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The American Trap

My Battle to Expose America's Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World

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The American Trap

By: Frédéric Pierucci, Matthieu Aron
Narrated by: Luke Thompson
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This is the story of a man caught in the middle of a huge American destabilising operation, illustrating the secret economic war that the United States is waging against developed nations across the world.

In 2014, France lost part of the control of its nuclear power plants to the United States. Frédéric Pierucci, former senior executive of one of Alstom's subsidiaries, found himself at the heart of this state scandal. His story goes to the very heart of a $12 billion thriller that illustrates the secret economic war that the United States is waging in Europe. And after being silenced for a long time, he has decided, with the help of journalist Matthieu Aron, to reveal all.

In April 2013, Frédéric was arrested in New York by the FBI and prosecuted for a bribery case, despite not being involved at all. The US authorities locked him up for more than two years - including 14 months in a very high security prison. In doing so, they forced Alstom to pay the biggest penalty ever imposed by the United States and to give up areas of control to General Electric, Alstom's biggest American competitor.

Frédéric's story unpacks how the United States is diverting the law and morality and using corporate law as an economic weapon against its own allies. One after the other, some of the world's largest companies are being actively destabilised to the benefit of the US Treasury, in acts of sabotage that seem only to be the beginning of what's to come....

©2019 Frédéric Pierucci (P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited Economics Engineering Politics & Government
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In one way or another the US, like most other historical empires, has been pursuing mercantile policies for a most of its existence. Tariffs, technical barriers to trade and the impartial application of the power of international institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and others (mostly set-up by the US) serve as crude tools for the implementation of mercantile policies that were developed by empires, notably the British empire, long before the US took on the mantel of global leadership. The innovation that the US brought to this historical toolkit is the application the reserve currency status of the dollar to extend its jurisdiction & control whilst building legitimacy for its application of legal mechanisms by cloaking its actions in the promotion of an ostensibly superior moral world view of “democracy”, “justice”, “freedom” - all commonly summarized in the nebulous notion of a just “rules based world order”.
Combined with the selective use of military and covert operations, the awesome intelligence capabilities provided by modern technology, an aggressive legal system spearheading arbitrary international enforcement, and an executive branch applying sanctions on competitors, the entire power of the US state is being employed to further the economic interests of its elite whilst crushing its geopolitical and geoeconomic competitors.
The concept is not new but the methods are. Frederic Pierucci is an unfortunate victim of this new and updated system of coercion and he has done a grand job in bringing his experience to the world in this book. To get a further understanding of these processes I can recommend “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” for an understanding of the role played by international organizations as well as Philip Bobbit’s “Achilles Shield” for a theoretical grounding of our mercantile future of international relations.

Eye opening account of US law-fare and mercantilism

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