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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

So much of the government is like this, they will hire some connected guy to manage something in a slightly competent manner.

Just learned that the federal government has long term leases on office buildings that congressmen have a financial interest in. More disappointment.

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To be clear: the crypto in question wasn't managed in even a slightly competent manner. It was literally embezzled.

It was embezzled in a slightly competent manner. Not very competently.

I think the level of corruption and blatant disregard for laws by the privileged we're seeing is unlike anything in modern history. If Nixon's watergate happened today it wouldn't even be a blip in the 24hrs news cycle, that's how far gone the erosion of institutions and rule of law is.

It's pretty wild how "normalized" it got within my generation.

What's more wild is how much of the US believes that the other party would be much worse.

To be clear, Republicans are absolutely the current cause of this insanity that's going on. The two party system doesn't help, but Republicans have committed insanity while claiming everyone else is doing worse. Trump is a literal pedophile who openly admitted to hating immigrants his entire life. We all saw this coming.

That's how Russian propaganda works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

It didn’t. You started paying attention. That’s all that changed. Hillary Clinton was pulling exceptional performance on cattle futures and Paul Pelosi had a strange knack for picking stock that reacted well to laws his wife pushed for. It is brazen today because they’re just launching $MELANIA and shit like that and selling pardons but that’s only because that’s user-visible. If someone siphoned your taxes or performed insider trading you wouldn’t even know.

But corruption has been part and parcel of US politics. Or are we supposed to believe that things like the Chappaquiddick incident were actually innocent accidents?

When I was younger I remember thinking that George Bush pardoning Scooter Libby was outrageous. Then I found out what these people were up to routinely.

Aaand people wonder why we don’t trust politicians. I know a couple of good people who have tried to get into politics, just on a local scale. They said it was the worst thing they ever did

I had a look at the Wikipedia on Chappaquiddick and it doesn't mention anything corruption? Seems to have been drunk driving? Not sure how it relates?

It relates, insofar as the driver was not charged, and in fact managed to run for president (and almost won the Democratic nomination) several years later, which a charge of manslaughter generally precludes.

> it wouldn't even be a blip in the 24hrs news cycle

It would be, but both mass media and people attention spans have changed, so it would be very different in a lot of ways.

Taken further, the reason you wouldn’t see it on the news is because the media is controlled by the people in government and friends…

Don’t believe me? Google how TikTok got sold off to Trump’s base and now the word “Epstein” has been banned in DMs

>unlike anything in modern history

The stuff currently happening in the US is unusual for the US but mild compared to Putin's Russia which Trump seems a little inspired by. At least you don't have people falling out of windows yet.

How tall is that ballroom going to be?

...should be at least as tall as the Salon de Fetes in the Elysee; that'd be appropriate.

oh, yeah, I forgot about that grift. Another favorite of mine are the many holier-than-thou NGOs that are little more than friends and family enrichment schemes, even more grotesquely than the federal government contracting grift that is not just replete with political and staffer corruption, but also just plain run of the mill nepotism... literally parent hiring and managing children. And no, this has been pervasive for many years now. I would say it really got bad in the aughts when the budgets blew up and things like enforcement and prosecution just couldn't keep up with the money spigots, not to mention that hiring criteria other than competence led to the most lazy, and disinterested people responsible for investigation and prosecution to the point that you basically had to build a case and deliver a signed, recorded, and notarized confession before anyone would even look at obvious corruption and grift.

>> More disappointment.

This whole headline in incredibly comical: https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-rel...

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/dem...

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