20 Secrets about Corporate Crime that You Must Know About.
Over at the THE DAILY CAVEAT, Michael Thomas posted an interesting link about
"Mr. Mokhiber as the editor of the long-running Corporate Crime Reporter. He's been on the white collar crime beat for at leas 20 years and knows a thing or two about its perpetrators.
This list of 20 Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime is derived from the text of a speech he gave a few days ago at a conference on corporate accountability in Washington, Dc." (Unfortunately, Thomas's link didn't work, but I found a link that does.)
Here is a partial list, but do read the entire report.
Number 20Corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.
Whether in bodies or injuries or dollars lost, corporate crime and violence wins by a landslide.
The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery - street crimes - costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.
The losses from a handful of major corporate frauds - Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, Enron - swamp the losses from all street robberies and burglaries combined.
Health care fraud alone costs Americans $100 billion to $400 billion a year.
The savings and loan fraud - which former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called "the biggest white collar swindle in history" - cost us anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion.
And generally, our collective response to corporate crime is to move on, pass it by, and forget about it -categorize it as some deviant behaviour, which doesn't really happen that often.
Number 16Beware of consumer groups or other public interest groups who make nice with corporations.
There are now probably more fake public interest groups than actual ones in America today. And many formerly legitimate public interest groups have been taken over or compromised by big corporations. Our favorite example is the National Consumer League. It's the oldest consumer group in the country. It was created to eradicate child labor.
But in the last ten years or so, it has been taken over by large corporations. It now gets the majority of its budget from big corporations such as Pfizer, Bank of America, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Kaiser Permanente, Wyeth-Ayerst, and Verizon.
This is an interesting observation, which highlights why you have to be skeptical of even the professional skeptics -they may be paid to look the other way.
Number 8There are very few career prosecutors of corporate crime.
Patrick Fitzgerald is one that comes to mind. He's the U.S. Attorney in Chicago. He put away Scooter Libby. And he's now prosecuting the Canadian media baron Conrad Black.
And in Canada, there are no career prosecutors of corporate crime. None, nada, zip. Now you know why Conrad Black wanted to be tried in Canada.
Number 4The Justice Department needs to start publishing an annual Corporate Crime in the United States report.
Every year, the Justice Department puts out an annual report titled "Crime in the United States."
But by "Crime in the United States," the Justice Department means "street crime in the United States."
In the "Crime in the United States" annual report, you can read about burglary, robbery and theft.
There is little or nothing about price-fixing, corporate fraud, pollution, or public corruption.
A yearly Justice Department report on Corporate Crime in the United States is long overdue.
