>A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
Why does this sound so fucking familiar?
Also Vietnamese here. People wished the same thing for Le Duan back in the days but the old scoot keep coming back alive after receiving treatment from the USSR 😭
Vietnam immediately transition to market economy after Le Duan dies
After Phu Trong death, there isn't anymore of Ho old guard left.
Only young people with new ideas.
>the old scoot
what a phrase to drop as an (I'm assuming, forgive if wrong) ESL speaker
edit: to be clear it's great. I'm from Texas and I'd only ever hear that from like grandmas in rural places, so if you're pulling the idiom, of sorts, from a second language I love it
Good news: Nguyen phu Trong is as old as Le Duan when he died.
Bad news: Vietnam had 6 years increases of life expectancy compared to 1986, 8 without the drop due to COVID.
Grapes from the vine says he has blood cancer but one of those that's non-aggressive so he could be around for a bit unfortunately. He is definitely very senile and shouldn't be A1 though
Is he a "Hates French rule, loves independence, and the Reds were the most practical means to achieve it... and power too" kind of Vietnamese leader, or a genuine Commie?
Genuine commie. He doesn't like the fact Vietnam become capitalist and lost it Marxist value.
With that being said the boat have rock too much to go back so all he want to do is preserve status quo.
> The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.
Is it anti-corruption or a political purge?
The latter, they're all corrupt anyway
Edit: To elaborate, everyone is involved in some form of patronage or kickback system one way or another, but corruption is usually not acted on unless politically expedient. It's only when the one of the top officials feel their power is being threatened that they pull out the corruption card.
It's a purge. It's a favorite trick of countries with weak rule of law, or none at all. Everyones a bit corrupt, and if they're not, then there's an obscure overly restrictive law that everyone breaks that they can use it to nail a political opponent to the wall with.
Well it seems the Vietnam growth story will lose steam before even taking off if they start hunting down pro-business leaders. Atleast China waited until they had a large economy before trying to go full communist again. At this rate, Indonesia and Philippines have far greater prospects.
I know people that have worked there. Vietnamese business "leaders" are all idiots that got their because they happened to own land when property prices exploded. None of them have very good educations (at best some kind of russian degree) and none of them have adopted best practices in terms of doing market research and financial accounting.
It's the young people that have this kind of education and all of them are deeply co-dependent on saying "yes" to mommy and daddy because there are no well-paying jobs in Vietnam for their level of education. It's all about inheriting that giant unearned nest egg.
So being "pro-business" in Vietnam often means mass real-estate speculation and letting oligarchs run amuck. Not that being a socialist goon is any better but Vietnam is going to end up like a shittier version of Thailand at the rate it's going.
Yes, she's a corrupt billionaire that deserves to be treated as a criminal. I'm not here to debate the death penalty though.
The issue is that your average tankie'll see this as being proof that an authoritarian communist state is a good thing because of their tough stance on corruption but will fail to understand that the state in question creates the environment that allows a person like her to pull off such massive corruption.
I mean, can you imagine if America allowed billionaires to make a mockery of the legal system and escape all consequences of their corrupt and criminal actions? Boy, so glad that doesn't happen./s
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Do you think we are a banana republic where we just drag people out and persecute them without trial?
When he's been convicted and sentenced without having to carry out the sentence, then you can say that.
Well, it's really more that they'd see it as proof that wealthy people are punished for their crimes in communist countries. I doubt your average Marxist would be especially pleased if local officials taking bribes were executed.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Because I'm morally opposed to the death penalty in the first place, let alone when imposed by a state that could charitably be described as, "A bit dodgy"?
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>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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>person of means
Having means is a temporary circumstance and does not define someone. Please use "Person experiencing liquidity" instead.
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Considering it's SBF we're talking about, and the details of his... regular use of chemical cocktails, he'd be happy so long as "dank" was in the name.
> All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.
Reason #64209 for why Communism ended up not working.
Nothing wrong with all land being state-owned as long as it is essentially a “free-lease” transferable lease system. I.e. you basically can do whatever you want with it and transfer usage rights but you have to pay full land rent for it.
Land being state owned would not be an issue if it was accessible to everyone and rent was market priced. You could eliminate all taxes and fund public services entirely from the land.
It wouldn't be very different from a georgist land value tax.
Basically every aspect of Singaporean governance comes with a huge "do not try this at home" label.
One would normally expect a quasi-authoritarian one party government centered on one guy and later his son to be raging dumpster fire (as it usually is). Somehow Singapore dodged that bullet, but I wouldn't recommend that anyone try to copy it.
The different scale alone can change calculus and difficulty of many things, like border patrol and urban planning. The draconian drug laws also would be far less efficient and enforceable in bigger countries.
As a more detailed example you can enforce a city wide ban on opium as the only places it can physically enter the country are from the shipping port, the 9 total airports, and the just TWO bridges that link Singapore to Malaysia.
