I wasn't surveyed but I would be part of that group. I believe the government has been corrupt for as long as I've been alive, if not longer. I also believe that it is not actually worse now than in the past. And contrary to what many uncharitable people in this thread claim, I am equally unhappy no matter which party backs the crooks in power. I just want a government that serves me, and I haven't had that in my 41 years on this earth.
Nah. At the end of the day it’s candidate A vs. B. Once they’re all corrupt you still have to decide between them and pick the lesser evil as you see it. They’re creatures of ambition and incentives, and the corruption is a feature of the system. It sucks but what can you do but vote for the corrupt dems or the corrupt republicans?
An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.
I know you’re going to get downvoted to hell, but you’re pretty much spot on. There’s something strangely desirable about being seen as the edgy contrarian “not left, not right” person. But 9 times out of 10, that person has approximately the same incoherent worldview most Trumpists have.
He's not spot on at all, and that's why he's being downvoted. He's examining the world through a false dichotomy of "if you aren't on my side, you support my enemies". But the reality is that most people who consider themselves independent are actually independent and vote for whomever they consider to be the best candidate.
When there’s a clear “right” side and a clear “wrong” side, being “independent” can trivially be chalked up to “wrong”.
Russia v Ukraine? Anything but Ukrainian support is clearly wrong.
Taiwan vs China? Anything but Taiwanese support is clearly wrong.
Axis vs Allies? Anything but Allied support is clearly wrong.
Being an independent in U.S. politics has been a honeypot for dipshits and awful people for 10 years now. Maybe before then your argument would hold water. Now? Absolutely not. The bigotry, corruption, lawlessness, and violence aren’t enough to push you to a side? Then you’ve passively chosen the side of bigotry, corruption, lawlessness, and violence.
> An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.
There's some truth to what you're saying, particularly a few years ago... but a rapidly increasing number of "independents" in America are strongly left leaning but feel that the Democratic party has abandoned them.
And they'll continue to vote Democrat, if they vote at all, for the purposes of harm reduction, but have renounced their official party affiliation.
>but a rapidly increasing number of "independents" in America are strongly left leaning but feel that the Democratic party has abandoned them.
Then they are listening to the Right. Biden did what he could to help unions and eliminate student debt.
The truth is those "left" leaning want socialism, but only for them, and not brown people. Socialism but only for their in-group. (That's also what you see with recent immigrants voting for Trump against even more recent immigrants. "Leopards eating faces party won't eat my face, etc.)
Union support is so absurdly widespread, I don’t even know what to reference. E.g., on his 3rd day in office, Biden signed an executive order to empower government employees to join unions. This resulted in about a 20% increase in unionized federal employees. He was also the first sitting president to ever attend a picket line on the side of the workers. His Department of Labor and NLRB appointees were longtime unionized labor advocates, who through regulations lowered barriers to joining unions and hammered anti-union behaviors by companies like Starbucks.
Student loan forgiveness is DOA since it fails to target the root problem: inflated tuition prices.
As for unions, ask the average union member what they thought of Biden's presidency. Clearly you weren't paying attention when these issues were making headlines and Biden was looking like the POS that he is in that regard.
It's all fluff, and you were swooped up by it. Get a grip or don't be surprised when your party keeps losing to a gameshow host.
Identifying as independents means nothing. 67% of independents in 2018 viewed one party more favorable and were unfavorable to other. In other words, the independents have a partisan lean towards one party and are more likely to vote that way.
This is correct. That is why I changed from independent to an actual political party. There is no point, it is highly improbable that I would ever vote for the party that is against my values. The two main US political parties are diametrically opposed.
No, they each manufacture consent for capital interests in a race to the bottom for everybody else, using time-tested good cop / bad cop, revolving door corruption, etc.
So, vote for a third party. If you don't actually like the candidate you vote for, you're engaging in political negligence. When I vote, I almost never vote for a Republican or Democrat candidate because they are, by and large, not people I want representing me. So I vote for someone I do want representing me.
That can work, if you are strategic about it. If your candidate is polling at 5%, you might as well have not voted at all.
Something I read once, probably 50 years ago now: you may not see a candidate you want to vote for, but you will probably see a candidate you want to vote against.
I understand this logic, but voting third-party should be reserved for democracies that are healthier than the US’s. When the only choice is a flawed but sane person or an extremist, a third-party vote is effectively a vote for the extremist. Your conscience is not as clean as you think it is, because you had the option to stop an extremist and didn’t take it.
Voting 3rd party is throwing away your vote in the US electoral system. The reason is structural. Currently, I believe there are two independent senators and one independent representative. Independents are not another party they are just unenrolled and they all caucus with one of the two major parties. There is no third party representation in congress.
Less than one third of eligible voters vote. Your espousing a self fulfilling prophecy.
The only reason party politics exists is because of you and people like you who keep spouting this lie that keeps them in power.
So instead of lying just say that you fully agree with everything both parties do and thats why you keep them in power and refuse to vote for someone rather than against.
I've never understood why I should join a political party. I mean, yes, I lean pretty heavily toward one of the two major parties in my voting, but what advantage does it get me to declare loyalty? Perhaps if I lived in a state without open primaries, but as it is I gain nothing by putting an R or a D in front of my name.
No, you are cutting off the nose to spite the face. Clearly if you lean heavily toward one of the two major parties, you should want to influence the party you lean to in some way.
The parties arent actually opposed its just that democrats want to change everything and republicans dont. Dems propose something and reps oppose it. Thats generally how its supposed to work but usually there is a debate that should accompany the proposals.
The general difference between a liberal mindset and a conservative mindset is the difficulty in making things work. Liberals believe that things usually work and the hard part is getting them to work exactly how you want them too. The conservatives think that things usually dont work and the difficult part is getting them to actually work.
This actually really matters when your talking about renovations whether its a building or a government you have to choose between the new fancy shiny thing will all the options and the old beaten up reliable thing that only does one thing and does it really well.
When dems propose something new, all the reps see is every way that it could go wrong or even be worse than the last thing.
When reps oppose something new all dems see is stupid old people afraid of progress.
And thats assuming that everyone actually has good intentions before we get into partisan bs and outright corruption.
The dem-rep balance would actually be really great in the politicians gave half a fuck about the country but they arent trying to make the country better in good faith they are trying to win politics which isnt even possible, a win for one party means the end of the country no matter which party the country needs the balance i just laid out above. You need long term trusted institutions and you also need to change and update things over time. Both perspectives are necessary if you want a functional government this petty infighting serves no purpose besides allowing politicians and their corrupt friends to loot and pillage the country from the inside while the stupid population argues over men in womens sports or when child sacrifice is okay.
I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.
The problem with government was that wealthy charlatans were rigging the system in their own favor. Naturally, the solution was to put a wealthy charlatan in charge of the whole thing and eliminate the middle man.
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 think they no longer have have to worry about it. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
What would anyone expect to happen when people are stupid enough to elect someone who tried, with multiple parallel methods, including an attack on Congress, to steal one election already.
Okay so now that everyone has been shown how they can cheat the election with mail in ballots. How do you propose to stop the republicans from using mail in ballots to steal the next election? Since clearly you cant use the feds to weaponize the post office.
How do the democrats secure an election? Do you just make sure you stuff the box with more mail in ballots than the other guy? You already made it illegal to show id when casting a ballot so if the republicans want to play the same game as the democrats how do you stop em? Do you just claim that its okay when we do it?
Our elections are already secure and have been secure. And mail ballots have never been shown in any significant way to constitute "cheating". Mail ballots are only issued to registered voters.
You need to cite some actual sources behind the question loaded in your comment.
Well it’s almost certainly not also just more open. But also more common and more intense. There is 100% absolutely no possible comparison to Trump’s personal acts of corruption in any prior White House ever.
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 exposed how rotten this game has gotten.
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
No one is excusing them. But it's worth pointing out that in every aspect of government ethics reform, from campaign financing to insider trading by government officials, the legislation promoted by Democrats is stronger than that promoted by Republicans, who often not only don't promote reform but actively oppose it. For example, the recent lukewarm ban on insider trading was opposed by Democrats on the grounds that it was too weak, excluded the President and VP, and included unrelated voter regulation measures. And the Democrats have been trying to pass legislation to correct Citizens United for years. So while it's a bipartisan issue, one party is much more pro-reform than the other.
That's great if you're talking to a high schooler that has never been politically active, but I'm literally a democratic party operative. I've attend state conventions, state nominating conventions, platform conventions, DNC twice. This is not the democratic party I want to part of and why I'm extremely thankful people-led organizations like WFP and DSA are actively trying to change things for the better.
None of what you are describing has any real momentum behind it and for how many decades will you let politicians fails you until you do something in response?
Like bro, the democratic party isn't an opposition party. There is a reason why the party has majority unfavorability rating [1] throughout Trump's entire second term. How do you square this?
This is a fucking terrible sign and it's why progressive candidates have seen a massive insurgency this cycle and why the corporate do-nothing dems are so scared shitless that they might have to actually answer why they are okay with genocide + corporate welfare programs while doing nothing to help people materially.
You say no one is excusing them, then spend your entire comment excusing them.
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
A write in, or even just scrawling "FUCK YOU" across the ballot is at least an active protest. It shows that you aren't apathetic to, or okay with, what is going on. It'd be interesting to see a write in campaign for someone with enough public support to be more than just a protest vote though. It'd be interesting to see someone campaign to the public with no interest in participating in the two party system at all, just asking the public to write them in when the time comes.
Well said. It's not that I disagree with the concept, just that the action itself is not meaningful to the overall process (not without a lot more people doing the same).
I've never written a name not on the ballot but wonder sorts of feelings arise afterwards. Is it "Good, I did the right thing"?
There are plenty of third-party candidates in most elections. However, most people are convinced that they have to vote for the lesser of two evils. In addition, a third party or independent candidate who starts getting too much public support will be likely be sabotaged long before election day.
