Prática de Shadowing: History Professor Answers Corruption Questions | Tech Support | WIRED - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
Criando lição...
1
I'm historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
2
Let's answer your questions from the internet.
3
This is Tech Support Corruption.
4
Andy Doodle asks, how do third world rulers get so rich if their countries are so broke ass?
5
Well, often those countries are broke and get broker because the dictator is stealing public funds.
6
A good case in point is Mobutu Seziseko, who was the leader of Congo for three decades.
7
He became immensely wealthy, amassing a fortune of five billion in a country where the average daily wage was $1.
8
How did he do this?
9
He stole public funds.
10
He took tax money and directed it to his pet projects, also to Swiss bank accounts.
11
He took kickbacks from foreign companies doing business, such as diamond extraction.
12
Mobutu was an important ally in the Cold War.
13
He was anti-communist.
14
So the International Monetary Fund and the United States gave him lots of loans
15
that were supposed to be to improve the country.
16
Instead, that money went straight to his bank accounts.
17
At Gadek asks, Alexa, define corruption.
18
Corruption is the abuse of power for private gain.
19
Now, corruption is also what we don't do, and that's called dereliction of duty, when we don't report abuses of power.
20
When we look the other way at the weaponization of investigations against innocent people,
21
or when we simply give up the idea of ethics in the workplace and in life.
22
Rocky Wired asks, Be honest.
23
Which country is the most corrupt in the world?
24
Transparency.org tracks corruption and absence of transparency in countries around the world.
25
So they have a list.
26
And according to this list, South Sudan is the most corrupt, followed by Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen,
27
Libya, Eritrea, Sudan, Nicaragua, Syria, and North Korea.
28
Some of these countries, such as Venezuela, are corrupt because the government is in an alliance with criminal gangs,
29
which are used as enforcers to beat up state enemies, also to get bribes from people.
30
And there becomes a gray zone between the state and civilian criminal actors.
31
Other countries such as South Sudan and Yemen are countries where authority has become fragmented and there are warlords,
32
each of them with their own corruption networks.
33
Myanmar is also on the list, and that is a military junta where the military has been allowed to become active players in corruption schemes.
34
Military officials have amassed their own fortunes, and this is how dictators keep people tied to the system.
35
Rockknocker61 asks, why does it appear that the number one job of all politicians is to enrich their family?
36
Well, autocrats are family men in a way.
37
Since Mussolini in Italy, they surround themselves with family members because family members can keep their secrets and be easily controlled.
38
Mussolini appointed his son-in-law, Gagliazzo Ciano, as foreign minister, and Ciano and his family had their own corruption network we now know.
39
Sons-in-law have an important place in the history of autocratic corruption.
40
In Turkey, Erdogan's son-in-law runs the biggest drone-producing company in Turkey, which is drones used all over the world.
41
In the United States, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has been conducting private business on behalf of his company, which is partly funded by the Saudis.
42
At the same time, he is representing the U.S government in sensitive negotiations in Ukraine and Iran.
43
In healthy democracies, this would be called a conflict of interest, but the Trump administration does not recognize conflicts of interest.
44
This is the privatization of foreign policy, and it's something that's very common in corrupt governments.
45
Dover299 asks, Where do politicians get so rich from?
46
Here we need to differentiate between politicians growing rich after they leave office, when they're not bound anymore by conflicts of interest.
47
Former heads of state, and this is true all around the world, can become very rich after they leave office, from book deals, from speaking gigs,
48
all kinds of things, consulting, anything that's going to use their expertise as a former head of state.
49
Quite different are leaders who amass wealth while they're still in office, ignoring conflicts of interest.
50
And that's the case with Donald Trump, who has amassed $5 billion in only 18 months in office.
51
There have been deals made that involve profits for the companies owned by his family.
52
He also promotes personal products with his name on them, which is something that former U.S presidents have never done.
53
And over $640 million estimated has come in from foreign investments to Trump and his family.
54
Ruby Z.
55
Heumann asks, WTF is a kleptocracy.
56
Literally, kleptocracy means rule by thieves, klepto being a thief.
57
Kleptocracy is a government where corruption and thievery have become so institutionalized,
58
so pervasive, that corruption is how you get things done.
