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> 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

> 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.
    - leonidasrup 29d ago
      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.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/here-are-the-latest-most-damaging-things-in-the-dncs-leaked-emails/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190630070810/https://www.washi...
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 29d 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.

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.
  - leonidasrup 29d ago
    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.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/here-are-the-latest-most-damaging-things-in-the-dncs-leaked-emails/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190630070810/https://www.washi...

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 29d 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.