A typical response I see on HN (and on other forums) in response to failings in other countries (e.g. acts of terrorism, corruption, failure of government support, etc) is to find some sarcastic analogy to compare it to in the US. The Chinese government has gotten on the bandwagon with its own publication of the US's human rights violations (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_1316113...). I found this humorous.
It would be naïve to think that the USA (I'm picking on the USA because I am an American citizen) is the perfect country. I haven't lived in other countries long enough to be able to compare, but I /can/ compare the experience between China and the US and it makes me grateful to be a US citizen.
The truth is, there is no real comparison between China and the US: I get questions about corruption in the US all the time and I always answer that there /is/ corruption in the US but not in the endemic/pervasive way that we see it in China. The media is more open than in China, the government process is more transparent.
My business partner and I are in the middle of doing a training/internship (simple LAMP application development) for students at a local university. This isn't a top tier university: it's a third-tier university in the capital of one of the poorest regions in the country. There's a lot of potential here but when we asked people if they had any aspirations to entrepreneurship, we mostly get a 'no'. The lack of mobility for the common person is evident here.
No matter what the US's failures are what it has that the Chinese system (note that I didn't say government, because some of the issues here are cultural) doesn't have is "opportunity". There's a lot of unrealistic optimism here amongst college-age students (i.e. "I can do it if I try.") but there is a dark understanding that this is severely limited by what is available to them after they graduate. It's actually really sad: people here are in love with pieces of paper that 'qualify' you for a job. But with an overabundance of college graduates (in a system where cheating is normal), the value of a college degree is lessened. So you have a huge population of mid-20's that paid large sums of money for degrees that are largely worthless (i.e. the degrees didn't fulfill the better life that they promised).
China has aspirations to be the world's best, but it won't be until it can find a way to empower its own people.
(speaking from Russia) at the time of that argument, our propaganda guys did have a point: the poverty was defeated here, everyone had a job guarantee, an opportunity to get (free) world-class higher education, choose a career in science, military, or industry, etc.
Speaking of China, they do have their problems (of course), but to have a moral right to criticize, other fellow countries should at least stop their oil-for-bombs and occupation-based-on-rumors politics (and we will see, how that will change the quality of life and corruption level).
Poverty in the USSR didn't impeach you from having free health care, free education and almost free basic food and transport. Compare with poors in the USA.
Yes, I'm speaking exactly of the golden era of USSR (1961 -- 1979, roughly), and the evidence of my family, relatives and friends clearly states, that poverty was _literally_ defeated by that time -- you plain could not be starving from hunger or be homeless (unless you prefered to, but that was against the law, and everyone was guaranteed to have a roof above his head).
Speaking short and plain, everyone had at least enough to live a healthy life, and quite many had somewhat more.
Entrepreneurial attitudes in Europe compared to the US and Asia //
Chinese people have the strongest preference for self-employment (71%), Japanese people the weakest (39%). Similarly, Chinese think it is quite possible to become one’s own boss (49%). In Japan only 12% consider this career option possible. //
A higher ratio of Chinese (40%) than Americans (38%) declare that they have first-hand experiences in starting a business. In Europe and Japan these figures are rather low (22% and 20%), even lower than in South Korea (31%).
In the US, entrepreneurs enjoy a good reputation. 73% of US citizens questioned in this survey said that they have a favourable image of entrepreneurs. In Europe, at least about half of the population (49%) has a favourable image of entrepreneurs. In China the ratio is only 40%, in Japan (32%) and Korea (30%) even lower.
The richest person in China did get sent to prison: 14 years for stock market manipulation (cant imagine how many hedge fund PMs will be there if people enforce this in every country. personally I think the punishment is severe). Nothing to brag about, but he went there himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Guangyu
The "body double"-stuff is rare and can likely happen in those poor undeveloped regions in China, where money can buy you anything. In better developed regions, the officers won't risk it, unless you are exceptionally "connected" I guess. Medias and Internet are quite good at revealing such scandals in China nowadays, which is why the Chinese government is so afraid of them.
