Paul's Justice Blog

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Required Readings

David O. Friedrichs. 2007. Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society, 3^rd edition. Belmont: Thomson-Wadsworth. 0495006041.

Jeffrey Reiman. 2007. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 8th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. 0205461727.

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, 9^th 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.

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.

Date

Required Reading

Click here for syllabus (adobe.pdf) | Career & Job Info

I would recommend bookmarking this page for further reference. You may need to hit the Reload/Refresh button to get the latest version. 

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.)

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). 

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. 

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. 

TEST 1 - remember to be on time because no one will be admitted to take the final after the first person has left

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. 

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. 

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?

ch 11 Connecticut's suit against Countrywide Financial (pdf of complaint); California's suit against Countrywide financial (pdf of complaint) 

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

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]

11/26, no class (University Open); 11/27-30 Thanksgiving Vacation

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. 

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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