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It is not a binary choice. My grandma can get the care via a bribe and the next day I can go join the local mafia.

Not like a US corporation, the machine of machines, systems of systems. An actual mafia that breaks down the government and replaces official services with a protection racket around people's families and uses physical violence to enforce arbitrary mafia business norms.

The real criminal mafia does not answer to a doctor who takes the wrong bribes and that doctor may go home that evening to find his house/family/prized thing to be in jeopardy. The mafia built on family and religious connections that can't be bought out, and will balance out a non-working government when it fails.

The Soviet system props up the normal structure just enough to leech off it. That is a luxury of Russian culture that doesn't survive elsewhere, for very good reason.

Suffering isn't an excuse for corruption that hurts basic services for the middle/lower class.

Lie, bribe, cheat and steal for all the yacht money and control over steel mills, between upper class toffs, I don't care.

When your corruption stops society from working for the majority, or oppresses the majority, then you have become the problem.



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