Saying “US corruption isn’t new” is a truism. There are probably isolated incidents, and many unproven theories, but everyone is quick to agree with this statement because it’s a common feeling everyone has now for some reason. The reality of corruption is likely much smaller and more boring than people think.
What we’re witnessing now is what should be called corruption. That corruption that everyone has been screaming for years. But finally real.
Remember, the job of these people’s propaganda is not to say that they’re better than the other side. It’s to say that they’re all the same. That’s it. And when you claim that this corruption is just a continuation of previous corruption, just bigger, and not a difference between essentially not having and having corruption (there’s always some small percentage of corruption, just like any crime) is essentially sweeping for them. It’s repeating their talking points.
Yup, if i claim everyone is corrupt, then i can be corrupt. Ironically, if im corrupt, i probably honestly assume everyone else is, or at least superficially assume that, because if i don't, i might think other people are good and i am bad.
I guess it’s more accurate to say that corruption didn’t start with Trump (he wasn’t even involved in politics when Citizens United was happening, for example). The US has been marching in that direction for a while.
The difference now is the openness and also the scale. If a president does one bad thing the press will dig into it, committees will investigate, etc. But what if the president does 20 bad things every single day? The press doesn’t know how to report on that and the legal process is as slow as molasses. And by tomorrow everyone will have forgotten because there’ll be new bad things.
> The US has been marching in that direction for a while.
It's trivial to remember corruption issues from 100+ years ago (I learned about one in middle school with Teapot Dome and political "machines", and those are hardly the full extent) so this is another one of those cliches that is easy to claim but is never proven. There's always some. Humans gonna human. But that doesn't mean either (a) there's always a high and critical amount in magnitude-of-impact OR (b) it's been definitely increasing.
Let's stop saying it as a general trend without examples.
On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.
It's naive to believe that corruption is impossible or vanishingly rare. It's also naive to believe that the current administration is not a major step change.
> On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.
"They" (the cult that worships Trump) would simply presume "TDS" over such an idea, but the fact here is that Trump absolutely is "off his rocker batshit insane" (to a degree we've not seen before in any U.S. president yet), and anyone who claims that he's "good for America" is just as (or more) insane than he is (or they genuinely do hate the U.S.A. and only support him because they know the kinda harm he's capable of doing).
Another fact is that if one really gives a damn about corruption, then you gotta start dealin' with it sometime or it just continues to get worse, and now is probably a good time to start, since it's currently lookin' so outta control that nearly everyone with more than a couple of braincells can easily see it and can't plausibly deny it, and givin' it time to fester doesn't seem like such a great idea. Historically it's never once been good to let the rot fester, and it never led to anything good for anyone to do so.
What can a single person legally do about corruption though?
> What can a single person legally do about corruption though?
These days not much it would seem. :(
The big cheap lever that everyone has is voting, and using whatever social leverage you have to get people around you to change their vote.
Primary legacy democrats. In NYC, the primary was the real election. Then vote in the replacement Democrat. Replace any Republican in any elected positions, then start taking a closer look at the local D machine.
What if it doesn't work? What if 40% of voters don't flip their vote just because I say so?
Democratic Party primaries
"Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically all of these examples came late in the primary -- after Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victory -- but they belie the national party committee's stated neutrality in the race even at that late stage."
https://web.archive.org/web/20190630070810/https://www.washi...
Like common, we have both data and examples of both clear corruption and money in politics.
And we have public legal changes, multiple by supreme court, that make corruption impossible to prosesute and more likely.
Yes, the trend was there for a while. And Trump can do what he does because the institutions and laws were eroded and already at the cracking point.
> The difference now is the openness and also the scale.
Yes, we just need to go back to the good ol' days of corruption with decorum
I refer you to the Knapp Commission Report of 1972.
Page 1 (the very first words): "We found corruption to be widespread".
