We have all heard the phrase “money can’t buy happiness”, but can it buy a “get out of jail” free card?

Main stream media favors “attention grabber headlines” than a corporate crime. The White House, Congress, and the Department of Justice have not noticed how Wall Street companies are able to break anti-fraud laws over and over again. No one has expressed any outrage. No one seems to care, but this is why you should.

To further examine this topic of corporate greed, I first looked at the article written by Amitai Etzioni, a columnist for CNN, published in February 2011. He talked about how New York Times investigated the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deals with companies who had violated anti-fraud laws.

Companies hire lawyers to help defend their case, often resulting in a settlement contract— a fine in which the company has to pay in order to not have jail time. In that same settlement, it contains a promise not to break the law again. Times notes how this is usually off because the company, “after all, was merely promising not to do something that the law already forbids.” Often the same corporations violate the law again — and make the same promise again and again.

A more prominent example is the global-wide bank, Citigroup. According to the Times, Citigroup agreed last month to pay $285 million to settle civil charges that it had defrauded customers during the housing bubble. The SEC made the company promise that it would never violate one of the main anti fraud provisions of the law again. This was one year after Citigroup broke that very same antifraud statue in 2010. Before that, they broke that promise again in 2006.

The Times found 51 cases over the past 15 years in which 19 Wall Street firms broke anti-fraud laws they had promised not to break.

What happens if a medium to small size company breaks one of these anti-fraud laws? That company would face hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt plus potential jail time.

What happens if a Wall Street company breaks an anti- fraud law? Nothing.

The director of the Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson, pointed out earlier this year the widespread fraud involved in the mortgage scandals. Despite corporations having hired people to forge thousands of signatures, “not only has nobody gone to jail, but there haven’t even been any criminal prosecutions. Literally zero under the Obama administration.”

When a case makes the headlines, it usually is about: abortion, gun control, or immigration. These issues tug at the citizens heartstrings. It has an emotional appeal– emotions draws in viewers.

No matter how big or small a company is, if it breaks a law, that company should face a just punishment.

What happened to right and wrong?

I think the purpose of this article is to bring attention to this topic. To stop corporate greed from taking over this country. I hope that more people will open their eyes to the evil going on in the world. The first step to fight the evil is to talk about it.