For example look up Butch Ware's recent run for governor in California. It's just the tip of the iceberg in how the two party system maintains control.
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.
They help launder this idea that every issue has two reasonable sides. Which is patently false
There is some kernel of value to seeking out information from diverse sources. But groups like Ground News pervert that to mean that the left and right are on equally good terms with fact and reality (nevermind that collapsing politics and news media down to left and right is balderdash)
Huh... I'm super liberal (not so progressive necessarily) and I enjoy Ground News a lot. I don't feel like it gives an impression of both-sideism at all, and that's something I'm quite sensitive to?
That is their stated purpose, though? To give equal parts left & right so that you can supposedly be better informed. But the implicit assumption is that left & right are equally truthful & fact based, which is not the case, so the resulting coverage leans right.
Notably, like another allegedly unbiased news source (RealClearPolitics and related), Ground News is run by conservatives. They know precisely how it works and are taking advantage of sensible people who think they must be getting biased news and want more exposure to the other side, with the intention of ratcheting the Overton window ever more to the right.
When I hear people making these claims (all unproven theories, or misrepresentation of what really happens), I want to know: what happened in democratic administrations that went in favor of a large corporate donor and against the public? Any specific example where they diverged, and a politician ruled in favor of the corp, and against their constituents?
I think a lot of these beliefs are downstream of some perceived aloofness and intellectual elitism in the party combined with sour grapes about how 2016 turned out for certain grassroots demographics in the party.
I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.
What is unproven here? This is all found in various wiki articles or just being alive at the time (yes Obama did bailout banks over people, yes Clinton did condemn large swaths of the US to poverty).
I honestly don't understand your other question, you can watch any primary challenge race across the country and you'll see these dynamics play out. We're also dealing with cumulative effects that have taken place over decades (NAFTA is still impactful in many areas that if you run as D these districts you are guaranteed to lose).
If you're from a certain region and want specific examples LMK.
What is this argument really? Comparing one man’s corruption to a whole party with decades of history. “Honey my cheating on you is bad but look at this man Trump with decades of public philandering.” Whataboutism at its finest.
No, it's more like "oh wow that explains why Americans do not trust institutions, have massive unfavorable feelings about the democratic party, and voters no longer believe democratic politicians are pro-worker."
Like this is a thread about corruption but I guess if you give a shitty corporate veneer it's suddenly. If you're older than 40 you saw the democratic party implement NAFTA, cut welfare programs, and bail out banks; apparently these three major policy pillars aren't related to people's feelings on corruption.
Totally independent, they're just totally only saying Trump + republicans are corrupt not like the entire system that compromises two parties both of which are in bed with corporations and voters have a lived history reflecting just this.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that the Gaza Genocide played no role in Harris losing '24 either.
> Feels like they're upset that Trump exposed how rotten this game has gotten.
You make it sound like he's the one calling this out, "Drain the swamp" style, when instead he's the one elevating it to the next level. A month ago he sat for a TV interview in the White House, and he said, verbatim, "My children are insider trading all the time". And it was so on-brand for Trump's administration that it barely moved the needle.
Barron is an unemployed college drop out who gained $150M in net worth in a year. Donald Jr and Eric start companies or get paid millions for board seats that get billions in government contracts within days of their forming/joining.
You, unable to form more than three words about all of this, but able to go on a vague rant about how its the Democrats we should really be angry at. Corruption is endemic. It's never been as brazen, and as much, as now.
Don't disagree, take your example of using cryptocurrency to massively break banking regulations plus the ability to make rug pulls a known feature. Now what do you expect democratic politicians to actually do about it since they have no issues working with the crypto industry while taking their donations? Gillibrand is a great example of this, crying about Trump getting rich off cryptoscams but not willing to actually legislate against this stuff because it'll cut off a lucrative source of campaign financing:
Like this plays into the record "high" perception of corruption. (also you know that the democratic has had majority unfavorable ratings throughout the Trump administration [1], a major blight and a poor sign that the opposition party is in fact not unified in opposition)
I do find the person that makes your comments amusing. Mostly the types that do zero organizing, never volunteered for a political campaign, have never canvassed in their life, don't attend party meetings, aren't part of any state committees across the US, but all seem to exactly know what's wrong with the voters and apparently you aren't allowed to criticize a party for reasons that allude me.
Perfectly capable to form plenty of words just fine. I'm a democratic party operative that has mostly grown to hate the party more as the years go by, luckily my sentiment is hardly unique (way more common than back in 2016).
What do you exactly do to help combat this situation? I rather converse with people that are engaged and not just consumers of advocacy.
Maybe it doesn't qualify as a personal act of corruption, but George W. lying us into the the Iraq war followed by capturing people off the street and then torturing them in military prisons, is comparable to what's happening today, in my opinion.
Dubya did some of the most horrific things in modern American history, and filled the pockets of many of his associates im sure.
But in terms of the letter of the law unfortunately he couldn’t be held accountable for much of it because it was legal! The US legal system has largely agreed that the president, especially with a bloodthirsty Congress behind him, can torture, kill and maim as much as he pleases so long as it’s outside the border.
Implying that it's always been this way is part of the reason we are now here. For my entire life, bad faith commentators insinuated that the federal government was rife with corruption. When under Democratic control, of course. The time that Al Gore made one long-distance telephone call from his official desk, using his own personal calling card, birthed over 200 New York Times articles, 30 of them on the front page. We just had to get to the bottom of all that corruption!
"Both sides are just as bad" is copium for when the guy from "your side" is revealed to be a corrupt piece of shit. You don't like it, so you justify to yourself that the other party is also full of creeps and assholes and thieves, so you can continue to support your guy guilt free...
> You don't like it, so you justify to yourself that the other party is also full of creeps and assholes and thieves, so you can continue to support your guy guilt free...
Trump is more corrupt than the alternatives. Trump massively shit the bed with trade wars and iran. Trump fucked up a lot.
But he is better for america than whatever short-term voter-pandering corporate democrat the DNC shits out.
I’m voting for Trump in 2028 (via JD Vance).
You are free to vote for Rubio, Newsom, Kamala, or whoever you like. I won’t stop you. Let the votes decide.
> Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...
Democrats lost to a gameshow host. Twice. They just had to be better than that, and the couldn't manage. Pathetic. They also created the conditions for his rise.
But please, pat yourself on the back some more since obviously you deserve it.
Thats just party politics operating as it was designed. You only have one real party just like communists and fascists. The democrats control everything in the country via bribes from their super pacs and "charitable" foundations and fundraisers.thats why they were so upset when us-aids got suppressed.
Thats why people give millions to the clintons for haiti and the Haitians never see a single penny. The corrupt take that tax money and give it to their friends who give it to charities which are owned and operated by their friends who then donate that money to campaigns or other charities who do the same thing.
The republicans are just as corrupt but their power comes from the dems pissing people off so instead they vote against the dems but the reps are the only other option so the reps do the exact same thing as the dems and steal tax payer money and set up laws that make it more difficult for small business to compete with government sponsored monopolies. The left and right parties are like a left and right hand they wont get in each others way or fight each other they cooperate to screw the american people over and the stupid americans keep pretending they have a choice between the left slap or the right slap. The only way to take control of the country is to root out the corruption but the corruption is perpetuated by party politics and stupid americans are more loyal to their stupid corrupt parties than their nation or neighbors.
The problems that happened during the Clinton admin (with the exception of Whitewater) weren’t so much corruption as they were short-sighted neoliberal trade deals and hostility to organized labor, which accelerated the process of hollowing out the country. But this was also an unusual period in US history due to the end of the Cold War, so this administration could be an exception. Most of the scandals from this period appear quaint.
An under-examined axis of this problem is that people choose to believe in corruption because it's better than the alternative.
It's way more comforting to believe that Bill Clinton's buddies (or whoever) got rich selling industrial America overseas to the cheers of the progressives who thought all that stuff was dirty any way because at least that way it looks sane and planned and rational, albeit selfish, than it was done out of ignorance or malice.
And once enough people believe in the corruption, it manifests itself because it's perceived as how things are.
> short-sighted neoliberal trade deals and hostility to organized labor, which accelerated the process of hollowing out the country
What if they weren't short-sighted and not hostile? Look at Germany, which did not do this and instead kept strong provisions in favor of organized labor and protecting their domestic industry from foreign entrants.
They can't keep doing it anymore. That would have been our future. But we pivoted to high skilled services and it has served us immensely better than if we had tried to defeat other powers in industrial and manufacturing where they had a clear advantage we didn't, in terms of cost.
This ignores that Germany is not energy independent (unlike the US), and that it suddenly lost its main energy supply and followed this up by closing its remaining nuclear facilities, a massive self-own.
This also ignores that the US is now having serious trouble supplying its own military and tech sector due to the same deindustrialization! It also basically created its most formidable geopolitical competitor through this process.
> It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks
Similar to The Death of a Euphemism [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
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.
Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.
"People hate Congress but love their Congressperson. "
I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country. But the system has become totally dysfunctional making it basically impossible to really work on issues. The influence of money is just too much. To me this goes hand in hand with the rising inequality that gives a few people at the top outsized influence. Super PACs don't even have to deploy their money anymore. The simple threat is already enough to bring most Congress people in line if they want to keep their job.
> I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country.
That seems wildly unlikely. Wouldn't there be evidence for it by now? Over the last decades there have been scant murmurs of the US congress sitting down and taking a serious look at what might be good for a country. I'm happy to say that the root cause is a voting public in the US (everywhere, really) rewarding unprincipled liars and punishing principled politicians. But the outcome is that the US Congress is full of unprincipled liars who have little regard for the good of the country, because that would be a principle that gets in the way of political expediency.
The system isn't some abstract concept foisted upon them from on high. They control it. There are some very high-level constraints on them that are all-weather good ideas and apart from that it is a free-for-all. The reason the system is dysfunctional is because that suits the congresspeople.
