“Corporations facing federal lawsuits and investigations aren’t giving millions to Trump’s inauguration out of the kindness of their hearts. They are trying to buy goodwill.”
An analysis released Monday in the wake of new Federal Election Commission filings shows that the Trump administration has dropped or paused federal enforcement cases against at least 17 corporations that donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, an indication that companies’ attempts to buy favor with the White House are already paying off.
In the new analysis, the watchdog group Public Citizen cross-references FEC data released Sunday with its own Corporate Enforcement Tracker, which documents companies facing federal cases for alleged wrongdoing.
Public Citizen found that corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement lawsuits donated a combined $50 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Trump raised a record sum of $239 million for his second inauguration, the new FEC filings show.
Inauguration fund is the craziest this on earth. Why should anybody donate to the inauguration if not to bribe the new administration?
This is what a failed state does.
Amazon really going hard on the bribes to get government cases dropped.
The next 4 years are going to be the Wild West in terms of big business regulation. If country survives the next 4 years, the next administration is going to be fighting an uphill battle to clean up this gigantic mess.
If we somehow have any allies at the end of this, I would be very surprised.
They are trying to buy goodwill.
English is a funny language, I thought this was called a bribe but it’s just good will after all
Honesty and straightforwardness are no more part of the journalistic typical speech. They are mostly busy to be presentable, even when their job suffers from this.
The thing to understand is that a journalist and an outlet have different motivations and goals. A journalist seeks to get the truth put int front of people. An outlet seeks to keep the wave forms going out. The outlet has a variety of motivations for this, and each outlet will have different balances of these motivations. The most common motivations are money, a desire to get the truth in front of the people, and personal political influence for the owner of the outlet. Given that the journalist and the outlet are not necessarily aligned, the journalist makes a deal with the devil every time they work with the outlet. They are ultimately making a choice between more reach and more integrity because the biggest outlets skew further and further away from getting truth in front of the people being their primary motivator.
So what does this all mean? It means you can actually learn a lot about how news media works by studying street art. The basic mechanism of street art is that you are co-opting a wave form to disseminate your message to people who didn’t ask for it. A jounralist does the same thing when they make their deal with the devil at the outlet. They follow the rules of the outlet to get their message in front of people who would not have otherwise seen it. The good news is that this outlet, commondreams, has a strong track record of seemingly being motivated by getting the truth in front of people. However, they have a strong enough record and reach that they also have the attention of the FCC who could be wielded against them, so it seems the editors have requested the language be adjusted to keep the waveforms going out.
However, there’s also another possibility. Journalism, just like street art, is a community. What one journalist takes up, so will another. If one journalist talks about “purchasing goodwill” suddenly that’s the terms that this will be discussed under by multiple journalists. Some journalists for the less good outlets weaponize this and perform a process called “sane-washing” where they create new euphemisms (newspeak, effectively) to let other journalists pick up and use. In the street art community we call this a “meme.” Yes. It’s a meme. We’re all netizens. We know what a meme is and how they work. How many memes have you disseminated without ever thinking about “Who created this? Why did they create it? What was their goal? When did they have the time to create this (if the meme is time relevant)? What is this meme saying to me, what is it saying when I share it, and is that something I want?”
If you’re like most people, you probably didn’t put that much thought into any of that when disseminating a meme. But a lot of meme creators do. You know. It’s ironic. Alex Jones called his show “info wars” and then just broadcast a bunch of bullshit. But at the very core of his show was a truth. There is an information war going on. It’s just that Alex Jones is not on the side he claims to be. His show’s purpose was to disseminate right wing memes and influence culture at large to become more right wing. In this he succeeded.
Anyway. What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah. “Purchasing goodwill.” So. There’s several possibilities here.
- The journalist originally wrote “bribe” and the editor changed it
- The journalist originally wrote “purchasing goodwill” because it’s a meme that started with another journalist
- The journalist originally wrote “purchasing goodwill” because they’re performing the sane-washing (I think this is the least likely scenario given the outlet)
If you want real actual news about the things going on, here are some outlets to keep an eye on:
(worth noting, I am biased towards anarchist news sources because of my world view. But! Because of my world view, I also think it is better to present your bias and say “Here’s what I think and here’s how it influences how I engage with the propaganda machines around us” than it is to say “I’m an unbiased sources writing from a position of authority” because the latter is inherently a lie. Everyone is biased. Everything is biased.)
I think your points are well made, but there is another possibility to consider, and that is deliberate language choice for effect. They certainly could have simply called it a bribe, and that would be true enough, but in my opinion lacks ‘punch’. We’re so used to that sort of behaviour that many people would pretty much just go “yup, that’s expected” and move on. By deliberately, and somewhat archly, using understatement, the reader goes “Buying good will?? That’s not buying good will, that’s bribery! Buying good will shouldn’t even be a thing!” thus neatly bypassing the first level of cynasism that a simpler statement would run in to.
