| petite6 |
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| Jokers Wild |
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| Reged: 08/14/06 |
| Posts: 189509 |
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 The Trump Administration Turns a Blind Eye to White-Collar Crime (Prison is for the poors that steal deodorant)
03/30/26 08:43 AM
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The failure to prosecute elite wrongdoing is a bipartisan trend that’s hastening under Trump.
In his first campaign for the White House, Donald Trump stoked voters’ rage against the widely perceived sellout of the government to corporations. His final ad before the 2016 election featured scenes of everyday working-class Americans interspersed with clips of the Clintons, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein and other icons of the economic and political elite. The commercial looked like something Bernie Sanders could have produced, except the voice-over was unmistakably Trump’s, warning of the “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our economy of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Trump was hitting on something true: Since the founding of the US, its criminal legal system has been more forgiving and less punitive toward the well-to-do and well connected compared with the average person. Over the centuries this punishment gap has waxed and waned. It’s become a chasm since the 1980s. While state and federal prosecutors have sent record numbers of people to prison for violent crimes and property- and drug-related offenses, the US retreated from prosecuting and punishing white-collar crime, despite a tsunami of elite-level wrongdoing. As I note in my 2025 book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, this has been a bipartisan trend. The savings and loan and junk-bond crises of the ’80s forced Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration to impose some modest regulatory guardrails and increase resources to prosecute corporate crime. But the Clinton administration and its successors bulldozed those regulations and fostered the decriminalization of corporate crime, a trend that has hastened under Trump.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-03-23/trump-administration-fails-to-punish-white-collar-criminals
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