> Airbus for years conducted a “massive scheme to offer and pay bribes”, involving very senior executives, according to disclosures in courts in Washington DC, Paris and London, as Europe’s aerospace champion agreed to pay €3.6bn in penalties to regulators in France, the UK and the US.
While lobbyists have sometimes bribed officials through gifts and perks, which is illegal, lobbying is not bribery. Say you're interesting in promoting renewable energy. You and like minded people put together resources to promote renewable energy to politicians, explaining its benefits. This activity is lobbying for renewable energy.
This breaks down when politicians get some kind of personal benefit such as campaign contributions or a consulting job. This is a conflict of interest and should exclude them from any vote about the interests of the lobbyist.
Lobbyist help politicians accomplish what they already wanted to do. Whenever politicians enact policy some interests inevitably benefit from it, and other interest's goals are frustrated by it. So of course there are going to be lobbyists (or activists) who want to argue their case on both sides, and good lobbyists are very well prepared and very persuasive. It's soft influence, and no quid pro quo is necessary for lobbyists to have a big impact on policy.
You haven’t explained why lobbyists are necessary, or even a good thing. Why is a system allowing lobbying better than one that bans it in favor of politicians independently making decisions based on the will expressed by and likely benefits for their constituents? And please don’t say it’s hard for them to understand all the issues. That’s literally their job and the reason they have a staff.
>Why is a system allowing lobbying better than one that bans it in favor of politicians independently making decisions based on the will expressed by and likely benefits for their constituents?
Because in many situations there's a very fine line between "lobbying" and "making decisions based on the will expressed by constituents". An organized group of concerned citizens is a lobby.
When it comes to outright bribing politicians, that's easy (and illegal). But there's a ton of grey-area in there. In fact, I'm not sure how you even could remove lobbying from the political process.
> I'm not sure how you even could remove lobbying from the political process.
So you get a group of interested citizens together, you write to politicians, you tell them your point of view. Nothing wrong here yet.
Then some of those politicians then agree with your group. You like that! So you start raising funds to get them re-elected. At face value, nothing here is wrong.
Except that you just used your money as an incentive for politicians to agree with you. They might now openly support you, not because they personally do, but because they want your financial support for re-election. Since actions speak louder than words, it just makes sense to support politicians who don't just say they agree with you, but to support politicians who actively enact policy you want.
At this point, we have reached 'paying politicians for enacting policy you want'. That is bribery. Where did it all go wrong? When your lobby was able to raise funds and spend that on getting a politician re-elected. And when a few lobbies being a 'concerned group of citizens' turned into a facade for corporate interests. Simply because there is just so much more money behind corporate interests than behind concerned citizens. And hence those lobbies get more influence.
How to solve this? Limit political spending to natural persons, and limit their contributions.
>How to solve this? Limit political spending to natural persons, and limit their contributions.
I think this would prove to be exceedingly difficult in practice. In fact, this kind of is the system we live under, and it doesn't work.
Sure, you could argue for changes in the amounts, and who can donate to what, but consider this: I believe Obama's biggest corporate donor in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and the value of their contribution was on the order of $1,000,000 (correct me if I'm wrong). Considering the funds that Goldman Sachs has access to, and the cost of a Presidential campaign, this is a pittance.
Clearly there are other forces at work here. You can fiddle with the numbers, but I don't know how you set up a system that doesn't reward "cheaters" or the already wealthy (ie received their "contributions" in advance). Which is where we're at.
PACs. They are not direct campaign contributions, (the candidate does not get to direct how the contributions are spent). But they are money spent on re-election anyway.
> Then some of those politicians then agree with your group. You like that! So you start raising funds to get them re-elected. At face value, nothing here is wrong.
Notice how you said a group of concerned citizens is a lobby, not a lobbyist. The line gets crossed when you go from a group of actual human constituents collectively asking a representative for something to either a corporation asking a representative for something or a group retaining the services of a professional individual whose job it is to convince politicians of something. Lobbies are mostly ok. Lobbyists and corporations have no defensible place in politics.
If it was banned, it would still happen, but not in the public eye.
A relative of a friend was a politician. He used lobbyists indirectly to work on issues. Say he needed help understanding a school textbook issue. He would call up his oil lobbyist, whose job it was to make him happy. It was definitely not his job to piss him off. He would quickly get a report on the textbook issue, probably written by the expert in the field.
This is kind of a weak argument, because this goes for literally every law. Even though this is true, as a society you can still make the decision that it isn't okay. By making it as okay as it is right now, you're saying that it's just a fact of life and we need to accept it because of that. Murder is a fact of life too (as in: it happens regardless of it being illegal), but that doesn't mean we need to make it legal.
Congress used to have The Office of Technology Assessment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...) but the republican party considered its expertise to be a hinderance to corporate influence, and eliminating it was one of their first action upon taking control of the congress in the mid 90's.
But the oil lobbyist wouldn't have a horse in the game for school textbooks. He would play fair in the hope that the politician would "play fair" on future oil issues.
It's a wierd sort of politician problem solving, making do with the resources you have.
why is it necessary to allow people to talk to their leaders? why is it allowable that people be able to band together and form organizations and speak to their leaders as one with one voice? The right to petition is considered fundamental and pre-dates democracy.
stop calling it "lobbying" like that means something special, it's called free speech and representative democracy. you don't like people speaking in secret? how about we register them, and call that lobbying.
irritated that the people who speak up get heard? that's called life.
"Lobbyist help politicians accomplish what they already wanted to do."
Absolutely not. This is expertise.
Lobbying is persuasion. Those are two different things. Purpose of lobbyingis to achieve specific decisions. If those decisions are defined by objective expertise, then they are alined but lobbying usually have different goals.
