Excellence In Corruption

[Laskar]

In 20th Century America, we had an ideal, and that ideal was that we would be led by our best and brightest. Learned men with minds like razors and balls of steel would land us on the moon, build our highways, and make diseases a thing of the past. And leadership would be provided by Washington, staffed with the smartest bureaucrats and cleverest congressmen that our Ivy League schools could turn out.

Obviously, this didn't happen. NASA is a jobs program for rocket engineers that gets regularly shown up by a South African coder with a tenth of the budget. The CDC wants to research gun violence because they've totally got that pandemic shit locked down and they're just bored of sitting around. And our politicians are spectacularly unimpressive.

Look, this isn't their fault. Not directly. Politicians are ordinary people given extraordinary power. As ordinary people, they're flawed creatures. As flawed creatures, they're going to disappoint you when you expect them to act noble and pure when you put them up on a pedestal. Corruption and abuse are constants in politics, and if you think that we can somehow educate or legislate that corruption and abuse away, you've got another think coming.

So what is corruption? A game theorist would define it as pursuit of power or profit creating a perverse incentive that drives abnormal behavior, but us normal people would define it as greed and pettiness. The politician who votes against a tax hike because a business donated to his campaign, or a sheriff who will only sign off on a may-issue gun permit if you're his friend. It happens all the time. It's almost normal.

I want to hear about the abnormal corruption.

Give me your stories about corruption that escalated from everyday straight into the realm of farce. If you've heard a story that makes you wonder at the chutzpuh of some politician, or makes you consider the difference between a bureaucrat and a mob boss, I want to hear it.

To start, I want to share the story of when a small community organization tried to bring free internet access to San Francisco. Free internet for the poor. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Wrong.

One SF Supervisor told us she would vote against it unless we promised to fund quarterly field trips (eg to the zoo) for the kids in her district. Another promised to vote against it because we wouldn’t give free laptops to all of SF.

One Supe rejected it because poor people needed “training to use the Net.” Countless low/no-income residents spoke at hearings about how they had computers and knew how to use the web, but couldn’t afford Comcast. Supes mansplained back to those very people that they were wrong.

Later, this guy speculates that he had the bad fortune to propose this project in an election year when a bunch of supervisors didn't want to give the mayor a political win.

 

[Terthna]

In my city, there was a vote held on whether or not we should build new schools. In the end, the result was that the people voted against building the new schools, and they were subsequently built. Our city council doesn't put construction projects to a vote anymore; they just keep building useless crap (like a performance arts center almost nobody attends, and almost nobody could afford to attend even if they wanted to) regardless.

Fun fact; quite a number of politicians in my area only lived here for at most a few years before they got elected, and a similar number of them end up moving away after their term in office is up. It seems that we're being treated like we're nothing more than an opportunity for aspiring politicians to pad out their political resumes, before they seek office somewhere more important.

 

[Captain X]

My state has a habit of putting things to popular vote, and when it doesn't go the way they want they just introduce it in legislature as a bill and pass it anyway. Recent example is that they first asked us if we wanted to make animal abuse/neglect a felony, upgrading it from a misdemeanor, and the populous voted against that. The next legislative session they made it that way anyway.