“I am not the Mafia”
Feb. 27th, 2009 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellAccording to a woman I met on the plane, Thailand has the Thai Mafia, the Chinese Mafia, the Russian Mafia, and the Government/Mafia. The guidebooks are quite open about it... eg “The Songthaew Mafia (a taxi-like system) has done everything possible to stop the excellent new public bus system, and to this day there is very little information on it”) I asked the hotel owner for the bus map, and he said there are no buses. He said there was also no songthaew mafia. So if I'm found floating dead in the moat around the city, that''s why. I just wanted to take the bus.
De corrupting a government seems extremely hard... once there is corruption at the top, it spreads all the way down to the local level. After all, if the leader is fleecing the system, why shouldn't you? Once corruption is ingrained, it's very hard to change. As a result, even if the country elects an incorruptible leader (which they've had a lot of trouble with), it's very hard to actually fix the lower levels. It seems like even a large army of incorruptible followers to fill appointed government positions isn't enough, as there would still be many corrupted elected officials at the lower levels.
De corrupting a government seems extremely hard... once there is corruption at the top, it spreads all the way down to the local level. After all, if the leader is fleecing the system, why shouldn't you? Once corruption is ingrained, it's very hard to change. As a result, even if the country elects an incorruptible leader (which they've had a lot of trouble with), it's very hard to actually fix the lower levels. It seems like even a large army of incorruptible followers to fill appointed government positions isn't enough, as there would still be many corrupted elected officials at the lower levels.
