a Quora about corruption

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Damien Leimbach
Former PsyOps at U.S. Army (1996–2000)Updated Apr 2
What is disrupting the Russian military supply chain?
This woman, right here, is what is responsible for the Russian military
supply chain problem.


Now she doesn't look very imposing, and thats an American flag behind
her, but this is all her fault. Well, not hers, but people like her, in
Russia.

That woman is Darlene Druyun. She steered contracts to replace the
KC-135 fleet to Boeing in exchange for a cushy job there after she left
her post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Air Force. She also got
jobs for her daughter and son-in-law, in addition to a signing bonus of
$50K.

She spent 9 months in jail.

Ex-Pentagon Official Gets 9 Months for Conspiring to Favor Boeing
(Published 2004)
Judge T S Ellis 3d sentences Darleen A Druyun, former top Air Force
official, to nine months in prison after she acknowledges she favored
Boeing Co in multibillion-dollar Defense contracts while seeking jobs at
company for herself and family; Druyun pleaded guilty in April to one
count of conspiracy for negotiating job with Boeing overseeing its
business with Pentagon; offers details on extent of her favoritism
toward Boeing as well as difficult negotiations during which she
admitted to misleading government investigators; apologizes to court for
her actions; photo (M)
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/business/expentagon-official-gets-9-months-for-conspiring-to-favor-boeing.html
Here is a picture of all the Russians who have been convicted of
military graft or corruption in the last 20 years in Russia.


In the US (and the west in general) we take a perverse sense of pride in
convicting corrupt officials. In Russia, not so much. People that had
never even been to Illinois were giddy with excitement when then
Governor Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years for trying to sell a
senate seat. Things like that just don't happen in Moscow.

Nobody gets in the way of Russia…quite like Russians.

Edit: People are more than free to disagree with me as long as they
aren’t rude about it. I won’t delete your posts.

But the people who think they can fling insults and then disable replies
to their comments will be deleted and blocked immediately. Thats just
childish and cowardly.

Edit 2: Please stop accusing me of hating the Russian people. That’s
just not true. I’ve known lots of Russians and they were all fantastic
people. But even THEY don’t like their government. They just don’t think
anything can be done to change it. That kind of fatalism is ingrained in
Russian culture and one of the reasons corruption and kleptocracy goes
unpunished there.

The Russians all know Putin and his friends steal. But they also know
that whoever replaces him will steal too. Their attitude is, ‘the devil
you know is better than the devil you don’t’ so there is no internal
push to displace him.

The Russians believe to their core that at some point something terrible
will happen to them. War, famine, disease, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, who
knows what or who it will be, but it will be something, eventually.
Again, fatalism.

Thats why these sanctions dont scare them. It will hurt them for sure,
but their attitude is “Oh thats what it will be eh? Shortages and
economic hardship? Well, that's not so bad. At least it’s here and we
know what it is now. I was tired of waiting.”

My mother likes to tell the story of the two weeks she spent in Moscow
and St. Petersburg in 1982. Russians immediately came up to talk to her
and to barter with her. When she asked how they knew she was a westerner
(she thought it might be her clothes) they told her is was because she
was walking around with her head up. No one else did that.

It’s hard to get a culture like that to fundamentally change their
outlook on life and expect better from their government. The USA is not
perfect, but we expect our politicians to be.

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