Corporate Crime and Voting Rights

...Ten states disfranchise felons for life, thirty-five states prevent parolees from voting, and twenty-nine states forbid voting by persons on probation for a felony conviction...

...On the other hand, if a person who occupies a position of prestige and command in a large corporation commits transgressions that are on a grander scale than those of the average street criminal, such as releasing defective, life-threatening products into the marketplace or defiling the environment by dumping chemicals into a river, the chances of that person's going to prison are virtually nil...

...When the fraudulent scheme was brought to light, Prudential paid more than fifty million dollars to state regulators and twenty million dollars to the National Association of Securities' Dealers...

...What is important as we consider the disenfranchisement of four million people is that corporations and the people who serve them face no similar exclusion from the political process...

...The restoration of voting rights after the completion of a probationary period would be an improvement in the states with lifetime bans on felons' voting, but would not have any significant impact in poor communities, given the numbers of people currently disenfranchised and walking the streets while on parole or probation...

...When one compares the effects of corpoDISSENT / Summer 2002 n 57 VOTING RIGHTS rate crime with those of street crime and also considers the respective punishments and postincarceration burdens, it is apparent that the machinery of the capitalist electioneering system has erected a class barrier every bit as impregnable as a prison wall...

...None of Exxon's executives, managers, or planners lost the right to vote as a result of the oil spill and its devastation...

...Civil rights advocates and community activists pushing for voting restoration legislation should vigorously point out to legislators the unconscionably disparate treatment of the street felon and the corporate criminal...

...What we need is federal and state legislation modeled after the Civic Participation and Rehabilitation Act of 1999 sponsored by Representative John Conyers (D-Mich...

...A Newsweek cover story titled America's Prison Generation (November 13, 2000) showed that in at least nine states—including the Bush country of Texas and Florida—more than 20 percent of black males are temporarily or permanently banned from voting due to a felony conviction...

...The Wall Street Journal quoted the spin put on the matter by the company's managing partner: "The SEC has not questioned the underlying quality or effectiveness of our overall audit methodology, nor has the SEC limited our ability to conduct audits for other public companies...

...Following release from prison, the ex-felon will be unable to vote in a majority of states until the probationary term expires, and then only after weaving through a difficult, often impossible, bureaucratic maze...

...His essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Judicature, and Privacy Journal...

...The executives may have lost their right to vote, but during the 1990s , as this case unfolded, an unbowed Archer Daniel's Midland contributed $4.7 million to federal lawmakers, including such prominent patrons as Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle...

...A tiny crumb of official recognition of the problem is found in the report of the task force of the National Commission on Election Reform, established as a response to the 2000 election fiasco, which recommends among other things, that "[e]ach state should allow for restoration of voting rights to otherwise eligible citizens who have been convicted of a felony once they have fully served their sentence, including any term of probation or parole...

...Birds and otters covered in oil televise well and are a welcome change from wellscrubbed talking faces...

...Chamber of Commerce estimated that white-collar crimes cost the economy approximately forty billion dollars a year, which was almost 700 percent higher than the Federal Bureau of Investigation's estimate of six billion dollars in goods and cash stolen by street criminals engaged in larceny, robbery, and burglary...

...Corporate criminals, whether they knowingly release defective and dangerous products into the marketplace, disregard environmental regulations, or "cook" the books to manipulate stock prices, after paying their fines, or occasionally doing time, remain free to lobby elected and appointed officials and to donate huge sums of money to political parties and activist groups that seek to influence the outcome of elections...

...However attenuated it may be in the context of prevailing economic arrangements and campaign finance laws, the vote remains to the average citizen, including the average ex-convict released with little money and few skills back into the community, as one of only a few options through which political preferences can be expressed...

...The Exxon Valdez spill was one of those few instances of corporate criminality and social irresponsibility widely covered by the media, not because the dominant media outlets have it in for oil companies or that during 1989 the press experienced a surge of responsibility, but because the nature of the crime lent itself to the all important "visuals" that television loves to display...

...If one of the objectives of incarceration is the rehabilitation of the convict so that he or she can rejoin society as a constructive, contributing individual, marginalizing the marginalized even more is, to say the least, counterproductive...

...The late Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neil's oft-quoted adage that "all politics is local" is nowhere more true than in legislation regarding the franchise...

...The impact of disenfranchisement will vary depending on the size and character of the voting venue—city council district, small town, large city, congressional district, and so on— as well as the racial makeup of the area...

