Aceticon

There has always been lots of Corruption in the US (IMHO), but now there is also a feeling of impunity and no shame, so both more Corruption and it being done in more visible ways.

I think a point could be made that larger cars are environmentally more damaging as well as more dangerous to pedestrians and other road users, in both cases due to there being a lot more weight of metal being moved around in larger cars (so, more fuel consumption - which in the case of electric cars is still indirectly causing some polution - and more momentum that needs to be removed to stop a collision or involved in the actual collision).

Not really the way the other poster was making his point but still provides a "Fuck cars" reason to complain about "government buys lots of large cars".

I've also made an argument elsewhere about how the higher values involved in corruption in the Procurement of Car Fleets compared to non-Car options might be incentivising state officials to go for cars and car-friendly policies, but that's not relevant for this specific thread.

The superior yield for corruption in the procurement of fleets of cars for a State seems like a Fuck Cars issue to me.

I mean, I can see how there could be corruption in the procurement of State Bicycles or State Employee Walking Shoes, but the values involved would be way lower.

And this is without going into the whole point made by somebody else that Governments having and using fleets of cars (especially State officials) incentivises them to have pro-car policies.

In all fairness, it's a Corruption Perception Index, so this doesn't mean that Corruption before wasn't horribly bad, just that people did not perceive it so.

It's not by chance that this index has the curious effect that when the Justice System in a country starts cracking down on Corruption that country's position on this index gets worse (probably because there are a lot more news about corrupt people being arrested during such a crack down, hence the perception of corruption goes up).

Judging by how these things are managed in the UK, the secret to look good on the index is for the Justice System to not even investigate allegations of Corruption (much less prosecute and convict) so officially there is no Corruption and if the Press ever publishes articles about Corruption they get sued for Defamation by the Corrupt and lose since the de facto Corrupt have never been convicted hence are not de jure so and in the eyes of the Law cannot be publicity said to be Corrupt, so the Press never points out Corruption and people tend to think everything is squeaky clean (mind you, this doesn't work in countries with lots of low level corruption - say, coppers demanding money for not seeing traffic infractions - because low level corruption is evident in day to day life whilst high level Corruption is not).

I suspect that the Perception of Corruption has been managed in the US in s similar way to how it's managed in the UK.

Mind you, I'm not saying the US isn't even more Corrupt now than before, only that the perception of it probably severely underestimated the reality (and quite likely still does).

Ah, yes, the "I don't trust experts" argument.

If my explanation so far on how the Glass-Steagal forced separation of Retail banking from speculative investing and in doing so protected retail depositors' money from the bank's speculative investments blowing up, and the nonexistence of said protections was exactly why the 2008 Crash was so bad and had such widespread effects hence why we can directly trace most of the problems of that Crash to the repealing of said act, then me talking to you is a real life illustration of the pearls to pigs saying.

Your ignorance is 100% willful and there is no point in feeding such trolls.

Then you know nothing of Finance, Economics or how Sector Regulation works - the full impact of regulatory measures on those things takes years or even decades to unfold: we wouldn't have had 5 decades of Neoliberalism if the full effects of unlimited deregulation were manifested immediately after a regulation is removed.

I was in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and most of what went wrong then would not have been possible if the Glass-Steagal act was still in place, so much so that after the Crash a weakened version of that act was put back in place, only to be thrown out again by Trump during his first presidency.

Clinton knew what the Act was for (plenty of Economists very publicly explained it back then) and why it had been put in place and he repealed it anyways because the Finance Industry could make more profits without that regulation (which they did, for a time, until the Crash, hence the boom-related suplus you loudly celebrated), all of which is very much the situation you described of, once knowing the long term harmful effects of something (specifically in this case, of removing certain regulations), doing it anyway for the short term benefits (the tobbaco industry got profits in their case, Clinton fueled a bubble and that yielded those celebrated Clinton surpluses, plus he personally got lots of money from the Finance Industry after he retired from the presidency).

His responsability is undisputable in Finance circles and all that's in dispute is how much of the total is his and if he was either reckless ("Conditions have changed so this time it's not going to happen"), incompetent (i.e. literally did not informed himself about the purpose of the Act he was repealing) or machiavelic ("My friends in the Finance Industry will be very thankful if I remove these costly regulations and if something happens it will be well after I'm POTUS and somebody else will get the blame") in repealing Glass-Steagal.

Doesn't the prefix "en" in enshittification mean "more of"/"increasing"?

Because "Windows is even more shit" makes perfect sense to me.

