Swag
Well, there’s one good thing. Maybe, maybe, maybe, now at last the news media will start calling bribery ‘bribery’ instead of ‘fundraising’ and ‘campaign contributions’. That would help. I don’t know, maybe the Beeb is different, maybe they’ve been calling it bribery at least some of the time all along, but US news media sure haven’t. It’s been driving me stark staring mad for years, hearing NPR reporters blithely referring to fundraising when what they’re talking about is simply solicitation of bribes, and campaign contributions when what they’re talking about is simply monetary payments to powerful elected officials in the expectation of favours in return. The whole incredible shocking disgusting deeply corrupt mess has been treated as normal and routine and therefore okay by our supposedly adversarial, liberal, suspicious, investigative, activist news media. Why? Why? Why? I seriously don’t understand it, and never have.
Surely it must look grotesque from the other side of the pond. We not only elect ignorant buffoons, we elect them by means of endemic bribery! They can’t even get elected without bribery. Everybody knows the equation – we hear it all the time – tv ads are expensive, you can’t get elected without tv ads, so obviously the only possibility for an aspirant to elective office is to demand large sums of money from people who have large sums of money. Gee, what a great system. It means we end up with corporate lobbyists actually writing legislation. [bangs head on desk]
But maybe the Abramoff thing will finally make it so obvious what a cesspool it all is that – oh, who am I trying to kid. No it won’t.
And people wonder why some of us saw some point to Nader. Which is exactly my point. Endemic corruption has become so normalized and routinized that putative liberals and leftists don’t even think it’s a reason not to vote for someone.
OB,
This isn’t gonna change a thing.
Even if the media and the courts bleed this for everything it’s got, I doubt the population will make the “donations = bribery” connection – and I say that knowing that people consider pols corrupt (or at least corruptable.) For some reason, taking the final, obvious step to “donations = bribery” is impossible.
Remember that when polled, the majority of Americans claim to believe in Angels. Invisible demi-gods with wings and superpowers. We’re not dealing with a population used to complex logical thinking.
sigh
I know, I know.
Of course, it would help if the god damn supine media would make the final obvious step themselves – or rather, would make the step unnecessary by calling bribes what they are instead of a ridiculous euphemism. But clearly that’s way too much to ask.
Liberal media!! Hah!
Chris, sorry, I understand very little of that.
But no, I don’t think it’s better to make bribes – not donations, bribes – publicly transparent, I think it’s better not to allow them at all. I don’t want the recipients returning the quid pro quo with a degree of circumspection, I want them not returning it at all.
They’re not donations, they’re bribes, because they are emphatically not a free gift: a return is expected. So why call them donations? If you donate money to MSF or Oxfam, you don’t expect the recipients to come over and clean your kitchen. If you did, that would not be a donation.
Ophelia: I’m not sure there has been a political system that has ever approached your pure world. As much as I hate the congress for Sale system, I’m not sure complicated rules are solving anything. The sad fact is politicans largely exist in a world of fellow members of their class. I doubt you can eliminate totally donations and favors.
Make it obvious, quick, and clean. Also, institute shorter election seasons like in some European countries, so it doesn;t cost quite as much?
Sorry for my incoherence! Try instead ‘What Brian said.’
On CNN yesterday, in an item about the appalling media handling of the West Virginia mining disaster, David Hertz (I think) from the Washington Post was comenting on the inability of the mainstream US press to do proper investigative reporting any more – they only seem capable of reacting to disasters or high profile scandals, rather than doing the ground work that could prevent them happening.
Mutandis mutatis, that seems to be what has happened here as well. It’s also a manifestation of the ‘people in glass houses’ syndrome. I’ve no doubt there have been a lot of articles in the US press about corruption in Indian politics and appalling safety standards in Chinese mines…
“Ophelia: I’m not sure there has been a political system that has ever approached your pure world. As much as I hate the congress for Sale system, I’m not sure complicated rules are solving anything.”
