Our poor Galtian heroes manage to keep getting away with murder:
On a plane earlier this week, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street. The film’s outsized antics—public masturbation, the tossing of little people, lots and lots of Quaaludes—seemed too big for a seatback screen, or, for that matter, reality. As despicable as some of Jordan Belfort’s behavior was, I was able to occasionally laugh at Leonardo DiCaprio’s version of him knowing that, by now, more than 10 years after his real-life sentencing, Belfort has been sufficiently punished.
But in fact, that’s hardly the case: After pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering, Belfort was ordered in 2003 to pay out about $110 million to those he wronged. Since then, he’s only paid $11.8 million. He was also sentenced to four years in federal prison, but he only ended up serving just shy of two years.
Meanwhile, he’s thriving as a motivational speaker, and has made some money from selling the film rights to his life story. In a testimonial for his speaking services, Leonardo DiCaprio called Belfort “a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work.”
Belfort’s relatively consequence-free story is only one of the more prominent ones in a parade of aggravating numbers reported on earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. There’s still $97 billion out there in penalties that the Justice Department has failed to recover, and between September 2012 and September 2013, the department collected only 22 percent of penalties doled out. One particularly demoralizing figure was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had collected about a tenth of a percent of the $3.7 billion owed to wronged investors.
The wealthy playboy son, Dan Bilzerian, who is discussed later in the piece, is quite something, isn’t he?
Snarki, child of Loki
Accountability is for the little people, you know, peons.
Comrade Dread
Rich people don’t pay for their crimes.
At least until the commoners start to go hungry and break out the guillotines.
Which is one reason why I never understood the opposition to and resentment of the safety net. The more hungry desperate people you have, the higher the chance that people will be desperate enough to stop giving a shit and opt for violence.
Howard Beale IV
Only the most egregious or if you piss off the Feds get the harsh sentences.
Matt McIrvin
Revolutions usually take place in times of rising expectations, when things get just a little better, and people start to expect more than they can immediately get.
If things just get worse and worse with no end in sight, the poor people don’t revolt, they just become resigned or die.
So once you go down the road of oppressing the poor, it’s rational to just keep doing it harder and harder. What kills you is deigning to throw them a bone: you can’t let any bit of hope emerge.
Iowa Old Lady
I saw that movie on a plane too. Usually in a movie, you see a plot arc and a character arc, but that movie made me feel like I didn’t know what the film maker was trying to tell me.
shelley
I thought it was illegal to profit from your crime.
Poopyman
@shelley: Well, it’s illegal for you to profit from your crime. But then, you’re not one of the MOTUs.
skerry
Why? Why has DOJ only collected 22% of fines owed? I don’t get it (other than I understand MOTU live differently than I do). But if the fines have been assessed, it seems the hard work has been done. Why no enforcement?
Am I naive?
mai naem mobile
Gee, if I get a photocop speeding ticket and genuinely don’t get it in the mail and therefore dont take care of it, I get an arrest warrant. These guys getting away with this? And why? And,yeah, what is Eric Holder doing about this?
Debbie
@shelley:
Tell that to Henry Blodgett.
Tommy
@shelley: I didn’t know this story. But I couldn’t get through The Wolf of Wallstreet. Only got about halfway through it. With that said I am like you, I didn’t know or think you could profit from your crimes.
Baud
@shelley:
Not illegal to sell your story. First Amendment.
@skerry:
Not sure, but if the fines assessed exceed assets, then they won’t be collected.
Tommy
@skerry: Look at Clive Bundy. It seems when fines are put in place they are not always collected. Not sure how this breaks down. I had one legal problem in my life. I got a DUI. I can assure you the state made damn well sure I paid them.
Keith G
@Comrade Dread:
One reason for this is how the public’s attention gets aggregated and focused. Stories about a brute pummeling a wife or a child is much more interesting, easy, and for some, fun to report than most tales of white collar crime.
How many would watch a series called C.I.S. Wall Street?
Linnaeus
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree. It’s understandable to believe that dismantling the social safety net (or not establishing one at all) will encourage some kind of revolution, but it’s more often the case that most people accept their lot or do not believe they can act effectively to change it. Unbalanced social systems can be remarkably stable.
Also, it’s no guarantee that any revolution that does happen will be a “progressive” one. Folks can go right as much as they can go left.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Dread: There are people who simply cannot enjoy their gourmet meals unless they know that someone, somewhere, is starving, preferably nearby.