Thanks for the links. They were interesting. Two comments:
1) The survey was taken amongst urban inhabitants: "...this sample covered 115,000,000 of the 615,000,000 urban inhabitants..." Which of course leaves the roughly 704 million rural residents unsampled. I don't fault the survey process; it's clear what they're after and they were transparent with the process. But it's difficult for me to say that this is representative of a whole country when clearly the sample was taken of the urban side only. (Of course, urbanization is expanding in China but my point still stands). Also, note that the actual survey has a question asking about locality (metro/urban/rural)). I'm assuming this was skipped for the Chinese respondents. Rural respondents might have been even more enthusiastic in their response to these questions, but I doubt it; most folks that I meet from rural areas don't have that kind of mentality.
2) "Trying asking about it in a better Chinese university." This underlines my point. Many well known (i.e. "successful") startups in the US are founded by people that have went to Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, etc. but this isn't a pre-req for being a tech entrepreneur (or any type of entrepreneur for that matter). There's a number of notable entrepreneurs that didn't go to college or finish that have found success. Why should it matter that I go to a better Chinese university? Further, the better the Chinese university the less representative that individual is of the overall population; those individuals are highly selected based on their Gaokao test scores (and possibly their family connections).
I was overly optimistic with the assessment of my university (Ningda). It's not even in the third tier according to this standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_985
I think it's cool that you know 985 :-) 985 is like Tier 1.5, so they are already decent comparing to the other 2000+ universities in China. But I never heard about "Ningda"...
Most common rural guys I know want to be a boss deep in their hearts, but they are less likely to reveal that to a foreigner. Chinese people are quite shy about their dreams. On the other hand, it is probably better to ask this question in urban regions. If someone goes to a Texas farm and ask their opinions on founding Internet Startups, probably the answers won't be very encouraging as well.
One thing I like about the Gaokao (University Entrance Exam) system: it is good for one thing - the family connections matter less than in US for this matter. As long as your score is impressive enough, you are in Tsinghua / Peking.
Take a look at the President of China (Hu Jintao). He has no family background at all (surprise), and got into the best university by his own efforts. But we only heard media fussing about Obama being the American Dream.
"Though his father owned a small tea trading business in Taizhou, the family was relatively poor. His mother was a teacher and died when he was seven, and he was raised by an aunt. Hu's father was later denounced during the Cultural Revolution, an event that (together with his relatively humble origins) apparently had a deep effect upon Hu, who diligently tried to clear his father's name.[6]"
People who studied Chinese Politics 101 knows the de facto ruling authority of China is a group of 9 persons:
and after Mao and Deng, no one has such power to overwhelm the other eight. Talk to a Chinese about Hu being a dictator and he wil laugh. (Yes, the Communist Party is dictating, but there are ~80 million people in it. No, I am not one of them. Actually I find it a bit scary that almost all of the smartest young people I know are now in it, and they are not naive teens - most of them are i-bankers / phds in top WallSt firms and US universities. Think about what will happen in 20 years).
Interesting enough, all of the 9 persons has no connections as well (except for the newly elected and soon-to-be-president Xi, who is the son of a former Vice-Premier. China is following the same path as every other developed country). What's more interesting: they are all Engineers. Shocking fact: China is a country running as a machine (at least at the highest level). Engineers couldn't care less about the people, but you can bet the country surely "move fast and break things". China = Crazy Startup (and yes, employees do suffer. No talk of democracy in companies). Consider this: if China is really so deeply corrupted, how come it is also developing so fast?
Eventually the lawyers and businessmen will take over and people will talk about China being the "largest democracy". Good thing for the people. I am not sure whether it will be good for the country. Aren't the people more important than the country? Or not? Tough question. I think it depends on the development stage.
TL;DR: The Chinese system is bad for the people. But it works well for the country. China is very corrupted in some sense, and highly effective in another sense.
Kinda off topic, but if you are from USA, you are a United States citizen, american is anybody who is born on the continental america (north, central and south).
