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Comment by Ice_cream_suit | Hacker News Reader

A CEO I know (billion dollar revenues, multinational corporation ) tells me that:

1.The tricky bit is knowing the right amount of the bribe to pay.

Pay a Senator or a member of the House too little and you have made a powerful enemy.

Pay too much and they figure that they have a sucker that they can keep milking. And of course, you have also wasted a couple of extra million that could have been directed to another Senator....

2.The bribes are structured as payments via "lobbyists" or as "campaign donations"

3.In every country bribes are structured just well enough to evade local scrutiny.

Thus in Indonesia it is suitcases of cash.

In the US it is directorships of companies or well paying board jobs for children of politicians or investments in a politicians son-in-laws hedge fund.

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In The Netherlands it's kind of the same I think. Politicians often end up with very lucrative private sector jobs at the end of their political careers. No doubt at least part of the jobs granted is payment for services rendered and part to get access to a political party.

In the EU it's the same situation as well. I mean this situation [0] with Neelie Kroes is quite suspect as well, isn't it?

>Taxi app Uber, which continues to battle regulatory clamp downs and legal confrontations in Europe, has appointed a former VP of the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, to its public policy advisory board as it looks to grease the gearbox of its regional fortunes.

The ex-VP in question, former digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes — who stepped down from her role in the European Union’s executive body in November 2014, after serving a five-year term in digital policy (and some 10 years in all as a European Commissioner) — was a vocal supporter of Uber during her time in post.

Prior to leaving office in 2014, for example, Kroes loudly condemned a ban of Uber in Belgium, publicly proclaiming that “Uber is 100% welcome in Brussels and everywhere else as far as I am concerned.”

I believe this kind of corruption is endemic in the Western world. For most "normal" voters this kind of corruption is quite invisible I believe, in contrast to people being payed directly a suitcase of money.

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[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/06/uber-appoints-former-ec-vp...

This claim is not something you need a CEO friend to tell you. Anyone on Reddit's conspiracy theory boards could give you exactly the same message. (BTW it's interesting to note that in my limited experience high level execs are just people, and prone to the same foibles as other people too. They don't automatically have insight into all things.)

So, at least in that issue, people on Reddit's conspiracy theory boards are less gullible than you, and other people believing these things don't happen/are rare, and that we live in a Disney world...

(And a difference with the CEO, that you probably missed, is that they have more likely than not done these kind of bribes themselves).

I'm gullible for my skepticism about an anonymous internet commenter's "CEO" friend's generic "in-the-know" boasts?

No, it's gullible because the CEO might not exist, and the boast might never been uttered to the OP...

...but the bribing and the situation described (including similar calculations) goes on every day, in every single country, since forever.

So to compare it to conspiracy theory takes a lot of gullibility on the good intentions, clean hands, and lawful operating of businesses, politicians, local officials, and/or the rich. Or maybe a better word would be "naivety".

This is not "Elvis is Alive", "The KKK killed Kennedy" or "PizzaGate".

This is all too common, everyday, corruption.

This sounds like some dialogue from a Scorsese film...

Don't forget lavishly paid speeches and inexplicably popular books of memoirs.

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