Come again? I thought threatening one's family was #1 in the mafia playbook.
Compare and contrast "detained 9 hours", which is a big violation of civil liberties on behalf of a government, with "dissolved an innocent child in acid", which is just sickening and inhuman.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omicidio_di_Giuseppe_Di_Matteo
Not to say at all that what the government did in this case was "not so bad", just that there is worse out there.
Lesley Stahl: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright: "We think the price is worth it." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Albright...)
Dissidents (those who Greenwald praises) point out that international politics runs on the mafia model. (Keeping in mind that the mafia is small and nation-states are large. https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/03-2)
The thinking that most politicians are just like people who would take a 12 year old boy and dump him in a vat of acid after strangling him is shallow and devoid of any depth of thinking on how different organizations operate.
States do dirty things, and so do individuals, and so do organizations on various levels. But there's a lot of differences in incentives, capabilities, tradeoffs, calculations and so on between them all. If you are really interested in understanding the world, rather than making the point that THE GUBERMENT IS EEEVIL, thinking about some of these differences would behoove you.
So: are you genuinely so poorly informed that you see no difference, or are you completely blinded by your libertarian propaganda as to not see any difference?
I live in Italy, and like many people, I intensely dislike Berlusconi. But, you know what? I'd prefer him 10 times - 100 times - to the sort of people who run actual Mafias.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/25/uk-italy-mafia-tria...
(http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200205--.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborations_between_the_Unit...)
Western liberal democracy often forgets (or pretends to forget) that history is a thing, and that people have memoeries. There are many more instances where Western foreign policy (often initiated by the US, supported by Europe) was beneficial to us in the short term, while having negative long term consequences. The CIA calls it 'blowback'. The last century in the Middle East and South and Central America is riddled with it. And then people turn around and ask 'why do they hate us?'.
I despair.
For example seeing the people in Egypt now (VICE documentary), both camps, whether the secular camp/army or Muslim Brotherhood were blaming Obama for the current situation.
On a similar note, hats off to Russia, that, even though is supporting the Assad regime in Syria and beyond, never gets such a strong backlash or blowback as you say. Or maybe the fights in Caucasus are underreported.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZZMBAS/?tag=dedasys-20
By a former corespondent for The Economist in Italy.
I don't really think the Mafia was an integral component of his success though - in some ways that's an easy out for people looking for someone to blame for the whole Berlusconi phenomenon.
Of course, a government has the power to brand a mafia as a criminal organization, but the line between legal and criminal can be very blurry, and often quite arbitrary.
If you just go, historically, by the score of committed crimes, then whatever metric you choose, governments and their agencies will beat criminal organizations by a huge margin.
Bullshit.
You'd do well to read more about the Mafia and how it affects places where it's strong. They are badly governed, and generally not good places to live or do business as an honest person.
Denmark has a strong government that is quite involved in its citizens lives, but the number of them that end up dead, tortured, with their lives ruined, and so on is minimal compared to people in Sicily, Calabria, Campania, or other areas in southern Italy dominated by Mafias. And the standard of living is far higher. People are happier; with the possible exception of the climate, which is not really something either Mafias or anyone else can change on a local level unless you read some of the wackier subreddits.
Mafias are nothing like western democracies. If you're going to compare them with governments, compare them with feudal, tribal systems where family and personal loyalty is everything, and the rule of law counts for nothing.
To equate even something so abhorrent as fascist Italy to the Mafia is to have a gross and severe misunderstanding of history. They are both bad, but very different.
The Mafia is a real thing here in Italy, not just some abstract talking point for your libertarian ranting.