How the US Legalized Corruption
indica.medium.com
indica.medium.com
Whether or not that’s a good idea depends on context. When you’re talking about matters of race, invoking race night make sense. When talking matters of nationality, invoking nation might make sense. When talking matters of nation, invoking race does not make sense.
Naturally, invoking nation as a means of stereotyping and discrimination is a terrible thing as well.
If you're born in Russia, raised in Russia, you're certainly Russian to me.
A black man born in China, I'd absolutely include him in "Chinese" if the context was nationality. However, yes; Chinese is commonly used for both race and nationality, I'll give you that.
> you will definitely not call people from Tibet or Uighur "Chinese", right?
I will confess I am not educated enough on these regions to have an opinion here. Do Tibetans(?) identify as Chinese nationally? Or do they resent the Chinese takeover and view them as unwelcome oppressors? I think that would have a lot to do with my perspective on them (and I think maybe a lot of label-based identification comes down to perspective).
Furthermore, the answer is not “no” —- I acknowledged that your usage may be acceptable, not that mine isn’t. I explicitly stated that while you may not call those people that, I would.
I'm fine with it.
It’s literally an issue tailor made for the ruling class to divide people. The core issues here have now been weaponized and are being used to divide and control the populace.
The people who are the most agitated by this argument are poor and white. The only people who take your argument seriously are too stupid to recognize that dumb people can believe dumb things and it doesn’t affect them.
Yelling “white privilege” at 19 year old dumbasses in manual labor who barely get by is not a productive strategy.
Trolling IRL is the privilege of assholes and narcissists.
So feel free to discuss. Start by defining the words “empathy” and “sympathy”.
1/4 of the 48 million white male workers make $716/week or less. That’s 12 million people. That cut-off is roughly between the 25th and 50th percentile incomes for Black men. Let’s say 1/3 of Black men make $716/week or less, or about 2.2 million of 6.7 million workers in that group. So the group of male workers earning under $726/week is disproportionately Black compared to the population as a whole, but the vast majority are still white. Between just Blacks and whites (Latinos and Asians are a separate issue because there’s the whole immigrant dimension there, and studies show that their incomes converge with whites within a few generations) the under-$716 group is 85% white.
Meanwhile at the other end, Black men at the top 10% mark make a bit more than white men at the top 25% mark. So say that’s 12 million white men making above $1,800/week and 670,000 Black men. So that group is 95% white.
So yes there is obviously a correlation and disparity. These numbers overstate the disparity a bit because it’s for everyone age 16+, and there is a significant Black-white age difference (a one decade difference at the median). But the disparity is there, and it’s durable (studies show that, unlike for Latinos and Asians, the disparity is not converging, and is stable).
But the income disparity doesn’t “follow racial lines” so closely as to render race even a partial substitute for class in terms of policy considerations.
Right from the beginning America's constitution was built on white power over black people. [1] Slaves helped build the White House. [2] We fought a civil war to end slavery, but gave up on Reconstruction, [3] leading to the Nadir. [4] After the Nadir, we had Jim Crow in the south and widespread ethnic cleansing elsewhere [6][7]. [5] As with Reconstruction, we had some improvement with the Civil Rights movement, but now reasonable people see us as being in a second Nadir, [6][7] and that the recent collapse in bipartisan comity is just more fallout from attempts to move toward racial equity. [8]
You could look at the pictures of presidents and see it's been very white. [9] Or take senators. There have been 11 black senators [10] out of 1994 senators total [11], a worse ratio than presidents. This is not an accident; it's something that white people have worked very hard for, from the US Constitution to the Wilmington Coup [12] to a former president who vigorously promoted racist lies and ended up trying to disenfranchise large black cities wholesale. [13]
Whiteness has a pervasive influence on America's history and still does today. And until white people can at least hear mention of that whiteness without putting their hands over their ears, we're going to keep having some of the same problems over and over. That especially includes problems in the political system, a major function of which has been to ensure continued white dominance.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise
[2] https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-backgroun...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/what-if...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
[8] http://bostonreview.net/forum/remake-world-slavery-racial-ca...
[9] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-urgency-...
[10] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3744902
[11] https://www.whitehousegiftshop.com/Presidents-Magnet-p/magpo...
[12] https://www.senate.gov/senators/EthnicDiversityintheSenate.h...
[13] https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/c...
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
This point is that the kind of people that are accepting "bribes", as the author calls them, are overwhelmingly white men. Yes, you could say that that's just be because the majority of appointees to relevant positions are white. But that author is implicitly pointing out that maybe the fact that they're mostly white is actually relevant to the discussion.
