14 percent:
By on Oct 15th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
14 percent:
The drop in federal corruption prosecutions since President Bush took office, according to a new Syracuse University study. Prosecutions have fallen every year since 2003:
The study also found that “prosecution of all kinds of white-collar criminals” has dropped 27 percent since Bush took office, despite the President’s 2001 promise following the Enron scandal to “do everything in our power to end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws.”
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you never heard of Opposite Day? This is Opposite 8-years.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:05 pmYah!, sure, you betcha, and I have some land to sell, ocean front property in Billings Montana…….Blessings
October 15th, 2007 at 6:06 pmAnd this is a surprise because?
October 15th, 2007 at 6:06 pmIts no surprise. The FBI said they moved 2,000 agents from white collar crimes to support their terrorist division. Also, did George Soros have anything to do with this study at Syracuse? You know FoxNoise will come to that conclusion.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:11 pmI think the answer is that the nation has just magically become a better place and everyone is behaving themselves. Yeah, that’s it, right?
October 15th, 2007 at 6:12 pmBush also served up this whopper after the Enron scandal broke:
“I got to know Ken Lay when he was the head of the-what they call the Governor’s Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994. And she had named him the head of the Governor’s Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place, just for the sake of continuity. And that’s when I first got to know Ken.”
For more, see:
October 15th, 2007 at 6:19 pm“Bush Lies About Ken Lay.”
Crooks in bed with crooks, and no surprises here, tap tap tap…
October 15th, 2007 at 6:19 pmMeasuring commitment to fighting white colar crime simply on numbers of prosecutions is like measuring how productive a Congress is on how many political “investigations†it has conducted. More relevant would be how many successful prosecutions there have been.
Comment by TCDon — October 15, 2007 @ 6:07 pm
TDCon it says prosecutions!! not investigations right thar untop o dat der chart.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:21 pm4: Agreed. Number of convictions/guilty pleas is more relevant, but the pattern does seem to confirm that bushco. winks at “bigbidness”.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:22 pmFrom the FDA to big pharma, bushco pushes “voluntary” compliance with the law. Fox meet henhouse.
“do everything in our power to CONTINUE the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws.â€
Thought I would help correcting that statement.
Buck Fush
October 15th, 2007 at 6:22 pmLordy, these Publicans are something else, they blame everyone else for everything that happens, claim values and morals, then run around public retsrooms and wear diapers.
And Coulter thinks heaven would look alot like the Republican 2004 convention.
Good God, could you imagine heaven full of cigar smoking crooks, drunken politicians, preachers with male prostitutes, grown men wearing diapers with hookers, sex in the bathroom stalls….
October 15th, 2007 at 6:26 pmThey need signatures.They close to a Million.
ImpeachBush.org
October 15th, 2007 at 6:29 pmAlso, did George Soros have anything to do with this study at Syracuse? You know FoxNoise will come to that conclusion.
Comment by Imichael — October 15, 2007 @ 6:11 pm
Only if FoxSnewz uses their current standards ( or lack thereof ).
To them facts are what they twist them to be.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:29 pmThe only major enforcement area where federal prosecutions were sharply higher is immigration, where the number of individuals charged with criminal offenses has undergone a 127% jump
That must be the amnesty program.
/snarkon
October 15th, 2007 at 6:30 pm*What* a surprise.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:31 pmThe Bushies never met a crook they didn’t award the Medal of Freedom.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:33 pmIf I was a Republican I think I would be in tears by now, how much more can go wrong?
Why is God angry at the Republicans?
October 15th, 2007 at 6:36 pmWhy is God angry at the Republicans?
Comment by Xisithrus — October 15, 2007 @ 6:36 pm
Umm, lemmee see… Death, destruction, they don’t give one hairy shit about anything that has remotely to do with Xian values or conduct, just for starters,….
October 15th, 2007 at 6:39 pmYou’ve done a heck of a job, Gonzo!
October 15th, 2007 at 7:08 pmThanks from everyone.
Welllll…. maybe everyone is just behaving better lately…
ya think?
October 15th, 2007 at 7:14 pmOops, Frosty — I didn’t steal your line, honest. I posted before I saw yours. Sorry.
October 15th, 2007 at 7:16 pmBut, “cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws†IS the bush way of ruling our land! Why would he do ANYTHING to change that????
October 15th, 2007 at 7:55 pmWhen the only ones requiring a indictment are their own, no wonder.
