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Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

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Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#341

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #127
tstrimple wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine there had been no Nuremberg trials. The Nazis just got a slap on the wrist and almost immediately let back into politics as usual. That's how we got here. We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks.

Here's a map which attempts to estimate when slavery was abolished across various parts of the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo... The US wasn't much of an outlier. As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years…

Someone replied to my comment. I composed a reply, then they deleted their comment. Since I already put in the effort to write my reply, I will paste it here.

* * *

Trump outperformed with black people relative to Romney and has appointed black people to his cabinet.

>problems going on to the present day

Often more noise than substance, e.g. the odds of a black man being unarmed and killed by cops in the US are something like one in a million annually.

>The white vote in the US was a solid majority for Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is now a solid Republican majority.

Ethnic bloc voting is not at all unusual by international standards. I might as well interpret black loyalty to the Democrats as racism against white people.

>Those who "deserve it" are usually not white.

Trump has had many many "beefs" with white people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, James Comey, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, Rosie O'Donnell, etc.

What frustrates me is when activists take an issue which should be a winner ("Trump is corrupt, let's do something about government corruption, all Americans can unite around this") and immediately pivot to handwavey, divisive race-baiting and talking about how utterly depraved conservatives supposedly are. Sometimes it seems like you guys are determined to lose.

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#342

Post by somenameforme »

dd8601fn wrote: post #210
colordrops wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't been paying attention and digging into unfiltered sources if you think significant corruption is a new thing in the US.

It’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. A…

They'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.

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#343

Post by throwawayffffas »

esalman wrote: post #205
Loughla wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The half that supports this nonsense genuinely believes this level of corruption has always existed. They're just happy it's their team this time. I simply do not understand American politics.

Well friend, the current political climate in America might be unprecedented, but is not unique. As someone who lived under a mix of military, monarchy, psudo-democratic and democratic governments for first 30 years of my life, I've seen this played out many times before.

That's what blows my mind, nothing that is happening is actually new, we have seen this shit play over many times. And yet the system was completely incapable of shutting this down.

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#344

Post by mitxela »

pjc50 wrote: post #305
mitxela wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can a single person legally do about corruption though?

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.

What if it doesn't work? What if 40% of voters don't flip their vote just because I say so?

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#345

Post by [deleted] »

Petersipoi wrote: post #136
rapind wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Trump tomorrow says communism is great, then every Fox news host, MAGA content creator, and MAGA bot would be extolling the virtues of communism. The republican house and senate would enable it, maybe with a small bribe here and there. There is no line. There is no integrity. It's just looting.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#346

Post by IIAOPSW »

hakunin wrote: post #195
autoexec wrote: post #8

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.

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 scream…

I 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).

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#347

Post by leonidasrup »

pjc50 wrote: post #305
mitxela wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can a single person legally do about corruption though?

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.

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.washi...

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#348

Post by potamic »

pjc50 wrote: post #307
potamic wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did shareholders get bailed out? Which bank? The UK and Ireland bailouts did not do that.

Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#349

Post by vkou »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #176
otterley wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your angle here, exactly? I don’t get it.

I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place. A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Part…

> because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues.

The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.

Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.

Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

#350

Post by cineticdaffodil »

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #314
hakunin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scream…

Wow, 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 re…

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