In the U.S., we usually take our protests to the ballot box and not into the streets

Man, when the Japanese decide they’re mad at a corporate executive, they don’t mess around.

Carlos Ghosn, chairman of global auto giant Nissan, thought he was arriving in Tokyo for a business meeting. Instead he wound up in jail, charged with underreporting his compensation.

Man, when the French decide they’re unhappy with government policy, they’re not nice and polite about it. A proposal to hike a gas tax has been met with full-on rioting sufficient to make the government back down.

Americans watch these events unfold with a mixture of curiosity and maybe a little admiration. Why don’t we do stuff like that in this country?

In the Ghosn case, Americans wonder, why don’t we see more corporate executives in this country doing the perp walk?

With the French situation, they wonder some more, how is it our fights over subjects like taxes don’t deteriorate into widespread mayhem and property destruction? Aren’t we the ones with the reputation for violence and gunplay?

Those are questions worth pondering, because they come up every time there are major stories like these, either in the United States or abroad or both.

The Ghosn case revived questions loudly voiced in this country during the financial crisis and ensuing recession of a decade ago. Why, many Americans asked, weren’t banking executives going to jail for their role in creating the disaster?

Here’s the answer, unsatisfactory to many though it might be. We do send executives to jail for criminal behavior like fraud.

Enron’s Jeff Skilling just got out of prison. Martha Stewart did five months in federal prison for lying to investigators about an insider trading case. Elizabeth Holmes could be facing jail time if she’s convicted of wire fraud charges in connection with the blood-testing company she started, Theranos.

But corporate executives have multiple ways of avoiding a trip to the pokey, and it’s not just the expensive legal help they have.

The corporation, not the executive, often faces the charges for misbehavior and pays the fine. The people who set the policies or who were supposed to be monitoring what was going on aren’t touched, and won’t be so long as they can maintain plausible deniability.

That term is important to keep in mind because it helps explain why indictments of corporate executives are comparatively rare. We don’t indict people for being bad at business. That excuse provides effective cover for a multitude of sins.

It kept a lot of dot-com-era execs out of confinement. Were we defrauding people by raising, then burning through, millions of dollars of capital to fund business models that had no hope of turning a profit? Why of course not! We were just inexperienced, naïve, overly optimistic, in over our heads. That’s not illegal — is it?

As for executives of the big banks, Wall Street investment firms, ratings agencies, wholesale housing finance companies and regulators, were they defrauding investors, borrowers and the American public by creating mortgage securities they didn’t understand, lowering loan standards to non-existence and failing at the core job of managing risk?

They might have been greedy, arrogant, negligent and not nearly as bright as they fancied themselves — good luck getting them to admit even to that — but crooks? Oh no, certainly not that!

Americans are no strangers to civil unrest, with causes ranging from the trivial (our hometown team won, or lost, some game) to the consequential. They’re also quite familiar with the idea of taxpayer protests and revolts.

But French-style strikes and physical action over taxes is a rarity in the United States, more a relic of history books (the Boston Tea Party, the Whiskey Rebellion) than current affairs. When tax revolts occur in this country they tend to play out at the ballot box, not on the streets.

On occasion voters have said “enough” and “no” to increased taxes, even in Washington.

The most recent example came with the rejection of Initiative 1631 and its efforts to raise energy prices. The governor has signaled he wants a focus on the same issues in the next legislative session, although as yet there’s no sign of I-1631’s more objectionable features, including higher energy costs for consumers and businesses and a giant state-controlled slush fund for “green” projects.

The trick is finding the tipping points at which voter attitudes tumble from approval to indifference to outright hostility.

A legislative increase in this state’s gas tax a few years ago raised barely a ripple with voters. But that was in a period with low gasoline prices, and the public could see something tangible in return for what it was paying. Try suggesting an income tax (again) and the reaction is likely to be more robust.

For all the references to pitchforks and tar and feathers as expressions of public outrage at corporate executives or tax increases, in the United States those tend to be metaphorical, the stuff of political cartoons rather than street action.

It might be a better way than how the rest of the world handles such matters, it might be worse, but it is, for the time being, just the way things work around here.

This story was originally published December 15, 2018 at 7:00 PM.