A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.
This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.
Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
To the degree great inequality leads to this being decisive in elections, it is a corrupting influence, but the term for it is still not “bribery”.
But when a presidential candidate tells oil companies they should donate because he is going to help them, that’s solid bribery.
When companies pay to “settle” ridiculous accusations, or “donate” to a president’s causes, while their mergers or other business legal issues depend on an openly pay-for-play president’s goodwill, that’s solid bribery.
The country’s policies, discipline, reputation and competence (economic, diplomatic and political) are being sold off for a tiny fraction of what their future adjusted value is worth.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
It's so broken.
To the extent that a pretty big chunk of donations are used to fund very short movies (we call them ads) for or against candidates, I'm not sure how that can be distinguished. I could see how one would distinguish get-out-the-vote or other similar non-speech type activities, but those on the Left seem to not oppose such expenditures.
The Citizen's United case being relevant to the former.
In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.
A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.
As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.
Now all that's required is a thin fig leaf that you're not actually directly coordinating with the actual campaign. And even that much is never enforced. It almost completely undoes campaign limits.
Ideally they "shouldn't". But in practice they do.
Because the Supreme Court determined that money is free speech, its use in elections cannot be limited in general.
And where coordination between purportedly independent groups isn't supposed to happen, there is a strong "don't ask, don't tell" code, and a mountain of lawyers ready to scream "political oppression!" on the dime of the rich.
Alright then what should it be called, because it's also not democracy.
We used to have some limits on it, but now it's trivial to bypass those limits because the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment isn't limited (except for all of those other limits.)
And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.
Yep. cf. Snyder v. United States[0]
[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...
No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of countries work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.
Vietnam works in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.
> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.
They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
Investors just care for the returns. As long as they can identify and bet on the side doing the bribing, they're fine...
2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).
----
Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.
#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
Do you have any sources for that?
Almost all equity ETFs do their balancing against dark pools or directly with market makers to avoid arbitrage and to ensure enough liquidity.
Since index ETFs have more AUM than the underlying instruments (the “ETF tail wagging the dog”), this sounds like a natural evolution.
There is nothing nefarious about this, it’s just how the markets work.
first_time.meme | Gold "up" 3.12% pre-Monday trading ($5411) #USDeflation #ThisGuyGetsIt
To where?
I'm in Europe, I'd like to see it come here. The news I see suggests China's ahead of us in this race, but I don't know if that's for all talent, or if it was just an artefact of a lot of Chinese people in the US on work visas returning home.
Or indeed whether the news about China doing well here was real or hallucinated by an LLM.
Immigration is hard.
I moved to Germany in 2018, and only just this month reached B1 level in the language; and that was a pre-Brexit move so I don't need to care about visa.
The EU has a "blue card" scheme modeled on US green card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
If language is your biggest barrier, pick a country whose language you already speak. As this clearly includes English, Ireland if you want specifically EU, and UK if you just want the continent (mainly London, but I spent a long time in Cambridge tech sector).
Germany may still be an option even without being a native speaker (depending on your skills), but with all the difficulty everyone has today with AI messing with job hunting, get the contract before considering a move.
I suggest you do the same -- the reply lists a dozen promising sites.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-an-american-citizen-a-tr...
Without a job offer, yeah not gonna happen easily unless you e.g. show an ancestral connection to the specific country.
0: Various kinds of engineers are on the so-called Positive List, see sections 21 & 25 on this page: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work/Positive-...
1: The supplementary pay limit track requires an annual salary of DKK 446000 (~$70000). This track could close if unemployment rises sharply, but it has been open for 6 out of the last 7 years: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work/Fast-trac...
There's plenty of room to fall if people are complacent.
General corruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Us US-ians are no longer naive. US was certainly corrupt before, and muckrakers had an uphill battle showing how e.g. Democratic admins were subservient to the oligarchy. But Trump has certainly taken this to a new level, and while it's a little bit sanity-enhancing to finally have middle-of-the-road friends see how bad things are for once, the brazen-ness of it all is nothing to celebrate.
What's more, it's precisely what happened with Putin, Orban, Berlusconi, Modi, Bukele &c &c &c. The right wing seeks to "finish the job" of private capture of public interests, and the populist side of it adds the mafioso "all in the family" touch where corporations explicitly kiss the ring.
The US is probably more corrupt that the most developed European countries, but they have also been becoming more corrupt.
kinda a stretch, don't you think?
While most of the network in in the US, there are very many highly placed people in Europe who will have been involved, and so far only a few have suffered. One Norwegian charged, two in the UK under investigation arrested and released.
> wow. you're comparing EU
Apart from the investigation in France, have guilty parties in any EU countries been charged, convicted, or are even facing invetigation?
It’s the best investment - just bribe your way to contracts
I the problem is that from the companies’s side you just have a whole country to exploit, so I’m fairly certain the investments still work.
Tldr; Rich people can bribe more, hence Rich people can be more rich+er..
I think a lot of poor tech multi-millionaires hate this in US but all rich billionaires must be loving it...