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I am also baffled that people do not know this. We had many such cases around BLM riots - rioters were arrested, they sued the local PD for excessive violence and sympathetic government enthusiastically settles. It is now basically accepted way of financing political players on par with "learing center" frauds, US AID frauds, or frauds via other supposed NGOs that are solely financed from government to do party activism.
It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe. This type of legal corruption is now baked into the society, it is how business is done and it is inevitable. Your local political activist protests with understanding, that his legal fees will be covered by some leftist activist group who in turn understand that they will get financed from some fake project or settled lawsuit with possible career moves from activism into local, state or federal bureaucracy or maybe some consultant job. This is how millions of people live and do business, it is the same system that was in place in Rome with politicians having their client network attached like leeches on tax systems and monopolies etc.
Refusing to play this game means, that you will lose and then get laughed off the stage by cynical progressive wonks as a stupid moron. They can now gleefully claim for decades how the right does not have institutional brainpower and numbers and support network from low level activists to high level people in academia and other institutions. Of course they don't have them, they refused to play the game for decades, and let the opposition entrench deeply into all the systems.
This does not strike me as inherently a racket. It's perfectly anodyne in western civilization for the government to spend money on public art, not just brutalist utilitarian concrete. Has been since the Romans. No doubt there is corruption in what artists get the commission, particularly if it's always avant-garde artists whose aesthetics are light-years away from the kinds of statues and decorations people actually want in their neighborhoods - but a small fraction of the budget being reserved for art is not in principle outrageous or even surprising.
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This type of collusive litigation is not a thing in Europe - in general the UK has less government-by-litigation than the US, and civil law countries have a lot less. In most of Continental Europe, there is direct on-budget government funding of political parties tied to the numbers of votes they receive or the number of seats they win. Everywhere, there is direct on-budget government funding of left-wing GONGOs.
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