It's pretty obvious there is quid pro quo in many cases. A strong society should have regulated channels for lobbying and ban any contact between lobbyists/industry and politicians outside of those channels, including after office.
Depending on the state, lobbyists generally have to be licensed/registered and report all their contacts [0]. I have a family member who's a registered lobbyist: as a lawyer for a regulatory agency, she sometimes represents its interests in dealing with the legislature that authorizes it.
A politician might cover or be involved with a lot of different industries during tenure in office. You can't go to work in any of them after? What if you're one-term-and-done at age 45? What are you supposed to do?
Sure, you could ban them. That's a sure-fire way to a government of low-competence, career politicians.
Sure, but money shouldn't be exchanged throughout this process. That should be explicitly illegal. As would any other way to influence the politician (offering jobs, etc).
Do hearings, have technical staff to consult you on issues, etc, instead.
many politicians use lobby and special interest groups as means to funnel money back to family and friends. this is the real swamp in US politics. friends usually involve fellow politicians "benched" by voters.
so while some will come back and say lobbyist are only pushing politicians to do what the politician was going to do it simply ignores this is all just a shell game to avoid the limits on campaign donations and similar by providing a means to funnel money to friends and family of the same.
I remember a portion of Lessig’s “Republic Lost” where a congressperson was quoted to the effect that accepting money from lobbyists wasn’t bribery if it came after voting on a topic. It was a reward not a bribe.
Everyone has a right in the US to petition their government but damn if that doesn’t sound like a convenient workaround
Nonsense. They get campaign contributions from virtually 100% of the political and economical spectrum. So do what then? Consulting job is after the post, and yes, it is used sometimes as a method of corruption (I've a read a case when some $20+M bid was given to a company and the person got $1m a year for x years after she quite the gov job. ...I read it because FBI busted them.).
But being humans and all, people slip. But there's a difference, just as their is between Syria and NYC when it comes to "crime" rate /chance of dying. Just because you have a x% chance of dying from a crime in NYC, doesn't mean it is the same as Syria.
Not only is lobbying bribery by another name, the realities of campaign finance make ours a system of mandatory bribery rather than mere moral corruption.
But how many politicians end up getting huge salaries from these so-called 'think tanks' after they finish their terms?
How is this different from receiving a 'gift'? It's extremely reductive to even mention gifts as bribery at this stage because we are far beyond that primitive level of interaction.
This unspoken agreement between politicians and think thanks is exactly the same as bribery. They're bribing politicians with (at best) implicit promises future money.
This legal approach to bribery is not only evil but it's also extremely hypocritical. Usually, when people do evil things, at least they know it's evil and many of them will hear a voice at the back of their heads telling them that they should stop doing it.
Now, the only voice at the back of politicians' heads is telling them "It's OK, it's not a gift/bribe, it's just a job offer given based on my skills" - Nevermind that the salary offered is 10x what they're getting now; that's just an irrelevant detail. A think tank's promises and its reputation for paying big are its currency; the result is exactly the same as bribing with gifts or money.
This is one reason why term limits are pernicious. They channel effective politicians into the lobbying industry, rather than allowing them to continue practicing their skills in government.
If you convince their constituents to whom they are beholden, sure.
Behind closed doors, not at all, I very much agree with GP, there's a lot of pernicious shit going on that is actively harming democracies across the globe.
Corporate lobbying is for the most part a well-funded, knowledgeable adversary generally in opposition to a bunch of people who at best can sign some petitions or march in the streets. It's an asymmetrical game that should be acknowledged.
We have chosen a non-direct, representative political system and lobbying is a direct causal result of this chosen system.
It is not a side-effect. We intentionally wanted to create a group of people who could spend their time educating themselves on the issues at hand better than people as whole ever could.
Lobbying is what we wanted as a result of this system. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to regulatory capture.
Some countries have been better at managing political corruption than others.
Except the US is by far the worst at this because it allows lobbying and political influence through donations.
In most other democratic countries this is illegal.
It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that lobbying just means "reaching out to politicians about an issue and educating them about it."
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem and corporations wouldn't have such unshaken influence on politicians compared to the People, if that was all there was to it.
But it's not just that - it's about those companies making "donations" to politicians that will then be much easier to "convince" to vote their way.
Watch this video if you aren't convinced, which is just a nice visual presentation of a study that was done and found out that what People want doesn't matter, but what corporations want has a direct correlation to how politicians vote:
Also, I remember when one Congressman said post-SOPA that the anti-SOPA petitions made by people and all the calls were nice and all, but it wasn't until Google and other big companies got involved that politicians started really listening and many changed their minds on the vote.
Money isn't even the worst of it at this level. It's about networking, and what you can ask for. A top politician doesn't need to be bribed when they understand perfectly well that if they happen to need a little pocket money, they can just come and hold a speech for six figures. If the money will be there when you need it, there's only risk in letting it lie in your bank account.
Likewise, blackmail. People imagine envelopes with incriminating pictures. But that kind of blackmail rarely gets used, because once you've given in to it, then what? The blackmail will still hang over your head. You'll serve the blackmailer for life. At that point the victim may think they have little to lose. (Relevant regarding Donald Trump. He has far too much ego to serve someone else for life, even if there was some "Moscow tape").
Instead, the blackmail that's powerful is the one that the victim knows will cost the blackmailer a lot to use. The understanding that if I go down, you all go down with me, is a lot more useful to make us come to an agreement. That's probably how Epstein got away with things for so long.
