Politics & Power Quote by Lee R. Raymond

There is a practiced slipperiness to Raymond's phrasing: he acknowledges corruption while sanding off any hint of culpability. "Tradition" is the tell. It recasts bribery and influence-peddling as local color, an inherited custom like patronage or protocol, rather than a set of choices made by identifiable actors-including multinationals seeking permits, contracts, and stability. The sentence performs moral distance: corruption is something that exists "in some of the countries where we operate", never in the corporate boardroom where the operating decisions are made.

"Operate" itself is antiseptic corporate diction, a word that sounds technical, not political. It implies neutral business activity, even when the reality is negotiating access to natural resources that are inseparable from state power. Then comes the real strategy: blame is distributed outward. "Political elites" are named as the prime movers; "business" is presented as a generic participant, not specific firms with compliance departments, internal controls, and lawyers trained to navigate exactly these "unsavory relationships". The phrase "framework of" is bureaucratese that makes corruption sound like a misdesigned system rather than a transactional bargain.

Placed in the late-20th/early-21st-century extractive industry context-where oil companies routinely faced allegations over payments, intermediaries, and cozy ties to regimes-this is crisis management by abstraction. Raymond signals awareness to investors and regulators while preserving plausible deniability. The subtext: we didn't invent the game; we merely play it to stay in business. The rhetorical trick is turning complicity into inevitability.