...For more than a ten-year period stretching from January 1, 1982, to December 31, 1995, Prudential bilked its customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars by misrepresenting the true cost and value of policies it sold them...

...In 1972, the U.S...

...In populous states such as New York and California, between 5 percent and 10 percent of black males are temporarily or permanently banned from the polls...

...The NCER noted the disparate impact of disenfranchisement on the African-American community: "Nearly 7 percent of black Americans cannot participate in the electoral process because of a felony conviction...

...On the other hand, the actions of the corporate criminal spray like a shotgun shell toward a flock of victims, sometimes known and sometimes unknown to the perpetrator...

...Rigged Casino Although it is rare for corporate officials to end up in jail for doing their masters' bidding, three former executives of Archer Daniel's Midland did receive prison sentences ranging up to two and a half years for attempting to fix feed-adDISSENT / Summer 2002 • 59 VOTING RIGHTS ditive prices worldwide...

...Similarly, the Sentencing Project of Human Rights Watch, drawing upon many of the studies the NC ER used, concluded in a report published in 1998 that 3.9 million citizens were disenfranchised as a result of a felony convicVOTING RIGHTS tion "including over one million who have fully completed their sentences...

...The uneven but pervasive disenfranchisement found in forty-eight states (Maine and Vermont are the exceptions) and in the federal system adds to political impotence and social degradation in poor—especially AfricanAmerican—communities...

...Voting Rights and Corporate Criminals The denial of the right to vote to a citizen who has rejoined the community after having cornpleted prison time, while absurd in itself, appears even more egregious when measured against the continued and influential participation of corporate criminals in the political process...

...To date, the government's treatment of both Enron and Andersen shows the usual kid-gloves treatment of the economic elite, The Associated Press reported on March 23, 2002, that Paul Volcker, the former chair of the Federal Reserve Board and Andersen's purported rescuer, has proposed that all current federal indictments against Andersen—meaning the relatively mild charges of obstructing justice (for shredding documents)—must be dismissed if Andersen is to be properly reorganized in order to survive...

...In ten states, voting rights are never restored after a felony conviction...

...One can only hope that substantial numbers of elected officials, whether on the two coasts or in George W's "heartland," are angered enough by the dominance of money in local and national politics and the obscenely bloated salaries of corporate executives, professional athletes, celebrity news anchors, and the like to open the voting booth to the disenfranchised even if the former prisoner is not going to attend a thousand-dollar-a-plate political bash any time soon...

...In December of 2000, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson pleaded guilty to criminal charges for, in the words of the New York Times, "selling defective blood glucose monitoring devices to diabetics and submitting false information about the problems to federal regulators...

...No surprise here, as blacks, who make up slightly more than 12 percent of the United States population, are 50 percent of the nation's two million prison inmates...

...Undaunted by its problems and with no laws to bar it and its executives from participating in the political process, Arthur Andersen and its affiliate companies contributed $82,500 to Democrats and $370,300 to Republicans for the 2000 election campaign according to Common Cause...

...An editorial in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution of June 4, 2001, noted this electoral race card: "Now a study also shows that the data used to purge felons from Florida's voting rolls was flawed, resulting in the denial of the right to vote to 1,104 legitimate voters who have never been convicted of felonies...

...The typical street criminal, generally ill-schooled, unskilled, and impoverished, acts out of financial desperation and steals or out of spiritual desperation and narcotizes himself, resulting in banishment from the voting booth...

...Of the many baseless premises and outright myths that infuse the criminal justice system, 56 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 none is more senseless or pernicious than the notion that revoking the right to vote of a person who has completed a prison sentence after conviction for a felony ensures the "purity" of the electoral process...

...A similar proposal is found in the report of state election officials who make up the National Task Force on Election Reform, which also was created after the November 2000 debacle...

...Occasionally, a mega corporation will be charged in a criminal proceeding rather than in the more benign—and appropriately named— civil action...

...But the point is not the amounts involved, although the total sums of corporate contributions dominate and shape election outcomes and national policies...

...It has been widely reported that the penchant in Florida for purifying voting lists by excising the names of convicted felons resulted ultimately in the election of George W. Bush...

...While financing a decade of legal maneuvers designed to avoid its responsibility to the people and land it had injured, Exxon remained an active player in the political game...

...In his insightful and meticulously researched 1999 book, Capital Crimes, George Winslow puts annual losses attributable to corporate crime and white-collar fraud at a minimum of two hundred billion dollars...

