What I've never understood is why the donation translates into favors?
It seems to me, if I was running, that I'd be willing to take a donation from anyone. Then I'd vote in the best interest of my constituency. So on the face of it I've never understood corruption. Taking the money isn't the bad thing, it's then casting the vote.
What're they gonna do? Accuse you of being corrupt after you vote against them? You just voted against them! Clearly they didn't buy your vote! Case dismissed, not guilty! So that's one thing that makes me have no sympathy for politicians that do this, it's just dumb. Take the money and run. A friend once told me that there are people that try this, they get found in a ditch having "accidentally" driven their car off the road or found with forty-seven gunshot wounds sustained while "cleaning" their revolver. I'm sure that type of thing doesn't happen anymore though.
So I don't think it's as simple as bribery, I think it's more subtle than that.
I think the type of person who will act in good faith isn't even given the option. I think at the state level the money acts to prevent good people from even entering politics. Nobody who actually sat and talked with me at a fundraiser would believe I was capable of voting in their favor, unless they could make a credible case that it would be good for the district.
So I think it's corruption along those lines. The donation lets you make the argument, and time is limited, so you don't necessarily hear the counterargument, or the people who would make that counterargument don't ever get a chance to have access.
So that gives me a little bit of sympathy to stupid people who end up winning an election, because they get taken advantage of by malicious operators. It takes a certain kind of discipline to go ahead and seek out people who disagree with you (particularly if alot of those who disagree with you insist on calling you a mean racist simply based on the color of your skin or your gender). My congressman very kindly wrote back to me when I informed him of his poor decisions that he appreciated my support and would be doing whatever the hell he wanted anyway. It was a form letter. I take some small comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one who's opinion he is deliberately not listening to.
That's two scenarios that I find self-consistent with the behavior I see in the modern professional politician. They're either very corrupt, or very stupid. The third scenario is someone like Ted Cruz, who just comes off as a total asshole. Acting entirely on his own convictions (or the convictions of his wife if you listen to people who go to his church).
So we have:
1. Corrupted individuals (or native sociopaths)
2. Morons
3. Something else that looks like an asshole to at least half the country at a time.
I'd like us to try expanding the size of congress to see if that helps. I think if we had one congressman for every four thousand people that would dramatically increase the difficulty of bribing all of congress. It would also stress the hell out of the system for controlling who can run. Like, if we ninja-changed that, even with a two year head start, the RNC and DNC would be like...fuck. You'd be scraping the paint off the back room to find that many people to fill those seats without also reaching into classrooms and tagging in professors, teachers, real people who've had time to think about these issues on their own.
Right now, you only need about 40 or 50 million dollars to get essentially every vote you'd ever need to go your way, which is not a large enough number. If congress had 5-6000 members, bribing any single one wouldn't make any damn sense.
As it stands now, for a billion dollar business it doesn't make sense to not bribe congress. It is almost a business imperative.
The bureaucrat bribe does make more sense, and is a form of corruption I am personally familiar with. Sometimes it is institutional, the environmental regulator that is all up your ass until you pay the inspection fee and then suddenly everything is fine. Nevermind that your neighborhood is polluted, every polluter paid the permit fee so all is well. That's the sort of corruption nobody thinks of as corruption, but its going on all the time everywhere.
In rural america, it's pretty common for businesses to do whatever they want in terms of fire codes in exchange for buying the fire department new engines/facilities/equipment. Is that corruption? I mean, I can make a solid argument that the local community gets a shitload more benefit from a 2.7 million dollar fire engine than they would out of whatever random building element wasn't quite right.
There are bribes that grease the wheel of progress when the strict regs don't quite address the current situation, and then there are bribes that undermine the nature of democracy and use the arbiter of force to deprive others of opportunity.
I don't understand the bribed though. I've been offered an envelope full of cash and just laughed in their face. Not because I'm unbribable, but because the amount you would need won't fit in an envelope.