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[jester]

dont you live in sydney max?

[Taricus]

Oi, Back to the US then. Not going to solve world hunger while everyone is speculating on food prices and making a profit on that.

[jester]

Oi, Back to the US then. Not going to solve world hunger while everyone is speculating on food prices and making a profit on that.

Thats exactly the sort of corruption im talking about, donate enough, lobby enough, and its not illegal anymore.  Still evil, just not illegal

[Max White]

dont you live in sydney max?

Yes, proud Sydney sider, I cross the bridge and get a great view of the opera house most week days.

[Farmerbob]

  so.... yeah, WTF?!  leader of the free world?

What? Oh come on, give me a break, I'm busy fixing Cambodia. I'll get to the US later, after I solve world hunger.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/07/f22_oped.html

Is this site to be trusted to not be full of hippy bias. Not that I don't like hippies, just the bias part.

I only looked for a site about the F22 - couldn't care where it came from as long as that particular article was reasonably accurate, and it seemed to be.  Several expensive projects that the military itself simply doesn't want are being continued due to corporate politics.

[EmperorNuthulu]

Am I the only one who thinks they should make a Oceans 11esque heist film out of this?

 "So it's a heavily guarded vault and there's cops everywhere, what are we going to steal?"

 "... One penny."

[Dsarker]

Am I the only one who thinks they should make a Oceans 11esque heist film out of this?

 "So it's a heavily guarded vault and there's cops everywhere, what are we going to steal?"

 "... One penny."

A satirical film, yes. Main character gets ill or something, decides to try and rob a bank. He recruits his friends, they help him to plan it out.

We can heighten the sympathy felt for him by having him constantly plan to steal only the dollar, while his friends try to convince him to steal more. He constantly defends bank executives and the like, and restates that he is only doing it not to be a drag on his family.

He does the deed, is arrested. We switch to the courtroom drama, him constantly trying to get the judge to sentence him to prison.

Now, should the judge be sympathetic but constrained by the law or evil and gloating over the guy's predicament? Whatever happens, he is sentenced to the 120 hours of community service, and as the sentence is passed, his eyes fall, and he collapses to his knees. Maybe cries.

[Siquo]

... Hmm. Needs more "Attica!".

[hamburgerfan]

Cuppsworth has been banned for being a ban dodge account (the Urist is dead tome/hamburgerfan family).

(cleaned out trolling derail, left G-Flex's reply because it was too long to delete, have to respect the typing fingers)

What an odd turn of events.

[Lagslayer]

Money mah dear boy.

Then stop going to war and fix yo shit before you go back to play in the sand box.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

World military spending, source.

I think you could afford it if you stopped trying to play super hero.

It's called Pork-barrel-politics and the good-ole-boy system, chum.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/07/f22_oped.html

Even when it's obvious how to save money, it sometimes doesn't happen, for a lot of interrelated reasons.

What the US needs to do is make it completely illegal for corporations to donate any money at all for any reason to any political entity, and additionally make lobbying illegal.  If you want to be a successful business do it by providing a superior product that people want, and treating both your employees and your stockholders well.

Until this happens and is enforced, big companies will corrupt the governmental process even more than politicians by themselves would normally manage to do.

The problem with this is that the secret deals will still never come to light. Even now with these sort of things illegal, they find other ways to give perks or money. I believe a more effective method would be to allow anyone to donate any amount of money or gifts they want to politicians or the government, but have absolute total transparency for government money and the finances of anyone in an elected/appointed government position. With this system, if a politician is accepting money/gifts/whatever from or is associated with an undesirable source, then anyone could find out. And if something is kept secret, because anyone could look at the whole picture any time they want, any discrepency could be identified. And because they willingly accepted the elected position, they would freely and knowingly waive their financial privacy.

The theory is if the people do not like who donates money or how government money is spent, they they would elect someone new. But if the public still does not pay attaention/care about it, then it does not matter what regulations we have regarding the subject anyways.

The legality of this assumes the constitution does not protect privacy directly (and I do not believe it is).


edit: added some stuff

[Montague]

Yeah.

In the USA, political corruption is more rampant on the lower end of the system. Mayors, city commissioners, sheriffs, local judges, governors.

On the federal side, there is an entrenched bureaucracy + the military and endless red-tape, checks and balances, political opposition, media scrutiny, foreign probing, legal transparency and just plain public observation.

Lower level governments are often famously corrupt and highly dysfunctional. Like in Chicago or pre-Katrina New Orleans. People either didn't care, thought the Good Ol' Boy Network was charming or beneficial or whatever... and corruption was wide-spread and these places suffered for tolerating the corruption.

On the federal side, there are constant inquires on the trivial sum of money used for Selective Service and persistent demands to see the president's birth certificate. There is not a million dollars in the federal budget that isn't scrutinized, except maybe foreign military aid to Israel...

Deregulated, unsupervised government bodies have the highest rates of corruption. Transparency is absolutely key to forming an honest government. There should be nothing outside public scrutiny, unless it compromises national security and even then, defense projects and foreign aid adventures need to be kept in check.

[Tilla]

Speaking of prison corruption, this one is just saddening

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

TLDR:

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

[SalmonGod]

The problem with this is that the secret deals will still never come to light.

-rant about transparency-

Support Wikileaks and whistleblowers in general if you believe in this, because they're really the only way to force transparency in these matters.  Be prepared to be investigated as a terrorist.  Suggesting that lawmakers should pass laws to limit their own corruption just isn't very realistic.

[G-Flex]

I hear talk about "secret deals", corruption, and so forth. That's a legitimate concern.

But what about the completely public corruption?

The private prison industry, well... it exists. That's bad enough. It exists, it's corporate-controlled, and it's profitable. If you think that the "military-industrial complex" is bad (not to say it isn't), consider the fact that we occasionally find it reasonable, apparently, to outsource such a part of our justice system to corporate interests. These corporations have every interest in (of course) maximizing profit, without any concern for social well-being or rehabilitation. Consider this: A company who owns prison has every incentive to promote recidivism and bad behavior rather than curtail it, and they're known to lobby for stricter sentencing and harsher "tough on crime" legislation, for fairly obvious reasons. The fact that we allow corporate interests to literally own and run our prisoners with shoddy oversight is despicable even on its face for the reasons mentioned, and is even worse when you consider the allegations of poorly-run facilities and the fact that the government/public doesn't even necessarily save money by doing it.

[Euld]

Her son, Kevin, now 18, was sentenced to 90 days in a detention facility last year in a simple assault case that everyone had told her would result in probation, since Kevin had never been in trouble and the boy he hit had only a black eye.

Wait, wait WHAT?  Kids (or adults I suppose) can actually be taken to court over giving other kids black eyes?  Seriously?  What happened to school suspension?  Sure if the guy was a jerk who bullied people, then something else would need to be done, but seriously?  Going right to court for school fights?