When was the last time a western government official received life in prison for their insider trading?
You should be praising this. You should be saying “yeah we need some of that too please”. It might actually form some pressure that results in the western ruling class feeling they need to at least pretend it’s a good society or else people might get some ideas about overthrowing them. Half the social-democratic policies that Europe has came about because of the European bourgeoisie fearing revolutions in their own countries and aiming to compete with the policies of the soviet union to prevent revolutionary energy from occurring. Roosevelt’s New Deal was also performed for the same reason, in fact he explicitly said so.
You should welcome political pressure from socialist countries, it can result in concessions in the capitalist countries if the ruling class get scared enough.
We class it as corruption because it is an example of a public representitive going against the public interests to selfishly benefit themself, thus creating a servere conflict of interests.
A politician evading taxes is still voting for public interests, no? Like obviously tax evasion is a bad thing, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as corruption. No country is crimeless. But European countries are a lot less corrupt than China.
Yeah it’s better that government officials get paid millions of tax money annually, that’s definitely more communist when officials can have private jets and have Foie Gras & Caviar smoothies for breakfast
Gotta give them money so they can’t be easily corrupted.
What is that? They still get money from lobbyists? I’m sure it is just because they are swell people who businesses just want to support financially without any hooks attached.
Also, don’t pay any attention to the ridiculous amounts of insider trading and politicians who become lobbyists when they quit politics. That is also just a coinkydink.
Okay? Why should I care what my ancestors were doing 200 years ago? Do you believe you should be held accountable for the actions of yours? I don’t hold a grudge against my German friends for WW2 either.
Because the antecedents and foundation of the Dutch, and to a larger extent, Europe and US/Canada’s economic and productive foundations were built on the exploitation and ruination of the colonies of people throughout the world. The wealth and comfort that Europe/US/CAN (the West) finds itself in is not from idealistic platitudes, false remorse, diligent government reform, and communal goals. The roots of the material luxuries and possibilities states like NL benefit from are from the exploitation. Distant past and persistent present. Your nations stole that wealth, benefitted from it, and believe you maintain that living standard because Europe is simply better.
All that happened with the end of those imperial and colonial periods, and after WWII, was that those imperial nations refined, modified, and sophisticated new tools of financial control and exploitation. Europe has the benefit of having the US enforce that capital hegemony with overwhelming and genocidal violence and covert, proxy financing and warfare.
Your countries aren’t magic nor are their revenues clean. It’s just blood money you’re drowning in.
Easy to point to those who invaded your country many centuries ago and blame them for everything wrong with it. You have enjoyed independence for many decades. Maybe time to look inward and fix your own problems instead of playing right into your dictator leaders hands by blaming it all on us. Or you can continue to whine about the west online while not changing anything.
My European country is currently the definition of corruption, I can and have criticized and protested against the regime, and I can vote freely. The only issue is that the position and opposition are working together…
Sounds like you have it tough buddy. At least you can always vote for a 3rd party instead. Dunno why you’d rather live under a dictator like dear leader Pooh in China.
There are like 20+ choices, most of them in coalition with the leading party, others are nominally opposed, but taking a cut to be quiet and not rock the boat.
I wouldn’t live in China, but I also wouldn’t ever live in the USA. Yugoslavian countries are more than enough for me…
I don’t know how idealistic and utopian you’d have to be to think that there wouldn’t be corruption in communist parties and the governments of socialist nations.
What’s most telling is that often the officials and party members who are found guilty of corruption are given extremely harsh sentences. China often hands down the death penalty for the most extreme cases of corruption, although in effect these are usually commuted to being life sentences in practice.
What you’re approaching this article with is a one half of the unfalsifiable orthodoxy; if the Chinese government punishes cases of corruption within its ranks then it proves that their model has failed and the government is corrupt yet if there are no corruption cases against Chinese government officials then that’s proof that the Chinese government is hiding its corrupt nature.
Of course there are going to be abuses of power and corruption within the government. That’s what happens and nothing is going to change that fact.
What I’m more interested in is how an organisation works to prevent these corruption and abuses of power and what steps it takes to punish them when they are discovered.
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Just because your country legalizes its corruption and bribery does not make it “not corrupt”. Your pirate ship being honest with its mode of operation, its objectives, and distribution of its loot does not negate its existence as an enterprise of plunder.
