Although serotonin is well known as a brain neurotransmitter, it is estimated that 90 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract. In fact, altered levels of this peripheral serotonin have been linked to diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis. New research at Caltech, published in the April 9 issue of the journal Cell, shows that certain bacteria in the gut are important for the production of peripheral serotonin.
“More and more studies are showing that mice or other model organisms with changes in their gut microbes exhibit altered behaviors,” explains Elaine Hsiao, research assistant professor of biology and biological engineering and senior author of the study. “We are interested in how microbes communicate with the nervous system. To start, we explored the idea that normal gut microbes could influence levels of neurotransmitters in their hosts.”
Peripheral serotonin is produced in the digestive tract by enterochromaffin (EC) cells and also by particular types of immune cells and neurons. Hsiao and her colleagues first wanted to know if gut microbes have any effect on serotonin production in the gut and, if so, in which types of cells. They began by measuring peripheral serotonin levels in mice with normal populations of gut bacteria and also in germ-free mice that lack these resident microbes.
The researchers found that the EC cells from germ-free mice produced approximately 60 percent less serotonin than did their peers with conventional bacterial colonies. When these germ-free mice were recolonized with normal gut microbes, the serotonin levels went back up—showing that the deficit in serotonin can be reversed.
“EC cells are rich sources of serotonin in the gut. What we saw in this experiment is that they appear to depend on microbes to make serotonin—or at least a large portion of it,” says Jessica Yano, first author on the paper and a research technician working with Hsiao.
The researchers next wanted to find out whether specific species of bacteria, out of the diverse pool of microbes that inhabit the gut, are interacting with EC cells to make serotonin.
After testing several different single species and groups of known gut microbes, Yano, Hsiao, and colleagues observed that one condition—the presence of a group of approximately 20 species of spore-forming bacteria—elevated serotonin levels in germ-free mice. The mice treated with this group also showed an increase in gastrointestinal motility compared to their germ-free counterparts, and changes in the activation of blood platelets, which are known to use serotonin to promote clotting.
Wanting to home in on mechanisms that could be involved in this interesting collaboration between microbe and host, the researchers began looking for molecules that might be key. They identified several particular metabolites—products of the microbes’ metabolism—that were regulated by spore-forming bacteria and that elevated serotonin from EC cells in culture. Furthermore, increasing these metabolites in germ-free mice increased their serotonin levels.
Previous work in the field indicated that some bacteria can make serotonin all by themselves. However, this new study suggests that much of the body’s serotonin relies on particular bacteria that interact with the host to produce serotonin, says Yano. “Our work demonstrates that microbes normally present in the gut stimulate host intestinal cells to produce serotonin,” she explains.
“While the connections between the microbiome and the immune and metabolic systems are well appreciated, research into the role gut microbes play in shaping the nervous system is an exciting frontier in the biological sciences,” says Sarkis K. Mazmanian, Luis B. and Nelly Soux Professor of Microbiology and a coauthor on the study. “This work elegantly extends previous seminal research from Caltech in this emerging field”.
Additional coauthor Rustem Ismagilov, the Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, adds, “This work illustrates both the richness of chemical interactions between the hosts and their microbial communities, and Dr. Hsiao’s scientific breadth and acumen in leading this work.”
Serotonin is important for many aspects of human health, but Hsiao cautions that much more research is needed before any of these findings can be translated to the clinic.
“We identified a group of bacteria that, aside from increasing serotonin, likely has other effects yet to be explored,” she says. “Also, there are conditions where an excess of peripheral serotonin appears to be detrimental.”
Although this study was limited to serotonin in the gut, Hsiao and her team are now investigating how this mechanism might also be important for the developing brain. “Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter and hormone that is involved in a variety of biological processes. The finding that gut microbes modulate serotonin levels raises the interesting prospect of using them to drive changes in biology,” says Hsiao.
The work was published in an article titled “Indigenous Bacteria from the Gut Microbiota Regulate Host Serotonin Biosynthesis.” In addition to Hsiao, Yano, Mazmanian, and Ismagilov, other Caltech coauthors include undergraduates Kristie Yu, Gauri Shastri, and Phoebe Ann; graduate student Gregory Donaldson; postdoctoral scholar Liang Ma. Additional coauthor Cathryn Nagler is from the University of Chicago.
This work was funded by an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and a Caltech Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions Award, both to Hsiao. The study was also supported by NSF, NIDDK, and NIMH grants to Mazmanian, NSF EFRI and NHGRI grants to Ismagilov, and grants from the NIAID and Food Allergy Research and Education and University of Chicago Digestive Diseases Center Core to Nagler.
The place that travel writer Pico Iyer would most like to go? Nowhere. In a counterintuitive and lyrical meditation, Iyer takes a look at the incredible insight that comes with taking time for stillness. In our world of constant movement and distraction, he teases out strategies we all can use to take back a few minutes out of every day, or a few days out of every season. It’s the talk for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the demands for our world.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
About the speaker
Pico Iyer · Global author
Pico Iyer has spent more than 30 years tracking movement and stillness — and the way criss-crossing cultures have changed the world, our imagination and all our relationships.
In a conversation with the “happiest man in the world,” Pico Iyer explores the concept of stillness and meditates on how we should spend time in an over-scheduled world.
Indigenous groups don’t want permanent nuclear waste site near river
Indigenous groups say a plan to store nuclear waste near the Ottawa River in eastern Ontario is “insanity” and want the federal government to intervene. 0:41
Indigenous groups say a plan to store nuclear waste near the Ottawa River in eastern Ontario is “insanity” and want the federal government to intervene.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, a private company, wants a 10-year licence to keep running the Chalk River nuclear labs in eastern Ontario.
In 2014, the federal government gave Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) control over nuclear operations at Chalk River. The government continues to own the nuclear assets.
CNL has plans for a permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Chalk River, plans that have been criticized by a concerned citizen’s group as being “cheap, dirty, unsafe and out of alignment with International Atomic Energy Agency guidance.”
Nuclear waste in Chalk River will cost billions to deal with and leave a legacy that will last centuries, opponents say.
“Trying to build this giant mound of radioactive waste … is insanity,” said Patrick Madahbee, grand council chief of the Anishinabek Nation, which advocates for around 40 communities representing around 65,000 people across Ontario.
He said CNL has an obligation under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to consult Indigenous people about storing hazardous materials in their territory, but CNL hasn’t talked to them about it.
The waste facility could be operational by 2020.
“We understand this is a complex file, but clearly the risks here are to people’s drinking waters and traditional territories,” said Patrick Nadeau, executive director of the Ottawa Riverkeeper.
CNL’s licence to run the Chalk River labs expires on March 31 and the consortium has asked the regulator, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, for a 10-year licence agreement, rather than the usual five-year term.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will hold public hearings in Pembroke, Ont., from Jan. 23 to 25 to consider CNL’s licence.
Dozens of delegations have registered to comment at the hearings.
But Mark Lesinski, president of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories said among those posed to present submissions at the hearings, there are a number of “misunderstandings.”
I plan to participate beyond what I submitted, which largely focuses on “No, we do not have the Rule of Law in Canada”. The people in Corporations and other people of power are not prosecuted for their crimes under The Law. They are exempted. Or, they pay fines, financed and expensed by the Corporation, and walk away.
