More of this, please:
Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy on Wednesday by a federal jury in Manhattan. He is the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street.
Mr. Rajaratnam, who was convicted on all 14 counts, faces up to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced.
Mr. Rajaratnam is expected to appeal.
The government built its case against Mr. Rajaratnam with powerful wiretap evidence. Over a nine-month stretch in 2008, federal agents secretly recorded Mr. Rajaratnam’s telephone conversations. They listened in as Mr. Rajaratnam brazenly – and matter-of-factly – swapped inside stock tips with corporate insiders and fellow traders.
“I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share,” Mr. Rajaratnam said to one of his employees in advance of the bank’s earnings announcement.
Hard time, none of this halfway house medium security shit.
No One of Consequence
JUMP YOU FUCKER$!
(always loved that sign)
– NOoC
Pliny
The article doesn’t mention a fine, but I’m guessing it won’t be $1.3 billion
4jkb4ia
Alas, you didn’t see Joe Nocera, who is claiming that this case is taking away from financial-crisis-related prosecutions.
Rajaratnam did look absolutely stone guilty.
(And then if the USA office and SEC aren’t going to get the resources to do all of these cases, it isn’t their fault)
DBrown
A billionaire serve hard time? Please! The elite run the system for themselves and millionaires don’t serve hard time – you really think a billionaire will? Get real.
maya
Can a governorship for Raj Raj be far behind?
Just Some Fuckhead
My money is on country club lockup.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
How about rounding up the corporate insiders and fellow traders as well?
MikeJ
@Pliny: Disgorging the profits from a crime doesn’t fall under fines. That’s a separate thing.
Tom
Want to steal $10? Get a knife
Want to steal $100? Get a gun
Want to steal $1000? Get a gun and a partner
Want to steal $10000? Get a gun, a partner, and a getaway car
Want to steal $100000? Get some automatic weapons, body armour, a partner, and a getaway car
Want to steal $1000000? Get a MBA
maya
That breath of fresh flatulence, Rushbo, will spin that Raj is a cohort of George Soros, a (D) will appear after his name on FOX News, or, no mention of it at all by either.
MTiffany
Hey look, the sacrificial lamb is a brown-skinned guy! Talk about a token prosecution…
Benjamin Cisco
@efgoldman:
That, and a gig on either CNBC or Faux Business Channel.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tom: Haha. That’s great.
singfoom
So, not as if the DOJ is taking suggestions, but now that they’re done with Raj, maybe they should look into Joe Cassano. He’s the major reason for AIG dying.
There’s plenty of bad activities (were) and bad actors at GoldInSacks as well. And they (AFAIK as I know) are the ones who pushed to have AIG destroyed rather than settle for payment over time.
fhtagn
Presumably Megan McArdle will now feel compelled to sick up her reminiscences of what a really super guy Raj Raj was, how they shared cooking tips, how his taste in rose crystal Himalayan sea salt was superb, how his place mats demonstrated a natural culture and elegance such as comes only with proximity to inordinate amounts of money….
jibeaux
@MTiffany:
Oh, for Pete’s sake. The article also says that the investigation of him led to insider trading charges of 25 other defendants, 21 of whom have pled guilty. I tend to the think the strategy there had more to do with the merits of that case than his Indianness.
BGinCHI
Obviously Rand Paul is right and this poor guy is on Obama’s Enemies List.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
Two words: brown guy.
Wake me up when a puffy, pasty faced Master of the Universe of any age winds up at USP Marion, dodging the involuntary sodomy gangs.
Bullsmith
He’ll get a big fat double-digit sentence now, but be released pending appeal. At the appeal, when there’s less attention, at a minimum his jail time will be cut down severely. That’s been a pattern with convicted Masters of the Universe before. Bait and switch justice.
Dexter
In other news: GOP Freshmen On Medicare Attacks: Let’s Let Bygones Be Bygones
Everybody does it. Also, too.
El Tiburon
Good one.
And that this dude is named Raj Rajaratnam, am I assuming too much it was easier to convict Raj rather than Ralph?
cathyx
Poor Mr. Rajaratnam must not have known the right people.
fhtagn
@Dexter:
Must be some mighty serious self-soiling going on for the GOP to ask for mercy so blatantly.
