White Collar Crime

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WHITE COLLAR CRIME IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 4TH ED.

CHAPTER 5

GOVERNMENTAL CRIME:

STATE CRIME AND POLITICAL WHITE COLLAR CRIME

Trusted Criminals

Designed by: Jordan Land, M.S.

Governmental Crime: Some Basic Crimes

  • Abuse of power is perhaps the broadest charge of governmental crime - it has no fixed meaning

  • In its broader meaning, abuse of power occurs when the state assumes and exercises power it ought not to have

  • The full range of governmental abuses of power entails many forms of harm, including violations of universally defined basic human rights

Governmental Crime: Some Basic Crimes

  • A second basic concept associated with governmental crime is corruption

  • Political corruption most typically involves the misuse of political office for material advantage, although it also encompasses acts undertaken for political advantage

  • Bribery is probably the activity most closely associated with political corruption

Governmental Crime: Some Basic Crimes

  • The concept of political scandal is important to our understanding of state crime and political white collar crime

  • Such scandals are most likely to occur when a basic division of power exists in society, when a major external threat to society is lacking, and when politicians violate widely supported norms about proper conduct in political office

Governmental Criminality on an Epic Scale

  • At its most extreme, anarchism holds that the state is a criminal enterprise

  • If unjustly depriving people of their property, their way of life, and their very lives is regarded as criminal, conquests and state sanctioned wars are governmental crimes of extraordinary scope

  • Over time, the state became the largest and most efficient users of violence, a dubious distinction it originally shared with bandits and pirates

Governmental Criminality on an Epic Scale

  • War crimes are:
  • The use of poisonous gases, biological and chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and mines, indiscriminate attacks against civilians, etc.

  • Only captured members of the losing side have been brought to account for war crimes

  • Most war crimes go unpunished

The Vietnam War

  • The U.S. engagement in the Vietnam War was illegal under U.S. law because Congress never specifically declared war, which is required by the Constitution
  • Some observers consider the destruction of millions of arable acres and hardwood forests to be an ecological crime of immense proportions
  • No president, cabinet officer, or other high-level civilian or military official involved in the pursuit of the Vietnam War has ever been required to provide a formal defense for their policy decisions

U.S. Military Activity
in the “New World Order”

  • More recent U.S. military ventures were all criticized in some quarters as criminal actions

  • Despite some history of antiwar mobilization, most conspicuously during the Vietnam War, the more enduring theme in American culture has resisted the imputation of criminality to American acts of war

Forms of State Criminality

  • Criminal state is when some form of state criminality becomes a dominant force in the operation of the state

  • Accusations of state criminality are subjective and likely to incorporate an ideological dimension

The Criminal State

  • The controversial notion of a criminal state is most commonly applied to the ultimate criminal enterprise wherein the state is used as an instrument to commit crimes against humanity

  • Such as genocide
  • Genocide refers to a deliberate state policy of mass killing directed at some identifiable group or people

  • Ethnic cleansing has also been invoked in the recent era to describe large-scale killing of such groups

The Criminal State

  • The Holocaust perpetuated by the Nazis during World War II is perhaps the single most dramatic, fully documented, and extreme case of genocide ever

  • The Nuremberg Trials generated some controversy over the question of whether the Nazi leaders could be tried by the Allies when no fully recognized international criminal law existed
  • And whether some of the Nazis’ alleged war crimes were substantially different from those committed by the Allies

The Criminal State

  • Since the post-World War II trials, it has proven difficult to bring perpetrators of genocides and ethnic cleansing to justice, and much of the world has been quite indifferent to these events

  • The United States was one of the few countries unwilling to endorse the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court as a means in the 21st century of bringing perpetrators of state crime to justice

The Repressive State

  • A repressive state systematically deprives its citizens of fundamental human rights

  • Human rights are rights humans are naturally entitled to - what the Declaration of Independence so eloquently called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

  • Until World War I, the matter of human rights was essentially a domestic concern

The Repressive State

  • The United Nations was formed after World War II, partly in response to the gross and conspicuous abuse of the most fundamental human rights by the totalitarian governments of the time

  • Though the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 identified a long list of fundamental human rights, the United Nations has not been able to impose these standards on any government

