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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand how market regulators allow this.

The US government is literally for sale. Businesses know that this window is limited and are executing antitrust manuvers left and right while they can.

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the window is un-limited so there is not rush. the government has been for sale for a long time and will continue to be so regardless of who is “running the country”

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yes

> the government has been for sale for a long time

The government has been under significant influence of corporations for a long time: this is true. But now bribes are being accepted unabashedly. Presumably, hopefully, this won't last beyond the current administration. To equate the two is dishonest.

Can you tell me the last US president to accept literal bars of gold and jumbo jets from foreign monarchs? Or the last one who ran a crypto coin, pardoned a crypto billionaire who he claimed not to know?

how is that different than say this? - https://www.npr.org/2016/06/12/481718785/clinton-scandals-a-...

I can list other Admins as well if necessary? Trump insanity is public though, maybe we like our corruption more private, is that it?

You seem to have a problem with, for starters, differences of scale. All corrupt politicians should be prosecuted, and we have had our fair share. All politicians are not equally as corrupt, and the differences in the levels of corruption are staggering.

how do you measure this? by number of clickbait-y articles you get fed inside your echochamber? or is there a more scientific scale by which we measure corruption that I can educate myself on?

An imprecise, but workable start might be to count the dollar amounts in question and evidence of direct conflict of interests. In both, the current administration has far exceeded previous ones. As others have pointed out, the degree and magnitude of corruption matters. While all corruption is problematic, there is a vast difference between bribes of billions of dollars vs a few thousand.

Or, if you prefer, you can count the number of times a president has pardoned someone he openly says he doesn't know anything about. At least the previous presidents tried to make up a plausible sounding reason.

re-read your own comment and then question just how silly the argument you are making is. starting from the bottom, you are saying it was better before when President made an effort to lie about shit they did.

then you are talking about counting dollar amounts as if we have access to bank accounts and shit to check these “dollar amounts” to see who stole more (we don’t but I am sure you can find some stories about some made up numbers and go “here, Trump this, Clinton that, Trump > Clinton - boom)

And my fav, the “degree and magnitute” is the shit, that is also something we can scientifically measure LOL. I am left-leaning centrists, most of my friends are right-leaning and for the AOC is more corrupt than Trump so you know, whatever world you live in will define “degree and magnitude”

Under current DoJ antitrust guidelines, there's nothing to stop a future administration from reviewing any anti-competitive actions ignored by the current one as part of an anti-competitive series of actions: https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/applying-merge...

So those businesses either know, or expect, that either:

a) these guidelines will be changed in a way that makes them hard or impossible to revert (i.e. through legislation or a Supreme Court judgement); or

b) there is little risk of a future change of administration.

Or (c) that any future administration is going to have a lot of more pressing concerns that will drown out seriously relitigating past mergers and acquisitions, and any concerns they do have will most likely be mollified with agreed remedies that sacrifice far less than the value of doing the merger.

Very few administrations do everything they theoretically could under the law and their own guidelines (even the ones that also do lots that violates both.)

I don't think future administrators would enforce laws retrospectively and thereby dent their business friendly image in the process.

A quick google search indicates the average tenure of a CEO is ~7 years.

I wonder if there should be a c) There is a lack of meaningful planning beyond the current status quo.

Well there's also a c) - Whatever they get away with now they will have in pocket, and whatever penance they will have to do with a future administration will take years and years of legal back and forth to actually pan out, by which time it will be watered down so any fine will dwarf the profits made during this period.

Also, if they manage to reach "too big to fail" status by that point, whatever punishment will be nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

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