Doing Business in the Big Bribery Nation
by Dr Les Sachs

There is a country where international business executives and companies face ever-heightening risks and dangers of dealing with the world's largest group of bribed judges and crooked lawyers. International companies and individuals are at risk in this large nation where the "rules" involve paying bribes via certain pathways, but where it is easier to go to prison than anywhere else in the world.

You might ask: What is this large corrupt nation? Where is this cesspool of corrupt lawyers and judges, who make such a mockery of the rule of law? In what nation must we be so wary when doing business?

Here's a hint: It is a nation that also has the world's most powerful propaganda industry, propaganda with all the glamour of Hollywood movies.

In fact, this corrupt nation actually DOES include Hollywood. It is a well-known fact to its internal powers, though not to the rest of the world, that the United States of America has the worst bribery culture of any developed nation, a bribery culture that centres very specifically in US judges and lawyers.

Your first reaction is perhaps shock or disbelief, thinking that I am a conspiracy theorist or just making this up. You may react like this because, like most of the world, you have been deceived by US movies and television shows, which are pervaded with propaganda images of lawyers and court cases. In these Hollywood films, there are endless "brave lawyers" who will "fight for your rights" and "fight for the little guy". In these films, the judges are patient and noble and smile like wise old uncles, as they deliver careful verdicts that let the innocent go free, and justice be done.

However, in the grim reality of the US, businesses, and especially foreign businesses, face financial destruction, and individuals face jail and death, if they believe too much in these movies about the US legal system. Let me set the facts out for you very quickly.

The World's Biggest Gulag

The US now has about 2.2 million prisoners, about 25 per cent of all the prisoners in the entire world. In Belgium, where I now live as a political refugee, about 1 out of every 1000 people is in prison. In the US, it is about 1 out of every 140 people in jail - a dramatically higher percentage than anywhere else in the world. Even in absolute numbers, many more people are in US prisons than in the prisons of China, even though China has 1.3 billion people, versus 300 million for the US.

If you don't count children and the elderly, you realize that about 1 out of 80 US adults is currently behind bars, in jail or prison. If you count adults who have been criminally convicted and include those still on parole or probation as well as in prison, you are down to about 1 out of 30. These are, simply, terrifying figures. Yet the US has huge amounts of crime - so they obviously didn't arrest all the criminals.

This is because, in fact, many of those people in US jails are innocent. Even the close "allies" of the US, like European governments, can not get their own citizens out of US prisons despite massive proof of the victims' innocence.

Many of these 2.2 million US prisoners are essentially slave labour for US corporations, working for wages below those paid in very poor countries in Africa or Asia. And these victims in the US prisons, all had "lawyers" to help shove them into jail. But such lawyers are NOT defenders of the poor. Many of them are court-appointed arm-twisters who tell their poor victims to "take a plea bargain" for a few years in jail, or else face a longer term if they risk a trial. These government-paid "lawyers" in the US get put out of work, and become jobless or worse, if they don't play along to help jail innocent victims.

Foreigners are treated very badly by US police and court procedures. The US has been repeatedly convicted of violating treaties, and of never even notifying foreign governments that their citizens have been arrested. As many Mexicans have found out, the US even sentences foreign people to death, while not allowing the victims any chance to have their own government help them.

Bribery and the Praetorian Guard

Now, as regards business, foreign companies, and the US bribery culture: The basic model of the US courts - well understood by large US corporations, but much less understood by foreign companies - is that the US judges, federal and local, all run their cases and courtrooms in a generally pro-business, pro-corporation fashion, PROVIDED that the businesses who find themselves in court, pay the appropriate financial tributes and bribes to the US governmental powers, and that their governments are politically supportive of the US.

Thus, there is great danger in the US, for companies that are associated with ownership in Venezuela, China, or any one of a hundred other countries that are potentially critical of the US and its policies. Even if the near neighbours of the US, Canada or Mexico, started rocking the US boat too severely, their companies would quickly find themselves punished via politically-motivated legal proceedings.