Linnaeus
The cat photos seemed oddly out of place amid all the obnoxiousness.
Richard Bottoms
Some thin skinned jerk named Freddie deBoer doesn’t seem to like criticism. After reading his wallowing self-pity about the end of culture and his insult to Beyonce here:http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/09/12/everything-that-you-need-to-know-about-pop-culture-and-adulthood/#comment-43646
I responded. He deleted it. So I posted it again. And I’m reposting it here and later on my own blog. Enjoy.
….
So, I’ve read two essays in which a couple of clueless white guys argue about whether a bunch of other clueless white guys refuse to grow up. Meanwhile black and brown people struggle at the bottom of an economic disaster created by white guys that make lives of the poor everywhere already precarious ever more desperate.
Uber get valued at $18 billion dollars while the World Health Organization has to practically hold bake sales to fund operations designed to keep the planet from succumbing to global pandemic.
Tony Soprano and Walter White don’t represent the last gasp of white guys doing evil but kind of feeling bad about it, they are simply the latest incarnation of it. Am I the only person who noticed that the most popular TV series ever featured a self absorbed jerk whose retirement plan was to sell his meth business to Neo-Nazis?
The trashing of Beyonce is by both you whining jerks is the latest version of calling black women wh*res while lusting after their sexuality. Our music has been making white folks rich ever since we were allowed to record it, Jay-Z and Bey and Dr. Dre are simply the first generation of blacks to not get f*****d in the process. The Motown sound for the first generation of black folks to gain a piece of the pie.
The greatest accumulation of wealth and power during the twenty years following the end of WWII occurred during a period of economic and cultural exclusion of blacks.
Blacks were locked out of Levittown’s from coast to coast, imprisoned in urban ghettos in the North and crushed under the heel of state sponsored terrorism in the South. We received the merest sliver of benefit from post WWII programs, but it was enough, just barely to keep us in the game.
And now, as white men crashed the world once again what gains we did make have almost been wiped out. When it finally looked like the %0.01 might have to at last share the world with the brown their greed and avarice plunged the capitalist system into chaos.
At the very moment America seemed ready to evolve, to regain the moral standing to challenge Muslim extremism, Russian gangsterism and the legacy of Africa’s colonialist past the West seizes up in a fit of economic chaos at once frozen an orgy of consumerism & comfort for a tiny sliver of the population and Teahadist rage at the mere thought that white people may not be at the center of everything any more.
The most powerful Lego set ever built was put in the hands of a the man-child George W. Bush, and when the pieces were sufficiently bent and battered a black adult gets handed the box of broken toys. And even as some rich white children run off to amuse themselves with pop culture distractions, other even richer ones are working mightily to set the box on fire if they can’t wrest it back.
You must not have read Marvel comics in the 60’s & 70’s because if you had you’d know the story of the Guardians of the Galaxy is essentially the same one told in a cosmos spanning saga from decades ago.
Since the more things change the more they stay the same, the technology may have evolved but GothG is still a story about a little planet wrestling with power it can barely control as it struggles through cosmic adolescence hopefully without erasing everything from existence.
Thanos the death worshiping maniac allows Ronin the Accuser to become a wrathful judge of a people he hates and Peter Quill the lonely boy who learns to face mortality are all characters who did not spring into existence just the summer. They have been part of a shared universe that goes back 70+ years in new pantheon of myths created after man created electricity & computing machines & the fire of Atomic power.
The Marvel universe has changed over time, Captain America’s unexpurgated comics from the 40’s contain racist imagery that would embarrass the KKK today. The introduction of The Falcon as equal partner to Cap in the 70’s represented a monumental shift in attitudes among some Americans, but not all. He was written at the time by white guys trying to talk black, but at least he became part of the story.
White folks going nuts over some meaningless bit of fluff, some non-important entertainment fad sweeping the country is as old as the country itself only now women and minorities demand their existence be acknowledged even as you work out your identity problems. You have always been Don Draper and Walter White and Tony Soprano and Doctor Doom, and blacks know this more than most.
So grow up and do it soon.
The clock is ticking on climate change, Ebola, A.I., mass surveillance, police brutality, nanotechnology, and mass unemployment as society shifts faster & faster still.
Beyonce isn’t the problem here, you are.
