Trump told Tillerson US businesses "unfairly penalized" by laws against bribing foreign officials

[highplainsdem]

From a long article in the New Yorker on Tillerson:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/rex-tillerson-at-the-breaking-point/amp

In February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.

Tillerson disagreed. When he was an executive with Exxon, he told Trump, he once met with senior officials in Yemen to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Yemen’s oil minister handed him his business card. On the back was written an account number at a Swiss bank. “Five million dollars,” the minister told him.

“I don’t do that,” Tillerson said. “Exxon doesn’t do that.” If the Yemenis wanted Exxon on the deal, he said, they’d have to play straight. A month later, the Yemenis assented. “Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes—that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.

[Beartracks]

1. And thieves are unfairly penalized by locks and window bars.

[Nevernose]

2. Please dont think Im supporting foreign corruption

Because the industrialist capitalist West is a huge part of (i.e. >50%, because it’s wealthy Westerners bribing much poorer people).

That having been said:

It’s really easy for Exxon Mobile to take a brave, hard stand against bribing foreign officials, isn’t it? They’ve had the full support of the United States military, diplomatic corps, and intelligence gathering. The American government has been overthrowing, murdering, bribing, aiding alternately brutal dictators & murderous insurrectionists for longer than most people reading this have been alive. Of course you don’t pay, Rex: you’ve got a $700 billion dollar a year war machine backing you up.