Please communicate with as many Canadians as you can. I hope my submission (Input to Govt) makes it clear that we will ALL be the worse off, if the status quo continues.
The issues I addressed may not be addressed by very many people. But they are fundamental. YOU will see things that I do not. And you will say things better than I did. Things have to be said by many people before there will be actual action. This is an opportunity. Let the waves be so large that the crumbling structure be washed out to sea. Tinkering with the existing system will get us nowhere. In my humble opinion!
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REPLY FROM THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
From: CJSR_RSJP [mailto:CJSR_RSJP AT justice.gc.ca] Sent: January 16, 2018 7:09 AM To: ‘Sandra Finley’ Subject: RE: How can the Criminal Justice system be changed to better suit Canadians?
Good morning Sandra,
Thank you for joining the conversation! We received your submission and appreciate that you have taken the time to share it with us. We value your input on transforming Canada’s criminal justice system. Please note the Department of Justice Canada’s online consultation will be open until January 31, 2018: justicetransformation.ca After this time, a report on what Canadians had to say will be made public on the Department’s website.
I must be from a different planet! I think it’s a huge problem for the Criminal Justice System that corporate offenders get off scot-free in too many cases.
The lengthy Government Report on “What They Heard” from Canadians came out in May 2019 (Date modified: no mention of the immunity from prosecution for white collar (“influential”) criminals.
UPDATE: What We Heard: Govt re transforming Canada’s criminal Justice System
How can the Criminal Justice system be changed to better suit Canadians?
TO: CJSR_RSJP@justice.gc.ca
I answer your question with this input:
DROP THE PRETENSES. A pretense tries to make something that is not the case appear true. If you do not drop the pretenses, there will not be useful outcomes of this exercise, only a tinkering with the system.
Pretense: In Canada we have the Rule of Law. That is not true.
The Rule of Law:
“All persons, regardless of wealth, social status, or the political power wielded by them, are to be treated the same before the law.
“The rule of law means that the law is above everyone and it applies to everyone. Whether governors or governed, rulers or ruled, no one is above the law, no one is exempted from the law, and no one can grant exemption to the application of the law.
“The rules must apply to those who lay them down and those who apply them – that is, to the government as well as the governed. Nobody has the power to grant exceptions.”
A few Examples of Reality – – persons, corporations, and institutions who are treated as “above the Rule of Law”:
We don’t stop to think about WHAT UNDERMINES the rule of law? . . . If people see that the law applies to them, but not to rich or privileged people, and not to Corporations and Institutions, they grow to hold the law in disdain.
Unequal application of the law breaks down the rule of law. The response then, of those who govern, is to invoke martial law, because people become unruly.
People comply with the law if they see that it is fair and equally applied. You can have a measure of PEACE in the community if the Rule of Law is upheld.
We don’t bother to understand that World War Two happened because the influential, the educated, the authorities – – the police, the lawyers, judges and university professors in Germany notoriously DID NOT stand up and speak up when they saw things that were wrong in the application of the laws.
In pre-war Germany, people did not stand up and insist that law-breakers be arrested and tried in courts of true justice.
As bad actors amassed power, they were allowed to break the laws with no fear of prosecution. A tipping point was reached, beyond which the system of governance could not be retrieved from the mad men.
The laws as they apply to George Bush for crimes against humanity are spelt out in a letter to the Chief of Police. Evidence is supplied. Notice is given well in advance of the visit. The Attorney General of Canada receives the same information. It’s easy to swagger and deal out “justice” to petty criminals. Neither the Police or the Attorney General have the courage to perform their duties, to uphold the Rule of Law, when it comes to serious crimes committed by monied people.
Canadians would stand up and raise hell if the Government gave our money to a person associated with the mafia, to someone who has been convicted of bribery, of fraud in Government contracts, and so on.
CONSIDER: A group of people get together under a corporate name. They commit highly unlawful acts, have a long list of court convictions, and have not been tried for all their crimes. They come to Canada and are not only immune from the laws of our land, but they also receive billions of our tax dollars.
There are many examples; we do not have the Rule of Law. The sooner you stop pretending that we do, the faster we might make progress.
Pretense: In Canada, citizens have ACCESS TO JUSTICE. No they don’t. Who can afford the cost of a lawyer? or the cost of self-representation in a complex system?
As I understand things, the role of the state is to protect citizens against violence. Citizens agree to abandon violence and vigilantism; we pay taxes for policing and the justice system, in exchange for the ability to live in relative security, without fear.
The Justice System is funded – – I would say owned – – by citizens. It is the responsibility of citizens. If we are fortunate, in the face of ineffective systems, communities will find their own ways to meet local needs. Neighbourhood Watch, for instance. Or programs that focus on the healthy development of the community, all its children and the environment.
If we are ineffective, violence will increase for the simple reason that it’s affordable to hire someone to break the knee-caps of an aggressor. It is not affordable to use the justice system.
The Police typically will not handle, for example, cyber violence. Amanda Todd, the UN admonitions for countries to do something about cyber violence, and local examples come to mind.
If the Justice and Policing Systems, the Governments in Canada, will not dedicate resources to create access to a Justice System designed to serve every day citizens, violence will increase because people tolerate only so much before they take matters into their own hands.
Violence begets violence in that system – – it is the available means of defence.
The Rule of Law is fundamental to Democracy. It is undermined through our failures to reform and evolve. There are too many financial beneficiaries of the status quo, roadblocks to what needs to be done.
2. The laws that apply to Citizens must also apply to Corporations and institutions, that is, to the individuals in those entities.
3. People from within the Justice System cannot be the ones to provide oversight.
4. There are systemic biases within the system that serve to protect the status quo. They need to be identified and abandoned if you have any hope of change.
5. The Justice system is a closed shop, a relatively small community of people across the country who have all graduated from the same small number of institutions. They are alumni brothers and sisters. They have “connections”. They have been trained the same.
Law Reform Commissions have been castrated. The Uniform Law Conference of Canada is under-resourced. And it is closed to input from citizens. You don’t get effective change in a closed system. It has to be opened up.
6. You have to stop the practice of using the Justice System as a tool of intimidation. Corporations perfected the practice, giving rise to Anti-SLAPP legislation in California and in Ontario, for example. Others learned. They extort money by threatening to file a lawsuit, which is known to be more costly than paying off the extortionist. Lawyers advise clients to capitulate to the extortionist; it is the financially sound decision. It is egregious, for example, in cyberbullying and cyber violence. The Justice system appears to be willfully oblivious to the practice of using the Justice system for intimidation and coercion.
7. A criterion in the ranking of Law Schools is the number of graduates hired by the top law firms in Canada. The top law firms are corporate law firms. They don’t get prosecuted for criminal behavior; criminal law is irrelevant to them. So Law Schools have a big incentive (ranking) for excellence in Corporate Law. Resources typically flow to where the money is . . . corporates. So…. what do you do? Citizens SHOULD fund universities and the Justice System, in order that our institutions not be subverted to serve corporate interests that are usually diametrically-opposed to the public interest. I do not find it surprising that the Justice system is increasingly criticized for its failures in serving our communities.
