white collar crimes need to be treated as crimes. if they exceed a certain dollar value they need to be treated identically to attempted murder or murder.
Replies
Yep. Death penalty for billionaires please.
apr 3, 2025, 12:55 am • 0 0 • view
I stopped being a prosecutor because the a Tea Party governor came in and said that the white collar division had to stop going after fraud and scam businesses, and had to focus on disabled people failing to report income usually less than a hundred bucks.
apr 2, 2025, 10:29 pm • 9 0 • view
fuck, id settle for them actually being enforced consistently
apr 3, 2025, 12:08 am • 9 0 • view
I've been saying this! My line: $9 Million. It's (one of) the government's "value of a statistical life" figures, so if you commit over $9 Million in fraud, you have stolen a life. Boom, done. Maybe go down to 20% of that for attempted murder? 10?
apr 3, 2025, 1:35 am • 17 0 • view
Damn that's high. I was thinking median retirement fund balance or sth like that. Around 200k. If you take a person's life savings-worth, you have essentially taken their like
apr 3, 2025, 3:07 am • 3 0 • view
This is the only way forward, it is uncontroversial among ANYONE who isn’t rich and even among the majority of wealthy people
apr 2, 2025, 10:15 pm • 5 0 • view
This definitely needs more tread A min at least a Bond set if you intend to corrupt the whole concept of devouring an economy in greed at least you need a back up crime spree Binding in court system White & Blue collar crime exist But these Pikers in corruption have no default. It’s policy
apr 2, 2025, 11:01 pm • 0 0 • view
looking over at the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries eh
apr 2, 2025, 10:16 pm • 0 0 • view
We (France) currently have politicians arguing that banning people from elections because they stole public money is unfair. And that the law should be changed. Because the leader of the far-right has been found guilty of it. And has to go to prison + election ban for 5 years.
apr 3, 2025, 8:24 pm • 0 0 • view
4 millions and some people dare to say it's politically motivated and the sanctions are too harsh. Some people get hard prison for stealing much less than that. White collar stuff should put you in prison with the worst violent offenders. That'd be fair.
apr 3, 2025, 8:26 pm • 0 0 • view
apr 2, 2025, 11:21 pm • 6 0 • view
Yes and the dollar value threshold should vary based on your victims' net worth.
apr 3, 2025, 12:18 am • 3 0 • view
There's a general legal-value-of-a-human-life that they use in wrongful death suits, right? It sounds pretty straightforward anyway. If a life is worth a certain amount of money, then that amount is equivalent to a human life.
apr 2, 2025, 11:48 pm • 0 0 • view
I like your breakfast sausage
apr 3, 2025, 6:37 am • 0 0 • view
The fact that we don’t have any sort of legal framework to deal with statistical mass murder and ecocide :/
apr 4, 2025, 6:18 am • 5 2 • view
such a framework would exclusively jail billionaires, business executives, and most of congress so yea we need it so bad
apr 4, 2025, 6:22 am • 7 0 • view
Don’t forget overturning citizens united
apr 3, 2025, 12:12 am • 0 0 • view
*mass murder* they need to spend an hour & a half reading of the guilty verdicts.
apr 3, 2025, 12:04 am • 0 0 • view
Yes! Yes! Yes!
apr 3, 2025, 10:05 am • 0 0 • view
Every time I have reported a theft there has been NO INVESTIGATION WHATSOEVER. Theft is perfectly legal as long as it's not from a coportion.
apr 3, 2025, 3:31 am • 0 0 • view
While I am very much ACAB, imagine how white collar crime would fall if the enforcement agencies whose job is catching and punishing those offenses actually got some of the tough on crime money police departments get.
apr 2, 2025, 11:09 pm • 17 0 • view
Imagine how funny civil asset forfeiture could get! "I'm sorry, but you did use your control over Chevron Group to facilitate stealing those wages, and so it is now property of the Lower East Saint Louis third precinct."
apr 2, 2025, 11:51 pm • 1 0 • view
There’s a revolving door between enforcement agencies/federal prosecutors & high-end law firms. They learn about regulation & prosecution of white-collar crime at taxpayer expense $ leave gov service to aid & abet the same.
apr 3, 2025, 1:42 am • 1 0 • view
Because the agencies KNOW how these crimes are committed and who is committing them but they just don't have the money and personnel to actively pursue these cases and make them stick (so no one weasels out on minutiae of the law after they are convicted).
