Sunday, April 22, 2012

WalMart's Massive Mexico Bribery Scandal is Only the Latest Conservative Corruption

The only question I have is why ALEC isn't being regarded as a corruption scandal here.  I would suggest to our readers it is because big money is very successful at putting layers of protective insulation around itself to remain unaccountable for illegal actions.

In the emerging scandal of WalMart it is yet more proof that principled and conservative are far too often NOT words which belong together.  Not for the Koch Brothers, NOT for the Waltons of the WalMart empire either.
These are the people shaping our local, state and federal level legislation.  Conservatives are willing to look the other way in exchange for virtually unlimited amounts of money, and pat themselves on the back for their morality because they have a false but smug sense of superoiority for their backward values, values which are hurtful, damaging and not in the best interests of this country.  Values which include embracing white supremacists. Here's a news flash - just calling yourselves Christian doesn't make you either virtuous or morally upright, and neither does being repressive bastards who use government to promote the redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy who bribe you to do so.
We have massive expenditure of money to commit voter fraud in states like Wisconsin where there are large numbers of robo calls voters who are expected to vote Democratic, mass maillings funded by Koch Brothers money to misdirect voters to the wrong polling locations, or to deliberately misinform them about absentee ballot voting, and again to repeatedly send them to the polls AFTER voting is concluded.  The 'principled' conservatives who are anything but that passed a voter ID bill.......and then promptly closed the offices where the ID can be obtained in Democratic areas of the state while opening more and for longer hours in Republican areas of the state in a calculated effort to make voting even more difficult and expensive for citizens.  These are NOT people of conscience, these are NOT people who are patriotic supporters of honest elections.  These are cheaters, these are evil unAmerican assholes who are doing one thing and one thing only - attempting to grab power, by illegal means, and by illegal, unethical and immoral acts wrongly given legal cover.
It is true in the bribery scandals of Koch Industries, and it is now shown to be true in the latest WalMart scandal, which involves one of the big power players on the current board of directors in the U.S., someone who has been promoted to the hightest levels of control where it is probable he will be too powerful to be removed.

THESE are the conservative 'captains of industry', who should be rather termed 'captains of corruption' who are using ALEC to corrupt our government in turn.  They are conservative, and it is other conservatives who are willing to cooperate with them, in exchange for wealth and power.
This isn't NEW.  Any good student of history would be familiar with this pattern in our past.  We had this kind of corruption by wealthy men in the gilded age, we had this exact same kind of corruption in our financial industry prior to the Great Depression in the 1930s.  And we have had our conservatives trying to dismantle every single damned protection against that kind of wealth and attendant corruption- they ALWAYS go together in history - our naitonal history, and world history. 
If we do not push back against that redistribution of power and wealth from people, from the 99%, we will become a decayed third-world country, where there is a small group of wealthy and powerful individuals and the 99% in poverty and ignorance. The right, including the misguided religious right, are already pushing that ignorance.  The Tea Party wallows in ignorance, ignorance of science, ignorance of history, and their worst ignorance, in economics.
That it takes corruption to make that ignorance stick doesn't seem to bother them.  It should bother all of us, including intelligent, moral conservatives.
As you read this, ask yourselves how many people had to be silent for this to work, and how many more had to agree and assist.  The New York Times story is long, but it is well worth the read.
And then stop to think about what corruption these same people are committing in THIS country with OUR government.  My best guess is that WalMart is hoping it is too long a story for lazy Americans to read all the way through, too complex for lazy Americans to give deep thought, or to connect the dots. 
I'm hoping WalMart is wrong about lazy Americans.  READ IT.
From MSNBC.com:
Wal-Mart hushed up vast Mexico bribery case

NYT: Top executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing

By
updated 4/21/2012 3:27:37 PM ET2012-04-21T19:27:37
In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.
The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.
Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”
The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.
Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

Follow the link.  Read the rest. Think about what these same people are doing, using conservatives to corrupt OUR government.

Then pour yourself another cup of whatever you drink............and read this.  Ask yourself........WHY THE STEALTH?  Do you want THESE people telling your legislators what to write, what to pass, how to vote - and then have them do it? I don't.  I don't think you do either, and that is why you should pay attention to this.


