Brazen Unapologetic Corruption
It continues to confound me the degree to which the American people are under-reacting to what is happening to their country.
Yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump-owned Truth Social is selling API access to Donald Trump’s tweets for $100,000 per month. The value? He says things that influence the market, and if you want to beat the market’s organic reaction, having access to those posts seconds faster can make you a fortune.
This brazen corruption is not unique. He has turned the presidency into his personal money printer. Worse, the entire American political establishment is going along with it, not only the MAGA Republicans.
The fact that American politicians can and do trade stocks and invest on the basis of information they learn from the positions they hold is mind boggling. There is no incentive to act in the public interest when their congressional salary is not their only source of income nor even their primary source. It is so rampant and wide-spread that the financial disclosures of their conflicts of interest don’t even make the news any more. Campaign Legal has gathered the data, showing that nearly half of American Congressmen and Senators hold individual stocks (rather than only investment or index funds), with only a thin majority of them being Republicans.
There are people on the American left, in office, with integrity, who understand what is happening and what needs to happen, who are calling it for what it is. That they are not participating in that corruption is what is preventing them from having sufficient power and resources to deal with it.
The old Democrat establishment are more concerned with Zohran Mamdani than they are with Donald Trump. They are more worried about a social democratic mayor fixing things that “centrists” have said could not be fixed than they are about a president who is destroying everything they claim to stand for, about Bernie Sanders or AOCs’ popularity than their own neoliberal policy failures.
It can only be assumed that they are enjoying cashing in on the instability and volatility being created by the president, that they do not want to kill the golden goose.
To address the president’s overt corruption, they also have to acknowledge and address their own practices. They have to seal the holes in their own ethical rules and conduct. Instead, letting the president make billions of dollars through crypto, branding, and selling access and services offers cover to those making more discreet fortunes. They can get angry while quietly laughing all the way to the bank.
I have been struggling to understand why their country as a whole continues to act like this president is somehow normal, that the differences of opinion and action are little more than partisanship. That the corruption is just this man being himself.
Meanwhile, Trump is systematically dismantling the core structures of American democracy while ripping off the people for every dollar he can get his hands on. Even the war he is waging in Iran is more about market manipulation and making himself and his enablers — I doubt he has any genuine friends — rich.
Selling stock trading companies quicker access to his market manipulation is quite literally announcing his own corruption while inviting high rollers to buy into it. It is to dare the country, the judicial system, the political system, the people, to do something about it. It is a statement that he is so corrupt and that the system is so beyond repair that he does not even have to pretend it is anything else.
Where are the American people? This is way past a simple vote in the midterms. It is not something that can be solved with a form letter sent to a member of congress. It will take concrete collective action — something that a country built around the idea of individualism is not prone to doing — to address the kakistocratic kleptomaniacs currently in charge of their country.
David wrote, "It continues to confound me the degree to which the American people are under-reacting to what is happening to their country."
I started to become confused by the USA in the 1990's when I became more politically active. I opposed US government policy generally, not merely policies from one of the two false binary political party brands. In those days I thought the problem was that the Canadian government was being forced by their violent southern neighbour into bad policy. This turns out to be the same mistake that “Democrats” generally make of assuming the “Republicans” are the problem (or that “Republican” supporters are making that the “Democrats” are the problem).
Once I started to move outside of Western European worldviews, which includes individualism and universalism, many of these things started to make more sense.
When a population is always looking for some “other” to blame for problems, fixated on individuals, they are never able to see the flaws in the systems around them. This is especially true of the systems they personally identify with, even if they are able to become aware that they are systems external to themselves.
The more I learn about Canada and the USA as systems (not places or groups of people), the more the problems I constantly observe make sense.
These institutions (Canada and the USA) are part of the “Other” group of Westphalian governments that are part of the UN’s Western Europe and Other Group (WEOG). Since they exist outside of Western Europe, and yet are founded on Western European worldviews, they are incapable of growing because of a built-in identity crisis that doesn’t apply to Western European governments that actually exist within Western Europe.
Questioning the origin mythologies of these institutions, and looking at the legal and policy realities of these institutions, is seen as a threat to the very existence of these institutions. So, people feel stuck pointing their fingers away from themselves or the institutions they identify with to some other individuals which must be the problem.
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While Western European settlements started earlier in the regions these institutions claim control over, each seems to be a snapshot of the flawed thinking of the era they were formed.
The USA was the first to break away from merely being part of the British Empire, so it is not surprising that it may be one of the first of the “Other” members to fully collapse. Canada, Australia and New Zealand made gradual changes, and remain parts of the rebranding of the British Empire to the British Commonwealth.
* United States: March 4, 1789.
* Canada: July 1, 1867
* Australia: January 1, 1901
* New Zealand: November 25, 1947
* Israel: May 14, 1948.
Israel has complex origins as the (re)Colonization of Palestine has been a core project of specific branches of Protestant Christianity for centuries. What would today be called Christian Zionists forming colonies in North America starting with the Pilgrims in the 1620s and the Puritans in the 1630s. While there was some rebranding in the 1890s, the origins of the project that is currently called Israel is from 1580s Anglosphere Protestant Christianity.
I don't know why you would struggle to understand why the country puts up with this. The US administration and congress, as a whole, is corrupt. As you pointed out, there are not many that do not trade on the stock market directly, which has frequently been reported in the news, the public is used to reading these stories and undoubtably simply shrugs their holders, thinking 'another corrupt one.. Or possibly wishing that they could do the same thing,.