Stop the corporate crime wave, says this world-renowned economist

Mea culpa

Jeffrey Sachs has a lot to make up for. He's the economist who introduced shock therapy to Communist countries after they threw over Communism. Shock therapy is the sudden introduction of the "you're on your own" economic doctrine so beloved of Tea Partiers. It includes lifting of price and currency controls, elimination of state subsidies, free trade and large-scale privatization.

Critics say Sachs' shock therapy in the Soviet Union led to

...drastic decreases in industrial output over the ensuing years, a nearly halving of the country's GDP and of personal incomes, a doubling of the suicide rate, and a skyrocketing unemployment rate. The Lancet has recently reported that rapid privatization of the Soviet Union caused a 12.8% death rate increase among males in just two years...

Sachs has quit with the shock doctrine and appears to be making amends for impoverishing so many people. Recently, he railed against the global economy's corporate crime wave in a post for Project Syndicate. He pointed out that not a single financial leader is in jail two years after the global financial crisis caused by their criminal behavior. And he takes apart Pink Slip Rick Scott:

The current governor of Florida, Rick Scott, was CEO of a major health-care company known as Columbia/HCA. The company was charged with defrauding the United States government by overbilling for reimbursement, and eventually pled guilty to 14 felonies, paying a fine of $1.7 billion.

The FBI’s investigation forced Scott out of his job. But, a decade after the company’s guilty pleas, Scott is back, this time as a “free-market” Republican politician.

Sachs attacks Dick Cheney, who ran Halliburton when it illegally bribed Nigerian officials to gain access to their oil fields. The only consequences he paid was to get elected vice president of the United States.

But here's what's important (because Sachs agrees with what we've been saying all along): 

Corporate corruption is out of control for two main reasons. First, big companies are now multinational, while governments remain national. Big companies are so financially powerful that governments are afraid to take them on.

Second, companies are the major funders of political campaigns in places like the US, while politicians themselves are often part owners, or at least the silent beneficiaries of corporate profits. Roughly one-half of US Congressmen are millionaires, and many have close ties to companies even before they arrive in Congress.

He concludes that we live in a culture of impunity, "based on the well-proven expectation that corporate crime pays." And he presents a hell of a good reason NOT to enter into a trade deal with Panama, one of the worst tax havens in the world.

The wealth, power, and illegality enabled by this hidden system are now so vast as to threaten the global economy’s legitimacy, especially at a time of unprecedented income inequality and large budget deficits, owing to governments’ inability politically – and sometimes even operationally – to impose taxes on the wealthy.

Yup.