Conservative nonprofit ALEC acts as stealth business lobbyist

Membership includes nearly 2,000 state legislators — and corporations

By
updated 1 hour 33 minutes ago2012-04-22T04:56:58
Desperate for new revenue, Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation last year that would make it easier to recover money from businesses that defraud the state.
It was quickly flagged at the Washington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business-backed group that views such “false claims” laws as encouraging frivolous lawsuits. ALEC’s membership includes not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country — including dozens who would vote on the Ohio bill.
One of them, Bill Seitz, a prominent Republican state senator, wrote to a fellow senior lawmaker to relay ALEC’s concerns about “the recent upsurge” in false-claims legislation nationwide. “While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved,” he said in a private memorandum.
The legislation was reworked to ease some of ALEC’s concerns, making it one of many bills the group has influenced by mobilizing its lawmaker members, a vast majority of them Republicans.
Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules. Amid the controversies, several companies, including Coca-Cola, Intuit and Kraft Foods, have left the group.
Most of the attention has focused on ALEC’s role in creating model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that broadly advance a pro-business, socially conservative agenda. But a review of internal ALEC documents shows that this is only one facet of a sophisticated operation for shaping public policy at a state-by-state level. The records offer a glimpse of how special interests effectively turn ALEC’s lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signaling how they should vote and collaborating on bills affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes.

Read it.  Read ALL OF IT.  Pay attention to it.
THINK.

5 comments:

  1. The fool that wrote this article doesn't understand the Mexican culture of corruption that commands bribes as a daily part of life. Like any insane liberal they should shut up and sit down. Any rational person would see through their lies immediately.

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  2. Welcome Bob to Penigma. The person that wrote this article DOES understand the Mexican culture, thank you - you clearly didn't read the NY Times article which distinguishes between the amount of bribes found before and after the role of one executive. That person came to WalMart from the Mexican Branch of Proctor and Gamble. What they did is illegal, under U.S. law - we made it illegal a long time ago to engage in foreign bribes. Which is a scandal Wallyworld has in common with the Koch Brothers.

    It is not lies, and you seem to be the person who has the problem with seeing truth. The documentation is clear.

    And what they did is wrong - and not so different from what they do here.

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  3. Hello Dog Gone,
    The days of responsible citizenship went the way of the Dodo Bird long ago. When you have a former Vice President guilty of bribery but received no repercussions of his actions…..what chance does the working middle class have in this country anymore?

    The Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) filed charges against Vice President Cheney, and who was later found guilty, when he was the head of Halliburton. He paid $180 million to bribe Nigerian officials.

    The EFCC filed a 16 count charges at a federal high court in Abuja against Cheney, along with David Lesar, Halliburton’s Chief Executive, and two other executives of the company, in a case that dates back to the 1990s.

    Just as a note for those who would nihilistically try to counter that is untrue simply because it is not what they want reality to be, I would pass on that Halliburton "Pleaded Guilty" to those charges!

    Yes Halliburton also pleaded guilty to the U.S. charges that between 1994 and 2004, that it paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas project in the Niger Delta.

    What!!! Say it ain’t so…..Dickey (I got a new heart) Cheney is a convicted criminal?!?!?? But…but…but that can’t be true…..He’s a good Conservative Republican who gets paid speaking fees for promoting Christian Values across the country. That would be hypocritical wouldn’t it?!?!

    Well the fact of the matter is Halliburton reached a $579 million settlement in the United States to bail out the “Good O’l Boy Dickey Cheney.” That being said, Nigeria, France and Switzerland have conducted their own investigations into the case. This was one of the biggest fines ever paid by a U.S. company in a foreign corruption case.

    Let’s continue extending this line of thought:
    There are “War Crime Warrants” filed in Switzerland against George W. Bush and he had to cancel a planned trip to Geneva. He would have been arrested upon arrival so George W. Bush called off a trip to Switzerland and would have been Bush's first to Europe since he admitted in his autobiography, “Decision Points,” that he had authorized the use of “Waterboarding.” (We executed a Japanese solder after WWII when found guilty for the torture of “Waterboarding” of U.S. prisoners as a War Crime then.) So even the U.S. has presence of executing a person for the crimes of "Waterboarding Torture."

