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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).

by dabinat 29d ago

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.

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.
  - mitxela 29d ago
    What can a single person legally do about corruption though?
    - blooalien 29d ago
      > What can a single person legally do about corruption though? These days not much it would seem. :(
      - budman1 29d ago
        donate $10 to your local non republican congressional candidate. heck, make it $100
        VotingIsFake 29d ago
        Fastest way to throw away $100
    - pjc50 29d ago
      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.
      - mitxela 29d ago
        What if it doesn't work? What if 40% of voters don't flip their vote just because I say so?
        bluGill 29d ago
        Recruit more people to help you changed votes.
      - 29d ago
- watwut 29d ago
  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.
- Tanoc 28d ago
  There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.
swed420 29d ago
> 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
- ninkendo 29d ago
  No but we do need to go back to the good old days of having like 1/100th the scale of corruption we have now.
  - swed420 29d ago
    Out of curiosity, how far back is this?
    - ninkendo 29d ago
      Not really interested in getting into a debate here, I’m just pointing out that GGP said “openness and also the scale”, to which you ignored the “scale” part and pretended it’s only about being corrupt in the open versus in private. I can point this out without making a comment at all (although I have my opinions) on whether I agree if the scale has changed. (To be clear, I absolutely believe the scale has increased tremendously, but arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it, and anything I can point out, you can just say “well that’s because they’re doing it in the open now, they were always doing it”, which is just as unfalsifiable. There’s basically no good outcome to debating this.)
      - swed420 29d ago
        > arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it I was just genuinely curious what somebody with your set of opinions has in mind for a time frame, because "1/100th the corruption" is too vague for me to quantify in my head. As for arguing, I generally don't expect to change opinions with comments, especially those of whom I'm engaging with directly, so no worries there.

by dabinat 29d ago

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.
- mitxela 29d ago
  What can a single person legally do about corruption though?
  - blooalien 29d ago
    > What can a single person legally do about corruption though? These days not much it would seem. :(
    - budman1 29d ago
      donate $10 to your local non republican congressional candidate. heck, make it $100
      - VotingIsFake 29d ago
        Fastest way to throw away $100
  - pjc50 29d ago
    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.
    - mitxela 29d ago
      What if it doesn't work? What if 40% of voters don't flip their vote just because I say so?
      - bluGill 29d ago
        Recruit more people to help you changed votes.
    - 29d ago
watwut 29d ago
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.
Tanoc 28d ago
There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.

swed420 29d ago

> 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

ninkendo 29d ago
No but we do need to go back to the good old days of having like 1/100th the scale of corruption we have now.
- swed420 29d ago
  Out of curiosity, how far back is this?
  - ninkendo 29d ago
    Not really interested in getting into a debate here, I’m just pointing out that GGP said “openness and also the scale”, to which you ignored the “scale” part and pretended it’s only about being corrupt in the open versus in private. I can point this out without making a comment at all (although I have my opinions) on whether I agree if the scale has changed. (To be clear, I absolutely believe the scale has increased tremendously, but arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it, and anything I can point out, you can just say “well that’s because they’re doing it in the open now, they were always doing it”, which is just as unfalsifiable. There’s basically no good outcome to debating this.)
    - swed420 29d ago
      > arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it I was just genuinely curious what somebody with your set of opinions has in mind for a time frame, because "1/100th the corruption" is too vague for me to quantify in my head. As for arguing, I generally don't expect to change opinions with comments, especially those of whom I'm engaging with directly, so no worries there.