Corruption is the US

[roopepa]

By "corruption" I mean general structures and politics in the US that are clearly not in the interest of the general population. Things like:

- the two-party system

- lobbying

- prison population

- economic inequality

- enviromental damage

- shit healthcare system

- shit welfare (if any)

- shit education

Meanwhile, correct me if I'm wrong, the US is literally the wealthiest country in the history of mankind.

I don't think this is only due to the spiral development. Yes, it plays a part, but I'm pretty sure anyone above red would recognize how ridiculous the system is, if they just used a bit of critical thinking.

Why isn't millions on the streets protesting already? What's going on? You guys need a good ol' revolution. Just by reading a bit about the things I mentioned above should make one see how poorly things are going. Is the propaganda really that powerful? Don't the people see how they are fucked over?

Yes, this is not just about the US. Same kind of stuff is going on everywhere. But for me it seems like the US is doing way worse than it should, given the resources they have. In comparison to some european countries for example.

Edited February 8, 2022 by roopepa

[PurpleTree]

something has to change for sure

it's like a stalemate between the parties (which are already sh*t) and many things can't really get passed everything becomes partisan and polarised.

and since the u.s. is leading the "west" in many things, sometimes for better sometimes for worse, the u.s. is dragging the west down with them imo.

i found this discussion kind of cute even though they agree on nothing basically. one has these lofty thoughts and the other one tries to be more realistic. infrared is saying that a 3rd party which isn't influenced by lobbies etc. so much is the only chance americans have for democracy and i don't disagree with him but who's to know

 

 

[aurum]

15 hours ago, roopepa said:

You guys need a good ol' revolution.

A revolution works well if you have a singular corrupt person that needs to be removed.

In the case of the US and basically all modern-nation states, things are way more complex than that. So a revolution becomes a way, way too simple of a solution.

15 hours ago, roopepa said:

Don't the people see how they are fucked over?

Some do. But many do not.

The US has a culture of strong national pride. This nationalism has allowed us to unify as a country and enhance our survival, but at the long-term cost of low introspection. Many Americans are not very open to critiques of America, regardless of their legitimacy.

This is the whole battle between the left and the right. The left, being more conscious, wants to move beyond nationalism and is more open to genuine self-reflection. They see critiquing America as actually helping to make it better.

But the right is less conscious and more interested in preserving nationalism and the narratives that enhanced our survival. Thus, they see the left as “hating” America, but that’s just the ego’s reaction to its survival being threatened. 

[Hardkill]

Unfortunately, there is not enough political will within our country for fixing all of the major flaws and corruption within our government because not enough people in the US have adequately suffered yet from these systemic problems. Once the overwhelming majority of people in this country finally have had it with the two-party system, corporate lobbying, prison population issues, terrible economic inequality, environmental crisis, no universal healthcare system, inadequate welfare, insufficient education, etc. then things will change. 

Also, since the 1970s our country has become increasingly politically polarized which makes it harder for the government to pass any meaningful legislation. Our country has now gotten so divided to the point where hardly anything can get reformed by the government. The only silver lining to this is that it also means that our country will very likely not go through any serious level of long-term regression in the future. When a country has major political gridlock then not much good happens from Congress and the presidency, but also not much bad happens from Congress and the presidency. 

Leo says that none of those improvements for the US will happen until everyone here who is a member of this forum has become old, if not very old.

[Preety_India]

Yea there's a shit load of corruption in the US. 

 

[Hardkill]

8 hours ago, Preety_India said:

Yea there's a shit load of corruption in the US. 

 

The US is not as corrupt as 2nd or 3rd world countries are, but it is more corrupt than almost every other 1st world country in the world. However, I think one of the main reasons for this is because of how large and ethnically diverse of a population the country has gotten. I also think that it's because we have A LOT more stupid and ignorant people in America than other westernized countries do. I think it's easier for a society to progress when it's much smaller and ethnically homogeneous and has a sufficient amount of educated and smart people, provided that the country has an abundance of good resources, developed technology, and developed infrastructure. 

