Corruption can be good for corporations, and President Donald Trump conveniently owns one. British, Brazilian and US authorities (pre-Trump) have cracked down on it in the past, with Rolls-Royce making a £671 million write-off this year to bail themselves out.
Trump is wrecking everything
America has a long history of fighting corruption, but as one might expect from a reckless, maniacal totalitarian who was the shady CEO of an American corporation and then got elected President, Donald Trump has been in office for four weeks and is already undoing four decades of anti-corruption work.
So, in addition to the extreme right wing and the racists and the sexists and the Islamophobes, now kleptocrats across the world love Donald Trump, too.
Trump made it abundantly clear during his campaign that he wanted to put America first, effectively putting an end to all overseas business dealings by American corporations in order to create jobs on American soil for unemployed rednecks. This means turning a blind eye to corruption, which will flood the market with shady offshore deals that shun American companies out, so they'll have no choice but to do their business domestically. It's not as simple as that, of course, but that's the basic gist.
Rejection of new law opens the door to corruption
Congress have voted against a new law that was going to make all American gas, oil, and mining companies to tell the Government about every payment (licensing, royalty, etc.), so that they could monitor the company's accounts and make sure there's no funny business. In other words, Congress is choosing to turn its back and ignore corruption.
In a move unlikely to happen often in Trump's America, the law was conceived in a joint venture by a Republican ex-senator, Richard Lugar, and a current Democratic senator, Ben Cardin, as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act from 2010, which specifically targeted a post-market crash Wall Street.
Big oil corporations did not for a second want the government knowing anything about their accounts and which of their cash changes hands overseas and with whom.
Their main lobbyist, the American Petroleum Institute, fought the Cardin-Lugar law all the way. They managed to delay its implementation, and played a long game of delaying it until something would come up to get rid of it, and then Trump came along to save them and their corrupt dealings. He's nuts about tightening the borders and US trade laws and stopping people from getting in or out of America, and that works just great for corrupt businessmen.
Rex Tillerson, Trump's Secretary of State, will fully support the vetoing of the Cardin-Lugar law, as he's one of the top members of the API. The API’s propaganda displayed the Cardin-Lugar law to the public as bureaucracy trying to invade the private sector, rather than an effort to minimise corruption.
To throw people off, they said that companies don’t have access to the information that Cardin and Lugar want access to, which is bullsh*t because it is readily available to them because it’s in their books.
Corruption costs businesses trillions
If anything, businesses should either be more careful with their corruption or avoid it entirely, because corruptions gets found out by governments one way or another, and the fines end up costing companies trillions each year, $2.6 trillion to be exact, and it’s estimated that corruption comes at a cost of raising business expenses by 10% every year. And the $1 trillion in taxes that goes to stopping corruption isn’t ideal. It’s the reason law enforcement and hospitals and education are so underfunded.
So, while the Cardin-Lugar law wouldn’t have put an end to corruption, it certainly would’ve put a roadblock in front of it, and a lot of businesses handing out bribes and politicians taking them would’ve been scared off by the risks posed by the new law. Trump is unwittingly inviting in corruption from overseas. He’s basically what Lenin referred to as a “useful idiot.” It’s so apt.