apr 2, 2025, 11:12 pm • 14 0 • view
I read a stat saying when the IRS pursues rich tax cheats, they get a return on investment of about $4500 per agent hour. I don't know what an IRS agent makes an hour, but that seems like an incredible ROI. How many social security payments would that be, school lunches etc per hour.
apr 2, 2025, 11:18 pm • 94 15 • view
Dilute shares instead of issuing fines.
apr 2, 2025, 10:27 pm • 0 0 • view
This a million times. The punishment should be proportional to the scale of the harm.
apr 2, 2025, 10:17 pm • 3 0 • view
"It is seldom bankers who starve" is just one of Those Lines tbh
apr 2, 2025, 10:18 pm • 51 0 • view
For most things in life, there is an applicable Discworld passage. I think few writers manage the insight of Sir Terry, or the simple, eloquent explanations.
apr 2, 2025, 10:23 pm • 4 0 • view
Yep. When he came to a point of moral clarity he knew pretty damn well how to drive it home.
apr 2, 2025, 10:24 pm • 4 0 • view
I feel like whatever the payout is on a wrongful death claim, if you steal more than that, your punishment should be equivalent to murder.
apr 2, 2025, 10:46 pm • 6 0 • view
If their crimes involve denying health insurance claims they must run a gauntlet of Luigi Mangione's fan club - armed with actual clubs.
apr 3, 2025, 5:01 am • 0 0 • view
Too bad that heart attack got to Ken Lay before he was sentenced. Might have done some good to see a CEO pay for their crimes
apr 2, 2025, 10:49 pm • 1 0 • view
Eric Holder FUCKED UP. Guess why they didn’t go after the white collar criminals? Bc they didn’t think they could prosecute them. WTAF??? We’ve got zero judiciary support for not getting screwed by corps & billionaires.
apr 3, 2025, 7:58 am • 1 0 • view
Didn't that UHC CEO steal millions of dollars from UHC customers?
apr 2, 2025, 11:14 pm • 0 0 • view
If corporations are people, then they also need to be subject to similar punishments -- we should be able to execute a company and disband it or take it over if there's been gross malfeasance or negligence.
apr 3, 2025, 3:59 pm • 2 0 • view
The logical conclusion of giving human lives a dollar value really.
apr 2, 2025, 10:35 pm • 1 0 • view
White collar crime displaces it’s violence, mostly to the state. Evictions, despair, anxiety, denial of health care; physical and mental harms as surely as if you bashed grandma over the head for her pension check.
apr 3, 2025, 11:39 am • 8 0 • view
i love how companies can do all sorts of crimes that actually cause death and destruction and then nobody is ever held accountable for it
apr 3, 2025, 6:01 pm • 1 0 • view
Better idea - once the damages from a crime exceed a certain value, have a second jury vote on audience submissions for funniest punishments to inflict on the guilty. Violence and death are bad (unless it's hitting evil people with a brick) but puerile public entertainment benefits everyone
apr 2, 2025, 11:58 pm • 0 0 • view
This should also apply similarly to corporate personhood. The intent and scienter threshold should be lowered and companies should be up for capital punishment (dissolution) or imprisonment (nationalization) for certain crimes.
apr 3, 2025, 5:54 pm • 1 0 • view
we should've publicly executed at least a dozen people after the housing market crashed and we are paying the consequences for not doing that now
apr 2, 2025, 10:13 pm • 2,247 306 • view
Nah, the game theory of execution just doesn't work ("I'm not going to be sad if I'm dead"). But physical punishment? Sign me in. (In general, suffering-based punishment works wonders against premeditated, planned behaviors. You get up to work every day, right?)
apr 2, 2025, 10:39 pm • 2 0 • view
Execution is best left for coups, tyrants, and leaders of hate movements. Because there the position within the network matters way more than the specific crime. At that point it's not about deterrence or rehabilitation, it's about disarticulation.
apr 2, 2025, 10:44 pm • 0 0 • view
Sometimes it's less about punishing them and more about the fact that we all deserve to live in a world without them in it
apr 3, 2025, 3:00 am • 1 0 • view
This is bullshit, you don't "deserve" shit.
