If your blackmailing someone forcing them to take cash from you can them be used to blackmail the person further. They can press on them more, because they are now collaborators and won’t get any symphony from the public or a jury.
Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)
The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into “window-looking jobs,” employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.
Very likely this. Transfers above a certain threshold are automatically looked into to prevent money laundering, so getting a big bunch of cash at once is less convenient than getting several, smaller payments.
I would think so, yeah. Purchases of over 10,000€ are automatically put under investigation, so a larger bribe would be tedious to launder. I’m not a money laundering expert tho, so I don’t know how they do it. That’s just how I would prefer to be bribed, I guess lol
Oh no no no! There is a huge difference between facism and national socialism!! I am german i know a thing or too! National socialism is based in extermination, facism isnt!
Your conservatives are faar from being nazis! Facists, yes. But not nazis! Stop crying wolf. There are defenetly nazis out there that need to be stoped!
Here’s an example of some of the things going on here. Conservatives may not consider themselves nazis. But nazis sure do seem think they have a lot in common with conservatives.
National socialism is a misnomer. The Nazis were not socialistic at all, in fact socialists were one of the first groups to be detained and/or executed as political enemies. They were pretty much just fascists with some nationalistic ideas.
The idiologie is called national socialism because their party was the Nationalsozialistische Arbeiter Partei NSDAP. Nazi is just short for Nationalsozialist (in english national socialist)
Ofc just because their name had socialist in the name doesnt mean they were socialists! Dont try to explain the nazis and what they did to a german.
You on the otherhand, seem to not grasp the difference between, nationalism, facism and national socialism. So here for you the difference: Nationalism: the belief of once nation/culture to be above and better than everyone else
Facism: same as nationalism just way more militaristic and beliefing in “the weak shall make way for the strong for they rule the world”
National socialism: all other cultures and nations should be eradicated. Belief and loyalty is the strong leader and nothing else
Every idiologie can be added with antisemitism anti christianism or any other hatret against religion
Alter, komm mal von deinem hohen Ross runter. Du bist nicht der einzige Deutsche hier und Deutscher zu sein macht dich nicht zu einer Koryphäe in Sachen politischer Ideologien nur weil du in der Schule eine 1 in Geschichte geschrieben hast. Schau mal lieber die Definitionen von Faschismus und Nationalismus nach bevor du hier deine Mentalgymnastik ablässt, denn das, was du geschrieben hast ist nicht richtig.
Nationalsozialisten waren einfach nur Faschisten mit der Idee von Großdeutschland (einer ultranationalistischen Idee, kongruent mit faschistischer Ideologie). Mit Sozialismus hatte die ganze Sache rein gar nix zu tun und zwar nicht im Geringsten.
Sure, Germany’s conservatives take payments from Putin just like U.S. conservatives, but how many handjobs have they given in a theater full of kids? They need to step up their conservative game.
From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, with the authorization and financial support of the Berlin Senate, Kentler placed neglected youth as foster children in the homes of single pedophile fathers with the ostensible purpose of resocializing them, while explicitly encouraging sexual contact between them.
I thought that sounded like a Behind the Bastards episode (The School that Raped Everybody), but that looks to be a different German child rape scandal about the Odenwald school.
The thing is, it was already known they were in contact and the politician in question claimed he did nothing sketchy. So he’s not only corrupt, or a traitor to our country, or (most likely) both, he also already publicly lied about it and there is supposedly evidence he actually accepted money. This makes things much worse for him.
His party also already claimed it’s a smear campaign, so if there really is evidence, they’ll look pretty stupid as well (although this really isn’t news).
I’ve had the “pleasure” of rubbing elbows with a few of the people currently engaged in bribery political donations. I hear the going rate is about $10k and a nice meal.
It’s some kind of not absent, but inverted moral principle. Where if someone buys you, you get bought. Even if it’s a small sum. Like as if between being for sale and not being for sale the former were morally preferable.
Maybe also some perverted understanding of valuing every dime.
Depends on the job, but I think more like 5 figures. Still enough to live comfortably, but of course not enough for these greedy fucks. The reason so many are millionaires is not their salaries.
You should see how many American politicians are just as corrupt for less money, I was surprised when I saw Devin Nunes was only making $15K from one of the bribery schemes that was supporting him while he was in Congress. I guess it all comes down to knowing your worth to the scumbags you work for. 🤷♂️
This is actually a sign of rampant corruption. Bribery is a tight market, and with a lot of politicians willing to accept bribes the cost drops significantly. It’s one of the few areas where capitalism behaves as believed.
