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My current thought is that corrupted capitalism has corrupted democracies making them unaccountable to the majority of people, leading to a massive and still ac

• drewrv 10y ago
  I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Voters actually have power. That's the silver lining to the depressing reality that voters don't care if industry writes regulations, the executive branch tortures people, and the rich pay even less in taxes.
  • mi100hael 10y ago
    > voters don't care if industry writes regulations, the executive branch tortures people, and the rich pay even less in taxes. The irony in your statement is that it's pretty much impossible to tell which candidate those voters you're referring to supported.
    • glhaynes 10y ago
      Seems pretty easy to me.
      • mi100hael 10y ago
        Clinton? - Revolving door: https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-clinton-isnt-taking-elizabeth-warrens-revolving-door-dare/ https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-... - Torture: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_hillary_clinton_why_we_cant_afford_to_forget_her_disturbing_track_record/ http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_h... - Taxes: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-tax-breaks-for-wealthy-charity-donors-2015-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-ta...
        • glhaynes 10y ago
          Clinton speaking against torture because it's ineffective even though Salon (and I!) would have preferred she'd publicly made the case against it for additional reasons doesn't make it any harder to figure out which candidate one should vote for if they want industry to write regulations, the executive branch to torture people, and the rich to pay even less in taxes. False equivalence is fun until, say, the 2000 or 2016 elections happen.
  • YCode 10y ago
    > I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Can you elaborate on that? I'm unaware of how it was demonstrated.
    • tbirrell 10y ago
      I think he meant that despite all the big money and power behind the Clinton campaign, enough of the electorate chose to vote against the establishment to render it ineffectual.
      • andrepd 10y ago
        Trump is a multibilionaire. Not quite the big money vs underdog story.
        • Amezarak 10y ago
          The Trump campaign as massively outspent by the Clinton campaign almost 2-1. It also received much less outside money - 60 million versus 190 million. [1] According to OpenSecrets, Trump spent 56 million on his own campaign. [2] In historical US election terms, that is quite the underdog story, even if it's still a lot of money. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864
          • andrepd 10y ago
            For me, an underdog story would be a common citizen getting elected with little money, and 100% crowd funded money from the people, at that. A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions, and "only" 60 million from someone else, leaves absolutely no sense of being an underdog, even if he did spend less than his rival (100mil instead of 200mil. Big whoop)
            • Amezarak 10y ago
              > A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions. The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them. Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians. If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.
  • bduerst 10y ago
    I think the election proved the opposite - that if you can manipulate headlines, you can suppress voters from even coming out. If you look past all of the fake news, twitter faux pas, etc., I think that FBI Director Comey's manipulation in the last week really did do a number on the voter base, and it's disappointing that nobody is enforcing the Hatch act.
    • matt_wulfeck 10y ago
      When was the last time you spoke to people in towns of less than 10k people about their most serious issues? It's so odd to me that Silicon Valley simply can't comprehend that their values aren't shared by the rest of the country. Literally the only explanation they can produce to explain Trump votes is that everyone must have been brainwashed by Facebook news (despite the fact that millions of voters probably don't even have social media). There was a time when democrats represented the blue collar working class -- who have watched helplessly as their jobs and security has been outsourced to china and Mexico. Now it's Trump who represents their values and clearly they're not alone.
      • bduerst 10y ago
        I grew up in an unincorporated town in WI, so to answer your accusatory question: Sunday was the last time I talked to people in a town <10k. I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right, and it's wrong to think it justifies manipulating the election. >Have you tried to start a business before? Are you familiar with the debilitating beauracracy and taxes associated with running a small business (15-50 people) that doesn't take venture capital funding? Nope. I'm a computer engineer and everyone should care about what I care about or they're brainwashed. Yes. Yes. And that last remark is uncalled for, since I'm not a computer engineer or think that.
        • kefka 10y ago
          > I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right. I would agree with that, but not for the reasons what the Neo-Nazis would say (seriously, "alt right" is nazis and skinheads). Most small towns had one or 2 companies that propped them up. Vehicles, parts, steel, coal, mining. Good strong stable stuff. Making things, and knowing that the sweat of your brow made that. And they paid well. Real well. $25/hr, $30/hr. And as we went to this "service economy", with many manufacturing jobs eliminated by companies closing, automating, or going elsewhere, it left crappy jobs for these workers. Crappy means working for $8.25/hr, or $10 if you're lucky. And no benefits. No 401k. No insurance. And yeah, Trump has ignited the neo-nazis. But in the end, what matters more: "some democrat love-relationship with LGBT, environmental stuffs, SJWs, or whatever" -or- "food on your plate, and a place to live in with your family"? Because what Trump said is he's going to bring back those jobs. Hope, that these people can get back on their feet. But, well, that won't happen. Too bad it will take 4 years to find out.
  • siavosh 10y ago
    I think that was indeed a silver lining, but the scary question is does that make any difference in terms of inequality in America? His economic cabinet is mostly old faces of industry, his tax plan is a continuation of trends since the 1980's (when inequality in America started increasing). We can all wait and see what happens in the next four years, but if inequality increases even more, the people will lose even more faith in democracy.
