Yes, because you are really only bribing people. If you have a board member or organization president who makes in the lower six figures, and you start bringing them big donations to their organization, it makes them look better, improves their job reviews, and brings them perks (travel junkets can be made to appear very legit on paper), and that’s all the above board stuff that they can claim they didn’t know was dirty money because it came from shells and corps that appear legit. Even if you leave out the backroom deals, but those would cost even less. To someone who makes $175k, a $75k bribe is a temptation.
You’d think that people wouldn’t want to have a dirty conscience, even if they did think they could get away with it (which they almost always do). But some of us are living in the past, when people actually had consciences. Family, God, Country. You’d never sell them out, right?
Well people today, even the ones who aren’t sociopaths, can rationalize anything. Look at the conscienceless political and social positions people can pretzel themselves into thinking are right. If you are taking a bribe, you tell yourself that it’s a victimless act. No one gets hurt, so what if you make a little bit out of it.
Couple the rationalizations that take place every day with the grotesquely slanted “news” and it is no wonder that a substantial portion of the citizenry think all is good. If more people get their news online than from broadcast outlets then read the tripe posted to either msn.com or yahoo.com on a daily basis.
“If you are taking a bribe, you tell yourself that it’s a victimless act.”
Some of the bribe takers have convinced themselves completely that the bribe is not even a bribe.
You made a lot of good points, including on the perks. People save themselves a lot of money with the perks of the business - free meals all week, laundry, no mileage on personal car, travel to destinations w sightseeing that does not have to be done on your own dime, etc etc. The overseas assignments are very lucrative. Over a career it can be 10s of thousands, or higher .... with foreign assignment .... of personal income never spent.
Communist China has been giving huge sums of money to universities for decades, with the stipulation that they can build “Confucious Centers” ostensibly to promote cultural exchange and offload instruction in Chinese languages, but they are just a cover for the ChiComs to keep tab on their citizens in the USA, and...Americans.
In the process, the Universities become totally beholden to them due to cash input.
Disgusting.