I find it interesting this sort of thing is rarely, if ever, presented as government gone wrong. Not everything based on self-interest falls within capitalism. When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism". And yet when the government engages in such at the behest of self-interested parties, "capitalism" gets the rap. Quite odd.
Either way, the main question is how do you counter it or at least balance it out so the little people don't get trampled?
Which is an oxymoron; government favoritism is the antithesis of capitalism. The fact that money is involved doesn't make it capitalism.
Libertarianism is a different concept that includes economic policies and non-economic policies.
I don't think this is true. It's named as government corruption often enough, and it's framed from that direction fairly frequently in some political media, both by people who believe it's a corruption of what government should/could be and who believe it's inherent in government power.
> When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism"
This seems truer than your first contention -- not only is it generally rare that crime is considered just another response to incentives, even people who think of it this way (myself and probably some economists included), it's fair enough to draw a line between a formal definition of capitalism and crime.
But then again, in this kind of discussion it's probably worth recognizing that terms like "capitalism" (or "socialism", for that matter) are usually used as shorthand in a heavily context-dependent sense, rather than as anything formally defined. I think it's better to be more precise so as to avoid hang-ups like this, but then again, being prescriptive or pedantic can have it's own hangups. Capitalism may not simply mean any laissez faire system founded largely on self-interest, but it's easy enough to accept it as a label for a class of possible systems for the sake of discussion about whether or not it's unfair to blame a private party for capture of a democratic/republic nation-state, or whether to blame the state for being there to capture.
Also, the NY State Attorney General's Office probably smells blood in the water, with a ton of the work (discovery, etc) done for them by the Federal prosecutors. It's probably viewed as low-hanging fruit in racking up convictions.
The more work by the USDOJ they use the more they will be accused of 'acting in concert' and the more likely the issue becomes one of double jeopardy.
This isn't about the application of law, this is about the application of political will.
If a given politician gets valuable future support in exchange for making people think less of government or their fellow pols overall, then that's a win for them.
There might be no evidence of corruption, but this stinks.