The Biggest Taboo of All

The bribery culture in the US is an entirely closed circle, it is completely taboo to talk about it. Even when judges and lawyers go too far, and commit felony crimes in broad daylight in the US, often nothing is done at all. Other lawyers and judges will not allow any complaints to go forward, and the politicians will not help the victim. The US media - itself controlled by large corporations deeply enmeshed in the culture of bribery and influence - will never print legal corruption stories unless the lawyers and judges themselves are filing legal action first. Lawyers and judges only get punished if they really go "too far" outside the corporate rules, like the US judge who regularly operated his penis pump in the courtroom during public court proceedings. (I am not kidding.)

In the US, nearly all complaints about lawyers and judges are kept secret. In some places it is actually "illegal" for the victim to publish such complaints. The complaints are buried and nothing is done. The same judges who take bribes, control the complaint process about lawyers and their fellow judges, and make sure that everything is quashed and kept secret.

Anyone who breaks the taboo, and tries to expose any crimes, is quickly crushed and destroyed. A New York Times reporter who wrote a critical article about the judges, was "mysteriously" shot dead in the street a few weeks later. The major media will not cover the story of a victim's fight against the judges, and the smaller, more independent media are themselves too afraid. The lack of media coverage then is held up as supposed "proof" that there is no corruption.

Even big companies can be destroyed if they break this taboo. Lawyers who complain about corruption are instantly disbarred, sued, silenced, even jailed. Victims who try and fight the system get nowhere, like the families of so many innocent people in prison.

In its actual workings, the US legal system often degenerates into fraud and farce and deep tragedy. Poor people are even sometimes put to death in the US, with not even a reply to their final appeal. Those who have total and complete "smoking gun" proof of crimes by US lawyers and judges, can do little more than put their stories on the internet, and they are sometimes charged and jailed for just that.

US judges actually commonly ban the victims' freedom of speech. Yes, that is "against the Bill of Rights" i.e., the famous first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, but the judges themselves decide when the Constitution "applies" and when it doesn't. Those same Amendments to the US Constitution prohibit torture too - but that doesn't help the victims of the US either, and the US is now one of the worst torturing nations in the world.

Dangers for Foreign Business

The danger for foreign business people in the US, is first of all that the US bribery culture is not sufficiently understood. What happens when companies do not pay sufficient bribes, for example, is that a major company gets shaken down, charged with various administrative crimes and then may have to pay huge fines for tens of millions of dollars, and the company then is left scratching its head, given that its behaviour is exactly the same - or even better - than other companies that are not charged or fined. The difference is that the other company was paying more bribes.

On the other hand, some foreign companies learn to play the US bribery game very well. In one case, a European company get huge mileage - and won a whole set of ludicrous court verdicts to its own benefit - simply by hiring the law firm where the federal judge used to work. The judge even publicly visited his old firm during the trial. Ah, nothing like old friends and good connections. The opposing law firm could see the bribery visibly taking place before its eyes, but was helpless to stop it. These opposing lawyers merely told their client company to keep quiet or it would be a lot worse. The company being victimized, was eventually able to get some of the judge's rulings reversed on appeal (after spending much more money), but the trick of hiring the judge's old law firm was effective overall. In general, in US courts, the first party to pay big bribes is the winner, if the other is not quickly up to putting money into the plate.

The much bigger danger in the US legal system, however, especially for foreign business people, is the fact that the US system, its cabal of judges, can together change course quickly, and make a quick political decision to destroy some individuals or an entire large organisation.

In upcoming events of possible political stress - military action by the US in the Americas, some new events of US foreign policy failures, or maybe the US getting angry at Venezuela or China as they continue to win more friends - in such a moment, the US courts could move very quickly to destroy foreign companies, seize foreign assets, and imprison foreign citizens.

US Courts Quickly Destroying a Billion Dollar Organisation

A good example of how the US turned the direction of its courts quickly for political reasons, is the 1990s US political assault on the Roman Catholic Church. The US very suddenly seized hundreds of millions of dollars of its assets and permanently smeared the Church's reputation around the world. The cases of Roman Catholic priests abusing young boys are, indeed, partly genuine, and very tragic. But those cases, those very same cases, had been around for many years, sometimes for several decades, and the complaints and proof got nowhere in the US courts, until a big political decision was made by the US rulers.