I never liked Mr. Ashcroft. I never despised him either. While I greatly disagreed with his stance on issues from Dancing to Presidents, I admired his willingness to make that stand, even when the outcome was bad for him. I was again impressed with his character when I heard that he stood up to his boss over an issue of our privacy. While he was Attorney General, President Bush wanted to push a version of the Warrantless Wiretapping that Mr. Ashcroft thought was unConstitutional. Even from his sick bed, he told the President, No.
Recently a policy has become more prevalent in the Justice Department. When a company does wrong, sometimes (and more often now) instead of prosecuting that company, the Justice Department offers them what I see as a version of Parole.
The offending company promises not to do the bad stuff any more.
An organization is set up to monitor that company to make sure that it does not do the bad stuff any more.
Now comes the disturbing parts:
1) Such monitors are paid for by the company, not the Justice Dept. This saves the govt big bucks, but it makes the monitors employees of the companies they are monitoring. This could lead to conflicts of interest.
2) The contracts for such monitoring relationships are not bid out. There is no competition. Again, this is not a big deal since no government money is being spent (though lots of fines are not being received, I'm sure that the court costs not being spent make up for the income not generated.).
3) The Company gets a say on who the monitor is. While the Justice Dept also gets a say, no impartial judge does, and no explanation or reasoning needs to be given why one monitor is picked over another.
Last year one of Mr. Ashcrofts old employees invites him to be a monitor for Zimmer Inc. Zimmer was caught paying kickbacks to doctors who sent them clients.
Mr. Ashcroft's legal team accepted, and was accepted by Zimmer.
Where most Monitors give a detailed bill to the companies they are monitoring, Ashcroft gave them a very generic invoice for about 25 million or so.
So here is where I am not sure how upset I am with Mr. Ashcroft.
1) This is a flawed parole system. No prosecutor like Mr. Ashcroft would offer a drug dealer a deal where they don't even go to court, in exchange for a parole where they get to pick their parole officer. The only cost to the drug dealer, the money he would have spent on lawyers gets to be spent on paying the parole officer.
2) There is very little tracking done on these deals. With no over site, how do we know what the recidivism rate really is?
3) The choice of Mr. Ashcroft's firm seems to be simple Cronyism. The Good Ol Boy network that got Brown placed as head of FEMA is neither honest nor efficient.
4) Several times in the Congressional meeting, Mr. Ashcroft said "There was no conflict of interest because Tax dollars were not used." Why must tax dollars be at issue for there to be a conflict of interest?
Yet is Mr. Ashcroft such a villian?
1) This position was offered to him. He did not seek it.
2) He hit the offending company with a major non-appeal-able bill that is larger than any fine would have been. Was he making sure that the criminal company paid for their crime, one way or the other, as a way to deter others from committing more crimes?
I'd love to hear from Dag and others on what they think of this situation. So far, I am saying that the monitoring program may work, only if it gets opened up to the public so that any abuses of it can be found, not buried. Mr. Ashcroft, I still don't know if you are a boon, a legal vigilante, or a money grabbing fake.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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What kind of offenses? If this is supposed to solve stuff like Enron and MCI, then I'm aghast.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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In this case it was Kickbacks. There is no published list of what offenses could and could not be covered by these Monitoring agreements.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Maybe it's more like giving a felon house arrest with a radio armband. But the whole part where the monitors are paid by the company being monitored seems like a major mistake.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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The Justice Department won the anti-monopoly case against Microsoft. Instead of going for multi-billions in real cash, Ashcroft settled for Microsoft handing out a quarter-billion or so dollars in programs to schools. ie He "punished" Microsoft by making it fund an inexpensive advertising campaign against other software dealers, the Apple system most particularly. And considering that the only extra cost that Microsoft incurred was burning some CDs and printing some cheap instructional pamphlets, that "~250million dollars" had a real cost to Microsoft of only ~10million; I wouldn't be surprised if it were far less.
In every instance during his entire public life of which I am aware, he chose to do evil when given the opportunity. That he may (or may*not) have mistakenly "done good" oncebecause he was sufficiently doped up to not understand what he was doing or was sufficiently fearful of death doesn't change my opinion of him.
* More likely, his action was purely self-serving. ie Ashcroft just didn't like the idea that he himself could become subject to a warrantless wiretap that would result in his own criminal convicton.
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Chiquita banana paid $14,000 in fines in the US when it was caught bribing a South American government (with $1.25 million). This was back in the 1970's.
If a quasi-independent monitor had hit them with a bill of, say, 2x the cost of the original bribe...and stuck around to look over their books for a couple of years, I'd call that "better" than the old way of doing things.
But I do not like that the company gets to say who the monitor is. I'd go along with that in cases where the Justice Department found some company in a "technical violation" where the investigators feel strongly that the company wasn't purposefully seeking to defraud or break the law. But where there is evidence of malfeasance, I'd say the company should get a choice of a huge fine or a court-appointed monitor at a fixed rate that comes out a bit less than the fine.
Oh, and the fine and/or monitoring should be independent of the decision of whether or not to pursue criminal cases against the corporate management who knowingly broke the law.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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