8. You should employ philosophers and psychologists in the effort to change the system. And most definitely, community activists. Basic principles of law in a democracy have been lost. Conflicts-of-interest don’t fall under Criminal Law. But they set the stage for criminal activity. Our forefathers learned from experience with the consequence that conflicts-of-interest were not allowed. Today? The Justice system and our institutions turn a blind eye to conflicts-of-interest. Think Bill Morneau, Government decisions on pension rules, and Morneau’s family business, Morneau Shepell. Or, take a look on the other side of the border and then see the same corrupt players here, KPMG mentioned in the URL’s at the top:
In the summer of 2006, the government’s once-promising prosecution of executives from KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm suspected of selling illegal tax shelters to wealthy clients, started going bad. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan felt so confident that it indicted 17 KPMG executives.) The case fell apart when the judge ruled that those prosecutors had violated constitutional rights by pressuring the firm to waive attorney-client privilege and stop paying employees’ legal fees; the government’s zeal, he noted, had gotten “in the way of its judgment.” With the “greatest reluctance,” he threw out the cases against 13 of the executives. (Two others were convicted.)
The same criminals are in Canada, doing the same thing, and undermining the Rule of Law: 2016-03-08Canada Revenue offered amnesty to wealthy KPMG clients in offshore tax ‘sham’, CBC. IMPORTANT VIDEO.KPMG takes a 15% cut of the taxes saved through schemes that send the money of wealthy Canadians offshore to tax havens. You are seriously deluded if you think that the failure to treat the individuals at KPMG the same as other Canadians are treated (the video), does not deepen disrespect for The Law in Canada.
9. Many Law School graduates have gone from High School directly to University. The ones who article in the prestigious job of Supreme Court clerk, reviewing applications to the Court and making recommendations to the Justices, are the top graduates from across the country. Many of those people have achieved excellence by single-minded devotion to their studies. They cannot be faulted for that. They can be assured of good jobs in the System at the end of their articles. The problem for the Supreme Court and for the Justice system: these kids are smart (“left-brained”), but are often bereft of experience that comes from the streets of our societies. Many have never been an “advocate” for a social issue in real life. John Ralston Saul argues that the rational is the most fragile of our faculties. I agree with him. We have to be able to see “the other”, especially in the Justice System this is important, but “Seeing” the other is dependent upon IMAGINATION. And experience. Effective CHANGE is dependent on CREATIVITY. Maybe you have already conferred with inmates – – they will have answers that well-placed people in the system will not have.
10. An adversarial system generates some really stupid tactics and costly outcomes, both financially and in time wasted.
11. Did you watch Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next“? He visits Norway to take their best ideas for the Justice System back to America. Canada, too, should steal some of Norway’s ideas. We have hardly emerged from the Middle Ages. And we regressed substantially under Harper. The prison farms should be re-introduced. Don’t tell me – – they sold off the land?
12. Do not hire American consultants for your endeavors. God forbid. Better the Norwegians.
13. If you are to have Integrity within the Justice system, and therefore respect for the Criminal Justice system, I would say that the officials responsible for abuse of their power as Prosecutors in the following cases, have to be identified and prosecuted.
Three women a threat to their communities (?), prosecuted.
Even though StatsCan knew (under oath, at the trial of Audrey Tobias – – but they may have been lying) that Lockheed Martin’s role in the Census was to be ended within two years (by the 2016 Census), AND the decision had been made by the time of the Tobias trial in Toronto, in October 2013, (ref 2014-07-17 Transcript, Tobias trial establishes Lockheed Martin is OUT)
the Federal Dept of Justice, in concert with StatsCan, went ahead and prosecuted:
Audrey Tobias, 89 years old
Janet Churnin, 79 years old and
(Karen) Eve Stegenga, a self-employed yoga instructor, 37 years old.
The cost of any one of these trials is very high – preparation, consultations, judges, prosecutors, court workers, facility costs, travel costs, opportunity costs (the money could have been put to better use).
The outcomes were dismal, from a prosecutorial point-0f-view. Judges are to be credited, the women were spared a criminal record:
(Karen) Eve Stegenga received a conditional discharge (July 17, 2014). She had to do 25 hours of community service.
Janet Churnin received a conditional discharge (December 2013). 50 hours of community service.
Audrey Tobias was found not guilty (October 2013).
Community service is a way of life for all three of these women. Lockheed Martin is the “group of people who get together under a corporate name. They commit highly unlawful acts, have a long list of court convictions, and have not been tried for all their crimes. They come to Canada and are not only immune from the laws of our land, but they also receive billions of our tax dollars”.
You might say, “This is just the way the world works”. Justice Department officials seriously abused their power in all three cases. What was the purpose of the prosecutions? According to the numbers supplied by the StatsCan witness, non-compliance has risen to 11% from 2%. StatsCan and the Justice Dept itself, by failing to listen to Canadians about the wrongness of hiring a rogue corporation like Lockheed Martin, with its extensively documented criminality, is teaching Canadians non-compliance with the Law.
14. It is 15 minutes before the deadline for submissions to you. I will therefore do a simple copy and paste. It is American documentation, an issue of increasing concern in Canada, too.
GROSS: So you think that having, say, investment banks settle for large fines is not an adequate punishment. Why not?
EISINGER: I don’t think it deters crime. And I think it undermines the sense of equity and justice in this country. I think people see companies paying big checks and the individuals getting away with it. And I think it stokes an enormous amount of anger with the system and undermines the legitimacy of our justice system, especially because we have a justice system which excessively punishes the poor and people of color while allowing top corporate executives, powerful people, off. We talk about inequality in this country, but I argue that the greatest perquisite of being powerful and wealthy in this country is the ability to commit crimes with impunity.
(INSERT: perquisite (perk) – a thing regarded as a special right or privilege enjoyed as a result of one’s position.)
You know, it seems paradoxical that in an era of mass incarceration, it’s so hard to prosecute executives of corporations. Can you describe this, like, judicial timidity about prosecuting executives for corporate wrongdoing? So how do you explain that disparity?
EISINGER: Well, one thing is that there’s a kind of class affinity here where I think that prosecutors have an easier time certainly prosecuting drug dealers and murderers but also prosecuting corrupt politicians. I think they see politicians, and it kind of disgusts them when they do corrupt things. But when they see an articulate, well-educated executive from the same schools that they went to or the parents of the – their classmates, they find it much more difficult to picture these people as criminals.
As one SEC regulator put it in an email when they were investigating Goldman Sachs for wrongdoing – he said these are good people who have done one bad thing. And they essentially view executives as good people who may have made a mistake, and they don’t want to put those people in prison. Suffice it to say, they don’t see young black males who are dealing drugs as essentially good people making one bad mistake.
The other problem is that the courts are much friendlier and judges are much friendlier to corporate criminals than they are to street criminals. So we have a divided society, which is no surprise to anybody. And it really manifests itself in criminal law enforcement.
GROSS: Are we seeing a double standard develop about what a corporation is – because in some instances, a corporation is a person. Like, when it comes to giving money to a campaign, a corporation is now a person. (INSERT: In the US, not in Canada) But does a corporation have a different standing when it comes to being prosecuted?
