avidamoeba

You can read more about his political record and ideology here.

No, the average consumer has no idea what to do about it. Which is why the respinsibility has to shift to data holders. But that won't ever happen without a hard push by people. It's cheaper to put the responsibility on the peasants.

Irony is dead.

Yup, that's the point, it's not about being a fan. Especially in the sea of well-funded right wing content online.

Hasan is doing important work.

That reminds me to donate to Rob Ashton's campaign. 😄

I will point out that in Canada, there's not much money in politics. We don't have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

For sure. Political campaigns are still too expensive for the average worker in Canada. The way I tell who is being represented is by looking at who and what's being prioritized. The LPC for example, while campaigning in part to represent workers, has trampled over multiple unions during important labour disputes. Whatever the influence channels are, they seem to be effective in prioritizing coroporations and their owners.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/20484278

There's public data independently gathered by western sources on this. Like this from Harvard. You could even see the numbers on corruption shift over time.

It feels like you're starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the region.

It's an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it's given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this. It's also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can't do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

European businesses don't want tariffs, but there's still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn't their call.

To this point, I'll restate that there is competition for profit (not in a single market but profit making overall) and therefore state control between billionaires since state control modulates profits. What tariffs are good for some are bad for others. E.g. lumber tariffs are great for the lumber industry billionaires but bad for the construction ones due to increased cost of lumber. They both compete for making profit because if say lumber makes a lot more than construction for a while, they could buy construction. Cross-industry consolidation happens all the time. So when a billionaire doesn't want tariffs but there are tariffs anyway - then it probably wasn't their call. Instead it's either the call of another, or an uninfluenced politician. I think the latter is an endangered species given how much billionaires spend on lobbying and I don't think it's a more complicated explanation. In fact given how capital-intensive political campaigns are, the existence of an uninfluenced politician that rose to a position of power where they got to set industry tariffs might be more complex. Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

To be clear I am not excluding ideology entirely, I think the owner class is a much bigger driver, including significantly driving the ideology of the day at a given place and time.

E: In the hypothetical where the tariff-profiting lumber billionaire buys construction, their attitude towards tatiffs may change depending on how the profit maximization formula works now that they own both lumber and construction. It may turn out that getting rid of the lumber tariffs yields higher profits overall, in which case that billionaire and the politicians who represent them would become anti-tariff.

And then people wonder why the Chinese have very high confidence in their government. Even if they only do this to the most brazen, that still builds an image of a government working for its people. It also sends the message that corruption has limits to the would-be corruptees.