Danny Schechter - ColdType

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The victims of corporate criminals rarely get the same treatment,
argues the former Texas Agriculture Commissioner,
populist Jim Hightower:
If you got caught robbing a bank, chances are excellent that
you’d be facing some serious time in the pokey. But what if
a bank robs you?
Corporate executives and their lawyers like to claim that a
corporation is a ‘person’ with all of the rights of an actual
human being. Yet when one of these outfits goes bad and
gets caught violating laws, then the lawyers drop the pretense
of personhood, insisting that while this entity might be fined,
it can’t be put in jail or given a death sentence, because, well,
because it’s a financial structure, not a human.
Embracing this game of now-you-see-us-now-you-don’t,
the Bushites have devised a neat way to go soft on corporate
criminals. Called ‘deferred prosecution agreements (or
DPAs),’ this ploy allows corporations and banks that are
guilty of everything from robbery to bribery to be given a getout-of-jail-free
card.
Of course, such judicial favoritism creates an incentive for
criminal behavior, since corporations now know that they can
likely avoid prosecution if caught. And fines are no deterrent
– multibillion dollar corporations can simply absorb them as
a necessary cost of doing business.
Unspoken, or unexplained in most media accounts, is how
Wall Street money was responsible for the softening of the
laws including higher standards triggering prosecution. Part of
the deregulation of the industry involved the de-fanging of the
power of prosecutors.
It also happened by design when Wall Street firms, who
benefited by this transfer of wealth, invested in a major lobbying
and political campaign to loosen regulations allowing
them to pursue their self-interest at other’s expense.
Ex-Investment banker Nomi Prins spelled it out for me this