I’m not going to say that us definitely what happened here, but looks quite deliberate to me. Language can be weaponised in many different ways, for different causes.
Journalists and news outlets should strive to be as neutral as possible by only presenting the verifiable facts and painting the picture for the reader/viewer. Good journalism should not make assumptions, speculate, inject opinions, or tell you how to feel about something. Use of loaded words or phrasing meant to evoke an emotional response should generally be avoided.
There is no proof these are bribes (though, yes, it’s pretty obvious to anyone with common sense what they are). CommonDreams is rated to have a “Left” bias, so it’s pretty safe to assume “buying goodwill” was the safest, most precise phrasing they thought they could use given the facts of the matter.
What you’re describing / seemingly demanding is colloquially called “a rag”: a biased news source that tells you what you want to hear whether all the facts are there or not.
Whist I would very much like a news source that just presents the unbiased facts, no such thing can exist as all of what we consume is mediated by humans, from story selection, to information gathering, to how that information is filtered, presented and finally how the reader processes it.
Even choosing to use the word ‘bribe’, the phrase ‘buying goodwill’ or just calling them ‘donations’ would be an editorial decision that would influence the reader. Depending on the reader each of those phrases would inspire different opinions. A reader who is more disposed to being positive about this administration may find ‘buying goodwill’ to be just about tolerable journalism, ‘bribe’ to be outragious slander and ‘donation’ perfectly reasonable and accurate. A more left reader would probably consider ‘donation’ to be unacceptable whitewashing, ‘buying goodwill’ to be euphamistic, and ‘bribe’ to fit their world view best. Therevis no phrasing that would avoid an emotional response, so either this can’t be reported, or the publication chooses to do so in line with their own biases.
There is also a constant tension between presenting just the bare facts of the current matter, and contextualising them for the reader, who may not be fully versed on the matter. How that contextualisation is done is also going to affect the reader’s perception.
There is, however, a very large difference between the presenting the information with some bias, and “a biased news source that tells you what you want to hear whether all the facts are there or not.” I would agree with you that the latter is a “rag”, though I would classify it that way for the willingness to draw a conclusion unsupported by fact, rather than necesarily for having bias. All sources, even your own senses, will give you a biased view of events. The critical thing is to acknowledge that and understand the bias you’re being presented with. Trying to make sure you consume sources with a variety of different biases is a good way to try to balance that, though I personally find it hard to stomach anything further than moderately right of my personal views anymore.
Thank you! According to your explication of memes, which I agree on, the whole thing would be quite sad and risky, socially speaking. Because it means we all would be giving away our ability to pick a very specific term for an already-existent one, possibly since the second option is just cheaper, in terms of effort. This regardless that the one we chose is not the most suitable and could even be misleading, included “sanewashining”. For example, people reading that Meta is trying to buy Trump’s goodwill will be probably more gentle in judging Meta, while the journalust goal was maybe to describe how Meta is a dangerous company (if it wasnt his, it is surely mine). This specific attempt partially failed, of course. So “sane-washing” is in itself a sane-washing term to indicate a more or less serious kind of misinformation. In this sense, smaller newspapers are more likely to avoid this linguistic simplification, since they are probably less controlled by statal agencies (maybe I am wrong?). I appreciate very much your insight, and though I know everyone is biased, I will take a look at your suggestions.
Google has been losing every part of it’s antitrust cases I’ve been aware of since though. Is there one I’m unaware of?
Maybe they didn’t bend the knee enough.
Probably. That or Trump is happy to take the money and stiff them like he does contractors. Still though for an article claiming cases are being dropped writing multiple paragraphs about Google, who is not having they’re cases dropped (again please correct me if I’m wrong), this seems wildly dishonest. I know Zuckerberg had to testify recently about Facebooks trial too but afaik that’s not being dropped either?
In before “Duh, we already knew that”.
There’s a difference between an assumption and having data to confirm the hypothesis.
We desperately need to elect a president willing to set the standard of holding past presidents accountable for breaking the law.
Biden was a waste of four years and now it’s getting worse due to his refusal to act.
I th8nk what we’re seeing today is the end result of pardoning Nixon.
Nixon resigned and got pardoned by his own VP who was almost certainly involved in the same crimes.
And Dems were facing a party split because they refused to hold anyone accountable and pivoted hard right with Jimmy Carter.
Which is a real brainfuck to a lot of people since Carter is so far left compared to the last 3 Dem candidates. At the time tho, Dem voters thought he was too conservative to be a Dem.
That’s how fucked things have gotten.
How does this not break our bribery laws?
SCROTUS said President is above laws.
That’s the neat part: it does!
Law? There is no law in the U.S. until, by some miracle, we get rid of Cheeto Chimp and all the rest at the top.
IMO: that’s not going to happen. Not even in '28.
Donvict is a thug.
Trump drops profits for corporations who funded his inauguration, too.
Now do something
What other plausible counter hypothesis is there?
