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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsReuters’s Chesapeake Energy drumbeat: Internal emails scheming to lower bids on drilling rights
Reuters has no difficulty finding experts to quote on how this is a slam-dunk antitrust case, including a former Justice Department lawyer who calls it a smoking H-bomb. This is textbook anticompetitive behavior (emphasis mine):
Full post: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/reuterss_chesapeake_energy_dru.php?page=all
Overseas
(12,121 posts)salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)This is the company whose hydrofracking operations have been called a Ponzi scheme in the NYT.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)colluding to lower bids on drilling rights, and etc.
This is contemporary capitalism, a monumental joke. And these corrupt assholes lecture the rest of us on the value of "competition," on moral hazard, on the rational function of the market. Meanwhile, at every turn they seek to avoid competition through monopoly or outright collusion; they engage in robbery, deception, theft; they make good and sure that there is no market, that they control the price function through fraud.
Oh, they'll come back with the "bad apples" defense. But the truth is that there is no free market, and never has been. Just criminals and fraudsters gaming anyone they can, whether by exploiting their labor power or through brazen corruption - and this for as long as capitalism has been called that. There has been no late-breaking devolution into criminality. Capitalism is criminality in its essence.
salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)After all, here we have one company -- Reuters -- doing masterful reporting exposing the corruption at the heart of Chesapeake Energy. Is Reuters a criminal organization? I don't think so. Not everything about capitalism stinks, just the way corporations have become enshrined and gained de facto control over the system in the U.S. and elsewhere.
And mind you, I say this as a socialist.
Arctic Dave
(13,812 posts)That way they can do as the want.
Response to salvorhardin (Original post)
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