On Sep 14, 2007, at 1:15 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
> Full disclosure: I briefly admired Giuliani when, in 1987 as a US
> Attorney, Rudy had a couple of Wall Street execs hauled off to jail
> in handcuffs to face insider trading charges (later dismissed, I
> believe); one of these execs was photographed crying his eyes out
> -- a sight that I must say warmed my heart. Unfortunately once he
> got into office Rudy switched from pummeling the powerful to
> pummeling the poor.
Not me. As Ernest Mandel says in one of his entries in the Dictionary of Marxist Thought, the reason that insider trading is punished is that it's an instance of little capital trying to steal from big capital. It also undermines public faith that the markets are "fair," which of course they're not.
Those guys were arrested in typically Rudy fashion - thrown against their office wall during the business day, handcuffed, and hauled out. The point was to humiliate. The charges never stuck, either. But even disgraced investment bankers can afford better lawyers than your average criminal. If it had been some public defender, the charges might well have stuck.
I used to know a guy who worked as a prosecutor under Rudy when they were doing the insider trading busts. The guy was seething with resentment that he - a Harvard Law grad! - was making a civil servant's salary while all those Wall Street guys were raking it in. So how do you turn that resentment into policy? By arresting a bunch of losers while letting the hotshots run wild.
Doug