20 November, 2018

The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten By the Public

“For the first time in the history of the world, a measure for bribery was introduced into law that was universal as far as those subjected to the law were concerned. For the first time, a country made it criminal to corrupt the officials of another country,” John T. Noonan writes in his exhaustive work on the subject, Bribe: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea. Noonan’s point is that for more than three hundred years, corporate bribery has endured as an inevitable global evil. It was no small feat the United States took it upon itself to prohibit bribery, at a time when other governments essentially looked the other way regarding kickbacks and their impact.