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Comment by fuzzygroup | Hacker News Reader

No. While there has always been corruption, this is a different order of magnitude.

It is not, the west corporations history of corruption in Latin America, Africa and Asia is at this same level but was heavily under-reported/persecuted, for obvious reasons.

As the old joke said - We already figured out what kind of woman you are madam, we just haggle about the price.

If someone is going to sell out the commons - isn't it better if they sell them out for a high price not a pittance.

The important difference is not the price, but the extent of the corruption. A politician whose public persona is clean, law-abiding, respectful of norms and institutions, and generally benevolent will be limited in how far they will go to abuse their power and sell out their country -- even if they are secretly very cynical and amoral. A politician who is openly corrupt, above the law, norm breaking, and vindictive will be free to do much more damage.

It is absolutely.

A murderer is not the same as a person that committed genocide.

A very silly argument you tried to pull there.

The crime is the same, Trump just wants higher payment.

Crimes have degrees of severity.

Also Trump is already a convicted criminal.

The Netflix deal with Obama for $50M and book deals for $65M are a bit blatant. Certainly a $8B crypto rug pull is far worse by a few orders of magnitude. I think it’s weird that these are the new standards, I really hate presidential politics. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was the least damaging and he was forced to give up his family farm.

One difference is that the few on the right that I know (I’m sure a biased sampling) think that what Trump did is wrong but those on the left seem to have forgotten all about Obama’s deals or worse they think that its kosher.

Maybe you can explain why the Netflix deal is corruption? The deal was signed after he was out of office (2018). Did he or people in his administration create policy that benefited Netflix in exchange for this deal? Was there any sort of quid pro quo? Where is the abuse of office?

The ability for Netflix to operate as it does is entirely dependent on banks lending it vast sums of money, the same banks that staffed the Obama admin who continued the bailouts. Corruption doesn’t have to be a direct quid pro quo, that’s the standard needed for bribery, I did not suggest Obama was bribed. Because it’s in the interest of the corrupt to hide their practices the general way of avoiding it is to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and on that standard I believe Obama has failed.

There's a difference between favors and corruption, there has always been. It's something called regulations. We the people must tolerate a certain amount of favors, but there's a line: You cannot accept these favors while in office, particularly so when the exchange involves a public good or decision. You must sell your peanut farm before you hold office. You can't accept a plane from a foreign government in exchange for use of an airbase while in office. The things you do in office must be for the people. The things you do after may be immoral but they don't impact your decisions while in public service.

Obama bailing out banks, and banks giving loans to Netflix, then later Netflix making a movie deal for Obama is not corruption.

Did Netflix in any way ask Obama to bail out the banks? How many other businesses were those banks giving loans to?

> he was forced to give up his family farm.

I don't know where this narrative comes from. He wasn't forced to do any such thing. He voluntarily put his family peanut seed business into a blind trust when elected, with his personal lawyer as trustee. He subsequently only gave up the business once he took control again after his presidency, because it was in massive debt.

I’m assuming the property was mismanaged during his presidency, which means it largely amounts to the same thing. Evidence I would be looking for would be evidence that it wasn’t mismanaged, or that if Carter had retained control that the farm still would have gone bankrupt.

In the general case it’s near impossible to find a third party who can run your family farm as well as you can, a task made more difficult if that person also has to be a lawyer.

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