Villago Delenda Est
Here’s a case of some Galtian assholes who are getting some justice.
skerry
@Tommy: It seems that if the money can’t be located (hidden or transferred to others like the man in the article), then there should be jail time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linnaeus: The French and Russian Revolutions started out pretty progressive, but rapidly deteriorated into tyrannies every bit as obnoxious as those they overthrew. It took France nearly a century to actually get most of the progressive ideals of their revolution into place, and Russia hasn’t managed it yet, nearly a century later. It’s nearly always “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Mr Stagger Lee
@Howard Beale IV: Yet the Reagan DOJ did that through Rudolf Guliani, went after Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and others. The first Bush Administration put Savings and Loans crooks
in jail. These were Republicans who did these actions. What does this say about this administration, that had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to confront these bastards? Remember when AG Holder used the phrase Too Big to Prosecute?
Corner Stone
@Keith G:
Would that be about the sex lives of fabulously wealthy narcissistic sociopaths?
Cause I’d probably watch that.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
I’d be like watching myself if I had money….
And a sex life.
Citizen_X
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Well, sure, over two decades ago.
Today’s GOP ain’t Dubya’s daddy’s GOP.
Corner Stone
@skerry:
The idea of corporate personhood has to be dissolved. The individual profits from his/her actions, they should be punished for their actions.
Actual jail time for individuals is the only way to slow some of this down.
Tokyokie
@Corner Stone: Or, in the alternative, corporate “persons” can get the death penalty of having their charters nullified and their share prices reduced to zero.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Among other things, it says that the situation is different in a number of ways. Give me specific crimes you would like to see prosecuted against specific people explaining the specific evidence that would be used to convict them. Keep in mind that the DoJ DID prosecute several people for financial fraud over mortgage bonds that went bad. The evidence they had included emails between the defendants in which they talked about how they were misrepresenting the bonds to their customers.
The defendants were acquitted. So if you’re going to demand prosecution, you need to have better evidence than the perps admitting that they were doing it.
Mike J
@Tokyokie:
There are an awful lot of people who work up a lot of sympathy for those poor, put upon shareholders who didn’t personally do anything wrong, but don’t really care about what happens to the family of somebody who gets sent away for having an unsmoked joint in the glove compartment.
Bobby B.
This blog is ringed by ads for Verizon and US Cellular. If I click on them won’t I be giving aid and profit to The Enemy?
trollhattan
@skerry:
Wonder whether they’re intentionally gelded by congress, like the IRS is?
“Yes, you have a mission now here’s half your requested budget, so get out there and do it!”
God bless Small-Gummint Konservatives.
Emerald
@Villago Delenda Est: One of my favorite quotations from Barbara Tuchman: “Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.”
And that would include ours.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Villago Delenda Est: thanks for that link… I was just thinking about that case the other day.
If those guys do in fact wind up doing the time, there will be some justice after all. Though you could still complain that they weren’t convicted of murder.
Baud
@Bobby B.:
I regard John Cole as The Enemy, so yes.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@trollhattan: Yes. That’s part of it. The SEC is woefully underfunded and the focus on terrorism gutted the DoJ’s white collar crime units.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Speaking of Galtian heroes, here’s an “entertaining” post by one of the founders of Galt’s Gulch Chile.
Read on for the low-down on the “rubber check” and the water rights and so forth… Oh, and check out the comments, too, from those who still support him…
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Bob In Portland
Speaking of accountability. Great photo too.
Mnemosyne
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Milken is still a millionaire (if not a billonaire) and has moved into the grift of for-profit education. I’m not sure you can say there was any kind of lesson learned there. He bought himself respectability the old-fashioned way: he set up a charitable foundation.
WaterGirl
We were supposed to get rain today, but it turned out to be only a 40% chance over a short period of time, and my flowers and zucchini were looking a bit thirsty. I decided I’d better water. Just came in from watering, and I see that the prediction is now up to 75% with a longer window of rain.
Is it wrong to conclude that I am very powerful?
Villago Delenda Est
@Mr Stagger Lee:
With the notable exception of Neil Bush, who is still busy grifting away.
Suffern ACE
@skerry: the justice system is PR. At some level, following corporate law is for suckers.