...No doubt the swindled diabetics were touched by these condolences...

...Not surprisingly, Prudential is as bold as its corporate friends...

...For the few who do lose the right to vote, it is a minor and inconsequential penalty, for their power resides in their personal wealth and that of their corporation...

...A case in point is Exxon, the oil giant recently merged with Mobil, which suffered only minimal collateral financial damage as a result of its criminal negligence in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska...

...They and their underlings, who cause financial ruin to thousands of people, inflict injuries on many and sometimes death, and befoul the environment, rarely see the inside of a prison, as their transgressions are treated as either misdemeanors or civil matters...

...I F A DRUG-ADDICTED person with a short criminal record of petty street crimes is arrested and convicted for shoplifting and at the same time is also convicted of possessing a few grams of cocaine, that person will likely spend several years in prison followed by five or ten years on probation...

...After declaring in bold type that "America's election system is NOT in crisis," the state officials mirrored the NCER, declaring that "State laws should be changed to allow restoration of voting rights upon pardon or full completion of a sentence (incarceration, probation, parole, restitution, etc...

...When it touches its multiple victims, be they shareholders, drivers of defective automobiles, or fishers in polluted streams or bays, the corporate crime always wreaks a costly havoc...

...The Common Cause Web site shows Exxon Mobil contributing $45,000 to Democrats and $330,000 to the Republicans at the national party level in the 1999-2000 election cycle...

...Needless to say, at the time the sentence is imposed, the defendant and defense counsel are thinking little about a future probationary time but are concentrating all their energies and forensic skills on minimizing the actual time in prison...

...As is often the case with corporate criminals, Arthur Andersen and its partners were permitted to remain mute and neither admit nor deny the fraud allegations...

...The list of corporate transgressors is endless, and the scale of their looting is staggering...

...These few shameful stories—and there are many more—show that whatever civil or criminal penalties and fines corporate America encounters each year, they are simply inconvenient potholes on the road to maximizing profits that have no impact on a corporation's giftgiving or lobbying...

...One does not have to be a cynic to ask whether the Andersen propensity for smoke-and-mirrors' accounting practices served as a recommendation to the chieftains at Enron...

...Nonetheless, this criminal's money is always welcome, and he or she is never excluded by legal sanctions from the corridors of political power...

...and though the loss to that individual is often significant in monetary terms and invariably felt to be a painful violation, only in the aggregate of all burglaries, or all shopliftings, are there social consequences, 58 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 such as the increased need for security and higher insurance premiums...

...Favored Treatment...

...Less photogenic crimes remain buried in the financial print media...

...Take the case of the Prudential Insurance Company, the one that promotes itself as having all the strength and integrity of the Rock of Gibraltar...

...For this, the subsidiary, LifeScan, paid fines totaling sixty million dollars...

...Yes, this is the same Arthur Andersen that paid $110 million as a civil settlement for "accounting improprieties and disclosure failures" related to the Sunbeam collapse and that is a central player in the Enron scandal...

...Those of the former usually have one victim, namely the owner of the stolen television or automobile, the store keeper, and so on...

...In other words, if you are free to be on the street, you should be free to vote...

...It is worth noting that the African-American community votes more as a bloc than the Irish, the Italians, or any other ethnic or racial group...

...For example, the Wall Street Journal of June 20, 2001, reported that the premier accounting and auditing firm of Arthur Andersen had agreed to settle a federal court fraud claim brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for seven million dollars and that three VOTING RIGHTS of its partners would pay fines of $30,000 to $50,000...

...That's almost twice as many votes as the 537 'official' margin of victory that gave George W. Bush Florida's electoral votes and the White House...

...Moreover, I am aware of no government official or mass media pundit who has suggested the obvious applicability of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to Enron and Andersen executives...

...The official will remain free not only to vote but—along with his or her corporate employer— to lobby state and federal officials and to contribute large sums of money to candidates, political parties, and political action committees...

...and if the conviction takes place in a federal court, a presidential pardon may be the only way to restore the vote, but this is an improbability if one is not well connected...

...In short, a criminal corporation's involvement in electoral politics, both during an election and between elections, remains unabated regardless of any court verdict of civil or criminal liability...

...Relying on figures and laws collated by Jeff Manza, Christopher Uggen, and Marcus Britton of the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, the federal task force of the National Commission on Election Reform (NCER) concluded that at the present time 4.2 million people have lost the right to vote, permanently or temporarily, because of current or prior felony convictions...