>> You and like minded people put together resources to promote renewable energy to politicians
Unlike corporations and their biggest shareholders, regular people don't have resources to influence politicians. Any lobbying attempt backed by non-corporate interests will not be able to reach politicians' ears. Politicians have no time for groups/think thanks which don't have a track record of paying up after politicians finish their terms.
Idealized theoretical forms of lobbying bear no resemblance to reality. To bring the ideal closer to reality, politicians would have to start reaching out to people instead of the other way round. Currently, the only reason politicians reach out to people is for a PR photo op.
As a regular person, I've spent $400 to travel to DC and walk in and meet with 12 senators and congressmen. No donations required and I got to spend an hour with each as and even got treated to lunch by one of my states US reps. Got the policy change,too. So many people are way to cynical. Lobbyists show up and citizens do not. When a citizen shows up (and is rational) legislators listen.
A senator will be hard to reach. Rep is very possible with an appointment.
But they all have staff. A mature, sober sounding constituent can absolutely get time with a staffer...and if your concerns are legitimate, then a good chance your view will be heard.
How often is a lobbying group made of or led by the politician's constituents? My representative requires and verifies the home addresses of town hall attendees, but I doubt he applies the same rule to lobbyists.
That's the naive version of lobbying for gullible people. In practice, whether it's big oil or renewable energy (still an industry with profits) it never works like that.
You seem to think that lobbying involves persuasive speaking; using the power of one's words to convince legislators of the rightness of one's position.
This is patently untrue. A lobbyist is just anybody who meets with an elected official on behalf of a group. There are perfectly legitimate lobbyists, and many depending on the group they may even be volunteers.
It just so happens that the lobbyists that get the most attention are those that represent the most powerful groups. But equating it with bribery is completely misleading.
> Foreign-funded lobbying efforts include those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, and China lobbies. In 2010 alone, foreign governments spent approximately $460 million on lobbying members of Congress and government officials.
From Wikipedia. So spending 460M USD on public officials. Was it simply to have 1:1 conversations with politicians?
So you have 535 members of Congress. Other govt officials (State, trade and aid agencies, ...) foreign powers have a legitimate interest in meeting probably brings that figure to a 1000. Congresspeople have aides, staff, &c — who also need to be dined. To maintain the whole show, you need to have your own staff — well-educated, worldly people — who need to be paid, need offices to work in, ....
Diplomatic staff is very limited in number (because they have immunity, so the host country does not want it inflated too much). These kinds of jobs do not require immunity and can be done by non-diplomats.
Every other country in the world where lobbying is not legal, all of this is done with government staff, this usecase cannot be a justification for having lobbying when everyone else gets along fine without it
when a foreign government employs a third party firm it looks like it wants plausible deniability , or that they are trying purchase access and influence that these firms have as Kushner was selling .
Congressmen didn't get $460M in brown bags or bank accounts, interest groups spent that much on lobbyists to meet them. No doubt campaign contributions, one way or another, followed but direct gifts are a no-no.
This is BS. Lobbyists serve the companies they work for and nobody else. There have been many cases of lobbyists getting fired for not sticking to the corporate agenda even on small matters. It's institutionalized corruption.
The hypothetical 'legitimate lobbyists' are 'low performers' and they don't stick around very long. Either they will be underpaid and quit or they'll be fired outright.
Bribery: Mr. Minister, buy from us 42 airplanes for $4.8 Billion and 800 Million will be deposited in off shore accounts of your choosing.
Lobbying: Senator, my clients would like that the recent changes in the tax code stay as they are but the deduction on ....is increased. (maybe a dinner or a small campaign contribution, as other lobbyists will oppose this one)
Lobbying: Senator, I hope you enjoyed this really nice dinner we cooked for you. Also, you are free to use this yacht (which is worth $800 million but we’ll just day it’s worth a couple bucks to keep the ethics committee happy) any time you please. No, this isn’t a bribe, the registration and taxes for the yacht will remain with our company but you can use it whenever you desire as long as you continue to help pass laws that are favorable to us. We’ll even write the legalese for how the laws should read.
Not so different. Granted, honest lobbying does occur at some levels (my friend’s dad lobbies for firefighters at state legislators), but there are some really scummy corporate lobby activities that look like bribery with extra steps.
>>Also, you are free to use this yacht (which is worth $800 million but we’ll just day it’s worth a couple bucks to keep the ethics committee happy) any time you please.
It's not exactly challenging to disguise these gifts as "fact-finding missions", "consultancy", or some other sneaky misdescription that disguises their true nature.
The only way to fix the problem would be to remove all private money from politics. Politicians get a campaign fund and an expenses fund and that's it.
If they can't make do with that, they don't have the skills to do the job.
Currently getting rewarded for lobbying is the definition of the job. It's just that most voters don't realise that the system is based on corporate sponsorship, and their vote is only useful as a rubber stamp on decisions that have been made for them.
Lobbyists usually call it "robust conversations" and that certainly involves giving money to politicians and other forms of quid pro quos. Institutionalized bribery.
That's the way it work now. If they get caught it just means they pay the government a bribe[1] to stay out of jail. With the other peoples money no less. They themselves never pay a cent.
I'm all for giving overpaid CEOs a couple of days or weeks of community service. The problem with only giving fines, is that those fines are usually a lot smaller than the actual money and profits involved, and it's not really punishment for the people who commited the crime, just cost of business for the company they work for. Unless executive start getting held accountable for the crimes their company commits on their watch, they'll just continue doing this.
