Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

You actually can’t, because of the nature of incentives. If everyone else is corrupt and you’re not, you fall behind and get pushed out. This is how systems work.

We see the same thing with companies. If everyone else is using, say, shady dark patterns you’re not, you lose market share and go out of business. The only result then is that everyone must use dark patterns, it stops being optional.

If everyone is corrupt, how will you compete with the amount of money needed to campaign and maintain incumbency? You won’t.

The only solution is to make corruption systemically difficult or impossible. Individual solutions and morals will go absolutely nowhere, because they’re ineffective at a structural level. Corruption is contagious by construction, the very nature of our political structure makes it so.

There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.

> On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.

"They" (the cult that worships Trump) would simply presume "TDS" over such an idea, but the fact here is that Trump absolutely is "off his rocker batshit insane" (to a degree we've not seen before in any U.S. president yet), and anyone who claims that he's "good for America" is just as (or more) insane than he is (or they genuinely do hate the U.S.A. and only support him because they know the kinda harm he's capable of doing).

Another fact is that if one really gives a damn about corruption, then you gotta start dealin' with it sometime or it just continues to get worse, and now is probably a good time to start, since it's currently lookin' so outta control that nearly everyone with more than a couple of braincells can easily see it and can't plausibly deny it, and givin' it time to fester doesn't seem like such a great idea. Historically it's never once been good to let the rot fester, and it never led to anything good for anyone to do so.

Like common, we have both data and examples of both clear corruption and money in politics.

And we have public legal changes, multiple by supreme court, that make corruption impossible to prosesute and more likely.

Yes, the trend was there for a while. And Trump can do what he does because the institutions and laws were eroded and already at the cracking point.

No but we do need to go back to the good old days of having like 1/100th the scale of corruption we have now.

as they say, the donald is 'stealing with both hands' and 'not leaving anything for others to eat'.

in the past politicians would steal a little, and there was enough to go around.

a couple of hundred grand on a land deal was OK. but $250B in crypto is just too much.

I assume youre being sarcastic, but ive heard serious thinkers, like sam Harris, sincerely make this argument.

America is truly lost when people wish their politicians were lying to them more.

What you call "normal" democrats are not solving problems for most people and are not in good faith. They maximized social inequalities since Bill Clinton and deregulated anything that was meant to protect people. That's not "good at governing", unless governing very narrowly means serving the elites.

Some things are not simple, and i'm really not a DSA fan (they're too mild in many regards to solve the problems we're facing) so i'm not really in their rabbit hole. But DSA is not what i'd call populist; they're making realistic and mild social promises based on rational/scientific study of solutions (and seeing what worked in the USA in the past, and what works in other countries, such as 100% free healthcare).

You, on the other hand, seem to be down a rabbit hole where making billions of people suffer for your little privilege is just business as usual and asking questions is dangerous. Things are not simple, but they're definitely simpler if someone tries to actually solve them which no mainstream politician is actually doing. Here in France, it took dozens of thousands of workers with guns post-WWII to have free healthcare for all, and it's been working surprisingly well ever since (although to be fair, since absorbed and reformed by the State, much less so).

> What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime.

These two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Also, “normal” isn’t good. In fact, “normal” often seems like a horrible bar to aim for.

> Corruption that actually meaningfully hurts the country and the world at scale (in recent history) only started with this administration.

You don’t do the sort of systemic damage observant people have been pointing out for MANY administrations. Is this one bad? Yes.

But it’s really weird and incorrect (based on the definition of the words) to say the corruption only just recently became real / meaningful / harmful.

> You listed a bunch of things only some of which are bad, and none of which are clearly corrupt.

Charitably, you might be using a different definition of corruption than most of the world uses. Even if we limit ourselves to only a narrow definition of only political corruption, the abuse of government power for private gain, most of what I listed would still be (sometimes literally) textbook examples of it. The revolving door, dark money, "kids for cash", no-bid contracts, Teapot Dome, these are examples of how we've seen bribery and cronyism play out in the Untied States. Voter suppression for example is a form of electoral corruption. While you're welcome to play at semantics or choose your own definitions for what you feel is and isn't corruption, claiming that "none of the things" listed were "clearly corrupt" is simply false.