  • kzrdude 10y ago
    Are you ignoring all the congress member races and looking at just the presidential election? The problem is biggest in congress; the influence of money is making the institution wholly nonfunctional.
  • gdulli 10y ago
    Is it really a silver lining if the voters can be so easily manipulated into exercising that power to vote against their own interests and to magnify (or at least maintain) the same problems the demagogue claimed to want to solve for them? Is it possible the former status quo, while far from optimal, was at least being stewarded by adults who knew how to keep it from going off the rails? A given Democrat or Republican has to at least preserve their party's ongoing reputation. Donald is a nihilist who doesn't even have that constraint.
    • devoply 10y ago
      They did not vote against their own interests. They voted for their interests in the only choice available that claimed to represent their interests. The point is the voters don't have an actual choice and never did, most of the consent is manufactured. The ultimate point I guess is that liberal democracy, which often does not represent mass opinion is becoming more direct and the system does not really support that sort of decision making because only people like Trump can get up there to be voted for, demagogues. The elite now don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle. This article is crying out HALP!
  • Brakenshire 10y ago
    Well, Trump is a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire. His level of spending may not be remarkable by American standards, but it is by the standards of most other countries. It still means that to get into power in America you either have to be an extremely wealthy businessman, or you have to be supported by big-business.
    • KirinDave 10y ago
      We see hints in the Trump campaign (and concrete evidence in the Obama campaign) that a lot of the cost for running is interfacing with entities that expect a lot of money to play ball. It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.
      • guildwriter 10y ago
        It's worth noting that Trump's campaign was also deeply invested in using data to drive campaign strategy. Here's a relevant excerpt from an interview with Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, who apparently masterminded the campaign strategy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1137f0472f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi... "This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.” For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."
  • devoply 10y ago
    Voters have always had power, they have just not been able to organize the "unenlightened" masses: http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/
  • lifeformed 10y ago
    The election didn't show that money or voters has the power, it showed that the media has the power (and doesn't know how to wield it).
    • golergka 10y ago
      The media? After all the push against the Trump?
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        Insofar as there was a late push against Trump by some of the mainstream media, it was after they spent many months fawning over him and giving him a multi-billion dollar free media advantage that was never erased. Given that people rarely change their view once it is well-established (rejecting new I formation which conflicts with it), even if there was quantitative balance, the fawning early coverage would be more significant in effect.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    It proved that billions of dollars in free media advantage overwhelms tens of millions of dollars advantage in direct campaign spending. Which isn't exactly an indication that money is weak.
• andrepd 10y ago
  > no one in political power is discussing serious policy proposals to reduce the influence of money in politics and hence address the accelerating transition of wealth from the lower and middle class to a tiny fraction at the very top This was the very platform Sanders ran on. Overturning citizens united was probably his #1 political priority.
  • woofyman 10y ago
    Also public funding of elections.
  • pg314 10y ago
    This was adopted by Clinton too: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/campaign-finance-reform/ https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/campaign-finance-refor...
    • thesagan 10y ago
      I think a lot of voters didn't take her as seriously on the proposal.
      • __derek__ 10y ago
        ... which is hilarious given that the case was about a negative ad about her.
      • metaphorm 10y ago
        I think a lot of voters found it impossible to take Clinton seriously on _any_ proposal she was making. The naked pandering and secret agendas were much too obvious. Trump too was nakedly pandering. He was just better at it and had a more receptive base for it. He was better at keeping his agenda secret as well. Does anybody have a clear idea about what his administration policies will really be?
        • dragonwriter 10y ago
          > Trump too was nakedly pandering. He was just better at it and had a more receptive base for it If that was true, wouldn't more people have voted for him?
• jseliger 10y ago
  Actually, it may be that there is too little corruption: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-07/in-politics-it-s-good-to-be-a-little-bad https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-07/in-politi... in most of politics, and too much ideological purity. Right now, for example, it is very hard for party leaders in the House and Senate to wrangle their followers, in part because they've lost the carrot and stick that earmarks used to represent (by the way, I used to be against earmarks and have changed my mind and realized that the "solution" is much worse than the problem). Consequently, we have much greater ideological coherence at the expense of actual government functioning.
  • ant6n 10y ago
    I'd say there are many other ways to make politics less dogmatic, rather than increasing corruption and pork. How about a more representative democracy, celebrating pluralism, and as a result, requiring parties to engage in coalitions as nobody ever has the majority.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    don't misuse the word corruption. you're obscuring the argument you're trying to make and misrepresenting the argument of the post you responded to.
• bradfordarner 10y ago
  Of course, the irony is that Trump, an ardent capitalist and pursuer of wealth, ran on a platform of decreasing the influence of money in politics. According to his 100 day plan, he is going to put a number of serious barriers on lobbying. I found this out after the election. It wouldn't have changed my vote had I known about it before the election (way too many other issues with Trump) but, at the very least, it is a hope that maybe something good will come out of this presidential cycle.
