271–280 of 570 posts
Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
Each group is exposed to different media, thus the polarization.
Current administration knows this very well
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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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xmd8ut/why_d...
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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.
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.
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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). 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 s…
> 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 a…
"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.
Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
I think they have discovered that what the public thinks simply no longer tracks what they actually do: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters“
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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 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 a…
> 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 th…
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I think it's worse. It's not that the government doesn't care that the public hates it; it's more like the government is doing whatever it wants and half the public is going wild absolutely loving it. Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.
It's more like a third. > 35% approve, 61% disapprove, 5% not sure https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
I also gotta wonder what percentage of this group is amplified beyond reality by bot armies and hostile foreign actors. There can't really be that many people so completely detached from reality, can there?
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Trump is bad, but please let's not excuse corporate neoliberal dems that are totally fine with insider trading, legalized bribes, and are quite proud that their consultant campaign workers get lucrative gigs at corporations/boards due to insider access. I mean we have people like Gillibrand that are openly in bed with the crypto industry while somehow decrying what Trump is doing. Feels like they're upset that Trump…
After reading about Ground News, I am starting to gain a real appreciation for how effective "both sides are bad" is at benefiting the right. It may well be the closest I've seen to 4D chess in reality.