I think we'd agree that a worker deleting a database doesn't have to be corruption, but that also doesn't mean it can never be an act of corruption either. I'm not talking about conjecture, just documented history, some of it recent. There are people in prison right now for their roles in it and many others who should have been, or who should still be, locked up for it, but who have escaped justice because of corruption.

It's difficult to imagine what "real ones" would even look like to you personally, but be assured that to the rest of us the US has a very long and well documented history of real corruption.

Does Iran-Contra count?

Note that it set the terrible precedent of the President pardoning high level crimes.

Grant and Harding are famous for being personally corrupt.

Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for political corruption.

Reagan colluded with Iran to prevent the release of hostages during Carter's re-election campaign and later sold them weapons to bypass congressional oversight.

These are just a couple well known examples at the presidential level, I am sure that for every one we know about there are dozens if hundreds of similar examples.

Go further down the scale to the congressional, state, city, and municipal levels and you encounter even pettier levels of corruption where you can buy votes for 5 figure construction contracts or just simple cash handoffs.

They've always rubbed our faces in it in modern times. There was a time, not that long ago, when Presidents wouldn't accept payments for speaking after office. It only began with Gerald Ford. Previously it was felt that it would impugn the integrity of the office, and obviously it 100% does. Nonetheless, now presidents are happy to e.g. bail out companies and then take tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees for 30 minute chats with those exact same companies.

The real issue is that partisanship tends to blind certain people to corruption when 'their side' is in office, which largely works as an enabling factor. When nobody cares or nothing happens over a 'little' corruption, it just leads to a little more, and the next thing you know - you get to where we are.

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Halliburton got a lot of work from Bush's wars if I remember correctly.

Dick Cheney.

Edit: I don’t really care though, I’m not a US citizen. Trump is terrible still. Shouldn’t have voted him in. :shrug:

What about the whole WMD debacle? Isn't it widely considered to be an act of corruption?

And bailing out bank shareholders during the '08 financial crisis.

Which US Administration said or did anything to prevent every US corporation from trading their manufacturing secrets for cheap labor, to the totalitarian country that they're all allegedly wringing their hands over for us?

Which one stopped the CIA from overthrowing democratic elections in other countries right from their inception, starting with Italy in the 50s and continuing with Operation Gladio all throughout Europe and moving into Southeast Asia as they worked with criminal groups to perfect their narco funded guerrilla warfare machine?

Did Trump even catch up to the number of bombs that "peace prize" Obama dropped in 8 years?

There are no sides, there's just a corporate Uniparty putting on some theater for you and you can absolutely prove that out if you dig past surface material and surface thinking.

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> so completely detached from reality

isn't really the crux of the problem with modern day USofA, more and more people are completely attached to their algo tuned bubble, curated for them by the data scientists of <insert techno silo here>.

It's not just the hostile bot armies of foreign actors tugging on the strings of perception, the distortion is coming from inside the borders.

Lotta racists and other bigots that like a president that "agrees" with them.

There is no local media in the US. A wide swath of the electorate gets 100% of their news from Fox news.

In Texas, it is widely known that the Trump family are experts in crypto finance, and worthy of the gains they have made. (also that sharia law is widely practiced)

When people that aren't highly educated have no source of accurate current events, they have a warped view of reality.

The stories hit reddit every day.

"ICE deported my wife. She was legal and was following the rules. I still love my Donald and will vote for him again"

Plenty of people have become alienated from their own family due to blind loyalty to Trump and support for his cruelty. They remain loyal.

I think you’re underestimating the true believers. Plenty of conservatives are willing to suffer if they think it makes others suffer more. See Dying of Whiteness.

People hate Congress but love their Congressperson. It's even got a name: Fenno's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenno%27s_paradox

Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.

I hate my congressman. Why, he won't listen to me. No public meetings, no interviews with real press. Only 1 way phone calls, where you can submit questions via e-mail a day before the event.

No private meetings either. I have repeatedly called both his local office and his DC office. If I have a donation, a staffer will meet with me.

His philosophy is simple "You love Donald, I love Donald". It is the focus of the mailers that are sent out every quarter.

This elections democrat has no polling. The prediction markets give her an 8% chance of winning.

People don't feel like they are well-represented by either party.

They may like some republican stances (say, reduced regulations and welfare spending), but despise others (Trump, wars, anti-renewable). Meanwhile they might like some democrat stances (Inclusivity, environment), but not others (high spending, rent controls, etc).

