I would love to see law enforcement take this more seriously. But we should be honest with ourselves that in this moment in America, government is much more responsive to the needs of the rich. One only need look at the newspaper to suspect that, but studies agree: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
One of the fundamental problems with employer/employee relations is that employers usually have more workers than employees have jobs. Losing your job is worse than having an employee quit. This fundamental imbalance of power means that we'll always need ways to even things out if we want reasonably fair situations for employees.
Labor laws and law enforcement can cover part of that. And we should certainly pursue it. But I think people should also pursue collective action, be that as formal as a union or as casual as Google's workers all pressuring their employers to stop doing military work. Resilient systems always have multiple ways to keep a problem from getting out of control.
It's funny that people blame law enforcement's lack of interest or effort in white collar crime when for the last many decades the automatic response to every economic 'issue' or moral panic of the day has been to set up more and more agencies and more and more economic regulations.
Courts and law enforcement has evolved to become the very last resort for dealing with these white collar issues. It's become the cultural automatic solution to everything in American (or should I say western) government systems. Every time something goes wrong we're always told the solution is more new agencies to be formed and more complex - slow changing - laws. And these agencies and law always have little mandate to prove efficacy and ROI. They get put in place and stay that way for years. What matters was 'something had to be done' at the time.
So of course law enforcement hasn't been doing a good job at punishing what the rich do. Looking at law enforcement in isolation as the only solution of course is going to look like it's doing a poor job vs enforcing typical criminal laws, which tend to affect middle/lower class people far more.
As income is the greatest indicator of standard criminal acts (drug crimes, theft, violence, etc). Wealthy people simply don't get involved in such crimes and are far more likely to be involved in white collar crime, which thousands of US agencies have been set up to punitively enforce.
There may be serious issues in the justice system (in terms of sentencing, representation, law enforcement culture, etc) regarding the way the wealthy are treated in terms of standard criminal issues. But applying the same lense to white collar crime while ignoring the larger scope of regulatory frameworks and agency based intervention is to severely misunderstand the issue.
These non-law enforcement agencies play a massive role in the US economy.
Yes, the efficacy of always turning to agencies and regulatory frameworks can be honestly questioned and likely a source of many loopholes, but their pure effort and the subsequent costs they impose on the economic system in their efforts to stop this behaviour can't be downplayed... as if they aren't being pursued compared to 'blue collar' crime.
Involving more of the courts and law enforcement to white collar crime could legitimately be a solution here and the lack of real punishment for these actions is a real problem IMO. I'm merely saying the results today are a side effect of how things are done, the automatic political solutions being put in place every time something goes wrong in business, not that things are good as they are.
One of the fundamental problems with employer/employee relations is that employers usually have more workers than employees have jobs. Losing your job is worse than having an employee quit. This fundamental imbalance of power means that we'll always need ways to even things out if we want reasonably fair situations for employees.
Labor laws and law enforcement can cover part of that. And we should certainly pursue it. But I think people should also pursue collective action, be that as formal as a union or as casual as Google's workers all pressuring their employers to stop doing military work. Resilient systems always have multiple ways to keep a problem from getting out of control.