Since the seventies, there's been a law on the books that makes it illegal for corporations to use bribes in doing business in foreign nations.
In recent years, the Department of Justice has been cracking down on corporations that violate this law, mainly because new IRS reporting requirements put the onus and risk of prosecution on corporate executives. Some of the biggest companies have been slammed with big fines, including Siemens, Halliburton and Johnson and Johnson.
Not surprisingly, these corporations are bitching about their being caught engaging in corrupt acts.
So what's a megacorporation to do? Fund the United States Chamber of Commerce to lobby for changes to the existing legislation to weaken the law.
The Wall Street Journal reports, in an article, Critics Target Bribery Law.
" For corporate America's top lobbyists, trying to curb a powerful antibribery law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has risen to the top of the agenda, sparking a widespread debate about how the legislation is enforced.
In the past five years, a remarkable run of enforcement of the U.S. law has led to about $4 billion in penalties against corporations. The law prohibits companies from paying bribes to foreign officials to win business. A violation can result in criminal prosecution."
Bribery flickr image By macalin
The article reports that so far, over $700,000 has been invested in lobbying to weaken or eliminate the law. They're framing these onslaughts on the law as "clarifications," and two Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) are on board with this framing-- perhaps vying for the "owned and operated by corporations" reputation that Chris Dodd used to hold.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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