The Criminalisation of American Business
30th August 2014
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).