Corporate Crime Runs Rampant Thanks to ‘Rigged’ System: Elizabeth Warren
(COMMON DREAMS) Deirdre Fulton, January 30, 2016 — “Corporate criminals routinely escape meaningful prosecution for their misconduct.”
This is the damning verdict of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) report released Friday, Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy (pdf).
“Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars.”
—Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Described as “the first in an annual series on enforcement,” the 12-page booklet “highlights 20 of the most egregious civil and criminal cases during the past year in which federal settlements failed to require meaningful accountability to deter future wrongdoing and to protect taxpayers and families,” according to a press statement from Warren’s office.
Take the Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest for-profit college, for example.
That institution “signed up tens of thousands of students by lying about its programs, it saddled them with fraudulent degrees and huge debts,” Warren wrote in an accompanying New York Times op-ed published Friday. “Those debts wrecked lives. Under the law, the government can bar such institutions from receiving more federal student loans. But EDMC just paid a fine and kept right on raking in federal loan money.”
Other cases outlined in the report include: Standard and Poor’s delivering inflated credit ratings to defraud investors during the financial crisis; “The Cartel”—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Barclays, UBS AG, and Royal Bank of Scotland—manipulating exchange and interest rates at the expense of clients and investors; the Upper Big Branch Mine Disasterthat resulted in 29 deaths; and the Novartis Pharmaceuticals  scheme that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and undermined patient health.
“The examples raise the disturbing possibility that some giant corporations—and their executives—have decided that following the law is merely optional,” Warren argues. “For these companies, punishment for breaking the law is little more than a cost of doing business.”
And they shed troubling light on the state of the U.S. justice system. “Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars,” Warren said in the op-ed.
What’s more, Rigged Justice places blame at the feet of federal agencies and regulators, whose “limp approach to corporate enforcement, particularly in response to serious misconduct that cost Americans their jobs, their homes, or, in some cases, their lives, threatens the safety and security of every American.”