Corporate Crime
Jun. 21st, 2006 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe section in the 'Crime and deviance' chapter on corporate crime is a bit of a shocking eye opener. I mean I'd heard about most of the incidents before, but I hadn't seen them all lined up together with costs and death tolls. And I hadn't seen them compared to 'crime' statistics, or the amounts of money that go into disaster relief. Any one of the incidents have worse consequences than the kind of crime the media goes on about in crime rates, the street crime. And yet there's more and more of it!
I guess the same theory - goals mattering more than means - still applies. People trying to make money however they can, ends up being a big huge mess.
But with the kind of crime where you pick up a stick and hit someone with it, you know you're doing it, know it is a bad thing. With the kind of crime where someone makes or ignores a rule, there is the possibility of not noticing one has picked up the stick, or even that there are people all lying there bleeding from it.
I'm thinking Angel again, and thinking this - corporate billions - is the kind of crime Lindsey would be playing with. The bits that Angel noticed and stopped, the murders and that, are tiny little side projects compared the the major activities here. No wonder Angel never felt like he was doing something once he was boss and signing papers. Nothing bleeding, can't see the crime. But its still way bigger in effect than a random vampire.
The kind of crime Angel stops is also important to stop, of course. People getting killed is of the bad however it happens.
I'm just trying to get my head around a section that talks in billions. Billions are very big numbers.
And one guy who got convicted and imprisoned and fined $650 million is actually still very very very rich, because they reckon he nicked more than $1 billion.
That kind of math is just... weird, and very big.
You know, the more I read, the more I understand how people get all shouty-Marxist about stuff. The false consciousness bit is still really annoying, but I can understand the shouting.
I guess the same theory - goals mattering more than means - still applies. People trying to make money however they can, ends up being a big huge mess.
But with the kind of crime where you pick up a stick and hit someone with it, you know you're doing it, know it is a bad thing. With the kind of crime where someone makes or ignores a rule, there is the possibility of not noticing one has picked up the stick, or even that there are people all lying there bleeding from it.
I'm thinking Angel again, and thinking this - corporate billions - is the kind of crime Lindsey would be playing with. The bits that Angel noticed and stopped, the murders and that, are tiny little side projects compared the the major activities here. No wonder Angel never felt like he was doing something once he was boss and signing papers. Nothing bleeding, can't see the crime. But its still way bigger in effect than a random vampire.
The kind of crime Angel stops is also important to stop, of course. People getting killed is of the bad however it happens.
I'm just trying to get my head around a section that talks in billions. Billions are very big numbers.
And one guy who got convicted and imprisoned and fined $650 million is actually still very very very rich, because they reckon he nicked more than $1 billion.
That kind of math is just... weird, and very big.
You know, the more I read, the more I understand how people get all shouty-Marxist about stuff. The false consciousness bit is still really annoying, but I can understand the shouting.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-21 01:04 pm (UTC)Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose"
no subject
Date: 2006-06-21 01:46 pm (UTC)yup