EISINGER: It does because the Department of Justice has effectively decided that it will not indict this kind of person, the corporate person. And it’s not an official policy. It’s just an effective one. And because of that, corporations have the ability to settle for money and never face the death penalty, never face serious indictment. And because of that, they can get away with a lot of wrongdoing for a long time without paying any serious penalty besides writing a check. And the checks are something that they can afford and something that comes out of not their pocket but the shareholder pockets.
(INSERT: Eisinger is an investigative business reporter with ProPublica. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that led to the financial crisis. Eisinger was interviewed in July 2017 on U.S. National Public Radio. I posted a couple of excerpts from that interview at 2017-07-11(USA) Is The Justice Department Shying Away From Prosecuting Corporations? NPR interview, author Jess Eisinger.This article is lengthy, the excerpts from the 2017 July interview are short and important, to my way of thinking, with relevance to Canada.)
Kareem Serageldin: “I’m ready to pay my debt to society.”Credit Painting by Alan Coulson, based on a photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This article is a collaboration between The Times and ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative organization.
On the evening of Jan. 27, Kareem Serageldin walked out of his Times Square apartment with his brother and an old Yale roommate and took off on the four-hour drive to Philipsburg, a small town smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. Despite once earning nearly $7 million a year as an executive at Credit Suisse, Serageldin, who is 41, had always lived fairly modestly. A previous apartment, overlooking Victoria Station in London, struck his friends as a grown-up dorm room; Serageldin lived with bachelor-pad furniture and little of it — his central piece was a night stand overflowing with economics books, prospectuses and earnings reports. In the years since, his apartments served as places where he would log five or six hours of sleep before going back to work, creating and trading complex financial instruments. One friend called him an “investment-banking monk.”
Serageldin’s life was about to become more ascetic. Two months earlier, he sat in a Lower Manhattan courtroom adjusting and readjusting his tie as he waited for a judge to deliver his prison sentence. During the worst of the financial crisis, according to prosecutors, Serageldin had approved the concealment of hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio. But on that November morning, the judge seemed almost torn. Serageldin lied about the value of his bank’s securities — that was a crime, of course — but other bankers behaved far worse. Serageldin’s former employer, for one, had revised its past financial statements to account for $2.7 billion that should have been reported. Lehman Brothers, AIG, Citigroup, Countrywide and many others had also admitted that they were in much worse shape than they initially allowed. Merrill Lynch, in particular, announced a loss of nearly $8 billion three weeks after claiming it was $4.5 billion. Serageldin’s conduct was, in the judge’s words, “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.” Nevertheless, after a brief pause, he eased down his gavel and sentenced Serageldin, an Egyptian-born trader who grew up in the barren pinelands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to 30 months in jail. Serageldin would begin serving his time at Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, in Philipsburg, where he would earn the distinction of being the only Wall Street executive sent to jail for his part in the financial crisis.
American financial history has generally unfolded as a series of booms followed by busts followed by crackdowns. After the crash of 1929, the Pecora Hearings seized upon public outrage, and the head of the New York Stock Exchange landed in prison. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. In the ’90s and early aughts, when the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from WorldCom, Enron, Qwest and Tyco, among others, went to prison.
The credit crisis of 2008 dwarfed those busts, and it was only to be expected that a similar round of crackdowns would ensue. In 2009, the Obama administration appointed Lanny Breuer to lead the Justice Department’s criminal division. Breuer quickly focused on professionalizing the operation, introducing the rigor of a prestigious firm like Covington & Burling, where he had spent much of his career. He recruited elite lawyers from corporate firms and the Breu Crew, as they would later be known, were repeatedly urged by Breuer to “take it to the next level.”
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But the crackdown never happened. Over the past year, I’ve interviewed Wall Street traders, bank executives, defense lawyers and dozens of current and former prosecutors to understand why the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution. Many assume that the federal authorities simply lacked the guts to go after powerful Wall Street bankers, but that obscures a far more complicated dynamic. During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms. By the time Serageldin committed his crime, Justice Department leadership, as well as prosecutors in integral United States attorney’s offices, were de-emphasizing complicated financial cases — even neglecting clues that suggested that Lehman executives knew more than they were letting on about their bank’s liquidity problem. In the mid-’90s, white-collar prosecutions represented an average of 17.6 percent of all federal cases. In the three years ending in 2012, the share was 9.4 percent.
After the evening drive to Philipsburg, Serageldin checked into a motel. He didn’t need to report to Moshannon Valley until 2 p.m. the next day, but he was advised to show up early to get a head start on his processing. Moshannon is a low-security facility, with controlled prisoner movements, a bit tougher than the one portrayed on “Orange Is the New Black.” Friends of Serageldin’s worried about the violence; he was counseled to keep his head down and never change the channel on the TV no matter who seemed to be watching. Serageldin, who is tall and thin with a regal bearing, was largely preoccupied with how, after a decade of 18-hour trading days, he would pass the time. He was planning on doing math-problem sets and studying economics. He had delayed marrying his longtime girlfriend, a private-equity executive in London, but the plan was for her to visit him frequently.
Other bankers have spoken out about feeling unfairly maligned by the financial crisis, pegged as “banksters” by politicians and commentators. But Serageldin was contrite. “I don’t feel angry,” he told me in early winter. “I made a mistake. I take responsibility. I’m ready to pay my debt to society.” Still, the fact that the only top banker to go to jail for his role in the crisis was neither a mortgage executive (who created toxic products) nor the C.E.O. of a bank (who peddled them) is something of a paradox, but it’s one that reflects the many paradoxes that got us here in the first place.
Part of the Justice Department’s futility can be traced to the rise of its own ambition. Until the 1980s, government prosecutors generally focused on going after individual corporate criminals. But after watching their fellow prosecutors successfully take down entire mafia families, like the Gambino and Bonanno clans, many felt that they should also be going after more high-profile convictions and that the best way to root out corruption was to take on the whole organization. A long-ignored Supreme Court ruling, from 1909, conveniently opened the door for criminal charges against entire corporations. And in 2001, Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s new criminal division chief, arrived at the Justice Department ready to put it to use.
Chertoff, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office under Rudolph W. Giuliani, the godfather of the Wall Street perp walk, seemed like just the guy to jump-start the initiative — and he arrived at an opportune moment. Prosecutors were beginning their investigation of Enron and probe into Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that had blessed the energy-trading giant’s phony balance sheets and shredded documents shortly after it detonated. Early in his tenure, Chertoff found himself sitting in a conference room at Justice Department headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, listening with growing irritation as lawyers for Arthur Andersen tried to dispose of the Enron case with yet another settlement. The company previously oversaw the fraudulent books of Waste Management and Sunbeam, and it dealt with those previous scrapes by reaching settlements and a consent decree with regulators, vowing never to commit such a crime again. For its Waste Management infractions, the firm paid $7 million. Then, it was the largest civil penalty ever paid.
