The level of grift seen in American society today is not normal.
It's worse than what I've seen in other Western countries by a lot.
Do I have hard data to support this? No. But anecdotally, everyone - everyone - I know who visits America has noticed this.
"The people over there are like wolves". "They're shameless". "They're all so focused on money". "That whole culture is just scams on scams on scams". "Christ, they're all so fake!" - All actual quotes, with emphatic expletives removed.
I know it's not a common topic of conversation for Americans, but the world hates us now. We're the number one threat to peace and stability since 2003, and only getting worse. Yes, I am ashamed of us. We had so much potential.
Presidents are grifters now. The military industrial complex is a grift. College is a grift. Healthcare is a grift - to an absurd and horrifying level. Banking is a grift that hurts the poorest the most, far worse than in other countries. The news is a grift. The legal system is stuffed to the brim with grift right up to the Supreme Court and right down to the police on the street.
It's been normalized to an extreme degree, at every level of American society. "I'm a hustler". "Don't hate the player". "Looking out for number one", etc. These are not normal phrases in other countries! This is seen as the sign of a very sick culture, one where to survive you need to fuck over other people; one where fucking people over to "get your bag" is seen as a necessity rather than as an abhorrence.
Again - this isn't normal in other countries. We've always had caveat emptor, but the idea that it's fine and normal to get 8 spam phone calls a day would be absurd in any other wealthy country.
This is, imo, fallout from the relentless attacks on anything that could be construed as socialist or taking care of people - itself a massive grift.
The war on terror was a grift - one that has resulted in trillions of wasted dollars - and it resulted in absolutely no consequences for anyone except the whistleblowers who exposed atrocities, war crimes, and global surveillance.
And we also suffer from lots of grift, which became normalized in the 90s. I think it comes from certain hardcore libertarian interpretation (which became popular with the rise of neoliberalism), according to which, making money at someone's expense is perfectly acceptable.
So for example, if someone sells some BS to a 70 year old grandma with shady practices, it is considered her problem, and government can't (and shouldn't) do anything about it. At best, it can "educate".
From what I hear, other Eastern-European countries suffer from this malaise as well.
Two places this is evident:
1) It is very, very common for small business owners to be "under-pricing". They price what seems fair & just for what they're doing, which has a tendency to be (sometimes far) under the greed-is-good price that the market could bear. They're often resistant to raising prices on ethical grounds.
2) Children quite consistently have notions about fair pricing that are directly in-line with #1, starting just about as soon as they learn about commerce and tending to persist until someone "corrects" them.
This "natural" feature of capitalism that "can't" be got rid of because it's in our "nature" generally has to be taught.
If anything this is due to social media amplifying and glamorizing people that loudly demonstrate how fit, rich, happy or whatever they are so they can sell their method of getting fit, rich, happy, etc.
The USA has always been an individualistic society compared to most, the entire point of capitalism is to leverage individuals greed. That spurs them to create more value for society than leveraging their sense of duty.
The problem we have right now is that the governmental agencies that are supposed to curb bad actors are not performing well. The FCC should have ended robo spam calls years ago.
As a non-American, I can't believe someone is so self-loathing to think this...yeah sure, America is the biggest threat to peace and stability, not Russia, not Iran, not Hamas...it's definitely America.
Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex. (I’m not an American.) The way a European might have perceived America in the 90’s would have been through Hollywood. And the same person in 2005– would have perceived America through fast and ubiquitous Internet. (Thanks American State Research?)
The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered, sensationalized reality. So even if America itself hadn’t changed in that time (but I guess it did) the outsider perception of it would still have changed.
Also, from what I remember of microeconomics, the free market model assumes a number of things that are not always true in reality, at least not all at the same time: robust competition among suppliers, perfect knowledge among consumers, rational decision-making behavior. Like any model, the more reality differs from the assumptions, the worse the model is at prediction, but the basic laws of supply and demand, where the price of a good is where the supply and demand curves meet, still hold.
This really doesn't need to be expressed in plural. We have one notable example of someone who entered the race as a grift and was arguably surprised to have won. We've had plenty of candidates in it for the grift before, but only one such victor. Maybe it was only a matter of time, though.
No. If you don't want people pointing out devilish deeds, don't do the deeds.
Global opinion on this isn't due to a "complex", but a very natural reaction to the events of the last couple decades. I know it's hard to accept. Most Americans I mention this fact to literally can't accept it as true. They get quite upset if they ask for evidence, and then receive exactly that. There's loads of evidence. All the polls broadly agree, and people state the reasons why - in a nutshell, psychotic foreign policy, an easily led populace, and greed.