Most of the US airforce is executive transport. Clearly you dont actually know people higher up in government. As someone who dated a very high up state legislator in my state said: She totally doesnt care cause she doesnt suffer the consequences. And at the congressional level it is again a level apart. Michal Crichton has a name for this, I think!
People don't feel like they are well-represented by either party.
They may like some republican stances (say, reduced regulations and welfare spending), but despise others (Trump, wars, anti-renewable). Meanwhile they might like some democrat stances (Inclusivity, environment), but not others (high spending, rent controls, etc).
So you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where there's no good way to express your desires. I can totally understand not wanting to vote in such an environment, and disliking the government no matter what. You can't get your specific views represented because everything has been collapsed into two broad camps that average out - and as lots of research shows, no one is truly average.
I hate my congressman. Why, he won't listen to me. No public meetings, no interviews with real press. Only 1 way phone calls, where you can submit questions via e-mail a day before the event.
No private meetings either. I have repeatedly called both his local office and his DC office. If I have a donation, a staffer will meet with me.
His philosophy is simple "You love Donald, I love Donald". It is the focus of the mailers that are sent out every quarter.
This elections democrat has no polling. The prediction markets give her an 8% chance of winning.
I'm sure you understand the dystopian irony of your last sentence, but I thought I'd highlight it anyway. That's some "no fighting in the war-room" level commentary on the state of the USA.
That 35% will change their tune if it screws their stuff up. Trump et al is great in the large unless he's your business partner or boss screwing your money and life up, hitting on your wife or daughter, owes you money etc. Cheap symbolism is appealing in a fog only, not in your face.
I think you’re underestimating the true believers. Plenty of conservatives are willing to suffer if they think it makes others suffer more. See Dying of Whiteness.
By the way two important social media strategies whether on TV or in text forums are,
1) appear unflappable
2) never deviate from the talking points
Read (1) and (2) with an implied parenthetical phrase: "when in public"
These are effective because the other side usually settles for small wins of seeing their counterpart flinch, feel lost or embarrassed i.e. to win in a fleeting way. Therefore, to the degree you can keep a straight face the better you deflect these small wins ... in public.
It has a strong secondary benefit of removing from context common sense, consistency i.e. the realm of cause/effect, policy where reality is more closely aligned. And when that goes out the window, your runway to BS is 10x longer.
Ejecting family wrongly arrested, misidentified, or those have followed the law (meager and crappy as it is sometimes), or who are denied due process is not unalloyed win in private people claim in public. Even if the guy is here is illegal and should be removed ... there's kids, money, and other dependencies involved. It's not the clean win people say.
What goes on off camera and off the HTML page is a whole other reality.
Here's an anecdote I heard personally: a guy I know went to Mar a Largo for a business function not related to Trump, but as a club house selling its meeting rooms and menu for revenue. My buddy is a non-white guy of considerable wealth, business success, and connections. This guy allegedly ran into Harris Faulkner (FOX news host) . During chit-chat she said she told this guy she does not associate with everything she says on camera. She continued to explain by saying she presents a viewpoint her employer pays her to convey.
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?
There is no local media in the US.
A wide swath of the electorate gets 100% of their news from Fox news.
In Texas, it is widely known that the Trump family are experts in crypto finance, and worthy of the gains they have made. (also that sharia law is widely practiced)
When people that aren't highly educated have no source of accurate current events, they have a warped view of reality.
Part of the problem with the open brazenness of the corruption is that the populace of the country will follow the lead. The rot will spread far and wide if it is seen that there is no consequence.
Now, if you had some grand master plan to use some part of the federal government to stomp somme people in some state for doing it wrong this is probably bad for you. But on a 30-40yr timeline it'll probably just mean a cycle of the feds doing less and the states doing more and the diversity that comes with that.
Like we'll all screech about the EPA revoking this or the DOT ceasing to do that but whatever those policies are, if people want them they will be picked up by the states. In most cases it'll probably be 40-something states continuing to do whatever it was or 40-something states saying that was stupid all along and stopping immediately.
The EPA is a good example of why this is so bad. Even if 90% of the states pass rules to protect the air and water it takes only a small number of states not following environmental regulations to cause a massive amount of harm to air and water quality and the effects of that can be felt in other states.
It also hurts businesses when they suddenly find themselves forced to follow an inconsistent/conflicting patchwork of state laws instead of a single federal law.
That said, it's still encouraging to see states picking up the slack and passing laws to protect their residents, even though I can't help but feel bad for people who become stuck in states where the government doesn't care about them. I hope that people will be begin to flee states where the government chooses to put corporate profits above the well-being of the public or wants to strip them of their rights, but realistically there will be many people who can't afford to move or who feel compelled to stay because of ties to their friends, family, and community.
You're only looking at the glass half empty side of things.
The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.
The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.
You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.
> The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Because there’s relatively little need for diversity. Dumping toxic waste into river systems is as bad in Oregon as it is in Florida. Things that genuinely need local management (e.g. wildlife) can be managed locally.
Which are a completely different set of ecosystems with different needs than the gulf coast, or the southwest, or the northeast.
Like for example aquifer depletion is a serious thing in the southwest. It's borderline irrelevant in the northeast which is only getting wetter with climate change anyway.
So you split the difference when you write the federal rules and the result is insufficient for the southwest and their governments have to do a bunch of BS rule stretching crap to take it further and a nuisance in the northeast where their governments have to do a bunch of the same BS in the other direction to lighten it up.
Why not just let these states write their own laws that work for them. Sure you'll probably get one or two screw ups but most states will probably be better served.
But you're still delineating regionally, based on one specific issue... There are issues that affect many or multiple regions. And states are going to have to duplicate effort, and firms or individuals will need to relitigate state by state.
There's been studies of healthcare administration, education, and other areas of devolution in UK and Spain. There are benefits, but there are also costs and outcomes can get worse despite the benefits.
Yeah, just look at the eastern block countries - corruption was everywhere and considered totally normal. So much that it eventually brought the whole thing down.
But it still left a deep mark on people - people who grew up under the old regime still considered it normal to bring gifts (usually alcohol in some form) when visiting doctors - the idea being it would be rude not to!
This is having real consequences - I saw an interview with a doctor, where he showed the reports a big closet, full of alcohol from these gifts.
That was from just the last week. He also mentions colleagues with tendencies for alcoholism dying from this...
I find this optimistic, suggesting that the rot can be stopped with some consequence? The rotten "populace" in the country seem to love their corrupt politicians, and it's because they're corrupt too. Meritocracy began it's slow death with the banking bailouts.
More than that, in 2020 Trump got a record number of votes for any Republican or sitting president ever. In other circumstances he would have won. It’s just that Biden also got a record number of votes.
When Congress people enrich themselves while serving in office[1] and there's a revolving door from public service into private and we have billions in unaccounted spending, fraud everywhere you look (especially since Covid), it's no surprise people feel upset by corruption.
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
The Supreme Court opened the doors to this with Citizens United. You can’t expect one party to unilaterally disarm while another rakes in hundreds of millions. We all just need to come together and agree on a constitutional amendment to end this.
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.
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.
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.
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 because they felt it would impugn the integrity of the 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.
My 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Can 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?
Reading 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.
Prove 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
He just bombed civilians in the middle east. Current administration is both bombing civilians in the middle east and stealing from civilians in the US.
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.
Most of the big ones. The government in fact was issued equity in these banks that they later sold to recover the funds. So it was very much necessary to preserve shareholder value.
This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.
Looked this up and it seems like most if not all high level officials divested from companies they worked for or would profit from. Cheney still owned stock in haliburton but it seems he gave away profits when selling those to charity, he did get a large parachute when he left them.
This is very different from the current admin at least. But direct profiteering by high level officials didn't happen or they were very good at hiding it. They did make their friends and old colleagues very rich, maybe that it reason enough?
And I am someone that considers that administration to be full of war criminals that manufactured a reason to invade Iraq.
But Cheney never profited from any of that increased work. He donated every single investment profit from Halliburton stock (since he was paid in it and held it as VP) to charity. That's like 1000x less corrupt than even one of the 3 situations of Trump corruption from only his most recent term that I outlined
Which US Administration said or did anything to prevent every US corporation from trading their manufacturing secrets for cheap labor, to the totalitarian country that they're all allegedly wringing their hands over for us?
Which one stopped the CIA from overthrowing democratic elections in other countries right from their inception, starting with Italy in the 50s and continuing with Operation Gladio all throughout Europe and moving into Southeast Asia as they worked with criminal groups to perfect their narco funded guerrilla warfare machine?
Did Trump even catch up to the number of bombs that "peace prize" Obama dropped in 8 years?
There are no sides, there's just a corporate Uniparty putting on some theater for you and you can absolutely prove that out if you dig past surface material and surface thinking.
Bad news is, you're probably in the midpoint of that meme bell curve. Grown up structures and institutions are designed well, with accountability built-in. Many many good people work in them, who hate corruption as much as you do. Bad actors are whistle-blowed upon, persecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. It's incredibly difficult in practice to do anything significantly corrupt and stay unnoticed. I don't know if you work (like, at a large-size workplace), but imagine doing something shady at your work, surrounded by your colleagues. It's not easy.
The irony is that your unending cynicism is actually turning you into a fool for the other side: the populists that constantly discredit institutions. They figured out that your cynicism (aversion to being scammed?) is so strong, that it can be used to scam you. They only need to discredit everyone else, that's easy. Make conspiratorial allegations based on perceived outcomes, not actual proof. Sell you all the cynicism in the world: everything is broken, everyone's bad. US institutions are corrupt and worthless. This lets them pretend to be experts, because you're now a guest in their version of reality. And they directly financially benefit from your attention.
Institutions maintain real internal accountability (none of these alternative media populists do), implement real processes that work, tackle real issues in ways that take into account all stakeholders, and don't just produce slogans and talking points. I know they're old and not cool, but they work. Unfortunately, very few groups are left that actually defend them, you all got scammed by relentless, self-serving, financially incentivized alternative media into thinking that everything is broken.