Andersen was expecting the same kind of wrist-slap. As Chertoff recalls, one high-ranking executive noted brazenly that such settlements were merely “a cost of doing business” — the routine surcharges applied to the nation’s largest corporations. That comment enraged Chertoff, and soon after, his prosecutors indicted the firm. “Destroy documents?” he told me. “It’s hard to view that as a stumble outside of its core business.” In June 2002, Arthur Andersen was convicted by a jury, and within months, the firm closed down, costing tens of thousands of people their jobs.
The Andersen case was supposed to embolden the Justice Department, but it quickly backfired. Chertoff’s chutzpah shocked much of the corporate world and even many prosecutors, who thought the department had abused its powers at the cost of thousands of innocent workers. Almost immediately, the Andersen verdict resulted not in more boldness but in more caution on the part of federal prosecutors, including Chertoff himself. In 2003, his investigators were digging into questionable off-balance-sheet deals between the Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank and AIG Financial Products. They contemplated indicting the bank, which spurred Herbert Biern, at the time a top banking-supervision official at the Fed, to demand a meeting with Chertoff to warn him against it. Chertoff told Biern, according to attendees, that if the Justice Department “can’t bring these cases because it may bring harm, then maybe these banks are too big.” In the end, though, Chertoff and the Justice Department blinked. They didn’t indict, and PNC entered into a deferred prosecution agreement. No bank executives were prosecuted. Two years later, the Supreme Court overturned the Arthur Andersen conviction.
From 2004 to 2012, the Justice Department reached 242 deferred and nonprosecution agreements with corporations, compared with 26 in the previous 12 years, according to a study by David M. Uhlmann, a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Michigan. And while companies paid large sums in the settlements — the days of $7 million cost-of-doing-business fees were over — several veteran Justice Department officials told me that these settlements emboldened defense lawyers. More crucial, they allowed the Justice Department’s lawyers to “succeed” without learning how to develop important prosecutorial skills. Investigations of individuals are more time-consuming and require a different approach than those of a corporation. Indeed, the department now effectively outsources many of its investigations of corporate executives to outside firms, which invariably produce reports that exculpate those at the top. Jed Rakoff, the U.S. District Court judge and former federal prosecutor who has become the most prominent legal critic of the Justice Department, explained the process to me this way: “The report says: ‘Mistakes were made. We are here to take our lumps’ ” — in other words, settlements and, if the transgressions are particularly bad, further oversight. “Lost in that whole thing,” Rakoff said, “was anyone trying to investigate whether the individuals did something wrong.”
The Bush administration may have earned a reputation as being friendly to business interests, but it wasn’t always that way. Around the time of the Andersen investigation, Larry Thompson, the deputy attorney general, was summoned to the White House to defend his department. He and Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., met with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where they decided not to present legal theory but to show evidence that prosecutors had amassed in matters like the Enron case, demonstrating that executives had made up numbers and lied to the public. Bush seemed stunned. He turned to Mueller and Thompson and said, “Bobby and L.T., continue what you are doing.”
If Chertoff had signaled a green light for going after entire companies, Thompson drafted a memo in 2003 that offered a post-Andersen playbook that went right at the heart of how large corporations protected themselves. For years, big businesses, like tobacco companies, shielded questionable conduct by invoking attorney-client privilege, which could render details of troubling executive dealings inadmissible in court. If a company came under federal scrutiny, it typically paid its executives’ legal bills, hiring some of the nation’s best firms, those who could slow or derail any inquiries. And when multiple executives fell under suspicion, their lawyers would often sign joint defense agreements allowing them to share with one another what they learned about the feds’ case.
Thompson’s memo declared that prosecutors could, in essence, offer a deal, but it wasn’t a very generous one. Companies could win Brownie points for being cooperative only if they eschewed privileges like joint defense agreements. Almost immediately, members of the white-collar bar asserted that this overreach eroded a fundamental right, but they didn’t have to argue incessantly; once again, the Justice Department’s ambition backfired. In the summer of 2006, the government’s once-promising prosecution of executives from KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm suspected of selling illegal tax shelters to wealthy clients, started going bad. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan felt so confident that it indicted 17 KPMG executives.) The case fell apart when the judge ruled that those prosecutors had violated constitutional rights by pressuring the firm to waive attorney-client privilege and stop paying employees’ legal fees; the government’s zeal, he noted, had gotten “in the way of its judgment.” With the “greatest reluctance,” he threw out the cases against 13 of the executives. (Two others were convicted.)
Soon after, the counteroffensive to the Justice Department’s overreach peaked, led by the white-collar bar and corporate lobbies and aided by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even the American Civil Liberties Union. Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, contended that the department was abusing corporations; his colleague Arlen Specter, then a Republican from Pennsylvania, readied a bill to prevent the Justice Department from receiving attorney-client privilege waivers. To cut that off, Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general, released a revised set of rules stating, among other things, that no federal prosecutor could ask a company to waive attorney-client privilege without permission from higher-ups.
Over the years, the KPMG debacle and the corporate revolt would lead the Justice Department to roll back the Thompson memo to nearly the point of reversal. Today prosecutors are prohibited from even asking companies to waive their attorney-client privilege. They are also prohibited from pushing a company to cut off the legal fees for indicted executives or pressuring it to forgo joint defense agreements. “It was very much a game-changer in the business of investigating and defending in those cases,” says Michael Bromwich, a top white-collar lawyer and former inspector general of the Department of Justice.
In the decade since, the courts dulled other prosecutorial tools. A Supreme Court ruling allowed sentences to be set below previously determined mandatory minimums (which made executives less likely to “flip”). Another narrowed an often-used legal theory that said employees were guilty of fraud if they deprived their companies of “honest services” (which helped nab Enron’s former C.E.O., Jeffrey Skilling, among others). No change was momentous on its own — and some may have legitimately restored the rights of defendants — but taken together they marked a significant, if almost unnoted, shift toward the defense. After Lanny Breuer entered the Department of Justice, he testified in front of Congress to restore the honest-services charge for corrupt government officials. But he didn’t even try to broach the topic of a private-sector fix.
Life on Wall Street is often portrayed as hours of kinetic fury with billions on the line, but the work is more often suited to wonks who are comfortable digesting Excel spreadsheets. Serageldin, who joined Credit Suisse’s information-technology department right out of Yale in 1994, was assigned the late-night job of “cracking tapes” — transferring magnetic tape reels of data, decoding them and running analyses. Senior bankers quickly identified his talent and brought him over to the moneymaking side, where he was soon working in the bank’s catastrophe-bonds business, or securities that transfer the risk of earthquakes and hurricanes from seller to investor. It required mastering geology, fault lines and property-damage projections. In order to achieve the kind of informational advantages that Wall Street requires to make money, Serageldin had to put the statistical runs on a personal computer, waking up in the middle of the night for days at a time to reset it. By 2007, he oversaw about 70 people and generated $1.3 billion in trading revenue.
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Serageldin’s group made so much money that some colleagues believed his bosses gave him a pass on risk controls. But by disposition, and by practice, he was anything but a swashbuckler. When the value of mortgage securities began to crater, on what became known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 2007, most traders kept trading, pumping out securities, boosting their personal earnings while endangering — and in some cases destroying — their institutions. Serageldin, however, began ordering his traders to get out of their riskiest positions. The bank’s head of fixed income at the time, James Healy, would later note that Serageldin’s decisions “took courage and personal conviction, in the face of immense pressure” from the sales force.