59
It's a system where elites use their political positions to amass private wealth,
60
where private businesses are plundered by the state and have to pay bribes and kickbacks.
61
If they don't, they're subjected to legal harassment, to tax audits, and sometimes even forced to sell at a loss.
62
And the beneficiary of all this is the state.
63
Ordinary citizens have to pay bribes to get basic social services.
64
This was true often in the former communist countries, certainly in Romania, of Ceausescu,
65
who had his country living in poverty while he lived in a grand palace.
66
Many countries that have a lot of oil or energy deposits become kleptocracies, and this is known as the resource curse.
67
The curse being that autocrats who have large supplies of oil or natural gas tend to stay in power longer.
68
In Gaddafi's Libya, of course,
69
the dictator was supreme, But oil profits created centers of extreme wealth around oil distribution and production.
70
Over time, these executives and others in the state bureaucracy who had to do with oil became immensely wealthy.
71
On the way, corruption becomes endemic.
72
It becomes pervasive.
73
In Gaddafi's Libya, which was a kleptocracy, everyone involved in the oil industry, whether private or in the government,
74
amassed private fortunes and were stealing these profits.
75
Instead of putting the oil profits for public good, for roads, for public welfare, most of them were siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts.
76
Now, sometimes if the dictator falls from power,
77
as happened to Gaddafi, this can lead to instability after because these people can become almost like warlords.
78
And so you have a fragmentation of power once the dictator leaves.
79
El Rey asks, how do corrupt dictators hide their money?
80
Asking for a friend.
81
In the olden days, dictators used Swiss bank accounts because until 2018,
82
you could be anonymous and there was no transparency regarding these bank accounts.
83
So you could stash your money in these Swiss bank accounts and feel safe.
84
Nowadays, offshore finance is the game.
85
Because anonymity is guaranteed, you can create a shell corporation
86
or have your money under someone else's name very convenient for the bad actors in the world.
87
Until the 21st century, United Kingdom outposts such as Gibraltar were big places for dictators to put their money.
88
Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, had his money in United Kingdom banks offshore.
89
Nowadays, the United States has come to be one of the main players in offshore finance.
90
States such as Nevada and Delaware and South Dakota are places where many warlords, arms dealers, dictators reportedly stash their funds.
91
Yet another Band21 asks, so what corruption is Benjamin Netanyahu involved with again?
92
Netanyahu faces three separate cases of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
93
Regular politicians, if they're facing investigation or have charges against them, they don't want to run for office.
94
Journalists could start poking around.
95
Who knows what might come out?
96
If you are a wannabe autocrat, though, like Netanyahu, you are compelled to run for office
97
because the point is to get into power and fix the judiciary so your legal problems can go away.
98
A list of leaders who were under investigation when they ran for office includes Vladimir Putin,
99
Silvio Berlusconi three times, Donald Trump three times,
100
and Netanyahu, who came into power and immediately pursued something he called judicial reform,
101
which was supposed to fix the judicial system to make his legal problems go away.
102
From the Ask a Russian subreddit, where did Putin get his wealth?
103
Russia is a kleptocracy, and President Vladimir Putin is rumored to be among the richest men in the world.
104
How did he do it?
105
On one hand, he plundered public agencies, in particular Gazprom, which is the oil and natural gas conglomerate.
106
Basically, kleptocrats see public agencies as pots of money that they can take for themselves.
107
So that's one way Putin did it, by siphoning off profits from public agencies.
108
The second is by plundering private businesses.
109
A shocking one out of six Russian businesses has been seized by the state
110
or threatened by the state or had a shakedown, which requires them to pay bribes or sell at a loss.
111
And so, again, it's the private sector and the public sector.
112
When you put these together, you create a formidable income stream for a dictator.
113
Legitimate Sunday8460 asks, Is Trump the most corrupt president?
114
Without a doubt.
115
Donald Trump has made over $5 billion just in the 18 months he has been in office.
116
Donors have been given contracts for businesses, high political positions.
117
He promotes personal goods, profits to which go toward the companies owned by his family or companies owned by donors.
118
Trump has also pardoned financial criminals as well as political criminals.
119
The Poor Man's Thinking Man on Quora asks, why are the cronies of dictators always rich?