Now that's just a tribalist attempt at excusing "one of your guys" with any excuse you can come up with no matter how illogical.

The speed with which the consequences unfold is irrelevant to responsability, only the awareness that there could be such consequences or lack thereof.

If somebody sets up a factory which releases contaminated water that poisons the region's water table with carcinogenic material resulting after several years in many people there dying of cancer, are those who set up a factory leaking carcinogetic materials not responsible anymore because of the time it took for people to end up dead?

Same thing with tobacco manufacturers once they had the scientific reports that tobacco caused lung cancer. Were they not responsible for continuing to sell their product without warning people of the dangers just because it took decades for the users of their product to die?

Whilst they didn't mean to kill people, they knew it could and went ahead anyway, hence they are responsible - just because it took years and was indirect doesn't reduce the responsability.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the repeal of Glass-Steagal led to the 2008 Crash - it's one of those rare measures where one can show a direct line between that specific piece of deregulation, retail banks engaging in massive speculative investing and them having to be saved as they would have taken depositor's money as they went down: what Glass-Steagal did was exactly to force the banks to keep the retail operations separate from proprietary investment hence with it in place even if the banks had a separate arm doing speculation which failed, depositor's money would never have been at risk and only said investment arm would have gone under.

There is no question Clinton was unaware of the possible consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because that act had been very explicitly put in place after the Great Crash and the Great Depression exactly to stop another major Crash and Depression, which was widelly discussed at the time.

Clinton was responsible for the direct consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because retail banks could never had started investing in a speculative way and end up sinking and taking depositors money with them with Glass-Steagal in place since that its purpose was exactly to stop that (and it worked for over half a century) - so it's there's a first order causal relation between the repealing in 2000 and the retail banks starting going under in 2008 - and because at the time he repealed Glass-Steagal he knew it had been put in place exactly to avoid a major Crash and Depression - he both did the deed and was aware of the possible consequences.

The only question there is around it was if he was reckless, deeply incompetent or Machiavelic (if he acted to benefit from it expecting problems would take years to come and hence be somebody else's) in chosing to repeal that act which he knew was meant to stop major crashes and depressions and which had worked successfully doing just that for over half a century.

Actions have consequences.

Or do you think the responsibility of a shooter ends when the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun?

For the Economy, repealing Glass-Steagal was the most widely impactful measure taken by politicians in the US since the New Deal and the current situation of a massive property bubble and growing inequality can be traced all the way back to it as a cascade of consequences of that act: the repeal leading to Retail banks going into ultra speculative investing and the overextending of Finance, leading to the 2008 Crash and the need for Government bailouts to save all the bank accounts of common people as the banks that were sinking due to their own speculative investing were (because of there being no Glass-Steagal) taking down retail customer funds with them, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash ever and ultra low interest rate policy which was supposedly temporary but really wasn't (interest rates are still below the historical average), which in turn pumped up of massive bubbles in housing because of that ultra-cheap money and continuation of speculative investment by Retail banks.

Clinton and the Democrat Congressmen's actions (as I stated elsewhere, fully supported by the Republicans, who if I remember it correctly wanted even more derregulation of Finance) directly led to the present situation of empoverishment of all layers of American society except the top (who have become far richer, the higher they are the more so) and probably also to Trump getting elected because of so many desperate drowning people trying to grab any perceived buoy ended up voting for the biggest scammer of all because he doesn't sound like a mainstream politician.

Whilst I seriously doubt that Trump was the result Clinton expected when he repealed the Glass-Steagal, he was the one who started the chain and before doing so he was definitely warned that removing the main regulatory protection on Finance put in place after the Great Depression to stop a similar Crash and Depression from happening again was going to have nasty consequences.

For the benefit of a few Finance fatcats (for which he got massively rewarded for it with things like millionaire gigs in the speech circuit, as did his wife) Clinton fucked up massively and hundreds of millions now suffer for it, so let's not laud that disgusting sold out politician a great statesman and steady hand steering the Economy.

That's up to him, his wife and his mistress.

I only care about his track record when it applies to the Economy.

Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagal Act, inflating a massive bubble (especially in Finance) which blew up in 2008.

If you're going to laud him for the positive effects of the bubble he inflated, then it's only fair to criticize him for the ultimate result of his bubble-pumping policies, which wiped out all the gains from the bubble.

The 2008 Crash was the direct result of Clinton's repealing of the Glass-Steagal Act (with the full support from the Republicans, so I'm not actually excusing them).

In the process of pointing out just how bad the Republicans are for the Economy, let's not excuse the Democrats so much that it turns into whitewashing.