I have never heard anybody, anywhere, ever, refer to somebody from the North or South American continents, who is not a US citizen as an "American". "The Americas" commonly refers to both continents, but I've never heard anybody call a non US-citizen "American". Where is this a common usage?
From what I've found its really only from predominantly Spanish speaking university students in South America.
It also ignores most colloquial usage of the terms America and American in English. While technically correct, it is unlikely to occur. Americans are citizens of the United States of America. Just as Mexicans are citizens of Estados Unidos Mexicanos. But we shorten them to Mexicans as well.
Its more useful in either case to just list your nationality in either case. Unless people seem to want to identify with an Italian name for both continents I don't see where getting all up in arms over Americans referring to a citizen of the US. USian is an alternative, but lets be honest, it rolls off the tongue horridly and is unlikely to catch on.
This mostly tends to come from people who have nationalistic quibbles, and who want to propose alternate "I will force a name onto you that expresses my attitude toward your country" schemes.
Also, it's an unsolvable problem, because there is no part of "United States of America" that is technically unique. It's not the only nation on the American continents, and it's not the only nation whose official name includes "United States" (Mexico does as well).
Technically correct, but I guess it depends on context, both cultural and conversational. In the UK for example, "America" and "American" always refer to US not the continent, unless there's specific context surrounding it to suggest otherwise. I believe that's generally the case in the US as well, and I suspect (but could be wrong) in most countries?
I think it's technically incorrect, actually. In standard English, American is the demonym used to refer to citizens of the USA.
People seem to make a number of wrong assumptions on that, including 1) it can't also be the demonym for anyone else and 2) other countries can decide another countries demonym in their native language. Both of these things are patently false. If someone wants to use American to refer to a member of the Americas (continents) then they certainly can, but they should include enough context to disambiguate. Moreover, other nations don't decide what a nation gets to call itself in its native language. We call ourselves Americans -- so we are Americans. If other countries don't like that, well, tough for them.
Go anywhere and the planet and tell people you're 'American' and not one of them will think you meant Brazil, or Canada, or anything other than the United States.
In the USA they just buy the way out of the system - I mean look at all the people in prison for the default swaps and banking scandals. Oh wait, there aren't any.
There are various tiers in the intelligence of criminals.
Tier 1: Get caught. Go to jail.
Tier 2: Get caught. "Fix" the legal progress in your favor. Don't go to jail.
Tier 3: Bribe the people doing the enforcement. Don't get caught, because there is no one to catch you.
Tier 4: Bribe the people doing the law writing. Don't get caught, because you aren't doing anything "wrong" (technically speaking).
Tier 5: Buy out the mass media, so that no one thinks there is anything wrong about what you are doing any more. The clueless voter who lives from the juices of the media mogul is the tier 5 criminal's best friend.
IMO, most of the global financial system is somewhere between tier 4 and 5, with a bit of 3 (recruiting away the SEC regulators to big iBanks). Thankfully we still have a relatively free press in the US, so even if there is some lockdown there is a lot of ability to get alternative information.
We have a weird situation in the US right now in that lots of information is available via the alternative press, etc., but none of it seems to matter during election time, in which the major parties and major media vehicles seem to be the only important aspects in pushing past the 50% mark, which is the defining feature of our democracy.
Thankfully we have the ability to operate presses fairly freely, but these little presses don't seem to matter all that much when it comes to fending off the thieves. I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves a large number of people working together to build a system that is better than the current one.
I saw this story on Reddit yesterday. Really disappointed to see it here today, and even more disappointed to see such a cynical, shallow comment at the top of the page here, just as on Reddit.
That's a pretty loaded statement. Your implication is that the credit default swap industry is rife with fraud but it'd be helpful to be more specific about what that fraud is, who committed it, and why they're not receiving an appropriate punishment.
My favorite of all-times bad-guy is Mr. Kenneth Lay, founder of Enron, supposedly RIP. Supposedly because the story of his death is crazier than most A. Christie's books.
So there's literally not a shred of evidence of anything being weird about his death except for the fact that it was good timing?
Maybe, just maybe, watching your life crumble and dealing with the guilt and shame of a conviction was a huge source of stress and caused a heart attack?