David in NY
Oh, cut it out. You’re not volunteering for a stay in the alleged “country clubs” and neither is he — no prison is fun, and they’re all run by petty tyrants. And I bet none of you has ever eaten prison food.
Furthermore, it costs the taxpayer significantly more to place someone in a high security prison than in one with low security. Putting somebody like Raj in a high security joint is pointless and a total waste of your money. There are plenty of really dangerous guys to fill up the secure cells (the BOP is bursting at the seams), and it’s stupid to use that scarce, expensive space on someone like Raj.
Cheap Jim
@jibeaux: Sri Lankanity, actually.
fhtagn
@David in NY:
Have you done time, David?
David in NY
And really, when I hear liberals get all huffy about “country club prisons,” I just think they’re trying to out-macho the wingnuts. Probably the single bad thing remaining that the Puritans left America is an insatiable desire (common to all sides of the political spectrum) for harsh punishment. That and race lie behind almost all that is bad in the Republican programs.
fhtagn
@David in NY:
You forgot the sadism, the hatred of women, the love of class warfare…..
David in NY
@fhtagn: I have visited many prisons in the course of my work, talked to countless prisoners, eaten in their cafeterias (yuck), counted the mouse turds in their food storage areas, etc. I’ve brought lawsuits based on intolerable conditions there. I’ve had friends incarcerated. I could survive it, but even the best run, safest prisons are emphatically not country clubs (at which I have also, occasionally, eaten).
arguingwithsignposts
@David in NY:
FTFY
jrg
So, we’re finally prosecuting these criminals and you all are whining because the one cited here is too brown.
Fuck you. Seriously. If someone’s ripping me off, I don’t give a shit what color he is.
David in NY
@fhtagn: You know, the class warfare stuff only works because we all know the poor have to be punished — those folks who are being foreclosed on can’t be helped because it’s all their own fault. The need to see the unsuccessful be punished for their failures is the key to Republican success on the class warfare front. It’s often tied to race, but the main thrust is — “They deserve what they get.”
David in NY
@arguingwithsignposts: I don’t get it.
fhtagn
@David in NY:
So, what you are saying is that all prisons are hell-holes and it doesn’t really matter where they dump Raj Raj? I happen to agree with you that maximum security is a waste of time for non-violent financial crime, by the way. That said, a good, stiff sentence might just serve notice to the financial crooks who nearly wrecked the economy that it’s time to be honest.
arguingwithsignposts
This is so totally OT, but be on the look out if you see any of these: The Hard Knock Life of an Internet Troll
danimal
@fhtagn: Vitter’s in the House now?
salacious crumb
its a good start, but Mr. Rajratnam didnt have the kind of political connections Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies have with the political connections. I would have been much happier if I saw Mr. Blankfein in an orange jumpsuit..not small peanut guys like Madoff and Rajratnam (not to say they dont deserve justice, just saying they are small fry…)
fhtagn
@David in NY:
“We all” know nothing of the sort. The people who think they know are the Beltway media and the Republican/teabagger jihad.
priscianus jr
I don’t really care too much if they put Mr. Raja-Rat in a country club jail or not. I’m sure the feds gained a lot of information from this, and what concerns me more is to see them put 2 and 2 together. I want to see the whole rotten system taken down is what I want. I have had the feeling for a long time that Obama decided to approach this problem legally rather than politically, because he realized that even with all the legal loopholes, it was still based largely on outright fraud. That’s a surer path.
“The wheels of the law grind slow, but they grind exceedingly small.”
Or, as in the Sybilline Oracles,
“Late do the mills of God grind the fine flour.
Fire then shall destroy all things and give back
To fine dust, the heads of the high-leafed hills
And of all flesh. First cause of ills to all
Are covetousness and a lack of sense.
For there shall be love of deceitful gold
And silver; for than these did mortals choose
Naught greater, neither light of sun, nor heaven,
Nor sea, nor broad-backed earth whence all things grow,
Nor God who giveth all things, of all things
The Father, nor yet faith and piety
Chose they before them.”
(Milton S. Terry translation)
fhtagn
@salacious crumb:
Also too, Jamie Dimon.
David in NY
@fhtagn: Stiffness can be accounted for by length. But frankly, even that is probably overkill. The rate and length of incarceration in this country is far higher than almost anywhere else in the world (used to be like that in USSR and apartheid-era South Africa; not sure if they’ve dropped back). All of Europe manages a safe and civil society with punishments a fraction of what we impose.
