The days of Bonnie and Clyde are over. The romanticized criminal protagonists from yesteryear have dissolved and in their place we are left with a bunch of wealthy, arrogant nerds trying to be cool.
You won’t see any more Robin Hoods stealing your hearts away with selfless acts of societal disobedience. Nor will you see an attractive couple turning over banks in every town they enter just because it improves their sex life.
The face of crime has changed and it ain’t pretty.
It’s pale and greasy from sitting in a dark office all day trying to fix our computers. It was a very big surprise when I found the same folks who created the microprocessor allowing my computer to function were actually multiple felons.
You may not have guessed from their scrawny appearances and quiet mannerisms, but the boys over at Intel Corp. are just straight bad ass. Don’t put it past them to sit down with Tony Soprano over a nice meal of “gabagool” and tell him how to handle his business.
If you were under the assumption that in recent years Intel gained 80 percent of the microchip market from making tip-top products, think again buddy. “Kickbacks” is the keyword.
Intel has been flowing funding to cooperative computer manufacturers like Dell to stay loyal and steer clear of any competitors. It has been passing them off as “discounts.”
Genius right? Who would ever consider annual $1 billion discounts given to business partners as suspicious activity? Surely, not its biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Well, it was fooled for a bit until it became apparent that, although Intel has inferior and more expensive products, it still maintained a monopoly over the microchip market. So AMD did some unorthodox research into Intel’s business practices, which led it to file an antitrust lawsuit a few years back.
Frequent use of collusion was not the only thing outlined in the Intel employee training video. You also had to be experienced in the arts of coercion, illegal threats and even just flat out bullying. Intel does not mess around.
If accepting large sums of solicited money in exchange for inferior products was not enough to keep companies on board, then it was time for plan B.
Intel followed up by funding an uncooperative company’s biggest competitors, consecutively ending any joint ventures between that particular company, while promising to pass up any future proposed efforts. A word used by an uncooperative company’s owner describing Intel’s business practices was “jihad.”
To stress the intensity of these corporate crimes, an almost identical one from New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has joined that initial lawsuit.
With New York on their back, if Intel attempts a get away with it, this is going to be a helluva car chase. I can’t wait to tune into “Cops” and watch the Intel van speed down the highway shooting out their back windows at the boys in blue.
Unfortunately, this getaway attempt seems doubtful to ever happen. Those chickens agreed to end the AMD lawsuit with a settlement of $1.25 billion. However, the New York lawsuit is still pending so don’t give up hope yet — Intel still might make a break for the border
Maximillian Piras is a fine arts major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.