13,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: tredition
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The list of economic scandals is extensive and growing. But as long as we fail to recognize the pattern behind all these individual ‘scandals’, both our personal and public awareness become weary. Only when finally the consequences of all those ‘scandals’ become evident, when major floods or heatwaves, financial or other disasters pop up, only then it seems is society ready to wake up. But even then the risk of scapegoating or the longing for a saviour or political charlatan is big.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 271
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
Business Crime – Systemic scandals
Herbert Storn
Business-Crime – Systemic Scandals
On business crime, criminal economics and divided democracy
From the meat industry to money laundering to the automotive industry, from environmental crimes to Cum-Ex to Wirecard, the headlines about criminal practices in the economy are never-ending. All isolated cases, all merely ‘scandals’? Or do these incidents reveal a deeper criminal structure? And is this structure part of our economic order or is it a kind of foreign body that must be combated by the rule of law? Or both? How is it that the state so often fails as a controlling authority? Or does it not fail at all because it does not want to control everything? Or are the criminal practices perhaps even accepted because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? What advantages? For whom?
And how can the left be won over to this question if they already assume that it is the capitalist system that lives from the exploitation of human labour (and nature)? In other words, it is no longer necessary to prove its criminal affinity. And which anyway can only be solved by overcoming the capitalist system. These questions will be explored in this book.
The occasion is the 30th anniversary of Business Crime Control, an organisation that has focussed on these questions. This could serve as a guideline: A criminal economy cannot be tolerated – if the ‘democratic constitutional state’ is not to become an ‘anti-democratic right-wing state’.
Herbert Storn has been an active trade unionist (GEW) for over 30 years, is a board member of ‘Gemeingut in BürgerInnenhand’ and chairman of Business Crime Control. He gains his insights from the active disputes between these organisations and policies that increasingly leave the initiative to private consultancy groups. Their private calculation of returns cannot remain without consequences for the common good, promotes the criminal economy and undermines democracy.
Storn thus builds upon the conclusions from his earlier books: ‘MIT DEMOKRATIE ERNST MACHEN’ and ‘GERMANY FIRST! DIE HEIMLICHE DEUTSCHE AGENDA’ (both only available in German) – also for the overdue ecological transformation.
Prof. Hans See, founder of Business Crime Control
“Globalisation politicians have allowed business crime and organised crime to grow to such an extent that it is necessary to assume a functional underground capitalism and to augment the fight against individual cases in this respect. A criminal economy was able to mature into a complementary system to legal capitalism because neoliberal capital strategists considered the privatisation, de-bureaucratisation and deregulation policies of democratic capitalist states to be insufficient and too slow. Business crime also has competitive advantages that no legal power can offset. As a result, capitalist democracies in particular are suffering devastating material and immaterial damage and are experiencing social Darwinist relapses, the breeding ground for which can only be removed via democratised corporations geared to preventing crime.
This book provides key considerations in this regard.”
Herbert Storn
BUSINESS CRIME
–
SYSTEMIC SCANDALS
On corporate crime, criminal economics and divided democracy
Table of Contents
Cover
Halftitle
Title Page
Copyright
Preface for the English edition
Introduction
30 years Business Crime Control (BCC)
Reflections on the concept of ‘capital-crime’ according to Hans See
Capital-crimes are business crimes
Organised crime and business crime
1. Loss of control and governance in times of crisis
2. A look at the damage caused by business crime - ‘peanuts’?
Waste
Salinisation of rivers, land and drinking water – the role of companies and the state
Money laundering and the criminal property market – a somewhat different damage comparison
Cum-ex/Cum-cum – sheer lunacy
Criminal supply chains – back to slavery?