The Repressive State

  • The principle motivating factor in the imposition of a repressive system of government is the extension or retention of power, often for its own sake

The Corrupt State

  • Corrupt state refers to a government used as an instrument to enrich its leadership

  • Although corruption is thought of principally as a major function of economic crime against citizens of a country
  • Corruption kills when it plays a role in building collapses during “natural” disasters like earthquakes

  • Corruption is virtually an institutionalized part of the political system in some countries

The Corrupt State

  • What accounts for such entrenched patterns of corruption?
  • Absence of a civil service “work ethic”, extreme economic inequality, a lack of disciplined leadership, extensive bureaucratic powers, cultural norms favoring tribal loyalties over integrity, and the absence of countervailing forces such as opposition parties or a free press
  • If political corruption is to be diminished, a fundamental transformation of the entire administrative structure and related cultural norms must take place

State Negligence

  • State negligence describes a situation in which “crimes of omission” are committed

  • The state fails to prevent loss of human life, suffering, and deprivation that are in its power to prevent
  • Malfeasance- doing something you are prohibited from doing
  • Nonfeasance- failing to do something you are required to do
  • Misfeasance- performing a permissible act in an improper manner

State Negligence

  • The most serious form of negligent state criminality involves the unnecessary and premature loss of life that occurs when the government and its agents fail to act affirmatively in certain situations
  • Hurricane Katrina has been characterized as a form of state crime of omission

  • The concept of state negligence could be extended to include inadequate or inefficient government responses to poverty in general, to crime, to environmental degradation, and the like

State-Organized Crime

  • State-organized crimes are acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their job as representatives of the state

  • Piracy is one of the earliest forms of state-organized crime

  • Other forms include:
  • State complicity in smuggling, assassinations, criminal conspiracies, spying on citizens, diverting funds illegally, etc.

State-Organized Crime

  • The U.S. government has had a long history of direct involvement in overthrowing foreign governments
  • While these operations have been justified by a rhetoric of liberation or national security, there is much evidence that the interests of Americans businesses were often at the core of these military ventures
  • In the modern era, states have been accused of carrying out state crime terrorism directly when they engage in massive bombing of civilian populations

The White House and State-Organized Crime

  • Some of the most significant state-organized crime in the U.S. has emanated directly from the White House
  • President Nixon had secret wiretaps that were used against journalists and government officials suspected of being disloyal to the White House agenda in Vietnam and elsewhere
  • This improper wiretapping scheme provided a basis for one of the articles of impeachment drawn up against President Nixon

The White House and State-Organized Crime

  • The single most celebrated case of state-organized crime was the Iran-Contra Affair

  • The principal illegality involved was the violation of the Boland Amendment
  • Prohibited covert aid to the Contras

  • The Iran-Contra case involved a conspiracy to violate the Boland Act

The Central Intelligence Agency

  • The CIA was created after World War II to prevent another Pearl Harbor
  • In 1975, a congressional investigation uncovered clear evidence that the CIA had periodically violated its own charter
  • New evidence of this illegal activity surfaced in 2007
  • The CIA has been accused of having a rightwing bias and of placing its own interests ahead of other considerations

The Federal Bureau of Investigation

  • The FBI generally enjoyed a reputation for integrity and high professional standards
  • After Hoover’s death, it emerged that the FBI had been engaging in warrantless wiretapping and unauthorized domestic spying for decades
  • From the mid-1950s on, the FBI had engaged in extralegal and illegal disruption and destabilization of dissident political groups though COINTELPRO, the umbrella for various counterintelligence programs

The Federal Bureau of Investigation

  • Over many decades, Hoover maintained secret files on public officials

  • The FBI has sometimes mounted undercover operations and used deceitful tactics to produce evidence against powerful and sophisticated white collar and governmental criminals

Police Crime

  • Police crime can be a form of state-organized crime involving the abuse of power and can also be an occupational crime, primarily corruption

  • It is not always possible to differentiate between organizational and personal motivations or objective

  • Police crime involves:
  • Violations of constitutional rights, excessive use of force, and related illegal acts to fulfill state or departmental objectives

Police Crime

  • The most serious form of police brutality is the sometime-fatal misuse of deadly force

