17. Friendly Economic Fire, with Frédéric Pierucci & Laurent Cohen-Tanugi

Uncommon Decency

This show has said its piece about Europe's inimical tendency to freeload on everything American, from defense spending to woke historical revisionism. But if there ever was an American Trap, Frédéric Pierrucci knows what it feels like being inside. Hell, he wrote a memoir about it (2019), but the book's title alone can't do justice to what it felt like being locked up behind the freezing bars of a maximum-security prison in Rhode Island. Frédéric was an Alstom senior executive, and his falling into the throes of a late 1970s US law written to combat corporate money laundering is, in his own telling, exclusively explained by General Electric's predatory acquisition of Alstom's power and grid capabilities in 2015, among the world's largest-ever industrial acquisitions. America is waging economic war against its supposed "allies", Frederic argues, and it is high time that we meet fire with fire. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French legal délicatesse at the New York bar, isn't one to throw around terms like "economic war" lightly, but this conversation between them will hopefully awaken others to the harrowing pain that extra-territorial application of economic law can produce. We come in peace, DoJ!

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