Corporate crime is endemic in this capitalist country, and many of those crimes are never punished at all, or when punished, aren’t punished at the level that they should be. We live in a society in which certain crimes by individuals can lead to incarceration for many, many years, but we find that for corporate crime, that seldom are those in the highest echelons of a given corporation held personally accountable for their bad actions, that have, for instance, damaged our environment, damaged our health, or damaged our pocketbook, for basically when it comes to corporate crimes, these corporate malcontents typically suffer only a monetary fine to the corporation, as well as sometimes these companies are subject to verification that they are now adhering to the laws that they have previously broken, structured for a set period of time.
Look, the bottom line is that whenever corporations are of the belief that if they are caught, the worse that they will receive will be a monetary fine, those that lack scruples, will weigh the probable cost of the fine, often reduced through negotiation, against the profits of what they are accomplishing by violating the law, in which, in an overwhelming amount of cases, the numbers are favorable for committing that bad act, because the revenue and profits far outweigh the potential punishment, which thereby encourages this type of ill behavior by corporations, again and again.
It has to be remembered, that the largest corporations don’t just sell billions upon billions of dollars of goods and services each year, but a significant portion of our largest corporations are routinely making a profit of billions upon billions of dollars each year, in addition to the fact that they employ people, which is beneficial to those communities who themselves are not wont to see punished that which seems to benefit the community through that employment as well as any other donations or sponsorships that come their way. So too, politicians and the legislation so contemplated and passed are subject to the influence of big corporations, who are absolutely determined to see that laws which are unfavorable to them are not passed, and if passed, that they aren’t applicable or applied to them. In other words, mega corporations have so much power that they are quite capable of ruling the roost, and because of this, they are far less susceptible to having to suffer from being accused, let alone found guilty of corporate crime, and because corporate executives are seldom held accountable, they basically see this as the cost of doing business, and nothing more.
Indeed, nothing is going to change unless some especially tragic and pernicious event happens that badly hurts the American people, in which, because of this, there might be some meaningful change, at least, for a while. The bottom line, though, is that if this nation desires to see less corporate crime, it needs to focus less on monetary fines and more on the imprisonment of corporate executives, so that these people will know on a personal level that crime does not pay and won’t be able to simply pay their way out of trouble.