And it’s fundamentally because even liberals in this country want great big sentences even when they’re practically unnecessary. Just look at the comments here, acting as if two or three years in prison are nothing. Liberals are as responsible for the incredible over-incarceration in this country as conservatives are. Just thirsty for punishment.
R. Porrofatto
Which is why the many CNBC-type Kudloads of the world think insider trading should be legal, and would actually be beneficial for ordinary investors if it were. I’m not making this up.
David in NY
@fhtagn: Yeah, but, as I’m pointing out, even “we” suffer from the same impulse — the only proper response to bad behavior by our chosen bad guys (for us the bankers, for others the strapping bucks and hapless homeowners being foreclosed on) is to punish them. It’s really pretty sick all around.
AWL
Having spoken with other Sri Lankan Tamils about this before, all of them were cheering the fact that he was arrested and quickly dismissed any conspiracy theories regarding his race (usually centered around the Sri Lankan government playing a major role in his arrest because he’s Tamil). Why? Because he’s a crook! And I’m almost sure one of the people in that group was Raj’s brother-in-law (or related in some other way).
Plus said conspiracy theory made little sense because supposedly most of his investments in Sri Lanka helped the Sinhalese government and not the Tamil minority.
Bobby Thomson
Oh, come on. The Puritans were wingnutty enough to get kicked out of two different countries, but harsh punishment was hardly an invention of Plymouth Colony. It’s one of the things the Romans gave us along with the aqueduct, and is of course even older than that.
jrg
@David in NY: Yes, David… Because the prisons are crowded with white-collar criminals. That’s the real reason our incarceration rates are so high.
Give me a break.
Amir_Khalid
@Cheap Jim:
I think the word you’re looking for is Serendipity. (Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka.)
fhtagn
@David in NY:
I am sorry, but you are confusing two things in your rush to judge others. You are confusing over-incarceration for petty crime, or things that should not even be criminalized with giving a strict sentence to white collar criminals like Raj Raj. You need to rethink this, and do so with a bit less denunciation of people you do not know. It is perfectly possible to want white-collar criminals to do time without thereby applauding the over-incarceration of e.g. young black men for trivial offenses, or crimes for which their white peers receive milder sentences.
cbear
@David in NY:
Bullshit.
You want prison reform? Throw that vile piece of shit and everyone of his compatriots in the nastiest hole in the federal prison system and let him fucking rot. Unless and until these Masters of the Universe are sentenced to the exact same type of terms, served in the same facilities, as black, brown, and poor white people robbing 7-Elevens there’s not a goddamn thing that’s going to change in our legal system.
4jkb4ia
Here’s a profile of Preet Bharara from New York magazine. Makes clear that he was born in India and that this would be the biggest insider trading case in history. Also discusses the choice to go after insider trading and to use wiretaps aggressively.
David in NY
@cbear: That’s not true. And really, as I’ve been trying to say, it’s hardly different from the wingnuts point of view — only the identity of the bad guy is different.
Your desire to be cruel to people is unseemly.
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m prolly the only one here that’s done time and I stand by my remark.
ChrisNYC
Allen Stanford went to a “real prison” and had a pretty rough time of it. The country club prison meme is really tired.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/allen_stanford/
singfoom
A conflation of so many issues. How to tease them apart?
Those convicted of a crime should not be coddled. This is not to say they should be mistreated, but the treatment of prisoners should be consistent regardless of their crimes, unless the nature of their crimes indicates an extra high level of danger to prison staff. They should still be treated as human beings.
White collar criminals should be treated the same as other criminals. Their crimes in the end, while less violent in a visceral way, tend to touch more people’s lives than a burglar.
Should Raj be thrown in a supermax? No, that would be a waste. But one can separate the need for white collar criminals to face justice and the over incarceration of people of color for petty crimes.
These things are related, but not the same.
Bob Loblaw
@priscianus jr:
I have had the feeling for a long time that the investigation was undertaken by the Bush SEC for a full year before Obama was even inaugurated…
singfoom
@David in NY: I do think cbear has a point and you’re just throwing it away. Crime will always be with us, but prison serves as a deterrent to criminal behavior.
