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name your price!
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If not with money, then with sex and privileges. Look at the recent case of the U.S. Navy officer who was arrested for passing information to big companies in Asia to help them land servicing and port contracts with visiting ships, all in exchange for booze, prostitutes and expensive 'gifts'. Treason and espionage are today committed more often to get money, sex and 'gifts', rather than for purely ideological purposes or racial/religious solidarity.
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In one of my writing projects, I'm using one I heard about from Washington D.C.
DOE investigators discovered that energy companies were blatantly committing gross fraud, on the scale of many hundreds of millions of dollars being filched by their making use of some regulatory loophole; some legal subterfuge, (something of that nature).
So the firms are asked to visit the capitol building to have a conference with the anti-trust branch of the FBI, Treasury, or whoever is going to rein them in; levy them, etc
The oil company execs and their legal team show up at the conference and under questioning, they openly admit that yes, they deliberately and with forethought, set out to rook the American people out of millions.
There isn't even a trace of guilt or conscience on their faces at all. They gaze calmly back at their questioners, simply awaiting word on what the fines will be.
Someone said afterward that if this had happened in the 1950s the whole thing would have been handled in a senate committee hearing. It would have been televised on a national broadcast every day for weeks. These men --these firms--would have been shamed, ruined, they would have been harangued, excoriated, and humiliated in front of the American public, their names blackened, their reputations ruined.
Contrast that, with today. No one even cares anymore. The companies see absolutely nothing wrong with defrauding the govt, and they even wonder why they are being fined. They expect to get away with it; and in the unlikely event they are caught, they expect a mere slap on the wrists. After all, they know that today the Senate itself is riddled with corrupt fatcats who all have their own scams going on under-the-covers.
Of course people have their price, it's the getting away part which stops them from snatching up their 40 pieces of silver. Who would want to backstab an organization/unit/country and then find themselves looking down the business end of a
Heckler and Koch 416, or, for that matter if the betrayed party is feeling particularly cruel, seal them in a graveyard for the living dead like Colorado's lovely ADX Florence.
To make him stop hounding them, to buy him off. Make him agree to cease and desist, look the other way, let the corruption or chicanery continue. They claim that 'every man can be owned' if you just 'find out what his price is'.
Typically, the protagonist draws himself up frostily and refuses, insisting that 'he can't be bought'. He 'isn't for sale'. (Why, How Dare [the villain] Even Suggest Such A Thing?)
But lately--with the way the world is so eff'd up these days--I'm wondering if this is still true. Does it still seem realistic? Wouldn't you say that these days --yes, everyone DOES have a price?
Isn't that the world we live in today? I'm just asking.