Joe Pinsker at
The Atlantic writes
Financial Criminals Have Been Fined Billions, but They Rarely Pay:
On a plane earlier this week, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street. The film’s outsized antics—public masturbation, the tossing of little people, lots and lots of Quaaludes—seemed too big for a seatback screen, or, for that matter, reality. As despicable as some of Jordan Belfort’s behavior was, I was able to occasionally laugh at Leonardo DiCaprio's version of him knowing that, by now, more than 10 years after his real-life sentencing, Belfort has been sufficiently punished.
But in fact, that’s hardly the case: After pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering, Belfort was ordered in 2003 to pay out about $110 million to those he wronged. Since then, he’s only paid $11.8 million. He was also sentenced to four years in federal prison, but he only ended up serving just shy of two years.
Meanwhile, he’s thriving as a motivational speaker, and has made some money from selling the film rights to his life story. In a testimonial for his speaking services, Leonardo DiCaprio called Belfort “a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work.”
Belfort’s relatively consequence-free story is only one of the more prominent ones in a parade of aggravating numbers reported on earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. There’s still $97 billion out there in penalties that the Justice Department has failed to recover, and between September 2012 and September 2013, the department collected only 22 percent of penalties doled out. One particularly demoralizing figure was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had collected about a tenth of a percent of the $3.7 billion owed to wronged investors.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Scott Brown adds another line to his resume:
Sen. Scott Brown is a very important man, and at Thursday night's debate with Elizabeth Warren, he added another resume item you might not have known about. Not only does Brown meet secretly with kings and queens, not only does Secretary of State Hillary Clinton call him all the time, but he's also "one of the ranking members on the Armed Services Committee."
This has the benefit of being a step or two closer to the truth than his claim that Hillary Clinton calls him "all the time" when they'd spoken twice, and not in more than a year. But a step or two closer to the truth still puts it about five steps from reality. There's one ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and that's John McCain. You'd have to spread the idea of ranking members, plural, pretty thin to get to Scott Brown, who is the sixth Republican member on the committee.
Brown is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Airland, but with 68 subcommittees in the Senate as a whole, being a subcommittee ranking member is not exactly a unique identifier.
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today's Kagro in the Morning show: Plastic microbeads are in everything. Even toothpaste. So now they're in your water. Open carry moves to... in front of schools. And how do you tell an open carry protester from a maniac? Wait for him to start shooting. Mark Pryor toes the NRA line, but they spend millions to defeat him anyway. What's Mayday PAC doing giving money to anti-reformers? Why the shift away from an assault weapons ban? Explaining away kids' fatal GunFAILs. Witness who reported Ohio WalMart "gunman" turns out to be full of it. Congressional inaction as tacit approval of executive action. Matt Stoller gives us stuff to think about, re: ISIS.
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