Bribing Government Officials
For as long as I can remember (so for at least half a century) the jurisprudence system in Mexico has worked on grease. If a request for a certain permit or action by the government was taking a bit too long, or you weren’t getting the results you wanted, all you had to do was apply a little grease (cash under the table) in order to speed it up and get things to go your way. If it still was not moving fast enough, then you just applied a little more grease.
The way the legal system ended up working in Mexico is that the party who paid the largest bribe to the law enforcement officers or the judges won. It is a nice system for those who have plenty of money. You can essentially ignore the laws that normal mortals have to obey if you have sufficient resources to buy off judges and regulators.
Unfortunately this system is very destructive to a country and a culture over the years.
Imagine that you and I both own companies which produce similar products which we are both selling for about the same price. We are competitors. You are making a product of very low quality, which contains large amounts of lead paint, and was manufactured by young children in a factory which pollutes the environment terribly. My product is extremely high quality, and we obey all the laws regarding child labor, workplace safety, product safety, and the environment. My expenses are somewhat higher because I obey the laws, but I am still making a good profit.
You buy off various government regulatory officials and cause my factory to be closed down on some trumped-up, unreal charges. You then are able to raise your sales prices. So the consumer ends up paying too much money for a substandard product. Society suffers the consequences of lead in your product. The children who work in your factory don’t get a decent education, and your operation pollutes the environment. You get away with it all because you have bribed various corrupt government officials. You become a pillar of society. This way of running a country is not good for its culture or its people.
Mexico has a long history of rampant corruption among law enforcement personnel. Now that the military is taking over many of the police jobs, this theft and sleaze appears to be taking hold among them as well. Mexico has never embraced the idea of rule-of-law, either in the government and the law, or in the culture of the Mexican people.
Over time I have been seeing more of this dishonest system and attitude here in America. In the last year or two we are seeing more corrupt American government workers in the Border Patrol, U.S. Customs, and various law enforcement agencies getting caught taking bribes to “look the other way.” One can be certain that for every crooked government worker who gets caught, there are many more who manage to slip by.
The massive amount of money being offered to the American public servants by these Mexican drugistas is hard to ignore. So are threats of violence against their wives or children, especially when it is clear that the U.S. Government is not able to protect them from the kidnappers and hit men employed by the Mexican mafia.
Here on the southern border of the United States of America corruption among all sorts of government workers is increasing greatly. Bribes have been demanded in order to win a bid to do some work for the government. Bribes have been paid in order to influence pending legislation. In some ways it mirrors what has been happening in Washington, D.C. The enormous “campaign contributions” being made to Senators and Congressmen by big organizations and the wealthy are in many (most?) cases nothing more than thinly disguised bribes.
Several different whistle blowers took the SEC regulators and led them by the nose trying to get them to see that Bernard Madoff was engaging in a massive ponzi scheme. But Madoff knew the right people to talk to, and perhaps even provide large “gifts” to. The well paid SEC regulators appeared to be just grossly incompetent and lazy. The terrible theft this crook was engaging in was ignored for many, many years. The government actually never did go after him. He turned himself in to them when his ponzi scheme began imploding because of the stock market fall and the recession.
Government workers being lazy and rude is almost routine all around the world. But when they begin accepting "gifts" and become corrupt, and once they are controlled by the criminals, the country is headed down hill. Big time.
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