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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 statem
by hakunin 29d ago
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.
- colordrops 29d agoYou haven't been paying attention and digging into unfiltered sources if you think significant corruption is a new thing in the US.
- hatsix 29d agoYou haven't read his comment if you think that's what he said
- dd8601fn 29d agoIt’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.
- cindyllm 29d ago[dead]
- somenameforme 29d agoThey'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.
- msandford 29d agoMy feeling about all the corruption talk is that everyone is at different points on the "oh yeah now I see it" curve. I've noticed that I'm really annoyed at people who are just now getting it as I've been seeing it for 20+ years. Because people who are further behind didn't see it before they have no idea how bad previous corruption was and only see the new corruption as a unique evil, unmatched by anything that ever happened in a million billion years. Which then makes for very tiresome arguments about how bad it used to be back in the day. They actually argue that it used to be fine, but NOW it's bad. Anyhow kind of a rant but it's an insight I had as to why nobody can agree on anything despite lots of folks probably being honest/good faith actors.
- somenameforme 29d agoI think when people grow up with something it grows to become all they know, and so they assume it's normal and everything else is aberrant. So the overt corruption of now a days (or at least of yesterdays) is not even seen as corruption, because otherwise surely somebody would do or say something about. Surely. So large 'awakenings' require localized extreme circumstances, or at least the perception of extreme circumstances. That perception keyword is what makes everything so dumb, but I won't complain. More people being 'aware' is a great thing, regardless of how we get there.
- Arodex 29d agoSee this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
- DarmokTanagra 29d agoCorruption 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.
- jimkleiber 29d agoI 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.
- aprilthird2021 29d agoCan 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?
- DarmokTanagra 29d agoGrant 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.
- aprilthird2021 26d agoAnd at least the last two of those were not brazen financial corruption which earned their committers over $1B USD
- guerrilla 29d agoReading 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.
- aprilthird2021 29d agoProve 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
- grebc 29d agoDick 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:
- aprilthird2021 29d agoCheney didn't increase his profit one dime from his connection to Halliburton while or after his stint as VP.
- budman1 29d agoYou can dislike Cheney's actions while in office, but I don't remember any scandals where he put money in his pocket.
- jimkleiber 29d agoYup, 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.
- DANmode 29d ago> Yup, if i claim everyone is corrupt, then i can be corrupt. We could just decide that’s not how it goes.
- preg_match 29d agoYou actually can’t, because of the nature of incentives. If everyone else is corrupt and you’re not, you fall behind and get pushed out. This is how systems work. We see the same thing with companies. If everyone else is using, say, shady dark patterns you’re not, you lose market share and go out of business. The only result then is that everyone must use dark patterns, it stops being optional. If everyone is corrupt, how will you compete with the amount of money needed to campaign and maintain incumbency? You won’t. The only solution is to make corruption systemically difficult or impossible. Individual solutions and morals will go absolutely nowhere, because they’re ineffective at a structural level. Corruption is contagious by construction, the very nature of our political structure makes it so.
- DANmode 29d agoNo, as a populace, we could decide. By voting, etc. Not by running for office. > If everyone is corrupt, how will you by doing it before literally everyone is corrupt.
- preg_match 29d agoOh yes I agree, we’re on the same page. But of course it doesn’t just need to be preventive, it can be fixed now.
- dabinat 29d agoI 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.
- majormajor 29d ago> 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.
- blooalien 29d ago> 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.
- TylerE 29d agoCounterpoints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_land_fraud_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_land_fraud_scandal and that's just the 19th century, nevermind the 20th.
- VertanaNinjai 29d agoYour counter points span decades. That is not the scale or rate at which we are seeing today.
- Arodex 29d agoSee this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
- JohnHaugeland 29d agowow, in 150 years we find a handful of things much smaller than what has happened in the last 2 years the whisky ring is definitely relevant to a discussion of today’s problems this isn’t a ridiculous padded list of whataboutism
- selfhoster1312 29d agoWow, 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.
- cineticdaffodil 29d ago[dead]
- Applejinx 29d agoThe ones (perhaps not so much candidates but national leadership?) that outright pursue Russian interests are surely 100% corrupt, if you count 'semisecretly serving an entirely different and hostile country' as corrupt. I get that the counterargument is 'yes but USAID and NATO are existentially evil and so anything for the purposes of destroying NATO is legitimate', but at that point you're Sephiroth-posting and I don't feel obligated to respect that at all.
