There is no doubt that such prosecutions will be very popular to a large section of voters, given that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley, along with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren pretty much have declared that nearly all American businesses are part of a massive criminal conspiracy that must be brought down by federal authorities.

Within the next year, we should expect to see mid-level business and finance executives doing "perp walks" in front of the news media, as federal prosecutors will charge them with various "economic crimes" in hopes that they will implicate their superiors. All of us by now know the drill and in a time of anemic economic growth complete with business failures, it won't be hard to find scapegoats.

Everyone Is "Guilty"

When famed civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate published his now-famous book, Three Felonies a Day, it caused quite a stir. Going through a number of very disturbing cases, Silverglate made clear that if federal prosecutors want to target an individual, it is very easy to fashion criminal charges against them.

To prove his point, he noted how the federal prosecutors in New York when Rudy Giuliani was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York regularly played a game in which they would see if various celebrities and others, including Mother Theresa, had broken federal criminal law. The result, unfortunately, was that for each person no matter how good his or her public character, a federal statue existed that would place them in prison.

Being that Giuliani's prosecutors — and Giuliani himself — regularly committed felonies by selectively leaking grand jury information to favored journalists in order to damage the ability of accused people to defend themselves. He also did it to stoke the fires of the anti-business mobs, and these prosecutors were quite familiar with how to fashion the ever-malleable federal statutes to turn ordinary acts into crimes. During the 1980s, when Giuliani was at DOJ, the New York office engaged in a massive show of force against Wall Street firms and other business enterprises in large part to enhance the coming political careers of Giuliani and others who worked under him, and to appease the anti-business Democrats and Republicans who were anxious to declare to roll back what they called the "Decade of Greed."

Is a New Wave of Crackdowns Coming?

Federal prosecution of business figures tend to come in waves. During the Great Depression, prosecutors tried to claim criminal behavior by businessmen was responsible for the lengthy economic downturn. During the 1980s, Wall Street rivals of Michael Milken and others who challenged the established financial firms were the quiet-but-effective engine of prosecution, combining their political connections with Giuliani's ambition to nearly destroy the alternative capital funding machine that was overturning the corporate status quo with new startups and shakeups of existing firms.

Because Milken had become wealthy through his financial dealings, he became the symbol of "greed" by the Democratic Left, which at that time was facing a loss of influence during the Ronald Reagan years and was desperate to regain its former status of America's "conscience." Going after Milken mollified both the Left and the Republican establishment on Wall Street, as the "old money" firms were happy to see Giuliani eliminate the competition.

After the spectacular failure of Enron and other firms that depended upon Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve System policies of easy money, policies that ended in the Tech Bubble meltdown in 2000 and 2001, the George W. Bush administration went after people like Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and others who had high-profile CEO jobs. In the lynch-mob atmosphere that inevitably follows the bust cycle of Fed-induced business cycles, it was not hard to convince Americans that the corporate bankruptcies and the subsequent recession were the handiwork of criminal executives.