Just because things are complex, doesn't mean they're broken. Just because measures taken aren't always satisfying, doesn't mean they are malicious. Don't get scammed into this world view by people who directly financially benefit from selling it.
Yup, 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.
You 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
1/100th is hyperbole. But it has gone up. My opinion on the timeframe is the obvious one:
Since Trump. Entirely.
I generally think there’s actually not that much corruption in politics in the US. Mostly just insider trading, if you count by dollar amount. But I think generally there have been studies on the net worth of people before they are elected to public office versus after, and it’s within a few percentage points of the general population. There’s also the issue of lobbying firms hiring ex politicians but to be honest there’s something to be said for an ex-politician as a lobbyist: they have expertise and connections, they’re valuable to lobbying firms even if there’s no favors involved.
What we have now is:
- The president openly hocking a cryptocurrency and making billions off of it
- Taking money for early access to his posts on truth social, which is essentially how he communicates to the public. “Give me money and I’ll tell you first”
- Giving pardons to his supporters in a brazen and obvious way
- Taking donations from private donors to fund his pet projects like the White House ballroom
I could go on but like I said, I’m not really interested in the actual debate here because nobody’s gonna change their minds if they haven’t already.
But the previous administration denying a fair primary process gave us the present one due to forcing an unpopular candidate. They collude with each other so much that they're effectively one party.
Where do you get the $250B crypto number. He is corruptly profiting of his position, plain as day, but $250B in crypto? Really? What's the point in ridiculous exaggerations like this when the truth is bad enough?
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 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.
The 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.
No, 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 look awkward on camera, and 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.
What you call "normal" democrats are not solving problems for most people and are not in good faith. They maximized social inequalities since Bill Clinton and deregulated anything that was meant to protect people. That's not "good at governing", unless governing very narrowly means serving the elites.
Some things are not simple, and i'm really not a DSA fan (they're too mild in many regards to solve the problems we're facing) so i'm not really in their rabbit hole. But DSA is not what i'd call populist; they're making realistic and mild social promises based on rational/scientific study of solutions (and seeing what worked in the USA in the past, and what works in other countries, such as 100% free healthcare).
You, on the other hand, seem to be down a rabbit hole where making billions of people suffer for your little privilege is just business as usual and asking questions is dangerous. Things are not simple, but they're definitely simpler if someone tries to actually solve them which no mainstream politician is actually doing. Here in France, it took dozens of thousands of workers with guns post-WWII to have free healthcare for all, and it's been working surprisingly well ever since (although to be fair, since absorbed and reformed by the State, much less so).
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).
When 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.
That'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.
Read this and imagined corruption as non-linear. What before is “isolated incidents”, spreads like an SIRS (Susceptible → Infectious → Recovered → Susceptible) infection model.
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.
What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime. Some crime is expected. It's like claiming that air travel is unsafe, because incidents exist.
The talk of shadowy cabals and conspiracies are fashionable, but never proven.
You're going down a populist rabbit hole, I've been there, it's not a good one.
> 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.
Observant 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.
How do we determine that there’s corruption? If we did that by just pointing out that something looks or feels like it, why not treat all crime this way? There is a reason we created a judicial system. Things very often look and feel completely not how they really are.
There exists unprosecuted corruption for sure, just like any other crime, but claiming that it’s somehow happening on an outsized scale vs expected normal baseline? Based on what? Listening to people pointing it out who have everything to gain from selling this narrative? Conjecture and vibes?
Again, things can be complicated, even bad. That doesn’t mean they’re corrupt until there’s credible evidence specifically of corruption taking place.
Because government and law enforcement should be held to a higher standard.
Here’s the closest and easiest reach to obvious regulatory capture from the other scumbag party:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
Lots of Americans are aware of regulatory capture.
Yet: folks aren’t even discussing fixing it yet. Everyone is just pointing and mentioning, like a meteor is coming.
Where does this fall in your argument? This looks more than “complicated” - whatever that means (please do better).
This was a descriptive, not a prescriptive statement, of a real problem. He literally says that it is concerning that prosecuting large institutions can cause economic harm. He isn't saying they won't prosecute, he says it's difficult because of the downsides. Holder made a mistake of wheeling out a complex nuance to a public that isn't prepared to handle it.
I don't understand where is the evidence of malicious force trying to self-serve? Anything specific that points to corruption here? Is this like "yay, we found a loophole! We just need to build an incredibly large, successful business, and now it will be difficult to prosecute us, so we can finally start being corrupt"? Is that what you're saying?
What large successful business would want to squander it all on corruption? They are even more incentivized to identify and remove that sort of PR and legal disaster than the public.
I’m saying you’re dangerously shit at reading between the lines if you don’t see the scheme when an ex-government person gets $400k+ per instance to show up and speak to financial institutions they/their administration didn’t prosecute out of profitability (or even majorly inconvenience their compliance department).
> What large successful business would want to squander it all on corruption on an off chance that the economic inconvenience would save them from prosecution? They are the most incentivized to identify and remove that sort of PR and legal cancer from their org
Plenty. All the way back before the East India Trading Company - work your way out from there.
Many business structures and owners only follow laws as is convenient - expected, if the only true consequence is a $$,$$$ speeding ticket and/or inconvenience ls that the ownership is insulated from.
> He isn't saying they won't prosecute
> That was the direct context of his statement.
He prosecuted them, and chose fines over criminal punishments. If this was due to maliciousness or corruption, I'm glad that whoever openly explained it all in this interview thwarted his plot. /s
> I’m saying you’re dangerously shit at reading between the lines if you don’t see the scheme when an ex-government person gets $400k+ per instance to show up and speak to financial institutions they/their administration didn’t prosecute out of profitability (or even majorly inconvenience their compliance department).
I'm saying that you're so good at reading between the lines, that you no longer see the lines. You say all these random facts, but aren't connecting them to prove any corruption. If our judicial system worked the way you read between the lines, we'd all be in prison.
> All the way back before the East India Trading Company
What happened in 1600s has zero bearing on what happens today. Even the world in the 80s and 90s is no longer remotely the same.
> if the only true consequence is a $$,$$$ speeding ticket
Nobody ever actually knows what fine they will get. One day it's a fine, another day it's a judge making an example. No business exec in their sane mind would ever risk this. No lawyer in a sane mind would ever advise this. It's an incredibly uninformed, foolish position to only see a couple of perverse incentives, and be completely blind to the overwhelming amount of positive incentives.
> What happened in 1600s has zero bearing on what happens today
Unchecked ignorance.
What relevant examples of getting away with corruption can we glean from a pre-enlightenment, pre-formal-police, pre-constitution, pre-checks-and-balances, pre-judiciary-act, pre-telegraph, pre-paper-trail, pre-internet, pre-camera-phones, pre-surveillance, pre-data-centers, pre-whistleblowers, pre-structures of accountability world?
Corruption has gotten magnitudes harder to get away with, which is why history is irrelevant. You would need something extraordinary, like becoming a president with criminal immunity and self-pardon powers, and having an electoral majority supporting you being openly corrupt.
Not sure how we can just go ahead and slice up the world into "tightly-knit communities", but even if we could, there's domestic violence, feuding, and mafia that arises just fine in those environments.
The 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.
> 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.
You 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.
> 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, no-bid contracts, "kids for cash", 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 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 documented history of corruption.
Let's take revolving door. Who would you want to be in charge of regulating an industry, a person who knows it inside out or a newcomer who has no idea how anything works? How would the latter have any hope at being an effective regulator? You would never accept this kind of lack of experience anywhere else in life. But for some reason we're all used to pointing out revolving doors as some kind of gotcha, without giving it the basic level of thought.
Dark money sounds bad, but anonymity doesn't imply corruption. Money also isn't enough. Look at billionaires trying to run for president, and where they got. You'll also be hard pressed to find any example where a politician picks a stance that goes against their constituents' opinion, in favor of money. Usually money piggybacks on a public opinion that already supports them, or is largely indifferent. History has shown over and over that pumping money cannot alone reverse public opinion to any significant extent.
Kids for cash — I didn't know what it was at first. Sure, that's straight corruption. A couple of judges committed crimes, got caught, and received prison sentences.
I could go down every example you made, but I hope the sample above illustrates what I mean. "Documented history" is conjecture until it's adjudicated. You're making a mistake of putting "documented history" (insinuations of corruption in dark money, revolving doors, voter suppression) in the same bucket as clear and adjudicated corruption (like kids for cash), and based on this mixed bucket of good and bad examples, make a conclusion that there's always been outsized corruption in US, compared to normal baseline. Your basis for that conclusion is flawed.
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.
You are partially right. We used to collectively throw people out when they were exposed as corrupt. Now it works like this: Republicans get called out by Democrats, Democrats get called out by Republicans and Democrats. And if that goes on long enough Democrats will start overlooking their own transgressions, I see that starting already.
I think if you re-read my comment we are basically in agreement, I just think if we continue on the current trajectory of not holding people accountable, it will spread to both parties. Ask yourself this, in a two party system, how bad would a Democratic nominee have to be before you’d vote for Trump? He has created a lot of runway for his opponents to be corrupt.
It is perplexing how similar it looks when a stupid person who is elected by a stupid base is directing a country.
The difference between people doing corruption before and Trump is that the other people had a "legit" lifestyle and worldview but did corruption as a side thing. An ignorant business person like Trump has corruption/intimidation/coercion/deception etc. as a lifestyle because someone like him can't live in the world that he is living in without this lifestyle.
Trump isn't really corrupt in the same sense as Obama because they are fundamentally different. You could even say more educated politicians that are able to understand what is going on are more evil.
People won't tolerate evil politicians anymore because they understand they are being robbed by the financial system and aren't getting their piece of the pie. It has to be a break to democracy (war?) or economic reform or Mamdani/Trump style government from now, it is really unthinkable people will keep electing Biden/Hilary/Harris/JD Vance kind of politicians anymore unless there is a big breakthrough in brainwashing
I don’t think that’s right. The US government cares a lot about what the public thinks about them. They propagandize actively on social media, the president puts his personal name onceverything, they are extremely persistent in their messaging to loyal reporters and so on.
