Crimes are committed, serious crimes that have jail-terms hanging off them, and yet no one goes to the pokey, and no admissions of guilt are made, because the bad guys are worth billions and ‘settle out of court.’
Just one more instance of the disparity between those who got and those who don’t got. Here’s a little trip down Memory Lane.
Even though it’s three years back, one of the hot topics of the moment is Jeffery Epstein, and it seems J.P. Morgan Chase Bank had their thumb on the scales of justice when they ponied up $365 million to settle a couple of cases charging their financial support of his so-called ‘enterprises.’ One can only wonder if the settlement outweighed the support, but Epstein was mainly a financial guy.
Wells Fargo Bank, an outfit that keeps showing up on the shady-deals list, got caught opening millions of fake accounts to pump up their balance sheet. That cost ‘em three-thousand-million-dollars, but there’s a silver lining…some executives got ‘personal sanctions’ out of the debacle.
Purdue Pharma (and my favorite criminals, the Sackler family) got an $8 billion haircut for killing a couple hundred thousand addicts to their opioids. No accident that, they promoted the stuff. Separately, the Sacklers settled civil suits without (you guessed it) admitting either guilt or liability. Did it affect their social standing? Probably not.
Which gets to the core of the argument.
What does the law really mean, when ‘if you got the dough, you get to go?’
A friend of mine was falsely accused of child abuse in an ugly divorce, and lost his ability to visit his children, the only thing of importance to him. His in-laws were too rich for him to fight, which is the other side of ‘if you got the dough, you get to go.’
Money rips the blindfold off Lady Justice.
Then, of course, there’s the lawyerly side of getting justice, which is seldom discussed and merely another word for leverage.
In the ancient days of my business career, I had reason to bring lawsuits against those who had done me wrong. I won them all, even getting a lawyer disbarred in the process. In every case, when my legal fees were paid, I ended up with pocket-change. The lesson I learned was to “leave the courtrooms to others,” and you can guess who I mean by ‘others.’
“We are a nation of laws, not men,” goes the saying.
There was a time when that was true.
The evidence at hand suggests those times are over.