  • pasquinelli 10y ago
    This is why I say there's no excuse for voting trump. "According to his hundred day plan..." you have no reason to believe a word he says and every reason not to. afaic, voting for trump's like buying a car off him, or lending him money, or attending his university, or signing an employment contract with him, and so on. He says what he needs to.
    • r_smart 10y ago
      Step two is to demonstrate how these claims don't apply to the other choice.
  • throwaway729 10y ago
    > he is going to put a number of serious barriers on lobbying All of the most influential people in his transition team are family members, career politicians, or industry lobbyists/partisans. Trump's plan doesn't decrease the power of money in politics; it concentrates the power of money by neutering other forms of influence.
    • blowski 10y ago
      The UK government is in the process of doing this as well. Charities are not allowed to lobby government with raised funds. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35509117 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35509117
  • chasing 10y ago
• dominotw 10y ago
  >reduce the influence of money in politics Isn't money in media more of serious concern. What about billionaires co-opting media as their mouthpieces. nytimes - carlos slim slate/wapo.. - jeff bezos salon - John Warnock twitter - price al waleed Ironically nytimes, for all their moral outrage, itself is funded by the money acquired through subversion of democracy in mexico , cheating mexicans out of billions of dollars every year. [1] 1. https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/50550219.pdf https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/50550219.pdf
  • pg314 10y ago
    Do you have any evidence that Carlos Slim has any influence on the editorial board of the New York Times? Or Jeff Bezos influencing the Washington Post editorial board?
    • dominotw 10y ago
      My response was to a comment wanting generic policy towards "money in politics", assumption being that everyone who gets money is offering something in return. Your question is irrelevant in this context.
    • mikeryan 10y ago
      I can't point to metrics but the current rash of Washington Post stories seem to be skewing much more left then in the past. It could just be the times we are in a lot of the news I follow seems to be that way.
      • iainmerrick 10y ago
        In the past it may have been a cheap shot, but I think it's fair to say that reality has a left-wing bias right now. Denying climate change is now right-wing orthodoxy and is about to be entrenched in the White House. Or to put it another way, I think politics has lurched right rather than the Post moving left. Do you have any particular stories in mind, though?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• Tharre 10y ago
  Are you suggesting that communism is somehow less corrupt? If so, I encourage you to read about how communism was practiced in the real world, and the meaning of the phrase "All people are equal, but some are more equal than others". Governments have, and will, always be corrupt. Politicians don't decide to become corrupt, it's part of the job. It's how power has always worked. If you want to reduce this corruption, the best thing you can do is to limit the power and money the government has. And the best way to do that is by passing solid constitutional laws. Surely not an easy task, but a real first step in the direction of a stable democracy.
  • blowski 10y ago
    The opposite of 'corrupt capitalism' is not 'communism'. It's possible to imagine a form of regulated capitalism that doesn't invoke Stalin.
    • Tharre 10y ago
      What is the opposite then? You can imagine a lot, but I don't see how telling the very same people that were supposedly corrupted by capitalism to regulate it would change anything.
      • blowski 10y ago
        There are a lot of different political systems - it's not a binary choice between unregulated capitalism and communism dictatorship. For example - democratic socialism, regulatory capitalism, state capitalism, etc. I have no idea how it will happen, but I hope we won't need a bloody revolution to reduce the influence of finance and economic markets on modern life.
        • Tharre 10y ago
          You misunderstood me. I don't argue that there is a binary choice, nor do I argue that unregulated capitalism is what we need. I'm merely arguing that corruption isn't inherently tied to capitalism or any other economic system. That Governments will always be corrupt. Meaning that blaming capitalism for being "corrupt" is about as productive as blaming people for being selfish.
• benevol 10y ago
  > corrupt capitalism has corrupted democracies making them unaccountable to the majority of people, leading to a massive and still accelerating level of economic inequality That's it, right there. The US is on a declining path regarding this most central issue, and I don't see any signs of change or social/political will for change.
• musha68k 10y ago
  I agree, all of these feel like symptoms of systemic failure on a global scale. From that POV how could we get back to a state where influence is in the hands of polticians (public servants) again? What if neo-liberalism really is a super contagious virus to economies/societies? Correlating, Žižek likes to emphasize how important global decision-making bodies are - now more than ever (e.g. in undermining tax-havens trans-nationally, setting up binding climate-change policies, etc) so damn if we get rid of them (lack of directed global power towards global problems) and damn if we don't (coporate shills)? Maybe we do need something new this time? I don't know, I don't see it - I'm solution blind myself. I just have got this feeling looking back into our huge catalog of isms - that we can't (and for many should not/must not) rely on those anymore. IMHO we definitely need to become more creative again..
• serge2k 10y ago
  > no one in political power is discussing serious policy proposals to reduce the influence of money in politics and hence address the accelerating transition of wealth from the lower and middle class to a tiny fraction at the very top. Clinton talked about attempting to get in a more liberal justice who could have helped reverse course on the citizens united ruling.