The US is very unlike other corrupt countries, where most bribes are paid directly to executive and administrative officials. Such things do take place in the US, but are comparatively rare. The crucial forms of bribery in the US are the bribes paid to judges and to leading lawyers, along with the campaign contributions and related gifts to politicians, which latter are often channelled via so-called non-profit organisations.

The importance for foreign businesses, and indeed any business in the US, is that if you do not pay the bribe money and political campaign money, you may get truly and utterly destroyed - You may suddenly find your name in the papers with news that you have been "charged" with various administrative or civil offences by government agencies, or even be facing criminal charges; and you may suddenly find yourself in court and all your court cases going very badly for you. Theoretically, all such charges and court cases are "unrelated", but the real motivating factor is that you didn't pay the bribe money that US judges and politicians wanted.

In the US, the direct political campaign contributions, and corporate gifts to political action committees, are more or less documented and out in the open. Slightly less so, is the channelling of what are really bribery funds, through non-profit organisations that have political connections. The "charitable donations" to these latter groups are unlimited in size, million dollar "gifts" and so on. But your "gifts" make possible the cushy employment of the friends of the politicians and the judges, and the issuing of policy propaganda by these "non-governmental organisations" or NGOs to support the corporations and the government. Thus they are an important part of greasing the wheels of the US system.

Since the 1970s, the US political establishment (and even the CIA) has made the covert use of NGOs a regular technique of conducting political activity, channelling money, and bending world media. The dirty money soiling many NGOs is a separate story, though, from the main topic here.

It is the bribes paid to the US judges and lawyers are the most central, most subtle and most hidden form of bribery in the US. Such bribes are huge, pervasive, and essentially untraceable, though the effects are direct and catastrophic if you do not pay up.

The money is nearly always channelled through American lawyers and law firms, under the protection of "lawyer-client confidentiality". America's army of about 1 million lawyers, includes a core of gangsters who are really the Praetorian Guard of the US empire. These lawyers guard the access to the inner sanctum of US control. Such lawyers mediate the connections between wealthy individuals and corporations and the power of the US government, power that is centred in the US federal courts and their judges-for-life. The so-called "rule of law", as they proclaim it in the US, is really the rule of lawyers who control all key matters to benefit the large and ruling wealthy corporate shareholders.

The way you bribe the US judges is simply by hiring the "right" lawyers and paying absolutely absurd lawyers' bills, and the law firms then fund the bribes to the judges. This assumes, of course, a background of also paying other dutiful political contributions to US politicians - of both parties, actually, Democrats as well as Republicans. The American "two party system" is as fake as America's courts, as both US parties support the same corporate policies, and get the same corporate funding - but the fraud of the US 'two-party system' is another story.

The bribery of US judges and courts is a factor for all businesses on US territory. If you are a significant-sized business in the US, you often look for a law firm that "knows" politicians and judges. That law firm bills you for huge amounts of "legal work" at US $400 per hour per lawyer or some similar high rate, leading to legal bills of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for no visible reason. The lawyers get rich, but some of that money finds its way to the judges via cash delivered by law firm "bag men". No one, no one in America, no journalist or prosecutor, dares investigate this process. Even as a business paying bribes, you and your lawyers almost never even discuss it, even though the main players in America all understand that this is how the system works.

If you are in a legal dispute with another large corporation, this bribery money that you pay, does not necessarily buy victory in court, because the other side is usually paying bribes too; but the bribery usually does buy insurance that you will not be destroyed or too badly mauled. US lawyers and judges are just playing the age-old extortion and protection-racket game, in a very genteel format, with the window dressing of the self-proclaimed "greatest legal system in the world".

What people can buy with such bribery - even some foreign companies do this - is the total destruction of little people and small businesses who are not paying bribes or who have no political connections, or who have no money for lawyers. A company in the US that is paying bribes, can also buy victory over even larger and richer companies that are not paying sufficient bribes or political contributions.

If you are paying bribes to US judges and you want to target a poor little victim, you can often have that powerless but innocent victim, completely destroyed, bankrupted, and jailed if you choose to do so. With so few people willing to even speak about the bribed judges and crooked lawyers in America, those who pay bribes can use the US legal system to have victims not just jailed, but also even murdered in their jail cells.