“Those affected remain fearfully silent and do not dare to go to court …” – warped labour law
Interim conclusion
3. Capital strives for its own law: the inherent affinity for crime
When capital becomes flight capital …
The crossovers between the criminal and the legal economy are fluid
Money laudering
The Wirecard example
4. Divided democracy, divided rule of law
Companies take on a wide variety of roles – which further increases their influence
Example Bertelsmann
Example Bill Gates – his foundation and his influence
Example Larry Fink– BlackRock and its influence
Davos Summit 2021
Systemically important large corporations – more powerful than states
The corona lockdowns brought huge profits for the ‘Big Four from the USA’
The particular increase in power of the financial sector
BlackRock is more than a black rock
Deregulation favours the financial sector
The enormous pressure of capital is almost impossible to contain legally and requires sweeping regulation
The control mechanisms are becoming a problem for the rule of law
5. Divided democracy is also more fiction than reality
The extreme concentration of wealth promotes the further oligarchisation of society
Society’s leading elites emerge from crises richer and with more influence
The wealth debate is not an ‘envy debate’! it is closely linked to the debate about democracy
Our oligarchy lives in its own bubble
Friedrich Merz and that little bit of pension provision
Exemption from gross negligence
Digression on ‘conspiracy theory’
6. Neither democracy nor the rule of law without regulation – new approaches are growing louder
‘Dare economic democracy’
‘Let’s build democracy’
Capital must be regulated according to ethical principles
Democratic rights are more than ‘co-determination’, and certainly more than ‘participation’
Transparency sounds modest – but is a valuable asset
Register of beneficial owners
The 2020 transparency report on ongoing public-private partnerships
Whistleblowers live dangerously
Crime-preventive co- determination
7. Flanking measures for democracy and the rule of law
Are the protection of property and its social obligation compatible?
Privatisation increases the reach of the criminal economy
Privatisation of consulting services
Strengthen the public sector instead of the invisible hand of the market!
Expansion of public goods and their financing
Where is the social obligation of property?
‘Restart’ after corona lockdown? Caution: the wrong term!
Double standards and democracy
8. Do we need disasters for something to change for the better?
Flashback: Fukushima – Chernobyl – Harrisburg
Fascism, the Second World War and the Ahlen Programme of the CDU
Other disasters and resulting political conclusions
Self-destruction in instalments? Wars and arms as profitable capital utilisation
Postscript
Interview with Prof. Hans See
Notes
Business Crime – Systemic scandals
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface for the English edition
Notes
Business Crime – Systemic scandals
Cover
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
On the occasion of the founding of the BCC on 22 March 1991
© 2025
Herbert Storn
Book design:
Wolfgang G. Schneider (trimedia.de)
Published by:
tredition
ISBN Softcover:
978-3-384-41330-7
ISBN E-Book.
978-3-384-41331-4
Printing and distribution on behalf of the author:
tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany
Photo Credit
© Cover:
pixabay.com © MichaelGaida (Detail)
First published in german 2021 (Büchner Verlag, Marburg):
ISBN Print:
978-3-96317-267-0
ISBN eBook:
978-3-96317-807-8
Translated by
Alexander Maisner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed biblio-graphical data is available on the Internet: http://dnb.d-nb.de
Preface for the English edition
Democracy’s decline is being voiced in increasingly rapid succession, especially following publication of Colin Crouch’s book “Post-Democracy” at the beginning of the 21st century.
The present book is for all those not wanting to drown in the wave of disillusionment but rather be encouraged in creating a democratic society where it is not the big corporations that set the rules and the fitting ‘narratives’ to justify them.
The list of economic scandals is extensive and growing. But as long as we fail to recognize the pattern behind all these individual ‘scandals’, both our personal and public awareness become weary.
Only when finally the consequences of all those ‘scandals’ become evident, when major floods or heatwaves, financial or other disasters pop up, only then it seems is society ready to wake up.
But even then, the risk of scapegoating or the longing for a saviour or political charlatan is big.
In this book I raise the question “Do we need disasters for something to change for the better?”. And as one example of disasters and conclusions in the political sphere I refer to the explosion of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in the USA in 1978. Long, long ago – but not in its by-products!
In Russell Mokhiber’s book ‘Corporate Crime and Violence – Big Business Power and the Abuse of the Public Trust’ of 1988 this disaster is described as one of his 36 ‘profiles’, i.e. examples of crimes.
From today’s perspective it seems the consequences drawn in Germany from nuclear disasters worldwide were much more drastic than in the US or the UK:
In Pennsylvania the federal prosecutors cut a deal with the operating company, which ended in a $155,000-fine for the company, a $2,000-fine plus two-years probation for the company’s supervisor and a $100,000 fine for the manufacturer of the reactor.
