Danny Schechter - ColdType

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it; so they set it up, not as a single transaction that’s a crime,
but a series of transactions, that once it’s all put together,
makes it a crime.
What was the crime? And was it illegal?
Are there really economic crimes? It is almost as a vague in
many respects as war crimes. Do you know them when you
see them, or forget them when you don’t see them?
The US government did not, at the time consider the My
Lai Massacre in Vietnam a war crime, and certainly many do
not see the economic crisis we are living through as a crime
scene.
Even Nazi war crimes were prosecuted selectively, with different
standards of guilt applied. Many offenders were freed
when the decision was made to only really go after the men
at the top. The United States government applied far stricter
criteria when it prosecuted Japanese war criminals in Tokyo
in a tribunal in which Washington was acting unilaterally as
opposed to jointly with three other powers in Nuremberg.
There is no widely accepted definition of economic crime, as
I discovered in the American Law and Legal Information library
where I learned that “it is impossible to enumerate briefly the
various definitions, theories, and offenses included in this category.
We focus on the theoretical work that explores three
aspects of economic crime: offender motivations, economic
outcomes, and economic processes.
There are many theories and it becomes clear that “intent”
is often unknowable and unprovable. This online legal encyclopedia
challenges simplistic notions of intent because “it
assumes that offenders’ motivations are readily observable
or knowable from the criminal act itself. Although the motive
behind robberies may appear to be the desire for property,
perpetrators’ primary motivation may be different (e.g., thrill
seeking or racial hatred). Some crimes have multiple motives
and economic gain may be a secondary goal. Furthermore,