120
Here we have the concept of authoritarian bargains.
121
Dictators make bargains with elites, could be media elites, financial elites, business elites.
122
They make money in return for absolute loyalty.
123
There are no bid contracts.
124
Competition is gamed in their favor.
125
The state doesn't go after them.
126
Over time, this results in what's called a mafia state,
127
where clans associated by profit to the dictator become immensely wealthy and powerful in and of themselves.
128
In Putin's Russia, for example, there's the dictator, Vladimir Putin,
129
and there are the oligarchs who become immensely wealthy by sharing profits from illicit transactions.
130
And this is how the dictator keeps them tied to him.
131
It can be dangerous to speak out, even if you're immensely wealthy, against a dictator.
132
In Russia, you might fall out of a window.
133
Corruption isn't only about finances.
134
It's a way of keeping people in line.
135
The dictator knows your secrets.
136
In Russian, this is called kompromat.
137
And the dictator, especially if he comes from an intelligence background like Putin, keeps information on those oligarchs, which he can use at any time.
138
And so this too is part of the authoritarian bargain.
139
It's not just profit, but it's keeping each other's secrets.
140
Where you at 42 Wallaby Way asks, hmm, I wonder why corrupt leaders always beef with the press.
141
If you want to know if someone is trying to be an autocrat, look at how they talk about the press.
142
Do they deride them as fake news?
143
Do they say they're corrupt? not to be trusted?
144
Usually.
145
That's because autocratic leaders or wannabe autocrats usually have secrets to hide, and they know the press could expose them.
146
Autocrats are afraid of journalists uncovering their corruption, and so autocrats try to silence, especially investigative journalists.
147
That is a very dangerous profession.
148
Damn Dirty Ape asks, why do some governments become corrupt?
149
Are there structural issues that make some governments more prone to corruption?
150
There can be corruption in any kind of political system, democracies, autocracies.
151
Corruption can happen anywhere in the world where there's a leader
152
and a political system that promotes it because of the imperative of self-preservation.
153
Autocrats are deathly afraid of being prosecuted.
154
This could be in Turkey where Erdogan has repeatedly fired prosecutors and judges and watchdogs.
155
The same thing happened in Hungary where Orban stopped an EU investigation against his son-in-law from taking place.
156
So it's not just in third world countries.
157
Corruption could be anywhere if the conditions are right.
158
P. Gadapabooks asks, Can democracy survive corruption?
159
Corrupt systems create environments in which things that used to be considered illegal and immoral, such as lying about elections,
160
stealing from the public, sexual abuse, they become normalized.
161
When that happens and institutions get retooled to protect immoral people, then democracy suffers.
162
Now, sometimes sexual assaults can be a prompt for a democracy to protect itself.
163
That happened in Italy when Berlusconi, who had sex parties with young women, was actually forced to step down.
164
He was investigated and convicted not only for bribery and fraud, but for sex with a minor.
165
Around the world, foreign governments have been prosecuting politicians who associated with Jeffrey Epstein and appear in the Epstein files.
166
That has yet to happen in the United States.
167
ZGermans31B asks, Denying elections, hmm, what has history taught us about this occurrence?
168
Many autocrats commit electoral fraud.
169
If the election doesn't go your way, you claim it was rigged, or you refuse to have the votes counted, or in the worst case, you refuse to leave office,
170
But election denial is something that's often not considered in under the bucket of corruption.
171
But I believe it is because it is public officials conspiring to lie to the public.
172
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election and claimed it had been rigged.
173
Later, he tried to stage a coup to prevent Lula da Silva from coming to power.
174
He now sits convicted with 27 years sentence.
175
Sigour asks, how does a country uncorrupt itself?
176
And what are some of the best examples of this from recent times?
177
A country can uncorrupt itself by restoring regulations that autocracies have removed.
178
They can restore professional ethics requirements for civil servants, compliance for businesses and corporations,
179
and they can rein in the leader who has to be held accountable.
180
We're seeing this in Hungary where Peter Magyar, the successor of Viktor Orban,
181
is restoring regulations that Orban discarded in order to restore transparency and accountability to Hungary.
182
So those are all the questions for today.
183
Thanks for watching.