I wished that only smart and educated people were allowed to vote in America. It wouldn't eliminated all of the corruption in the US, but it would definitely eliminate a massive amount of systemic corruption in the country. 

[Preety_India]

6 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

The US is not as corrupt as 2nd or 3rd world countries are,

You can't be too sure. 

[DocWatts]

Considering that legislative institutions within the US operate on a form of legalized bribery known as Lobbying, the US is a good case study of how unregulated Capitalism eats democracy by capturing political institutions.

The makeup of the US Senate is highly undemocratic, with California (containing 40 million people) and Wyoming (containing 600k) each getting the same amount of Representation in the Senate. Washington DC and Puerto Rico don't get any representation at all (aside from purely symbolic representation that can't vote), because they aren't States.

So as bad as things have gotten within the US, it was already a pretty flawed democracy. Demagogues like Trump wouldn't have been as successful in destabilizing political institutions if democracy within the US had been in a healthy place beforehand.

[Fleetinglife]

@aurum

"The US has a culture of strong national pride. This nationalism has allowed us to unify as a country and enhance our survival, but at the long-term cost of low introspection. Many Americans are not very open to critiques of America, regardless of their legitimacy.

This is the whole battle between the left and the right. The left, being more conscious, wants to move beyond nationalism and is more open to genuine self-reflection. They see critiquing America as actually helping to make it better.

But the right is less conscious and more interested in preserving nationalism and the narratives that enhanced our survival. Thus, they see the left as “hating” America, but that’s just the ego’s reaction to its survival being threatened. "

Well they can start to slowly change that and lessen that identification perhaps by starting to refer to themselves as a form of distinction North Americans rather then the ubiquitous, homogeneous term Americans, that would be a marginal signifier start to lessen their nationalism, and empty signifier and exclusivistic and monopolising the appropriation of the identification with that term of all the peoples who live in the American continents as only that referring to those who are US citizens and the view that they monopolise the term America (and I think it has an effect of a thought-terminating cliche effect in people's minds when they think about other countries on the American continent) and Americans at the behest of other Americans, people who live on the American continent but who are not US citizens (the country/state should maybe renamed and called the United States of North America (USNA) to signal a more finer distinction in terms of its actual geolocation and in terms of other South American and Central American countries having the ability to call themselves American without immediately the first association being the US and to maybe signal a break with the imperialist past towards Latin/South American countries in choosing to stick with included adjective American within the States as to signal a monopoly for the whole of the American continent) name such as South or/Latin Americans and Central Americans regardless of what peculiar nationality those people also are within that umbrella term Latino, Latin Americans. 

Hey if Macedonia can rename its country North Macedonia, at the behest of the political and historically motivated complaints of its neighbouring countries Bulgaria and Greece, maybe America can too itself to United States of North America, for the South/Latin/Central American countries. 

BTW sorry for the grammar errors and sentence clarity issues, I wrote this very quickly on my phone without paying much attention to the way I phrased my sentences, in a lot cases now I see in retrospect, incorrectly, and full of errors, though I hope you got the general idea, message, meaning and background of where I was coming from with this within my post, when I saw your post and it reminded me instantly of this contradiction and paradox regarding the US's official full name and how it's citizens refer to themselves ubiquitously Americans, I think it was generally used as rule of thumb to enforce a civic form (rather then an particular ethnic or organic) of nationalism to Immigrants from all backgrounds coming to the US as a way to create solidarity and bonds that way to signal that they participated in creating a country different in some of its core assumptions and nature then the rest of those of whence they came from, though despite other forms of specific toxic group nationalism that emerged within the US political, immigrant and civic nationalism one context, but I think that was a rule of thumb then I don't see now that much of the importance and cruciality of the functionality of its  continued use as an exclusive living experience and simple, shared story integration and unifying mechanism and relevance of maintaining it still, especially when other Latin American countries become more powerful, coming soon in the near future when the country and some people living in it might have to start facing with some things from its past. 

Edited February 9, 2022 by Fleetinglife

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, Preety_India said:

You can't be too sure. 

