How Austerity Allows Criminals to Escape Punishment

Every time you hear some repug or repug-lite dem claim we "must" gut public services through budget cuts, ask yourself who benefits from your community have fewer police officers and firefighters and social workers and librarians and parks/recreation staff and bus drivers and trash collectors.

Almost always, the beneficiary is some private company executive who has bribed elected officials to allow the executive to take over the formerly public service and make huge profits from performing it far worse for far more money.

But sometimes, the beneficiary is corporate criminals who want to make sure that the infrastructure of law enforcement and criminal justice is too starved for funds and devastated to prevent the corporation from defrauding the public or punish it after the fact.

From Firedoglake:

“Facing major budget and staff cuts, federal officials are scaling back several high-profile health-care fraud and abuse investigations”.

 

How very convenient for the Big Hospital criminals.