Bribery is forbidden by law, for obvious reasons. A law is useless if it is not somehow enforced. One could enforce it by holding the company accountable, however history has shown that this does not withhold individuals from breaking the law for personal gain. (Remember Enron or the credit crisis)
So that's why there are custodial sentences for bribery.
well the bribing was done by people. The company is an abstract entity that merely exists as a convenience for doing business and paying taxes. those people who did the actual bribing aren't being held liable, instead getting to hide behind the abstract entity for some reason. instead they hold the company liable and say 'just give us our cut and we will have done our jobs and we can shut up about it'. Of course Airbus isn't exactly operating in an ideal market and europe needs to do everything to avoid becoming irrelevant in the face of competition from american companies which are funded with military money, but this kind of 'justice' is not exactly what people imagine when they first hear about the concept.
The fines are bad for Airbus but the individuals who committed the crimes don't have to pay anything, what's more, they probably have already cashed their bonuses.
So fines for only the company are not enough to prevent these lucrative crimes from happening again in the future.
A particularly nasty aspect of this story, alluded to at the bottom but not made explicit, is that Airbus was taking massive export credits (in the UK, they got the lion's share of the budget).
It was only in the UK that Airbus was required to actually required to produce documentation about the customer, and the scheme was only uncovered when someone at UKEF realised that Airbus wasn't doing this and the govt had been giving out hundreds of millions to corrupt politicians.
Also, the timeline here is incredible. As soon as the UK announced their investigation, and Airbus was banned from receiving credits...they were in negotiations to resume funding, and (somehow) Enders only lost his job 3 years later (and even the UK has turned back on the money spigot...although this time with sheepish promises about trying to fund a company other than Airbus through UKEF).
Airbus is everything that is wrong with the corporate world. Run by politicians, hopelessly corrupt, always spinning, and receiving massive subsidies by dint of their impact on local job markets.
So both companies build planes that crash, with mostly similar rates as well
The outliers in this list are the 747, the A310 and the 737MAX in ascending order
Boeings look unsafe now but are Airbus really any safer? We are looking at a small sample of extreme events. And just generally, I would not put a great deal of confidence in a company run by politicians...that doesn't mean Boeing is great btw, just that it is probably less bad.
Every company doles out bribes. In many countries bribery is the way to go. Things don’t happen without it. They just find creative ways to make it legal that’s all.
It's actually legal to pay someone a bride under FCPA, but only if they are already legally bound to carry out the task you are bribing them to do. The purpose of the bribe in this case is to "expedite" the service.
I'm not a lawyer much less an international one, but "obviously" there's a difference between a fee for expediting a request that is documented officially and one that is not. I think it would be unreasonable to call the former type a bribe. I recall that there is an option in the US to get your passport faster if you pay an extra fee, but it's not a fee that somebody random made up and they collect.
For now, yes. Recent statement from the president: “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas. We’re going to change that.”
You are asked for a bribe to get your goods to market in a country. That's illegal for a US company. You hire a local company to expedite the process using their customs experience at 2x the bribe -- poof legal.
No, under US law you are still responsible for bribery committed by your proxy, and have to have a process in place to ensure that all proxies follow anti bribery laws.
So if I'm a Senator/Congressman and Comcast came to me promising $500k for my re-election campaign if only I could help them slow down Google Fiber rollout in some town, is it illegal for me to agree? I mean, this is a bribe, isn't it?
If it's structured like that, sure, but it'll not be done that way.
One approach is for a politician/candidate to hold a fundraising lunch/dinner/whatever, and charge for seats. Lobbyists and other folks who want to get access to the senator will buy those tickets and get their couple of minutes to talk about whatever issue is important to them.
Any direction on bill will almost certainly be of a more indirect nature.
It won't be: "Vote against municipal fiber rollouts, and $ISP will give your campaign $10k".
It'll be more along the lines of: "We'd find it difficult to support the campaign of someone who wasn't seen to be acting in our best interests. We think that this municipal fiber rollout is bad for $ISP."
This is how it is done: A congressman proposes a bill (written by cable company itself) such as "Neighbourhood Protection Bill". It will impose regulations on digging for new companies in the name of lower pollution and noise. Then cable company will get behind that bill in the name of betterment of neighborhoods and give ton of money to the congressman for getting elected so bill gets his vote. Then they setup a foundation created for neighborhood peace which invites the congressman to run it. Then the congressman gets to sit on boards of 3 different related companies and get paid half-million each of that "service". Not to mention all the travels and talks engagement that his sponsor will set up around the world to preach neighborhood peace. Every single of this is legal and done openly in public. Congressman will actively seek the support of sponsors for his bill.
Economics wise, there are 535 congressman. Now assume a big company can make $50B of revenues from drilling into arctic. A 10% of this can then be utlized to purchase half of US congress and which comes to about $20M/congressman price tag. However rules allow much lower election donation. So companies often setup foundations, boards etc for congressman to run and get paid $20M over the years for those services.
A congressman salary is less than $175K/yr. US Congress has shit ton of "career politicians" who have held no other jobs for decades. Somehow most of them own a significant amount of properties and wealth nevertheless. How? Above is how. Yes, politicians are massively corrupt.
So you're saying it's 100%, without a doubt bribery, but we're just going to use some tricky language so it doesn't sound like that.
America is corrupt to the very core, don't try to explain it away with newspeak or some kind of roundabout language. It's extremely common to buy the favour of politicians.
> So you're saying it's 100%, without a doubt bribery, but we're just going to use some tricky language so it doesn't sound like that.
Possibly, but it'll depend on your POV and where you draw the line on what's bribery.
Scenario 1:
I represent a mega-corporation and I want legislation changed to make it easier for my factories to comply with pollution laws by changing the definition of pollution.
Is it bribery to say to politicians "Our friends see the current standards on pollution are an impediment to the way we do business. Friends help each other out. Would you like to be our friend?"
