>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>>I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me who exactly the
>>victims were of Milken's crimes. Not in the moral or figurative sense
>>but in the legal sense.
>
>Doug, securities laws are really picky about disclosure of ownership and a
>whole host of other areas. Milken not only played games around insider
>trading but helped friends hide ownership stakes to violate disclosure rules
>in takeovers. You seem to not care the substantive harm that Milken did but
>want to focus on the actual crimes under the law. That's relatively
>straightforward since there was a long count of the criminal charges made
>against Milken under the securities laws. Milken chose not to go to trial
>and accepted a plea bargain. Here's a quick summary of the charges that led
>to the indictment from THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
Ah, so the victims were shareholders - i.e., other (and often bigger, more prestigious) capitalists. Not workers. Thus Milken's a notorious criminal, while Chainsaw Al Dunlap is a free man.
By the way, here's Mike's version of his "legal dispute" with the government <http://www.mikemilken.com/legal_dispute.html>:
>In the late 1980s, Milken faced broad government charges that John
>Steele Gordon, author of a definitive book on Wall Street, suggests
>may have been a result of "ambitious prosecutors" lusting after a
>high-profile case. Because of intense pressure on him and his
>family, Milken settled, paid a $200-million fine and admitted
>conduct that resulted primarily in violations of securities
>regulations that had not been prosecuted as crimes before and have
>not been prosecuted since. The judge found only one transaction that
>Milken pleaded to had any economic impact - and that was only $318
>thousand. The editor of Forbes said he was "a scapegoat." However,
>he accepted responsibility for the specific actions to which he
>pleaded and served a sentence of 24 months, during which he tutored
>GED classes in math and language skills. Despite many erroneous
>press reports to the contrary, he had no involvement in insider
>trading or the savings and loan crisis. Upon his release, columnist
>George Gilder wrote, "The entire case against him has collapsed."
>Ethicist Norman Barry said the case involved "trivial offenses" and
>was "an affront to the rule of law." Cornell law professor Jonathan
>Macey called it "the vengeful response by America's business and
>regulatory establishment to Mr. Milken's phenomenal success." A
>detailed analysis of the Milken case can be found in the book,
>Payback, by Daniel Fischel, the dean of the University of Chicago
>Law School.
Back from MM to NN:
>It may be true that getting Milken serves as a form of ideological
>justification for the system, as every prosecution of "bad apples" does, but
>I shed no tears for Milken as a person. There are literally millions of
>minor drug crimes that I would pardon long before I would see Milken
>qualifying for a pardon in the queue.
You should know that I agree with this entirely. I think the drug war is an abomination. And in the piece, I said I wanted Peltier sprung too, which I'm guessing you agree with.
Doug