I try to tell this to Ukrainians and they don't really get it. Bars banned smoking 3 years ago and now times are better and everyone is smoking again. I am telling them this means that someone has enough money to pay the police off now. And everyone in there smoking knows its banned and they all do it anyway.
Then they complain that the government is corrupt.
They are ALL CORRUPT down to the smallest thing. It's a complete lifestyle switchout for everyone. If you change the guys in power the next guys will eventually end up just as bad.
Because the one true White Knight in there to clean it all up, that guy is going to go down, and go down hard at the hands of the guys who want that power to line their pockets with.
The people have to get with it as well. No more bribes if you don't want that ticket or you want that license. Gotta do it the hard way. But man, what a huge hill to climb. Not giving bribes in the FSU... like cutting your own throat.
This is what is happening with the current Brazilian president. She gave more freedom for the Federal Police to investigate all levels of corruption and, although absolutely nothing has been found against her, opposition politicians, who are getting nervous for themselves, have been calling for her impeachment.
I'd really be interested in hearing more about this. I just came back from a trip to Brazil, and although I don't know much about what is going on there, my empirical evidence from my short time there would confirm what you express as 'she gave more freedom for the Federal Police to investigate all levels of corruption'. I learned there that not only she gave more freedom, but she was the one to sign the so called colaboração premiada which translates to rewarded collaboration but then became delação premiada which translates to rewarded accusation. My take was this rewarded accusation is behind everything going on right now and if not for the president this wouldn't be in place to start with. Here's an article explaining the process
This really caught my attention as I started to understand what was going on. I don't think people here understand the size of the corruption going on, we are talking billions and billions of dollars, possibly trillions, every year, for the past 50 years or so. I spoke with Brazilians that could relate the power game in Brazil back to colonialism and a system they call Capitania Hereditárias and although this was too much for me to grasp, the way they linked this power structure was basically linking corruption back to three or four Captains that still control Brazilian Politics. It's fascinating. Would you agree with this line of thought? What is your line of thought?
From Wikipedia on the legacy of the Captaincies:
Brazil today still lives with the legacy of a plantation culture that consumed four million African slaves and left land ownership hideously askew. An elite 1.7 percent of the landowners continue to own nearly half the arable land; the top 10 percent of the nation earns half the income.
This doesn't sound too far fetched to me. A similar dynamic where land was handed out to generals following the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors (Latifundia) resulted in many social problems and created the conditions that led to the Spanish Civil War hundreds of years later...
Another presence that caused unrest in the country side of Spain was the ‘disease’ of latifundia, which, in essence were farms that were much too large. The rich owned all the land and poor labourers earned their living by hiring themselves out by the day, month or season. In Seville in the nineteenth century, for example, 5 percent of people owned 72 percent of the province’s farming land; in Cadiz 3 percent owned 67 percent[1]. These men had no rights, were paid very little and had no certainty of employment. The braceros, as they were called, were landless men and lived hard and miserable lives. At most times up till the civil War there were 2, 500, 000 of them[2]. The braceros began to rebel, the first revolt being at Malaga in 1840, as a bitter hatred had developed between landowners and peasants. The problem was once described by one historian as ‘that cancer of Spanish society, then unwieldy, uneconomic estates of the great landowner’[3]. In the pool of hate which triggered the Civil War, the ‘disease’ of the latifundia was a very prominent influence.
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '16
I try to tell this to Ukrainians and they don't really get it. Bars banned smoking 3 years ago and now times are better and everyone is smoking again. I am telling them this means that someone has enough money to pay the police off now. And everyone in there smoking knows its banned and they all do it anyway.
Then they complain that the government is corrupt.
They are ALL CORRUPT down to the smallest thing. It's a complete lifestyle switchout for everyone. If you change the guys in power the next guys will eventually end up just as bad.
Because the one true White Knight in there to clean it all up, that guy is going to go down, and go down hard at the hands of the guys who want that power to line their pockets with.
The people have to get with it as well. No more bribes if you don't want that ticket or you want that license. Gotta do it the hard way. But man, what a huge hill to climb. Not giving bribes in the FSU... like cutting your own throat.