If America was as corrupt as 3rd world countries or even as corrupt as almost every 2nd world country in the world, then Trump would've gotten away with easily overturning the 2020 presidential election results. He also would've been able to turn our government into an authoritarian regime. Also, while most Republican voters in the US may still believe that the Democratic Party "stole" the election, most American voters including some significant portion of Republican voters, virtually every Democratic voters, and the good majority of Independent voters all throughout the whole country still believe that Biden/Harris won the election legitimately.

Furthermore, the solid majority of the entire US military, FBI, and other law enforcement personnel also honored the transition of presidential power and vice presidential power to Biden and Harris. Otherwise, if our military was too corrupt especially those in the upper echelon, then they would easily defied the rules of the electoral process according to the sacred established US constitution by doing a military coup for Trump. General Mark A. Milley who is the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer, and the principal military advisor to the President, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council absolutely made it clear to the public before the Inauguration of Biden and Harris that he was already committed to not ever let Trump and any of his dangerous loyal followers allow them to take over the presidency and vice-presidency. He said "Everyone in this room, whether you're a cop, whether you're a soldier, we're going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in." He also told his associates, "They may try, but they're not going to fucking succeed. You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."

Same with every judge within the entire country. None of the judges, including all of the most conservatives judges and Trump-appointed judges throughout the entire nation from the local level to highest federal level of the courts, bought into Trump's big lie. 

Besides, stopping Trump from stealing the election and totally destroying our democracy, the government has become much less corrupt overall than it used to be.

 

 

 

[Preety_India]

3 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

If America was as corrupt as 3rd world countries or even as corrupt as almost every 2nd world country in the world, then Trump would've gotten away with easily overturning the 2020 presidential election results. He also would've been able to turn our government into an authoritarian regime. Also, while most Republican voters in the US may still believe that the Democratic Party "stole" the election, most American voters including some significant portion of Republican voters, virtually every Democratic voters, and the good majority of Independent voters all throughout the whole country still believe that Biden/Harris won the election legitimately.

Furthermore, the solid majority of the entire US military, FBI, and other law enforcement personnel also honored the transition of presidential power and vice presidential power to Biden and Harris. Otherwise, if our military was too corrupt especially those in the upper echelon, then they would easily defied the rules of the electoral process according to the sacred established US constitution by doing a military coup for Trump. General Mark A. Milley who is the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer, and the principal military advisor to the President, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council absolutely made it clear to the public before the Inauguration of Biden and Harris that he was already committed to not ever let Trump and any of his dangerous loyal followers allow them to take over the presidency and vice-presidency. He said "Everyone in this room, whether you're a cop, whether you're a soldier, we're going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in." He also told his associates, "They may try, but they're not going to fucking succeed. You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."

Same with every judge within the entire country. None of the judges, including all of the most conservatives judges and Trump-appointed judges throughout the entire nation from the local level to highest federal level of the courts, bought into Trump's big lie. 

Besides, stopping Trump from stealing the election and totally destroying our democracy, the government has become much less corrupt overall than it used to be.

 

 

 

You still can't be too sure. If someone is corrupt in a third world country and makes a million dollar out of it, someone in the US could be doing the same for a billion dollar. The scale of a billion dollar corruption is much higher than that of the million dollar one. 

Now how it impacts a country is dependent on the country's infrastructure and economic standards and general development. 

In the case of third world countries, the infrastructure is too bad and combined with poverty any amount of corruption proves to be fatal enough to make it collapse. 

Whereas America already has a robust infrastructure and most people are doing well financially, so the impact of even the worst kind of corruption is not going to be too bad. Having democracy or not having democracy has very little to do with this. In fact even if you removed all the corruption and established a fresh clean non corrupt Democracy in a third world country, it is not going to bring any marked improvement in the conditions of these countries because they are already so poor and fucked up. The basic structure is broken. There is no solid structure that can be improved upon. Over time as these countries begin to do worse economically it will have less to do with corruption and more to do with bad choices of the collective masses in that country. You can blame corruption only for so long. At some point you have to stop blaming it. If you are extremely rich and if someone is constantly scamming you, no matter how much they scam you, you can still not be affected by it because you already have so much, any loss no matter how big is like a drop in the ocean. But if you are poor and if someone scams you, you lose everything in one incident and it's enough to destroy you completely because you have nothing left to provide a cushion against the loss. So at some point you can't blame the scammer all the time, you have to check the fact that you're too poor to ensure yourself against ups and downs of life, because you can't expect a life free of scams, it's that you should have the ability to handle the downs instead of blaming them. 

