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CRM 370 White Collar Crime
FALL 2008: W
5:30 - 8:10 200 Strong
Required
Readings
David O. Friedrichs. 2007. Trusted
Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society, 3rd
edition. Belmont: Thomson-Wadsworth. 0495006041.
Jeffrey Reiman. 2007. The
Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 8th ed. Boston: Allyn &
Bacon. 0205461727.
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Recommended Reading
Ronald Burns, Michael Lynch and Paul
Stretesky. 2008. Environmental
Law, Crime and Justice. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.
9781593322762
Moses Naim. 2006. Illicit:
How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.
New York: Anchor/Doubleday. 1400078849.
Penny Green and Tony Ward. 2004. State
Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption. London: Pluto
Press. 0745317847.
Neal Shover and John Wright. 2001. Crimes
of Privilege. New York: Oxford U Press. 0195136217.
David Simon.. Elite
Deviance, 9th ed. Boston: Pearson. 0205571956
James Coleman. 2005. The
Criminal Elite. Worth Publishers. 0716787342
Stephen Rusoff, Henry Pontell and Robert Tillman. Profit
Without Honor: White Collar Crime and the Looting of America,
4th ed. Prentice Hall. 0131722328.
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Recommended Websites
White
Collar Crime Blog (by law professor)
10b-5
blog (refers to SEC rules on "Employment of Manipulative or
Deceptive Devices")
Recording
Industry v the People (About the RIAA's attempt to monopolize digital
music by redefining copyright law, through the commencement of tens of
thousands of extortionate lawsuits against ordinary working people)
Financial blogs that sometimes post on
business wrongdoing include Calculated
Risk (housing and mortgage issues by people in the mortgage business);
Naked Capitalism (investment
banker); the Big Picture
(market researcher); and Footnoted
(problematic issues from companies' SEC filings)
Fortune
magazine, which broke the Enron story and whose reporters wrote The
Smartest Guys in the Room. The archive
of back issues.
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Date |
Required
Reading |
Click here for syllabus
(adobe.pdf) | Career
& Job Info
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9/3
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Introduction &
Greeting |
I would recommend bookmarking this page for
further reference. You may need to hit the Reload/Refresh button to get
the latest version.
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| 9/10 |
Friedrichs, Ch
1 + Reiman Appendix II (PP 236 - 249) |
White
Collar Crime review (PaulsJusticeBlog)
clip from The Corporation: Investigative
journalism and corporate power [Monsanto and milk] (10 min YouTube.com).
For more, see the milk
info from preventcancer.org and organic
valley (they produce organic milk, so do have an interest, but they cite
many of the original medical studies)
The Government Accountability Project - whistlebower.org. Daily
Show on the identity of Watergate whistleblower 'Deep Throat.'
Public Citizen -
even if you're skeptical about Nader for President, the organization does
some great work.
QUIZ 1: On his blog, The Talking Heads' David
Byrne talks about the harm of payola. The quiz will ask: (1) What types
of thoughts ran through his head as he heard rumors about payola (why does
he mention Pavlovian dog and free will)? (2) How does he respond to the
comment that "you can’t make people like a BAD song"?
You don't need to know it for the quiz, but there's a brief
history of payola and a Salon.com
report on "pay for play" ("Why does radio suck? Because
most stations play only the songs the record companies pay them to.)
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| 9/17 |
Friedrichs, Ch
2 & 3 |
White
Collar Crime review (PaulsJusticeBlog)
PBS Frontline Video: "A
Dangerous Business" Revisited. The New York Times also has a
collection of stories on McWane (part of their Workplace
Safety investigations)
PBS Frontline Video: Tax
Me If You Can ("because the government is not collecting all that
is owed -- the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters --
everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should" - from the
summary
The
Birth of the Corp from The Corporation DVD (via You Tube - [see
complete playlist]
Multinational
Monitor site ~ Recalls.gov ~ Center
for Food Safety ~ Bureau of Labor Stats - workplace
injuries (why
the real numbers are higher than reported) ~ prescription
project ~Many
firms didn't pay taxes (Washington Post) ~
If you eat salmon, check out the Findlaw.com column
on the disclosures about additives to color the fish (the SalmonFan
is used to help pick the desired color). There's much worse on BarfBlog
(food safety blog).
