Big Dirty Money
Penguin USA (Verlag)
978-1-9848-7999-8 (ISBN)
How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it.
There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute.
This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.
Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate whose writing focuses on "follow the money" matters--promoting transparency and opposing corruption. She has testified as a banking law expert before Congress and has appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe and CNN's Newsroom. Taub was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law in fall 2019 at Harvard Law School and is a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law. She is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.
BIG DIRTY MONEY Excerpt
Chapter 1
Defining White Collar Crime
Philadelphia is a city where revolutionary ideas come to life. It was there one cold December evening in 1939 that Professor Edwin H. Sutherland shared a breakthrough theory he'd been developing for over a decade. The soft-spoken sociologist from Indiana University chose the Crystal Ballroom of the eighteen-story Benjamin Franklin Hotel to unveil his transformative criminology framework. The location fit his circumstances. The swank hotel was just three blocks down Chestnut Street from the old Pennsylvania State House, where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence and the framers attended the Constitutional Convention. To be clear, Sutherland's crowd was not a bunch of provocateurs eager to shake up society. This was a stuffy assemblage of sociologists and economists gathered together for the joint annual meeting of the American Sociological Society and the American Economic Association. As the society's outgoing president, Sutherland was scheduled to deliver an address on the first night of the conference. They were not expecting a revolution.
Sutherland's demeanor was genial and his words bland, but the lecture-"The White Collar Criminal"-gave the world a catchphrase and launched an entire discipline. Half a century later, experts acknowledged that it had "altered the study of crime throughout the world in fundamental ways by focusing upon a form of lawbreaking that previously had been ignored by criminological scholars." It was an impressive legacy for a Nebraska-born man who began his career in sociology with a correspondence course offered by the University of Chicago's Home Study Department.
Sutherland crushed the conventional wisdom as to the causes and nature of crime. He asserted that his peers' current "conception and explanations of crime" were both "misleading and incorrect." Crime was not "closely correlated" with poverty or the "psychopathic and sociopathic conditions statistically associated with poverty," he said. To support his fresh perspective, Sutherland attacked the data. He explained that experts drew the wrong conclusions about crime because the data were incomplete. While it was true that "less than two percent of the persons committed to prisons in a year belong to the upper class," this did not mean that the elite were saintly. The way that crime was "popularly conceived and officially measured" was wrong. The standard measurement tools were lacking. Where did the bad numbers come from? He explained that criminologists narrowly studied "criminals handled by the police, the criminal and juvenile courts, and the prisons." They myopically focused on "such crimes as murder, assault, burglary, robbery, larceny, sex offenses [and] drunkenness." Excluded from what should be the accurate count, he said, were "vast areas of criminal behavior of persons not in the lower classes."
Sutherland's core thesis in his address that evening came down to this. The experts were not looking at all crime. By ignoring the criminal behavior of professionals, businessmen, and even tycoons, they had a wildly inaccurate picture of who was in the criminal "class." Based on his own detailed research into fraud and conflicts of interest in business and politics, he surmised that crime was not concentrated among the poor. Pulling no punches, Sutherland named names. First, he spoke of the nineteenth-century "robber barons," deeming them "white collar criminals, as almost everyone now agrees." He quoted American industrialist Colonel Cornelius Vanderbilt as admitting his own criminal tendencies when he once quipped, "You don't suppose you can run a railroad in accordance with the statutes, do you?" Sutherland went on to shame various contemporary "merchant princes and captains of finance and industry." Crime was rampant in all occupations, he informed his audience. In particular,
| Erscheinungsdatum | 20.09.2021 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 139 x 213 mm |
| Gewicht | 295 g |
| Themenwelt | Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie |
| Wirtschaft ► Allgemeines / Lexika | |
| Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management | |
| Schlagworte | Biographies • business • business books • corporations • Crime • crime book • crime books • criminal justice • Criminology • dirty money • Economics • economics books • economy • Geopolitics • gifts for lawyers • Government • History books • International Politics • Law • Law enforcement • law school graduation gifts • legal books • MONEY • Police • political books • Political Philosophy • Political Science • political science books • Prison • Social Justice • Sociology • sociology books • Strategy • True Crime • true crime book • true crime books • World Politics |
| ISBN-10 | 1-9848-7999-5 / 1984879995 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-9848-7999-8 / 9781984879998 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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