[lapcat]

How we get bipartisan corruption:

• Lack of public financing for political campaigns.

• Lesser of two evils thinking, where each party gives their own politicians a pass because "the other side is worse".

• Corporate consolidation of the news media, where the culture and even the personnel of reporting and politics are interchangeable.

• "Success" (AKA greed is good) as a national ethos, with no pushback from religion, since the dominant US Christianity has somehow (is there anyone more anti-capitalist than Jesus?) been captured by amoral business interests.

[dehrmann]

Regulatory capture isn't the same thing as corruption. In cases like this and the Boeing 737 MAX, the systems are too complex to regulate without some amount of insider input. The problem is it's hard to tell when the input is constructive and when it trades off safety.

[yterdy]

Overengineering is a choice. You can take the slower way, with fewer points of failure, and while you can't (or might not even want to) always stop people from trying to a build a faster solution, you CAN make them pay for the real cost of any adverse incidents which occur under their aegis. If the ship is already burning, you treat the passengers (within reason) and you fine the carrier; you don't bail the latter out, on the promise that they'll make the former whole.

The very paradigm of allowing these entities to lobby their way to private profits and socialized losses is indeed corruption.

[lapcat]

"Two months later, SVB added former Obama Treasury Department official Mary Miller to its board"

"Around that time, federal disclosure records show the bank was lobbying lawmakers"

"Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (D), for whom Becker held a fundraiser at his Menlo Park, California, home in 2016, according to an invite obtained by The Sunlight Foundation and OpenSecrets. The bank’s political action committee also donated a total of $10,000 to Warner’s campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles."

The "insider input" is money.

[theGnuMe]

Evangelical Jesus is the Profit.