Light Sentences Cast Cloud on Crackdown (of white collar crimes)

[Dover]

By Bill Berkrot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When the U.S. government began cracking down on corporate criminals two years ago, after the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, differences in judges' attitudes around the country were of little concern.

But now prosecutors and securities lawyers have seen that a crime that leads to a long prison sentence in one state might get little more that a slap on the wrist in another.

Judges who find mandatory sentencing repugnant are exercising their independence in unpredictable ways when plea bargains allow discretion in what they mete out to the guilty.

At its most extreme, this could mean both crooks and prosecutors would worry less about the crime itself than where it is committed.

The latest trigger for such concerns is the extremely light sentences for executives who pleaded guilty in Birmingham, Alabama, to charges arising from the HealthSouth accounting scandal...

..MORE..

http://tinyurl.com/3c56h

[napi21]

1. This has been TOP on my bitch list for a long time!

Way before Enron was caught! That just made me angrier! Why aren't people more upset that guys like Dennis Kozlowski even had a trial and walked away! Ken Lay seems to have disappeared for the face of the earth! I admit, because I was an accountant for 40 years, it bothers me more than some people, but the excessive GREED and deception of our Corporate leaders hurts EVERYONE of you. There's only two things that will make it stop. The stockholders, who have resons to stop the multimillion dollar salaries, and the courts who put offenders behind bars! I've worked for a lot of greedy a**es who were always ticked at me because I would only let them push the envelope so far, but the one thing they feared the most wasn't fines, bad press, or losing thier job, it was JAIL TIME!

[w4rma]

2. Our corporate media refuses to spend much time on this.

I don't think it's the American people who aren't upset. It's that the media isn't reporting on us with respect to these scandals and on the scandals themselves.

[napi21]

3. You can blame it on the media, but not alone!

Do you remember how quick our congress acted when lots of people called their Rep. & Sen. over the do not call list that some judge said wasn't legal? I'm 61 years old, and I NEVER remember ANYTHING getting passed through both houses and signed that quickly!

Nobody's complaining! They grum & growl because minimum wage isn't a living wage. Workers either aren't getting a pay raise, or they're being asked to make concessions on money or benefits. Doesn't anyone realize that if their CEO received compensation of $1.5 million instead of $15 million or more, the bottom line of the company would actually improve, keeping the stockholders happy at the same time?

I feel like the tree that falls in the forest and nobody hears.

[Trillo]

4. Rotten to the Core.

The stockholders, who have resons to stop the multimillion dollar salaries

Individual stockholders, who I suspect are the most likely to be outraged, are not the largest shareholders by far. Funds are, and these are "professionally" managed, and have a "fiduciary duty" to their shareholders, but no duty or obligation to pass along their shareholders' concerns. While fund money is nothing more than small individuals in aggregate, those individual shareholders are NOT granted any voting rights in the companies the funds own stock in.

Therefore, we have ended up with huge corporations controlling other huge corporations.

Throw campaign money into the flux, and we get Senators and Representatives who are essentially beholden to these same huge corporations.

It's no wonder that CEOs who are ripping everybody off don't get longer jail sentences. The system is now rotten to the core.