The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote of the hierarchy of human needs and recently we have had pretty good indications of the hierarchy of the prosecutable in our system of justice. So let’s see who gets the time, and who gets to do the crime.
Last week the Boston Globe reported on a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee at which the senators questioned federal regulators about light punishment meted out to British banking giant HSBC for – get this – laundering Mexican drug money. Federal regulators fined the bank $2 billion but did not force it to shut down its US operations, or to prosecute individual employees. Here is Senator Elizabeth Warren:
If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you go to jail. But evidently, if you launder nearly a $1 billion for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night…I think that’s fundamentally wrong.
What happened to ‘corporations are people, my friend’?
Just the other day I was contrasting the punishments intended by the Office of the US Attorney in Massachusetts for the late Aaron Swartz and for lifetime human crime wave Michael McLaughlin:
When asked by US District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock what McLaughlin’s motive was, the assistant US attorney replied, “It was money.” Contrast the outcome here with what the late Aaron Swartz was facing from Ortiz’s office: six months in prison for making public academic papers. His motive was free access to information, not to score pelf. Apparently greed is good. Alas, Swartz had no pol to trade.
A day before the HSBC hearing Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the big banks are too big to jail:
The size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them. If we do prosecute – if we do bring a criminal charges – it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.
By the way, AG Holder also defended US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s handling of the Swartz case, terming it “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”
So here is Cunningham’s Hierarchy of the Prosecutable:
Cocaine possession: Prison, years
Aaron Swartz: Prison, 6 months
Michael McLaughlin: Deal, walk
Big bank laundering drug money: Civil fine, walk
Big banks holding economy hostage: Cuddles, little kissies