White Collar Crime is the Root of All Evil

Several years ago, Disney stopped paying royalties to authors of Star Wars related novels after they purchased Lucas Film. A task force was started and public pressure applied, and most authors seemed to get most of what was owed them, years after they should have. I am not sure they even were paid interest, but the reporting is unclear, so I apologize if I get some of the details wrong.

Disney had two excuses for this action. First, it claimed that sometimes things get lost in mergers. Not, I should note, the permission to publish these books or add them to omnibuses. That they seemed to have no problem finding during the transition process. Who to pay, though, that turned out to be really hard to discover. I suspect that is because the real reason was that they tried to steal from the authors:

This is backed up by a statement from a Disney legal representative in correspondence with Foster’s representatives, shared with THR, in which the argument is made that “[the original publisher] had personal service agreements with Mr. Foster under which [it] was obligated to pay compensation to Mr. Foster in connection with the novelizations. Neither Fox nor Disney have assumed any of these obligations to Mr. Foster, nor did they agree to a separate obligation to do so.”

This is outright theft. Claiming that you can take something of value from someone but not the corresponding obligation to reward that person for the thing of value you created? Theft, plain and simple. In no world are liabilities tied to work not transferrable. They agreed to write the books for royalties, so anyone who profits from said work owes said royalties. No one was punished for this theft much less went to jail for it.

By itself, this may not seem like a huge story. It only involved a handful of people, after all, but it is representative of the light touch we treat economic criminals with. The Supreme Court has made bribing an official an almost impossible crime to prosecute. Wage theft is the single largest crime in America, and yet the punishments are very lite — fines, etc. Hardly anyone goes to jail, and hardly anyone has their business turned over to the employees that they robbed, for example. Companies that commit crimes involving poisoning people or harming their worker almost always just end paying fines with no admission of guilt. And the fines are almost always much, much less than the money saved or stolen by the initial crime. We have created and entire generation of rich people who are immune, and expect to be immune, from the law. And it is destroying the country.

Donald Trump and organizations controlled by him have committed fraud consistently, going back almost to the beginning of his career. At no point did his theft — and that is what fraud is, theft — result in even the hint of jail time or losing his businesses. Trump is not unique in this respect. Businesses are not held to account for their crimes. In the increasingly rare occasions they are prosecuted, they get off fine a fine. And a fine is not a punishment it is a price for doing business. This immunity encourages bad behavior by firms and individuals, and it erodes belief in the system, the idea of the rule of law.

Just in the last few years, a Supreme Court Justice lied about how much he received from private interests. A lobbyist bought the home of the current Vice President for significantly above market. Elon Musk offered money for voting, twice, in public, a clear violation of Wisconsin law, and the authorities did nothing. And Donald trump never faced trial for stealing secret documents or his role in the January 6th insurrection because the cases were slow walked before the Supreme Court immunized him.

Corruption is the story of the day. Some of the actions above might not even be illegal under the way existing law is understood by the courts. Things like letting Congresspeople sell individual stocks even though they have information that can let them sell or buy before the public gets said information, or allowing companies and company owners, like Elon Musk, who give to political candidates to receive government contracts are legal, but obviously corrupt. Corruption is the issue of the day, and the Democratic Party must treat it as such when it returns to power. Corruption destroys democracy. It enables the rich to avoid accountability, to manipulate the government, and to harm people without recourse. Normal people understandably lose trust when they see the wealthy and connected skate on crimes that would send them to jail for the rest of their lives.

Democracy is a fragile thing. Corruption is one of the fastest ways to undermine it. Going back to business as usual is not acceptable. Individuals in the DOGE program, given that they are involved in usurping the power of the purse from Congress and ignoring Congressional restrictions on how and where money is spent of not spent, which agencies exist and do not, are likely committing crimes. We cannot, under any circumstances, look ahead and not back. We did that for Watergate, for the torture scandals in Iraq, for January 6th. We avoid looking at the crimes of powerful businesses people and turn a blind eye to handing out government contracts to donors and to Congresspeople doing the equivalent of insider trading. We cannot allow this to continue.

We must punish any law breaking that happens at any level in this Administration. Doing otherwise is part of what got us here. Ignore the torture crimes and January 6th and now we have people being disappeared from the streets, in part because no one believes they will be held accountable for their crimes. And people look at the system and think it is hopelessly corrupt and not worth fixing or saving, turning instead to people who promise to fix everything by blowing everything up. And, frankly, they are not entirely wrong to mistrust such a system.

If we want to save our democracy, we cannot let this continue. We cannot merely defeat these people at the ballot box. We must destroy the center of their worldview — law for the little people, immunity for them. We must aggressively punish people for breaking the law and we must reform the law so that blatant, plain corruption is now against the law and punished harshly. People in charge, people with power, need to be held to a higher standard than those without. If we let these things slide, if we make no changes, if we look forward not back, then we are merely an interregnum before the restoration of the corrupt kings. We owe democracy and ourselves much better than that.