“You can examine the Lehman collapse and the LIBOR scandal and see the same glaring enforcement problems in both narratives. Major regulators like the Fed and the SEC knew of frightening problems within both companies and elected (a) not to launch criminal investigations and (b) not to tell the investing public. You see the state making moves like warning other banks of problems within a firm like Lehman, or using public funds to help protect other banks from damage caused by Lehman's collapse. But the public, in the end, gets nothing. No justice, and not even a bake sale.” 🥀

"It's heavy duty politics. It puts an entire segment of the population constantly on the defensive, gives it a criminal record essentially in advance, puts everyone in the dragnet up front, so that one false move leads to real time. It's a system that is also set up to make consequences for nuisance arrests almost impossible, which emboldens police to even stupider behavior, which in turn leads to less respect for the law---an endless cycle of idiocy."

“The attorney general of the United States was saying that the economy had grown so complicated that his own office was now and henceforth helpless to decide on its own when it was okay to prosecute, that before it moved against any high-powered target, it needed to ask the "experts" on Wall Street if the economy would survive such an action. Of course, it wasn't like that on the streets anymore. On the streets, more than ever, they arrested first, asked questions later.”

“collateral consequences” aren’t worthy of being brought into consideration unless you’re a multi-million or -billion dollar company, but the everyday person must bear the cost

“For the small subset of offenders who are guilty of truly systemic, transformative, organized crime, for offenders to whom losing a big case could be politically embarrassing, let's carefully consider the collateral consequences of criminal pros-ecution. But for everybody else, let's ignore them more than ever before.”