Let's not pretend that a slick lobbyist hired by vested interests to talk to representatives with no money changing hands is comparable to the stuff that goes down in high corruption countries, where there's literally briefcases full of cash given to politicians.
> “…it was publicly disclosed that Boehner in the last week of June 1995 walked around the House floor delivering six or more of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. PAC checks.
> “in the same week Boehner was giving out the checks on the House floor, the House Appropriations Committee met in its room in the Rayburn House Office Building and voted down (17 to 30) an amendment that would have ended the government's price support program for tobacco. Seven Appropriations Committee members each had received a $500 check from Brown & Williamson's PAC, including one for the committee chairman, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.).”
This kind of activity seems to refute the “objective difference” you’re imagining.
You were talking about high corruption and low corruption countries in general. Did you forget your own context?
The point that I and several others have made is that what “low corruption” often corresponds to is that corruption has been legalized in various ways.
Re the amount, the fact that it’s a token is kind of the point in those cases. It’s a public display and reminder to everyone where their campaign funding is coming from. Other amounts are often donated at other times, and larger amounts may come from other companies in the same industry. They didn’t change their vote for those specific checks, it’s more like a reminder that the vote that had already been bought was coming up.
Their tactics apparently worked on you to make you inclined to ignore the exact kind of blatant corruption you had just been criticizing. It’s not “low corruption”, it’s corruption that’s apparently less easy for many people to recognize.
> 500, even in 1995, is a token amount of money to the representatives.
In the post-soviet countries (many of them now in EU), you can't imagine how much you can "get done" by "gifting" the right person a bottle of their favourite poison - which costs a token amount by almost any standard (like, high school pocket money).
My point is that these are two names for the same thing, an attempt to justify the "rules for you but not for us" on the moral spectrum. Microsoft can launder open source code with generative AI, but don't you dare even look at their sources.
> Let's not pretend that a slick lobbyist hired by vested interests to talk to representatives with no money changing hands is comparable to the stuff that goes down in high corruption countries, where there's literally briefcases full of cash given to politicians.
That's just a make-up, parfumerie on top of the same exact concept: use money in some way to corrupt decision making.
Just because in some countries it's done with a veneer of legitimacy, in a way that doesn't look as dirty and disgusting as "those other over there with their dirty hands full of bags of money", it's just corruption with a façade of high-class. It's still the same thing, just has more layers of indirection and make-up on top.
> The CPI measures perception of corruption due to the difficulty of measuring absolute levels of corruption
So the difference consists primarily in perception, the slickness of it all as you put it? How well we can hide corruption with a facade of legality and civility. Somehow the crude briefcase full of cash feels more honest and direct.
"a facade of legality and civility" is literally the point of rule of law. It's why if you detain someone it's a crime, but if the police do it it's normal law enforcement.
Let's not pretend that a slick lobbyist hired by vested interests to talk to representatives with no money changing hands is comparable to the stuff that goes down in high corruption countries, where there's literally briefcases full of cash given to politicians.