apr 3, 2025, 5:23 am • 0 0 • view
Nuremberg putting outright fascism in the developed west under a rock for 40 or so years should be a lesson we should do these sorts of things and on some sort of schedule
apr 2, 2025, 10:20 pm • 26 0 • view
The developed west seems particularly susceptible to fascism 🤔
apr 3, 2025, 12:17 am • 5 0 • view
yeah because we haven't had one of those reminders in a while
apr 3, 2025, 12:50 am • 11 0 • view
My country gained independence from European fascism not a full century ago, around the time they were genociding jews. Short memories I guess
apr 3, 2025, 6:20 am • 3 0 • view
exactly. some of these fucks need a reminder of what happens when you turn that way again
apr 3, 2025, 10:55 am • 4 0 • view
Much like Measles, Tuberculosis, "Bird" Flu...
apr 3, 2025, 3:00 am • 0 0 • view
And after the Civil war and after Kennedy’s assassination.
apr 2, 2025, 11:31 pm • 0 0 • view
SNL did a skit about the bailout where the couple who sold subprime lender Golden West Financial right before the crash were introduced with the caption "People Who Should Be Shot," and there was such a fuss made about the incivility that they edited it out of the video available on the Web.
apr 3, 2025, 3:17 am • 2 0 • view
youtu.be/NWgb_yDAFak?...
apr 3, 2025, 3:18 am • 1 0 • view
They were big Dem donors...shocking, I know. www.unz.com/author/miche...
apr 3, 2025, 3:23 am • 2 0 • view
Too big to fail Plenty big to swing.
apr 2, 2025, 10:49 pm • 5 0 • view
This. 100% this. Let’s get boring as fuck actuaries to measure the effect of crimes and set the punishment accordingly
apr 3, 2025, 6:06 am • 4 0 • view
better late than never!
apr 2, 2025, 10:30 pm • 1 0 • view
Same with wage theft, tbh.
apr 2, 2025, 10:15 pm • 24 0 • view
George Carlin said decades ago we should crucify bankers who launder drug money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
apr 3, 2025, 1:39 am • 11 0 • view
We could have bailed out the people with bad mortgages but instead we bailed out the predatory lenders. Still mad
apr 2, 2025, 10:16 pm • 31 1 • view
I promise every mental health professional working in the late 00s and early 10s saw at least half a dozen deaths, a dozen more lives ruined, a dozen more divorces, and more domestic violence that were directly caused by the 08 financial crimes and the criminal neglect by Obama admin.
apr 3, 2025, 12:43 am • 30 5 • view
if SBF and the rest of the executive suites at FTX had died on a gibbet we wouldn't be hearing about Crypto today I'll tell ya that
apr 2, 2025, 10:18 pm • 1,247 64 • view
But then who would give our elected octogenarians endless amounts of money to stay in power?
apr 2, 2025, 10:58 pm • 2 0 • view
No mercy for shoplifters, grift a whole nation and you get a medal
apr 2, 2025, 10:49 pm • 4 0 • view
I'm against states murdering people... however if we came together as a society and crushed the people responsible for 2008 under one really big rock, cypto would still be the buy drugs on the internet thing.
apr 3, 2025, 2:32 am • 6 0 • view
Maybe next time.
apr 2, 2025, 10:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I think you die IN a gibbet, but otherwise it checks out
apr 2, 2025, 11:17 pm • 3 0 • view
Imagine how much less scamming would happen in the world today if the Amway founders had lost all their money and gone to jail for 20 years.
apr 3, 2025, 12:35 am • 7 0 • view
White collar crime is legal in America as long as you victimize the right people. SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, and Madoff are only in jail because they ripped off rich and powerful people and made them look stupid.
apr 2, 2025, 10:34 pm • 25 1 • view
I keep saying, We don't need to eat a whole rich, just a quarter of one.
apr 2, 2025, 10:23 pm • 90 0 • view
*cackles*
apr 3, 2025, 3:11 am • 6 0 • view
Where's your imagination? Dracula had the right idea all along.
apr 3, 2025, 5:44 am • 0 0 • view
Everyone reacted in horror at the Chinese business guys who killed babies being executed but honestly maybe they were on to something.
apr 2, 2025, 10:20 pm • 6 0 • view
Make America Gibbet Again
apr 2, 2025, 10:51 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm still waiting for Trump to pardon SBF and put him in charge of the department of based crypto or something.
apr 3, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0 • view
agreed!
apr 3, 2025, 8:32 pm • 0 0 • view
Obama could have crushed banks into just a subset of the fucking post office and didn't. Fucking weak president fir that
apr 3, 2025, 5:58 pm • 6 0 • view
300 minimum.