The cost of cleaning up, repairs and compensation were exorbitant. But as far as the supervising state is concerned, the license to run the plant was not terminated and lasted more than another 40 years until September 2019.
In Germany, by contrast, the combination of the largest German anti-nuclear demonstration up to that time with 100,000 participants against the planned Gorleben reprocessing plant – and the Harrisburg-disaster backdrop – prompted the conservative Minister President of Lower Saxony to declare that the reprocessing plant in Wendland was not politically feasible. And this is still the case today.
And with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s proclaimed pull-out from nuclear power in 2011 it seems like ‘lessons learnt’. The democratic movement needs to experience successes like this at least once in a while!
This book, as the example shows, is not the result of a research project (many of which we certainly need). Nor is it merely a collection of observed irritating scandals.
The author was confronted with many of these ‘scandals’, their narratives and – above all – their devastating consequences during his 35 years in the teachers’ trade-union GEW, teachers’ councils at various schoolboards in the German state of Hesse, and numerous NGOs.
Among those experiences one struck me the most. This was when the city government of Frankfurt am Main was willing to hand over the city’s complete underground-facility (U-Bahn) to anonymous US-corporations for 100 years. Such a long-lasting contract over three generations was necessary to obtain US-tax deductions.
And, on the other side, the city would receive a paltry one-off amount of $100 million. This was called ‘Cross Border Leasing’.
This could only be prevented at the last minute by launching a citizens’ initiative (Bürgerbegehren), averting severe damage to the city’s budget which many German and European cities suffered until this legal construct was ended by US-government legislation in 2004 and declared illegal.
Thus, political activism and theoretical analytical background go hand in hand throughout the book.
The final push came from Prof. Hans See, the founder of Business Crime Control (BCC) on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. (See the interview at the end of the book)
A visit to Hans See’s private library revealed a vast wealth of US books on the subject, 30 years ago: Best known probably, ‘White Collar Crime’ from 1949 by Edwin H. Sutherland, who not only coined the widespread term ‘criminals in suits’, which also creates the respective picture in the mind! Others were John D. Nagle, Alison Mahr, Brian Burrough, Ralph Nader or Michael Waldman. John D. Nagle, who worked for thirty years as Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University, was also a Member of “Business Crime Control” and author of the German variant on Russel Mokhiber‘s “Corporate Crime Reporter”.
And, in 1999, together with Robert Weissman, Russell Mokhiber published “Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy”, which I unfortunately did not know when I wrote my book “Mit Demokratie ernst machen” (Get Serious with Democracy).
Just a glance at some of all these turn-of-the-century books reminded me of two things: First, how little has changed since.
Second, it’s still all the ‘scandals’ that trigger us, not the underlying structure and the systemic approach – unfortunately.
Maybe that will change as the resulting disasters mount.
That’s why I’m grateful to analytical books like Katharina Pistor’s “The Code of Capital” with its sub-title: “How the Law creates Wealth and Inequality” or Johanna Stark’s “Law for Sale”.
They deliver the scientific background for those disinclined to accept the decline neither of democracy nor the rule of law. And scientific background is also needed to blow up all the narratives deployed to justify them in the public domain, as Thomas Piketty revealed in “Capital and Ideology”.
Hopefully, reading the book will serve to reveal the pattern, the economic and legal structure behind those ‘scandals’ and help not only to understand their functioning, but also to finally overcome them.
Herbert Storn
May 8th, 2024
Introduction
“Dirty business – high time for tough measures against financial crime” (FR) “Meat industry – major raid due to illegal contract labour” (manager magazin) “Banks worldwide, including Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, have been involved in money laundering on a large scale in recent years”.
“Mightily uncontrolled – the German financial lobby” (der Freitag)
“When the rent ends up in the Cayman Islands: The housing situation in major cities is becoming increasingly tight, partly because of large investors. According to a study, they often fiddle themselves poor – and hardly pay any taxes.” (SZ) “Money laundering: See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing – dirty money also makes for good business.” (Zeit)
“25 dead due to WilkeWurst? Scandal seems to be spreading dramatically – public prosecutor’s office investigating” (Merkur)
“Markus Braun to remain in prison – The former Wirecard boss suspected of fraud must remain in prison” (FAZ)
“Werra salinisation: A thriller from the hand of a public prosecutor” (FR)
“Kali+Salz: Proceedings closed, but the public prosecutor’s office raises serious allegations in its reasoning” (Hessenschau)
These are just some of the headlines between autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Criminal practices in the economy appear in the media almost incessantly. All isolated incidents, all merely ‘scandals’?