Consider: The wealth and living standard that western europe is sustained by is done through the exploitation of the developing world. Which means, as a bloc, those countries corrupt their own and their client states to accede to these exploitative relationships. What do you think ECOWAS and France are for if not for the exploitative relationship between France and its former colonies to maintain relationships of exploitation; what corruption do you think France makes their client states in ECWAS foster to undermine their own democratic processes in favor of the exploitation by France (and to a greater extent the entire Western world).
Corruption-free is when you have a government that works hand in glove with corporations to protect their interests and you have a revolving door between politics and mahogany row.
Corruption-free is when most corruption has been legalised through regulatory capture.
You’re not really going to tell me that there aren’t countless examples of government corruption in Western Europe that I could point to, are you?
Keep in mind that China’s population is 1.4 billion. Whichever country you happen to live in, I can tell you right now that its population pales in comparison. Of course there are going to be cases of corruption when you have a population that large.
The EU is of course famous for not protecting consumer interests or regulating corporations. They never do such a thing.
Compared to the US, where the government does everything in its power to protect the status quo of the wealthy, or China, where the people can’t even vote for, let alone criticize their own government, European countries seem to be making quite a good effort to accommodate the will of the common man.
That’s a lot of whataboutism and goalpost-shifting that you’re doing there. I never claimed that the EU doesn’t ever pass consumer protection laws or that they never regulate corporations.
In fact, implicit in my argument about regulatory capture is the notion that there exists regulatory bodies who are performing the function of regulation of the market whose interests get perverted by the appointment of business people and executives, often from the exact same industries which said regulatory body oversees. So pointing out that regulatory bodies regulate in the EU is no more proof to the contrary of the existence of regulatory capture than using ice-skates on a hockey rink disproves the fact that ice-skates are designed for use on ice.
You must be pretty across China to be able to make a call like “let alone criticize their own government”.
I take it that you don’t consider the White Paper Protests to be criticisms of the Chinese government and its COVID policy for some reason? Have you just not looked into this protest or is there some other reason why it’s not an example of Chinese citizens voicing criticisms of their government?
And as for elections, China has them. (Remind me again how people are elected to the European Commission, the Secretariat of the European Parliament, the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives…)
they’re located in the netherlands, a country that, frankly, shouldn’t exist. ridiculous language and ““culture”” that has contributed nothing to the world.
Or… we actually did something about it, and as a result enjoy some of the highest standards of living on the planet. But sure, we should strive to live more like the Chinese do.
I don’t really care what they’ve done. All that I know is that the parties I’ve voted for generally vote in my interests, and that actual noticeable change comes from it. As a result I enjoy high standards of living. The impression I get from my government is that they’re genuinely trying to make things better for their citizens (even if it doesn’t always work out). That’s all I really need to know.
If corruption/lobbying is somehow rampant, it hasn’t stopped many legislative measures to protect my interests. A good recent example is the many actions the EU has taken against anti-consumer tech giants. I lobbying was a thing here, do you think that would’ve happened? God knows these companies have the money.
I’m not omniscient, but I think we’re doing quite alright.
So by the same standard, if China, for example, were to lift 800 million people out of poverty, a little corruption would be okay?
As lobbying is a fact throughout Europe, yes, I think the fact of gains and the fact of corruption can happen at the same time.
For another look at a contradictory unity of opposites, here’s a look at how the corrupt EU is willing to fund research into combatting excessive PFAS in water while at the same time allowing companies to pump excessive PFAS into the water: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2023/02/pfas-in-drinking-water.html?cb
So by the same standard, if China, for example, were to lift 800 million people out of poverty, a little corruption would be okay?
If the Chinese government acted in the interests of their people I wouldn’t care where they got their money from. Unfortunately, they do not. Luckily, I do not live there. And I will fight any attempts to make my country more like China.
Laughable. Europe outside of Constantinople was a backwards shithole that needed to purchase all its manufactured goods from the superior civilizations of India and China. Absolutely nothing before colonialism.
Europe was a backward hellhole before the 1500s and wasn’t really “modern” by any standard until the 19th century, which very curiously coincided with the Scramble for Africa. Hmm, interesting.
Edit: so you’re Dutch. Isn’t the Netherlands’s wealth built on slavery? Why didn’t you guys give all that stolen money back?