That’s honestly the most disgusting part of it to me. The amount of money they make doing it is barely enough to insulate them from the effects of living in a worse country
If they got $250k to redirect $1m in funding to a company, I wouldn’t like it but I would understand why someone without morals would sell out like that
But it’s more like $100k over a decade at the cost of billions to the country. Half the time, they’re basically just funding their next campaign… they’re burning our society, and they don’t even come out ahead
Just greedy short sighted fools who are willing to abase themselves to scum, or they are sociopathic monsters who don’t care about anything but whatever they want.
A common theme in politics around the world is that you can buy politicians for a shockingly low amount of money. In the UK we’ve had politicians paid off for similar amounts, or politicians bought for £100k for basically their entire career.
That’s the thing. Campaigns are super expensive AND the politician doesn’t get to keep the money, so if you can find a politician who takes cash payment it’s way cheaper than “legitimate” political spending.
It’s in a twisted way a major reason mega corps like the massive expense of lobbying and PACs. Bribes are cheap and anybody can do it, but pulling together millions for PACs and campaigns is something smaller companies and individuals can’t do.
You’re often seeing the tip of the iceberg, with significantly more money changing hands under the table or being paid out with in-kind services like friendly media coverage or consulting services or loans.
This is AfD, our resident fascist clown party. At least we have a coalition based democracy, so it’s unlikely that they take over the less fascist “center”-right party.
The CxU (among others) is working on making those clowns a viable coalition partner by taking them seriously and talking to them on TV. Maybe that’s not their intention, but it will be the result if it continues.
Financing your friends and bankrupting your enemies is a strategy western nations perfected during the Cold War and employed to brutal effect in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR.
But its not a trick that’s unique to western intelligence. Chinese officially had effectively bought out Hong Kong long before it transitioned into Beijing’s control. Singapore, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the better part of the African eastern seaboard are undergoing a similar conversion as Chinese exports ramp up.
Russia’s economic influence over Ukraine was a big part of what triggered the civil war in 2014 and the Crimea takeover that same year. The Russian government has succeeded in quelling revolts in Chechnya with investment dollars in a way they never managed with military forces. They’ve got friends in Italy, Greece, and France as well as Germany, thanks in no small part with the open purse of Russian lobbyists and intelligence groups.
The whole BRICS coalition is about coordinating financial flow through these high population third-world states operating slightly outside the western periphery. Its been happening since 2008, when the western operated international financial system faulted. Every country with the means and the leadership has been building up parallel institutions, in order to buffer themselves against the next big Wall Street / London financial crash.
Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.
Some user at a .ml community the other day was mocking the idea that Russia was trying to destabilize Europe, comparing someone else’s depiction of Russia as if it was an EU4 country. This is another piece of evidence that Russia has been financing far right politicians, parties and think tanks in several countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Despite being on .ml, there’s a real issue with Tankies here. They hate the USA which…like fair enough, not exactly a paragon of virtue them. But then they go waaaay the other way and think China and Russia are utopian meritocracies, it’s fucking bizarre.
There’s a very common mental trapping in humans where, once you’ve identified a serious problem or antagonist, you immediately become more sympathetic to its opposites or declared rivals. A lot of them had a genuine, valid concern with a capitalist society that was screwing them over, turned that into an identity, and ended up in echo chambers where that fallacy wouldn’t be called out. It’s difficult to get them out of there because they feel like they have to defend their identity and their social group, so in the rare cases where they meet someone who does understand and share their valid anti-capitalist positions but is capable of reasonably calling out their campist bullshit, they immediately jump to think it’s just “another lib” and refuse to engage.
That tracks. Though I’d say it’s often less “refuse to engage” and more “refuse to engage in good faith”. They definitely engage enough to yell things with fingers in their ears.
There’s a very common mental trapping in humans where, once you’ve identified a serious problem or antagonist, you immediately become more sympathetic to its opposites or declared rivals.
Which is why I’m very proud of the World News community not to let the justifiable Israel hate go overboard into Hamas support. Most, if not all, of us appear to be smarter than that and know that the Palestinian people are who need to be supported.
Think about this for a second. Hamas has an interest in accurate internal head counts for e.g. tax purposes - they were the de-facto government of the strip, after all. Their public statements cannot be trusted.