Compare this scenario to that of an infection. If you are already very weak and your immune system is a wreck, even a small infection totally sends you into an emergency and messes yo your body. But if you are strong, your immune system is good, your health is excellent with no existing conditions, then you can overcome even the worst form of illnesses without much damage. And so you can't blaming the virus because you can't expect a virus free life, you have to take responsibility for your own health and build it up and stop crying about broken things and start building them and securing your system. The same principle also applies to self development and just survival in general. Too often we are caught up in blaming bad things that happen to us and in general blaming anything that is bad, but it takes away from the fact that you were irresponsible all along and did nothing to provide protection and security to yourself, you did nothing to ensure that those bad conditions didn't exist again, you did nothing to ensure that you would bypass those conditions and still come out unhurt undamaged and you did nothing to make the situation less damaging, rather you made it worse by introducing more problems into an already complicated situation. That's what happens in third world countries, they are always looking for the bad guy to blame for everything without ever taking the responsibility to actually solve existing problems and doing something about it, at least not adding to it. 

An excellent example of this is the environmental pollution problem in third world countries. This has nothing to do with corruption. The city I was living in had pure clean air for a very long time until it got over populated by people and the pollution levels rose rapidly over the last 2 years completely destroying the clean air of the city, this is not an outcome of corruption or some bad guy, this is the outcome of irresponsible behavior from people who are exploiting their own environment by overusing the resources, it's something of a matter of choice. 

The same can be applied to an abusive relationship. A woman can always keep blaming the abuser. But sometimes she needs to reflect on the fact that she is not leaving it and is unwilling to change her situation in the relationship, she is not giving it up but at the same time blaming the abuser for being an abuser, meanwhile she has every option in the world to leave that abuser and start a fresh life with some better person who wants to be with her. 

The bottomline is you can only blame the bad guy for so long, what you attract eventually reflects who you are. The condition in third world countries are so bad, but not so much because of corruption but because the people who are less willing to bring a big change and overcome their conditions, they are attracting suffering and loss because that's what they are attracting without realizing, you can also in the same situation attract abundance and happiness. You can only blame the bad guy when you can't do anything else and are completely helpless. But if you have avenues to seek help and if you can easily get out of the situation (for example the abusive relationship), and you are still doing nothing then it is your recklessness and irresponsibility at fault that you aren't trying to fix. You are simply exacerbating the problem and then blaming the problem. For example you will often find that women who stay in an abusive relationship have more children with the abuser, thus complicating an already messy situation by bringing more children into it, and now the abuser also abuses the children making things worse for everyone in the situation. 

Bottomline - bad things are only bad if you don't have a way to remove those bad things, but bad things are not to be blamed when you can try and fix those bad things quite easily yet you won't and would rather just keep blaming those bad things. Then you are attracting those bad things. 

 

[Hardkill]

19 hours ago, Preety_India said:

You still can't be too sure. If someone is corrupt in a third world country and makes a million dollar out of it, someone in the US could be doing the same for a billion dollar. The scale of a billion dollar corruption is much higher than that of the million dollar one. 

Now how it impacts a country is dependent on the country's infrastructure and economic standards and general development. 

In the case of third world countries, the infrastructure is too bad and combined with poverty any amount of corruption proves to be fatal enough to make it collapse. 