  • Police brutality has rarely been prosecuted and only in recent decades has this situation improved with the establishment of civilian review boards, citizen mobilization and more attentive press

  • Other forms of police crime include:
  • Perjury, searches without warrants, false arrests, and tampering with evidence

Political System Corruption

  • The electoral process and inter-party competition in society promotes forms of corruption

  • Once politicians gain the power of office, they more often than not attempt to hold on to it

  • It has never been illegal for politicians to propose, endorse, or push through policies and programs that still benefit special interests and constituents, as long as no direct quid pro quo exists

Corruption in the Electoral Financing Process

  • We tend to view political corruption in individualistic terms because it is easier and more reassuring to focus on individual wrongdoers

  • The financing of elections and the related practice of legislative lobbying are two integral parts of the political system that promote corruption

Corruption in the Electoral Financing Process

  • Since the federal election financing reforms of the early 1970s, political action committees (PACs) became a vastly more important element in the financing of elections

  • This form of legalized bribery not only gives incumbents an enormous financial advantage over challengers but has been demonstrated to influence legislators’ voting records as well

Political White Collar Crime
in the Executive Branch

  • No U.S. President has been convicted of using this high office for personal enrichment
  • Many are alleged to have engaged in unethical or specifically illegal conduct for economic gain
  • George Washington was alleged to have engaged in suspect land deals early in his career
  • Although President Clinton was accused of various offenses, including perjury, these charges for the most part did not allege personal enrichment

Political White Collar Crime
in the Executive Branch

  • Vice presidents have sometimes been targets of accusations of wrongdoing

  • Schuyler Colfax (VP in Ulysses Grant’s first administration) was accused of accepting bribes and was politically ruined even though he was never formally charged

Political White Collar Crime
in the Executive Branch

  • Many other high-level members of various presidential administrations have been charged with specific criminal acts

  • Samuel Swartout was charged with having embezzled more than $1 million

  • The complex intersection of big money and major governmental power on this level generates endless opportunities for corruption

Corruption in State Government

  • In the course of the 20th century, 15 sitting American governors or former governors were indicted or convicted of such charges as conspiracy, fraud, perjury, bribery, racketeering and income tax evasion

  • These charges typically involved accepting stocks or taking bribes from contractors and others doing business with the state in return for political favors

Corruption in State Government

  • Corruption on the state level is hardly restricted to governors

  • Countless other state and county officials have been charged with various forms of corruption

  • During the colonial period, local governors were often guilty of embezzling, taking bribes, and reserving for themselves the right to rent out city property and sell liquor for profit

Corruption in State Government

  • The single most famous example of political machine corruption is New York City’s Tammany Hall

  • The Tweed Ring defrauded the City of New York of up to $200 million through vastly inflated purchases and repairs, false vouchers, fictitious bills and other such devices

Political White Collar Crime
in the Legislative Branch

  • James Madison believed that Congress was less corruptible than the executive branch in part because of its large number of members and diluted power
  • The Credit Mobilier affair was the first major public scandal concerning congressional corruption
  • Since this Credit Mobilier affair, major congressional corruption scandals have erupted in the form of:
  • Junketing
  • Double billing
  • Free mailing privilege
  • Using congressional staff for personal purposes

Political White Collar Crime in the Legislative Branch

  • Lobbyists are often at the center of legislative corruption cases
  • Tom DeLay was forced out of his leadership role and Congressional seat after being indicted for violation of state election laws and for corrupt dealings with lobbyists
  • Jack Abramoff bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars while showering gifts, free travel, and donations on Congressmen and other political officials

Political White Collar Crime
in the Judicial Branch

  • The judicial branch has probably been the least tainted by claims of corruption, but it has not been free of such claims

  • Judges have been charged with many crimes:
  • Bribery
  • Extortion
  • Obstructing justice
  • Income tax evasion
  • Embezzlement
  • Fraud
  • Abuse of authority

Political White Collar Crime
in the Judicial Branch

  • Many judges so charged have been forced to resign
  • Others have been impeached, censured, or disbarred
  • Some have gone to prison
  • Judges are in a position to abuse their considerable power
  • Because judges are relatively well compensated and enjoy considerable prestige, they have relatively less to gain and much more to lose by engaging in criminal conduct