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“
Problem is, public thinks that the government is corrupt but it doesn't impact their voting choices. Public is OK with corruption.
If you look at many deeply corrupt countries, corruption is beneficial for majority of population there. As people in Belarus used to complain to Russians some 20 years ago, "in Belarus we live very poorly because Lukashenka does not allow us to steal unlike your bosses", and they were right.
It is concerned, but not in the way one would think.
From what i hear politicians like Gavin Newsom from California are passing bills to prevent independent journalists like Nick Shirley from exposing fraud and corruption.
That signals that they (government officials) are extremely concerned with what the public thinks, but mainly in the sense that they don’t want the public to have the information that would put them in a thought spot.
On the other hand, the fact that fraud and corruption is only reported by some early-twenty-something independent youtuber/journalist should really tell you a lot on the state of mass media in the USA (in the sense that the mass media are essentially colluding with politicians).
All they have to do is persuade the public that all politicians are corrupt, then they can be as corrupt as they like. It’s the populist playbook the world over.
>Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently.
It's been open a long time. Patriot Act/Snowden/Assange, JFK coverup, shutting churches to keep Walmart open, social media censorship, gerrymandering, immigration enforcement, etc
Corruption does not mean bad policy. It’s government officials breaking the law to empower and enrich themselves. To the extent the items on your list even exist outside of the addled minds of conspiracy theorists, they aren’t corruption.
It's also possible that we have better tools now to expose corruption and communicate it to each other. The level of corruption could be the same but we are just much more aware
I agree though it's concerning that now it seems to be done without care to the visibility
Part of the problem is we've essentially made corruption legal, at least for Congress. In the past if you gave a million dollars in cash to your Congressman, he stood a good chance of getting caught and arrested. But these days it's just normal for wealthy people, companies, and pressure groups to donate large sums of money to political campaigns.
Then the money gets laundered through book sales. We're all supposed to pretend that money isn't affecting votes, but come on.
Think about it as 25% who disagree to only 11. Less than half of the people who thought corruption is not widespread still think so. Further, the US is now the #1 ranked country in corruption.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
I'd guess it comes down to what counts as "the government."
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
I (and I'm sure others) would obviously agree. just a smattering of the obvious cases
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
I think there's probably plenty of minor corruption around. A lot of it takes the form of "I have control over funds and I am going to award contracts to people I'm close to"
Or maybe soft bribery, like government officials being wined and dined by lobbyists. I'm sure that isn't "supposed" to happen, but I'm also pretty sure it happens a lot.
This sort of corruption exists a ton at corporations for sure, so I am hard pressed to think it doesn't happen in government
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.
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.
And stood in front of a TV camera during Obama's administration and said that Republicans would not support bills that objectively made Americans lives better because their goal was only to make sure Obama was a one term President.
It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
Oligarchy has completely subverted democracy in the US.
In this era, venal actions are official actions. Nothing is even hidden anymore. Racketeering and thuggery are on display even during supposed negotiations.
The US is under mob rule. Sure sure, we gonna make a deal. Da best deal evah. Da deal is dat we won't whack ya.
I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
“ As President Trump publicly declared last week that he was "sending an armada" to the Sea of Japan in an attempt to send a message to North Korea, the carrier group was actually sailing thousands of miles in the other direction to war game with the Australian Navy, per the NYT, which reported that the mixup was due to "a glitch-ridden sequence of events."”
What’s funny is he started an UNE essay war with Iran, strengthened the Iranian regime and gave them a guaranteed income source from a toll Trump can’t get rid of. And this is your argument? You’re funny.
> You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.
I live in California and even though Trump lost here he still got 1/4 to 1/2 the vote even in the coastal areas so a lot of people one might work with support Trump - there’s always an undercurrent of racist dog whistles in GOP campaigns that with Trump became daily broadcasts on social media and conservative news sources - these MAGA hear it and believe in that and the ones I’ve talked to are like cultists - they won’t believe any other evidence to the contrary and they like the simple message and the messenger - others are to blame and he can fix it.
I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
Citizens United is widely considered the event that would cause US corruption to spiral out of control, but there was always the hope that a constitutional amendment could get us out of this.
Neither side ever even attempted it. Every once in a while you get some lip service about small money donations but nobody ever tried to go after the problem at the root in all this time. Think about what that means.
Some local governments are fully designed to be perfect vehicles for corruption by this point. The incentives just lead to it over time as one corrupt prick makes things a little easier for themselves and their ilk to operate without oversight. Things compound over the decades of people drawn to the graft opportunities in local government with their campaigns funded by the beneficiaries of the graft, against little to no opposition.
Absolutely. In my town the politicians on the planning and zoning committees are all best friends with all the developers in town, and not just "we work in the same area, socialize at the same events", but "we go on joint family vacations with our kids together and are in each other's bridal parties"...
... and then wonder why the public gets mad when the environmental impact study says "not good", public works says "area roads can't support the traffic influx and can't support increasing capacity due to geography and existing homes" and still approve the developer's new project anyway.
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.
It doesn't seem like they asked about specific levels or branches of government, so presumably the respondents were giving a general impression. And in that case, it's hard to believe that a corrupt President wouldn't strongly influence the response.
The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)
In many countries around the world, corruption is a huge problem. But pretty much everywhere it happens there's a surface-level denial or attempt to hide it. If you're Putin or Erdogan, for example, you'll have children who get beneficial contracts and there's layers of obfuscation.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
The far right won office and made it manifest. Just like they complain on government inefficiency and that it can never accomplish anything while explicitly making those things worse while in power to prove their point.
Yes possibly so I'd have to see the evidence for that, but my point is it's great that such a large majority of people are now well aware of the horrific and disgusting corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence in governments.
For some quick and easy evidence, you could look at the history of the Post Office.
USPS has always been the poster child for efficient and effective government agencies. Despite claims otherwise, the agency still manages to deliver letters and other postage to areas private industry like FedEx, UPS, et. al. would never touch.
Unfortunately, over the years, Republican Congresses and Presidents have repeatedly attempted to sabotage the agency. Some recent(-ish) examples:
* The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to create a fund to pay the cost of post-retirement health care costs 75 years into the future.
* The Republican-appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy overseeing the removal of 711 sorting machines as well as a number of public mailboxes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, which, due to Covid, was expected to have larger-than-normal use of mail-in ballots. Not only did it cause significant concern regarding mail-in ballots, but it also resulted in significant delays and backlogs in general mail delivery.
You were not clear at all, I am asking for clarification. I thought that `atmavatar's question was clearly in response to your statement and you are saying it is not.
Assume I am ignorant to the context of this conversation if need be. What were you referencing when you made your claim to needing evidence?
I was referencing the claims made in the post I replied to. I'm trying to help but I can't imagine what it is you're having so much difficulty with about that.
359 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadVote for a third party, or don't vote at all. Casting a vote for someone you don't actually want in office ("the lesser of two evils") is negligent.
Of course most elections aren't close enough for your vote to matter at all.
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
Russia v Ukraine? Anything but Ukrainian support is clearly wrong.
Taiwan vs China? Anything but Taiwanese support is clearly wrong.
Axis vs Allies? Anything but Allied support is clearly wrong.
Being an independent in U.S. politics has been a honeypot for dipshits and awful people for 10 years now. Maybe before then your argument would hold water. Now? Absolutely not. The bigotry, corruption, lawlessness, and violence aren’t enough to push you to a side? Then you’ve passively chosen the side of bigotry, corruption, lawlessness, and violence.
Which is the point the person you reply to was making: those independents are incompetent, incoherent and uninformed.
Meanwhile in my FB circle of friends and acquaintances I have 3 people who call themselves Independent, and 4 who call themselves Libertarian.
All of them have voted for Trump, twice, and as far as I know, at least 2 voted multiple times for the Bush dynasty.
There's some truth to what you're saying, particularly a few years ago... but a rapidly increasing number of "independents" in America are strongly left leaning but feel that the Democratic party has abandoned them.
And they'll continue to vote Democrat, if they vote at all, for the purposes of harm reduction, but have renounced their official party affiliation.
Then they are listening to the Right. Biden did what he could to help unions and eliminate student debt.
The truth is those "left" leaning want socialism, but only for them, and not brown people. Socialism but only for their in-group. (That's also what you see with recent immigrants voting for Trump against even more recent immigrants. "Leopards eating faces party won't eat my face, etc.)
LMAO, etc
Student loan forgiveness: blocked by the Supreme Court along partisan lines: Biden v. Nebraska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Nebraska)
Union support is so absurdly widespread, I don’t even know what to reference. E.g., on his 3rd day in office, Biden signed an executive order to empower government employees to join unions. This resulted in about a 20% increase in unionized federal employees. He was also the first sitting president to ever attend a picket line on the side of the workers. His Department of Labor and NLRB appointees were longtime unionized labor advocates, who through regulations lowered barriers to joining unions and hammered anti-union behaviors by companies like Starbucks.
As for unions, ask the average union member what they thought of Biden's presidency. Clearly you weren't paying attention when these issues were making headlines and Biden was looking like the POS that he is in that regard.
It's all fluff, and you were swooped up by it. Get a grip or don't be surprised when your party keeps losing to a gameshow host.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
It means "I am not firmly affiliated". You still have the ability to make choices on who is a better likely outcome
Something I read once, probably 50 years ago now: you may not see a candidate you want to vote for, but you will probably see a candidate you want to vote against.
The only reason party politics exists is because of you and people like you who keep spouting this lie that keeps them in power.
So instead of lying just say that you fully agree with everything both parties do and thats why you keep them in power and refuse to vote for someone rather than against.
