Business should tune out the rhetoric of US justice Whatever the flaws in the US system of corporate justice, with its overlapping regulators, competing prosecutors and ferocious state attorneys-general, it produces tip-top rhetoric. The Department of Justice's indignant blast against BP in a Louisiana court filing this week has a nice turn of phrase. Not only did it accuse the company of "gross negligence and wilful misconduct" in spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, but it said BP's failures "would not be tolerated in a middling sized company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall." John Gapper That almost matches Benjamin Lawsky, the former federal prosecutor who runs New York state's new Department of Financial Services. He extracted a $340m fine from Standard Chartered after pillorying the UK bank of "scheming with the government of Iran" to leave the US financial system vulnerable to "terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt regimes." British companies are not the only ones getting slapped around by those who oversee business in the US. The private equity industry now faces a tax inquiry from Eric Schneiderman, New York's attorney-general, who has launched a campaign against "firms that rip-off government pension funds" and "large-scale tax cheats." This burst of high-profile cases against corporations and Wall Street raises the question of whether such officials are merely intent on combating crime, or have murkier motives. Some of the targets think so. "The government is out to destroy the private equity industry for political gain," observed one executive to the Financial Times. It is no coincidence that Mr Schneiderman has followed in the tracks of President Barack Obama, who has made Mitt Romney's record as the former head of Bain Capital, the private equity firm, a core feature of his re-election campaign. That led to Bain documents being leaked to Gawker, the gossip website, and giving Mr Schneiderman material to investigate. He presumably did so with a spring in his step. He is, after all, an elected Democratic party official who could well run for higher office in future. It won't hurt if he brings down some well-known miscreants, and lives up to his pledge to "stand up to powerful interests on behalf of everyday New Yorkers." As Colin Provost, a lecturer at the University of London who has studied US state attorneys-general, says: "The office allows you to pursue pretty much anything you want under the guise of law enforcement." In one study, Mr Provost found that the busiest litigators were the most likely later to end up as governor of a state, or a senator. The question is whether we should worry about it. Americans have elected judges in many states since the mid-19th century, a practice that worried Alexis de Tocqueville even then. Europeans still prefer regulators and prosecutors to be impartial professionals; the US likes the personal touch. Nor are political campaigns against the overweening power of big business new. They go back to the Sherman Act of 1890 and Theodore Roosevelt's break-up of railway trusts a century ago. Since then, the Department of Justice has enforced antitrust laws against companies including Microsoft and AT&T. The recent DoJ inquiry into Walmart paying bribes in Mexico illustrates how the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act is used more often and more aggressively. But the law itself is not new. It was passed in 1977 and then expanded in 1992 to cover non-US companies with US subsidiaries. The latest surge of prosecutions and inquiries, which have caught many a business by surprise, has been encouraged by two things. One is the 2008 financial crash and a widely unpopular bailout of Wall Street. That has made voters eager for a crackdown on "banksters" similar to the 1930s. A second factor is the growth in the number of agencies that can take action. Mr Lawsky's department was only founded by New York state after the crash. It has to vie for attention with federal regulators including the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and various state-level prosecutors. Business organisations such as the US Chamber of Commerce complain that they suffer arbitrary, populist attacks as a result of this melee. But in some ways it is simply the US constitution at work, with its belief in institutional democracy and the division of powers. Competition among regulators acts as a check on arbitrary prosecution as well as promoting it. State attorneys-general like to operate in packs for interstate cases such as the campaign against tobacco groups in the 1990s. A prosecutor who cannot persuade others has a weaker case. Mr Lawsky's play of breaking with other regulators that had also investigated Standard Chartered to seize the spotlight himself led to a lot of grumbling from his rivals. In the event, he gained a quick victory because the bank was desperate to restore its battered share price and faced the potential loss of its licence in New York. Other states do not have the same leverage as the one that contains the financial capital of the US. Furthermore, most regulators and prosecutors do not decide the outcome of cases themselves - they have to convince a court of their merits, and even agreed settlements must be approved. The brilliance of their rhetoric is often inversely related to their power. An election year in which a Democratic president faces a Republican who used to work on Wall Street while jobs are scarce is clearly fertile ground for ambitious prosecutors and aggressive regulators. It is hardly surprising that this flurry of action angers and scares businesses. But only when this election is over, and the rhetoric has eased off, shall we discover how many of the words stuck. Sound and fury is only part of the US justice system.