a while. America is obsessive with one component of cost, but total cost of ownership suffers all the time because of it.
This would be horrible, in my view.
A legal system with selective outrage, fueled by monetary (or other power/political) incentives -- is a sure way to a broken and unfair justice system (which, in turn, would have disastrous consequences).
To make a common person equivalent, in legal power, to a corporation -- (so that a common consumer can fight effectively against a potential injustice),
what simply needs to be done -- is legislating a common contract law framework, so that a corporation cannot choose to a specific/tailored contract terms/escape clauses when providing service/product to a consumer.
(same for environmental accountability).
So that when I buy products (computers, health services, cars, etc) -- The agreement and liabilities I accept, are the same regardless of the business I created the contract with.
This way, reliance on mega bucks lawyers to 'favorably interpret' and to confuse jury -- will be eliminated.
And there was plenty to persecute then for (e.g. laundering money for drug cartels).
At least some of the issues in our justice system stem from not having the resources to handle every case fairly. Every criminal case should be fully investigated and tried in court, but the system would break under these conditions.
So you end up with a highly perverse system based on extortion, and heavily biased depending on socioeconomic status. Sometimes it works "too well", other times it doesn't work at all.
When you award promotions based on, say, the total number or total percentage of successful convictions, then the whole culture starts to optimize for that. Given the sheer number of cases that could be pursued, naturally the easiest-to-win cases will be selected, and more often than not those are small potatoes.
Plus, we have Eric Holder on the record for saying he wouldn't go after bank executives because it could "hurt the economy", a reason I rank right up there with "terrorists attacked us for our freedoms."
This makes it possible to make a case out of ignoring warning signs, ignoring possible whistleblowers about illegal conduct, etc.
Usually the Oversight Authority should be able to set at least some rules of these reports to help them set up the right responsibility (and thus incentive) structure (both for prevention and for whistleblowing).
The prosecutor's don't have this leverage over the rich.
which is the very epitome of injustice. Prosecution should be about finding out the truth, and finding out parties responsible for a wrong (and force them to make amends somehow).
As is the case with Kim Dotcom.
Holder wanted fines, not prison.
The SEC didn't announce it was probing Enron until October 22nd, 2001.
I would have sworn, before I wiki'ed it, that the Enron scandal broke YEARS before 9/11, certainly not just over a month after.
It also had the most fascinating account of Fairfax Financial and a group of traders who shorted the company before trying to destroy it.
It's worth noting that Fairfax sued the group of traders in that story but the lawsuit never went anywhere and was eventually dismissed.
A party, candidate or prosecutor who makes contributors nervous has no chance of re-election.
1. Prosecutors are afraid of losing and protracted court battles with all avenues of appeals pursued - making all but the slam dunk cases unattractive to pursue
2. A great deal of the acts the the public would like top executives to be prosecuted for when examined objectively typically are mix of moral shortcomings, Grey areas, and civil (rather than criminal infractions) - making them easy to try in the court of public opinion and less so in a court of law.
3. A lot of prosecutors don’t have the technical support to parse some do the data/complex aspects of the case - let alone make it digestible for a jury
Curious: So how much would Blankfein be charged in a case like this? Saved at least tens of millions in lawyer fees and that's if he was found not guilty. Maybe his firm is hired to do legal work for Goldman but that can be problematic. $1 Million if the case dropped + hours worked?