“Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage” is real enough, but there’s a door that has for too many years swung against the common good that’s ripe to swing the other way
As Bill is old enough to remember, following the collapse of the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, there were at least 1,100 criminal convictions of former S&L executives, a…
“Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage” is real enough, but there’s a door that has for too many years swung against the common good that’s ripe to swing the other way
As Bill is old enough to remember, following the collapse of the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, there were at least 1,100 criminal convictions of former S&L executives, and many more followed in the Enron/dot.com days a decade later. But when the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 rolled around, individual criminal prosecutions all but stopped.
And in there place came toothless prosecutions of their corporations. Something that happened primarily for “institutional reasons.” Chief among them being the “revolving door,” where regulators, line prosecutors and tax professionals in the IRS could look forward to moving into private sector jobs drawing on their government experience and paying enough to pay their kids private school tuition, just as long as they hadn’t gone out of their way to make too many waves while in government service. Then if everything played out, and after they made partner a few years later, they might qualify for a political appointment in their old agencies, keeping them until it was time to pay for college etc.
Meanwhile corporate law firms etc were filled with people who cut their teeth in the S&L Crisis and could put on fearsome defenses against government prosecutors just starting out, and who
wants to incur a loss in their first high-profile case?
Bottom line: the laws hadn’t changed but the culture had.
Fast forward to January 2129, while the old criminal statutes will have gathered a lot of dust, they’ll probably still be on the books. And meanwhile there’s likely to be and enraged populace screaming for blood. And with federal statutes of limitations running anywhere from 5 to 20 years,
justice may be considerably delayed, but if all goes well in 2028, no one should count on it being denied.
“Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage” is real enough, but there’s a door that has for too many years swung against the common good that’s ripe to swing the other way
As Bill is old enough to remember, following the collapse of the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, there were at least 1,100 criminal convictions of former S&L executives, and many more followed in the Enron/dot.com days a decade later. But when the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 rolled around, individual criminal prosecutions all but stopped.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/were-bankers-jailed-in-past-financial-crises/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html
And in there place came toothless prosecutions of their corporations. Something that happened primarily for “institutional reasons.” Chief among them being the “revolving door,” where regulators, line prosecutors and tax professionals in the IRS could look forward to moving into private sector jobs drawing on their government experience and paying enough to pay their kids private school tuition, just as long as they hadn’t gone out of their way to make too many waves while in government service. Then if everything played out, and after they made partner a few years later, they might qualify for a political appointment in their old agencies, keeping them until it was time to pay for college etc.
Meanwhile corporate law firms etc were filled with people who cut their teeth in the S&L Crisis and could put on fearsome defenses against government prosecutors just starting out, and who
wants to incur a loss in their first high-profile case?
Bottom line: the laws hadn’t changed but the culture had.
Fast forward to January 2129, while the old criminal statutes will have gathered a lot of dust, they’ll probably still be on the books. And meanwhile there’s likely to be and enraged populace screaming for blood. And with federal statutes of limitations running anywhere from 5 to 20 years,
justice may be considerably delayed, but if all goes well in 2028, no one should count on it being denied.