The deterrent for white collar crimes has been missing for a long time. When those financial wizards realize that they will do time in a normal prison (ala Alan Stanford), it will hopefully deter them against committing financial crimes.
Are you against preventing crime through deterrence?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bob Loblaw:
lolz
jrg
@David in NY:
As someone who has lost tens of thousands of dollars to corporate crooks (I was a Worldcom employee who got had by the execs who pumped up the stock by giving us discounts, then dumping it), go fuck yourself.
You want to sell weed? Have at it, I don’t care. You steal thousands of dollars from me, and place my co-workers in a position where they may be eating cat food in retirement? You get ABSOLUTELY no sympathy from me.
Innocent people commit suicide because of shit like this. Just because you cannot comprehend the externalities here does not mean they don’t exist.
Did it ever occur to you that abuses like this are so widespread because the risks are not great enough to disencentivize white collar crime?
horatius
That’s still pretty low-hanging fruit. I’ll believe it when John Paulson’s in the slammer for pulling much worse shit.
Nutella
Info about one of this guy’s co-conspirators. He “and prosecutors have agreed on a sentencing recommendation of 37 to 46 months. However, the judge could impose a harsher punishment at the Aug. 19 sentencing hearing.” He says he “made a horrible mistake”. That’s white-collar crime for you, just a horrible mistake, not really a crime crime like sticking up a 7-11.
cbear
@David in NY:
Bullshit again. I have a hell of a lot more experience with our “legal” system than do you, and from a vastly more personal viewpoint, and I’m the most staunch advocate you could possibly imagine for reform, BUT, all the bleating and blathering in the world ain’t going to change the system until the people who perpetuate it are forced to see and feel it’s true impact and horror.
David in NY
@jrg: @fhtagn: “denunciation of people you do not know”
I’m just denouncing what people say — their solution to every problem is to, as cbear put it so eloquently above — “Throw that vile piece of shit and everyone of his compatriots in the nastiest hole in the federal prison system and let him fucking rot.”
I did not object to a “strict sentence” for Raj. I objected to the notion that he would be getting off easy because he’d go to a “country club,” which is, in my experience an asinine cliche. Maybe you know more about prison life than I, but I firmly doubt it.
Finally, look at the sentencing guidelines for this crime, from Cole’s link. “Mr. Rajaratnam, who was convicted on all 14 counts, could face as much as 19 and a half years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said on Wednesday.” I submit that 19 years for this crime is absurdly unnecessary. No one in any other industrialized nation would get that kind of sentence. But a sentence of that lenght is not just “strict,” it’s ridiculous. A sentence far lower than that would be adequate to serve every purpose of punishment — deterrence, revenge, you name it. It would be in Europe, at least; I don’t see why not here.
cbear
@David in NY: If you’re going to denounce me and what I said, at least have the courtesy to accurately quote me, you stupid fuck.
David in NY
@cbear: Yeah, “horror” is necessary. I say you’re just looking for unnecessary cruelty.
The key to deterrence of such crimes as this is not the “horror” you’re thirsting after. Rather, it’s increasing the risk of being caught. It’s a commonplace of criminology, and even makes common sense, that the severity of punishment deters far less than does the likelihood of apprehension. These guys are, by and large, scared shitless of being in any prison, however pristine by your standards.
But they, realistically, believe they’ll never be caught. And precious few of them are, largely because of lack of resources devoted to enforcement. (These guys can be found, witness this case, but wiretapping is really labor intensive and expensive.) You prosecute two dozen cases like this in a year, each with two dozen defendants, and give each of them one to two years in prison, maybe three to four for a really big guy like this, and you’ll put a real dent in this stuff. But one big, cruel sentence? Forget it, ’cause they think, “I’ll never be caught.”
jrg
@David in NY:
Clearly not, as this problem re-appears again and again and again.
Additionally, punishment should be stricter for this type of crime, because it takes more from more people than any other crime. You could make an argument that this is worse than murder (I believe this to be the case because I’ve seen white collar crime destroy lives)… Even if you were not sympathetic to that argument, you should note that it’s a lot harder to catch these guys than it is a common thug. Since the chances of getting caught are less, the punishment should be more severe if it is to be an effective deterrent.
David in NY
@cbear: I don’t understand your point then. You don’t want to throw him in the “nastiest hole” in prison? Sorry if I misconstrued you, but I don’t follow you, if I did.