apr 3, 2025, 3:05 pm • 1 0 • view
We can't even imprison, much less execute, people/entities responsible for upper tier dictator body counts like Purdue/Sacklers, Union Carbide, Nestle or Nintendo.
apr 3, 2025, 12:09 am • 10 0 • view
Take them out on their yachts to the middle of the ocean and scuttle them
apr 2, 2025, 10:19 pm • 2 0 • view
Let the orcas have them.
apr 2, 2025, 10:47 pm • 2 0 • view
That's a lot of pollution.
apr 2, 2025, 10:52 pm • 0 0 • view
A dozen would have been barely a start...
apr 3, 2025, 12:10 am • 1 0 • view
My MiL posted something about Elon’s bribery in WI with the question “is this legal?” Seems like it’s legal if we don’t punish it.
apr 3, 2025, 12:27 am • 12 0 • view
And Mike Pence should’ve done the Christian thing and allowed himself to be martyred on J6, bearing witness to his faith.
apr 11, 2025, 4:15 pm • 0 0 • view
You could say the same thing about the civil war. But maybe more than just a dozen.
apr 2, 2025, 10:27 pm • 9 0 • view
we should've hung ever confederate officer and elected official and basically every adult male of the planter class
apr 2, 2025, 10:28 pm • 95 8 • view
The liquidation of the planter class should've been much more literal
apr 3, 2025, 12:47 am • 12 0 • view
Lee and Davis should’ve been shot on the Mall
apr 3, 2025, 12:05 am • 8 0 • view
Based Sherman
apr 2, 2025, 10:35 pm • 1 0 • view
Been saying this for years.
apr 2, 2025, 11:08 pm • 0 0 • view
The biggest mistake of reconstruction was not breaking the spirit of the south permanently and thoroughly.
apr 3, 2025, 3:40 pm • 5 0 • view
Oh, is that the new edgy fed line?
apr 3, 2025, 12:07 am • 1 0 • view
I don't like getting the executions started. Sometimes they really gain a life of their own and speed on down the hill for a while and take out the people advocating them. That's presuming you're at some point going to join a parade down the Champ de Mars in nankeen trousers, as you're famous for.
apr 2, 2025, 10:33 pm • 1 0 • view
What about symbolic executions? Strip them of all assets and identification, burn off their fingerprints, and send them to Arkansas to provide valuable blood products to the needy.
apr 2, 2025, 10:34 pm • 10 0 • view
😂
apr 2, 2025, 10:36 pm • 1 0 • view
Sounds complicated but sure.
apr 2, 2025, 10:36 pm • 1 0 • view
Robert's way is simpler and quicker but my way gets us that sweet sweet plasma
apr 2, 2025, 10:36 pm • 2 0 • view
Oof Robert I can only get so hard what are you doing with this
apr 2, 2025, 10:50 pm • 4 0 • view
Luckily when all this is over and done with we surely will do absolutely nothing differently
apr 3, 2025, 1:29 am • 0 0 • view
declining to hold any of the PNAC/Vulcan neocons accountable for Iraq and then immediately not bringing the hammer down on Angelo Mozilo and his ilk utterly fucked us as a society The rules simply don’t apply to you if you’re rich and connected
apr 3, 2025, 12:06 am • 7 0 • view
thanks obama. even the previous savings and loan scandal lead to lot's of prosecutions by the justice dept. they know how to do it and how to hire accountants and dig in to the details. they decided not to do it after the collapse in 2008 and it sucks because fuck all those people.
apr 2, 2025, 10:19 pm • 16 1 • view
One thing China did right after the baby formula scandal...
apr 3, 2025, 2:22 am • 3 0 • view
ya :-/
apr 2, 2025, 11:29 pm • 2 0 • view
One of the most annoying moments in The Wire for me was in S1 when they asked the FBI for help with Barksdale. The FBI saw evidence that a State Senator was involved with the Bmore drug scene and wanted to focus on him.
apr 3, 2025, 12:14 pm • 1 0 • view
But the cops said they didn't care about the political corruption and only wanted to go after the drugs and murders, so refused FBI help. Glad they eventually got back to the corruption in later seasons, though.
apr 3, 2025, 12:14 pm • 0 0 • view
Sure looks like the only way Alex Jones will ever appreciably pay for his crimes against humanity will be if he ends up in prison
apr 3, 2025, 12:43 am • 5 0 • view
What if we just greased them anyway, you know, for fun?
apr 2, 2025, 11:35 pm • 2 0 • view
to that end, Self Regulatory Organizations need to be acknowledged for the jokes they are.
