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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)

It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.

Now it's common but underreported.

So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.

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I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.

Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.

I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...

> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show.

I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.

Corruption is not new- in fact looking at US history it appeared to be the norm. Tammany Hall, railroad barons, the Prohibition, Standard Oil. There were just a brief few decades after WW2 when it slipped into the background.

It happens in the private sector too. I was involved in procurement at a megacorp for several years.

At one point one of my colleagues asked for assistance in getting an order of 500 iphones approved. As "spares".

Fortunately the corp had a policy that phone purchases needed to have a named individual declared.

I declined politely to assist.

It was common to see certain mid level execs churning through 2x - 5x the equipment of IC's (who would never get out-of-lifecycle approvals anyeay) and some quid pro quo stuff. As a fraction of their total comp it was modest ultimately, and for this reason my boss advised me to keep my mouth shut.

There’s probably a feedback loop: as people have become convinced that the government is only useful for corruption, that becomes an expected perk of the job.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.

The way you get out of that loop is by creating immense pressure from the outside until the governing system breaks, then supervising the reconstruction as an outside power until it can function by itself again. The issue is that there's a very high risk of it suffering malformed development during that reconstruction, or even worse it's abandoned early and never even builds the functionality needed to sustain itself. The risk is so high that people prefer to let the system degrade with the hope that it will eventually halt or in the slimmest chance even regress to a better previous state. Meanwhile the success rate is so low that I can think of a myriad of failures off the top of my head including Panama, the Kingdom Of Italy, Albania, the American South during Reconstruction, and Indonesia with the only success coming to mind being Japan.

> It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.

What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.

The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.

Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.

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