Jennifer Taub

Pacific Gas and Electric, General Motors, Governor Robert MacDonnell of Virginia, Wells Fargo, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, WeWork, Enron, Sandy Weill, Countrywide Mortgage, Ivan Boesky, Sackler's and OxyContin, Donald Trump’s tax evasion and the Subprime Mortgage Collapse...

The list above are just a few of the latest examples of corporate and individual greed that have largely gone unpunished. Companies may get fined and they may receive a slap on their wrists but few executives go to jail.

Taub provides an overview of various scandals and its effect on consumers, taxpayers and the public in general. She also offers some suggestions on how to better enforce regulations and laws. However given the greed of American businesses, the indifference of the American public and the soullessness of the Republican Party, I don’t think much will happen.

Well written book---makes a number of great points but she’s preaching to the choir to this reader..

My notes from the book below:

Just day after Valentine's Day in 2020, President Donald Trump granted clemency to a slew of affluent felons. Their offenses? Bribery, investment fraud, tax evasion, Medicare fraud, public corruption, computer hacking, and extortion cover-up, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the federal government, obstruction of justice, mail fraud, wire fraud.

White-collar crime in America , such as fraud and embezzlement , cost victims and estimated three hundred billion to eight hundred billion dollars per year yet street level property crimes including burglary , larceny and theft cost us far less – – around sixteen billion dollars annually , according to the FBI .

In 2018, the Wells Fargo Board of Directors authorized paying shareholders billions of dollars in dividends and stock buybacks, but the bank still announced layoffs of more than 26,000 employees.

When powerful people plunder with impunity, they grow even wealthier. And they can use this wealth to change the laws and their enforcement so that they favored those at the top like themselves. This is not a theory. It's reality.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: "From 1999 to 2017, almost 218,000 people died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids. That was more than half of the nearly 400,000 opioid deaths during that time period.”

The IRS was busy trying to survive budget cut after budget cut. Its 2019 budget was around $2 billion lower than in 2009. Along came layoffs, with 30,000 fewer employees at the IRS by 2020. Fewer auditors meant fewer audits. The agency lost out on collecting at least $18 billion per year.

The 2017 tax giveaway was expected to cost around $1.9 trillion by 2027, according to the Congressional budget office. Imagine if we had directed that money to where the greatest need is, not the greatest greed. We could have provided affordable childcare and pre-K to all families for a decade. But that's not all. Child poverty would have been eliminated during that period of time. After doing both, we could've raise teachers wages in a low income area schools by $10,000, doubled the amount of government funding for climate science, invested $100 billion fighting the opioid epidemic, and directed $60 billion towards community colleges.
… (plus d'informations)

I got to know about this book because I think I saw the author comment on Twitter about it during some conversation about 45’s corruption and if they’ll ever face consequences. I immediately decided to get it from the library and it was so eye opening.

The one overarching feeling you are left with after reading this book is rage. Rage at the wealthy corporate executives who use corrupt and unethical practices to maximize their profits while screwing over the lives of millions of normal people, while also getting away with a slap on the wrist or no consequences at all. The other feeling of rage is against the politicians who create such laws favoring corporates and prevent them from being punished, just to preserve their donor class. It’s absolutely horrifying to read and after seeing so many instances of powerful people getting away with just about anything, the chances of any convictions for the corrupt members of the outgoing administration seem very bleak.

But the book ends on a small hope. The author lists down the things that even we normal and usually powerless people can do to nudge our politicians to write better laws and ensure that the existing ones treat everyone equally before it. It doesn’t seem like an easy path forward but unless something is done to get money out of politics and to reduce the influence of corporate lobbyists on the writing of new laws, the situation is only gonna get worse.

In conclusion, this was a very interesting book to read and you should especially pick it up when you are ready to read something that’ll make you angry. I think what also works in its favor is that the author never shies away from giving her opinion about how despicable these massive frauds by powerful people are, and this natural outrage of the author is even more evident in the audiobook. I learnt a lot and I hope you will too... highly recommend.… (plus d'informations)

There’s a lot of corruption, wage theft, and fraud in the US, and we don’t even track it (so when you hear crime has spiked, think about the things we don’t try to count). I don’t think I’d seen this about the GM ignitition switch scandal, where they killed a bunch of people to save money on a part costing less than a dollar and then covered it up: One driver pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she lost control of her car and her boyfriend was killed. For years, the woman believed she was responsible for his death and her own severe injuries, but five months before she pled guilty, GM’s internal review found that the ignition switch was at fault in her accident. GM didn’t tell her; instead, it wrote a letter to NHTSA falsely saying it hadn’t looked at the crash. Seven years after the accident, she was finally cleared. And the lack of prosecution has gotten worse even in the past ten years—even as late as 2006, the DOJ was convicting CEOs, presidents, CFOs, and COOs more regularly. But court decisions and prosecutor timidity have made that far less common. We also help launder money from thieves and corrupt politicians around the world. Our elected officials and administrators could choose differently, if we had the votes and the will.… (plus d'informations)

Another history of the financial crisis, emphasizing the continuity of 2008 with the S&L crisis of the 1980s, which was never truly fixed: it was sweetheart bailouts and captured regulators all along, with even the details often repeating—as well as the people and institutions. Taub starts with one particular mortgage whose foreclosure eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which held that banks couldn’t be forced to write down a first residential mortgage to its actual value. This prevented bankruptcy from being a way that people could save their homes when an economic shock hit; first residences receive special treatment compared to most other debts that can be reduced through bankruptcy. Like similar rules about student loan debt, this is all about helping wealthy banks and their bonus-slurping employees regardless of the consequences for ordinary Americans. As it turns out, this particular mortgage—like many mortgages—traveled through several fraud-ridden banks whose stories Taub tells along the way. She chronicles how every single entity involved received a bailout, sometimes more than once—everybody but the (former) homeowners.… (plus d'informations)