I love how many of my fellow Americans crow about how we’re so much better than the “corrupt” nations of the world.
Our bribe culture is merely more expensive. It isn’t done at the peasant level as much solely because our owner class has cornered and legalized the bribe your own regulators market and made it too cost prohibitive for the peasants.
And when Americans “protest” by permit in designated protest zones, at designated protest times, deliberately out of the eyeline of those they’re protesting and allocated/placed so as not to disrupt, we might as well masturbate at home. Protest means disruption, and if Americans actually protested in a potentially effective way that disrupted traffic and commerce as it should, our militarized police would go China/Russia/etc on our ass to protect capital gains over human life.
Our answer to corruption isn’t to just turn a blind eye, it’s to legalize it for the owner class and make it their exclusive domain.
Honestly, this country had more humanity when the mafia ran it than today’s Wall Street reptiles. And that’s no endorsement of the Mafia of old, just further condemnation of the owner class that would bathe your children in lead saturated water if it made them an extra nickel that quarter. At least the mafia occasionally took care of the mother/child of the people they killed, and wouldn’t shut down their community’s parks and sabotage their community’s schools for a slightly larger take that quarter.
I think the correct headline should be “AT&T got outed on paying bribes to get two major pieces of legislation passed”. You can bet they did not only spend bribes on just two pieces of legislation.
22 grand… Are you fucking kidding me? That’s all it takes? They should put att out of business for shit like this. Not a slap on the wrist here. How much did they make from bills passed due to this scheme?
It’s very frustrating. Here in Ohio, there was a maybe bribery scandal on a bailout for two energy companies. The former house speaker and one or two other legislators got prison sentences.
The bailout stayed in place, however, and all Ohioans are stuck paying an extra $50 a month, just for having a fossil gas line active. If you have a gas stove, water heater, or furnace, it’s fifty bucks a month just to be able to use them, plus whatever you actually use on top of that.
Well I mean, yeah. Nobody is surprised by this. Except that the government is actually maybe possibly thinking of considering hypothetically doing something about it.
It’s not like anybody in the government would actually consider a proper penalty. They need to stop having flat rates or stupidly linear fine scales with a cap. They need to make it an exponential scale with no cap, based on the net worth of the corporation. Same with the tax rate for rich people. But neither of those will ever happen because the companies and rich people write all the laws and then their puppets just sign off on them.
Add comment