    It is a sad and extraordinary development that a former U.S. President has an “International War Crimes Warrant” for his arrest and would be enforced if he were caught outside of the country.

    Similarly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even had to be sneaked out of France in 2007 to avoid arrest after he landed in Paris to give a talk as he too has his own “International War Crimes Warrant” for his arrest.

    So conclude and to summarize, there are "War Crime Warrants" with the world wide "International Criminal Court" (I.C.C.) against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condi Rice, and Alberto Gonzales over the practice of extraordinary rendition.

    All know that they cannot be caught outside of this country and the reason why President Obama’s Administration won’t enforce the international warrents and prosecute the previous administration for these “International War Crime Warrants,” is that it would be an expansion of executive power that would set a dangerous precedent.

    In reality, those Conservative Republicans instead of bashing President Obama, they should be thanking him everyday and be publicly kissing his ass in the middle of D.C. as thanks.

    How proud the George W. Bush's Administration's members have made us all as U.S. citizens. We are nothing more that distained hypocrites and guilty by association. Those who do not see this fact don’t want to see the obvious.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bob,

    First, Welcome to Penigma, please comment often. Comments which are cogent and generally stay away from being insulting are welcome even when they disagree with the position of the author.

    Which brings me to the next point. Your commen had not less than four insults while stating one somewhat ephemeral point. That's not the kind of comment I allow. If you want to call liberals fools for believing in something, then say, "You liberals all (or most) seem to believe that Mexico's 'culture of corruption' isn't the primary culprit here, and in that, you're very foolish." That sort of comment would never be challenged. However, calling liberals insane, calling the author a fool, and telling people who don't agree with you to "sit down and shut up" or perhaps going as far as suggesting they shouldn't speak, perhaps being taken then by others as advocating silencing dissent, well, that's a pretty far cry from civil.

    Consequently, I'll give you a warning - I don't give very many before I simply ask folks to not comment. What you wrote was offensive, what you wrote was juvenile. On the basic premise, that Mexicans have a "culture of corruption" could easily be taken to mean you think they somehow are "more prone" than here, or culturally/racially are more likely to be corrupt. Do you believe that? My experience in dealing with Mexicans is that they HATE the corruption in their country, and many flee the country for that reason alone. But more, and most importantly, Mexico is run by 12 families, families which are, by any measure, ruling under an ultra-conservative definintion of capitalism/corporatism where they control the government, the police, the Army and so on. THEY allow this culture of corruption. THEY, the elite aristocracy, you know the people Mitt Romney like to call "job creators" and of whom any criticism is labeled as "attacking success", those folks, those ultra-wealthy folks who have 10's of millioins of people working at poverty levels, THEY set the tone in Mexico. THEY allow the police to be corrupt, they keep the Army from punishing and ending the drug cartels wave of murder, in fact they help to foster the drug cartels by keeping wages so depressed that people have little alternatives.

    In short, Mexico's "culture of corruption" IS, writ large, what conservatism leads to when good and decent people don't stand up and speak out. So, I'll not shut up, nor sit down, and for the sake of your kids and mine (assuming you have them), I hope I'm successful in stopping the uber-elite from taking this country down Mexico's path. However, unlike many self-inflated conservatives, I won't claim to have been YOUR savior, I won't demand you shut, sit down, and say "thank-you", your decent, civil dissent will be thanks enough.

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  5. I am less than thrilled with Bob's tone but I give him credit for expressing a dissenting opinion. What I don't give him credit for in his comment is failing to be fact based. Ideology doesn't replace facts; it is not an equal substitution.

    We in the U.S. in a variety of ways contribute to foreign corruption. We have laws against doing that - and WalMart knowingly violated those laws, was alerted to it, continued it, and put the fox in charge of the investigation hen house, which argues they were NOT honestly interested in identifying and cleaning up the problem.

    We have some of our largest corporations based in the U.S. doing the worst damage - WalMart is the single largest employer for example in Mexico. You are correct Pen that the conservative owned and dominated corporations are responsible for corruption in other countries --- and for the political corruption of government in this country.

    If Bob wants any cred here, he needs to be fact based, not just spout more conservative drivel.

    ReplyDelete