So they wouldn’t want to know what their head count is now? Or they’re just lying about it now but weren’t lying about it then? You’re not really making much sense.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not just deliberately doing the old "just asking questions" thing and are legitimately having difficulties with understanding relatively simple concepts.
There is a difference between their internal numbers and their outside communication. It's quite easy to keep an accurate head count during peace time and they did that, for taxing purposes alone - and to maintain the level of control that they wanted as the rulers of an oppressive police state. Just in case you didn't know what kind of place Gaza was before the war.
However, they actually have no idea right now, because it's war, it's chaotic, with shifting front lines, people being displaced, caught under the rubble, disfigured bodies with no identifying marks, families getting torn apart and not knowing what happened to their loved ones, etc.
You know, the same chaos as in every other war. You can't keep accurate records under these conditions, especially considering that everything even remotely resembling an official Hamas government office has been bombed to smithereens or overrun by ground troops - but Hamas pretends that they do, with precise casualty figures published incredibly frequently. That's not how this works. Israel needed months for an accurate count of their deaths from just October 7th, despite the fact that the fighting within Israel lasted only for a day or two. Ukraine has huge "unknowns" about their population in occupied areas and where there has been or is fighting.
Yet Hamas of all people somehow are omniscient record keepers - and barely anyone is willing to question it. We then get a game of telephone of increasingly reputable parties repeating Hamas numbers to one another, until people can naively say that "the BBC" or "the UN" is reporting something, oblivious to the actual source of the information. It's as if nobody learned how to properly trace sources at school or university.
Conflating the Gaza Ministry of Health with Hamas is a very common propaganda tactic. The truth is that they operate under the de-facto government of Gaza, which is Hamas, but they don’t work for them as in pushing their agenda. Your statement of the numbers being “provided by Hamas” is entirely false tho.
Yeah, the Hamas support is weird. Hamas isn’t a popular front or anything, they’re also fucking over the Palestinian people. They took power and stopped holding elections many years ago.
The people I want to succeed are the Israeli and Palestinian people seeking to build a positive peace and a constructive cohabitation. That’s the anti Zionism I was sold on. And yes the first step is for Israel to stop massacring civilians.
Turns out Russia sucks pretty bad at real war but they’ve been excelling at these shadow ops for quite some time. The fact that they’ve bought so many plants in the US government is a sign of the success they’ve had.
He is their dictator. When people say the name of a country they generally refer to their government. For example: Iran is violently misogynistic. The Iranian women who riot against the government’s misogyny are not, I’ve met multiple militantly feminist Iranians in fact. But people understand what I mean when I say that Iran is misogynistic.
I think it’s easy to read between lines that I mean the Russian government, currently led by Putin, rather than personally accusing all Russians of being assholes.
And Hitler was not Nazi Germany?
Believe it or not, but Putin is not the sole doer of all of Russia. There are a lot of people directly and indirectly involved in all of this shit and even more so are complicit by inaction. Many Germans knew what the Nazis did to the Jews and "traitors", but they still kept their mouth shut, ratted out their friends and neighbors, or had positions directly involved with the Nazis, so that they themselves could continue living a comfy life while others suffered and died by their own country.
No, Putin is not Russia. But Russia still has a collective responsibility, and with that guilt, painting all of their hands in blood. And this type of debt will not be forgotten until a certain price has been paid.
It basically “was” proven through exposes through Cambridge Analytica, Arron Banks, and their ties to Russian benefactors. There are also strong ties of Russian influence to notable political influencers like Nigel Farage, alongside those that provided funds to the Conservative party.
I don’t think it’s really possible to get more proof outside of Vladimir Putin literally stating on the record that he was involved.
They had a serious investigation going, but that was during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister (BoJo = the Trump-impersonator with the silly hair), so it was pretty handicapped and when the investigation stopped, well:
Johnson’s government refused to release the report to the public before the general election in December 2019.
By June 2020, the report had still not been released, and the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been convened, the longest gap since the committee’s creation in 1994.
Too many Putin-worshipping Russians live in Germany. You can usually tell who they are by their names, when a 20-something guy is named „Karl“ or „Eugen“ or some similarly old-ass German name nowadays, they’re most likely Russian. It’s creepy why don’t they go live with their Führer?
Funny isn’t it…all the time our right wing assholes talk about foreign traitors but in the end it’s always them. I bet their Nazi grandfathers are rotating in their graves at lightspeed 😂
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