Villago Delenda Est
— Honoré de Balzac
Translated:
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: “Dallas” “Dynasty” “Falcon Crest” “Knot’s Landing”
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Well, your nym is WaterGirl, so it makes perfect sense.
ruemara
This is not a world where justice, fairness, or any sort of good thing exists.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
Rich assholes oppose the safety net because to them, the concept of paying the peons to not revolt is equivalent to paying protection money to a racket. If they’re going to pay for their safety, it’s going to be by paying half the poor to righteously kill the other half – not by paying the ransom those horrid union gangsters are demanding.
WaterGirl
@ruemara: A world where justice and fairness depends on your wallet or your skin color isn’t just or fair, I’ll give you that.
But all sorts of good things exist, that’s what makes it bearable. I’m sorry to see you feeling so discouraged. Anything we can do to help?
WaterGirl
@Baud: Okay, but if I ever change my nym to WaterGoddess, you have to promise to bring me back down to earth. I wouldn’t want to get too full of myself.
Chris
@Keith G:
Oh, White Collar seems to have done all right. So did Leverage.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Sure, but if you ask me, there ain’t much on the earth worth coming back to.
kc
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I wonder if the author of that article has inadvertently admitted to helping commit a fraud?
WaterGirl
@Baud: Wow, you guys are discouraged today. ruemara can understand; she is being treated like crap, a disposable employee not being valued for the good work she’s doing, with no acknowledgement of the value she has brought to the business. (Here’s a clue – if you want me to be perky and happy at work, try not treating me like total crap.)
What’s going on with you that would lead you to say something like that?
Edit: Full disclosure. I did eat some very yummy dark chocolate ganache on a cookie a few minutes ago, so I am probably at peak happy + caffeine.
Mike in NC
@Villago Delenda Est: He’s probably hoping for a cabinet post under President Chris Christie.
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
I’m a little gloomy myself, today — I have to confess to my boss on Monday that I fucked up again on the same aspect of my job after assuring her that I totally had things under control, so that’s gonna suck.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Much of the same, WG. Maybe not as bad, but it’s been doing on for a while now.
Corner Stone
Col Jack Jacobs is fairly sceptical about Obama’s plans in Syria and ISIS.
Corner Stone
@Baud: Like what? Something personal or just asshole idiots in general?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Bob In Portland: You’ll like this site, no doubt:
(Emphasis added.)
I knew they were involved!!11 They always are!!111
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
Richard Bottoms
@Chris: To what union gangsters are you referring? The ones who helped give people good wages, health insurance and freedom from the worst conditions imaginable? Or someone else?
scav
Excuse me, this title alone needs to be expressed. The Guard: Polygamist women dressed ‘like ninjas’ attack home of witness in Utah sex assault case
Utah+swords (note not killed by police this time). Utah+Polygamy. Child and domestic abuse, with necessary plot twist while lacking the weird shaped ball. Lacking Ebola and ISIL, but a strong showing all the same.
Baud
@WaterGirl
Nothing like that. Just getting harder to keep up the effort when the rewards and recognition aren’t there. Every day becomes a grind.
Mnemosyne
@Richard Bottoms:
Please adjust your snark meter. Thank you.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
My comment at #56 is stuck in moderation for some reason. Help?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, I saw that last night but didn’t reply because I couldn’t think of anything constructive to say. My first thought was “it’s not just monday that’s gonna suck; that would ruin my whole weekend just thinking about tit”, and I figured that wouldn’t be very helpful!
But there it is. I feel for you.
What do you think happened? If I were your boss, I think that’s something I might ask you, and what you said would have a big impact on whether you got another chance at whatever it is. Were you distracted by your upcoming procedure?
WaterGirl
@Baud: That can really wear you down. I’ve been there; I know firsthand.
That’s what I like about having left the university and having my small consulting business – I get to pick my clients and I can drop them (oh so politely) if I don’t want to work with them. That’s only happened once, but I got the hell out of there as soon as I figured out that the new owner of the business I had been working with for years wasn’t trustworthy.
But you’re an attorney – that’s a pretty marketable field, isn’t it? You’re smart, clever, funny, you communicate well and you surely seem to know your stuff. Isn’t there always another firm you can move to? (she said, naively)
WaterGirl
I have no idea why my last comment got eaten. I asked about sassafras trees. What bad word could I have used?
In my earlier (eaten) comment, I said I was thinking of putting in a sassafras tree to replace either the tree that crashed on my house 15 months ago or to replace the other silver maple the city will likely be taking down in front of my house because it doesn’t look all that healthy.