apr 2, 2025, 10:17 pm • 10 0 • view
I say this often to my partner.
apr 2, 2025, 11:52 pm • 0 0 • view
I will not take any politician seriously unless they say "we need to be more like China" with their whole chest
apr 4, 2025, 1:11 am • 0 0 • view
depends on who you do it to, imo if you embezzle a million from a company making 10 billion in sales should be treated diff than if you steal a million from a company making 10 million, kinda like an assault would be different if you punched a 50 pound kid in the face as hard as you did a grown man
apr 2, 2025, 10:15 pm • 1 0 • view
Losses, unlike gains, actually do trickle down. That embezzled million doesn’t mean a CEO loses a bonus. Some poor sap who failed to catch your scam loses their job, the bank adds an extra overdraft fee to their poorest customers to account for the insurance hike, prices and layoffs go up.
apr 2, 2025, 10:30 pm • 4 0 • view
Embezzling from big companies is less of a directly asocial Dick Move but the ultimate indirect costs are charged to the weakest among us. It should still be heartily discouraged on the same basis that sailing the high seas as a pirate is—many things heroic in fiction tend to suck in real life.
apr 2, 2025, 10:34 pm • 4 0 • view
Exactly!! Prison, no country club jail.
apr 3, 2025, 1:17 am • 3 0 • view
Isn't there some literal dollar value placed on a human life either by the UN, or maybe just insurance companies? (I know those are wildly different things. I've heard a lot of bullshit and done a lot of drugs.) Can we just divide the losses by that number and charge them with that many murders?
apr 3, 2025, 4:49 am • 6 0 • view
This is more suggestion than question.
apr 3, 2025, 4:49 am • 2 0 • view
Actuaries have this data, for an average American it’s around a million.
apr 3, 2025, 5:05 am • 5 0 • view
I always hated this concept, but I love the idea of flipping it around in this way.
apr 3, 2025, 5:22 am • 1 0 • view
I met a young guy who had been in prison for a couple years for stealing $4k (retail) of vapes when he was on drugs. Right around that time I had discovered my landlord had stolen $3k from me, but changing the books is just an honest accounting mistake! Same exact crime, very different outcomes.
apr 3, 2025, 4:56 am • 21 1 • view
While a poor choice of words, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat speaks to me. The interests of the rich are so misaligned with the bulk of the population they should not be allowed to weld power, because they'll just do crimes to the rest of us and get away with it.
apr 3, 2025, 1:56 pm • 2 0 • view
We need an exception for rouge traders at big firms that cause losses over $1B. If it's funny enough, it's not a crime.
apr 3, 2025, 1:19 am • 1 0 • view
100%
apr 3, 2025, 11:19 am • 0 0 • view
Wait I thought insider trading was already illegal
apr 3, 2025, 6:56 am • 0 0 • view
Trust me when I say that they absolutely do if you’re poor. You have to be above a certain net wealth to escape consequences.
apr 2, 2025, 10:24 pm • 5 0 • view
A fine is a price. Put some rich people in lockup.
apr 3, 2025, 5:32 am • 0 0 • view
Just swap them with the drug laws. Get rid of the mandatory minimum drug charges and replace them with insider trading and bribery.
apr 3, 2025, 11:36 am • 0 0 • view
Also: levy graduated fines proportionate to income (AKA Day-fines).
apr 3, 2025, 3:12 pm • 1 0 • view
They kinda did that with Bernie Madoff, but only because he ripped off rich people.
apr 2, 2025, 10:32 pm • 5 0 • view
Wait, in the 1991 movie nothing but trouble I thought Dan Aykroids judge character was the villain... But I was wrong. It was Chevy Chases banker this whole time!
apr 3, 2025, 12:47 am • 1 0 • view
Not for nothing but the "Statistical Value of a Human Life" apparently gets estimated to between $1-$10Million, FEMA put it at $7.5Million for a person in the US in 2020. Good place to start for charging a financial crime as deserving penalties equivalent to what a murderer would be sentenced to.
apr 2, 2025, 11:35 pm • 4 0 • view
Tax evasion involving more than, oh, say, $250 thousand, should be a capital offense, and a fine of 1,000x that amount levied against the offender's estate.
apr 3, 2025, 12:16 am • 0 0 • view
Fuck, embezzling $50M gets you the same punishment as shoplifting a pack of Skittles.
apr 3, 2025, 3:55 pm • 3 0 • view