The one question that can no longer be ignored:

[LuckyCharms]

6. Unfortunately in America, there are several people who are either

Last edited Wed Apr 6, 2022, 11:00 PM - Edit history (6)

effectively above the law, or are able to just barely skirt existing laws enough to stay out of prison.

I'll try to give an example of what I am trying to say.

There have been relatively few individuals in the financial world who have been sent to prison for breaking financially related laws. Most people have only heard of Bernie Madoff, who was involved in a blatant and clearly unlawful Ponzi scheme, and Martha Stewart, who was sentenced for comparatively minor insider trading. But when looking at the big picture, only a very small amount of people go to prison for financially related crimes.

There are organizations called short hedge funds, who by all appearances, manage to operate within the law, but actually perform misdeeds. What they do is to short stocks to make a profit. Shorting a stock is borrowing a share(s) of stock from someone who owns the share, then they sell it, hoping that the share price will drop. When the price drops, they buy the stock back at a lower price, and return the stock to the person they borrowed it from. So they sell a stock at a high price and receive that cash, buy it back at a lower price and pay out a lower amount of cash to buy it back, and return the stock and record a profit.

Short selling is a perfectly legal, and it is said to create healthy liquidity in the market.

But here's the thing, things do not frequently work in the manner that I described above. What frequently happens is this...greed.

Many short hedge funds perform what is called "preditory shorting". This is when they short sell a stock, and then use hundreds of different tactics to purposely drive the price of a company's stock down so that they can profit. There's many tactics that they can use. Some are legal, some are arguably legal, some are illegal, some are arguably illegal, and some are merely shady and wrong. To explain all the tactics that can be used would require a post the length of a novel, so I won't address the tactics, but in summary, they short sell a stock and purposely try to drive companies into bankruptcy, get them de-listed from the stock exchange, and force the price of the stock to $0. This maximizes their profit, with the added benefit of them having to pay $0 taxes on that profit if the company does indeed go bankrupt.

They have performed this action with legitimate and valuable cancer research companies. They have performed this action by attacking companies who may momentarily be struggling, so they take advantage of that and try to drive them to bankruptcy.

Are these actions illegal? Sometimes yes, they are. If so, can these actions be proven in court? Yes they can. Is the SEC aware of these actions? Yes. Does the SEC have the manpower to recommend prosecution to the DOJ for all of these cases? No, they don't. Does the DOJ have other priorities? Most likely.

I think that in the legal world on the national level especially, everything boils down to this: There is so much fuckery and illegal or possibly illegal action being performed in every sector of this country, that on a national level with the DOJ, it boils down to which cases they decide to pursue. Manpower is limited, complex cases are hard to prove and require a lot of work. Even though a case is bad, the DOJ may choose to focus on a case that is worse.

Because of this, then yes, some people become *effectively* above the law. Actually they are not above the law, but effectively, they are. The end result is the same...no prosecution.

However, there is probably nothing worse than what Trump and his cronies have created. My current belief is that the DOJ is aggressively pursuing every person involved in this whole thing, including Trump himself. I pray this statement proves to be correct. The more people involved, the more complex the cases are when taken as a whole, and the more time they take to prove. Also, the DOJ cannot come out and announce that they are building a case until evidence gathering is completed. If they announce too early, then that hampers their ability to gather valid evidence. Essentially, it gives the people who they are looking to prosecute a "heads up", a warning that they are being looked at, and how they are being looked at. Hence, the standard line "we cannot comment on any potential ongoing investigations".