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points by TheArcane 3 days ago | 0 comments

Oligarchs don't face consequences in an oligarchy silly

GP apparently expects the US to return to normality, without ever facing any consequence for these last few years of idiocy and blatant corruption. "Whoopsie, sorry everybody"

[–] njovin 3 days ago

Can't speak for GP, but I hold a similar 'justice doomer' viewpoint for two reasons:

1. The current president has shown no hesitation about pardoning anybody he owes a favor to or feels allegiance from.

2. SCOTUS has give the office of the president basic blanket authority to do anything and everything under the sun for "official acts".

3. Half of our two-party system has abdicated all oversight powers for the current administration.

When you combine those 3 things, it's hard to imagine how somebody like Trump or Elon could possibly face federal consequences. Hell, Trump could say he launched his shitcoin "as an official act to help prop up the failing Biden economy" and I don't imagine SCOTUS or anyone else would push back much.

[–] ribosometronome 3 days ago

There's not much recent history of particular consequence facing for this sort of thing in the United States, financially or politically. It's not like we locked up bankers after the housing bubble collapsed or punished people for lying us into Middle Eastern wars.

[–] 0xDEAFBEAD 3 days ago

Rule-of-law means you only lock people up when you can show a law that they broke, not based on bad vibes or generic poor decisionmaking.

[–] TripolitianFish 3 days ago

I have a hard time pinning down when we stopped handing out actual sentencing for stuff like this. Nixon walked after Watergate, but at least the fall guys get hit with (some) time. Reagan walked after Iran-Contra (grand treason by the way), but his fall guys also walked. Even moving away from unitary executive talking points, like you said nothing really happened to the 07-09 gang, midlevel analysts got pinched for manipulating LIBOR, I'm trying to think about the last time there was proper consequences, IIRC most of the big wigs at Enron pled guilty, and it turned the big five into the big four. Maybe SBF? Even then, that was one guy catching several dozen people's utter carelessness and EA fueled mania.

I really would love to figure out when we phase shifted into this mode, maybe it was always like this, I'm frankly too young to have anything else to compare to.

[–] ActorNightly 3 days ago

Has nothing to do with oligarchy, has more to do with that SpaceX is providing valuable services, the disruption of which can be worse than punishing those in charge.