Justice Department Continues Pitiful White Collar Crime Cycle

After hitting a record low in President Biden’s first year in office, white collar prosecutions from the Department of Justice have slowly started to increase. The only problem is that the worst offenders keep getting away with the worst kinds of behavior. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.commondreams.org/news/corporate-prosecution

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

After hitting a record low in President Biden's first year in office, while white collar prosecutions from the Department of Justice have slowly started to increase, the only problem is the worst offenders keep getting away with it. Isn't that, that's the story, right?
It is.
Pick up the story. Yeah. Do you remember after the burndown, financial burndown, Wall Street stole eight, what $8 trillion from mom and pop? And then we had Obama comes in, oh, I'm gonna do something about this. This is gonna stop, and some people are gonna be prosecuted. Do you remember that?
Yep.
It's one reason I jump, do you remember me getting up first thing in the morning going on Fox News of all places to defend Obama because I was so convinced that he was gonna do something meaningful about all this? I mean, that was my talking point. How do we not do something about this? Time after time we heard, that was his point. Not just him, but virtually every president that runs, we're gonna do something. We're gonna clean up the white collar criminal problem in this country. Well, do you know what? After that was done, he let virtually everybody go. Nobody, none of those bankers, not one single banker went to prison. The documents and the conduct was overwhelming. It was criminality from top to bottom. Everybody walked free. It's just the new norm, isn't it?
It is. And on top of that, a couple years into Obama's administration, we had the BP Deepwater horizon.
Good. I forgot about that.
Obama came out and said, you just tell me who's to kick. Those were his exact words, tell me who's to kick.
Right. Right. As if he.
Well, nobody got their kicked. Everybody got off scot free, even with all of the horrible things we learned. And this cycle just continues itself. And so this story comes out and says, hey, look, we've actually had an uptick in white collar prosecutions. The DOJ actually prosecuted nine more people.
Nine.
Nine.
Not 90, but nine.
Nine more than we did the year before. So, hey, we're winning. But then as Public Citizen points out, you look at the numbers and you realize, wait a minute, wait a minute. Whoa. You're not actually prosecuting the big corporate people. You're prosecuting small business owners.
Put that in perspective.
People with less than 50 employees, you're going after the little local pizza joint on the corner. But you call that a corporate prosecution. Meanwhile, you've got the bankers, you've got the Boeing CEOs, you've got the pharma CEOs, they're killing people. And oh, well, we like them, but yeah, we're gonna get the little clothing shop around the corner.
76% of the prosecutions were for corporations that had fewer than 50 employees. Okay. The rest of the prosecutions, there weren't any. If you had a thousand employees, you weren't, you got something called deferred prosecution. Explain to the viewers what that means.
Yeah. This is basically the slap on the wrist. That is the DOJ coming to you and saying, listen, we know deep down you're good people, so we're not gonna hold you accountable. There's gonna be a fine, so give us some money and that's what they, the DOJ loves their fun money. And they get to spend that money that they bring in, that is essentially their big piggy bank. And so they would rather get the money by themselves new offices, new company cars, new computers.
Cool SUVs.
Exactly. And that is what they do because we've done that story too. But then these companies say, okay, well we won't do it again. Two years later, they'll be back in front of those DOJ lawyers saying, okay, we did it again.