Whereas America already has a robust infrastructure and most people are doing well financially, so the impact of even the worst kind of corruption is not going to be too bad. Having democracy or not having democracy has very little to do with this. In fact even if you removed all the corruption and established a fresh clean non corrupt Democracy in a third world country, it is not going to bring any marked improvement in the conditions of these countries because they are already so poor and fucked up. The basic structure is broken. There is no solid structure that can be improved upon. Over time as these countries begin to do worse economically it will have less to do with corruption and more to do with bad choices of the collective masses in that country. You can blame corruption only for so long. At some point you have to stop blaming it. If you are extremely rich and if someone is constantly scamming you, no matter how much they scam you, you can still not be affected by it because you already have so much, any loss no matter how big is like a drop in the ocean. But if you are poor and if someone scams you, you lose everything in one incident and it's enough to destroy you completely because you have nothing left to provide a cushion against the loss. So at some point you can't blame the scammer all the time, you have to check the fact that you're too poor to ensure yourself against ups and downs of life, because you can't expect a life free of scams, it's that you should have the ability to handle the downs instead of blaming them. 

Compare this scenario to that of an infection. If you are already very weak and your immune system is a wreck, even a small infection totally sends you into an emergency and messes yo your body. But if you are strong, your immune system is good, your health is excellent with no existing conditions, then you can overcome even the worst form of illnesses without much damage. And so you can't blaming the virus because you can't expect a virus free life, you have to take responsibility for your own health and build it up and stop crying about broken things and start building them and securing your system. The same principle also applies to self development and just survival in general. Too often we are caught up in blaming bad things that happen to us and in general blaming anything that is bad, but it takes away from the fact that you were irresponsible all along and did nothing to provide protection and security to yourself, you did nothing to ensure that those bad conditions didn't exist again, you did nothing to ensure that you would bypass those conditions and still come out unhurt undamaged and you did nothing to make the situation less damaging, rather you made it worse by introducing more problems into an already complicated situation. That's what happens in third world countries, they are always looking for the bad guy to blame for everything without ever taking the responsibility to actually solve existing problems and doing something about it, at least not adding to it. 

An excellent example of this is the environmental pollution problem in third world countries. This has nothing to do with corruption. The city I was living in had pure clean air for a very long time until it got over populated by people and the pollution levels rose rapidly over the last 2 years completely destroying the clean air of the city, this is not an outcome of corruption or some bad guy, this is the outcome of irresponsible behavior from people who are exploiting their own environment by overusing the resources, it's something of a matter of choice. 

The same can be applied to an abusive relationship. A woman can always keep blaming the abuser. But sometimes she needs to reflect on the fact that she is not leaving it and is unwilling to change her situation in the relationship, she is not giving it up but at the same time blaming the abuser for being an abuser, meanwhile she has every option in the world to leave that abuser and start a fresh life with some better person who wants to be with her. 

The bottomline is you can only blame the bad guy for so long, what you attract eventually reflects who you are. The condition in third world countries are so bad, but not so much because of corruption but because the people who are less willing to bring a big change and overcome their conditions, they are attracting suffering and loss because that's what they are attracting without realizing, you can also in the same situation attract abundance and happiness. You can only blame the bad guy when you can't do anything else and are completely helpless. But if you have avenues to seek help and if you can easily get out of the situation (for example the abusive relationship), and you are still doing nothing then it is your recklessness and irresponsibility at fault that you aren't trying to fix. You are simply exacerbating the problem and then blaming the problem. For example you will often find that women who stay in an abusive relationship have more children with the abuser, thus complicating an already messy situation by bringing more children into it, and now the abuser also abuses the children making things worse for everyone in the situation. 

Bottomline - bad things are only bad if you don't have a way to remove those bad things, but bad things are not to be blamed when you can try and fix those bad things quite easily yet you won't and would rather just keep blaming those bad things. Then you are attracting those bad things. 

 

I agree with a lot of you are saying, but in America I really don't think that any official or employee working for the US government, especially these days, can be bribed off by any rich person. The only exception to this is corporate lobbying. 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Hardkill

[Zedman]

There must be sub-categories of corruption. Quantitatively 2nd and 3rd world countries would take the lead but in terms of quality I strongly believe US is number 1.