David in NY
@jrg:
The problem is that this is not prosecuted very much. And when it is, it doesn’t usually target the big guys like Raj. The guys you see getting prosecuted are the unsophisticated guys in the mail room. That’s cause they’re the low-hanging fruit. For about the last two decades, there’s been little prosecution of higher-up insider trading. So this is big. We need more of it.
But look, the standard punishment for this under the guidelines is over 19 years. That’s just incredible. And unnecessary. What’s needed is to prosecute more guys like this — which hasn’t been happening. It matters far less what their sentence is — what matters is the fear, which hasn’t existed, that they will be caught.
cbear
@David in NY: Are you fucking dense?
NOTHING WILL CHANGE UNTIL THE POWERFUL ARE MADE TO SUFFER THE SAME HORRORS AND INDIGNITIES AS THE POWERLESS.
Of course that’s fucking cruel, but 30-40-50 years of rational discourse and appeals to our political elites has done EXACTLY nothing to change the system, it’s only gotten worse.
Joel
I could live with this guy getting a reduced sentence if the Feds can get him to flip on about 100 other traders.
Stefan
And that this dude is named Raj Rajaratnam, am I assuming too much it was easier to convict Raj rather than Ralph?
I know most of you don’t work around Wall Street, but these days, you’re as likely to encounter a Mohammed or a Raj or a Houjin or a Guilherme as you are a Ralph. The financial industry is fairly color-blind; if you’re smart and work well with numbers then you’re in. So yeah, some of those crooks will turn out to be brown-skinned, but that’s largely due to the fact that financial world as a whole has gotten a lot less white over the last decade.
David in NY
@jrg: Sorry, some crimes like Worldcom, Enron, and so on do deserve these very long sentences (though maximum security is still wasteful and unnecessary). Insider trading is not that. This guy did not cause anyone the loss of his job, his retirement or the like. I have no problem with the sentences of this length that Ebbers and Skilling, for example, got.
But that sort of criminality, the deep fraud involved and its terrible consequences, is quite different from what Raj is charged with. The victim in Raj’s case, is the “market” really, and maybe millions of investors for small amounts, adding up to a lot, but with nothing like the impact of, say, Enron.
Anyway, my main objection here is the immediate, reflexive call for harsh conditions of imprisonment (“hard time”) as the first step in analysis, without considerations of what’s necessary to reflect the impact of the actual crime, the economics of imprisonment, the likely deterrent effect and so on. Half of what Cole said, “More of this please,” was 100% correct. The other half, “hard time,” not so much.
RSA
@David in NY:
The other problem, as you know, is that none of this is evaluated in the abstract; people inevitably make comparisons. I just did a Google search for “20 year sentence” and “embezzlement” and found people who had stolen between $50K and $100K facing the same length of sentence as Rajaratnam. In this case, it seems that once you dive into white collar crime, it doesn’t really matter how much you steal–you’ll face the same punishment. But we really, really do want to deter the criminals who steal hundreds of millions of dollars, in comparison with those who steal hundreds of thousands.
David in NY
@cbear: See, I think, if you read my comments, I’m not dense. I think you are. If we can make these guys genuinely fear that someone will report them, be listening to their calls, reading their texts, if they do this, then we’ll get somewhere. But everybody’s immediate impulse to call for harsh conditions of confinement is, well, wrong, from any point of view of efficiency and effectiveness.
Might make you feel good, I guess, but I think that that’s sort of low on the list of desirable effects.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Stefan:
FTFY
jibeaux
As Hank Hill said, “Peggy, what kind of a country is this if I can only hate a man if he’s white?”
danimal
Two issues here. First, the length of sentences has gotten out of whack. Newsflash: no one spends 231 years in prison. The length of sentences can be shortened for almost all major crimes without an appreciable impact on public safety.
The second issue is the ‘balance’ between sentences for white collar crimes and other crimes. Justice is not being served. Four years in ‘Club Fed’ for a fraud charge may not be a bad sentence, but when it is compared to a 30 year sentence at Mini Guantanamo for a comparable burglary crime, there is a real problem.
The white collar criminal should get the same type of sentence that the street thug gets for a comparable crime. And I want a pony, too.