So you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where there's no good way to express your desires. I can totally understand not wanting to vote in such an environment, and disliking the government no matter what. You can't get your specific views represented because everything has been collapsed into two broad camps that average out - and as lots of research shows, no one is truly average.

Do they act on their beliefs or merely parrot them?

I ask because I've known people who were shocked at what took place 2021-01-06 but who proudly voted to re-elect Trump.

Today isn't much different: talk to a conservative voter who complains about the tariffs, Iran war, etc. and ask them whether it would be enough for them to vote Democrat, and the answer is near universally no. Lots of people have performative outrage because they're supposed to be outraged at what's going on, but the truth is that there's no line the Republican party can cross which would make them switch votes. Exceptions to this rule are still few and far between as far as I can gather.

Do those conservative people keep voting for Trump? Will they support his blatantly unconstitutional third term run? If so I think we need more words for nuances around what conservatism has come to mean.

That's what blows my mind, nothing that is happening is actually new, we have seen this shit play over many times. And yet the system was completely incapable of shutting this down.

A lot of the early Trump responses were incredulous about some insane thing Trump said to a rally crowd, but he was basically repeating whatever insanity they'd all heard on Fox News the night before.

>> We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy.

Consicely put, and not nearly present enough in contemporary discourse.

The United States must be one of the only nations on earth that names its own military bases after enemy commanders.

Here's a map which attempts to estimate when slavery was abolished across various parts of the world:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo...

The US wasn't much of an outlier.

As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.

I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.

  Either George, who enslaved her mother, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, who enslaved her older brothers, Rufus and Andrew,[3] was probably Anna's father

West Germany and Japan did not purge "most of those elements". Both places retained a surprising number of people from the early 1940s, for the simple, cynical reason that many of these people had skills and experience in administration. Many Nazis ended up in significant positions in NATO and even NASA, and some such as Walter Debus and Klaus Barbie ended up in American employ.

A few examples of prominent Nazi officials who worked in West Germany: Reinhard Gehlen, Albert Schnez, Adolf Heusinger (Inspector General of the West German Army), Hans Speidel (major NATO commander), Johannes Steinhoff (Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971–1974), Johann von Kielmansegg (Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe), Ernst Ferber, Karl Schnell, Franz Joseph Schulze, Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin etc.

“Researchers found that some 77 percent of senior officials in the [West German] Justice Ministry had once identified as Nazis, a portion higher than during the Third Reich, the period between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler controlled Germany, and much higher than researchers expected. The group included Nazi-era prosecutor Eduard Dreher, a man who sought the death penalty for petty criminals, and Max Merten, who played a role in deporting Jews from Greece.” – 2016 Christian Science Monitor Study

East Germany did purge most of its Nazi elements, but became a dictatorship in its own right. When Germany reunited, there was a purge of East German judges but a number of people involved in the old system continued in the new Germany. (Even Angela Merkel who had a significant position in the FJD.)

Most of former Soviet Union made a limited attempts to remove Communist era officials. Some of those responsible for Stalin era atrocities died in their beds. Russia is still full of them, and age, not officialdom . Even people like Valentina Tereshkova the former cosmonaut. PR China has never purged itself fully of Maoism, and Chairman Mao's picture still pops up everywhere despite being arguably the biggest mass murderer in history.

I mean that is what happened. Most of the politicians and bureaucrats in Germany post WW2 were Nazis.

Comparing MAGA to Nazis is a bit much, and I would argue that this kind of hyperbole is a better example of how we got here.

look what they did for Russia.

Mortal enemy of the US to closest friend in 2 weeks.

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Don't know why you're being down voted. I can't believe there are people who didn't vote for Harris because she wasn't anti-Israel, as if Trump would somehow be better for the Gazans.

(Well I can believe it, it shows a limitation of rational thought and second order effects, which our electoral system exploits. And some of them are outright "accelerationists" which is a looney strategy itself.)

> Trump and Obama are about as opposite as possible

Are they though? Both serve the same master.

Well, banana republics are run by American companies from what i understand

Lol do you know how the term "Banana Republic" originated

> “We found the scapegoat, blame that guy!”

Yeah, that's not what an scapegoat is.

