you're kidding right?
Bribery and corruption are accepted in many Eastern (and Middle Eastern) cultures. everyone does it, and if you don't, you don't get to play.
when someone tries the same thing in the US or Europe, they always end up facing charges or at the very least looking for work somewhere else. if money buys immunity, then why did Enron, Worldcom, Madoff, etc. all end up prosecuted?
The question you need to be asking is, if Enron, Wolrldcom, Madoff, etc. all came to light after years of milking their employees/stockholders/investors/etc., how many haven't come to light? What percentage of the scams do those represent?
Your statement is a bit like saying, "my anti-virus software says it found and removed 3 viruses. It's just lucky for me that there were only 3 there to discover! Now, I'm safe."
The correct take on bribery is that Western cultures have reached a relatively stable point where the amount of bribery and corruption is just small enough that it doesn't typically do to our economy what it just did over the past 2 years.
those are merely the public ones. cases too small to make the national news happen all the time. people will always cheat and attempt to bribe officials to get ahead.
my point is that as a culture, the West as made an effort to rein in these abuses by the rule of law, as it makes our economy a less-dangerous place to do business than, say, a country that will nullify your contracts if you don't grease the right palm.
in the US, we prosecute bribery and corruption. in China the government arguably is run through bribery and corruption.
i must caveat my post by saying that what we call "corruption" was the dominant business model around the world for a very, very long time (Renaissance Italy comes to mind). it is a recent luxury to have economic environment like we do.