David in NY
@RSA: That’s interesting. Were those federal cases? If so, that’s astonishing (although it might support my view of over-punishment). Raj faces 20 years under the federal guidelines because he caused an immense loss (actually in a way a theoretical loss, but still, that counts). Maybe it’s in states where there’s still parole, and the defendant won’t do anywhere near the 20 years. I think I’ve known little lady bank tellers who got 3-4 years for taking, say, $300,000, which seemed to me like a lot, since they were losing their job, the possibility of even having a similar job, and would certainly never do it again. But not 20.
Figuring out the right punishment is hard. I just oppose the reflexive “throw away the key” impulse.
Just Some Fuckhead
@danimal:
I don’t wanna take a chance on them solving mortality and then letting a bunch of hardened 150 year old criminals, who’ve only ever known prisonlife, loose on the public.
gwangung
@cbear: He may be dense, but it’s clear that you’re not listening.
Please. Read what he’s written; it’s not hard to figure out that his point that surer punishment is a better punishment than harsher but rare punishment; it’s a common point for all levels of crime. And I don’t think it’s that controversial.
David in NY
@danimal: Federal sentences for white collar crime have been adjusted upward. When you actually deal with cases, it’s just very hard to say what’s the right sentence. In many burglary (since you mentioned that crime) cases, the prospect of recidivism is very high. In most (hardly all) “white collar” cases, that is not so true (though there are professional fraudsters who are essentially incorrigible). How to measure the actual loss to victims, the need (or not) for deterrence, the appearance of justice — it’s not easy.
David in NY
Anyway, as you see, I’ve got strong views about this stuff. Mainly that the reflexive reach for the punishment stick tends to defeat the need for better, more efficient, punishment and alternatives to it. I did not mean to offend anyone above. And I do compliment the B-J commentariat: so far as I’ve noticed, no one has called for Raj’s rape in prison (an all too common trope in these discussions of appropriate punishment). Thanks for that.
samsa
Good job. A man named Rajaratnam nabbed by an FBI agent named Kang and prosecuted by Chhabra. Only in America.
danimal
@Just Some Fuckhead: @Just Some Fuckhead: I stand corrected. lol
@David in NY: No, it’s not easy, but the disparities, especially as sentences are actually carried out, lead to a lot of mistrust in the system. We may have made progress, but there is still room for improvement.
samsa
@MTiffany: Reminds me of a story long time ago when one of the first to be prosecuted under a new (at the time) federal hate crime law was a non-white man in Michigan.
Judge Crater
If somebody hasn’t said it already, give him the Bradley Manning treatment. He may be suicidal so he should be made to sleep naked on a concrete bunk. And cold showers every couple of hours.
Ash Can
@Dexter: Back OT, that link is a riot. I imagine Obama putting that letter in a special little file marked “when I need a good laugh.” I can only imagine his response to them. They’re just begging to be sliced and diced.
cbear
You should really think about changing your nic to “If Dog Rabbit in NY.” (If the dog hadn’t stopped to take a piss he would have caught the rabbit).
The simple fact of the matter is we live in a society that is ruled by elites who refuse, except in very rare cases, to even investigate, much less punish, their fellow elites.
Here’s a question for you: For all your apparent good work and well-meaning efforts to effect some modicum of change in the system—exactly what effect do you think you have had?
Here’s another one: if the children of the powerful were forced to serve alongside the children of poor in fighting our country’s wars—would there be less or more war?
bkny
considering the destruction they assholes have caused, i suggest the same sentence as osama…
daveNYC
David in NY
@cbear:
So the Raj prosecution, convicting him and 20+ others, never happened? To quote Cole, the solution is “More of this please…” Those “very rare cases” need not be rare. It’s common knowledge that Bush II just pulled the plug on investigation of this stuff. Different members of the elite appear to be following different paths. We’ll see.
David in NY
@danimal: Yes, I agree. Problem is, one person’s “disparity” tends to be another’s “justice.” The federal system has been attempting to eradicate disparity for a quarter century and found that it far too often led to injustice (though that may have been a problem of implementation, not theory).
David in NY
@bkny:
I hope it’s not too picky to note that the last economic crash was not caused by insider trading, the crime at issue here.
Nutella
@David in NY:
I was going to accept your point about long sentences until I read this:
You think your hypothetical unlucky little old lady (who stole $300k from her employer) deserves sympathy and/or a shorter sentence because she lost her job????