This is greatly because most congressional elections are not competitive.

Corruption has been rampant under multiple administrations. I actually had hoped Trump might root out more corruption in his 2nd term, but two things happened: Congress wouldn't go afraid the corruption that was being found, and Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight...after 2-3 assassination attempts on Trump himself too.

It's easier to start looking the other way when bullets start flying.

Having said that, I'm not saying Trump was a saint, but it seems this board forgets we just had Obama and Biden running their corruption rings for 2 decades too...

You're only looking at the glass half empty side of things.

The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?

Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.

The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.

You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.

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This ignores that Germany is not energy independent (unlike the US), and that it suddenly lost its main energy supply and followed this up by closing its remaining nuclear facilities, a massive self-own.

This also ignores that the US is now having serious trouble supplying its own military and tech sector due to the same deindustrialization! It also basically created its most formidable geopolitical competitor through this process.

That's great if you're talking to a high schooler that has never been politically active, but I'm literally a democratic party operative. I've attend state conventions, state nominating conventions, platform conventions, DNC twice. This is not the democratic party I want to part of and why I'm extremely thankful people-led organizations like WFP and DSA are actively trying to change things for the better.

None of what you are describing has any real momentum behind it and for how many decades will you let politicians fails you until you do something in response?

Like bro, the democratic party isn't an opposition party. There is a reason why the party has majority unfavorability rating [1] throughout Trump's entire second term. How do you square this?

This is a fucking terrible sign and it's why progressive candidates have seen a massive insurgency this cycle and why the corporate do-nothing dems are so scared shitless that they might have to actually answer why they are okay with genocide + corporate welfare programs while doing nothing to help people materially.

You say no one is excusing them, then spend your entire comment excusing them.

What do you actually do politically?

[1] https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/favorability/democratic-part...

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Why is Ground News relevant here?

Don't disagree, take your example of using cryptocurrency to massively break banking regulations plus the ability to make rug pulls a known feature. Now what do you expect democratic politicians to actually do about it since they have no issues working with the crypto industry while taking their donations? Gillibrand is a great example of this, crying about Trump getting rich off cryptoscams but not willing to actually legislate against this stuff because it'll cut off a lucrative source of campaign financing:

https://theintercept.com/2026/07/13/gillibrand-crypto-trump-...

Like this plays into the record "high" perception of corruption. (also you know that the democratic has had majority unfavorable ratings throughout the Trump administration [1], a major blight and a poor sign that the opposition party is in fact not unified in opposition)

I do find the person that makes your comments amusing. Mostly the types that do zero organizing, never volunteered for a political campaign, have never canvassed in their life, don't attend party meetings, aren't part of any state committees across the US, but all seem to exactly know what's wrong with the voters and apparently you aren't allowed to criticize a party for reasons that allude me.

Perfectly capable to form plenty of words just fine. I'm a democratic party operative that has mostly grown to hate the party more as the years go by, luckily my sentiment is hardly unique (way more common than back in 2016).

What do you exactly do to help combat this situation? I rather converse with people that are engaged and not just consumers of advocacy.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2026/07/13/gillibrand-crypto-trump-...

What is unproven here? This is all found in various wiki articles or just being alive at the time (yes Obama did bailout banks over people, yes Clinton did condemn large swaths of the US to poverty).

I honestly don't understand your other question, you can watch any primary challenge race across the country and you'll see these dynamics play out. We're also dealing with cumulative effects that have taken place over decades (NAFTA is still impactful in many areas that if you run as D these districts you are guaranteed to lose).

If you're from a certain region and want specific examples LMK.

I think a lot of these beliefs are downstream of some perceived aloofness and intellectual elitism in the party combined with sour grapes about how 2016 turned out for certain grassroots demographics in the party.

I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.

Okay and how do you think it helps the democratic candidate's ability to win elections when they are part of the same party that supports corporations over people? In the not so recent past the democratic party controlled Congress for 60+ years on the new deal coalition alone, now look what the party has morphed into...

I read the article too, in what sane world is it okay if 70% of citizens thought their governments + corporations are corrupt over a 20 year time span here. Society apparently has get quite bad for the last 20% to realize the state of things.

The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.

No, it's more like "oh wow that explains why Americans do not trust institutions, have massive unfavorable feelings about the democratic party, and voters no longer believe democratic politicians are pro-worker."