Or do such incidents reveal a deeper criminal structure? And does this structure then belong to our economic order or is it a kind of foreign body that must be combated by the rule of law? Or both?
How is it that the state so often fails as a controlling authority? Or does it not fail at all because it does not want to control everything?
Or are the criminal practices perhaps even accepted because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? What advantages? For whom?
And how can leftists be won over to this question if they assume without question that it is the capitalist system that lives from the exploitation of human labour (and nature)? In other words, it is no longer necessary to prove its criminal affinity, so that only the elimination of the capitalist system promises a solution. All these tasks and problems will be explored below.
The occasion is the 30th anniversary of Business Crime Control, an organisation that has addressed these issues.
We can therefore draw on many years of expertise. And these are by no means just theoretical considerations. After all, the key fundamental questions are: Do we (still) have a rule of law worthy of its name? Are we protected from arbitrariness? Is it fair?
These are existential questions because they touch on basic human needs.
30 years Business Crime Control (BCC)
Hans See has pursued these questions about the systemic nature of business crime and its structural elimination very thoroughly – both theoretically and in practical political terms, the latter by founding Business Crime Control on 22 March 1991 in Hanau.
The 30th anniversary is a good occasion to compare the considerations of that time, which led to the founding of the BCC, with the developments in the meantime and to renew the claim to get business crime out of its marginalised view and to genuinely and seriously combat it not with individual laws, but with an economic democratic reform concept. This is also the aim of this book.
To this end, the systemic nature of the problem, which tends to be ignored by the general public, is emphasised using striking examples that are also discussed by the general public. The same applies to the damage, which goes far beyond that which can be quantified in monetary terms. This ranges from damage to the environmental structure to damage to social cohesion and democracy.
The book takes up the concept of ‘divided democracy’ and extends it to the rule of law, which is in danger of being increasingly subjugated to individual economic interests.
Because analyses alone do not help, proposed solutions are presented in the form of agenda items that should be discussed in critical public discourse. As long as these are avoided by politicians, we need not be surprised by populism and worse. However, it would be downright fatal if it always required disasters to lead us to better insights.
The interview with Hans See at the end of the book, in which the last 30 years are revisited, and the message is renewed, highlights just how topical the arguments put forward are.
Hans See, former professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt am Main, has been critically analysing the classic analytical scheme of the anti-capitalist left since the early 1980s and has turned his attention to the problem of economic crime, which has been neglected by the left as a whole. When his book KAPITAL-VERBRECHEN (CAPITAL-CRIME), written during this period, was about to be finalised, the GDR collapsed under the pressure of a strong protest movement. It was therefore possible to include a chapter on business crime under real, existing socialism in this book.
Shortly after reunification (accession of the former GDR), See met a former Criminal Director of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Dieter Schenk, on a talk show on the Freies Berlin radio station, with whom he founded the first allGerman civil society organisation in the new Federal Republic in March 1991. As it was planned as an international civil and human rights organisation, it was given an internationally understandable name: Business Crime Control (BCC).
Reflections on the concept of ‘capital-crime’ according to Hans See
In See’s academic books, KAPITAL-VERBRECHEN (2nd edition published in paperback after the BCC was founded) and WIRTSCHAFT ZWISCHEN DEMOKRATIE UND VERBRECHEN, the economic criminologist uses the term ‘capital-crime’. Although the spelling clearly indicates that he is referring to breaches of the law committed by the capital side, the traditional way of thinking and the official use of the term were stronger, especially as the dash cannot be spoken. It was intended to replace Sutherland’s term ‘white collar crime’, which had been used until then, but this did not succeed, although it was actually used once as a SPIEGEL title (without reference to See’s book, which had been reviewed in SPIEGEL) and was praised and used by Peter Sloterdijk (and later again by Harald Lesch in one of his television programmes) as particularly accurate.
