

The supreme court decided that getting money in exchange for services rendered is OK, and that influence peddling is fine.
The court case that decided this was an asshat that gave a government contract to a company, went to that company and asked for money in exchange, and they gave it to him and the facts of that wasn’t disputed. The US supreme court said that’s fine, so now a bunch of people are getting their corruption cases re-opened because the US supreme court didn’t think it should be illegal.
In addition the supreme court also said companies can give money to a senator after they’ve won an election (to “pay off debt”) which is just a way for people to buy influence.
The citizens united case made it so that companies can just buy influence. You can’t however, since for normal people there’s a limit to how much you can spend, but companies can just spend as much as they fucking want.
The US is incredibly corrupt, and it’s in the open.










This is also why SMTP is such a fucked up protocol. It was designed so that you could just follow the email protocol by hand. HTTP as well followed this philosophy (up to 2.0 at least). A decade or so ago there was a bug in outlook where you couldn’t have a line with only a period in it because that’s the end-of-email signal in SMTP.