Compare and contrast white collar crimes and street crimes, while understanding the definition of corporate betrayal.

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        The significance of corporate betrayal has only begun to surface.  For years white collar crimes have gone unnoticed and undefined.  Many still feel the local murder effects their lives more than the “guy in a suit on CNN.”  I would like to compare and contrast white collar crimes and street crimes, while understanding the definition of corporate betrayal.  Corporate misdoings and scandals have become a staple in the news today.  The pictures of the former Tyco CEO dancing at his $2.1 million party for his wife have been sprawled across the evening news.  While many Tyco employees have lost their entire life savings the CEO has not lost his two-step.  While he is on trial for his role in the Tyco scandals, it is unlikely he will face much jail time, if any.  This is a disturbing trend across corporate America; management and boards have betrayed the employees in many, many large companies.  This can be seen in numerous companies today, from Enron to WorldCom the outcome has been the same; many families have lost everything, while management gets a slap on the wrist and retains its own large retirement plan.    For years management and board members use company funds to travel the world, join golf clubs, throw extravagant parties and live the “good life” many working class are feeling the effects.  Unfortunately, the ripples of this corporate greed do not stop here; communities, taxpayers and the society as a whole have been affected by these wrongdoings.  The cost is tremendous.  This is especially true when the employees own the company such as Weirton Steel.  

        Directly following the 1992 Democratic National Convention, then presidential and vice-presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Al Gore traveled to Weirton, stopping as part of a nationwide bus caravan campaign.  Worker ownership and employee participation at Weirton Steel, they claimed, were examples of “what was right in America,” of what worked, the future of American industry.  AS Clinton and Gore spoke they were framed by a familiar sign in town: mill employees (one black, one white, a woman and an executive) pulling a rope connected to a Weirton Steel logo with the words “working together works.”  Ironically, it was a sign that captured the beleaguered sprit of liberalism that Clinton and Gore carried across America, and it belied the conflict over worker ownership that was soon to erupt in the company.

Businesses today are faced with the great task of trying to gain as much profit as they can.  Many times businesses hurt employees or the communities around them by trying to make too much money.  Businesses take the idea of making a profit too far.  But how far would they go to make a profit and how many people can be steamrolled in the process?  ?  It seems that there is an ever-increasing trend in our society. Big corporations are becoming more and more influential in our lives.  As they gain muscle in our government, they also invade our schools and many other facets of our lives.  Weirton Steel and its owners as an ESOP hurt itself.  How could the owners let this happen?  The fundamentals were unstable from the beginning.  National Steel needed to sell, it was cheaper for National to sell then to revamp the organization.  In order for us to understand the specifics of Weirton we must first examine the ever-growing problem of corporate greed and power as a whole.  We must look at every outlet including: media, Capitalism, corporate power in American and how our judicial system deals with corporate white-collar crimes.

Perhaps the most disturbing area of potential influence is corporate control of the media.  Can the American media uphold its values of free press under pressure from big corporations?  Can they continue to present the absolute truth?  The simple answer is no.  Perhaps one of the biggest stories of this decade has been the tobacco industry.  We saw them stand before Congress and tell the world that cigarettes were not addictive.  The industry was able to lawyer its way out of trouble time and time again.  They essentially used legal maneuvers, and certainly money, to keep the truth from the American people.  The point is: business has no right to decide what news is, yet they are able to manipulate what the public reads through massive public relation campaigns.  This, of course, requires money, something corporations have no trouble spending.   They have no right to come and stop a story from airing because it might hurt their profit margin, yet it happens regularly.  Obviously, large news organizations need to have a corporate division to handle business affairs, but business should not be allowed to effect good journalism. Is the press free only to someone who can afford it?  The whole reason that the First Amendment exists is to ensure that the government cannot interfere with what we see and hear, however, government allows this to happen “for the good of the nation.”  We are allowing business to do it instead.   We cling to our belief in free speech and free press as one of our greatest accomplishments, but does this exist.  When one sits to watch the evening news is the program not littered with commercials?  Is this not a cost?  Is speech really free?  Big corporations cannot be allowed to control what we see and here.  Yet it happens daily.  The “masses of asses” are thrown a bone on occasion so that our government may suggest they have cracked down on big business.  “Our courts have decided that Microsoft is a monopoly, and we will make them divide.”  Our news does portray the problems of society from a simplistic level.  The television show Cops shows black males thrown around by police officers.  While corporate crimes are rarely shown.  Perhaps we should create a Cops show for corporate crimes.

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Is Street Crime More Harmful than White Collar Crime?  By general definition, a crime is a wronging, proclaimed by law against society.  All acts of disobeying the law are crimes.  Be it an assault or embezzlement one has committed a wrong.  Yet, we have learned values and morals from our surroundings which gave us concepts of the degree of harm pertaining to a particular crime.  From our being submerged in a culture, our concept of crime is usually that of a physical one.  We as a society, generally conjure images of a personal assault on oneself when defining the concept ...

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