Yet Serageldin’s caution failed him in one crucial moment. Later that summer, traders in one of his portfolios began to avoid taking the necessary losses on their mortgage-backed securities. Traders are required to hold securities at their current value, known as marking to market, determining how much the portfolio made or lost that day. At one desperate point, one of Serageldin’s traders approached a friend at a small regional bank to give him a so-called independent price that happened to be nearly identical to the prices in the portfolio, enabling them to conceal the size of the losses. In early December, that spreadsheet tallying the losses made its way to Serageldin, who would later admit to recognizing that the prices should have been lower. He had assumed the positions were hedged, a friend of his told me, but instead of saying anything, he tried to protect his reputation. By early 2008, he was out at Credit Suisse. The bank reported him to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York.
In a matter of months, the markets plummeted in a financial crisis that made Enron look like small-time pilfering. And as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs or homes, an inchoate but palpable demand for justice — for a crackdown — emerged. Breuer may have come with the right pedigree, but he now faced troubles that hurt as much as the debacles of Arthur Andersen and KPMG, or the retreat from the Thompson memo: austerity. The department faced periodic hiring freezes. The F.B.I., which assigned dozens of agents to Enron, had shifted resources to terrorism. The Postal Service wound down an elite unit that had specialized in complex financial investigations. President Obama’s Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, which was designed to give hundreds of millions to prosecute financial criminals, was able to deliver only $65 million in 2010 and 2011. Prosecutors reporting to Breuer proposed setting up a mortgage-fraud initiative, a “Prosecutorial Strike Force,” as one July 2009 memo put it, but the Justice Department dithered. Finally it set up the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an enormous coordinating committee with essentially no investigative operation. One former Justice Department official derided it as “the turtle.”
Resources aside, the erosion of the department’s actual trial skills would soon become apparent. In November 2009, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn lost the first criminal case of the crisis against two Bear Stearns executives accused of misleading investors. The prosecutors rushed into trial, failing to prepare for the exculpatory emails uncovered by the defense team. After two days, the jury acquitted the two money managers. “For sure,” one former federal prosecutor told me, “it put a chill” on investigations. “Politicos care about winning and losing.”
The fear first wrought by the Andersen case, meanwhile, ossified around financial firms. In early 2009, the Obama administration deliberated over serious tax misconduct by UBS, the Swiss bank, but top Treasury and Justice department officials worried about the effects criminal charges could have on the financial system. UBS settled with the government. Breuer had another shot, in 2012, when the department was moving toward a resolution of a six-year investigation into HSBC, which had become the preferred bank for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels and conducted transactions with countries under American sanctions, including Iran and Libya. Breuer surveyed Washington and London regulators and policy hands and sought assurance that the system could weather an indictment. A top Treasury Department official told Breuer, in carefully couched language, that an indictment could cause broader problems in the financial system. Breuer even went as far as discussing whether banks were too big to indict with H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, who was representing HSBC in his very own case. Cohen told Breuer that while the Justice Department can’t have a rule not to indict a large bank, prosecutors should, well, take into account how the target has cooperated and what changes it has made to fix the problems. Of course, HSBC happened to have taken those very measures. The Justice Department blinked again. That December, the bank was fined $650 million and forfeited almost $1.3 billion in profits. No one went to jail.
It would be easy to blame the Justice Department’s ineptitude on past mistakes alone. But again, the very ambitions of its prosecutors played a prominent role. Top governmental lawyers generally don’t want to spend their entire careers in the public sector. Many want to score marquee victories and avoid mistakes and eventually leave for prominent corporate firms with starting salaries at 10 times what they make at the Department of Justice. According to numerous former criminal-division employees, Breuer almost immediately signaled his interest in bigger things. In October 2009, Steven Fagell, his deputy chief of staff and former Covington colleague, sent an email to the division. “Do you like giving toasts? Do you think it should have been you accepting the writing Emmy for ‘30 Rock?’ ” Fagell wrote. “If so, we need your wit, smarts and gift for the written word! We’re putting together a speechwriting team for the assistant attorney general.” Prosecutors developing cases against Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda members found it more than a little tone deaf. (Fagell says the email request was intended “both to foster internal morale and to send a message of deterrence to the public.”)
According to numerous sources from the Justice Department, the Breu Crew instilled a careerist culture that was fearful of sullying its reputation by losing cases. Kathy Ruemmler, who worked on the Enron task force and later became Obama’s counsel, would needle Breuer: “How many cases are you dismissing this week?” Later Ruemmler was upset when the Justice Department decided against retrying a case against Merrill Lynch executives who helped Enron boost its earnings with an infamous transaction involving a Nigerian barge. (Breuer was recused from the barge case.) A former prosecutor at the Justice Department in Washington concurred that Breuer’s staff didn’t “want to pursue cases where they feel the person is 100 percent guilty but they are only 70 percent sure they can win at trial.” Prosecutors contrasted that with previous eras, some fondly recalling a line favored by James Comey, who served as one of George W. Bush’s deputy attorneys general and emphasized the need for “real-time” white-collar prosecutions. “We have a name for prosecutors who have never lost — the ‘Chicken(expletive) Club.’ ” (In a statement, Breuer said he had a strong record of white-collar enforcement: “Where there were cases to bring, we brought them, and where there were not, we took a pass.”)
But given that Washington rejected a unified national task force, these career motivations would prove particularly relevant. When Preet Bharara, former chief counsel for Senator Charles E. Schumer, arrived in the Southern District of New York in 2009, he had a decision to make. There were cases arising from the financial crisis, which could take years to investigate and, after all that, never make it to a jury. Or there were insider-trading cases, which were far more straightforward. Someone improperly learns nonpublic details about a company and makes a killing on the stock market. “You do have a tough choice,” one former Southern District prosecutor says. “Am I going to chase after crimes I don’t know were committed and don’t know who by, or do we go after crimes we do know were committed and by whom?”
Bharara focused on insider trading, and his office has amassed a stunning 80-0 record of prosecutions, locking up the hedge-fund titan Raj Rajaratnam and Rajat Gupta, the former managing director of McKinsey & Company and a director at Goldman Sachs. They took down eight former employees of Steven A. Cohen’s notorious SAC Capital hedge fund. (Notably, however, they haven’t been able to bring charges against the man himself.) Time magazine put Bharara on its cover, with the bold headline: “This Man Is Busting Wall Street.” Yet Bharara didn’t touch Wall Street’s real players — top bankers. The former prosecutor was almost sheepish about the insider-trading cases when I spoke to him: “They made our careers, but they don’t change the world.” In fact, several former prosecutors in the office told me that going after bankers was never a real priority. “The government failed,” another former prosecutor said. “We didn’t do what we needed to do.”