Page 10: "Commissioner Murphy in his early statements about corruption regularly included a pointed statement indicating that the corruption in the Department was limited to a few officers. On one occasion he went so far as to imply that there were no more than about 300 corrupt police officers in the entire Department. After Patrolman Phillips had completed two of his three days of testimony at our public hearings, Commissioner Murphy found it necessary to discount his testimony of widespread corruption, referring to him as a 'rogue cop.'"
"Smith defined it [the rotten apple doctrine] as standing for the proposition that 'police departments are essentially free of corruption except for the presence of a few corrupt officers who have managed to slip into police service and also into key assignments such as gambling investigations, despite rigorously applied screening procedures designed to keep them out.'"
"the Department now rejected this approach 'not just on principle, but because as a way of controlling corruption it had utterly failed.'"
Page 7: "The Commission examined and rejected the premises upon which the rotten-apple doctrine rested"
Page 11: ". . . they [the public] are sick of ‘bobbing for rotten apples"
Page 5: "investigations have occurred on the average of once in twenty years since before the turn of the century, and yet conditions exposed by one investigation seem substantially unchanged when the next one makes its report. This doesn’t mean that the police have a monopoly on corruption. On the contrary, in every area where police corruption exists it is paralleled by corruption in other agencies of government, in industry and labor, and in the professions."
Page 61: "The Commission’s findings were hardly new. As long ago as 1844, when the state legislature created the New York police force as the first municipal police department in the country, historians record an immediate problem"
(This was followed by a brief summary of every previous scandal and Commission dating back to 1844).
Wow, i really dislike your argument. So instead of cleaning their acts on corruption, war crimes, and other abuses, the Democrats should just be held accountable to nothing because Trump is worse?
I'm sorry but your mindset is precisely what got Trump elected. The democrats abandoned the working people, propped up the military industrial complex even more, and enriched CEOs and bankers. Trump propaganda is not the reason people are not voting for them.
Just look at DSA. Why do you think so many both democrats and republicans end up supporting DSA candidates? Because they are the only mainstream candidates who are not 100% corrupt.
Counterpoints:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_land_fraud_scandal
and that's just the 19th century, nevermind the 20th.
Your counter points span decades. That is not the scale or rate at which we are seeing today.
See this reply:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
Corruption in the US went from proxying bribes through layers of shell corps and lobbyists to just buying Trump coin.
It has always existed, but it is absurdly easy now and happening in plain sight.
I dont think it existed nearly at the same level, not even close. And honestly, even now, i still think it's a handful of actors doing a lot of it.
Kinda like when women say that men harass them in the bars and a lot of men seem confused because we don't think we harass them, when it can be like 1 guy harassing 20 women in a bar on the same night.
So I think it's quite unevenly distributed.
Can you prove any corruption from another President similar to one very obvious case of corruption, where the UAE invested in a very clearly scam crypto company run by Trump's family (who have no crypto expertise) and then very soon after got contentious export licenses for Nvidia chips?
Grant and Harding are famous for being personally corrupt.
Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for political corruption.
Reagan colluded with Iran to prevent the release of hostages during Carter's re-election campaign and later sold them weapons to bypass congressional oversight.
These are just a couple well known examples at the presidential level, I am sure that for every one we know about there are dozens if hundreds of similar examples.
Go further down the scale to the congressional, state, city, and municipal levels and you encounter even pettier levels of corruption where you can buy votes for 5 figure construction contracts or just simple cash handoffs.
Does Iran-Contra count?
Note that it set the terrible precedent of the President pardoning high level crimes.
You haven't been paying attention and digging into unfiltered sources if you think significant corruption is a new thing in the US.
You haven't read his comment if you think that's what he said
It’s so, so much worse now.
Like everyone here said, they just don’t even care about being “caught”. Not ten years ago most of this stuff would likely end a career or land you in prison.
Now it’s just, “So what? Nobody can do anything.”
It’s not better that the corruption is blatant. They’re rubbing our faces in it, and not the least bit concerned about consequences. The message is clear… there aren’t any, anymore.
And the most insulting was how they telegraphed it all. Accuse people of things they clearly didn’t do… and then actually do all those things.