Nah, you're right, he's probably drinking Mojitos on a beach in South America and chuckling over all the suckers he fooled.
That is because prison is not the punishment for most of those offenses. Before you say shit about the U.S. judicial system, you should learn something about it.
SEC and FTC violations are civil offenses. The punishment for civil offenses are fines. Plenty of firms and higher-ups have paid fines.
Jail time only applies in cases where deliberate fraud is proven to have occurred. We all know that the finance guys were too reckless in their pursuit of profits. But recklessness is not a crime (and indeed, the only crime in the U.S. system for which "recklessness" is relevant is manslaughter/murder).
I like (as in don't like) how that's the excuse for every counter example. Just like how Martha Stewart only went to jail because she didn't play golf with the right people.
Agreed. Great wealth and connections didn't seem to help Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon (a billionaire) avoid prison for insider trading. Or Rajat Gupta. Or the ~60 other wealthy hedge fund managers and their associates who have been convicted in the investigation. (Or, for that matter, Michael Milken.)
In 1980s hundreds of banksters went to jail in loans&savings scandal. US went to the dogs:
1. Militarily: terrorism as tactics is just effective (especially cost-effective). US looks like it is trying to kill a fly using a machine gun. Good luck!
2. Politically: corrupt to the core. As weak as never before.
3. Economically: capitalism is really not about being in debt. It is about capital accumulation via savings. Currently, the US is the biggest debtor in the History of the World. 600% gdp - that's our total debt.
The article says he paid 67.5 million in fines to settle a securities fraud lawsuit brought by the SEC. It was a civil lawsuit, so the penalty if he lost (instead of settled) would have been a fine.
The criminal case was dropped because a grand jury would not indict after 2 years debating the issue.
The settlement has nothing to do with the criminal case.
And in the other case of the "low-level countrywide loan officer".. the level of fraud detailed in your link goes far and beyond the fraud occurring in the mortgage industry at the time. He had countrywide issue 38million in fraudulent loans, of which 8.7million went into his own bank account.
>We all know that the finance guys were too reckless in their pursuit of profits. But recklessness is not a crime (and indeed, the only crime in the U.S. system for which "recklessness" is relevant is manslaughter/murder).
Perhaps this is a facet of law that people should lobby to get changed. The kind of wanton disregard shown by the finanical sector during the recent meltdown damn well should be a crime, if it isn't already.
Does it also mean people who bought houses way out of their price range in hopes of selling them to the next fool and took out huge home equity loans and blew it on vacations and luxuries and then defaulted on their loans and by this contributed to the following economic crash - should they go to jail too? They were reckless without doubt.
I also submit it was reckless to provide mass government guarantee for subprime loans - after all, they are subprime for a reason, due to very high default risk, and when this risk materialized - and it had to materialize sometime unless whoever evaluated these loans as subprime was wildly mistaken - taxpayers were on the hook for these loans. Should people who supported FNM and FMA operations go to jail for that?
I'm afraid we'd end up jailing a real lot of people, including a lot of politicians, if we go this road. And if it would produce any negative consequences, we'd also have to jail whoever proposed such laws - as it would be deemed reckless to propose it...
If recklessness while driving is a crime by it's self.
There are plenty of other examples, but many of these people went well past recklessness into fraud. EX1: If you setup a deal, know it's terrible and bet your own money that it will fail while advising your clients to do the deal with their money then your committing fraud. EX2: If your training documents tell people to commit fraud then your directly culpable.
In my opinion rechlessness is necessary to bring society forward. This behavior induces change to the system and breaks the status quo. Sure, this has often bad consequences, but daring to break the status quo should be generally rewarded, and only regulated in cases where the negative impact on society gets too extreme/long term.
Do whatever the hell you want with your own money (set fire to it, if you feel like it), but if you're trusted with other people's money, you shouldn't be "reckless". It's not a video game that you can return to last "saved" point before your ridiculous adventures if they prove to be wrong.
It does not, but in order to foreclose you state, under risk of perjury, that the details are right.
