Corporate crime is notoriously underpoliced and underprosecuted. Mostly, that's because we just choose not to do anything about it. American corporations commit crimes at 20X the rate of real humans, and their crimes are far worse than any crime committed by a human, but they are almost never prosecuted:
I’ve long wanted Marvel to create a crime-fighting character who defeats white-collar criminals. But this essay makes me realize this as-yet uncreated character could plow richer ground fighting corporate crime. Give a franchise built around Michael Claytons.
@patrickgillam@pluralistic I was kind of disappointed about the TV series "White Collar". All that stuff about forgery - bah! It should have been non-stop money laundering and wage theft.
@patrickgillam@pluralistic I would like to see “Corporate Crimefighter Yet To Be Named” beating the absolute shit out of the likes of Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne. Give me ten movies of this please.
@patrickgillam@pluralistic I read an idea once in which #Batman caught a crooked cop and strung him up to be taken away by the police just like he does with any other criminal and it turned the cops against him and he had to go back to being a true vigilante. That pissed him off so he started focusing on corruption which ruffled every feather. It also resulted in making Gotham a better place much more than capturing any two bit thugs could have.
@jcriecke@patrickgillam@pluralistic isn't that part of the Batman mythos already? The current Batman works in an environment where Commissioner Gordon has cleaned up the GCPD to a point where they are largely clean. The stories about the early career of Batman often are much more focused on corruption and criminals both with badge and without.
@pluralistic You make it sound like the awards program is a substitution for legislation in place. it's not. It's an added incentive for people to keep an eye out at work prior to getting involved in the crime, or not having been involved at all.
Nothing changed.
The political ramifications of paying a convicted criminal? I wouldn't want to touch that, either.
@janisf It's literally the way that every whistleblower reward program has worked since the LINCOLN ADMINISTRATION. I think the "political ramifications" have been thoroughly worked out over the ensuing 159 years.
@pluralistic Everything that was in place just prior to this 90-day sprint pilot program still exists. The administration didn't feel like that was enough, so in the interest of seeing what drums up interest, they're trying a limited, targeted test intended to draw the eyeballs of people who keep their eyes down and just do their jobs.
@janisf No one has claimed that this will change precedent.
The argument is that this is a defective program because it eschews the practice of literal centuries of whistleblower bounties.
You said that this practice would be unworkable due to "political ramifications."
When I pointed out that these ramifications have not surfaced in 150 years, you raised the seeming non sequitur that this doesn't invalidate those older programs.
@pluralistic You're right That was a knee-jerk subjective reaction, and not until I started reading about it did I understand what the program's intended purpose is. And as I read more, it feels like lip service in response to low case counts.
@pluralistic I'm genuinelyh onored. Thank you for the engagement.
I will write to my federal rep about it. What I'd really like to find out is who, or what cultural influence in the Democratic administration is Hermie the dentist. This isn't the first legislation I've formally complained about lacking teeth.
@janisf I think the Dems are riven, broadly, into a finance-friendly faction - the Manchin-Synematic Universe - and a left/progressive coalition led by Warren/Sanders. Biden's trying to serve as broker between the two and pleasing no-one:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
We can't even bear to utter the words "corporate crime": instead, we deploy a whole raft of euphemisms like "risk and compliance," and that ole fave, the trusty "white-collar crime":
The Biden DOJ promised it would be different, and they weren't kidding. The DOJ's antitrust division is kicking ass, doing more than the division has done in generations, really swinging for the fences:
Main Justice - the rest of the DOJ - promised that it would do the same. Deputy AG Lisa Monaco promised an end to those bullshit "deferred prosecution agreements" that let corporate America literally get away with murder. She promised to prosecute companies and individual executives. She promised a lot:
Was she serious? Well, it's not looking good. Monaco's number two gnuy, Benjamin Mizer, has a storied career - working for giant corporations, getting them off the hook when they commit eye-watering crimes:
Biden's DOJ is arguably more tolerant of corporate crime than even Trump's Main Justice. In 2021, the DOJ brought just 90 cases - the worst year in a quarter-century.
2022's number was 99, and 2023 saw 119. Trump's DOJ did better than any of those numbers in two out of four years. And back in 2000, Justice was bringing more than 300 corporate criminal prosecutions.
Deputy AG Monaco just announced a new whistleblower bounty program: cash money for ratting out your crooked asshole co-worker or boss. Whistleblower bounties are among the most effective and cheapest way to bring criminal prosecutions against corporations.
If you're a terrified underling who can't afford to lose your job after narcing out your boss, the bounty can outweigh the risk of industry-wide blacklisting. And if you're a crooked co-conspirator thinking about turning rat on your fellow criminal, the bounty can tempt you into solving the Prisoner's Dilemma in a way that sees the crime prosecuted.
So a new whistleblower bounty program is good. We like 'em. What's not to like?
As the whistleblower lawyer Stephen Kohn points out to Russell Mokhiber of Corpate Crime Reporter, Monaco's whistleblower bounty program has a glaring defect: it excludes "individuals who were involved with the crime." That means that the long-suffering secretary who printed the boss's crime memo and put it in the mail is shit out of luck - as is the CFO who's finally had enough of the CEO's dirty poker.
This is not how other whistleblower reward programs work: the SEC and CFTC whistleblower programs do not exclude people involved with the crime, and for good reason. They want to catch kingpins, not footsoldiers - and the best way to do that is to reward the whistleblower who turns on the boss.
This isn't a new idea! It's in the venerable False Claims Act, an act that signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. As Kohn says, making "accomplices" eligible to participate in whistleblower rewards is how you get people like his client, who relayed a bribe on behalf of his boss, to come forward. As Lincoln said in 1863, the purpose of a whistleblower law is to entice conspirators to turn on one another. Like Honest Abe said, "it takes a rogue to catch a rogue."
And - as Kohn says - we've designed these programs so that masterminds can't throw their minor lickspittles under the buss and collect a reward: "I know of no case where the person who planned or initiated the fraud under any of the reward laws ever got a dime."
Kohn points out that under Monaco, the DOJ just ignores the rule that afford anonymity to whistleblowers. That's a big omission - the SEC got 18,000 confidential claims in 2023. Those are claims that the DOJ can't afford to miss, given their abysmal, sub-Trump track record on corporate crime prosecutions.
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