October 15th, 2007 at 7:57 pmJust what goes on in the Justice Dept, …….State Dept, Pentagon, homelasnd security, interior, the office of the president? Could it be worse than sex?
“…cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws.â€
Ah, the Bush Legacy in a nice little sound bite. Sums up the Iraq war nicely, too.
October 15th, 2007 at 8:18 pmSee? There are less corruption prosecutions, because there is less corruption under Pres Bush!
The word magically turned just and righteous!
/sarcasm off
October 15th, 2007 at 8:46 pmAll them nice white people are so good and clean
October 15th, 2007 at 9:09 pmWow!! These guys are good- reduced corruption by 14%!
October 15th, 2007 at 9:34 pmOh, they didn’t?
Duh, with a 14% drop in corruption, stands to reason you’d have a 14% drop in prosecutions.
October 15th, 2007 at 9:43 pmBig suprise. Why would DoJ prosecute the 1%’ers that are the Bush Rangers, lobbyists, Katrina contractors, thugs providing private security in Iraq, and and a variety of no bid contractors when they’ve got allegations of voting violations, death penalty cases to prosecute and torture policies to defend.
Saving taxpayors money thru efficient flow of resources . . . law enforcement and Constitutional rights be damned . . . Bush knows how to best serve his constituents.
Oh yeah, what ever happened to that Cheney oil policy commission? As oil hits $90 a barrell, someone might want to ask . . . if not to prosecute what and who was involved there. . . based upon the widespread nature of that malfeasance, we could probably bump those prosecution numbers up significantly.
October 15th, 2007 at 10:12 pmDenver just temporarily named a street: “Rocky Road”!
Go Rocks!
October 15th, 2007 at 10:52 pm“do everything in our power to end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws†for everyone except ourselves and our friends.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:07 pm.
Being fluent in my Bush-lingish,
this just means that there are far fewer bad white collar criminals.
.
October 16th, 2007 at 2:59 amHmmm, seems to me the war in Iraq alone increased corruption by about 50% of the American NGP. Hell, the US would have been better off BRIBING ALL IRAQI’s to just not vote for Saddam the next election.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:35 amLet me tell you about a recent case that put a man away for a quarter of a century, a case where the government named more than a hundred people as “un-indicted co-conspiratorsâ€, but presented no evidence of this vast conspiracy in the trial. Instead, they used this tactic as a very effective method of scaring anyone from testifying for the defense. In this same very high profile case, where the defendants were “presumed guilty until proven innocent” by a very biased media, jury selection was limited to five whole hours (Timothy McVeigh got a week, Terry Nichols a month) and the defense was all but handcuffed as to which prospective jurors they could reject. In reading back through responses on perspective juror’s questionnaires, you can see the obvious prejudice among those who were selected. The bulk of the government’s case consisted almost entirely of witnesses who had copped a plea to reduce their own sentences, giving them a very strong incentive to “cooperate”. Some of these people were might have actually been innocent but, like the un-indicted mentioned above, they were pressured into a guilty plea by the prospect of a lengthy sentence. The government’s star witness (who truly was a confessed liar) gave the supposed damning testimony, but it was never corroborated because the government never called the only person who could to the stand. It all makes you wonder just what the government was trying to hide.
If I told you this and more about this trial, you’d be screaming, “Injustice!” and railing against a Dept of Justice that is completely out of control…that is until I tell you that I’m talking about the Lay/Skilling trial.
I am a liberal, I sing folk music for a living, if you can call it that. I am not a corporate apologist. I also happened to pay very close attention to the Enron affair. It’s quite safe to say it ain’t nothing like the books or movies or even most of the news reports you’ve read. The average person believes Enron was a house of cards, a place of massive corruption, but the real house of cards was the Enron Task Force. They spent untold millions telling us they were uncovering massive fraud but they didn’t even come close to proving it. If you actually let yourself look into the details of this case you’d see the same out of control DOJ you see in other recent events, and you’d see a witch hunt of a case where two men were railroaded into long prison terms (one has of course since died) with hearsay and a whole lot of mudslinging, but little or no real evidence. We have been hoodwinked into believing every the government said about Enron because we believe “they’re rich, so they must be guilty.” Isn’t that kind of thinking as black and white as anything W and the neo-cons say?
I say be careful what you wish for. Thinking Progress may mean fighting corporate crime, but it doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to prosecutorial abuse by an over-arching Dept. of Justice and putting a man in jail for the rest of his life without evidence of any wrongdoing.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm