Well, yes: if you leave enough crime by the well-connected alone for long enough, in a country with poor election integrity and unlimited campaign finance spending, then you get a country run by gangsters. It came about pretty rapidly in Russia where there was no established democracy to displace.
You'd have to completely reframe the penalty for crimes to be percentage based instead of fixed amounts. Even when caught the penalties are often so low that they don't matter, so white collar criminals go right back to it. When you can routinely make $10 million doing something a $1 million fine the one time you get caught just isn't a big deal.
The cost-benefit analysis almost always favors the criminal for white collar crimes (or any non-violent crime, really) when you have money. If I had $100m+ I wouldn't really pay attention to the law either.
White collar crimes are problematic. I once saw a case where someone was convicted for selling prescription sleeping pills. It shouldn't be illegal to sell under the counter pills, I thought, but otherwise it was hard to fault the prosecution. The accused was caught trying to sell the pills to an undercover officer, fled from the police, and apprehended with a wide variety of illegal substances on his person. There was little doubt that he was at least guilty of the conduct of which he was accused.
White collar crimes are murkier. There is, for example, nothing illegal about getting the upper hand in a transaction. But it can be illegal based on little more than what the seller knew or was thinking at the time of the sale. Even things like false claims to the government often turn on little more than the characterization of certain transactions. A great deal of the white collar prosecutions I've seen have left me unsettled--the evidence was murky or subject to different characterizations, and the "wrong" often turned on the unknowable--the accused's knowledge or intent.
Monetary fines are not enough deterrent in many cases. Even short stints in prison might be better.
If we have laws that we don't enforce, then we should strike them from the books. If we are not willing to fund enforcement of a law, we should not pass it. This will show us what we really value as a society.
We need to punish judicial corruption with the death penalty. Judicial corruption endangers the entire basis of our courts, and is tantamount to treason.
Relevant Twitter thread by Matt Levine
https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1033185120520417280
Tldr: "cracking down on fraud" will mostly harm poor people
What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
Obligatory Chickenshit Club reference: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Chickenshit_Club.ht...
My screenname here is an anonymous throwaway. This is evidence of conservative opinions not being welcome here at all.
I think if the US approach to crime was different, that this situation might be altogether different.
As it stands, right now, in "Corporate America" is less forgiving than God, assuming you're religious.
the entire u.s. socio economic system us defined by usury cascades ( interest rate financing of publuc /private activities) that ultimately are paid off by long term
rises in cost of living ( via money printing) . the u.s. id also built on theft of labor ( payroll and EARNED income tax)
the tax system is designed to emcourage speculation as well as the over burdening of local labor upon the federal rather than state government munipial bonds are federally tax free.
the supreme court ruled in the 70s that states can block imported usurous loans from out of state to their local real estate markets.
the clintons eliminated glass steagal and unconstitutional deprived unsecured (educational) debt from being dischareable in bankruptcy. bushs 2005 bankruptcy act instituionalized further deterioration of bankruptcy rights.
empires are buult upon a sytem of human promises , that means human debt.
when the debt is abstracted by third partes for the purpose of making further profit via secodary mechanisms such as financialization and speculation for its own sake, the empire is eventually reduced to operating as a casino.
our empires business is legalizing white collar 'crime' and making it into a series of redistribution games run out of new york and washington dc.
its not posdible to fix' the system.
we need dictatorship, at least temporarily. democracy is broken.
We don't need a "crackdown". The problem with our approach to financial crimes is that it is based almost entirely on crackdowns -- splashy press releases that are supposed to deter all the thousands of other financial crimes that we lack resources to prosecute. Sometimes this leads to injustice, e.g., see the documentary film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The only bank to be prosecuted criminally for shenanigans in the subprime era.
What we do need is vastly more resources for financial regulators, as well as courts. Yes the laws and regs could also be improved, but that is a harder problem. The easy problem is that the people doing good work to combat financial crimes only have the staffing and money to go after a small, small fraction of likely targets. And the courts do not have what they need to handle a high volume of increasingly complex, technical subject-matter.