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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

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That would be like showing up for the battle of Kursk with an M18 battalion. Might go well at first, you might score some big flashy wins, but....ugh... things are gonna get worse as the party goes on and it's generally an ill advised strategy.

Rico as written and enforced walks right up to the limit of constitutionality in a dozen ways. It's built for speed. It's never really been thrown into a knock down drag out legal action between titans on equal footing (i.e. a bigco legal team, potentially helped by other bigcos). It might survive nominally but it probably won't come out the other end in serviceable condition. You might win a few but eventually an appeal will find its target and end your day.

I say go for it. Heads I win. Tails you get RICO reform.

I’d be ok with civil asset forfeiture for corporate officers

Are you serious? That sort of inequality under the law for people we don't like is literally how we got here, both in terms of civil asset forfeiture as it currently exists and all the precedents that bigco legal teams can leverage to make the law apply differently for them.

"I'd be ok with civil asset forfeiture for drug traffickers/dealers"

-The 1980s equivalent of you

We can’t have a death penalty for corporations (because economy and jobs and too big to fail) so there needs to be something to put the fear of god into them.

And when CAF is found to be too draconian for rich people maybe there will finally be the political will to do away with it totally.

This seems like a grand proclamation rather than a curious conversation-starter about the specific case the article is about. The guidelines have different ways of asking us to avoid this kind of comment.

Please don't fulminate...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It would make all the difference if the comment included some commentary on why Antitrust law is inadequate in this case and how RICO would be likely to enable a better outcome.

Shouldn't be hard with the obvious circular investing and... oh yeah... the poaching emails between Steve Jobs and Eric at Google back in the day, along with emails revealed during a discovery phase where big tech CEOs were agreeing to act in each other's interests as if they were one big family of companies; it's just physics, afterall

But everyone was making tons of money due to ZIRP trickle down no one cared then

>Under the law, the meaning of racketeering activity is set out at 18 U.S.C. § 1961. As currently amended, it includes:

It lists plenty of crimes, but anti-trust violations isn't one of them.

Also, obligatory https://web.archive.org/web/20170301062028/https://www.popeh...

See specifically sections "Wait. Isn't the defendant the enterprise?" and "So what's "racketeering activity"?"

Seems like that's just for protesters.

"It's never RICO"--Popehat

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