Capital-crimes are business crimes
The term business crime was intended to make it clear from the outset that it refers to all crimes committed by business. And that the crime committed by dependent employees (unless it is a manager with an employer function) is qualitatively different.
There were reasons to emphasise the criminality of corporations (and those responsible in the boardrooms, including supervisory boards and private supervisory bodies), even if this was not intended to trivialise that of the small selfemployed and SMEs.
In the USA, we now speak of corporate crime, the criminality of large corporations. And their dominance, indeed hegemony, could no longer be convincingly conveyed and criticised by BCC by bundling them together with all sizes and forms of business. The concept of business crime remains of fundamental importance, especially for states with a democratic and constitutional rule of law.
Because behind the global problems of our age – climate change and environmental destruction, social inequality, hunger, global poverty, many diseases that have long been curable, etc. – lie not least business crimes, as will be shown below.
Organised crime and business crime
In one of his first lectures after the founding of BCC, Hans See spoke about the organisation’s mission:
“Rather, BCC wants to revisit the question of democracy – now that the Cold War against Eastern Bloc communism has been won – with a view to the necessary control of the powerful of the free economy and the global economic power ‘capital’. (…) This presents the advocates of a free economy with the very serious question as to whether they consider it capable, i.e. whether they want to expect it in principle to subordinate itself to the democratic laws of a critical and increasingly aware society that demands more social justice and effective environmental protection, as can be demanded of every member of society in a state governed by the rule of law.
It is also about the increasingly important question regarding the democratic capacity of the free economy in general. Because in our economic system, democracy, so highly praised in speeches also by entrepreneurs and their spokespeople, still remains outside the factory gates.”1
The co-determination regulated by law in Germany is not sufficient for this. It is not enough to prevent economic offences.
Nowhere has this become clearer than in the case of the diesel emissions fraud perpetrated by the major car companies, which not only have works councils under the Works Constitution Act and supervisory bodies with employee representatives under the Co-Determination Act, but also – in the case of Volkswagen – state controllers. More traditional co-determination is not possible!
See lamented the cronyism between capital and labour associated with the existing co-determination system.
“Organised crime would have little chance of penetrating the legal economy or gaining influence over it if the latter, i.e. the management responsible for it, were subject to stronger public, above all external, democratic control.”2
This is because the police is generally the wrong address for business crime, as they are simply overwhelmed. Business crime is about structural problems, about the criminal procurement, utilisation or safeguarding of capital.
The difficulty of procuring capital legally is a motive for obtaining it criminally. Under extremely difficult conditions, its utilisation is also becoming more and more socially damaging, making it increasingly necessary to safeguard it – even if this means establishing capital-loving dictatorships.
And beyond criminal law, there are also “crimes in a non-justiciable, moral and socio-political sense.”3
“If capital procurement, capital utilisation and capital security are carried out legally, but with the help of socially harmful, environmentally unfriendly and therefore also inhumane practices, we call them criminal in a moralising sense. This is where the criminal policy debate must begin and the question of ways to prevent or punish such offences must be raised.”4
And given the dominance of globalisation by corporations, it is not presumptuous for Hans See to say that “peace between peoples, human rights and freedoms and the peaceful coexistence of citizens … cannot be permanently secured if the complex, economically criminal causes of social conflicts and ecological disasters are not identified and widely publicised.”5
Later on in the lecture, See then attempts to make a conceptual distinction between business crime and organised crime, while at the same time shedding light on the overlap and mutual pervasion
“From the outset, organised crime aims to serve criminalised needs in order to collect a high-risk premium for what is often a low risk.
Business crime, on the other hand, encompasses offences committed in an economy that is designed from the outset to conduct legal business, but which becomes caught up in the famous pull and spiral effect of business crime as a result of distorted competition, crises, the threat of competition and the obvious competitive advantages of illegal business.”6
See also refers to a report published in the journal “Kriminalistik” in 1990, in which some experts expressed the opinion that exclusively legal company management would hardly be possible in the future due to a lack of competitiveness.