[Nahm]

@roopepa

The corruption doesn’t seem nationalistic to me, it seems male. 

Criminally statistically speaking, if you have manipulated / exploited someone, harmed someone with abuse and or molestation, raped someone, murdered someone, or assaulted someone, there is an 85% - 90% chance, you are male. This is the same for all countries, and has been the same throughout history. 

When asked in this survey, the percentage of females who said they want to leave prostitution but can’t due to a lack of money or food, is 92%. When asked if they were abused as children, 85% said they were. 93% of abusers are male, and of abused males surveyed, 93% reported it was by a male. 

The average age a female becomes a prostitute in the US, is 14 years old. When prostitutes in this survey were asked how many time a year they are beaten, the average of their answered was monthly. The rate of which prostitutes are murdered is 20 times higher than the national average. 

In regard to collective conditioning, and not perpetuating it, when surveyed it was found that 90% of New York City prostitutes had to give away at least one child to protective services, and 40% of prostitutes were victims of human trafficking as a child. 

 

It would be difficult to make a case that the solution to corruption is something other than, women. 

[IAmReallyImportant]

13 hours ago, Nahm said:

It would be difficult to make a case that the solution to corruption is something other than, women. 

Makes sense, except for the fact that women are on average less successful in business and politics due to evolutionary and not generally societal reasons.

[Nahm]

@IAmReallyImportant

What is meant by successful?

[DocWatts]

2 hours ago, IAmReallyImportant said:

Makes sense, except for the fact that women are on average less successful in business and politics due to evolutionary and not generally societal reasons.

Women are also expected to perform a disproportionate share of child and family care duties (in addition to work), which explains the lion's share of the earnings gap between men and women in developed countries.

So not like it's an even playing field. 

Policies such Rights to paid parental leave for both men and women, and access to affordable child care, can help to address this issue. Here in the US the second point is a huge issue, as it's not at all uncommon for child care to cost more than what a typical person would make working at a job.

Also, sex is biological but gender roles (such as what types of careers men and women are socialized towards) are socially constructed. So you've got it completely backwards.

Edited February 11, 2022 by DocWatts

[IAmReallyImportant]

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

Women are also expected to perform a disproportionate share of child and family care duties (in addition to work), which explains the lion's share of the earnings gap between men and women in developed countries.

So not like it's an even playing field. 

Policies such Rights to paid parental leave for both men and women, and access to affordable child care, can help to address this issue. Here in the US the second point is a huge issue, as it's not at all uncommon for child care to cost more than what a typical person would make working at a job.

Also, sex is biological but gender roles (such as what types of careers men and women are socialized towards) are socially constructed. So you've got it completely backwards.

There is a lot of evidence that women are less successful in their careers on average, even if you put the "child problem" or "societal injustice" aside. And there are a number of reasons for this. Of course, there are two sides to every coin, so women also do better on average in areas that are not directly related to career success. Personally, I generally think that people are individual and everyone should decide for themselves rather than relying on statistics per se.

Edited February 11, 2022 by IAmReallyImportant

[IAmReallyImportant]

No woman is forced to have children. Just as no one is forced to do other things that could hinder one's career. And if they are involuntary, then you can take responsibility for them. Because in most cases, it can be prevented.

[DocWatts]

5 minutes ago, IAmReallyImportant said:

No woman is forced to have children. Just as no one is forced to do other things that could hinder one's career. And if they are involuntary, then you can take responsibility for them. Because in most cases, it can be prevented.

In developed countries there's no reason why support structures can't be more accommodating to something that's both a normal part of life and necessary for society to continue functioning (having children, that is).

Workplace hour flexibility, the ability to work remotely, rights to paid parental leave for both genders, and access to affordable child care subsidized by public funding are some examples of such support structures.

Socialization to make sure that both boys and girls are given opportunities to cultivate an interest in diversity of fields is a part of that as well. 

Obviously since women are the ones who biologically give birth women are always going to be disproportionately affected by having children compared to men, but there's no reason why the earnings gap between men and women need be nearly as large as it is today.