...No state or federal laws forbid such electioneering activities, no matter how criminal the corporation...

...The accounting firm had been charged with "improper accounting practices that inflated the garbage-hauling concern's [Waste Management Inc.'s] earnings...

...Though the majority of states eliminate permanently or temporarily a felon's right to vote, neither Congress nor any of the states has enacted laws prohibiting a convicted corporation or a convicted corporate officer from continued financial participation in the political system or from sending minions to Washington or state houses to lobby...

...THESE POLICY recommendations acknowledge the problem, but opt for a solution that is timid to the point of being farcical...

...Congress, under the Constitution, defers almost exclusive authority to the states for the enactment 60 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 of laws and rules governing a voter's qualifications, the scheme of primaries and elections, vote recounts, and so on...

...SCHOLARS AND CRITICS have known for some time that the actual social cost of corporate crime far exceeds that of socalled street crime...

...There is no reason to believe that this disparity regarding the consequences of boardroom versus street criminal activity has narrowed...

...From January of 1995 through June 30 of 2000, Exxon contributed $382,015 to Democrats and $2,531,690 to Republicans...

...As bleak as the electoral landscape is, now may be a ripe time for activists to push at the state house level for reform of this situation and the restoration of voting rights to persons who have completed their sentences and are not in prison...

...THE SITUATION is markedly different for the corporate criminal...

...Improper accounting practices, especially regarding earnings, can lead the public to invest in companies with unsound foundations and a camouflaged risk of financial loss...

...Moreover, these three, plus an additional partner, would not do "accounting work for public companies for a period of one to five years...

...If half the news accounts imputing the falsification of figures and required disclosures are true—and assuming that this false information was disseminated through the United States mail or over telephones, the Internet, and television to employees of the company investing in Enron's pension fund, potential stock purchasers, and government regulators—a first-year law student could draft a RICO indictment...

...Most people who are sentenced to jail for felonies return to the community with suspended sentences and substantial terms of probation...

...Common Cause reports that in the 1999-2000 election cycle, Prudential and its affiliates contributed $366,500 to Democrats and $431,125 to Republicans...

...The corporate criminal, on the other hand, is generally well-fed, welleducated, and obscenely overpaid, and intentionally concocts socially pervasive and damaging schemes to satisfy his greed...

...That legislation went nowhere, but it spoke VOTING RIGHTS to the point: "The right of an individual who is a citizen of the United States to vote in any election for Federal office shall not be denied or abridged because that individual has been convicted of a criminal offense unless such individual is serving a felony sentence in a correctional institution or facility at the time of the election...

...Forty-two percent of those on the inaccurate list were African American...

...Nothing will be done by any law enforcement agency to prohibit the corporate official—or the corporation— from participating in the electoral process...

...but had they been punished with that sanction, what would the loss of a dozen votes have been to Republicans compared to the two- and-one-half million dollars they could spend on television advertisements soliciting hundreds of thousands of votes...

...Although not as brutally final as capital punishment or as gratuitously cruel as the incarceration of a person for addiction to drugs, the obliteration of the franchise of a person who has completed "hard time" is every bit as illogical and pointless...

...STEPHEN J. FORTUNATO, JR., is an assistant justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court...

...We are committed to learning from this experience...

...and twenty-six other, mostly African-American, members of the House of Representatives...

...DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 61...

...Payback came when Prudential settled a class action suit requiring it to repay its customers $2.8 billion...

...Regarding the calamitous impact of disenfranchisement laws in the black community, the Sentencing Project noted that "13 percent of African American men-1.4 million—are disenfranchised, representing just over one-third (36 percent) of the total disenfranchised population" The Project concluded ominously: "If current trends continue, the rate of disenfranchisement for black men could reach forty percent in the states that disenfranchise ex-offenders...

...When we look at why the street criminal is stripped of an already feeble vote while the white-collar criminal retains the rights to lobby and make political contributions, we should focus on the consequences of the different criminal behaviors...

...In short, the game of electoral politics is rigged in favor of the casino, and the casino is corporate America and the candidates it sponsors at election time and succors in between...

...Ralph S. Larson, the chair of Johnson & Johnson, matched Arthur Andersen's spin: "We fully acknowledge those errors and sincerely apologize for them...

...More of a tightwad than some of its corporate friends, Johnson & Johnson gave a paltry $25,000 to Democrats and $20,600 to the Republicans for the 2000 election...