1. Loss of control and governance in times of crisis
Business crime is not a ‘trivial offence’. A term like this is used colloquially to blur the line between legal and illegal. And, significantly, offences against tax regulations are mentioned first, as surveys show. In this way, those responsible for serious tax law violations have succeeded in portraying their associated attack on the financing of public services as (almost) legitimate personal enrichment. The opinion-forming media have been very helpful in this endeavour. It is astonishing how well they succeeded. Because when it comes to the poor provision of public services, the state and local authorities are mercilessly criticised and portrayed as incompetent. On the other hand, when it comes to wresting tax money from them, i.e. depriving them of resources, the state and local authorities are just as readily portrayed as enemies, or even better, as ‘robbers’ – orchestrated schizophrenia.
This ‘game’ could be observed around the federal elections on 26 September 2021 with the opponents Kevin Kühnert (SPD) and Christian Lindner (FDP), when Kühnert called Lindner an ‘airhead’ because he wanted to provide tax relief for the super-rich, but at the same time had no serious financial concept.7
Nor is business crime, as some seem to think, a matter that primarily takes place in the field of accounting, i.e. ‘on paper’ so to speak, and does not really affect people. The chapter on the considerable and – as far as the ecological aspect is concerned – often irreversible damage is intended to shed light on the fact that this popular image is not true either, using a few examples.
If we talk about social conflicts, personal damage and ecological disasters and associate business crime with crime, then we are getting closer to the point.
But even this is often labelled as ‘collateral damage’ by interested parties, i.e. as a regrettable by-product of an economy that is actually working for the greater good.
But if, in addition to the damage caused to many individuals, this actually results in lasting environmental destruction and wars, it is difficult to speak of collateral damage! All the more so, of course, when the systemic character of thousands of ‘individual cases’ increasingly reveals itself as the underlying fabric.
In the long run, it doesn’t help to keep using the word ‘scandal’! But the media, trimmed for push news, live more from the exception than the rule or indeed the structure that should be criticized.
If we look at the criminality of large commercial enterprises below, a structure and a mechanism very quickly become recognisable which suggest that reciprocal transitions from legal economic operations to illegal ones and vice versa should be regarded as the norm. Almost all legislative measures, be they environmental protection, labour law or taxation, are now subject to the verdict that large transnational corporations (and that is practically all of them) can and do evade statutory regulation by relocating their activities to an unregulated territory. Substances classified as toxic continue to be used in all those countries that do not ban them. The most primitive labour protection regulations are circumvented by relocating production. By involving more and more subcontractors, legal responsibility can become so blurred that it can no longer be traced back to the original company. This problem plays an important role, not least in supply chain legislation. In extreme cases, clandestine companies can thus be involved in unlawful operations, which is not uncommon, particularly in the defence industry.
Conversely, ‘money laundering’ is the means of transforming illegal funds into legal ones. It is not without reason that banking secrecy is still a legal right worthy of protection today and is almost on a par with the secrecy of the confessional in the Catholic Church.
It could be argued that the move into unregulated areas is not illegal and that, at best, it should be considered illegitimate, i.e. from an ethical perspective.
However, this does not mitigate the problem because
a) this boundary is fluid, as can be seen from the cum-ex transactions, and
b) the demarcation itself is often in the hands of the profiteers or is given to them,
c) an economic system that works with rankings of maximum profits exerts permanent pressure on this demarcation at the expense of regulation.
Of course, this cannot be accepted either from the perspective of democracy or the rule of law. The damage to democracy and the rule of law, but also to society and ecology, would be intolerable in the long run.
For this reason, the following section will begin by spotlighting some of the damage, as more than spotlights would go beyond the scope of this book. As already indicated above, this is not abstract damage that is merely committed ‘on paper’ and otherwise does not cause any major problems. Quite the opposite: the scale of this damage is considerable and reaches dizzying proportions.
Incidentally, all this damage was and is being caused against better judgement in order to make short-term profits. Because the damage could have been avoided. In any case, there is no lack of alternatives. Nor is there a lack of social commitment in each individual case.
Many of these examples are also presented in the BCC’s quarterly magazine – BIG Business Crime8 – and currently as a supplement in Stichwort Bayer – magazine of the Coordination gegen BAYER-Gefahren.9
2.