The general difference between a liberal mindset and a conservative mindset is the difficulty in making things work. Liberals believe that things usually work and the hard part is getting them to work exactly how you want them too. The conservatives think that things usually dont work and the difficult part is getting them to actually work.
This actually really matters when your talking about renovations whether its a building or a government you have to choose between the new fancy shiny thing will all the options and the old beaten up reliable thing that only does one thing and does it really well.
When dems propose something new, all the reps see is every way that it could go wrong or even be worse than the last thing.
When reps oppose something new all dems see is stupid old people afraid of progress.
And thats assuming that everyone actually has good intentions before we get into partisan bs and outright corruption.
The dem-rep balance would actually be really great in the politicians gave half a fuck about the country but they arent trying to make the country better in good faith they are trying to win politics which isnt even possible, a win for one party means the end of the country no matter which party the country needs the balance i just laid out above. You need long term trusted institutions and you also need to change and update things over time. Both perspectives are necessary if you want a functional government this petty infighting serves no purpose besides allowing politicians and their corrupt friends to loot and pillage the country from the inside while the stupid population argues over men in womens sports or when child sacrifice is okay.
If yes, you might want to look at your information environment.
How do the democrats secure an election? Do you just make sure you stuff the box with more mail in ballots than the other guy? You already made it illegal to show id when casting a ballot so if the republicans want to play the same game as the democrats how do you stop em? Do you just claim that its okay when we do it?
You need to cite some actual sources behind the question loaded in your comment.
Democrats want all legitimate ballots counted and to make it easier to vote in person.
Only one party cares about defending democracy.
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
Yeah you're brainwashed
None of what you are describing has any real momentum behind it and for how many decades will you let politicians fails you until you do something in response?
Like bro, the democratic party isn't an opposition party. There is a reason why the party has majority unfavorability rating [1] throughout Trump's entire second term. How do you square this?
This is a fucking terrible sign and it's why progressive candidates have seen a massive insurgency this cycle and why the corporate do-nothing dems are so scared shitless that they might have to actually answer why they are okay with genocide + corporate welfare programs while doing nothing to help people materially.
You say no one is excusing them, then spend your entire comment excusing them.
What do you actually do politically?
[1] https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/favorability/democratic-part...
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
If you want to protest, please do it. But throwing away your vote is not a protest, it’s a method of ceding a small amount of power.
I've never written a name not on the ballot but wonder sorts of feelings arise afterwards. Is it "Good, I did the right thing"?
There is some kernel of value to seeking out information from diverse sources. But groups like Ground News pervert that to mean that the left and right are on equally good terms with fact and reality (nevermind that collapsing politics and news media down to left and right is balderdash)
Notably, like another allegedly unbiased news source (RealClearPolitics and related), Ground News is run by conservatives. They know precisely how it works and are taking advantage of sensible people who think they must be getting biased news and want more exposure to the other side, with the intention of ratcheting the Overton window ever more to the right.
I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.
I honestly don't understand your other question, you can watch any primary challenge race across the country and you'll see these dynamics play out. We're also dealing with cumulative effects that have taken place over decades (NAFTA is still impactful in many areas that if you run as D these districts you are guaranteed to lose).
If you're from a certain region and want specific examples LMK.
Like this is a thread about corruption but I guess if you give a shitty corporate veneer it's suddenly. If you're older than 40 you saw the democratic party implement NAFTA, cut welfare programs, and bail out banks; apparently these three major policy pillars aren't related to people's feelings on corruption.
Totally independent, they're just totally only saying Trump + republicans are corrupt not like the entire system that compromises two parties both of which are in bed with corporations and voters have a lived history reflecting just this.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that the Gaza Genocide played no role in Harris losing '24 either.
You make it sound like he's the one calling this out, "Drain the swamp" style, when instead he's the one elevating it to the next level. A month ago he sat for a TV interview in the White House, and he said, verbatim, "My children are insider trading all the time". And it was so on-brand for Trump's administration that it barely moved the needle.
Barron is an unemployed college drop out who gained $150M in net worth in a year. Donald Jr and Eric start companies or get paid millions for board seats that get billions in government contracts within days of their forming/joining.
You, unable to form more than three words about all of this, but able to go on a vague rant about how its the Democrats we should really be angry at. Corruption is endemic. It's never been as brazen, and as much, as now.
https://theintercept.com/2026/07/13/gillibrand-crypto-trump-...
Like this plays into the record "high" perception of corruption. (also you know that the democratic has had majority unfavorable ratings throughout the Trump administration [1], a major blight and a poor sign that the opposition party is in fact not unified in opposition)
I do find the person that makes your comments amusing. Mostly the types that do zero organizing, never volunteered for a political campaign, have never canvassed in their life, don't attend party meetings, aren't part of any state committees across the US, but all seem to exactly know what's wrong with the voters and apparently you aren't allowed to criticize a party for reasons that allude me.
Perfectly capable to form plenty of words just fine. I'm a democratic party operative that has mostly grown to hate the party more as the years go by, luckily my sentiment is hardly unique (way more common than back in 2016).
What do you exactly do to help combat this situation? I rather converse with people that are engaged and not just consumers of advocacy.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2026/07/13/gillibrand-crypto-trump-...
Is that what's happening here?
But in terms of the letter of the law unfortunately he couldn’t be held accountable for much of it because it was legal! The US legal system has largely agreed that the president, especially with a bloodthirsty Congress behind him, can torture, kill and maim as much as he pleases so long as it’s outside the border.
But he's easily the most corrupt, also aided by the simplicity of his character.
Trump is more corrupt than the alternatives. Trump massively shit the bed with trade wars and iran. Trump fucked up a lot.
But he is better for america than whatever short-term voter-pandering corporate democrat the DNC shits out.
I’m voting for Trump in 2028 (via JD Vance).
You are free to vote for Rubio, Newsom, Kamala, or whoever you like. I won’t stop you. Let the votes decide.
Democrats lost to a gameshow host. Twice. They just had to be better than that, and the couldn't manage. Pathetic. They also created the conditions for his rise.
But please, pat yourself on the back some more since obviously you deserve it.
Thats why people give millions to the clintons for haiti and the Haitians never see a single penny. The corrupt take that tax money and give it to their friends who give it to charities which are owned and operated by their friends who then donate that money to campaigns or other charities who do the same thing.
The republicans are just as corrupt but their power comes from the dems pissing people off so instead they vote against the dems but the reps are the only other option so the reps do the exact same thing as the dems and steal tax payer money and set up laws that make it more difficult for small business to compete with government sponsored monopolies. The left and right parties are like a left and right hand they wont get in each others way or fight each other they cooperate to screw the american people over and the stupid americans keep pretending they have a choice between the left slap or the right slap. The only way to take control of the country is to root out the corruption but the corruption is perpetuated by party politics and stupid americans are more loyal to their stupid corrupt parties than their nation or neighbors.
It's way more comforting to believe that Bill Clinton's buddies (or whoever) got rich selling industrial America overseas to the cheers of the progressives who thought all that stuff was dirty any way because at least that way it looks sane and planned and rational, albeit selfish, than it was done out of ignorance or malice.
And once enough people believe in the corruption, it manifests itself because it's perceived as how things are.
What if they weren't short-sighted and not hostile? Look at Germany, which did not do this and instead kept strong provisions in favor of organized labor and protecting their domestic industry from foreign entrants.
They can't keep doing it anymore. That would have been our future. But we pivoted to high skilled services and it has served us immensely better than if we had tried to defeat other powers in industrial and manufacturing where they had a clear advantage we didn't, in terms of cost.
This also ignores that the US is now having serious trouble supplying its own military and tech sector due to the same deindustrialization! It also basically created its most formidable geopolitical competitor through this process.
Sure the US is having trouble with that. But the easy fix to that was to not start unnecessary wars
Similar to The Death of a Euphemism [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg
Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.
> 35% approve, 61% disapprove, 5% not sure
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.
I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country. But the system has become totally dysfunctional making it basically impossible to really work on issues. The influence of money is just too much. To me this goes hand in hand with the rising inequality that gives a few people at the top outsized influence. Super PACs don't even have to deploy their money anymore. The simple threat is already enough to bring most Congress people in line if they want to keep their job.
That seems wildly unlikely. Wouldn't there be evidence for it by now? Over the last decades there have been scant murmurs of the US congress sitting down and taking a serious look at what might be good for a country. I'm happy to say that the root cause is a voting public in the US (everywhere, really) rewarding unprincipled liars and punishing principled politicians. But the outcome is that the US Congress is full of unprincipled liars who have little regard for the good of the country, because that would be a principle that gets in the way of political expediency.
The system isn't some abstract concept foisted upon them from on high. They control it. There are some very high-level constraints on them that are all-weather good ideas and apart from that it is a free-for-all. The reason the system is dysfunctional is because that suits the congresspeople.
They may like some republican stances (say, reduced regulations and welfare spending), but despise others (Trump, wars, anti-renewable). Meanwhile they might like some democrat stances (Inclusivity, environment), but not others (high spending, rent controls, etc).
So you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where there's no good way to express your desires. I can totally understand not wanting to vote in such an environment, and disliking the government no matter what. You can't get your specific views represented because everything has been collapsed into two broad camps that average out - and as lots of research shows, no one is truly average.
No private meetings either. I have repeatedly called both his local office and his DC office. If I have a donation, a staffer will meet with me.
His philosophy is simple "You love Donald, I love Donald". It is the focus of the mailers that are sent out every quarter.
This elections democrat has no polling. The prediction markets give her an 8% chance of winning.
By the way two important social media strategies whether on TV or in text forums are,
1) appear unflappable
2) never deviate from the talking points
Read (1) and (2) with an implied parenthetical phrase: "when in public"
These are effective because the other side usually settles for small wins of seeing their counterpart flinch, feel lost or embarrassed i.e. to win in a fleeting way. Therefore, to the degree you can keep a straight face the better you deflect these small wins ... in public.
