Did the Biden-Harris failure to take corporate crime seriously contribute to Kamala Harris’ defeat?
That’s a question raised by Emma Marsano, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, in an article posted after the election titled – The Biden Administration Completely Failed to Address Corporate Crime. Can We Blame Voters for Noticing?
“The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco, took a lax approach to white collar crime enforcement, and its final year was no exception,” Marsano writes. “As the Democratic Party apparatus’s post-election reflections continue this week, they would do well to consider this basic question – was it smart to run a campaign hinging on your opponent’s blatant corruption and white-collar criminal status, despite the failure of the Biden administration to take tangible steps to address the harms perpetrated by corporations and the wealthy during their time in office?”
Marsano cites TRAC’s analysis of the latest available Department records – through September 2024 – released last month, demonstrating that there was barely an increase in prosecutions over 2023, with 4,332 prosecutions – fewer than in all but the final year of the first Trump administration.
“In addition to the sliding number of prosecutions – which seem to suggest that the Biden administration was even less motivated to prosecute corporate wrongdoing than corporate scam artist Donald Trump himself – the first three years of the Biden Department of Justice saw a continued reliance on leniency agreements when addressing the crimes of murderous corporations like Boeing.”
“As we’ve worked with allies to highlight this year, Boeing’s 2018 and 2019 737 Max crashes killed 346 people. Nevertheless, Boeing received yet another sweetheart deal and slap-on-the-wrist fine from the Department in July of this year after violating their 2021 deferred prosecution agreement. (What’s the deterrence impact of “deferred” prosecution if it never actually arrives?)”
You wrote this article under the headline – The Biden Administration Completely Failed to Address Corporate Crime. Can We Blame Voters for Noticing?
“There is a bit of dramatization in the headline there,” Marsano told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last month. “But for the duration of the Biden administration. we did critique Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco’s lack of holding powerful and wealthy corporations accountable. We noted the historically low numbers of white collar crime prosecutions and the particularly disappointing leniency agreements that were granted to large corporations. This included the deferred prosecution agreements to Boeing and other recidivist corporations who had massive failures that have killed people, and who are still receiving these lenient deals.”
“The administration didn’t live up to their early speeches promising to hold the powerful to account for their wrongdoing. And at a populist moment when people were looking to have some of the broken faith in government restored, the Democratic Party did not rise to the occasion. The Biden administration didn’t lay the groundwork in the four years leading up the campaign to earn the trust that they would protect people from corporate malfeasance.”
But right before the election you wrote an article titled – Successful Biden-Harris Efforts Toward A Corporate Crackdown: A Pre-Election Week Review
You open that article this way:
“We reviewed efforts at five agencies (DOL, NLRB, SEC, CFPB, and FTC) toward using existing enforcement powers to crack down on corporate wrongdoing, highlighting successful enforcement actions with real impact on our daily lives. Over the past four years, these critical (if not always public-facing) executive branch agencies have made significant strides toward reversing the deregulatory efforts of the Trump administration, while pushing protections for workers and consumers further.”
“These successes should inspire confidence in the potential for a progressive administration to wield the administrative state to lower prices, increase wages, and improve workplace conditions – issues we know voters prioritize. However, the sometimes-obscure nature of rule-making and enforcement of existing regulations means there’s more to be done to publicize the positive impacts of these agencies’ work.”
So while the regulatory agencies were doing a pretty good job, the Justice Department was not?
“The restitution oriented effort by the regulatory agencies – back pay for workers who were fired for union organizing, trying to improve workplace safety – that kind of thing – shows that the regulatory agencies did take steps to improve conditions for workers.”
“But when we look at criminal prosecutions, we are not seeing enthusiastic enforcement.”
Your headline on your current piece reads – The Biden Administration Completely Failed to Address Corporate Crime. Can We Blame Voters for Noticing?
There was so little reporting on corporate crime. Most of the people I know don’t even know what corporate crime is. Did voters actually notice a failure to crack down on corporate crime?
“It’s not so much that they notice a specific decline in corporate prosecutions. But they did notice generally that the Biden administration is not publicly setting itself up as an ally of people against concentrated corporate power.”
“Polling data shows that people across the aisle understand that corporate power is at odds with their own success and wellbeing. People on the whole support government actions to hold corporations accountable.”
“It was a populist moment, with people wanting scales to be less tilted, wanting a more level playing field, wanting the administration to be more willing to challenge those major corporations so that people can afford rent or groceries. But instead they got a decline in criminal prosecution of corporate crime. It wasn’t so much that the people knew about the decline in criminal prosecutions, but they weren’t seeing signals from the administration that they stood with them against corporate power.”
Do you sense that because of the fear of Trump, the inside the beltway non profits pulled their punches on confronting the Justice Department for failing to criminally prosecute big corporations?
“It’s hard for me to imagine that wasn’t on people’s minds,” Marsano said. “In many spaces there was – we don’t want to be the group or coalition that gets blamed for landing us another Trump administration. I imagine funders also had that on their minds. And maybe that was a top down influence on the ways these non profits were approaching this issue. I wouldn’t want to speculate on the exact decision making process.”
[For the complete q/a Interview with Emma Marsano, see 38 Corporate Crime Reporter 47(12), December 2, 2024, print edition only.]