This is exactly what infuriates me and many others about white collar crime: Losing your job/profession is not adequate punishment for a major crime like stealing $300K. Anyone who says that loses a lot of credibility.
Nutella
@Nutella:
Especially since thousands of people who have not committed any crime lose their job/profession every day in this economy.
Sloegin
Former grade-school classmate of mine just got 18 for dealing meth. Raj might get 19.
Is one too high? One too low? Kill one person you get a life sentence. Kill 5? A death sentence. Kill 70+? Maybe death, maybe life (Green River killer). Kill 3000+? The government hunts you off and on for 10 years and guns you down.
3 years for grand theft (give or take). What do you do with several thousand counts worth of grand theft?
liberal
@David in NY:
Yeah, you’re right—I think the banksters should be hanging from lampposts.
AAA Bonds
This man will never serve even half of that 25-year sentence.
If I’m proven wrong, hell, I win anyway.
liberal
@David in NY:
Not really.
Take the current statistical value of an average human life in the US. For sake of argument, let’s say it’s $5 million. Anyone caught stealing that amount or more should (a) forfeit all their assets, and (b) be sentenced to a life behind bars.
AAA Bonds
@David in NY:
And I see we have the pro-banker squad out here in their full force (that is, one person). I cry a million billion tears for this criminal asshole and your weepy-weep feelings over how he’s been wronged.
liberal
@David in NY:
That’s just bullshit. Just because the injury is more diffuse doesn’t mitigate anything.
By that logic, if I somehow managed to steal $100 from every adult in the US, my crime would be minor.
AAA Bonds
Seriously, when did we get a mini-Reason-Magazine in here?
1) Banker gets sentenced to actual real prison time
2) Libertarian pops up to say WHOA WHOA WHOA THESE PEOPLE SHOULDN’T GET LONG SENTENCES LIKE THOSE REAL CRIMINALS DO
Maude
@David in NY:
If the financial guys who think they are so clever believe they are going to be caught when they pull a fast one, it would prevent some of them from trying.
AAA Bonds
These investment houses, based in the United States, collapsed the American economy, not to mention the world economy, and clearly did so by a combination of agency capture, fox-guarding-the-henhouse legislation – and clearly, CLEARLY, by criminal fraud and other crimes.
Alongside substantial re-regulation of their free-lunch activities, the full force of the state should be brought to bear to punish them and make an example of them.
That’s the only just thing to do, and it’s the only wise thing to do. This is one step in the right direction.
AAA Bonds
@David in NY:
You ever see that scene in spy farces where someone’s mustache sort of half comes off in the middle of the big infiltration?
AAA Bonds
@David in NY:
M-m-m-mister Koch? Is . . . is that you?
I’ll take this opportunity to point out the proprietors of Balloon Juice that given the immense amount of money that the Kochs and associated organizations have put into hiring sockpuppets to post on blogs (Google up “koch facebook ad” if you don’t believe me), it’s not paranoia to assume that they’re working here too.
Here’s a link from KochWatch.
Nutella
@efgoldman:
Agreed, except they should be required to return every penny plus interest PLUS the fines. If they don’t have all of it in cash right now then they need to sell everything they own, including the family home(s), so that the total due is paid now. If all they have when they get out of prison is one set of clothes and a bus ticket out of town, that’s OK with me.
It’s part of that deterrence thing Dave in NY keeps talking about: If you steal a million bucks and go to jail for a year and DON’T have to return the million, you have received a very nice salary (over $100/hr for each of the 365×24 hours in jail). If you have to give every nickel back plus interest plus fines, that year in jail isn’t such a good deal.
David in NY
@AAA Bonds: Do you have a substantive dispute with what I’ve said? I don’t get your problem. If you don’t understand what I was saying, I’ll be happy to explain.
David in NY
@Nutella: No. Of course she lost her job. She also became essentially unemployable for the rest of her life — that’s what a felony conviction for a wage earner does. Can lead to loss of house, etc. It’s not a matter beyond consideration.
cckids
@Nutella:
Amen. This. THIS. Because that is what would truly hurt these types-the loss of the “status” that their money buys. These are the people who cannot imagine living on a pittance like $500,000 per year. I’d like to see them living in a tent/camper in a National Park for the rest of their lives, building trails & cleaning showers. Maybe pay them $18,000 or so. For most of them, it would seem like hell on earth. For a few, they just might become better humans.
