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Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago these claims would have been considered conspiratorial, and would have yielded public outrage. Now it's just banal and accepted that a municipality and private company got together to manipulate and effectively rob their own citizens.

How have politics become so corrupt? At the early days of the broadly available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone in the opposite direction.

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Last time I got one of these "tickets", it came from the red light camera company and informed me that as long as I paid the fine on time, I would not be reported to the authorities and therefore would not receive a moving violation (and so points on my license). The money went to the red light camera company.

So, as a private entity, they collected evidence of a "crime" I committed, and threatened to expose me to the authorities unless I paid them off. How is this not extortion?

Have you contacted your state's attorney general? This sounds like exactly the sort of case that their office would be interested in pursuing.

I actually considered that but wasn't able to gauge how realistic an option that might actually be.

>How is this not extortion?

because it's authorized the state (municipality).

That sounds suspiciously like a phishing scam, they had photos and everything?

I'd argue politics has probably always been just as corrupt, if not more corrupt than it is now. We just know about it because they found out that when exposed the average person just doesn't care.

One of many reasons we are seeing a crackdown on free speech and internet freedom in general. In the information age, having a monopoly on information is the grand prize. The ruling class is going to do everything in its power to regain that monopoly, and with it, control over an easily-influenced population.

Exactly! Panama papers, koshoggi murder, arab spring, occupy movement, etc. there is a ton of light shone upon corruption. The problem is that the light does nothing to eliminate the flow of money being made from said corruption and thus that money is used to quash oppress and extinguish the light.

Id say the most successful attempt in the US was the OWS movement, given how quickly it was brought down.

I don't think OWS reached anywhere close to the level of influence that the WUO/SDS movement had.

What was WUO/SDS?

But occupy had the feds working with local LEOs with a supposed "kill list" to "take out leadership.

They remodeled the front steps of the SF fed reserve due to them, and we're working with Oakland pd on how to deal with the protests and wound up planting agent provacatuers in the midsts to foment vandalism and sway public opinion against ows.

But I am not familiar with what the ones you mentioned accomplished with respect to influence. Interested to know.

> The Weather Underground Organization (WUO)... was a radical left-wing militant organization founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan ... Weatherman organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

There are a number of books about the group (some by former members) that are worth reading, and there's also a documentary:

-- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/

Two things, public consumption and interest of local news has gone down, and local newspapers etc. have gone out of business/severely curtailed their coverage of local town hall meetings etc.

The consolidation of news means less local news and a single point of view pushed to many markets.

> How have politics become so corrupt?

It's an election year for New York's aspiring Attorneys General. If there is a better source for this man's claims, it might be possible to bring it up at upcoming events. As it stands, it's hard to differentiate this source's anecdotes from those of a nut job.

Perhaps being exposed to lots of information does not make us informed in any meaningful way.

It makes us informed, but so much information saturates us and we end up not caring.

In Portland someone did a fantastic statistical analysis of how their yellow lights are chronically undertimed per state regulations. He mentioned that he was an engineer in the report submitted to the state to try and overturn his wife's red light ticket. They tried to fine him for practicing engineering without a license.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/0...

>At the early days of the broadly available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone in the opposite direction.

I've always thought the same. I suppose what may have happened instead is that exposure to corruption has been increased to the point of banality and normalization.

I don't think this is a good example of government corruption. It's just a population stunned by lack of education trying a feel-good solution to a problem that works against their best interests. It's the same as most laws in our society - gun control, marijuana prohibition, the list goes on and on.

How is this an example of a feel-good solution? This is in Suffolk County, Long Island - a county with a median income almost twice that of the nation as a whole. It's not a completely uneducated populace.

Yes I know - I grew up in Suffolk County. The people continue voting for politicians that allow these initiatives to occur. It's a feel good solution because at least some people believe the traffic light cameras solve the problem of car accidents at red lights. If they were educated everybody would know about the study that said that auto incidents increase and take it into account at the polls. But unfortunately they do not educate themselves on these issues and vote accordingly to fire the people responsible, instead they almost always just vote party-line no matter who is on the ballot and what they stand for.

> instead they almost always just vote party-line no matter who is on the ballot

This is a really hard single issue to run on. You’d probably have to have a law enforcement or prosecutorial background, to avoid looking soft on crime. And you’d have to tell wealthy voters how you’re going to replace the lost revenue. In a wealthy county like Suffolk, these are tough sells.

Somebody actually ran on this ticket a few years back and lost - their campaign signs said something along the lines of "RED LIGHT CAMERAS ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL". The revenue question is more a matter of ideology. You could always tell them that before the sixteenth amendment the only revenue our government needed came from excise taxes and tariffs... it's not like there's no precedent for funding a country without red-light cameras, or income tax for that matter.

> The revenue question is more a matter of ideology

Practically, it’s a matter of raising taxes or cutting services. That’s what makes it a tough platform to run on.

Not really it has been pretty much been publicly know from day one of their implementation.

>How have politics become so corrupt?

Anonymous dark money being funneled into politicians pockets, a complete lack of oversight on many departments and overall complacency from many people who now view the security state as a safety measure for us all.

This. Citizens United's effects are just beginning to be felt.

Oh Christ. Why is Citizen's United bad? All it says is you can make a political film leading up to an election and the production of that film shouldn't count as a campaign contribution. It's a perfect example of freedom of speech.

Because in practice it circumvents all the campaign finance laws that tried to somewhat level the playing field between candidates backed by the super rich and those not.

That might say more about how well the laws were written.

It’s tricky to make campaign finance laws that don’t result in censorship. If the law would have prevented someone from making and distributing a documentary ... I believe it was a documentary critical of Hilary Clinton, which is interesting ... the law wasn’t well written and could easily be abused.

It allows corporations, non-profits and labor unions to make electioneering communications. That's it.

I find it quite shocking that public service unions can spend millions of dollars electioneering for the people with whom they will be negotiating their contracts, but I'll accept the free speech rights of a voluntary association outweigh my concerns.

What public union is spending millions of dollars on elections?

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000061&cy...

American Federation of Teachers https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000083&cy...

National Educators Associantion https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000064&cy...

In addition it also says the PAC and politicians cannot work together. Yes, that's a valid read of the situation. But it's also naive. What Citizen's United is in reality is a loophole that allows politicians and monied people to wink at each other (without explicitly saying anything). The whole point of one person one vote in democracy is to prevent the sort of power that money and resources can bring in. A limitless amount of money pouring into elections ruins democracy. If that means a restriction on speech in a very narrow sense, so be it.

It really depends on your perspective. From one perspective, it was terrible that the least sympathetic defendants they could come up with were like Thomas Paine's great-grandsons targeted by a tyrannical FEC, so the courts really had no choice but to throw out the terrible law. From another perspective, it was really convenient that all the rhetorical noise and political effort that went into McCain-Feingold could be neutered so easily. Why did Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart really start out with such an absolutist argument? The "even one sentence" formula was fairly shocking in that context, but the public may never know why he used it...

Do you have a link to General Malcolm Stewart's argument? I'd like to read up on it to learn more about this perspective.

Sorry to take so long. The following contemporaneous NYT article discusses the argument, but it doesn't contain the phrase "even one sentence". It does give a flavor of the justices' skepticism at the absolutism of the deputy solicitor general's argument:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washington/25scotus.html

Citizens United.

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