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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (96259)	7/8/2011 9:27:08 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Here is the problem with either self regulating captialism or letting capitalism monitor itself. Corporations are sociopaths. As Bentway said so brilliantly: "there is no division of conscience. So if our society does not regulatre or police corporations and businesses we will end up like many third world countries where corporate criminality is rife and our entire justice system becomes unfair. LIke Mexico right now where drug cartels are taking over the coutnry because of a weak judicial system. 10 years for smoking crack, or stealing a pair of tennis shoes and nothing for stealing billions. Present that to a law class. <<Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes — a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis. Though little noticed outside legal circles, the guidelines were welcomed by firms representing banks. The Justice Department’s directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled “an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors,” Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September. The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return, the government could enter into agreements to delay or cancel the prosecution if the companies promised to change their behavior. But this approach, critics maintain, runs the risk of letting companies off too easily. “If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,” said Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney. “I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime, in particular in the financial space.”