As a result, Bharara and his team neglected seemingly winnable cases in their own backyard, including one particularly big one. After Lehman imploded, the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters split responsibility investigating what the bank’s executives knew among three U.S. attorney’s offices: the Southern and Eastern districts of New York and the New Jersey operation. But for all of that manpower, to those closest to the Lehman probe, the government’s case was seemingly conducted by one lawyer, Bonnie Jonas, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District. She would make pilgrimages to the offices of Jenner & Block, a prestigious law firm that had been assigned to investigate the Lehman bankruptcy. Jonas would pore over the 40 million-odd pages of Lehman documents the firm assembled. (The Southern District says it devoted multiple people and ample resources to the investigation.)
Nonetheless, the Justice Department never aggressively pursued what may have been the most promising angle. On Sept. 10, 2008, the chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, Ian Lowitt, told shareholders and the public that the bank had $42 billion of available cash, or liquidity. The bank’s position, Lowitt reassured, “remains very strong.” Lehman would file for bankruptcy five days later. “What they were saying was not just wrong but materially wrong,” Robert Byman, a Jenner & Block partner, told me.
Over 14 months, Jenner & Block would put about 130 lawyers on the case to prepare a report on the collapse. At one point, recalls Stephen Ascher, a partner, one of them discovered “this wonderful chart” breaking down the liquidity figure into three categories: high, moderate and low. Of those billions, $15 billion was in the “low” category, generally because it had been pledged as collateral to other banks. One former Lehman executive told me that several other company managers understood that they could not tap much, if any, of that encumbered money. And at least two executives objected to how the bank was representing its liquidity, including its international treasurer, Carlo Pellerani, according to the Jenner & Block report. The law firm found that regulators, credit-rating agencies and Lehman’s outside lawyer had no idea that the liquidity pool wasn’t, in fact, all that liquid. When Lowitt came to talk to Jenner & Block, he explained that he had not fully understood the issues when he assured investors of its liquid assets. That may be a reasonable defense, but it does not appear that prosecutors and federal investigators made a serious attempt to test how much Lehman’s chief financial officer knew about his own books. Three Lehman executives and one regulator at the Federal Reserve, all of whom were involved in the bank’s desperate attempts to keep itself liquid, told me they were never even interviewed by any federal-government officials.
When Wall Street bankers are arrested, they often do what is known in finance as an expected-value analysis: They weigh the cost of fighting, how long it would take and the chances of the best and worst outcomes. Serageldin was a Wall Street banker with a foreign name who helped make securities that played a role in blowing up the global economy. He seemed to reach a logical conclusion: Plead guilty and take his chances with a judge’s sentence. Other bankers made the opposite choice. After ignoring the risks of the housing and credit bubbles, they took the high-risk-high-reward gamble again, hiring top lawyers and claiming that they never intended to deceive. As it turned out, they benefited from a decade of subtle changes that favored corporate executives under investigation. Serageldin took the sucker’s bet. Prosecutors simply got their man by default.
In his first months in prison, Serageldin has tried to remain upbeat. The investment-banking monk is now spending his nights in a basketball-court-size room with about 70 others. If the problem sets don’t occupy him, he is allowed five books at a time. After explaining that he had lived abroad, Serageldin became known as London. The extent of his crime, meanwhile, has been revised. Initially prosecutors implied that the trader had been part of a conspiracy to hide $540 million worth of losses. By the time he was sentenced, the government was down to accusing him of conspiring to hide about $100 million. An internal Credit Suisse analysis put the misstatement at $37 million. “There’s not a moment’s doubt on my part” that such mismarking happened elsewhere during the crisis, Fiachra O’Driscoll, a friend and former colleague of Serageldin’s, who has been an expert witness in private litigation, told me. “I have seen evidence along the way that similar things happened dozens of times.”
Federal prosecutors have their own explanation for how only one Wall Street executive landed in jail in the wake of the financial crisis. The cases were complex to investigate and would have been infernally difficult to explain to juries, some told me. Much of the crisis and banker transgressions stemmed from recklessness, not criminality. They also suggest that deferred prosecutions — with their billions in settlements and additional oversights — can be stricter punishments than indictments. Still, while the Department of Justice has not been without its successes — it won a guilty plea from BP in the Deepwater Horizon spill, and it’s currently going after traders in the wake of the JPMorgan Chase London Whale trading loss — these remain exceptions even beyond the financial sector. Federal prosecutors almost never bring criminal charges against top executives of large corporations, from banking to pharmaceuticals to technology. In March, the Justice Department entered into a deferred prosecution against Toyota but did not indict the company or any top executives. As the economy limps back from the Great Recession, compensation has recovered, corporate profits are at record levels and executives see that few, if any, of their peers ever go to prison anymore. Perhaps one reason Americans have come to begrudge the wealthy is a resentment of their culture of impunity.
Larry Thompson became known for his memo, but back in the Clinton administration, the deputy attorney general Eric Holder laid out his own memo for strengthening corporate prosecutions. But he undermined his own words by also explaining that prosecutors needed to take into account the collateral economic consequences. In testimony in front of the Senate in March, Holder, who is now the U.S. attorney general, seemed to lament the position government enforcers had found themselves in. “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” Holder quickly walked back the remarks. Soon after, Lanny Breuer returned to Covington & Burling as a vice chairman.
ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger says that the government undermines the notion of equity and fails to deter crime when it allows large corporations to settle lawsuits by paying fines.
GROSS: So you think that having, say, investment banks settle for large fines is not an adequate punishment. Why not?
EISINGER: I don’t think it deters crime. And I think it undermines the sense of equity and justice in this country. I think people see companies paying big checks and the individuals getting away with it. And I think it stokes an enormous amount of anger with the system and undermines the legitimacy of our justice system, especially because we have a justice system which excessively punishes the poor and people of color while allowing top corporate executives, powerful people, off. We talk about inequality in this country, but I argue that the greatest perquisite of being powerful and wealthy in this country is the ability to commit crimes with impunity.
(INSERT: perquisite (perk) – a thing regarded as a special right or privilege enjoyed as a result of one’s position.
…
You know, it seems paradoxical that in an era of mass incarceration, it’s so hard to prosecute executives of corporations. Can you describe this, like, judicial timidity about prosecuting executives for corporate wrongdoing? So how do you explain that disparity?
EISINGER: Well, one thing is that there’s a kind of class affinity here where I think that prosecutors have an easier time certainly prosecuting drug dealers and murderers but also prosecuting corrupt politicians. I think they see politicians, and it kind of disgusts them when they do corrupt things. But when they see an articulate, well-educated executive from the same schools that they went to or the parents of the – their classmates, they find it much more difficult to picture these people as criminals.
As one SEC regulator put it in an email when they were investigating Goldman Sachs for wrongdoing – he said these are good people who have done one bad thing. And they essentially view executives as good people who may have made a mistake, and they don’t want to put those people in prison. Suffice it to say, they don’t see young black males who are dealing drugs as essentially good people making one bad mistake.
The other problem is that the courts are much friendlier and judges are much friendlier to corporate criminals than they are to street criminals. So we have a divided society, which is no surprise to anybody. And it really manifests itself in criminal law enforcement.
GROSS: Are we seeing a double standard develop about what a corporation is – because in some instances, a corporation is a person. Like, when it comes to giving money to a campaign, a corporation is now a person. (INSERT: In the US, not in Canada) But does a corporation have a different standing when it comes to being prosecuted?
