The Bankruptcy Machine (How Chapter 11 Became Corporate America's Secret Weapon)

For readers of Evicted, There Is No Place for Us, and When McKinsey Comes to Town, a devastating investigation of how corporate America turned bankruptcy into a weapon.

Bankruptcy was supposed to offer a last resort for the insolvent: a way to manage failure, preserve value, and give debtors and creditors a fair path forward. But in The Bankruptcy Machine, Lily Jamali shows how it became one of corporate America’s most potent legal weapons—a way to halt lawsuits, silence victims, protect shareholders, and convert catastrophe into leverage.

At the center of the book is PG&E, the California utility whose equipment sparked some of the deadliest wildfires in the state’s history. After the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed scores of people, PG&E entered Chapter 11—not because it was going out of business, but because bankruptcy offered a way to control the fallout. Inside the court, fire survivors found themselves transformed into “creditors,” forced to compete with hedge funds, insurers, lawyers, and investors who understood the rules far better than they did.

Moving from the origins of modern bankruptcy law to mass-tort cases involving asbestos, defective medical devices, opioids, and wildfire, The Bankruptcy Machine exposes a system built in the name of fairness that now routinely shields the powerful from accountability. It is a devastating account of law, money, disaster, and the quiet machinery that decides who pays when corporations do harm.

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