I've been following foreclosure stories for a while. The DAs are willfully asleep - hundreds of thousands of perjuries have been committed and documented, tens of thousands have been confirmed by the perjuring entity (as in this case), but the legal system is not interested in pursuing justice. Read Deninger's "The Market Ticker" or ZeroHedge for (almost daily) specific details.
Usually a perjury charge requires that you know the truth and tell a lie, knowingly and willingly. I'm not sure where negligence comes into it, but I think you'd have to prove WF knew their filings were wrong, as opposed to just careless. Also, it's rare to prosecute for perjury when the defendant volunteers the new version, as that would discourage past liars from ever coming forward with the truth.
In other news, I amended my tax return a few years ago. I do not generally refer to that event as the time I committed perjury.
> Usually a perjury charge requires that you know the truth and tell a lie, knowingly and willingly. I'm not sure where negligence comes into it, but I think you'd have to prove WF knew their filings were wrong, as opposed to just careless
Foreclosures are different, and for a good reason. One of the statements you make (similarly to DMCA takedowns) is something along the lines of "I have done my due diligence, and I assert under risk of perjury that the info contained below is correct."
If your bad foreclosure (or DMCA takedown) is taken to court, you should be able to prove that a mistake happened in spite of your due diligence.
Unlike amended taxes, or patent infringement, the results of an unjustified foreclosure might be fatal and essentially irrecoverable for the foreclosed party.
> Also, it's rare to prosecute for perjury when the defendant volunteers the new version, as that would discourage past liars from ever coming forward with the truth.
No truth was volunteered willingly here. They are challenged in court every day, and often shown to be fraudulent! After a lot of these, they went back to revise.
It is rare to prosecute when someone corrects themselves with a good excuse.
It is not rare to prosecute when someone admits perjury with no good explanation (and really, you should look into it, e.g. on Deninger's market ticker - the only explanation here is greed, which is not good enough). Unless you are a big bank.
> In other news, I amended my tax return a few years ago. I do not generally refer to that event as the time I committed perjury.
Perjury requires, as you stated, making a knowingly wrong statement. (Will does not enter the equation, only knowledge). If you knowingly filed a fraudulent tax return - then, yes, you have possibly committed perjury - but unless you are already on the IRS' sight, not much is likely to happen.
Of course there's a reason. Regulation is deeply captured http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture (reading this article and all the examples in it, some of them very recent, will be an eye opener if you are not familiar with them. Or cause you to put an SEP field over the whole thing because it looks too crazy to be true)
People are not generally angry at "the rich," but rather the fat leaches on the govt and financial sectors. I've not heard anyone complaining about the self-made man.
Ok. I'm Canadian, so all US law blurs together to me (especially since in Canada, criminal law is under the sole jurisdiction of the federal government).
Quoting from a recent post[1] on a law professor blog regarding the relationship between the states and the federal government on criminal matters:
"...[T]he states and the federal government are not exactly co-equals in the criminal law sphere. The states have general police powers while the federal government has limited powers; the states inherited the common law while the federal government must enact statutory offenses."
Well, in Canada all criminal prosecutions happen at the provincial level -- the Federal government defines the criminal law, but the Provincial governments are responsible for the "administration of justice".
Which can make things interesting when the governments don't agree on whether something should be illegal or not...
There is US Federal criminal law, and then there are the criminal laws of each of the 50 US States. Federal crimes are usually more serious (like espionage), but sometimes are just a matter of federal courts being the most appropriate venue (like copyright).
There are some standards that are widely applied across the states (like the MPC, some model jury instructions), and obviously the legal issues are very similar, but there are definitely major important differences between the states; for instance, groping a 17 year old in Alabama might be an aggravated sexual battery crime, but doing the same thing in Oregon might be a basic sexual assault.
In the United States, a US Attorney with the political will and backing could convict virtually any citizen.
One broad statute is honest services fraud. Basically, if you have a fiduciary duty to someone and commit an act that could reasonably be expected cause economic harm, you've committed a felony.
