In a letter mailed last week, Citizen Works founder Ralph Nader and Citizen Works communications director Lee Drutman called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to include statistics on corporate crime in the FBI's annual "Crime in America Report," an annual compendium of crime statistics that focuses only on street crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and burglary while entirely ignoring the growing epidemic of corporate crime.
"Because the FBI does not collect data on corporate crime, both the American public and the law enforcement community lack good information on what has become a pressing national problem — a corporate crime wave," wrote Nader and Drutman. "Comprehensive data on corporate crime would help law enforcement officials to better analyze patterns and better direct resources. Information is also a powerful tool for public support of strong law enforcement, and the lack of it hampers your efforts to stay true to your tough words on corporate crime."
The letter notes that, "Where the costs [of corporate crime] have been estimated, the numbers are staggering. Most credible estimates confirm that, in the aggregate, white-collar and corporate crimes cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually — far more than conventional categories of crime such as burglary and robbery — and cause many preventable deaths, injuries, and disease."
To read the letter, see: http://www.citizenworks.org/corp/ashcroft-letter.php
Sometime i want to put together a thingy that shows precisely where every tax dollar you pay goes, such as "debt and compounded interest for bombs used in WWII", "S&L Bailout debt and interest", "medical benefits for veterans who were injured while fighting", etc.
Hundreds of billions of dollars don't mean anything, but if you realize you're paying $400 a year every year for something it will i think have a lot more reality. Social Security is lumped in with the rest of government expenditures to make the pie graphs look like much more tax money is being spent on social benefits than is really the case; might as well throw in all 401k plans and other retirement savings. (Tho any social security shortfall that is made up for by normal taxes should of course be included.)
blah blah.
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