“White Collar Crime: How Whiteness Presides”

“Big Dirty Money”, Author, Professor Jennifer Taub

  January 9, 2021 :: 10 pm EST

Join us LIVE: http://bit.ly/OCGTruthTalk

In a controversial 1975 article, titled “White Racism, Black Crime, and American Justice,” criminologist Robert Staples argued that discrimination pervades the justice system. He said the legal system was made by white men to protect white interests and keep Blacks down. (At the time this was received as “outlandish and untrue”). Staples charged that the system was characterized by second-rate legal help for Black defendants, biased jurors, and judges who discriminate in sentencing. No matter, study after study demonstrates how extreme racial disparities address for Blacks in the judicial system, no matter the income strata or available resources.

Unwarranted disparity is defined as different treatment of individual offenders who are similar in relevant ways, or similar treatment of individual offenders who differ in characteristics that are relevant to the purposes of charging and sentencing. Whiteness is honored, it is protected and it blinds much of the judicial process. We can no longer deny, racial disparities exist because the system protects whiteness for the most part. It is clear that in sentencing especially, “departure” from the guidelines is reserved for mostly whites, and rarely extended to Blacks. Fair sentencing is individualized sentencing and it is mostly decided by people who value whiteness, having a value system of what crimes are punishable with distinct stereotyping of criminals.

Our guest, Professor Jennifer Taub, in her book, “Big Dirty Money” suggests we first attempt to measure white-collar crime as a whole. Then we need to measure the harm to victims in terms that go beyond the economic costs. She points out that “The wealthy have the resources either to exert political influence or become lawmakers themselves”. But Taub explicitly and persuasively places the breakdown of enforcement and accountability in the context of money and class.

What happens when a group of wealthy bankers fraudulently bring foreclosures on an entire class of people, as they did after the crash of 2008? Unlike a loss of, say, $210, the loss of a person’s home affects their life and well-being in ways that cannot be assigned a dollar amount. Thousands of people have spent the years since the recession uprooted from their communities. Taub posits that “the elite class had the power to define what was criminal.”

What happens when the President of the United States pardons criminals who have violated security, foreign interference, sedition, and treason laws? Trump is a stark illustration of why so few wealthy malefactors are held accountable. Like other members of the .01 percent, he can act with seeming impunity, able to buy or influence his way out of trouble. He empathizes with rich people who run afoul of the law. He minimizes their guilt, suggesting white-collar crimes aren’t really crimes, especially when the accused are white men, as the vast majority of all rich white-collar criminals are. Yet Trump is a symptom, not the cause. What happens when white politicians create laws to intentionally suppress and violate voters? How can we measure the social and political costs of mass dispossession because the defendant and violator are protected by a cloud of whiteness?

We will talk with Professor Taub who clearly articulates in her book, the cause and effect of white-collar crime “blinded by the whiteness” that plagues the judicial system. Leaving white-crime bosses to their devices operated by their money and “white card”.

ABOUT Jennifer Taub

Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate, devoted to making complex business law topics engaging inside and outside of the classroom. Her research and writing focuses on corporate governance, banking and financial market regulation, and white collar crime. Similarly, her advocacy centers on “follow the money” matters  –– promoting transparency and opposing corruption.

Her new book, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime (Viking) will be published on September 29, 2020. Taub was a co-founder and organizer of the April 15, 2017 Tax March where more than 120,000 people gathered in cities nationwide to demand President Donald Trump release his tax returns. She is a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law where she teaches Civil Procedure, White Collar Crime, and other business and commercial law courses, and was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School during the fall 2019 semester. She formerly was a professor at Vermont Law School.

An authority on the 2008 mortgage meltdown and related financial crisis, Taub is also an emerging expert in white collar crime. In addition to Big Dirty Money, she is co-author with the late Kathleen Brickey of Corporate and White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials, 6th edition (Wolters Kluwer 2017). Relatedly, she has appeared on cable news programs including MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN Newsroom to discuss the Special Counsel investigation into links between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign.