Scenario 2:
I represent a small business, and there's legislation proposed that would make it illegal for me to trade on certain days.
I've always given small donations to my local politicians because they've done things that helped my business, but now there's this threat that could ruin my business.
Is it bribery if I tell them "If you support this legislation, we, and all the other local businesses owners like me will no longer be donating to your campaign, we're going to support your opposition instead".
> Nobody should be giving any money to politicians, or their campaigns, for any reason what-so-ever.
I don't disagree on the fundamentals, but I think there's a lot of side effects of something like this.
How should election campaigns be funded?
I've heard suggestions of having the state pay for campaigns, everyone gets a fixed budget (or some variation of this).
But this leads to issues then around who should be eligible to have campaign funding from the state and regulation around that.
If Anna is standing as a candidate, what's to stop Anna's friends Barry, Celeste, and Dina standing, but spending all their campaign funds on promotion that makes it clear that Anna is actually a much better candidate.
Should candidates be able to contribute to campaign expenses themselves? For instance, in situations where there's a lot of travel involved - having better accommodation, more comfortable transport options, more assistants to help them out/etc can make a difference on even a short campaign.
What constitutes a donation? Just money? Time? Resources?
Can I hand out flyers, run a phone tree/social media account for the local council/town/city elections?
What if I own hall, can I let a candidate use that for free?
Maybe I own a restaurant, and want donate the use of that to a candidate for a big campaign speech where they're going to invite all the press.
The press wouldn't ordinarily be interested in this no-name candidate, but the event is at that restaurant that you can't get a reservation to without waiting for months. I also happen to have a bunch of celebrity friends that might just attend. You can be sure that all the journos will be wanting to come along, and that it'll be making the news, even if it's just for the celebrity thing.
Maybe I'm best mates with a candidate - I love flying my private jet, can I fly them around and let them use my Uber Lux account?
If I'm on an hourly contract working for the campaign, can I work overtime without charging the campaign?
These are all good questions, and details would of course have to be worked out, but in Sweden where we do have a system of state funding for political campaigns, I've never heard of these issues arising in practice.
I'm not sure what the details of our rules actually are, except that your party gets funding if you got more than 4% (edit – correction: 2,5%) of the votes in the last election and that people are free to volunteer their time.
You're making the classic mistake of not trying to improve anything because it's difficult and there are tons of edge cases.
Clearly the system as it stands now is terrible and needs to be fixed. Start fixing it now, and worry about the edge cases later. A 10% improvement is better than no improvement.
It's not done by giving money to politicians or their campaigns. This is extremely regulated and the dollar amounts permitted are trivial.
It's done by independently advocating for the candidate. And it's pretty hard to tell people they can't do that. Should you need to fill out a financial disclosure form to be allowed to write a positive comment about Bernie Sanders on Reddit?
Not long ago, I stumbled upon an old book in my uni library - Congress meeting notes from 1860s. It was fascinating to read about some dude who bribed congressmen to get his book published/distributed (the $50 book was about some tax rules, thousands of copies sold). One of his trial responses has stuck in my mind: "You gotta know someone to get things done". Nothing has changed. Oh, in that particular case, back then, a couple of congressmen lost their jobs, but no one went to jail, even though it was proven the bribery took place.
I think corporate donors are held to the same limits as individuals: $2,800 per election to the candidate, $5,000 to their reelection committee. The rest (which still totals less than $500k) goes to state and federal party committees.
Where the unlimited contributions come in (think Citizens United) are Super PACs, but those aren't technically affiliated with candidates, and they can't contribute to the candidates. The freedom of speech angle on this is that corporations or individuals can spend this money on political ads, but it has to be independent of the candidates.
> is it illegal for me to agree?
Yes, or it was illegal for them; this exceeds campaign contribution limits.
It's rare that such large sums would go through the campaign-finance slot. Supposedly Biden received only $200k from the credit card industry for his awful bankruptcy "reforms". Of course larger bribes are paid, but they are less direct and less public. One method I've seen up close (I worked for Lucent back when they were in business) is to hire close relatives of favored politicians at vastly inflated salaries for "show-up" jobs for which those relatives had no observable skills. Those relatives would eventually transfer large portions of the millions they "earned" to the politician, but there was no hurry. In addition, there are sweetheart "investment" opportunities that somehow are only offered to politicians. We've all heard about the exorbitant "speaking fees". ISTR a mayor somewhere published a book and arranged for certain constituents to buy thousands of copies of it. Avaricious politicians have imagination.
Perhaps you're thinking of "Healthy Holly," a series of self-published children's books for which Mayor Pugh was paid over $800000, which came to light last year.
You might want to check out where it is a crime and what agreements big parts of the world have made to make it a crime. The article we're discussing makes these points. Or you could read about them on Wikipedia.
I mean, I agree with you that "every company" is certainly hyperbole, but bribery happens on different scales. Its not all national level and involving 6+ figure sums.
I know someone who worked at a local restaurant where the owner bribed someone at the local health inspection office to be tipped off before "random inspections" giving them a couple of days notice to get things sorted out prior to the inspection.
I suspect companies committing bribery are the minority, but it can and does happen at the local small-business level.
Your local deli needs its location zoned for commercial use. Delis don't make that much money, so if it's sitting on prime real estate, it needs a narrow enough zoning category to prevent a higher value business from scooping up the lease.
It needs approval from the building inspector, the fire marshal, and the health department. Unless there's a yellow curb or a loading dock, it needs the police to look the other way while its suppliers' trucks park illegally during unloading.
