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Most getting caught get off with mere wrist slaps or occasional fines amounting to a tiny fraction of the crimes, so it pays to keep committing them. According to Law Professor and corporate crime specialist John Coffee:
"Any criminal prosecution....must show either a specific intent to defraud or, what federal law calls, willfulness which means a real intent to deliberately defraud someone and engage in misconduct that you realize was causing injury."
So if fraud is committed with good intentions, criminal prosecutions won't follow, only civil ones can to redeem losses, and during the Bush administration, the Justice Department sought cash settlements most often to keep plaintiffs out of court. And over 60% of the relatively few tried and convicted served only about two years on average in country club prisons, and over one-fourth of them were never incarcerated.
It's why year after year, "The beat goes on (as) new scandals seem to surface daily....(yet) no sooner does one scandal erupt (when) another threatens to push it out of the public eye," or another unrelated issue is manufactured like the phony Swine Flu crisis tries to sweep them under the rug altogether. Sadly, it works because the public is none the wiser and never catches on to what investigative journalist IF Stone once explained:
"All governments are run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed." Or he simply said: "All governments lie," usually about the most important issues affecting everyone.
The Criminal Mind
The new Con Artist Hall of Infamy web site explains the art of the con, has a con watch, and lists current inductees, including many prominent past and more recent figures like Bernie Madoff, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, and Conrad Black. But for everyone exposed, dozens more get away with cooking the books, manipulating markets, profiting from insider deals, selling toxic junk to unwary investors, and pocketing multi-millions as their legitimate right. Why not, when regulators and law enforcement are complicit in letting them.
They use "every angle to persuade people to believe" that their integrity is impeccable, their financial skills unmatched, and their strengths include:
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