AT&T to pay $23M fine for bribing lawmaker’s ally in exchange for vote

Reading about this man is fascinating. He’s a sort of a composed, calculated, competent evil.

Longer than Secretary of State Jesse White in Illinois?

I’d like for companies that do illegal things to have repercussions in line with what an individual would face for doing the same thing. Whoever signs off on it at the highest level should pay the price.

I used to be shocked by this, but at some point I realized how expensive it must be to get a dollar to a politician. Getting $20K to Madigan involves meetings, planning, lawyers, accountants, and bagmen. I'm sure the total expense was closer to $100-$200K. Spent badly in this case because they still got caught, but spent well in the hundreds of cases we don't talk about.

It's also capitalism; if Madigan weren't cheap and effective, he wouldn't have lasted as long as he did. He might have gotten a dozen AT&T-sized bribes that month from different sources.

Of course the laws and prosecutors are managed by the individuals involved in the crimes, so what will change?

Lobbying = "Hi, I'm a representative for [large donor]. I'd like to speak with you about how they feel about an upcoming piece of legislation, carefully using my words so that I'm just pushing our position on the issue and hoping you'll 'see our side' and vote in our favor, even though you and I both know what I really mean here."

Bribery: "I will give you $[amount] if you vote [this way]."

T-Mobile market cap is $165B, Verizon $152B, and ATT at $106B.

Not that the government punishment should not be worse, but kind of breathtaking how badly managed ATT is.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/11/... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952512/att-price-hike-c...

I almost feel sorry for AT&T here. It's hard to overstate just how powerful Mike Madigan was in Illinois politics (and he's still very influential). He was undoubtedly more powerful than the governor. His corruption was legendary and well known by everyone, yet hardly anyone seemed to care and people voted for him anyway. He acted like a mob boss in the legislature, ensuring that all his colleagues would continue to vote him into the Speaker position year after year. Any Democrats who voted against him as speaker were very publicly punished, since he controlled most of the Democratic party money in the state. In a state that almost always has a Democratic supermajority, there were basically zero checks to his power. Companies like AT&T may have been in a bad situation of having no choice but to play ball with him just to be able to function in the state. Everyone in Illinois knew that you didn't say no to Mike Madigan.

[0] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/10/14/23404193/mike-madiga...

Previously unaccounted for labor costs. Bought x amount of labor yesterday by paying y > x tomorrow, but not acknowledging y > x in any official reports. And, of course, there was most likely some loss due to corrupt investments.

Note that federal laws exempted taxpayer funded deferred compensation schemes from laws such as ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006 specifically because taxes can be increased in the future, so why bother preventing future taxpayers from having to pay for previous generations of taxpayers?

Commit a "blue collar" crime, you or I go to jail. But do a white collar crime and it's a slap on the wrists.

Time - separated from family, etc. - has value. Money, for the amounts these people play with might as well be Monopoly money.

You can't get that for an indictment unless you're indicting a poor person. In the US we ostensibly punish people when they're convicted.

What we need to do is to punish the appearance of impropriety when it comes to politics, and be very specific about what appears to be impropriety. As it is, we can only stop dumb or lazy corruption, the kind that people talk about over the phone and write in emails.

It would also be perfectly legal to hire a politician or regulator who advanced your interests once he's no longer in office. There is, in fact, a revolving door between many industries and the agencies that regulate them. But you can't explicitly promise these individuals a job while they're still in office or you committed illegal bribery. A politician also can't sell a Senate appointment (as the governor of Illinois infamously tried to do after Obama was elected president) but he can give it to one of his political allies as a favor and reasonably expect that the favor will be repaid in the future.

Of course, these differences aren't particularly meaningful in reality but they're very important under the law and anybody who is stupid enough to execute their bribes the wrong way will probably be punished for bribery even though it would have been perfectly legal if they'd done it the right way.

The problem with under-the-table bribes is that you can't "follow the money" so to speak.