> The way a European might have perceived America in the 90’s would have been through Hollywood
Opinion didn't change because 'Friends' ran its course. It changed because in 2003 America's leaders chose to lie to America and the world, condemning millions to death for the sake of cheaper resources (yet again).
> The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered, sensationalized reality.
This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people? Memes?
Hollywood and the Internet have roles in all this, sure, but don't get it twisted. It was the war crimes. The murders, bombings and assassinations. The systematic torture of people who never had a trial. The displacement of tens of millions, the support of genocidal regimes, the murderous sanctions.
Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way. Sure, it feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world. How unfathomably low the floor has become. But from the outside, it's clearly just sticking your head in the sand. The gleeful and flagrant disregard of the rest of the world's opinion is really old at this point.
> So even if America itself hadn’t changed in that time (but I guess it did)
America and the world has changed, and so have perceptions. But the perception that America is an existential threat to peace and stability hasn't. It rocketed in Iraq, and has continued ever since.
It probably dipped a bit when the US helped defend Ukraine, but the Gaza thing has quite reversed that.
I think it's important that we talk about these very real problems. But it's so much easier to con people, than show them they've been conned.
Here there is a huge amount of public pressure to regulate behavior of banking sector targeting things like deceptive practices, predatory lending etc. See for example the 2017 Royal Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Miscondu...). The conservative government fought tooth and nail against and were heavily pressured into it due to massive public support for it.
I am unsure what the US equivalent of a Royal Commission is (it is essentially a Public Enquiry with the power to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath and investigative powers to gather evidence etc.) I don't think the same kind of attitude exists for a targeted investigation into the US banking sector, at least the messaging we get over here is US is very against stricter regulations.
"I know we've killed millions with torture, cruel sanctions, and pollution - but we had to! Because if we hadn't, where would we all be?!"
A stable middle east, climate change accords, fewer refugees and less pollution. 8 trillion extra dollars to spend on becoming 100% renewable while literally ending homelessness and world hunger. The humanity!
... It's like that scene where Lionel Hutz imagines a world without lawyers. Funny, but sad.
Trump was just more open about it.
Not stupid, just busy and desperate. And, sure, perhaps less intelligent than the people who are paid vast amounts of money to come up with marketing that's optimized to deceive them, while remaining just "technically honest" enough to avoid catching out too many members of the PMC who might kick up a fuss.
Do US banks still process each day's transactions in largest-first order, so that they get to charge as many insufficient funds fees as possible? (While mouthing the excuse that it's for the customer's benefit, so that their more important transactions like rent are more likely to clear, and in any case it was disclosed in the small print so there's no grounds to complain). That's the kind of thing that's illegal in any other industrialised country, and IMO reasonable to call a grift.
My intent seems straightforward to me, whether you agree with it or not. You do know that there has only been one black president? Moreover.
> > the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices;
Maybe I’m misremembering here, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen comments adjacent to this by the same author (Reed) which commented on how Obama was claiming that he was from the grassroots. Then either Reed himself or other people from the local grassroots would ask, who is this? Hence: foundation-hatched black communitarian voice; an astroturf.
Perhaps that wasn’t what Obama did. (Again: I might be misremembering and this quote is from 1996 so there are a lot of [dead] links around.) Assertive people just showing up and claiming to be the voice of X without having done any work is certainly a kind of grift.
But it’s not like any of this would make a difference to you anyway. Because when you indirectly make claims like “Trump is the first grifter president” then what a “grift” is to one person apparently is just “savvy and politically astute” to the people you find respectable. (I’m alluding here to the viewpoint that politician is the most dishonorable kind of profession that wears a suite.)
> but it seems ahistorical
Again, a quote from 1996. It was printed and all that so apparently the historicity seems fine enough (that it happened).
What I was trying to point out is that it’s not about you. No reasonable person is either going to (1) thank you personally for landing on the Moon or (2) blame you for killing half a million Iraqis.
Most bad things the US does is done by the government. And the US is not terribly democratic anyway.
So you can chill out.
> This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people? Memes? […] Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way.
I keep becoming an Honorary American.
> Sure, it feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world.
“Fallen”.
It seems you interpreted my whole comment as an excuse for what America does. When what I said was:
- Europeans seemed to love the US when their interpretation of “the US” was by way of the US (Hollywood)
- Europeans seemed to start disliking the US when they saw what America is like by way of the Internet
I can’t fathom how that is a compliment.
Your pre-2003 amnesia is interesting but oh well; it seems that it can go in either direction.