Does anyone have any experience with a sassafras tree?
Is it a good idea/bad idea to plant the same tree in the back yard and the front yard?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Thank you, WG. I complain too much. I get that way when I’m weary. I’m going to go offline for a little while and get some rest. I’ll catch you later.
Bob In Portland
Why do stories like this tend to be accompanied by stories like this?
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
It pretty much is ruining my whole weekend. I decided not to also ruin my boss’s whole weekend by telling her about it right before she left on Friday when there wasn’t anything either of us could do about it. And it really is the exact same damned mistake I made a few weeks ago, when I discovered that I had months-old reconciliations sitting on my desk. This one was just sitting in a different place that I didn’t look in, though it’s even worse because this other place is literally in front of me. And labeled. But I didn’t look in that folder.
The one sort-of good thing is that there is (again, quite literally) no possible way for me to ever make the same mistake going forward, because the entire process is online now and I don’t have to do paper reconciliations anymore. So the sticking point is that I assured her that there were no more of these lurking out there and … there was one more lurking out there.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: That sucks. Definitely not a fun conversation. Big sigh.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: The thing is, they object to what the see as “racketeering” if they are not personally benefiting from it. They’re like the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, who were not so much fleeing religious persecution as creating a situation where they got to be the persecutors
Kay
It feels overwhelming to me right now, like they’re all too corrupt and even if we had rigorous or sufficient regulation we’d have to hire an army of regulators. Thousands.
I was following this “consent agreement”, a for-profit college chain, and although I knew the announcement that they were going to be finally regulated was over-hyped and mostly bullshit, I am still shocked at how brazen they were and ARE, even AFTER the consent agreement with the USDOE.
They made an agreement with the US Department of Ed that they would put 30 million aside to make some of their ripped-off students whole, and they simply haven’t done it. They were quickly selling off assets (which in this case are debts- they sold their bad debt) when the CFPB finally filed a complaint.
I don’t know what to do. There are too many of them. It’s a complete ethical collapse. They have to start putting them in prison, or at least prosecute, even if they lose. Believing they are going to comply with these “agreements” assumes SOME ethics, some organizational moral code or belief system even if the belief system is simply “we honor a contract”.
You can’t enter into contracts with people who don’t accept that they are bound by them. This is reciprocal. Both sides have to believe there are rules, the state side and the private sector side, and I don’t think the private sector side believes that anymore.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-19/corinthian-colleges-faces-further-criminal-investigations.html
Lurking Canadian
@Keith G: there’s a reasonably good argument to be made that that is what Person of Interest is. That show is not perfect from a political perspective, but it has a short way with asshole financiers. And Cheney-like political operators. Lots to like, really.
rikyrah
@Richard Bottoms:
Amen
Amen
Amen
rikyrah
@Kay:
tell the truth
Corner Stone
@Kay:
There has to be some threat of jail time to deter this. They have to absolutely know there’s a real deal chance they’ll be locked up for a not insignificant amount of time.
Kay
@Corner Stone:
I agree, but supposedly the existing law on that is insufficient. They have trouble convicting, so that could serve to embolden them.
I’m talking about right now. State AG’s have a lot of power, so they can do some of it, but this is really corrosive to the idea of “markets”, let alone all the “little people” who are being screwed.
You would think all these lovers of markets would worry about credibility and the FACT that we MOSTLY have to operate on trust in this country, since we can’t assign each one of them a full-time regulator. Why should anyone honor any agreement?
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
But like the Puritans with the oppression – when they do it, it’s not a racket. Then it’s a man working hard for a living.
@Lurking Canadian:
Been meaning to get to that show. Sadly, neither Hulu nor Netflix had it the last time I looked.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
More generally – there’s no reason white collar criminals’ actions would be any more abstract and impersonal than those of, say, drug dealers. And *those* guys are on all the time. Start the episode with a snapshot of some victims (people made jobless or homeless, people scammed out of all their life savings – in more than a few cases, even dead) – throw in an interesting enough main cast and you’re good.
And, indeed, the last few years suggest that if you put shows like that on the air, people will absolutely watch them.
Bill Murray
@Chris: You just described Leverage
Chris
@Bill Murray:
Indeedy. And like I said, that show had no shortage of viewers.