U.S. Government Extortion Racket
October 7, 2016
The USG is forcing Och-Ziff, the hedge fund, to pay $412 million to resolve civil and criminal allegations of bribery across Africa. Turns out the United States has a law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that prohibits the use of bribes to foreign officials to get or keep business. Why? Why should that be a crime? And anyway, whether the bribe is legal or not is between the U.S. company and the government of Africa. It is none of the business of the U.S. government. Don’t many U.S. companies and individuals have to pay some government entity in the United States–federal, state, and or local–in order to get or keep business? The USG is a giant extortion racket.
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The Free Society; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest book is The U.S. Proxy War in Ukraine.