David in NY
@Nutella: @efgoldman: Interestingly, that’s more or less what the law requires, where there are victims to whom restitution can be made. Federal law mandates full restitution (which is not always practicable, of course). The problem in insider trading, I think, is, how and to whom is restitution made? How is it calculated? How are victims identified? This is less easy than making restitution in cases of theft or embezzlement.
Probably a defendant in such a case must disgorge all earnings from the crimes of which he was convicted. This is far from all the wealth he has accumulated (some legally, some not).
300baud
As an entrepreneur and a sincere fan of free-market economies, I’m fucking delighted to see this sort of crony capitalism bullshit getting taken seriously. I also want to see hard time. If this guy had stolen this much by embezzlement or robbery, he’d be looking at a long stretch in the pokey. He should get at least this much here, and probably more.
David in NY
Man, you guys really do explain why we have the highest incarceration rates in the world here. Most of these white collar criminals are just never going to commit another crime. So the need to incarcerate them to protect people, usually a driver of prison sentences, is quite small. Furthermore, in the European nations, significantly shorter sentences than the ones proposed here (life imprisonment for a theft of $5 million dollars, e.g.) work adequately to deter such crimes. And these crimes are non-violent. It’s pretty clear that one important driver of over-incarceration in the US is too much incarceration of the non-violent.
Why the uncontrollable urge to punish in the US, I wonder? It’s pretty clear that the length of possible incarceration has little effect on deterring crime. What’s so appealing to everybody about imposing lengthy prison sentences on the non-violent criminals, as well as the violent ones? If you’re giving life imprisonment to somebody who defrauds a bunch of people of $5 million, then what does a convenience store armed robber, or someone who commits a serious assault, get? Death?
There’s just no sense of proportionality, it seems to me. Moreover, incarcerating people costs lots and lots of money. I don’t get it.
David in NY
@efgoldman: Sorry, that was not directed at you, but rather some other suggestions supporting what I think are excessively lengthy prison terms for non-violent crimes. Sorry if I seemed to be attacking you.
I think you’re right. Fines are probably underused in these big cases. I have as a rule represented the poor, where fines have little utility — but big financial frauds are different. Mere restitution of a victims losses may be inadequate for several reasons: 1) restitution applies only to victims of the crime of conviction, 2) much of such a person’s other gains may also have been ill-gotten, but not count as restitution, and 3) the reason you say, it doesn’t seem just, exactly, for them to be living the high life, even if they have served prison time. Of course, not all of their money may have been earned through crime, and substituting a fine for incarceration may seem to some like buying their way out of prison.
Ed: Oh, and what and to whom restitution should be made in Raj’s case is, as I noted above, a difficult question.
Mnemosyne
@David in NY:
A big part of it is that people really do get off easy all the time … but not the ones that the right wing rants about. Nice, middle-class white guys are able to get lighter sentences than minorities, especially if they “have a bright future.”
It’s the years of accumulated irritation of watching the Milkens of the world do a few years and then go right back to what they were doing.
I think your approach is right — shorter sentences with more prosecutions — but we have the best justice system that money can buy, so I think it’s a little utopian in the current circumstances. I mean, Jesus, Robert Durst killed someone, dismembered him, dumped his body in the Gulf and was still acquitted.
nastybrutishntall
Call me when it’s a white guy. A Protestant white guy. You may have to let it ring a bit, since I may not be around to answer it on that particular cold day in Hell.
Stefan
Call me when it’s a white guy. A Protestant white guy. You may have to let it ring a bit, since I may not be around to answer it on that particular cold day in Hell.
You know, this isn’t the 1920s anymore. There just aren’t that many Protestant white guys left in high finance these days — as I mentioned, it’s become increasingly international, and Protestant white guys are now under-represented on Wall Street compared to their number in the general population.
nastybrutishntall
@Stefan: But somehow the brown guy wasn’t able to convince the prosecutor, judge or jury that prison time would be “bad for his career.” Hmm.
I’m not saying he shouldn’t go to jail. I’m just saying that nobody’s surprised the only perp to walk so far isn’t named A. Hardy White III.