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DHS Secretary Homan was alleged to have been caught on video taking a bribe from undercover FBI agents. In the fog of
warpolitics, who knows if this is actually true, maybe eventually we'll see the video and can make an informed judgment.But forgetting whether or not it happened, the thing that always gets me on these cases is the paltry sums involved: $50K. By comparison, my landscaper drives an F150 Raptor, an $80K truck. Hard to imagine that he's driving around in something more expensive than a Cabinet member in the US government.
That got me into a rabbit hole of bribery cases across the political spectrum
The lack of ambition here is starling. I've heard cases of embezzlement in the billions (e.g. 1MDB) or at least the mid-millions.
Not sure I have an actual point here, but I guess it's that if someone is going to bribe you, insist on a real sum.
Across the board most Americans, even smart ones, regularly misestimate the sums involved in politics. For example, many are under the impression that even everyday candidates are getting giant payouts from massive corporations left and right, who lean on them hard to buy their votes. This is very frequently not the case. I challenge you to look up your local US House rep on opensecrets. Don't just look at top donors, click it and look at all donors. I don't particularly care about doxxing myself, so here is mine, a safe republican seat, which IMO is a classic angle for officially laundered bribery (little accountability if races aren't close). A bunch of PACs giving 10k apiece, but not even that many. Only 7. The rest is a lot of individuals. Far cry from the millions that people seem to get the impression about. No, a lot of these races are more small-dollar than you'd expect.
I've disagreed with people about this before, but in my eyes this suggests bribery isn't actually nearly as common as the median American believes it to be. If corporations have outsized influence, it's through lobbyists. And lobbyists are effective partly because they are effective persuaders and salespeople, quite loud and persistent and charming, and armed with industry facts and inside knowledge and expertise that cows the inexperienced. In short, they present themselves as subject matter experts, and congresspeople find themselves in little mini-bubbles of partisan opinion. Yes, congresspeople read the same news you and I do, and they probably get fired up about partisan issues more than you or I do, at least most of them. The median American thinks of them as pure egotists, ambitious people without morals. I think this is fiction. Most congresspeople are incredibly ambitious, but they also - many of them - at least to some degree initially entered politics because they were fired up about something, and had a big social network of wealthy peers (or their own money) who they could ask for money to make the first leap, not because they felt it was a good career to obtain bribes.
Politicians are people too, and vulnerable to similar psychology.
If American politics are anything like Australian politics in this regard (which it certainly is), of course this is not how bribes work. No, it takes the form of "not bribes" where while in office, corporations and donors will invite them to galas and events with fine dining, ridiculously high "speaking fees" and so on.
But the important part is when they leave office. You can expect a nice cushy job on a corporate board paying 7 figures, or a lucrative "consulting" role. The revolving door, as they say.
That's only if you're unwilling to abuse your position outright though, unlike a particular former US Democratic Speaker of the House.
I’ve thought this for a long time. But you need to at the same time create strict rules precluding them from speaking fees / going to industry for a significant time thereafter.
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