Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
Not only do we see that politicians, at least at the national and state levels, not have proper incentive structures to do what they are theoretically supposed to (represent their constituents’ interests and uphold rule of law), they actually have perverse incentives: the more wealth they can extract from the dying middle class, the more civil liberties they can purge to accumulate ever-greater power for their masters in the permanent bureaucracy, the greater their rewards — in the form of campaign cash, lucrative speaking engagements, lifetime appointments to corporate boards, etc.
If there’s one political maxim that encompasses the Armageddon Prose ideology, it’s that carrots and sticks — and especially sticks — are the only thing that makes a politician, with the very rare exception of a Ron Paul type, act right.
And we definitely need some new carrots and sticks around here, because hundred-millionaire Nancy Pelosi and her posse are filthy animals rolling in ill-gotten cash piles that grow by the year as the plunder goes unchecked, like dragons hoarding gold.
Related: Congress Quietly Passes Pay Raise for Itself
Performance-based incentives are great ideas — for instance, if your constituents’ health experiences a net improvement as measured by chronic disease rates, or if their net wealth increases under your reign, you get a bonus and some kind of official accreditation to use in your next run — but I’d, again, promote the stick in addition to the carrot.
Say what one might about the more authoritarian regimes of the Far East, but they at the very least maintain a theatrical pretense of punishing corrupt public officials and even private white-collar criminals.
Via TIME (emphasis added):
“It’s Southeast Asia’s biggest ever fraud, amounting to $12.5 billion and embroiling some of Vietnam’s top bankers and officials. And on Thursday, a Ho Chi Minh City court reached its verdict: a death sentence for Truong My Lan, a highflying 67-year-old businesswoman who began life hawking cosmetics from a market stall in the southern city before in 1992 founding Van Thinh Phat, a sprawling company which developed luxury apartments, offices, hotels, and shopping malls.
In 2011, Lan was enlisted to shepherd the merger of the troubled Saigon Joint Commercial Bank, or SCB, with two other lenders in a plan overseen by the Vietnam Central Bank. But until her arrest in 2022, she stands accused of using SCB as her personal piggybank, embezzling billions via illegal loans to herself and confederates through thousands of shell companies at home and overseas. The verdict is the first death sentence for a private businessperson for financial crime.
The case has sent shockwaves through Vietnam’s business community and is the highest profile collar of Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s sweeping “Blazing Furnace” anti-corruption campaign. The full impact of Lan’s sentence—a family member told Reuters she intends to appeal—is not yet known though there are clear implications for international firms looking to Vietnam as they diversify supply chains away from China.”
Of course, there has to be a transparent judicial process in place with all the conventional rights afforded to defendants for any real public-execution-of-corrupt-officials scheme not to devolve into French Revolution territory — although I am a big fan of the guillotine as a remedy for public corruption, personally.
Furthermore, in the interest of good governance the corporate campaign cash spigot needs to be turned off as well. As far as I am aware, even at this late stage of an American empire in decline, elected representatives still take oaths to defend end uphold the Constitution — not Goldman Sachs’ and Boeing’s bottom lines.
Via Marketplace (emphasis added):
“A new report from AdImpact predicts that the 2023-24 election cycle will be the costliest of all time, with candidates expected to spend cumulatively more than $10 billion in political pitches across various platforms. For major candidates, fundraising hasn’t been an issue. The campaigns of Joe Biden and Donald Trump raised more than $24 million each during the third quarter.”
“Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle — we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020. Of course, the usual inflation caveats apply,” OpenSecrets executive director Sheila Krumholz notes.
Which means more money from special interests with their hands out, more favors promised to said interests by candidates, and more cash at the end of the rainbow for all of that “service” once they “retire” from Congress in the form of cushy board appointments and hundred-thousand-dollar speaking engagements.
Of course, all of these revisions to how we handle the political class as free people comes with the massive caveat that they would never enact these changes of their own volition — in fact, they’d be liable to start a brutal suppression campaign to prevent even 1% of such an agenda from going through.
Lasting change will only come from outside the governing class.
What we need is a political insurgency with some teeth. Like #DraintheSwamp, but coming from someone who really means it rather than just as a catchy bumper sticker slogan, who has an army behind him ready to make it happen.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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