The strain of white supremacy running through America's history is willing to do absolutely anything to maintain power. Things like the Wilmington Coup and the Tulsa Race Massacre and all of the Jim Crow violence make that very clear.
It's possible that has absolutely nothing to do with America's legalized bribery. But if somebody wants to make that claim, they're going to have to argue it. It isn't a given. And given that the Citizens United decision, which legalized even more bribery, was supported by the judges appointed by the much whiter party, they're going to have to bring a fair bit of evidence to it.
The author feels there is a double standard where the “white” US perpetually demonizes black and brown countries corruption while excusing their own corruption under the guise of “lobbying”, “speaking fees” and “dinners.”
To the author, it appears to be racism when in fact it may just be hypocrisy (ie. Russia).
Its sad because many people are not happy with all this lobbying, speaking fees, dinners, etc., but the author ignores this and acts like people in the US approve when. They really just don’t have any say in the occurrence.
I feel this isn't correct. People have their vote and Americans overwhelmingly vote for people who trade law & Fed power for campaign cash.
That’s because there isn’t another option. Voters are villified for voting third party.
However, news orgs find broad system betrayal+corruption much less interesting than, oh say, sportball. Or literally anything else at all.
In reality they are just another power interest.
> However, some things are simply far, far, far less important than sportball.
True
Voters could also choose to not reelect officials who trade in bribes.
No, thats irrelevant. The relevant factor is which viable candidates have accepted contributions. And the answer is “all of them.” The part where one of the guys accepting bribes tells you “I’m opposed to bribes” is marketing.
Setting an impossible standard and then decrying anybody who doesn't meet it is more about you than the system. Politics is the art of the possible.
They’ve no doubt received campaign contributions and remember those when they propose changes to the law.
> Setting an impossible standard and then decrying anybody who doesn't meet it is more about you than the system. Politics is the art of the possible.
I think the fact that you agree its impossible to elect someone who hasn’t already been bribed makes my point. I don’t trust people to take bribes and then betray the briber.
The truth is that many politicians don't like the fact that they have to spend so much time fundraising to pursue their actual goals. They don't like the influence fundraising has on politics. They would rather focus on solving issues. It's possible to make progress on this issue, just like has been done before.
You may be a person who slavishly follows their economic incentives, in which case I'm sorry for you. But don't make the mistake of thinking everybody works like that.
I’m tracking that you don’t agree but it might be more helpful for you to consider why I might feel that way instead of dismissing my perspective as cartoonish.
> The truth is that many politicians don't like the fact that they have to spend so much time fundraising to pursue their actual goals.
Sure, maybe. They’d probably prefer to get the same money with less effort.
> They don't like the influence fundraising has on politics. They would rather focus on solving issues. It's possible to make progress on this issue, just like has been done before.
I’m not sure how. Campaign finance already has the unintended consquence of inhibiting the free speech of citizens by limiting their ability to purchase advertisements prior to an election. And they politicians still get bribed.
What solution do you envision? Further restrictions on political speech? Prohibiting people from donating to causes they support?
> You may be a person who slavishly follows their economic incentives, in which case I'm sorry for you. But don't make the mistake of thinking everybody works like that.
People who don’t follow economic incentives starve to death or die of exposure. I’m pretty sure the politicians who collect a six figure annual salary from the treasury in addition to their laundered campaign contributions are quite attuned to financial incentives. The part where they claim otherwise is just marketing and its quite naive to take that at face value.
> People who don’t follow economic incentives starve to death or die of exposure.
That's just absurd. Every day people make choices between maximizing revenue and other things they value. If everybody was so slavishly devoted to economic incentives, we'd have no teachers or nurses. I'm no expert, but I haven't heard of many teachers dying of exposure because they have other values than money.
This is also cartoonish:
> What solution do you envision? Further restrictions on political speech? Prohibiting people from donating to causes they support?
This is already a well-discussed space. Other countries do fine. In the past, the US did better. We can do better again. If you really want to understand it, go do the work. But since it looks like you don't, I don't think it's worth my time to spoon-feed you something you could look up perfectly well.
Thats a ridiculous strawman. Teachers follow economic incentives, thats why they demand a paycheck for their labor.
> This is already a well-discussed space.
Yes, and people still insist on pushing authoritarian restrictions on people because they seek to control other people’s behavior.
> Other countries do fine.
Them move to those countries. Not everyone here agrees that they are doing fine.
