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Comment by haliskerbas | Hacker News Reader

My dumb American brain is surprised these things are allowed. :shrug:

There's the idealized America that we learn about in school, then there's America as it is.

I guess ideals are a nice tool to compare something against to measure something's relative value. But they can also be used as a whitewash. Maybe the difference is how engaged an informed citizen body is with the government.

For the past 40 years one party in particular has lectured me about how they are the ones who instill the values of this idealized America you mention, how they are the ones who are the real patriots, and how they only can interpret what the founding fathers intended.

From this post I'm not sure which of two parties is the one.

Are you joking? Democrats cannot resist pointing out that the founding fathers owned slaves, while the GOP basically treats them as saints.

> There's the idealized America that we learn about in school, then there's America as it is.

I strongly dislike this take.

There is the idealized America that we wish America was, and there is an entire continuum from that point all the way to "no functioning state at all Mad Max hellhole". Treating all points that are not exactly at "idealized America" as equivalent discards a massive amount of nuance and effectively makes it impossible to advocate for incremental change.

Yes, America is not perfect. But that doesn't mean that the America we had before Trump's massive corruption is identical to the American we have today.

> Treating all points that are not exactly at "idealized America" as equivalent

> that doesn't mean that the America we had before Trump's massive corruption is identical to the American we have today.

I don't know how you got that out of my post.

To be fair, taking bribes for your presidential library has been apart of American politics for a while. Also, sorry, I forgot we don't call it "bribing" anymore, it's called "lobbying" now ;)

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/03/shining-a-light-on-...

(also I absolutely love your interpreter book - you single-handedly got me a perfect score for my bachelor thesis, sorry had to sneak this in)

you only need the "lobby" cover for levels under president. you can note how the meta donation doesn't have to be called as such.

> "no functioning state at all Mad Max hellhole"

This is exactly the track we're on, if you hadn't noticed the last week. The train has left the station. We likely are arriving a lot sooner than you may think.

America rides eternal, shiny and chrome!

Ideal or not, it's propaganda. We're lead to believe only other countries use propaganda to control their citizens, shield them from truths, and paint foreign countries as "lesser than" or, worse "the enemy". All the while, we're doing the same thing. Maybe I've had the wool pulled over my eyes my first 4 1/2 decades, but it seems pretty clear now.

They don’t pay teachers enough to challenge the norm and deal with the fallout. Whether that’s by design or not… probably? The idea here being to incentivize teachers to do the bare minimum.

Teachers are expected to teach the norm. Or at least somewhat within a range of it.

It’s literally their job.

Exactly government controlled and mandated education = you will be "appropriately" indoctrinated with framing assumptions while being educated. State schooling = statist schooling.

If you give after the fact, its a "Gratuity" and allowed.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...

It’s not called the American Dream for nothing

We are discovering that enough of the electorate does not care when some politicians do it, so that the ideal is unenforceable, and I think it’s because of the media.

after Nixon various people came together to form media organizations explicitly to prevent holding people like Nixon accountable, today is a result of that and our failure to hold Nixon (and before him the leaders of the south in the civil war) accountable

You have to have people willing to enforce the laws we have. We don't have that these days, incredibly few people in government over the past 4 years have been willing to try to push back against his racket.

Put this in it, it might make you feel better.

https://theyesmen.org

Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Not sure how is paying for food relevant to paying for politician. In many countries there is absolute cap per campaign to make it fair. Making it 'fair' is maybe not that relevant in two party system but still that amount of money from single entity is corruption.

Yup, it distorts what a politician will say and what bills they'll sponsor if they're elected. The most dangerous thing the $12 billion in almond money will do is buy a politician to allow them to skirt worker protections and environmental protections to continue maximizing almond money. That puts the interests of the politician not with the general population who wants clean water and safe non-abusive jobs but rather the few almond farm owners who want to maximize almond production while minimizing worker costs (and perhaps locking out new almond farmers from the industry).

This sort of kleptocracy is the problem with American politics. Bribery laws are so laughably bad that you have to literally stuff gold bars in your suit pockets before you run the risk of being prosecuted. You have to be a grade A moron to get caught.

Speaking of grade A morons. Our political establishment here in Ohio jumped into bed with a huge publicly traded energy company who was pushing millions of dollars each to various individuals. I'm still boggled that these people thought they could bag millions of dollars and no one would notice.

It used to be that when payoffs to politicians were discovered it would be paltry amounts like $10-30k that no one would notice and which are easily ingested into someone's finances without ringing any bells with the IRS or regulators. You would ask yourself why they would risk their career for such a small amount of money.

These politicians and appointed regulators in Ohio were trying to literally absorbed generational wealth without regulators or the IRS noticing. Impossible.

Our governor DeWine, who was definitely knowledgeable of all this and involved, was smart enough to keep his hands off the money--though they did fund his campaigns legally. He stands to serve out his final term and be replaced by one of the others in the cabal. (Yost), or Viveck Ramaswammy. The times.

Well, almonds are far more delicious than the average congressional representative.

Wait, have we actually started eating the rich already? I thought that was just a saying.

only the arms of, but this joke doesn't work in English.

This conflated two things as equivalent, and they are not equivalent.

Buying almonds is a market exchange with good transparency around what you’re getting and how much it’s going to cost.

Elections are not open market exchange. For starts, you aren’t buying a good. Another is that this discounts a lot of other election adjacent activities like all the party volunteers who are unpaid, for example. Those don’t count toward spend but if it did I imagine the totals would get much higher.

Not to mention, we are talking about someone getting elected who very well does have influence over citizenry. Buying almonds is just buying almonds. Getting elected is a transference of power.

Honestly elections are surprisingly cheap for what is gotten in return, but they couldn’t be more different

I'd say that by spending money on elections, both as donations and as taxes, we do buy a good: good governance (preferably) and peaceful transfer of power.

The problem is that the market is not efficient: only 2-3 offers, mostly from the same two brands, each brand with its own known serious problems. The process is actually an auction of sorts (first past the post), and returns are not accepted!

IMHO, the cost is the least of the problems here.

USA should eliminate first-past-the-post voting, and replace it with something like ranked choice voting. Allows for more brands in the election, as people can preference minor parties and not 'throw away their vote' if they didnt get enough votes in total.

Should == I wish.

Why do you think the current power structure would encourage that?

I think most of us agree that this would be vastly better. Problem is how to get it done with the establishment in place.

Yes, it's shocking that we don't spend $100bn on our campaigns.

Looking over campaign expenses from 2024 it’s somewhat hard to determine where exactly the other 90 billion would be spent.

Directly buying votes, or voter intimidation is popular in many places.

Telling folks that they are being sold out for peanuts (or almonds) doesn't diminish the betrayal; it only makes it worse.

2018 wasn't a presidential race, which consistently have higher spending. 2020 and 2024 were each over $15B, and there is a steady upward trend in real dollars.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/total-2024-election...

The current supreme court also has a tendency to strike down campaign finance regulations. Everyone knows citizens United, but more recently e.g. AFP v Bonta (2021) struck down reporting requirements in California, which paves the way for unlimited anonymous spending, and Snyder (2022), which reclassifies anything except the most obvious bribes as "gratuities". We'll probably have more 5-4 or 6-3 decisions in the next four years that increase money in politics.

It is not allowed. People are conflating a private lawsuit between Donald Trump and some large corps, with the Justice Dept suing large corps. Justice Dept can't settle and give money the money away. Let's not let politics lobotomize our common sense.

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