It has a strong secondary benefit of removing from context common sense, consistency i.e. the realm of cause/effect, policy where reality is more closely aligned. And when that goes out the window, your runway to BS is 10x longer.
Ejecting family wrongly arrested, misidentified, or those have followed the law (meager and crappy as it is sometimes), or who are denied due process is not unalloyed win in private people claim in public. Even if the guy is here is illegal and should be removed ... there's kids, money, and other dependencies involved. It's not the clean win people say.
What goes on off camera and off the HTML page is a whole other reality.
Here's an anecdote I heard personally: a guy I know went to Mar a Largo for a business function not related to Trump, but as a club house selling its meeting rooms and menu for revenue. My buddy is a non-white guy of considerable wealth, business success, and connections. This guy allegedly ran into Harris Faulkner (FOX news host) . During chit-chat she said she told this guy she does not associate with everything she says on camera. She continued to explain by saying she presents a viewpoint her employer pays her to convey.
"ICE deported my wife. She was legal and was following the rules. I still love my Donald and will vote for him again"
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?
In Texas, it is widely known that the Trump family are experts in crypto finance, and worthy of the gains they have made. (also that sharia law is widely practiced)
When people that aren't highly educated have no source of accurate current events, they have a warped view of reality.
Now, if you had some grand master plan to use some part of the federal government to stomp somme people in some state for doing it wrong this is probably bad for you. But on a 30-40yr timeline it'll probably just mean a cycle of the feds doing less and the states doing more and the diversity that comes with that.
Like we'll all screech about the EPA revoking this or the DOT ceasing to do that but whatever those policies are, if people want them they will be picked up by the states. In most cases it'll probably be 40-something states continuing to do whatever it was or 40-something states saying that was stupid all along and stopping immediately.
Basically the sky isn't falling.
It also hurts businesses when they suddenly find themselves forced to follow an inconsistent/conflicting patchwork of state laws instead of a single federal law.
That said, it's still encouraging to see states picking up the slack and passing laws to protect their residents, even though I can't help but feel bad for people who become stuck in states where the government doesn't care about them. I hope that people will be begin to flee states where the government chooses to put corporate profits above the well-being of the public or wants to strip them of their rights, but realistically there will be many people who can't afford to move or who feel compelled to stay because of ties to their friends, family, and community.
The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.
The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.
You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.
Because there’s relatively little need for diversity. Dumping toxic waste into river systems is as bad in Oregon as it is in Florida. Things that genuinely need local management (e.g. wildlife) can be managed locally.
Like for example aquifer depletion is a serious thing in the southwest. It's borderline irrelevant in the northeast which is only getting wetter with climate change anyway.
So you split the difference when you write the federal rules and the result is insufficient for the southwest and their governments have to do a bunch of BS rule stretching crap to take it further and a nuisance in the northeast where their governments have to do a bunch of the same BS in the other direction to lighten it up.
Why not just let these states write their own laws that work for them. Sure you'll probably get one or two screw ups but most states will probably be better served.
There's been studies of healthcare administration, education, and other areas of devolution in UK and Spain. There are benefits, but there are also costs and outcomes can get worse despite the benefits.
But it still left a deep mark on people - people who grew up under the old regime still considered it normal to bring gifts (usually alcohol in some form) when visiting doctors - the idea being it would be rude not to!
This is having real consequences - I saw an interview with a doctor, where he showed the reports a big closet, full of alcohol from these gifts.
That was from just the last week. He also mentions colleagues with tendencies for alcoholism dying from this...
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_in_Net_Worth_of_U.S._Senator...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_...
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
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.
Note that it set the terrible precedent of the President pardoning high level crimes.
But Reagan did not put any money in his pocket. Other than a set of snow tires, Lt.Col Oliver North did not take any money for himself.
It makes it better, somehow, not for money to be the motive. Or maybe it makes it worse.
Edit: I don’t really care though, I’m not a US citizen. Trump is terrible still. Shouldn’t have voted him in. :shrug:
And bailing out bank shareholders during the '08 financial crisis.
Please name a bailed out bank which didn't hit shareholders.
This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.
This is very different from the current admin at least. But direct profiteering by high level officials didn't happen or they were very good at hiding it. They did make their friends and old colleagues very rich, maybe that it reason enough?
And I am someone that considers that administration to be full of war criminals that manufactured a reason to invade Iraq.
Which one stopped the CIA from overthrowing democratic elections in other countries right from their inception, starting with Italy in the 50s and continuing with Operation Gladio all throughout Europe and moving into Southeast Asia as they worked with criminal groups to perfect their narco funded guerrilla warfare machine?
Did Trump even catch up to the number of bombs that "peace prize" Obama dropped in 8 years?
There are no sides, there's just a corporate Uniparty putting on some theater for you and you can absolutely prove that out if you dig past surface material and surface thinking.
Bad news is, you're probably in the midpoint of that meme bell curve. Grown up structures and institutions are designed well, with accountability built-in. Many many good people work in them, who hate corruption as much as you do. Bad actors are whistle-blowed upon, persecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. It's incredibly difficult in practice to do anything significantly corrupt and stay unnoticed. I don't know if you work (like, at a large-size workplace), but imagine doing something shady at your work, surrounded by your colleagues. It's not easy.
The irony is that your unending cynicism is actually turning you into a fool for the other side: the populists that constantly discredit institutions. They figured out that your cynicism (aversion to being scammed?) is so strong, that it can be used to scam you. They only need to discredit everyone else, that's easy. Make conspiratorial allegations based on perceived outcomes, not actual proof. Sell you all the cynicism in the world: everything is broken, everyone's bad. US institutions are corrupt and worthless. This lets them pretend to be experts, because you're now a guest in their version of reality. And they directly financially benefit from your attention.
Institutions maintain real internal accountability (none of these alternative media populists do), implement real processes that work, tackle real issues in ways that take into account all stakeholders, and don't just produce slogans and talking points. I know they're old and not cool, but they work. Unfortunately, very few groups are left that actually defend them, you all got scammed by relentless, self-serving, financially incentivized alternative media into thinking that everything is broken.
Just because things are complex, doesn't mean they're broken. Just because measures taken aren't always satisfying, doesn't mean they are malicious. Don't get scammed into this world view by people who directly financially benefit from selling it.
We could just decide that’s not how it goes.
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.
By voting, etc. Not by running for office.
> If everyone is corrupt, how will you
by doing it before literally everyone is corrupt.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Yes, we just need to go back to the good ol' days of corruption with decorum
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.
Since Trump. Entirely.
I generally think there’s actually not that much corruption in politics in the US. Mostly just insider trading, if you count by dollar amount. But I think generally there have been studies on the net worth of people before they are elected to public office versus after, and it’s within a few percentage points of the general population. There’s also the issue of lobbying firms hiring ex politicians but to be honest there’s something to be said for an ex-politician as a lobbyist: they have expertise and connections, they’re valuable to lobbying firms even if there’s no favors involved.
What we have now is:
- The president openly hocking a cryptocurrency and making billions off of it
- Taking money for early access to his posts on truth social, which is essentially how he communicates to the public. “Give me money and I’ll tell you first”
- Giving pardons to his supporters in a brazen and obvious way
- Taking donations from private donors to fund his pet projects like the White House ballroom
I could go on but like I said, I’m not really interested in the actual debate here because nobody’s gonna change their minds if they haven’t already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
in the past politicians would steal a little, and there was enough to go around.
a couple of hundred grand on a land deal was OK. but $250B in crypto is just too much.
America is truly lost when people wish their politicians were lying to them more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_land_fraud_scandal
and that's just the 19th century, nevermind the 20th.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572770
the whisky ring is definitely relevant to a discussion of today’s problems
this isn’t a ridiculous padded list of whataboutism
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.
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 look awkward on camera, and 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.
Some things are not simple, and i'm really not a DSA fan (they're too mild in many regards to solve the problems we're facing) so i'm not really in their rabbit hole. But DSA is not what i'd call populist; they're making realistic and mild social promises based on rational/scientific study of solutions (and seeing what worked in the USA in the past, and what works in other countries, such as 100% free healthcare).
You, on the other hand, seem to be down a rabbit hole where making billions of people suffer for your little privilege is just business as usual and asking questions is dangerous. Things are not simple, but they're definitely simpler if someone tries to actually solve them which no mainstream politician is actually doing. Here in France, it took dozens of thousands of workers with guns post-WWII to have free healthcare for all, and it's been working surprisingly well ever since (although to be fair, since absorbed and reformed by the State, much less so).
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).
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.
You might have a strong argument but you seem to be afraid to name anyone or anything.
Read this and imagined corruption as non-linear. What before is “isolated incidents”, spreads like an SIRS (Susceptible → Infectious → Recovered → Susceptible) infection model.
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.
What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime. Some crime is expected. It's like claiming that air travel is unsafe, because incidents exist.
The talk of shadowy cabals and conspiracies are fashionable, but never proven.
You're going down a populist rabbit hole, I've been there, it's not a good one.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m all set here. Talk weird circles with another user.
Your position seems to be that if it can be corruption, it is corruption.
Both your interpretation of my position, and your expression of your own, are indecipherable by any charitable standard.
Make more sense, sooner.
There exists unprosecuted corruption for sure, just like any other crime, but claiming that it’s somehow happening on an outsized scale vs expected normal baseline? Based on what? Listening to people pointing it out who have everything to gain from selling this narrative? Conjecture and vibes?
Again, things can be complicated, even bad. That doesn’t mean they’re corrupt until there’s credible evidence specifically of corruption taking place.
Because government and law enforcement should be held to a higher standard.
Here’s the closest and easiest reach to obvious regulatory capture from the other scumbag party:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
Lots of Americans are aware of regulatory capture.
Yet: folks aren’t even discussing fixing it yet. Everyone is just pointing and mentioning, like a meteor is coming.
Where does this fall in your argument? This looks more than “complicated” - whatever that means (please do better).