> If you really want to understand it, go do the work. But since it looks like you don't,
I understand that you can’t prevent rich people from spending their money to support causes without also restricting poor people from doing the same, and that the specifics about how those restrictions are made and enforced are the result of a product that the rich people have wildly disproportionate influence over, and the media that informs you of all of this is likewise beholden to oligarchs. So historically, these programs always result in a consolidation of power by oligarchs that is marketed to the public as “giving power to the people” and despite this issue being heavily discussed, no one seems to want to discuss this inconvenient fact.
Does Yellen have some professional ethics that guard against her acting in a way that overly favors businesses that have her millions of dollars? I think she does. Are those ethics effective as a guard against corruption in the same way that, well, not taking millions of dollars would be? I doubt it. Money talks.
Maybe even more importantly, it severely hurts the legitimacy of government. How are you supposed to convince people you're on their side if you're making millions from the other side? If your lawyer was getting paid more than you could ever pay to share his wisdom with the other side over a fancy lunch, and then you lost the case, you would have every right to doubt their integrity--even if they had done nothing wrong.
The US would have would have a lot less problems with conservative populism if the centrist technocratic impulse wasn't so often so tone deaf.
There is nothing in this article that says "Here is exactly how Yellen is abusing her power," all the article says is "she accepted money from banks!"
But why would they do that without the implicit expectation of quid pro quo? Or more to the point, the past experience of quid pro quo, as it's obviously a one-of instance. You're attributing irrational behavior to billion-dollar CEOs.
If Lyft regularly paid the chief software engineer for Uber a million dollars for having lunch with their CEO, the commenters here wouldn't be doing this wishy-washy "it's just a completely ethical lunch" crap.
1. the author is not white, nor lives in a place where white people are any sort of majority.
2. politics has largely been dominated by white people for much of America's history, so it's likely fair that these patterns were started and perpetuated by white people.
3. the author doesn't exempt non-white politicians from scrutiny (i.e. Obama doesn't get a pass).
4. it doesn't make his points any less valid, which is where the merit of this post lies.
2) Sure, but are these patterns unique to white people? In America, sure, but what about corruption in Africa, China, Brazil, pick one.
3) Then why bring race into it? Surely saying something along the lines of 'white people are corrupt... But other races don't get a pass' is only inflammatory and does not help the discussion.
4) Sure, but you can have valid points and discuss them civilly. This article doesn't really attempt to do that, so why would I want to share the word? If the author wants people to take him seriously, he needs take optics into accounts.
I'm eastern-European, we have regular corruption around here and I see no correlation between that and my skin tone.
Debates about access and the role of money in American politics are important.
Conflating direct bribery (as in transfer of value for official action) with fuzzy access politics does NOT clarify the discussion.
It seems the point is to push back against some strawman argument that corruption only exists in less developed countries. But thankfully, we have a well-developed political science tradition that defines, measures and tracks these things much more carefully than a blogger-agitator.
Toss in the petty racial elbow-jabs, this blog post is not particularly worthwhile.
I'm for much harder reforms on political money but this article is surface level at best.
You could:
- Not have political donations at all (many countries run this way)
- Have very strict accounting on political donations so they go the party, not the individual
- Force politicians / elected representatives to wear the logos of the companies that are paying them so it's more transparent.
> this article is surface level at best.
The first step to fixing a problem is to identify there is a problem at all. As the article says, most have become to numb to this because it's seen as normal.
In this frame of reference, the US political system does look extremely corrupted.
If y'all want to be a decent human beings, you need to renounce whiteness. I'm brown but I'm not getting together with Pakistanis to bomb Myanmar based on our 'brownness'. Be American, be Italian, be your football team, I don't care. But whiteness is white supremacy, and it's central to the major problems the world faces. If you have a problem with that, you're a part of the problem
As I wrote elsewhere:
"Whiteness is white supremacy. There’s actually nothing else to it. There is no white food, there is no white music. Whiteness is just the dehumanization of everyone else, and that shit’s got to go. Renounce your whiteness. Be a decent human being."
https://indica.medium.com/renounce-your-whiteness-be-a-decen...
Like: "The US Treasury Secretary, for example, has taken $7.2 million in ‘speaking fees’ from the people she’s supposed to be regulating."
Not mentioned is that the speaking fees were prior to her being the US Treasury Secretary. They were all after she left her post at the Federal Reserve, and before becoming the Treasury Secretary.
I don't care if a politician gets paid 100,000 dollars for eating a meal because there's no obligation to do anything in return.
Imagine if there was a car dealership where everything was full price but the salesman didn't have to give you a car after they take your money unless they felt like it. The author of this article is saying that business model should be illegal, but only if you're a politician.
Really bizarre way to start an article. It's quite remarkable how such statements are mainstream now. Is the author unaware that there are corrupt politicians of all backgrounds?