How to get government permission to be a criminal

[ThomCat]

With Obama trying to organize the Attorney's General to sell the wall street firms permanent blanket immunity for all the robo-signing and everything/anything else that led up to the economic collapse in exchange for a small one-time fee that amounts to a small amount of what they took in from even a single deal, it really seems to me that this is demonstrating very clearly that there is a obvious and preferred way that the Department of Justice, and the current administration prefer that people go about breaking the law.

• Form a company
  
• Incorporate it
  
• Give yourself a contract and pay yourself to commit the crimes
  
  
  
  If you get caught, the government is on your side!
  
  Your contract is sacred. Only union contracts can be broken and cast aside oh so easily, so you will get to keep everything you paid yourself.
  
  If history so far is any indication, your company will have to pay a fine that amounts to something less than a fraction of a percent of the profits from the crimes. Pocket change should cover those fees without much difficulty.
  
  You won't have to admit any guilt, because you're just an anonymous employee. That's the benefit of incorporating. The corporation takes risks and liability away from you individually. It is "the company" that was involved, not you personally. Even "the company" won't have to admit guilt either though, because of course posted company policies somewhere instructs all employees to obey all laws, even if your specific job is to break the law.
  
  In exchange for paying that small fine, and without ever admitting any wrong-doing, your company will get to purchase blanket immunity against ever getting sued for the crimes you committed. For the price, it will be the cheapest insurance your company ever purchased with the absolute best return on investment, guaranteed.
  
  All of this because you had the wealth, connections and foresight to incorporate your criminal activities.
  
  Only little criminals go to jail. They aren't smart enough to incorporate and only keep for themselves the portion of the take that they can filter through a contract as salary, bonuses, and perks.
  
  
  *note for the humor impaired, don't try this.

[Skittles]

1. does that idiot fanbase operate 24X7?

K&R back to zero

[ThomCat]

2. You know they never sleep. :)

:hi:

Thank you. :)

[Skittles]

3. I swear they operate in shifts

:hi:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. A big K&R for you, my dear ThomCat...

SO good to see your intelligent post!

:hi:

[ThomCat]

6. Hi CaliforniaPeggy!

:hi:

Thank you. I'm glad you like it. :)

[saras]

5. "*note for the humor impaired, don't try this." - why not? It works just fine for the humorless...

...in fact, all of the admittedly small number of right-wingers I know who started businesses in the Bush era were humorless if pain wasn't involved, and they had exactly this goal in mind. These days it appears that you have to be a fairly large corporation, though.

[ThomCat]

7. Outside of DC, you do seem to need to have a very large corporation.

Inside DC all you seem to need is to call yourself a Consulting Firm, or even better, a Defense Consulting Corporation, and even if all you have is a post office box you can get away with anything.

x(

Of course, you are right that this only works for right wingers. A Completely Different, much thicker rule book applies to anyone who wants to work on the left side of the spectrum.

[DCKit]

8. You'd think the for-profit diploma mills would have a more savvy strategy to teach....

but I guess not.

Attila the Hun was more subtle in his raping and pillaging.

[ThomCat]

11. Attila the Hun was definitely more preferable to what we have

under the leadership of the banks. He was building an empire, with centralized communication, and he wanted peace within that empire. Once he took over a location, he installed people to rule it, but he expected it to be ruled well with a minimum of fuss and corruption.

By and large, he succeeded. That's how he was able to create one of largest empires the world has ever seen. It could not have spread so far if he tolerated random violence, wanton greed and corruption from the troops and administrators.

His fearsome reputation was because of how far and wide his hoards succeeded in capturing and converting people into his empire, and for how quickly they accomplished this, but not because he was mindlessly violent and greedy the way republicans seem to be.

[quaker bill]

9. A corporation is not good enough

You and a few friends need to make a sea of related corporate entities, each managed in a web with a fair ration of LLCs up front. Then they contract with each other to bounce assets about with inflating values, bizzare financial ratings, and increasing financial leverage. At some point the music stops and one of the LLCs goes badly broke, you hand the nearly worthless assets back to the bank and keep as much of the churned profits as possible.

It helps a bunch if along the way you kicked some $10,000 checks at winning politicians, even if you have to fund both sides in close races....

Of course at some level this becomes criminal, but below that level you might even get a bailout.

[ThomCat]

10. Oh, you're right. How could I have forgoten about the

accounting do-si-do.

It's a Beautiful Dance. The choreography is amazing. And you are right, it's an essential way to get government permission to break the law.

You can't do the dance properly if you don't have enough sets of books though, and that requires a bunch of different incorporated names that were incorporated in different countries.

Any money you can claim you earned, and assets that have monetary value, get moved to the books in countries that don't have taxes. Everything that can be depreciated, taken as a debt or a loss gets moved to the books in the countries with the highest tax rates so you can claim huge honkin' tax refunds! Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

[quaker bill]

13. No real need to go off shore

Delaware works just fine. Then you register them as "foriegn entities" in the states where you want to do "business".

[Supersedeas]

12. and an AG who knows the law and has the courage not to enforce it.

And Eric Holder called our entire country a Nation of Cowards.

[quaker bill]

14. The whole point of creating a web of corporate entities

is that it makes prosecuting these matters very tough and expensive, and asset recapture particularly tough. You more or less have to prove willful intent to hide assets through collaboration between the entities. This sort of thing is done over the phone and no written records are kept for the conversations. The structures are set up by lawyers to make tracking it back as legally challenging as possible.

Often you will have to pierce the corporate veil of 7, 8, or 9 entities in seperate proceedings to actually get back to the guy with the money. This alone could take a decade. This is why these structures are created. The further problem is that until you have nailed the last one down with an injunction, the money can just keep moving. One could literally chase it forever and never get there, unless some big mistake is made.

If there is a big mistake, the case usually resolves quickly with perp walks, but without one, it is a pretty difficult case to run.