- hakunin 29d agoNo, what got Trump elected is both the republicans falling in line en masse, and the lefty populists backstabbing democrats the entire time it was happening. This is why republicans support DSA — it helps democrats lose. Mainstream democrats who actually know how to govern unfortunately don't have great rhetorical skills, easy slogans and sound bites, or the social media skills required to fight back against populist pundits. The mainstream media at one point also started going insanely harsh on normal democrats, while giving lay up interviews to trumpers, to avoid being accused of TDS. Democrats fail to fight on both fronts because they often suck at being influencers, and are actually good at governing. They're boring government officials, nerds that try to actually tackle difficult problems in good faith, by taking all stakeholders into account, and finding feasible solutions. Things are not simple. You're in a populist rabbit hole. It's easy to hate these suit wearing "corporate" dems if you don't actually appreciate the complexity of modern problems we're solving.
- IIAOPSW 29d agoI 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).
- t-3 29d agoWhen people say that US corruption is nothing new, they aren't condoning it, they're (in every case I've seen) drawing exactly the contrast you are making - it was like this before, but now it's so much worse! Corruption was not isolated incidents and unproven theories before, there have been corruption scandals throughout US history and even similarly flagrant actions earlier in the US (read about the "robber barons" of the industrial era, the early figures in long-lived political dynasties like the Bushes or Kennedys or the history of organized crime groups like the Irish or Italian Mobs). Political machines built on graft and money laundering were just thought to be something of history books because nobody pays attention when things are going well and the past century has been pretty great for US citizens overall. We've come to dominate the world militarily and economically, righted historical wrongs and corrected contradictions in our society, and achieved a level of global cultural and political influence that is truly unprecedented in history. Now, we are probably going to go through another few tumultuous round of reforms and changes just as previously happened.
- andai 29d agoMaybe we should define what words mean.
- CGMthrowaway 29d agoThat's a lot of words to issue a reproach of people using manipulating "truisms" and propagandic non-specifics, without using any specifics of your own. You might have a strong argument but you seem to be afraid to name anyone or anything.
- sagarm 29d agoHow can you prove the negative?
- xtiansimon 29d ago> “There are probably isolated incidents…” Read this and imagined corruption as non-linear. What before is “isolated incidents”, spreads like an SIRS (Susceptible → Infectious → Recovered → Susceptible) infection model.
- DANmode 29d ago> But finally real. The word you’re looking for is blatant. It has been there over 50 years, with the ratchet tightening toward where we are now not each year - but mostly in the shadows, not in your face laughing. Two things change each year: - how much the populace has been proven to “take” - how much further the empire’s attention is spread out, leading to it not serving its own interests and citizens, aside from continuity of governance Not everyone pointing out corruption is normalizing it, by the way. I’m personally looking forward to the conclusion of that.
- hakunin 29d agoNo, the word is _real_. What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime. Just like we can say that air travel is safe, despite there being incidents, we can say there is no corruption, despite there being incidents. The talk of shadowy cabals and conspiracies are fashionable, but never proven. Corruption that actually meaningfully hurts the country and the world at scale (in recent history) only started with this administration. You're going down a populist rabbit hole, I've been there, it's not a good one.
- DANmode 29d ago> What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Also, “normal” isn’t good. In fact, “normal” often seems like a horrible bar to aim for. > Corruption that actually meaningfully hurts the country and the world at scale (in recent history) only started with this administration. You don’t do the sort of systemic damage observant people have been pointing out for MANY administrations. Is this one bad? Yes. But it’s really weird and incorrect (based on the definition of the words) to say the corruption only just recently became real / meaningful / harmful.
- hakunin 29d agoObservant people pointing out corruption is not corruption. Real prosecuted corruption exists. That's why we have courts. Otherwise, it's conjecture that everyone is too eager to believe. Any behavior that can be explained, among other things, with corruption, is just added to the roster, because being cynical protects you from accidentally coming off foolish or naive. But it isn't serious. This is the first time in recent history we went from normal amount of incidents of corruption to straight up corrupt administration. > “normal” often seems like a horrible bar to aim for. If "normal" is a horrible bar to aim for, you should figure out what a world with zero crime would look like. I don't think you would ever want that world if you take time to think about it.