They've always rubbed our faces in it in modern times. There was a time, not that long ago, when Presidents wouldn't accept payments for speaking after office. It only began with Gerald Ford. Previously it was felt that it would impugn the integrity of the office, and obviously it 100% does. Nonetheless, now presidents are happy to e.g. bail out companies and then take tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees for 30 minute chats with those exact same companies.
The real issue is that partisanship tends to blind certain people to corruption when 'their side' is in office, which largely works as an enabling factor. When nobody cares or nothing happens over a 'little' corruption, it just leads to a little more, and the next thing you know - you get to where we are.
See this reply:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
Reading things like this help me understand how so many people fall for scams. You're so extremely trusting that it's hard to wrap my mind around... I can't relate on any level.
Prove him wrong. Show us documented cases of corruption from, say Obama, or Biden, or Bush Jr. And then we'll compare it to the documented cases of Trump corruption, starting with his 2 crypto pump-and-dump schemes and his family's fake crypto company (3 already very brazenly open ones and there are more!) and let's see if you can pull similar for any of the previous presidents of the 21st century
Dick Cheney.
Edit: I don’t really care though, I’m not a US citizen. Trump is terrible still. Shouldn’t have voted him in. :shrug:
What about the whole WMD debacle? Isn't it widely considered to be an act of corruption?
And bailing out bank shareholders during the '08 financial crisis.
What exactly was corrupt with WMD debacle? There were multiple investigations that found that this is an analytical error, not corruption.
Do you have a source that says it was an analytical error? Everything I've read over the years suggested they knew there were no WMDs, yet went with the narrative. Here's one post that cites a CIA report that shows the administration knew there were no WMDs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xmd8ut/why_d...
No, they’re not examples of corruption. Did Bush or Biden seek to profit from their actions financially? Not that I know of, unless you have proof showing what and how.
Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.
Did shareholders get bailed out? Which bank? The UK and Ireland bailouts did not do that.
Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.
Halliburton got a lot of work from Bush's wars if I remember correctly.
Looked this up and it seems like most if not all high level officials divested from companies they worked for or would profit from. Cheney still owned stock in haliburton but it seems he gave away profits when selling those to charity, he did get a large parachute when he left them.
This is very different from the current admin at least. But direct profiteering by high level officials didn't happen or they were very good at hiding it. They did make their friends and old colleagues very rich, maybe that it reason enough?
And I am someone that considers that administration to be full of war criminals that manufactured a reason to invade Iraq.
I get where you're coming from (been there too).
Bad news is, you're probably in the midpoint of that meme bell curve. Grown up structures and institutions are designed well, with accountability built-in. Many many good people work in them, who hate corruption as much as you do. Bad actors are whistle-blowed upon, persecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. It's incredibly difficult in practice to do anything significantly corrupt and stay unnoticed. I don't know if you work (like, at a large-size workplace), but imagine doing something shady at your work, surrounded by your colleagues. It's not easy. The amount of surveillance, paper trail, auditing that government work entails is way more than any normal business.
The irony is that your unending cynicism is actually turning you into a fool for the other side: the populists that constantly discredit institutions. They figured out that your cynicism (aversion to being scammed?) is so strong, that it can be used to scam you. They only need to discredit everyone else, that's easy. Make conspiratorial allegations based on perceived outcomes, not actual proof. Sell you all the cynicism in the world: everything is broken, everyone's bad, and you're one of the smart ones who sees it. US institutions are corrupt and worthless. This lets them pretend to be experts, because you're now a guest in their version of reality. And they directly financially benefit from your attention.
Institutions maintain real internal accountability (none of these alternative media populists do), implement real processes that work, tackle real issues in ways that take into account all stakeholders, and don't just produce slogans and talking points. I know they're old and not cool, but they work. Unfortunately, very few groups are left that actually defend them, you all got scammed by relentless, self-serving, financially incentivized alternative media into thinking that everything is broken.
Just because things are complex, doesn't mean they're broken. Just because measures taken aren't always satisfying, doesn't mean they are malicious. Don't get scammed into this world view by people who directly financially benefit from selling it.