But words like "fraud" and "bribery" also have a plain English meaning, however much they may have been distorted by judges intent of keeping
people like themselves out of jail.
Kenny Lay died in his mansion, while a thousand kangaroos in long black robes made it almost impossible to convict a white-collar criminal of anything, because...
People like us must not go to jail!
Kenny Lay dumped his stock in a bankrupt corporation while thousands of his employees were locked into worthless Individual Retirement Accounts composed entirely of stock in Enron, but Kenny Lay never went to jail, because...
People like us must not go to jail!
And if you pulled off their long black robes, and put fifty federal judges on one bus, and fifty bankers on another, you would never know which bus was which without a score-card.
People like us must not go to jail!
So before you can convict Kenny Lay or Richard Fuld of fraud, you have to jump through so many hoops that Dick and Kenny will probably die at home, surrounded by all the good things of this world... except justice.
Phil Gramm devised the law that exposed bank deposits to incomprehensible manipulation and eventual disappearance into the void, and Gramm-Leach-Bliely made a lot of bankers very, very happy!
So when Phil Gramm left the Senate he got a multi-million-dollar job at UBS, and that very good job was a bribe.
There wasn't any mystery about how Phil Gramm got that beautiful job and all those millions of dollars. It was just a delayed payoff. It was nothing but a bribe, and a bribe so screamingly obvious that anyone who doubts it was a bribe is ape-sh@t crazy!
But public corruption has been defined so narrowly by courts and legislatures that you would have to have a video-recording of somebody delivering a suitcase full of money to Phil Gramm before you could convict him of accepting a bribe, and when the bag-man handed the bag of money to Phil Gramm, the bag-man would have to say "I am giving you this money specifically as a payoff for breaking down the barriers between banking and speculation," and then Phil Gramm would have to say "I am accepting this money specifically as a payoff for Gramm-Leach-Bliley," and still, unless every "i" in every warrant was dotted and every "t" was crossed, Phil Gramm would walk out of court rich and free, and no judge would convict him, because...
People like us must not go to jail!