This was a descriptive, not a prescriptive statement, of a real problem. He literally says that it is concerning that prosecuting large institutions can cause economic harm. He isn't saying they won't prosecute, he says it's difficult because of the downsides. Holder made a mistake of wheeling out a complex nuance to a public that isn't prepared to handle it.
I don't understand where is the evidence of malicious force trying to self-serve? Anything specific that points to corruption here? Is this like "yay, we found a loophole! We just need to build an incredibly large, successful business, and now it will be difficult to prosecute us, so we can finally start being corrupt"? Is that what you're saying?
What large successful business would want to squander it all on corruption? They are even more incentivized to identify and remove that sort of PR and legal disaster than the public.
That was the direct context of his statement.
> Is that what you're saying?
I’m saying you’re dangerously shit at reading between the lines if you don’t see the scheme when an ex-government person gets $400k+ per instance to show up and speak to financial institutions they/their administration didn’t prosecute out of profitability (or even majorly inconvenience their compliance department).
> What large successful business would want to squander it all on corruption on an off chance that the economic inconvenience would save them from prosecution? They are the most incentivized to identify and remove that sort of PR and legal cancer from their org
Plenty. All the way back before the East India Trading Company - work your way out from there.
Many business structures and owners only follow laws as is convenient - expected, if the only true consequence is a $$,$$$ speeding ticket and/or inconvenience ls that the ownership is insulated from.
He prosecuted them, and chose fines over criminal punishments. If this was due to maliciousness or corruption, I'm glad that whoever openly explained it all in this interview thwarted his plot. /s
> I’m saying you’re dangerously shit at reading between the lines if you don’t see the scheme when an ex-government person gets $400k+ per instance to show up and speak to financial institutions they/their administration didn’t prosecute out of profitability (or even majorly inconvenience their compliance department).
I'm saying that you're so good at reading between the lines, that you no longer see the lines. You say all these random facts, but aren't connecting them to prove any corruption. If our judicial system worked the way you read between the lines, we'd all be in prison.
> All the way back before the East India Trading Company
What happened in 1600s has zero bearing on what happens today. Even the world in the 80s and 90s is no longer remotely the same.
> if the only true consequence is a $$,$$$ speeding ticket
Nobody ever actually knows what fine they will get. One day it's a fine, another day it's a judge making an example. No business exec in their sane mind would ever risk this. No lawyer in a sane mind would ever advise this. It's an incredibly uninformed, foolish position to only see a couple of perverse incentives, and be completely blind to the overwhelming amount of positive incentives.
So no actual prosecution, none worthy of considering prevention. Predominantly citizens being hit.
> You say all these random facts
Financial institutions paying out lottery jackpots to members of administrations that didn’t meaningfully harm them is far from random.
> What happened in 1600s has zero bearing on what happens today
Unchecked ignorance. Go about your business.
What relevant examples of getting away with corruption can we glean from a pre-enlightenment, pre-formal-police, pre-constitution, pre-checks-and-balances, pre-judiciary-act, pre-telegraph, pre-paper-trail, pre-internet, pre-camera-phones, pre-surveillance, pre-data-centers, pre-whistleblowers, pre-structures of accountability world?
Corruption has gotten magnitudes harder to get away with, which is why history is irrelevant. You would need something extraordinary, like becoming a president with criminal immunity and self-pardon powers, and having an electoral majority supporting you being openly corrupt.
Sorry - what do I have to gain from “selling this narrative” again?
Not zero, but relative near-zero, is possible through exactly two paths.
The one you’re validly warning against (surveillance state),
but also: tightly-knit communities with few-enough outside visitors.
Note that this can include neighborhoods in rural US or urban Italy.
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.
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.
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.
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, no-bid contracts, "kids for cash", 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 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 documented history of corruption.
Let's take revolving door. Who would you want to be in charge of regulating an industry, a person who knows it inside out or a newcomer who has no idea how anything works? How would the latter have any hope at being an effective regulator? You would never accept this kind of lack of experience anywhere else in life. But for some reason we're all used to pointing out revolving doors as some kind of gotcha, without giving it the basic level of thought.
Dark money sounds bad, but anonymity doesn't imply corruption. Money also isn't enough. Look at billionaires trying to run for president, and where they got. You'll also be hard pressed to find any example where a politician picks a stance that goes against their constituents' opinion, in favor of money. Usually money piggybacks on a public opinion that already supports them, or is largely indifferent. History has shown over and over that pumping money cannot alone reverse public opinion to any significant extent.
Kids for cash — I didn't know what it was at first. Sure, that's straight corruption. A couple of judges committed crimes, got caught, and received prison sentences.
I could go down every example you made, but I hope the sample above illustrates what I mean. "Documented history" is conjecture until it's adjudicated. You're making a mistake of putting "documented history" (insinuations of corruption in dark money, revolving doors, voter suppression) in the same bucket as clear and adjudicated corruption (like kids for cash), and based on this mixed bucket of good and bad examples, make a conclusion that there's always been outsized corruption in US, compared to normal baseline. Your basis for that conclusion is flawed.
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.
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
The difference between people doing corruption before and Trump is that the other people had a "legit" lifestyle and worldview but did corruption as a side thing. An ignorant business person like Trump has corruption/intimidation/coercion/deception etc. as a lifestyle because someone like him can't live in the world that he is living in without this lifestyle.
Trump isn't really corrupt in the same sense as Obama because they are fundamentally different. You could even say more educated politicians that are able to understand what is going on are more evil.
People won't tolerate evil politicians anymore because they understand they are being robbed by the financial system and aren't getting their piece of the pie. It has to be a break to democracy (war?) or economic reform or Mamdani/Trump style government from now, it is really unthinkable people will keep electing Biden/Hilary/Harris/JD Vance kind of politicians anymore unless there is a big breakthrough in brainwashing
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“
... only because the elections aren't completely rigged yet and they still need some votes to cling to the power.
From what i hear politicians like Gavin Newsom from California are passing bills to prevent independent journalists like Nick Shirley from exposing fraud and corruption.
That signals that they (government officials) are extremely concerned with what the public thinks, but mainly in the sense that they don’t want the public to have the information that would put them in a thought spot.
On the other hand, the fact that fraud and corruption is only reported by some early-twenty-something independent youtuber/journalist should really tell you a lot on the state of mass media in the USA (in the sense that the mass media are essentially colluding with politicians).
(Downvote me if you want, I don’t care)
It's been open a long time. Patriot Act/Snowden/Assange, JFK coverup, shutting churches to keep Walmart open, social media censorship, gerrymandering, immigration enforcement, etc
I agree though it's concerning that now it seems to be done without care to the visibility
Then the money gets laundered through book sales. We're all supposed to pretend that money isn't affecting votes, but come on.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
Or maybe soft bribery, like government officials being wined and dined by lobbyists. I'm sure that isn't "supposed" to happen, but I'm also pretty sure it happens a lot.
This sort of corruption exists a ton at corporations for sure, so I am hard pressed to think it doesn't happen in government
https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
I wonder if the split would still be roughly the same if a Democrat was in power at the time of the survey.
Edited to add: Answer seems to be in the article, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571258
First diagram in the article shows uptick, but since 2010 it's been in the 70-80% range. So it seems pretty party-agnostic.
Republicans were at 88 and went to 83. Down a tiny bit but pretty flat overall. The Democrats went from 57->91.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/697421/trust-government-depends...
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
Republican: 88->83
Democrat: 57->91
Republicans barely changed. It's insane than Democrats were so low 2 years ago.
Each group is exposed to different media, thus the polarization.
Current administration knows this very well
In this era, venal actions are official actions. Nothing is even hidden anymore. Racketeering and thuggery are on display even during supposed negotiations.
The US is under mob rule. Sure sure, we gonna make a deal. Da best deal evah. Da deal is dat we won't whack ya.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
Yeah, he stopped US military from defending other countries for free.
Soft power doesn’t pay your rent/mortgage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/trumps-north-korean-armada-...
“ As President Trump publicly declared last week that he was "sending an armada" to the Sea of Japan in an attempt to send a message to North Korea, the carrier group was actually sailing thousands of miles in the other direction to war game with the Australian Navy, per the NYT, which reported that the mixup was due to "a glitch-ridden sequence of events."”
What’s funny is he started an UNE essay war with Iran, strengthened the Iranian regime and gave them a guaranteed income source from a toll Trump can’t get rid of. And this is your argument? You’re funny.
False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Neither side ever even attempted it. Every once in a while you get some lip service about small money donations but nobody ever tried to go after the problem at the root in all this time. Think about what that means.
... and then wonder why the public gets mad when the environmental impact study says "not good", public works says "area roads can't support the traffic influx and can't support increasing capacity due to geography and existing homes" and still approve the developer's new project anyway.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-founder...
USPS has always been the poster child for efficient and effective government agencies. Despite claims otherwise, the agency still manages to deliver letters and other postage to areas private industry like FedEx, UPS, et. al. would never touch.
Unfortunately, over the years, Republican Congresses and Presidents have repeatedly attempted to sabotage the agency. Some recent(-ish) examples:
* The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to create a fund to pay the cost of post-retirement health care costs 75 years into the future.
* The Republican-appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy overseeing the removal of 711 sorting machines as well as a number of public mailboxes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, which, due to Covid, was expected to have larger-than-normal use of mail-in ballots. Not only did it cause significant concern regarding mail-in ballots, but it also resulted in significant delays and backlogs in general mail delivery.
> Yes possibly so I'd have to see the evidence for that,…
Then?
Assume I am ignorant to the context of this conversation if need be. What were you referencing when you made your claim to needing evidence?
> Yes possibly so I'd have to see the evidence for that,…
And then in your next comment
> Oh no, I don't need evidence…
You are being contradictory
> Yes possibly so I'd have to see the evidence for [thing A]
> Oh no, I don't need evidence [for thing B]
I hope this clears everything up for you. Let me know if you're struggling with anything else and I'll try to dumb it down for you even more.