📺 Mesmo canal
B11
BTS Answer the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
TeensDaily Conversation
B11
Is Priyanka Chopra Jonas Vegan?
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B11
Riverdale Cast Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B11
Madison Beer Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B24
Retired Navy SEAL Explains How to Prepare for Dangerous Situations | Tradecraft | WIRED
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2Owen Wilson Answers The Web’s Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
Jack Black & Paul Rudd Answer The Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B22
Dolly Parton Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
Ricky Gervais Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C19
We Know More About Time Than You Think
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B13
TXT Answer The Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B27
Giancarlo Esposito Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Daily Conversation
B22
Chris Evans & Ana de Armas Answer the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
Sexuality Professor Answers Dating Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
Urban Designer Answers City Planning Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2330
Tokyo’s Vertical Farms - The Future of Farming | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
Cleo Abram Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B12
Baker Answers Baking Questions from Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B22
Demographics Expert Answers Population Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1Neuroscientist Answers Emotion Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
✨ Vídeo recomendado
B2291 frases
Why did white men conquer the world?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B23
41 frases
'Cuba's In a Lot of Trouble': Rubio on Pressuring Cuba
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
211 frases
Another War is Starting in the Middle East
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
233 frases
Pourquoi les États-Unis ont-ils perdu la Guerre du Vietnam ?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B28
20 frases
What Is It About Society That Disappoints You So Much - Mr. Robot
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C11
417 frases
How Did The Philippines Become One Of Asia's Most Unequal Countries? | Insight
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
73 frases
How Foreign Aid Keeps Africa Poor | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
B21
30 frases
Professor Jeffrey Sachs on CIA's Role in Syria & Operation Timber Sycamore | AC1G
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B2193
28 frases
Why should we care about coral reefs?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
147 frases
Countries with the Worst Punishments Today
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B213
41 frases
RE2 Unit 11B
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepBusiness English
C155
66 frases
What science can’t answer, according to physicist Jim Al-Khalili | Big Think
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
Objetivos de fala para este trecho
Este vídeo é ideal para praticar a shadowspeak (técnica de imitação de fala) e melhorar a fluência em contextos analíticos. O objetivo é dominar a articulação de palavras complexas (como "corrupção", "autocratas") e a fluidez ao expor ideias estruturadas, alinhando-se a marcos de proficiência como a capacidade de discutir temas políticos com clareza.
Banco de frases reutilizáveis
- "Abuso de poder para ganho privado" (definição de corrupção)
- "Zelar por segredos e ser facilmente controlado" (sobre familiares em governos corruptos)
- "Conflito de interesses" (termos-chave em discussões políticas)
- "Privatização da política externa" (expressão para descrever influência privada em decisões governamentais)
- "Amassar fortuna enquanto ainda está no cargo" (frase para descrever enriquecimento ilegítimo em funções públicas)
Corrija seus pontos fracos
O diálogo ajuda a aprimorar a pronúncia em inglês, especialmente na entonação de palavras longas e na pausa entre ideias. A técnica de shadowing em inglês aqui é essencial: imite a velocidade e a ênfase da historiadora Ruth Ben-Ghiat, que usa uma fala clara mas com ritmo natural. Observe como ela articula "Mobutu Seziseko" ou "Gagliazzo Ciano" – palavras com sílabas acentuadas que exigem atenção à pronúncia de consoantes. Além disso, pratique a conexão de frases, como "He stole public funds and directed it to..." para evitar pausas desnecessárias. Esses exercícios de shadowspeak fortalecem a fluência e a confiança ao falar sobre temas complexos.
Outro ponto chave é a compreensão de termos políticos em contexto. Frases como "dereliction of duty" (descumprimento de dever) ou "weaponization of investigations" (armamento de investigações) são comuns em debates internacionais. Usar o shadowing para repetir essas expressões ajuda a fixá-las na memória e a usá-las corretamente em conversas. Lembre-se: a prática regular do shadowspeaks transforma a imitação em habilidade, tornando a fala mais natural e precisa.
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — uma ação que começou antes e continua | has been conducting · have been prosecuting |
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | has become fragmented · has been allowed · have amassed |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | has been allowed · be easily controlled · would be called |
| Orações relativas who / which + oração — informação extra sobre uma pessoa ou coisa | Turkey, which is · company, which is · them, which is |
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.