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April 26, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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April 26, 2002
No Kidding:
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
By Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
A key anti-bribery law has taken a major hit.
A startling decision handed down last
week by a federal judge in Houston undermines the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act and will make it difficult for weak and demoralized
prosecutors to bring to justice U.S. corporate executives who
openly bribe foreign government officials.
The judge in the case ruled that under
the law, it is perfectly legal for an executive from a U.S company
to bribe a foreign official to reduce the company's tax burden
or customs duties in that country.
We knew it was a big victory for Corporate
America because earlier this week, the criminal defense attorneys
started calling us, while the federal prosecutors in charge
of prosecuting  foreign bribery cases, including
Peter Clark and Philip Urofsky at the Justice Department's Criminal
Division, refused to return our calls.
The case involves American Rice, Inc.,
the nation's largest rice miller and marketer of branded rice
products in the United States, selling under names such as Comet
and Blue Ribbon. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1998.
A federal indictment filed earlier this
year charged David Kay, the company's vice president for marketing,
and Douglas Murphy, the company's chief executive officer, with
violations of the anti-bribery law.
The company was not indicted.
The indictment alleges that Kay and Murphy
bribed Haitian customs officials for purposes of reducing customs
duties and the tax burden that the company faced in Haiti.
Kay and Murphy filed motions to dismiss
the indictment.
At an argument before U.S. District Court
Judge David Hittner earlier this month in Houston, lawyers for
Kay and Murphy argued that even if you assume, for purposes
of argument, that a bribe was paid to reduce customs duties
and taxes, such a bribe is not covered by the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act.
"The law prohibits corrupt payments
to influence a foreign official's acts or decisions, but only
if they are made to assist -- and here is the magic language
-- in 'obtaining or retaining business,'" said Reid Weingarten,
a partner at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. and Kay's
lawyer. "That's the language of the statute. So, what you
are left with is this: the only acts that can be prosecuted
under the law are corrupt payments made to obtain or retain
business."
Judge Hittner agreed and threw out the
indictment.
The law has always been weak and while
its backers claim that its passage in 1977 has had remedial
effects on how business conducts its affairs overseas, no one
really knows what impact the law has had on foreign bribery
by U.S. companies.
The Department of Justice has criminally
prosecuted only 30 or so cases in the entire history of the
law.
Big business substantially weakened the
already tepid law in 1988, when it pushed through Congress,
and President Reagan signed, what is known as the "grease
payment" exception.
According to Weingarten, this exception
says that "if you are paying money to get the machinery
of government in a foreign country to take routine governmental
action" it's not a violation of the law.
Over the past few years, big companies
have been on the offensive overseas, arguing that since U.S.
corporations have to live under the threat of criminal prosecution
for foreign bribery, then so should the Germans and the Japanese
and the French.
They have funded groups like Transparency
International to push to "level the playing field."
And as a result of that effort, many
foreign countries have passed laws similar to the U.S. anti-bribery
law.
But foreign companies make a persuasive
argument to counter the American effort overseas -- you have
a weak law, you rarely prosecute, hardly any American executives
go to jail for bribery.
In response, the Justice Department said
it was investigating 75 possible cases of bribery in 2001.
But now, the decision by Judge Hittner
threatens government actions in similar cases, including a pending
case where federal officials allege that executives of the oil
services company Baker Hughes paid a bribe of $75,000, through
KPMG-Siddharta Siddharta & Harsono, to wipe out a $3 million
tax bill for the company's Indonesian subsidiary.
Martin Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor
and now partner at Foley Gardner in Washington, D.C., represents
one of the executives in the Baker Hughes case.
Weinstein says that while he agrees with
Judge Hittner's decision, the Justice Department will not let
the decision stand.
"First they will appeal it, and
if the decision stands, they will seek to amend the law,"
Weinstein told us. "They cannot live with the law as interpreted.
The law will have to be changed or else the enforcement effort
will suffer greatly. We go overseas and convince our allies
to criminalize their laws, to prohibit foreign bribery. And
they look at the Kay case and say -- we just criminalized foreign
bribery, and you let Kay walk on these facts? You have to be
kidding me."
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and the co-director of Essential Action. They
are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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