In the area of banking and financial market regulation, Taub’s book Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business was published in May 2014 by Yale University Press. Recognized as accessible and informative, OPH was honored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as one of the 2015 finalists in the nonfiction category. Other People’s Houses was favorably mentioned by Nobel Laureate, Robert Shiller in his 2015 edition of Irrational Exuberance. Taub testified as an expert before the United States Senate Banking Committee and a United States House Financial Services Subcommittee. She also co-organized a conference and co-lead a panel discussion at the Financial Stability Law Workshop at the U.S. Treasury Department, hosted by the Office of Financial Research.

In addition to Other People’s Houses, Taub has written extensively on the financial crisis. Her publications include “The Sophisticated Investor and the Global Financial Crisis” in the peer-reviewed Corporate Governance Failures (UPenn Press, 2011) and a case study on AIG in Robert A. G. Monks and Nell Minow’s fifth edition of Corporate Governance (Wiley, 2011). In response to Roberta Romano, she presented and wrote “Regulating in the Light: Harnessing Political Entrepreneurs’ Energy for Post-Crisis Sunlight Hearings” (St. Thomas L. Rev. 2015). Additional works include the chapter “Delay, Dilutions, and Delusions: Implementing the Dodd-Frank Act” in Restoring Shared Prosperity (2013) and “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Banking,” in the Handbook on the Political Economy of the Financial Crisis (Oxford, 2012). She wrote entries on “Shadow Banking” and “Financial Deregulation” for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor and Economic History (Oxford, 2013) and the chapter “Great Expectations for the Office of Financial Research,” in Will it Work? How Will We Know? The Future of Financial Reform (2010). In addition, she has published Reforming the Banks for Good in Dissent (2014). Her article, “The Subprime Specter Returns: High Finance and the Growth of High-Risk Consumer Debt,” was published in the New Labor Forum (2015). And, she recently wrote a book chapter on “New Hopes and Hazards for Social Investment Crowdfunding” in Law and Policy for a New Economy (Edward Elgar, 2017).

Taub’s corporate governance work often focuses on the role of institutional investors, including mutual funds. Her article “Able but Not Willing: The Failure of Mutual Fund Advisers to Advocate for Shareholders’ Rights,” published in the Journal of Corporation Law (2009) was presented at a conference jointly sponsored by the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and the Oxford Said Business School. Her article “Managers in the Middle: Seeing and Sanctioning Corporate Political Spending after Citizens United” was presented at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and later published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy (2012). Taub’s article, “Is Hobby Lobby a Tool for Limiting Corporate Constitutional Rights,” was presented at Harvard Law School and later published in a symposium issue of Constitutional Commentary in 2015 on Money, Politics, Corporations, and the Constitution (2015).

Taub has also ventured into the area of legal education and pedagogy. This includes her article “Unpopular Contracts and Why They Matter: Burying Langdell and Enlivening Students,” published in the Washington Law Review (2013). She is a co-author with Martha McCluskey and Frank Pasquale of “Law and Economics: Contemporary Approaches,” published in Yale Law & Policy Review (2016). With McCluskey and Pasquale, Taub is a co-founder of APPEAL (the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law), a research network linking economists, legal scholars, and policy makers concerned with inequality and instability who view markets and the government as mutually constituted. She has also developed a model syllabus for course on Financial Stability.

In 2017, Taub received the Vermont Law School, Women’s Law Association Phenomenal Woman Award in the faculty category. She also served as chair of the Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services for the 2017 AALS annual meeting. Prior to joining academia, Taub was an associate general counsel with Fidelity Investments. She received her BA degree, cum laude, from Yale University, with distinction in the English major, and her JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School where she was the Recent Developments Editor at the Harvard Women’s Law Journal. She was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law for a short course in 2015 and a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Management during the 2016 spring semester. She was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law during the 2019 spring semester.

Taub has written pieces for a variety of platforms including The Washington Post, CNN opinion page, Slate, the New York Times Dealbook, Dame Magazine, The Baseline Scenario, Race to the Bottom, Pareto Commons, The Conglomerate, and Concurring Opinions.

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