What about state funding of political parties or maximum individual donations?
“What about state funding of political parties or maximum individual donations?”
Well, that’s a good start. But what about corporate donations? should they be permitted at all?
Come to think of it, they probably don’t have to be banned. Just disallow them as tax-deductable expenses.
Ah, but Corporations are “people” under the law. First Amendment protections and all that.
Don’t have the reference, but this doctrine (corporations as people) comes from an obscure jotting by a LAW CLERK in the 19th century. It’s been blown up since then to give corporations a whole slew of “rights.”
I prefer the older view of “the corporation” as an exception to society’s rules of personal obligation and liability in exchange for very specific and delimited public benefits. This belief alone would probably get me sent to GITMO :)
Yeah. The hijacking of the 14th Amendment to treat corporations as “persons” is the root of a lot of evil in the US. Terrible mess.
However. I’m not talking about a “pure world”. Blatant brazen corruption is not taken for granted in, say, the UK – why is it taken for granted in the US?
Maybe part of the problem-and I’ll go way off the reservation here :)-is the problem of empire and an excessively large federal government. There is simply so much money to be made feeding at the trough of the Pentagon that corruption is, to be honest, almost inevitable. That’s not a defense of the corruption by any means. But, maybe a libertarian critique of excess fderal power and expenditures needs to be added to the outrage about corruption. Something many liberals are unwilling to do.
Of course, local, and especially State governments, have also been notoriously corrupt. But, at least State governments are not giving contracts for overpriced military rations that are inedible in the field. Or equipment that doesn;t work.
We’ve already seen the (largely) conservative response to any restrictions on campaign contributions. It’s seen only in the context of a free speech issue.
Yep. The Supreme Court struck down a campaign finance law on free speech grounds. That’s one reason it’s so very hard to do anything about the problem.
But it would help if it were universally seen as a problem, and people in office and running for office themselves saw it as corrupt and disgusting, and simply stopped doing it because they don’t want to be corrupt and disgusting.
Given how much money it costs to run a political campaign, how can they stop accepting the corruption if they want to win?
A related question: the airwaves are legally a “public resource” like the air. Why do we not as a condition of licensing get serious about requiring more public service/even political advertising? I’m not sure how this would work practically, but it might “solve” one reason underlying the corruption.
Surely it is even more corrupt to expend state resources to FUND the parasites trying to tap into the state’s coffers?
“Given how much money it costs to run a political campaign, how can they stop accepting the corruption if they want to win?”
They can’t very well, unless enough of them do it at the same time – or, unless corruption starts costing them votes and non-corruption starts winning votes for the non-corrupt. Unless voters’ attitudes change, in short. I’m not holding my breath.
ChrisPer: You are even more cynical than I.
Unfortunately, as long as we have political offices, we will need politicians.
I’d still rather have limited state funding, a very clearly defined election season, and maybe less empire-building than the current system. My main point is that unless we address the root causes of the corruption, opining bleakly about evil politicans won’t do all that much. The more clever ones will just hire more clever fundraisers that allow them to just skirt legality while vacuuming uip cash.
But nobody’s even motivated to address the root causes of the corruption, or the shallow causes either, as long as they’re not motivated to do so. (Yes, I know that’s a circle.) And they’re not motivated to do so partly because the whole subject is shrouded in a fog of euphemism. Surely step one is to try to shove the subject onto the radar. It’s not a matter of ‘opining bleakly about evil politicans’, or hanging out the window shouting I’m madashellandI’mnotgoingtotakeitanymore, but it is, surely, a matter of saying that bribery is bribery and not something normal and okay. One has to start somewhere.
Well, I can’t disagree at all with what your saying, Ophelia. My main concern is that people not think the “solution” is more cumbersome legislation which can inevitably be sidestepped by clever lawyers and which in many cases worsens the problem. I would almost rather have transparency-and a vocal press that we seem to have lost in this country.