In many ways, Il Trumpe et alia are the culmination of years, if not decades, of the failure to prosecute white-collar crime–looking forward, not back, if you will (boldface mine):

But America’s federal institutions are not the only ones designed to prevent someone like Trump from undermining the Constitution. We have other kinds of institutions, too — legal organs, regulatory bodies, banks — that are supposed to prevent men like Trump from staying in business, let alone acquiring political power. The truth is that many of these equally important American institutions failed a long time ago. Trump is not the cause of their failure. He is the result…

Nearly 40 years ago, in 1980, Trump employed 200 illegal Polish workers to destroy the Bonwit Teller department store, a historic building on Fifth Avenue, to make way for what would become Trump Tower. The men earned half the union wage and worked 12-hour shifts without hard hats; at one point, their contractor stopped paying them. Eventually they sued. In 1998, Trump paid $1.375 million to settle the case.

Trump broke immigration law and employment law, and he violated union rules, too. Yet neither immigration authorities nor employment regulators nor union bosses put him out of business. Why not? Why were the terms of that settlement kept confidential? Why, with his track record, was he allowed to get a casino license? Building permits? Wall Street banks did, it is true, stop lending to him. But when he began looking abroad for cash — doing extremely dodgy deals in Georgia and Azerbaijan, for example — no one stopped him. As Adam Davidson of the New Yorker has written, “So many partners of the Trump Organization have been fined, sued, or criminally investigated for financial crimes that it is hard to ascribe the pattern to coincidence, or even to shoddy due diligence.” But shoddy due diligence usually brings legal consequences. Why wasn’t the company shut down years ago?

…Trump has a record of destroying historic buildings: Why did the federal government allow him to lease the Old Post Office building, now Trump International Hotel Washington? The terms of that lease explicitly forbid any elected official from holding it. Why has that small piece of law been overlooked?

But it’s not just Il Trumpe, but also Paul Manafort too:

Here is a man who is alleged to have declared income as “loans,” concealed foreign bank accounts and lied about money that Ukrainian oligarchs were paying him via shell companies in Cyprus. For decades, in other words, U.S. law enforcement institutions were unable to spot the money-laundering, tax evasion and fraud that his partner Rick Gates spent several hours describing, even when carried out by a prominent person. As long ago as 1985, Manafort’s name featured in Jacob Weisberg’s still-famous New Republic cover story about Roger Stone, then his consulting partner. The headline: “The State-of-the-Art Washington Sleazeball.”

For decades, Manafort’s “political consultancy” has helped crooks and autocrats retain power. But even leaving aside the question of morality: Why wasn’t Manafort put out of business for suspected fraud years ago? Did the police not have the resources? The motivation? Whatever the reason, here, for the optimists and skeptics, is a clear institutional failure: A society allegedly obsessed with “law and order,” so much so that it has the highest incarceration rates in the world, couldn’t be bothered to investigate a famously sleazy man who was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on antique rugs and men’s suits in Northern Virginia.

Meanwhile, Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, is accused of $120 million worth of fraud. Steve Mnuchin, Trump campaign fund raiser and now Treasury Secretary, illegally foreclosed on up to 80,000 homes in California.

The last item provides the clue. The federal prosecutor, Kamala Harris (yes, that Kamala Harris) let Mnuchin walk. Before everyone dogpiles on Harris–though she really does need to address this convincingly if she plans on running for president–Harris’ actions were no different than just about any other prosecutor, Democratic or Republican, in the post-Enron era. For a variety of reasons, they stopped bringing criminal outcomes against lawbreakers, and, instead, focused on monetary damages. In other words, pay a fine–one that would never drive the company out of business and thus discourage the bad behavior–and move on.

Meanwhile, if you’re low-income, or minority, well…

If the Democrats take back the Congress and the presidency in 2021, prosecuting white-collar crime–and white-collar criminals–needs to be a much higher priority. It’s not as sexy as terrorism or the drug war, but the failure to take these crimes seriously affects so many people’s lives for the worse.