Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.
Actions have consequences. It is a simple notion, but in the broad sense of the economic meltdown here in the United States, it is one that has often failed to play out.
We have been led to believe that banks are not only ‘Too Big To Fail,’ but also ‘Too Big To Jail” and that their employees will not be held liable for the misdeeds performed in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
We have managed to jail the Bernie Madoffs and Allen Stanfords of the world but we are still grasping on how we can hold the vast Wall Street financial complex responsible for their institutional misdeeds.
And while Ponzi schemers and the like have affected many, many people, our government has failed to hold the larger corporations responsible for a housing and financial collapse that the banks should have seen coming.
But I believe it can be done, and if you take a long hard long across the globe, and even here in the US, you’ll find that governments are starting to redefine a corporation’s culpability, liability and responsibility to the public.
Why? I believe that the very definition of corporate crime is being looked at in a new light. No longer is it simply viewed as white-collar crime, but rather a form of economic homicide. This is no longer just a matter of money lost or bottom lines being padded, there are real victims whose lives have been devastated and in some cases, lost to a company’s culpability and wanton disregard of their reckless actions.
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