- dennis_jeeves2 29d ago>There are probably isolated incidents, and many unproven theories, Depending on how/what you calculate, cumulative taxation is between 50% to 70% of an average person's income. This is all that you need to know.
- crote 29d agoThe US has been suffering from late-stage capitalism for quite a while now. The obvious example is Citizens United allowing corporations to make unlimited political bribes. We just pretend it is okay by calling it "lobbying", but with the current slide into fascism the megacorps no longer feel the need to pretend.
- autoexec 29d ago> 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. Corruption in the US been extensively documented and proven. The revolving door at regulatory bodies, dark money, gerrymandering, no-bid contracts, "kids for cash", the collusion at the DNC before the 2016 primary, unconstitutional domestic spying by the NSA (along with the directer James Clapper lying to congress under oath without consequence), the lies the George W. Bush administration sold the public to justify his wars (and just about everything else surrounding them including profiteering, the use of torture, and many other war crimes), the Whitewater scandal, etc. You can go back in time as far as you like and you'll find things like The Teapot Dome scandal or The Whiskey Ring. The kind of corruption we're seeing today is exceptional, but to pretend that anything before now was "isolated incidents" and "unproven theories" is beyond ridiculous. Things right now are bad enough that we don't have to blind ourselves to our own history in order to make it appear worse. It is worse. It doesn't change the reality that corruption has been an ongoing problem in the US and maybe if we'd been more aggressive about punishing it we wouldn't be here today. Sweeping any of it under the rug is the last thing we should be doing.
- hakunin 29d agoYou listed a bunch of things only some of which are bad, and none of which are clearly corrupt. Did you know that things can be bad, and still not corrupt? When you delete a customer database at work, it doesn't have to be because you're corrupt. You're believing conjecture, because it makes you feel smarter, like you can see through the facade. The reality is that you're probably afraid to come off naive. We have to be stronger and fight this urge to cry wolf about everything, because sometimes real ones show up.
- autoexec 28d ago> You listed a bunch of things only some of which are bad, and none of which are clearly corrupt. Charitably, you might be using a different definition of corruption than most of the world uses. Even if we limit ourselves to only a narrow definition of only political corruption, the abuse of government power for private gain, most of what I listed would still be (sometimes literally) textbook examples of it. The revolving door, dark money, "kids for cash", no-bid contracts, Teapot Dome, these are examples of how we've seen bribery and cronyism play out in the Untied States. Voter suppression for example is a form of electoral corruption. While you're welcome to play at semantics or choose your own definitions for what you feel is and isn't corruption, claiming that "none of the things" listed were "clearly corrupt" is simply false. I think we'd agree that a worker deleting a database doesn't have to be corruption, but that also doesn't mean it can never be an act of corruption either. I'm not talking about conjecture, just documented history, some of it recent. There are people in prison right now for their roles in it and many others who should have been, or who should still be, locked up for it, but who have escaped justice because of corruption. It's difficult to imagine what "real ones" would even look like to you personally, but be assured that to the rest of us the US has a very long and well documented history of real corruption.
- godelski 29d ago> because it’s a common feeling Even the graphs in the article suggest this. The low point for perceived corruption was 59% in 2006. So 20 years ago more than half of Americans already believed it. Even their OECD median graph's lowest point was 55%. What I hate about the top comment is it is a thought terminating cliche. It sure as hell makes a difference when 90% of people believe the government is corrupt vs 60% of people. It treats the situation as binary. What also matters, and isn't shown in the graphs, is how corrupt people believe the government is. But we can also make some pretty good inferences here that more people think corruption is higher. There's a big difference between a leaky bucket with a few small holes and the bucket having such large holes that it's more accurate to call it a pipe. > It’s to say that they’re all the same. Exactly. It is the binarization of things. Extreminism is a lack of nuance. It is dehumanizing because we're all complex beings. It is a lie because the world and all of us have complexity to us. Extremism wins by making everything simple and easy to understand. "It's so simple, you just..." tune in and tune out. Don't think, just feel. Don't solve problems, just get angry. You get to feel high and mighty, because you're smarter than everyone else. If you were king for a day you could solve all the world's problems, because it is so simple. So I'm going to leave everyone with this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4