China has actually been doing a mass anti corruption campaign for about a decade to root out corruption throughout the country; this guy is just the latest guy to get prosecuted.
Hey I know you! Youre one of those endless accounts who argue one sentence at a time to sound like you have more arguments than us. Hand me a copy of your manifesto on the way out.
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When was the last time a western government official received life in prison for their insider trading?
You should be praising this. You should be saying “yeah we need some of that too please”. It might actually form some pressure that results in the western ruling class feeling they need to at least pretend it’s a good society or else people might get some ideas about overthrowing them. Half the social-democratic policies that Europe has came about because of the European bourgeoisie fearing revolutions in their own countries and aiming to compete with the policies of the soviet union to prevent revolutionary energy from occurring. Roosevelt’s New Deal was also performed for the same reason, in fact he explicitly said so.
You should welcome political pressure from socialist countries, it can result in concessions in the capitalist countries if the ruling class get scared enough.
Idk, a long time ago in my country, because there’s not really any corruption here in the first place.
Hexbear.net comes close enough
This is currently happening in China and isn’t at all imaginary lmao
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2021/10/almost-1000-dutch-nationals-are-named-in-the-pandora-papers/
What do you call this, then?
Tax evasion isn’t corruption.
Then what the fuck do you class as corruption?
We class it as corruption because it is an example of a public representitive going against the public interests to selfishly benefit themself, thus creating a servere conflict of interests.
You’ll have to coax their definition out sentence by sentence and piece it together.
A politician evading taxes is still voting for public interests, no? Like obviously tax evasion is a bad thing, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as corruption. No country is crimeless. But European countries are a lot less corrupt than China.
Once again, What the hell do you define as corruption?
You aren’t even serious are you?
AHAHAHAHAHA
You see, we made the corruption legal so it isn’t corruption any more
Yeah it’s better that government officials get paid millions of tax money annually, that’s definitely more communist when officials can have private jets and have Foie Gras & Caviar smoothies for breakfast
Gotta give them money so they can’t be easily corrupted.
What is that? They still get money from lobbyists? I’m sure it is just because they are swell people who businesses just want to support financially without any hooks attached.
Also, don’t pay any attention to the ridiculous amounts of insider trading and politicians who become lobbyists when they quit politics. That is also just a coinkydink.
Don’t confuse me for an American. My government gets paid a fair wage and is among the least corrupt in the world.
If you’re Dutch, didn’t Lockheed Martin get away with bribing one of your politicians and they got away Scot free? Was their income not high enough?
You mean 60 years ago? Sorry, I wasn’t born yet. Is that the most recent example you could find?
Edit: still no one has been able to come up with anything better
I mean there is also the whole monarchy thing, isn’t that just legalised corruption for one family?
Why didn’t you guys try the Robespierre or Lenin method? Are you stupid?
Our monarchy is a tourist attraction. The king holds no real power. We could get rid of it if we wanted to, but most people really don’t care enough.
Weak
It took your swamplands 200+ years to "apologize’ for slavery. In 2022.
Okay? Why should I care what my ancestors were doing 200 years ago? Do you believe you should be held accountable for the actions of yours? I don’t hold a grudge against my German friends for WW2 either.
Because the antecedents and foundation of the Dutch, and to a larger extent, Europe and US/Canada’s economic and productive foundations were built on the exploitation and ruination of the colonies of people throughout the world. The wealth and comfort that Europe/US/CAN (the West) finds itself in is not from idealistic platitudes, false remorse, diligent government reform, and communal goals. The roots of the material luxuries and possibilities states like NL benefit from are from the exploitation. Distant past and persistent present. Your nations stole that wealth, benefitted from it, and believe you maintain that living standard because Europe is simply better.
The “garden” is harvesting its fruits from the “jungle”. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r1OzGUuPztw
All that happened with the end of those imperial and colonial periods, and after WWII, was that those imperial nations refined, modified, and sophisticated new tools of financial control and exploitation. Europe has the benefit of having the US enforce that capital hegemony with overwhelming and genocidal violence and covert, proxy financing and warfare.
Your countries aren’t magic nor are their revenues clean. It’s just blood money you’re drowning in.
Lahooo-ha-ser
Easy to point to those who invaded your country many centuries ago and blame them for everything wrong with it. You have enjoyed independence for many decades. Maybe time to look inward and fix your own problems instead of playing right into your dictator leaders hands by blaming it all on us. Or you can continue to whine about the west online while not changing anything.
