DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

The Criminalisation of American Business

30th August 2014

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WHO runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

A variant of this, polished to a fine art by Willy Brown while he was Speaker of the California legislature, is to introduce a bill that would destroy a company’s business, and then withdraw it once one’s campaign coffers had been adequately ‘topped up’ by the potential victim(s).

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