There are many politicians and bureaucrats with discretion over whether it gets to exist. Most of the time, those people probably act in good faith. But they absolutely could shake down the owner if they wanted to, or accept a bribe for lax enforcement. Or the departments could be so short-staffed that it'll be years for an approval unless an interested politician escalates on your behalf.
Good luck running a small business in Chicago while not on friendly terms with your alderman.
That may be true, but Deli are also often the target of vendors, distributors for kickbacks. They may not have bribed anyone, but they could also have been bribed.
Option 3: start jailing these fraudsters for criminal fraud. Jail corporate profits for 6 months. Claw back any and all executive pay since the fraud began and distribute it to low level employees or other victims of the fraud.
If you can't survive as an honest company you don't deserve to survive.
And there are very few people that give the government as many screws as executives to modify their behavior.
In medical devices when you screw up they can stop you from selling in a country for a while. That usually wakes people up. Stopping them from doing business for a while would wake up a lot of companies. But they can always hold their employees hostage since they would take most of the suffering.
Unless of course the screw up is “normal”, like leaving your device unsecured and open to the internet (which is wide spread in the medical device community, at least in practice).
I guess with “screw up” I meant things the regulatory organization doesn’t like. This could mean just wrong paperwork.
As far as security goes things are improving. Five years ago you got brushed off if you pointed out how easily hackable the devices were. Now people are listening and the FDA also seems to understand issues better.
Yep. Restrict their access to countries, markets, permits, approvals, private jets, the list goes on. There's a lot we can do short of jailing. And we can and should jail.
Well it is not completely clean in that industry. When selling large capital equipment you influence the buyer alot - invite them to your HQ, big hotel, show your secret innovation and talk about massive deals in reagents or other system the buy from you...
In most of the developing world/3rd world countries to get any contracts you need to bribe the politicians. So any western company that has got government contracts to build anything has given bribes then that black money (illegal money) is parked in real estate and banks of the developed countries. Then they provide loans through development banks like IMF etc to offset the trade imbalances that results because of the money going out of these poor countries. I personally feel one of the reasons western countries don't like China silk road initiative is that China used their own playbook and cut them out of this market of exploitation.
For the countries being exploited they exchanged 1 for the other but because of competition the politicians now get better deals make billions and once loose the power move to the west where their money was parked.
The EXIM bank can be viewed as a subsidy (and unfair trade advantage) for companies like Boeing. I assume there's an EU version of it that will do everything it can to put you in an Airbus today.
Anyone here actually believes it is only Airbus???
Does it matter? Airbus is being punished for what Airbus did. If other companies also misbehaved, that doesn't suddenly mean that Airbus didn't break the law and shouldn't be punished.
It's the difference between a justice system and mob rule.
Well, in the UK no less than PM Blair personally interfered to get to SFO to drop the in investigation into BAE bribery on the Eurofighter Typhoon project in Saudi Arabia.
Something about 5,000 jobs, ₤6 billion, and - of course - upset Saudi princes.
While I'll get a ton of down votes for saying this: any place where government has too much presence and authority over economy is riddled with bribery. It just cannot be other way. What is that saying? Power corrupts.
As for solution - not sure. It seems this is defense case so more transparency might not be an option
Bribery happens when people have power with little accountability. Any kind of power, government or not, should go hand in hand with accountability. It's the only way to prevent corruption.
What about whataboutism? Seriously though just calling whataboutery is so boring, I found it interesting how often this happens with all defence contractors, as if there’s something deeply immoral at their core...
This is not an easy thing though: the countries in which bribes are paid are run by corrupt people who expect kickbacks as part of doing business, and there's no other way about it.
If the West wants to play morally superior on this - then 100% of Airbus, Boeing, SNC, Halliburton and massive industrials will full-on go out of business.
This issue is not part of the current round of negotiations with China and it's too bad, because without a level playing field - many industries will be wiped out and other countries will be happy to pick up the slack.
This stuff is quite common, we need a comprehensive solution.
One indirect approach might be to invest and push for open journalism in places like Malaysia, so as to force their own hand on corruption though that may be asking too much.
I question the premise. The US has the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 has already made it illegal to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. Somehow, Boeing, SNC, Halliburton, and many other massive industrials have survived so far.
"and many other massive industrials have survived so far."
Because they are paying bribes.
It's rampant, and almost out in the open.
Major Western corporations keep 'sunshine funds' off the books, in offshore companies, for bribes high and low.
'Bribery' as we call it, is normative in most of the world, and it's how it works.
And this is not just corrupt leaders, it's anyone in a position to benefit, from bottom to top.
As I said: the issue is how the Western public is going to deal with this information coming to light because they're completely naive to what's going on.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that because some companies were prosecuted under the statute(s) that they, or industry in general, engage in just as much activity as they would have unregulated.
It's a very natural thing for someone who has status to think that they should be able to cash in on that power.
Everyone with responsibility is looking at a pile of money every day, all they have to do is reach out and grab some. And after all, they 'work hard' so why shouldn't they? (Is the internal logic they might use).
Most businesses are commodities, it's hard to compete on price or anything else. It makes much more sense to compete on some other basis.
In 2020 most industries continue to run on soft grease. The next time you go to a sporting event, look at the Box Seats and consider that 100% of them are business write-offs, used to 'entertain' i.e. to 'give a gift' to someone in business they are not otherwise allowed to do.
There is no such thing as a Free Lunch
Some might even argue that while it might be unethical to bribe a judge, it's altogether different for commercial kickbacks. Why should an exec who has toiled all of his life leave the profits to the considerably more corrupt owners? ... is the internal logic they might use.
When you think about the nature of power and influence - such activities are the natural course of action, and it takes a pretty strong, moral social organization + strong laws to overcome it.