Someone did a crime in China did you ever think about that you stupid fucking tankys?
And then the corrupt side hustle gets you life in prison.
Show me just one country not under the control of a communist party where that would happen, you absolute baby.
In my country we like to not have any corruption in the first place :)
If you repeat it enough times it might just become true ;)
Well, at the very least I can criticize and vote for my leaders freely, unlike some “global powers” I could mention.
My European country is currently the definition of corruption, I can and have criticized and protested against the regime, and I can vote freely. The only issue is that the position and opposition are working together…
Sounds like you have it tough buddy. At least you can always vote for a 3rd party instead. Dunno why you’d rather live under a dictator like dear leader Pooh in China.
Mayos try not to be racist for a minute challenge: impossible
Lol he brought it on himself
There are like 20+ choices, most of them in coalition with the leading party, others are nominally opposed, but taking a cut to be quiet and not rock the boat.
I wouldn’t live in China, but I also wouldn’t ever live in the USA. Yugoslavian countries are more than enough for me…
I don’t know how idealistic and utopian you’d have to be to think that there wouldn’t be corruption in communist parties and the governments of socialist nations.
You see a slow but steady stream of corruption cases coming out of countries like China and Vietnam.
What’s most telling is that often the officials and party members who are found guilty of corruption are given extremely harsh sentences. China often hands down the death penalty for the most extreme cases of corruption, although in effect these are usually commuted to being life sentences in practice.
What you’re approaching this article with is a one half of the unfalsifiable orthodoxy; if the Chinese government punishes cases of corruption within its ranks then it proves that their model has failed and the government is corrupt yet if there are no corruption cases against Chinese government officials then that’s proof that the Chinese government is hiding its corrupt nature.
Of course there are going to be abuses of power and corruption within the government. That’s what happens and nothing is going to change that fact.
What I’m more interested in is how an organisation works to prevent these corruption and abuses of power and what steps it takes to punish them when they are discovered.
Unfalsifiable orthodoxy you say? @ParentiBot@lemmygrad.ml you know the drill.
The quote
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Is it idealistic? My country in western Europe is pretty corruption free as far as anyone can tell. Seems perfectly achievable to me.
Just because your country legalizes its corruption and bribery does not make it “not corrupt”. Your pirate ship being honest with its mode of operation, its objectives, and distribution of its loot does not negate its existence as an enterprise of plunder.
Consider: The wealth and living standard that western europe is sustained by is done through the exploitation of the developing world. Which means, as a bloc, those countries corrupt their own and their client states to accede to these exploitative relationships. What do you think ECOWAS and France are for if not for the exploitative relationship between France and its former colonies to maintain relationships of exploitation; what corruption do you think France makes their client states in ECWAS foster to undermine their own democratic processes in favor of the exploitation by France (and to a greater extent the entire Western world).
Corruption-free is when you have a government that works hand in glove with corporations to protect their interests and you have a revolving door between politics and mahogany row.
Corruption-free is when most corruption has been legalised through regulatory capture.
Corruption-free is when your supranational organisation is opaque, anti-democratic, and riddled with lobbyists.
You’re not really going to tell me that there aren’t countless examples of government corruption in Western Europe that I could point to, are you?
Keep in mind that China’s population is 1.4 billion. Whichever country you happen to live in, I can tell you right now that its population pales in comparison. Of course there are going to be cases of corruption when you have a population that large.
The EU is of course famous for not protecting consumer interests or regulating corporations. They never do such a thing.
Compared to the US, where the government does everything in its power to protect the status quo of the wealthy, or China, where the people can’t even vote for, let alone criticize their own government, European countries seem to be making quite a good effort to accommodate the will of the common man.
That’s a lot of whataboutism and goalpost-shifting that you’re doing there. I never claimed that the EU doesn’t ever pass consumer protection laws or that they never regulate corporations.
In fact, implicit in my argument about regulatory capture is the notion that there exists regulatory bodies who are performing the function of regulation of the market whose interests get perverted by the appointment of business people and executives, often from the exact same industries which said regulatory body oversees. So pointing out that regulatory bodies regulate in the EU is no more proof to the contrary of the existence of regulatory capture than using ice-skates on a hockey rink disproves the fact that ice-skates are designed for use on ice.
