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The Golden Age Of White Collar Crime
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Huffington Post
Posted: February 23rd, 2020
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/white-collar-crime...
The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Since 2015, criminal penalties levied by the Justice Department have fallen from $3.6 billion to roughly $110 million. Illicit profits seized by the Securities and Exchange Commission have reportedly dropped by more than half. In 2018, a year when nearly 19,000 people were sentenced in federal court for drug crimes alone, prosecutors convicted just 37 corporate criminals. Tax evasion ... siphons up to 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by Americas largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004. Thats roughly two decades worth of street crime every single year. Over the last four decades, the agencies responsible for investigating elite and white-collar crime ... have seen their enforcement divisions starved into irrelevance. More than a third of the FBI investigators who patrol Wall Street were reassigned between 2001 and 2008. Even though auditing millionaires and billionaires is one of the most cost-effective government activities imaginablean independent report estimated in 2014 that it yielded up to $4,545 in recovered revenue per hour of staff timethe IRS investigated the returns of just 3 percent of American millionaires in 2017.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.
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