I guess it's a good thing that most regular people in the West think bribery is bad, and that at least it's not something they should do. That probably took a few hundred years of indoctrination at least.
Ok, you disagree. But after writing "Yes it is", none of your following 8 sentences seem to support your opinion.
If someone is prosecuted and assumed guilty of a crime, then it proves that the law does not prevent the activity 100%. However, it also seems virtually certain that it prevents some of the crime.
If someone claimed that because people are arrested for murder all the time, the law(s) against murder have no effect, is that really serious? Or is it just the sort of thing people like to say, but everyone knows better?
If you make a statement and then don't support it, it creates the unfortunate appearance that you're not expressing sincere opinions, or if you are, that you won't explain where they come from.
You left out an unfortunate appearance: that the poster might be rationalizing the practice of bribery as "everybody does it" specifically because the poster engages in bribery.
Nice dinners, catered events, golf meetings, game.tickets, 'free' staff to work on projects isn't quite bribery.
A wink and a nudge showing that politicians and senior staff can have a job making millions isn't quite an offer either..no one would.be so gauche. But it sure gets close.
You can also just forgive debt, or anonymously pay it off.
There is no bribery, but I guess the practical difference seems pretty tiny.
They can set up the politicians' children and relatives with lucrative government contracts and positions on the boards of investment funds and foreign oil and gas companies, though. The meme that this is somehow OK needs to die.
The lobbyists are expensive lawyers. Their publically reported fees are the tip of an iceberg, where the bulk of valuable considerations is hidden from view.
Where there's memes there's facts. (smoke -> fire)
The Clintons were "never bribed", for instance, they were just getting paid millions of dollars in "speaking fees".
You don't need to swap briefcases at a park bench to do bribery. There's plenty of unspoken quid pro quo understandings that the participants are well aware of, and this is far more effective as there'll never be any smoking guns to bring them down.
With the Clintons, the big conflict of interest is the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation.
It's a charity (which apparently does pretty good work) but it pays for a lot of things for the Clintons and gives them tremendous status.
Hillary Clinton accepted 100's of millions into her charity from officials with whom she, as a rep. of the US was directly doing business.
She was caught once, directly conferring titles to an individual who contributed to the fund, and the title had to be removed.
Even though I do not generally believe that this is a form of corruption, it's a massive conflict of interest. Just like an exec how owns 90% of a company and takes office has to put said investment in a 'blind trust' - I believe the Clinton Foundation should have effectively been turned into a 'blind trust' as well.
But there are 100% cases of soft pay for access going on here.
Edit: to be more precise, the Clinton charity accepted money from officials of countries and other orgs that the US was dealing with, wherein Hillary was a rep of the US Gov. Not necessarily individuals she was dealing with directly. I'm not throwing flames here, just saying 'conflict of interest'.
Corruption has already massively improved since the heydays of the 60s and 70s, so I doubt your cynicism.
But of all the industries, big planes should be among the easiest to clean up: there’s only two participants in this prisoners‘ dilemma, and they are both, theoretically, under the purview of rigorous enforcement in countries governed by law.
"there’s only two participants in this prisoners‘ dilemma, and they are both, theoretically, under the purview of rigorous enforcement in countries governed by law."
What? No.
There are 1000's of participants, and few of them are under the purview of the law.
1. Someone wants access to a Malaysian Air exec at some hotel event. Bribe someone for info.
2. Someone is overseeing the aircraft regulatory body, their findings will sway one way or another. Bribe them.
3. Someone is drafting legislation to support the state-sponsored purchase of aircraft. Bribe them.
4. The brother of the 'deciding individual' at Malaysian Air hints he can help access. Bribe them.
5. The people responsible for lower-level contractual affairs are putting up a fuss over some little details? Bribe them.
6. The 'respected international consultancy' is putting together the business plan for the national airline strategy. Bribe them.
7. The executives making the purchase want a kickback. Bribe them.
These bribes come in all forms, some of them more or less legal, or more or less ethical - depending on the law.
Does giving the son of the Malay MP drafting relevant legislation a job at Airbus constitute a bribe? Or just congeniality?
Does flying in a team of officials for an all-expenses-paid, swanky getaway at a high-end swiss resort for 'a meeting' constitute a bribe?
In the West, a lot of this happens in fuzzier ways, borderline ethical. In other countries, it's just how business is done.
In other places, like Nigeria, it's pretty straight forward. Once you get to the Nigerian Minister of Natural Resources, he will have spelled out for you by people in his periphery beforehand nature and expected size of the bribe, how it gets transmuted so that nothing 'impolite' happens directly in his presence.
If you're an American IT company that has support offices in the Middle East and Africa that subcontracts the work to local companies, but then wants to end such contracts in favor of direct hires ... and said subcontractors are connected - you will 'pay a bribe' out of the sunshine fund.
If you're IKEA and want to open a store in Moscow, you will pay x% of your revenue to a local 'businessman/thug'. If not - no store! So you wait a decade and realize you have no choice, and so you just pay the appropriate tributes.
Again - the issue is how the plebes in the West are going to react when they start to learn how everything is working.
The only way to 'end' this is to have a lot of various powers on board, and it's going to be different in every country.
It might work out differently in every country, and maybe at different levels of scale, or happen in a different way, i.e. instead of 'kickbacks', execs get lucrative contracts somewhere else or some other kind of benefit.
This will take a few centuries to sort out.
Edit: to be clear I'm not advocating at all for any of these shenanigans.
"If you're IKEA and want to open a store in Moscow, you will pay x% of your revenue to a local 'businessman/thug'. If not - no store! So you wait a decade and realize you have no choice, and so you just pay the appropriate tributes."
