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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", sykesix asked the members: "What do you do if you arrive early at movie besides go to the snack bar?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
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Author: wzambon ✶❂🐝 BRONZE
SHREWD   😊 😞
Number: of 88909 
Subject: One by One...
Date: 10/27/26 12:45 AM
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One by one they are falling, victims of their own greed, their need for domination, and their loyalty to foreign autocrats rather than their people. First Victor Orban in Hungary, who conceded without a fight due to the strength of the opposition’s turnout: he had enriched himself and his family on the backs of Hungarians, and did all he could to further Putin’s interests.

Now it is the turn of Aleksandr Vučić in Serbia, whose corruption became more publicly known when a Novi Sad train station roof collapsed in 2024, killing over a dozen people, including children. The station’s renovation had been controversial, with the use of Chinese contractors, and a lack of transparency. Then came the revelations that Vučić wanted to take away the protected status of a landmark building to allow Trump to build a hotel and residential tower on the site....

...The defeat of Flavio Bolsonaro can also be ascribed in part to concerns over corruption —corruption being entrenched in political life in Brazil. Not just the expectation that Flavio would issue a pardon to his father, Jair Bolsonaro (now serving a long jail sentence) and others involved in the conspiracy to stage a coup to stay in power after he lost the 2022 election, but the prospect of a return to the deforestation, mining, and other environmental destruction of his father’s presidency.

So I ask us to consider an updated way of thinking about authoritarianism as a political system centered on processes of corruption and plunder. State capture is the means, but plunder is the end.

Ruth bin Ghiat

lucid.substack.com - Strongmen fall when corruption is
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This community has written 88,852 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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