QUIZ 2: Go to the Multinational
Monitor's 10
Worst Corporations of 2006. Choose two (2) examples from Boeing,
FirstEnergy, King Coal, and Smithfield. For each one, be prepared to write a
paragraph describing the company's conduct and the reasons the Multinational
Monitor's concern (which sometimes includes the outcome of negotiations with
government agencies).
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| 9/24 |
Friedrichs, Ch
4 & start Ch 5 |
White
Collar Crime Review
PBS Frontline Video: Spying
On America
COINTELPRO - FBI program against black activists - 9
minute provocative YouTube video or 54
minute Google video. There are also some explanations
of the program at The Public Eye
FBI Files on well known people (Beatles, Einstein, MLK, etc)
The Indian Trust
case is one of the largest financial scandals by government. I
wrote a short piece on the removal of a republican judge who had been
handling the case for many years because he called the Dept of Interior
racist. There's a six
minute YouTube video that interviews the woman who is behind the suit.
See Crash Course:
Fuzzy Numbers for govt manipulation of inflation data.
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| 10/1 |
Friedrichs, finish Ch 5 and Ch 6; Leighton
& Reiman, Getting
Tough on Corporate Crime?; review
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White
Collar Crime Review
PBS Frontline Video: Bigger
Than Enron
The 'Getting
Tough on Corporate Crime' piece I did with Reiman was part of an invited
lecture I gave that is available on YouTube, via my blog.
Fortune magazine: What's
Wrong with Wall St and How to Fix It.
EPA
says life is worth less (agency calculates value of life for
cost-benefit analysis and recently lowered the value of life - thus creating
fewer benefits for life saving regulation) [Washington Post, 18 July 2008,
A1]
Defending
Science.org (Project of Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy) works to
correct the distortions in knowledge introduced by industry in law making.
See also the Center for Science in the
Public Interest and The
Pump Handle public health blog.
Chocolate's
Bittersweet Economy: Seven years after the industry agreed to abolish child
labor, little progress has been made (Fortune.com, Feb 08)
QUIZ 3: Read these
two postings on popcorn
lung from The Pump Handle public health blog - Popcorn
lung coming to your kitchen? and EPA
microwave popcorn emissions study finally published. Your quiz will ask:
(1) what causes popcorn lung and what are the effects of the chemical on the
body, (2) what is the significance of Dr Rose's letter, (3) what are the
four agencies charged with protecting health that have done nothing, and (4)
how would you briefly summarize the results of the EPA study for a friend or
family member who liked to breathe in deeply when they open a bag of
microwave popcorn? [7 point quiz]
You do not need to read these links for the quiz, but
if you are interested in more information about this issue, the pump Handle
blog has a popcorn
lung category for all their posts on that topic, and Defending
Science has a case study on the topic. The author of The Pump Handle
articles is David Michaels, who has written a book called Doubt
Is Their Product
which is excerpted at Hazards magazine.
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| 10/8 |
TEST 1 - remember
to be on time because no one will be admitted to take the final after the
first person has left
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| 10/15 |
Friedrichs, Ch 7& 8 |
Princeton University video
on to tamper introduce a virus on a voting machine that will change votes
and delete itself so it can't be found. Salon.com
has some background in a story called Hack the Vote, which notes the
company's response to such demonstrations: "For there to be a problem
here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and
nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of
software. I don't believe these evil elections people exist." (People
created keys to open the locked slot for memory cards from a picture of the
key at the manufacturer's website - yes, one key opened all machines,
and they had a photo of it on their website!) Cyber security expert Stephen
Spoonamore is interviewed about voting machine fraud and accuses the
Republicans (his own party) of stealing votes: part 1
~ 2
~ 3
~ 4
~ 5
~ 6
~ 7
~ 8.
See also votersunite.org. The Onion
has a funny and cynical 'news' clip: Diebold
accidently leaks results of 08 election (YouTube, 3 min)
Quick overview of botnets
and eFraud.
QUIZ 4: Follow the
links in each question for the answers. Your quiz will be: (1) in 1 -2
sentences each, explain what a botnet
and DDos are; (2) how do
they relate to the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia (be more
specific that 'they were used'); and (3) from this post on Cyberwar,
state the three ways the author says China and Russia have approached
cyberwarfare.