I don't know who downvoted this but come on. jariel has a point and it's not going away because we bury our heads in the sand.
At a basic level I think it falls down to fundamentally different conceptions of what is a "business" versus individuals, families, organizations of many types. What we call "lie" and "theft" in the West might be innocuous or praised in the East (think "great poker player", "bold move"), and no regulation will make each side suddenly re-order their hierarchy of values, and the centennial legal system that surely goes with it.
I don't know where the solution lies, if any, but that's one hell of a cultural clash.
That is not the same as more coincidental, opportunistic bribery the likes of dictatorships or local lords, the chaos tax. That's more of a temporary friction that can (and should) be dealt with more swiftly — had we the global political will to do so. It's nowhere near as hard a problem as the above cultural matter.
Every year we learn more about how suit-wearers do business: nepotism, bribery, kickbacks, back scratching, quid pro quo … but we continue to believe the myth of the “self made man,” who raised themselves to success by hard work and thorough understanding of their technical field.
Maybe people here have never heard the EU point of view on it, so let me sum it up: Airbus bribed Saudi officials in the 90s to get a 6 billion contracts. It was "whistleblowed" by this then little-known agency: NSA and in the end Boeing got the contract. It triggered a EU investigation in what was then called ECHELON. A Cold-war era spying network that was being repurposed for economic intelligence.
Airbus defense was that in Saudi Arabia, nothing gets done without corruption and Boeing probably did the same, but of course, EU had no interceptions to prove it.
I often argue that Snowden told us very little new information and that the EU kney most of this since 2001. I don't understand why it took 15 years to become a public concern.
I agree with all you've said, including that probably the US bribes (or threatens) as much or more than the EU. But being even more cynical about it, this is just the way the free market sneaks in, including these big government deals: one party has money, the other party has power. Say Airbus bribes Saudi Arabia Officials. The officials don't have that much money, but they surely have power, and Airbus doesn't have the power to decide on the deal but they surely have some cash. A transaction is agreed and done and both parties reach a win-win situation. Of course the losing part is the citizens, but a capitalistic view of this is that corruption is just anything that breaks the fairy tale idea that the people that work in government seek the interests of the general public and not their very own private interests. Citizens were already on the losing side when the government forced them to pay taxes.
Actually, this is orthogonal to governments. There's widespread bribery in the private sector too, where decisions makers are gifted to persuade them.
To use your phrasing, a capitalistic view of this is that corruption is just anything that breaks the fairy tale idea that the people who work in the corporation seek the interests of the company and not their very own private interests.
You can even see it play out here on Hacker News - people who optimize for their own career goals at the detriment of the company that pays them to get a job done.
It's true, but it's also true that many things that are considered corruption/illegal when you do it for the government, they are not when it's inside a company. If a business owner hires his nephew, that's not illegal and many people wouldn't consider it corruption. If a government official appoints his nephew, that's frowned upon to say the least. But going back to your argument, if an employee uses his position and gets bribed, of course that's going at the detriment of the company... but you could also say that if the company has the right checks and balances he will get caught, and that if the company had made sure that the interests of the employee were well-aligned with the company's it wouldn't be a logical step. And that's why some companies pay so handsomely.
I feel a government has a scope wider than a company and is answerable to the public at large. A corporation is answerable to its shareholders so slightly different.
Bribery at any level is not acceptable, and even at the corporate level if shareholders are affected, they would want to remove the person taking bribes
A company is inherently answerable to the public at large. No less than a government, it's a legal fiction that is enabled by the collective behavior of the public remaining consistent with its existence.
Just to be clear, are you talking about a publicly listed company or feel that every business, let's say a small grocery store as well is equally responsible.
I feel a company is responsible to its customers and shareholders, that's about it.
I didn't use the exact word "responsible" which sounds ambiguous and maybe normative. I was trying to make a factual statement rather than a normative one. Even a small grocery store depends on abstract legal concepts having power which require public assent.
Corruption is not how free markets sneak in, that's how they die.
Free markets don't exist in a vacuum. They rely on governments to maintain a state of fair competition. Corruption does not lead to free markets, it leads to monopolies and oligopolies.
It is true, however, that unchecked free markets often lead to this state.
Free markets rely on fair competition: you want companies to compete on quality and price and remove all the other factors, like nepotism, entryism or corruption. There is a competition in corruption, but a competition that is not in the public interest.
The company getting the big plane contract in country X should be the company with the best/cheapest planes, not the one able to send the hottest hookers to the crucial decision makers.
Still, tolerating bribes could lead to a dysunctional corporate culture where technical obstacles are solved with money instead of engineering. Airbus isn't as bad as Boeing, but it'd be nice if they didn't go down a similar road.
This is really US taking down strategic competitors. It's nothing new.
It's foreign policy, america first, double standard or whatever you want to name it.
The US with the power of various DAs etc attacked the european banking industry whilst completely ignoring the american banking industry over almost nothing in some cases.
Considering that Boeing is in deep, deep trouble Airbus has stayed very quiet and deliberately so. Their only major competitor collapsing can't be good for the strategically. Just imagine Boeing going bankrupt and being split up with China buying some parts...
US government will never let this happen, as a matter of national security. They'll bleed and may be bought by a US company, but never international interests
Article is paywalled, what was the timeline of the bribes happening? Would it be fair to say:
Airbus runs 'massive' bribery scheme -> Airbus wins more orders -> Boeing feels pressure of losing orders -> Boeing execs pressure engineers to cut corners -> Boeing aircraft develop various major safety issues
so not happy with making loads of cash with boeing loosing business they want to make even more. What happened to just making money, when did they become so greedy they want to make all the money!
So nobody went to jail, though