There are many other laws that could be used to lock up many bankers, assuming the will existed to do so.
In China, financial fraud is punishable by death. It is at once crude and effective. The subprime bubble may never have ever occurred if the perpetrators knew they would literally be risking their lives.
In that case why can jaywalkers be charged with the crime of reckless endangerment in the US without anyone killed, or hurt?
Reckless endangerment in Nevada occurs when someone allegedly "neglects any duty imposed by law in willful or wanton disregard of the safety of persons or property." So if a police officer believes that you were deliberately jaywalking in a careless way that could hurt someone else, you may face reckless endangerment charges.
If no death or substantial bodily harm results from an alleged act of reckless endangerment in Nevada, the charge will be a gross misdemeanor carrying up to $2,000 in fines and/or up to one year in jail.
Do you have a list of "candidates" that are willing to go to jail for a certain price?
Or would you get a client first, then try to find someone who looks like them, and then offer the person some amount of money to go to jail?
Both seems tricky, the 2nd one if the body double is not reliable they can go to the cops and everything falls apart.
The thing is, in China being rich and powerful usually means being connected to the upper echelons of the government and military. It's not as risky if you can tell the second guy "...either way, keep your mouth shut or all your organs will be in different people by the end of the week."
So, where is this special country where the rich do no use their wealth to manipulate justice, what ever justice actually is? The rich always have done, do so now, and always will. China is nothing special.
I'm a Chinese and I'm sure that such things are very much possible in China. It's even worst in smaller cities since the media there is even more "unopened". Thanks to the fast growing of Internet usage in China(the only trustworthy media in China), things are getting a little better in the past ten years or so.
Yeah, but there it was justified as a way to raise funds for ruinously expensive wars at a time where most alternative methods of fundraising like issuing debt or debasing currency (Continentals, greenbacks) had already been tapped to the hilt. And buying your way out was expensive - IIRC, the Civil War fee was like $300, and I don't even know what that'd be equivalent to today ($30,000?).
Because the people demand a win in the court against the rich and powerful.
Once the verdict is out, the people are happy.
Give a few months to a year give or take, the people will forget what happen (temper goes down), the rich is out but not necessary in plain sight everyday (semi-hiding), and the body double is in the prison.
As a Chinese whom know a lot of real dark side of this country, I must say this report is just a joke. There may be 10 or 20 cases in the whole China for a decade, but exaggerating to that level is just a joke. Maybe people want to see this kind of story.
sad. i have a theory that this happens for entrance examinations and things like SATs. i sometimes see these morons getting into good schools like harvard from china. take for instance bo xi lai's son.
It would be naïve to think that the USA (I'm picking on the USA because I am an American citizen) is the perfect country. I haven't lived in other countries long enough to be able to compare, but I /can/ compare the experience between China and the US and it makes me grateful to be a US citizen.
The truth is, there is no real comparison between China and the US: I get questions about corruption in the US all the time and I always answer that there /is/ corruption in the US but not in the endemic/pervasive way that we see it in China. The media is more open than in China, the government process is more transparent.
My business partner and I are in the middle of doing a training/internship (simple LAMP application development) for students at a local university. This isn't a top tier university: it's a third-tier university in the capital of one of the poorest regions in the country. There's a lot of potential here but when we asked people if they had any aspirations to entrepreneurship, we mostly get a 'no'. The lack of mobility for the common person is evident here.
No matter what the US's failures are what it has that the Chinese system (note that I didn't say government, because some of the issues here are cultural) doesn't have is "opportunity". There's a lot of unrealistic optimism here amongst college-age students (i.e. "I can do it if I try.") but there is a dark understanding that this is severely limited by what is available to them after they graduate. It's actually really sad: people here are in love with pieces of paper that 'qualify' you for a job. But with an overabundance of college graduates (in a system where cheating is normal), the value of a college degree is lessened. So you have a huge population of mid-20's that paid large sums of money for degrees that are largely worthless (i.e. the degrees didn't fulfill the better life that they promised).
China has aspirations to be the world's best, but it won't be until it can find a way to empower its own people.