It's not fashionable to actually read long articles, since to take the time means one will be slow to comment and likely be buried (like this comment will proba

It's not fashionable to actually read long articles, since to take the time means one will be slow to comment and likely be buried (like this comment will probably be) but this article is worth it. Especially valuable among the "24 theses" are: Corrupt capture of political and economic institutions and the culture at large is not a historical constant. Victims have reversed it by penalising perpetrators and enacting systemic reforms. Or by establishing new forms of government. We don't have to accept the status quo. We don't have to keep letting foreign criminals who don't even live here (for any value of "here", since this is a global problem) buy our real estate. We can take that shit back. "Property rights" were not invented by God. People made them up and people can unmake them if there are good reasons to do so. But corrupt networks are resilient. When challenged – and even after suffering such blows as the fall of a government or the prosecution of leading members – they usually succeed in maintaining or reinstating the corrupt system. That's what terrifies me. Look at how quickly the worst people in the Soviet bureaucracies turned into cappie criminal thugs--and, in Putin's regime--murderers. "Communist" systems (the USSR never claimed to have achieved communism; the cappies started calling an extremely flawed country "communist" to discredit the idea rather than the implementation) had more than a few bad leaders, but capitalist systems have only bad leaders, and we pay a lot more for this shitty "leadership".