Cunt wrote:Cormac wrote:Cunt wrote:I think if you were to force the government welfare cases to work, you could accomplish more than forcing the rioters to work. How many elected officials have been caught stealing from their boss, only to find excuses and keep on going?
I suggest an e-petition to criminalize white collar crime to the extent that this rioting and looting has been.
White collar crime is already seriously criminalised. Are you familiar at all with penalties for such crimes?
To be honest, no. I was thinking of the number of convictions. I don't see all that many.
So, rather than concluding that there may not actually be all that much of it, you conclude that there is a conspiracy of corruption in place protecting corrupt business people, and that this corrupt conspiracy stretches from the police, through the Director of Public Prosecutions (or whatever the equivalent office is in England), through the courts, and through the businesses that are the victims of such crimes?
The reality is that white collar crime is usually some sort of embezzlement, and it is boring and not very newsworthy.
Also, what is actually criminal in business is fairly arbitrary, and can change at the drop of a hat, because much of it is set in legislation. (What is legal one year is illegal the next).
Finally, while there was certainly a great deal of fraudulent and reckless activity that led to the recent global crisis. I would like to see aggressive prosecutions for this. We might yet see it. It takes time to carry out investigations in these matters. However, there is a problem. We'll find that the profusion of regulations has given people screens to hide behind. We'll now find it possible for executives to show that they always acted to the letter of the law, even though it is plain that the business was not in control. The problem for effective regulation is simply that the letter of the law now leaves so many gaps, that it is reasonably easy to exploit. The more regulations, the more gaps.
What is required is less complex regulation, but much more aggressive application of the existing laws.
But the notion that there is a grand conspiracy of criminality in the Financial Services Industry that is robbing Britain of billions annually is just totally wrong-headed. The Financial Services Industry is the single biggest revenue generator in the UK, and therefore it pays for more social services than any other business - between corporation tax and wages (and the tax on wages etc).