EISINGER: It does because the Department of Justice has effectively decided that it will not indict this kind of person, the corporate person. And it’s not an official policy. It’s just an effective one. And because of that, corporations have the ability to settle for money and never face the death penalty, never face serious indictment. And because of that, they can get away with a lot of wrongdoing for a long time without paying any serious penalty besides writing a check. And the checks are something that they can afford and something that comes out of not their pocket but the shareholder pockets.
Nowadays, electrohypersensitivity (EHS) is in Sweden an officially fully recognized functional impairment (i.e., it is not regarded as a disease). Survey studies show that somewhere between 230,000-290,000 Swedish men and women—out of a population of 9,000,000—report a variety of symptoms when being in contact with electromagnetic field sources. To this, one should also add all the current issues regarding the bigger picture: the health effects of electromagnetic fields on the general population.
David Fancy, a theatre professor at Brock University, shows Out in the Open host Piya Chattopadhyay some of the equipment and readings he uses to gauge the electrical environment in his home. (Sam Colbert)
David Fancy first noticed it while was living in Montreal in the early 2000s.
He got headaches and heard ringing in his ears after he used his cell phone. It got worse when he moved into an apartment near power lines and a cell tower. It got so bad, he had to move out.
He finally discovered an explanation that seemed to make sense: “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or “EHS” for short.
“Simplest terms, it’s an allergy to human-made electromagnetic emissions,” says David, a dramatic arts professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.
Reported symptoms of EHS include headaches, ear ringing, dizziness, nerve pain, burning skin sensations and heart palpitations. Common triggers are cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth signals, cell towers, power lines and, in extreme cases, anything electric.
David Fancy says he started feeling symptoms of ‘electromagnetic hypersensitivity’ in the early 2000s, and was forced to move because of it. (Sam Colbert)
“There was an extensive period where I had to live outside because I was unable to tolerate being indoors,” David says. “Simply being in the electrical environment of a household was impossible.”
Health Canada’s position is that there’s no scientific evidence to support electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
Some studies have blamed the “nocebo” effect. That’s the flip side of the placebo effect, when the expectation of a negative outcome causes that outcome. In other words, it might be psychological.
Or perhaps the symptoms associated with EHS are caused by something else, and have nothing to do with electromagnetic fields.
But David expresses frustration with the skepticism over EHS.
“Anybody who wholesale disregards the lived experience of thousands or tens of thousands of people, without investigating or trying to understand them, in this day and age, is described as bigoted, prejudiced and discriminatory,” he says.
He lived in a woodlot in the Niagara region for three years. At Brock, he was able to continue teaching at a location off campus.
“You go through an initial phase of feeling hunted, frankly, where you don’t understand the correlation between the trigger and the experience,” he says.
After David was told that EHS might be the culprit for his symptoms, he worked with a team of environmental physicians. He says he is now able to tolerate electromagnetic fields at low levels or short durations. He built himself a house out in the country, specially designed to limit exposure.
He’s also been helping others who’ve had similar experiences, and is hopeful that EHS will become more widely recognized and treated.
“Change takes time. And I’m comfortable with skepticism, as long as the skeptics take time to look at all the research.”
See the action item for Canadians near the bottom.
From 350.org:
New York just added $200 billion — including tens of millions invested in companies operating in the tar sands — to the nearly $6 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have already been divested. When we dreamed up the idea of fossil fuel divestment in 2012 we were thinking: some colleges and some churches will do this. We didn’t dare dream that half a decade later one of the richest cities on earth would lead the charge.
We’ve seen a series of announcements recently that give us real hope for the future. Norway announced its state oil fund will divest from oil and gas. France announced it would ban any new oil and gas exploration anywhere on its territory. The World Bank announced it would cease funding new fossil free projects anywhere in the world. And of course, in 2017, the movement in Canada stopped Energy East — the largest tar sands pipeline ever proposed.
Momentum is on our side. We are at the beginning of something truly awe-inspiring in 2018. And that’s thanks to all sorts of folks coming together to stand up to the big greedy bosses of the fossil fuel industry. Our future is a Fossil Free one.Let’s show Prime Minister Trudeau that we believe this to be true here in Canada.
“The revolution has already happened, and it’s about adapting to it.”
So says Oxford Martin School fellow Chris Kutarna, paraphrasing the famed Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan.
Last season on The Current, the co-author of Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance, argued we’re living in a second Renaissance period — in an age of disruption, from healthcare to technology to politics.
Now Kutarna says the world must adapt to the significant changes of our new reality.
“There are a lot of deeply held ideas, behaviours, truths in our society today that probably need to be shaken a bit,” Kutarna tells The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti.
As many politicians and social commentators wring their hands over how social media is disrupting political and social systems, Kutarna sees positive progression. He says that though there are dangers in the huge power of social media, there are also benefits to the truths about our society that social media is exposing.
“Maybe we need to let social media run amok, because whatever breaks, needed fixing,” he says.
‘If we double down on the idea that our participation in society is how we flourish, then we will flourish.’ – Chris Kutarna
Kutarna points specifically to the example of Russian interference in the U.S. election.
“If you look at the content of the messages that Russia was promoting on Facebook, these weren’t policy messages, these weren’t political messages,” he says.
‘We need to be sober about asking ourselves can we really censor out foreign interference in our public discourse?’ asks scholar Chris Kutarna. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)
“These were hate messages — the misogyny, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia. These were the messages that their algorithms had told them were going to activate the American voter, maybe influence voter behaviour. You know, at some level, we need to thank the Russian taxpayer for presenting such a blunt lens to our societies about the gap between our public political discourse and some of our privately felt feelings.”
While Kutarna believes the shake-ups surfacing through social media and the internet can lead to positive change, he wants to make sure we keep an eye on the potential dangers as well.
‘As a species, humanity is tremendously adaptable.’ – Chris Kutarna
He points to the Chinese government as an example where social media has been used to curb freedom rather than just empower people.
“In the 1990s, we thought that the Internet was just going to be this instrument of empowering individuals,” says Kutarna, a China scholar.
As a China scholar, Chris Kutarna says the government in Beijing ‘has an active and sophisticated campaign around the world’s democracies to alter public discourse.’ (Andy Wong/Associated Press)
“And what China has demonstrated, to its own population and to the rest of the authoritarian world, is that, ‘hey, this is a terrific technology for strengthening the state.'”
Kutarna suggests the current series of disruptions, both through social media and beyond, can strengthen democracy, as long as we make a conscious effort to push them in this direction.
“What comes from this moment is a need to get honest and to double down on the practice of democracy,” says Kutarna.
“If we double down on the idea that our participation in society is how we flourish, then we will flourish.”
But a time of great change isn’t always an easy one to live through, says Kutarna.
“As a species, humanity is tremendously adaptable,” says Kutarna. “As individuals, we tend to have a harder time adapting. Adaptation tends to happen through generational change.”
And there is one thing that’s necessary to help individuals adapt to change, says Kutarna.
“If we think individually, psychologically, I think it takes some hope, in the sense that we are adaptable,” he says.
Listen to the full conversation near the top of this post.
This segment was produced by The Current’s Julian Uzielli and Karin Marley.