You must be pretty across China to be able to make a call like “let alone criticize their own government”.
I take it that you don’t consider the White Paper Protests to be criticisms of the Chinese government and its COVID policy for some reason? Have you just not looked into this protest or is there some other reason why it’s not an example of Chinese citizens voicing criticisms of their government?
And as for elections, China has them. (Remind me again how people are elected to the European Commission, the Secretariat of the European Parliament, the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives…)
I hear you, I hear you, but does China even have changedotorg and fearless journalists willing to speak truths handed down by power?
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C’mon tell us where are you from so we can dunk on your chauvinism even harder
they’re located in the netherlands, a country that, frankly, shouldn’t exist. ridiculous language and ““culture”” that has contributed nothing to the world.
Or… we actually did something about it, and as a result enjoy some of the highest standards of living on the planet. But sure, we should strive to live more like the Chinese do.
Yes, your legislators renamed it lobbying or consultancy. Now corruption doesn’t exist.
I don’t really care what they’ve done. All that I know is that the parties I’ve voted for generally vote in my interests, and that actual noticeable change comes from it. As a result I enjoy high standards of living. The impression I get from my government is that they’re genuinely trying to make things better for their citizens (even if it doesn’t always work out). That’s all I really need to know.
If corruption/lobbying is somehow rampant, it hasn’t stopped many legislative measures to protect my interests. A good recent example is the many actions the EU has taken against anti-consumer tech giants. I lobbying was a thing here, do you think that would’ve happened? God knows these companies have the money.
I’m not omniscient, but I think we’re doing quite alright.
So by the same standard, if China, for example, were to lift 800 million people out of poverty, a little corruption would be okay?
As lobbying is a fact throughout Europe, yes, I think the fact of gains and the fact of corruption can happen at the same time.
For another look at a contradictory unity of opposites, here’s a look at how the corrupt EU is willing to fund research into combatting excessive PFAS in water while at the same time allowing companies to pump excessive PFAS into the water: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2023/02/pfas-in-drinking-water.html?cb
If the Chinese government acted in the interests of their people I wouldn’t care where they got their money from. Unfortunately, they do not. Luckily, I do not live there. And I will fight any attempts to make my country more like China.
Right, that’s why you have this standard of living, not centuries of colonial exploitation of the Global South
We were prosperous long before that and are prosperous long after that.
Oh wow, “Museum of mercantalist past”?
Wonder what exhibits they have…
Huh, so that’s how they got prosperous.
Theft.
Tell me, how’d we get the funds to sail and conquer these countries in the first place?
And without our colonies, how are we still rich today after many economic collapses and resets?
If Europe is nothing without colonies, why are we still here.
Laughable. Europe outside of Constantinople was a backwards shithole that needed to purchase all its manufactured goods from the superior civilizations of India and China. Absolutely nothing before colonialism.
Ekhem.
Istanbul.
You don’t want to be called a :LIB: by me, the one true leftist, now do you? :smuglord:
Europe was a backward hellhole before the 1500s and wasn’t really “modern” by any standard until the 19th century, which very curiously coincided with the Scramble for Africa. Hmm, interesting.
Edit: so you’re Dutch. Isn’t the Netherlands’s wealth built on slavery? Why didn’t you guys give all that stolen money back?
Didn’t you hear? They spent it and everything they have since the 1960s is due to hard work and intelligence (just don’t ask whose).
After? It’s ongoing
What do you think China is doing now?
Arresting one man instead of changing the system that lead to his corruption in the first place. Classic.
China has actually been doing a mass anti corruption campaign for about a decade to root out corruption throughout the country; this guy is just the latest guy to get prosecuted.
Cool, but an anti corruption campaign is meaningless without democracy. Call me when Xi can be voted out.
ahh but the system that legalizes corruption and bribery – that’s ok and doesn’t need changing because it protects your interests.
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These comrades have engaged your comment with thoughtful and well constructed responses. I’m just going to call you
or
whichever one best applies
Hey I know you! Youre one of those endless accounts who argue one sentence at a time to sound like you have more arguments than us. Hand me a copy of your manifesto on the way out.
There’s 50 of you and one of me here. I’m just replying to the dumbest/funniest comments. Call it a hobby.
Nerd
you rn