Like this is a thread about corruption but I guess if you give a shitty corporate veneer it's suddenly. If you're older than 40 you saw the democratic party implement NAFTA, cut welfare programs, and bail out banks; apparently these three major policy pillars aren't related to people's feelings on corruption.

Totally independent, they're just totally only saying Trump + republicans are corrupt not like the entire system that compromises two parties both of which are in bed with corporations and voters have a lived history reflecting just this.

Next thing you're going to tell me is that the Gaza Genocide played no role in Harris losing '24 either.

A write in, or even just scrawling "FUCK YOU" across the ballot is at least an active protest. It shows that you aren't apathetic to, or okay with, what is going on. It'd be interesting to see a write in campaign for someone with enough public support to be more than just a protest vote though. It'd be interesting to see someone campaign to the public with no interest in participating in the two party system at all, just asking the public to write them in when the time comes.

And stood in front of a TV camera during Obama's administration and said that Republicans would not support bills that objectively made Americans lives better because their goal was only to make sure Obama was a one term President.

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I would think the bailouts after the 2007 financial crisis destroyed more trust and lives than 9/11 and the Patriot Act.

Why should the money get spread around? It's a business, pay the people that earn it.

I understand what is in it and wouldn't take any of it as long as it is combined with caps on player pay. Where's the cap on media revenues or stadium ticket prices?

No, they each manufacture consent for capital interests in a race to the bottom for everybody else, using time-tested good cop / bad cop, revolving door corruption, etc.

I've never understood why I should join a political party. I mean, yes, I lean pretty heavily toward one of the two major parties in my voting, but what advantage does it get me to declare loyalty? Perhaps if I lived in a state without open primaries, but as it is I gain nothing by putting an R or a D in front of my name.

So, vote for a third party. If you don't actually like the candidate you vote for, you're engaging in political negligence. When I vote, I almost never vote for a Republican or Democrat candidate because they are, by and large, not people I want representing me. So I vote for someone I do want representing me.

The parties arent actually opposed its just that democrats want to change everything and republicans dont. Dems propose something and reps oppose it. Thats generally how its supposed to work but usually there is a debate that should accompany the proposals.

The general difference between a liberal mindset and a conservative mindset is the difficulty in making things work. Liberals believe that things usually work and the hard part is getting them to work exactly how you want them too. The conservatives think that things usually dont work and the difficult part is getting them to actually work.

This actually really matters when your talking about renovations whether its a building or a government you have to choose between the new fancy shiny thing will all the options and the old beaten up reliable thing that only does one thing and does it really well.

When dems propose something new, all the reps see is every way that it could go wrong or even be worse than the last thing.

When reps oppose something new all dems see is stupid old people afraid of progress.

And thats assuming that everyone actually has good intentions before we get into partisan bs and outright corruption.

The dem-rep balance would actually be really great in the politicians gave half a fuck about the country but they arent trying to make the country better in good faith they are trying to win politics which isnt even possible, a win for one party means the end of the country no matter which party the country needs the balance i just laid out above. You need long term trusted institutions and you also need to change and update things over time. Both perspectives are necessary if you want a functional government this petty infighting serves no purpose besides allowing politicians and their corrupt friends to loot and pillage the country from the inside while the stupid population argues over men in womens sports or when child sacrifice is okay.

Identifying as independent is the first step toward not voting at all (which itself is a type of vote, especially in a rigged system).

So definitely not meaningless. It demonstrates increasing amounts of people are tired of pretending our democracy isn't mostly illusory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty

> Biden did what he could to help unions and eliminate student debt.

LMAO, etc

Yeah, and the best candidate they voted for was Trump.

Which is the point the person you reply to was making: those independents are incompetent, incoherent and uninformed.

"the reality is" as you offer up as much evidence as you claim the OP is lacking.

Meanwhile in my FB circle of friends and acquaintances I have 3 people who call themselves Independent, and 4 who call themselves Libertarian.

All of them have voted for Trump, twice, and as far as I know, at least 2 voted multiple times for the Bush dynasty.

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Vote however you want, but I'm sick of people abusing the flag feature.

Oh no, I don't need evidence that governments are dirty hives of corrupt incompetent criminals, leeches, and parasites.