You do not need to read these for the quiz, but if you
are interested the Information
Warfare Monitor has more and the American
Federation of Scientists has a good resource page. There's also a
blog about the Russian Business
Network, which were heavily involved in cybercrime and may or may not
have been disbanded.
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| 10/22 |
Friedrichs, Ch 9; Leighton & Reiman, A
Tale of 2 Criminals.
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Communities
and Environmental Laws focuses on how citizens can learn about the
environmental laws and how these laws can be utilized to help the people
make their communities healthier places in which to live. (20 min video)
Selling “fair trade coffee,” as Starbucks does
to those customers willing to pay a premium for it, is not corporate
philanthropy. It’s just supplying a product at the profit-maximizing
price to a person who is an altruist. Business is happy to sell to
altruists, just as it is happy to sell to selfish people. Selling “fair
trade coffee” is no different, from the corporation’s standpoint, from
selling leather clothes to sadomasochists. Likewise with Nike’s efforts
to improve working conditions in its foreign plants: it is an example not
of corporate philanthrophy but of a corporate response to consumers’
demand for a different production method. From "Against
Creative Capitalism" on the Creative
Capitalism blog overseen by Bill Gates.
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| 10/29 |
Friedrichs, Ch 10 & 11
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QUIZ 5: Read the
posting entitled Ebbers'
25 Year Sentence for Worldcom Fraud Upheld. Good.
Your quiz will ask: (1) what did Ebbers do and what was his sentence? (2)
& (3) – what are two bulleted objections and what is the response to
them?
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| 11/5 |
Friedrichs, Ch 12; review
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Britain's Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act - Center for
Corporate Accountability's assessment
and other
materials related to the law.
ch 11 Connecticut's
suit against Countrywide Financial (pdf of complaint); California's
suit against Countrywide financial (pdf of complaint)
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| 11/12 |
TEST 2 - remember
to be on time because no one will be admitted to take the final after the
first person has left
Review
sheet ~ link
for the bonus question
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| 11/19 |
Reiman Ch 1 and 2 |
Companion website for the Rich Get Richer has chapter
summaries and links for Ch 1 and
Ch 2
In 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter's
administration, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)
commissioned a series of three 30-minute films about worker safety. In
1981, Reagan appointed a construction executive, Thorne G. Auchter, who
proceeded to systematically dismantle the agency. Evidently, the 3
films disturbed Thorne greatly, because OSHA issued a recall, threatening to
withhold OSHA funds from any organization that did not return their copies
of the films, which were promptly destroyed. But, a
few union officials defied the ban and "stole" copies, which are
now available on the internet (longer description and embedded YouTube
video). Or see archive.org: The
Story of OSHA; Worker
to Worker; and Can't
Take No More.
Paper 1: Read the NY Times article, When
Workers Die: U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace. Paper
Topic: In Ch 2, Reiman discusses the carnival mirror. What does he mean by
this analogy, and what are his five hypotheses about the way in which the
public's image of crime is created? How does the information in the NY Times
article When Workers Die relate to Reiman's carnival mirror and
hypotheses? [2-3 double spaced pages]
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11/26, no class
(University Open); 11/27-30 Thanksgiving Vacation |
| 12/3 |
Reiman Ch 3 and 4 |
Companion website for the Rich Get Richer has chapter
summaries and links for Ch 3 and
Ch 4
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| 12/10 |
Reiman, conclusion; Review &
Catch-up
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Companion website for the Rich Get Richer has chapter
summaries and links for the Conclusion.
PLEASE
NOTE: Professors
do not have regular office hours after the last class. Make sure to get in
touch before classes end if you have an important issues to resolve.
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Final Exam
- Dec 17, regular class time (the syllabus has the 15th, but that is
a mistake)
remember
to be on time because no one will be admitted to take the final after the
first person has left
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If you're graduating, congratulations.
Whether or not you are graduating, check
out the commencement address given by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. He
discusses dropping out of college (he never graduated), getting fired from
Apple (a company he helped start) and dealing with cancer.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
[ Up ] [ Crim Grad Program ] [ CRM 331: Corrections ] [ CRM 370 White Collar Crime ] [ CRM 412 Law & Society ] [ CRM 550Domestic Violence ] [ CRM 611: Soc of Crime ] [ CRM 681 Race, Gender & Crime ]
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