Justice system unbalanced in dealing with white-collar crime

By Dale Woodard - Lethbridge Herald on January 15, 2022.

Raining money down on just a few causes so many to drown.
Larry Elford, the author of Farming Humans, his second book, was the guest speaker at the weekly Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs online session Thursday.
Elford reflected on his two-decade financial career as well as the tricks and tactics used by those who profit from harming others, suggesting some of the unique features of white-collar crime are worth looking at, as they shed light into some key problems faced in today’s world. 
Elford also spoke of the causes and effects, which largely have been left out of the public discourse, problems which include inequality in systems of finance, justice, politics and resulting side effects, not only globally, but also here through a vast increase in drug dependency, homelessness and people dying on the streets. 
“We cannot arrest our way out of this problem in my view because we don’t arrest anybody at the top that causes the problem,” said Elford, a former financial industry insider with two decades of experience in some of the larger firms in the industry. “We can’t arrest the things that are the result of the problem because we absolutely refuse to look upwards.”
Elford likened the situation to a dollar store flashlight that only shines downward.
“I turn it upward and it quits working and the justice system is somewhat like that,” he said. “Some of the interest in catching people kind of wanes when you have to catch people who are much more powerful than you and much more influential than the people doing the policing. So justice does not go up as quickly and easily as it goes down.”
Elford laid out the steps in gaining the financial upper hand.
“First, capture the ability in whatever economic game we’re playing, give me the ability to create the money.”
Elford said step two is capturing the power and step three is tilting the playing field to purchase whichever rules and laws and the elected representatives of the public, those connected to the public money and power. 
“Those are the first to get the ability to create the money, then create the rules and then rig those rules for the next 100 years for the benefit of private parties and at trillions of dollars of cumulative harm to society,” he said. “So we wonder why there’s a guy sleeping on the sidewalk in the cold today in a Canadian winter and in fact that person cannot even picture having the ability to afford the cost of living when some people are raining trillions of dollars down upon themselves.
“Our streets consist of a different world, a world of economic refugees, people who are, in no way, shape or form connected to the system of money or power creation. They’re completely left out. We label those people and we give them all kinds of terms, some deserved, some undeserved.”
Elford said our wealth circuit has been plugged into our political circuit, so there is little to no interest in prosecuting the crimes of the rich and powerful. 
“The crimes of the rich and the powerful, crimes that are never seen in the media, or very rarely, are a wonderful profit centre for those at the top and the millions of handmade professionals who serve those at the top. There is a class structure there that prevents justice from operating in an upward direction. Not in all cases, but like a law of gravity or something akin to a law of poverty, the light of justice does not shine upward with anywhere near the ease with which it shines down upon people who are weak and defenseless.”
As such raining money on just the few causes so many to drown, said Elford.
“When we create a game which encourages the destruction of the exchange of much of the world’s resources for little green pieces of paper, there are a lot of people who are not in the business of creating little pieces of paper or can’t do it easily. They end up drowning in a higher cost of living in such a world.”
Elford said we put water wings on children before tossing them in a swimming pool.
“But we don’t say it’s going to make them weak and we should let them drown,” he said. “We actually try to keep their heads above water and we’re not doing that in today’s society.
“The game works because first we capture the money, then we capture the political power and the people who are public servants and then they can rig the rules in the favour of the richest people and you repeat or cheat that game until someone is a trillionaire.”

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