is amazing...and how 'we the people' look at crime is too. Corporations get fined for polluting our air, water and making millions doing it, and are actually a major contributor to street crime... while possession of drugs can get you 10 years. From time to time I pull out "The Rich and the Super-rich" by Ferdinand Lundberg. It is available for free down-load here because of it's copyright expiration. I hope no one minds my posting some of it, it is so appropriate..
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html
White collar crime, as Sutherland makes clear, is far more costly than crimes customarily regarded as constituting the "crime problem." 28 The crimes committed mostly by the propertied and wealthy in the course of managing their property include embezzlement; most big fraud; restraint of trade; misrepresentation in advertising and in the sale of securities; infringements of patents, trademarks and copyrights; industrial espionage; illegal labor practices; violations of war regulations; violation of trust; secret rebates and kickbacks; commercial and political bribery; wash sales; misleading balance sheets; false claims; dilution of products; prohibited forms of monopoly; income-tax falsification; adulteration of food and drugs; padding of expense accounts; use of substandard materials; rigging markets; price-fixing; mislabeling; false weights and measurements; internal corporate manipulation, etc., etc. Except for tax fraud the ordinary man is never in a position to commit these crimes.
A distinction between most white collar crime and most ordinary crime is that the white collar criminal does not usually make use of violence; he depends chiefly on stealth, deceit or conspiracy. In the case of illegal labor practices, however, he does often through agents employ violence leading to death of workers. And there may be violent, even fatal, reactions to some of its nonviolent forms, such as the consequence of adulteration or improper preparation of foods and drugs.
The "white collar criminals, however, are by far the most dangerous to society of any type of criminals from the point of view of effects on private property and social institutions." 29 For their predations gradually tend to undermine public morale and spread social disorganization. 30 Large-scale stock swindles, bank manipulations and food and drug adulteration administer particularly convulsive shocks to broad segments of the populace. The volume of total violations, much of it officially unchallenged, leads to a spreading mood of public cynicism and more and more rank-and-file lawbreaking. It is finally echoed in the statement: "There's one law for the rich and another law for the poor." Government itself stands impugned. The stage is set for anarchy, sometimes emerging in riots.
An equally grave consequence, which Sutherland does not notice but upon which I shall later touch, is that the attempt to gloss over, conceal, minimize and apologize for white collar crime in general and in specific cases trammels the channels of public communication, undermines the terms of public debate and clouds the critical faculties even of many scholars.
The laws relating to white collar crime, as Sutherland remarks, tend to "conceal the criminality of the behavior" and thus do not reinforce the public mores as do other laws. 31
Sutherland surveyed the laws and took note of those instances in which white collar crime is explicitly stated to be crime and those where it is only implicitly indicated. White collar crimes are committed by individuals and by corporations, mostly the latter as the transmission mechanisms of widespread illegal planning. They are committed against a small number of persons in a particular occupation or against the general public; it is rarely a case of individual versus individual. Individuals only commit such white collar crimes as embezzlement and fraud, and when they do they come under statutes clearly labeled criminal.
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He took the seventy largest nonfinancial corporations as given on two lists, that of Berle and Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1933) and that of the Senate Temporary National Economic Committee (1938). He then excluded from these lists public utility corporations (he examined fifteen power and light companies separately) and the corporations in one other industry. Left with sixty-eight corporations, he added two that appeared on the list of 1938 and not on the list of 1929. It was a list representative of the cream of corporate society, the elite. 35
The average life of these corporations was forty-five years. Their criminal histories were traced through official records, which Sutherland names.
He found a total of 980 decisions against these corporations, with a maximum of 50 for one and an average per corporation of 14.0. No fewer than 60 (or almost all) had decisions against them for restraining trade, 53 for infringements, 44 for unfair labor practices, 43 for a variety of offenses, 28 for misrepresentation in advertising and 26 for rebates. In all there were 307 adverse decisions on restraining trade, 97 on misrepresentation, 222 on infringement, 158 on unfair labor practices, 66 on rebates and 130 on other cases.
One hundred and fifty-eight of these decisions were entered in criminal court, 296 were in civil court, 129 were in equity court, 361 were by commission order, 25 were by commission confiscation and 11 were by commission settlement.
Even if the analysis had been limited to explicit criminal jurisdiction, 60 per cent of the corporations (or 42), with an average of four convictions each, had experienced that particularly stigmatic jurisdiction. As Sutherland points out, in many states persons with four convictions are defined as habitual criminals or "repeaters." Applying this concept to corporations, on the average at least 60 per cent of the leading corporations are habitual criminals.
Few cases initiated after 1944 are included in the Sutherland study, and the author warns that his work does not include all violations that have taken place because not all administrations were vigorous in enforcing the law and not all cases were systematically recorded. In general, there was lax enforcement under Republican Administrations--only 40 per cent of the cases from 1900 to 1944 date from prior to 1934--and more alert enforcement under Democratic Administrations. The most serious attempts at enforcement occurred under the New Deal, although the bulk of the laws had been on the books for many decades. One gets some insight here into reasons for the pre-Johnsonian enthusiasm of the corporate world for the foot-dragging Republican Party as well as some understanding of the quid pro quo for heavy national campaign contributions.
Of these seventy corporations, Sutherland found, thirty were either illegitimate in origin or began illegal activities immediately thereafter. Eight others, he found, were "probably" illegal in origin or in beginning policies. The finding of original illegitimacy was made with respect to twenty-one corporations in formal court decisions, by "other historical evidence" in the other cases.
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In the case of white collar crimes of corporations, if any individual is punished (usually none is) it is only one or a very few. The authorities do not dig pertinaciously with a view to ferreting out every last person who had anything to do with the case. But, as Sutherland points out, it is different with crimes of the lower classes. In kidnapping, for example, the FBI, in addition to seizing the kidnappers, flushes to the surface anyone who (1) rented them quarters to conceal the kidnapped person or to hide out in; (2) acted as unwitting agents for them in conveying messages or collecting ransom; (3) transported them; (4) in any way innocently gave them aid and assistance; or (5) was a witness to any of these separate acts. The government men do such a splendid job that almost everyone except the obstetricians who brought the various parties into the world are brought before the bar, where the aroused judge "breaks the book over their heads" in the course of sentencing. Sovereignty, it turns out after all, is not to be trifled with.
It may be argued that kidnapping, which resorts to violence, is a more serious crime than bribing a judge. With this I would disagree. Gravely serious though kidnapping is, its commission strikes directly at only a few, and in most cases involves comparatively small sums--even though they seem large to the ordinary man. But bribing a judge--and in the Manton case far more than any known kidnap ransom was at stake--strikes at a very broad public and, indeed, at the foundations of social institutions in general. It is subversive in the deepest and truest sense.
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