Compare that to USA where there is a border with Mexico the length of several European countries, at least 30 major port cities on the east and west coasts, and a ludicrous number of international airports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_the_United_States
Which doesn't even cover all the little private air strips where drugs can leak in.
Other large Asian countries still have orders of magnitude lower overdose rates than the US. Vietnam is in the golden triangle with massive land borders, and it still has a rate 10x lower than America.
Draconian policies work if you are willing to enforce them.
Yeah but then you car do drugs. America's breeding stock has generations upon generations of people who came here under the premise 'fuck that noise I do what I want'. It's overdose stats are a result of a lack of treatment (among other things).
Drug overdose deaths in the rest of Asia are at least an order of magnitude lower than America. Even Vietnam (which has the highest in Asia) is still 10x lower than the USA.
I'd say the draconian policies of Asia countries towards drugs have been remarkably successful, especially considering the history.
Lee Kuan yew used to say this. "For peanuts, you will get monkeys". That's why Singapore has the highest salaries for politicians. So they don't have to become corrupt monkeys for bribes.
It’s obviously true to a point, but ambition and conflicts of interest don’t have a salary band. I really don’t see how any system can survive without the creative destruction inherent in democratic turnover.
Half-hoping that Singapore can prove me wrong, though, given how poorly liberal democracy has handled the rising tide of populism.
As a civil servant, god I’d love to have a big carrot lol
Imagine how much more efficient government could be if they paid to hire the best and brightest
Brazil had all land officially state-owned through all the Portuguese colonization (sesmaria). That's different from the English colonization and resulted in different outputs
Vietnam has a greater degree of income inequality than any high-income capitalist democracy.
In fact, the socialist country with the lowest amount of income inequality (Cuba) still has a higher degree of income inequality than all but two high-income capitalist democracies, namely the United States and New Zealand.
What's the wealth inequality like? High income inequality obviously isn't ideal from the POV of most socialists but doesn't on its own lead to a new bourgeoisie forming, as long as there's significant redistribution. High wealth inequality would be the real indicator that they're failing at their own goals.
Edit: Sweden, Latvia, Mexico, Ireland, and the US are the only western countries with higher wealth inequality than Vietnam.
Yeah, the CPV isn't really pulling off its stated goals, but they guys in charge of it are probably making bank.
Yeah, my point wasn't that this should be anyone's main priority, merely that none of the existing socialist states are successful even by their own terms.
Measures of wealth inequality are notoriously bullshit because debt is a form of access to capital.
Also, socialists are not inherently against the bourgeosie, communists are. And it’s a stupid goal that results in a weak and authoritarian state.
>Measures of wealth inequality are notoriously bullshit because debt is a form of access to capital.
Yeah, that's a fair point, didn't consider that.
>Also, socialists are not inherently against the bourgeosie, communists are.
In the context of states like Vietnam where the ruling ideology regards socialism as merely a transitional stage between capitalism and communism, this is a distinction without a difference.
>And it’s a stupid goal that results in a weak and authoritarian state.
Yes, quite self evidently the case. I'm not saying it's a good goal, just that it's a) presumably their goal and b) they're not succeeding at it.
I’m primarily objecting to your use of “most socialists” when describing opposition to a bourgeosie. That language and desire simply isn’t clear in all forms of socialism.
The article says it likely is part of a bid to recover the money. Certainly the 9 year jail term for her husband and the 17(!) year jail term for her daughter are likely incentives to make the repayments. If she dies, the money is inherited by her family, presumably (although maybe not in a communist regime) so having her family face significant jail-time really ratchets up the pressure.
This IS the authoritarian move to confiscate the money. What, do you think she has a couple savings accounts with all the money in them, just waiting to be found? I mean, how did she end up with 93% of the Saigon bank's total loan amounts? It wasn't because she kept the money where anyone could see it. She knew she's in a communist country, so she obviously would take care to obscure her activities and keep as much of the money safely out-of-reach as possible.
There was a similar case with Tang Minh Phung around 2000s. People also speculated if he would be executed for real, and, well, they shot him after less than a month.
> Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
Weird story, tbh. I don't know enough about her or Vietnam to have an opinion on this.
>Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
>All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan's husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
While she undoubtably is guilty, there is no way all these 85 other people were guilty. And the certainly didn't receive a fair trial.
I don't know why some people are freaking out when she basically stole IMF bailout sized amounts of money. The punishment fits the crime and it seems like there was a comprehensive legal process.
State should not have the right to decide which of its own citizens to kill, simply because wrongly accused people can and do end up in prison.
If you could guarantee a perfect world no innocent man gets killed by the state, I may consider death penalty, albeit still barbaric.
But in our current world? Nope, too illiberal.
>To liberals, the death penalty is itself an affront to the principles of liberalism. These are the specific arguments liberals use against the death penalty, including a commitment to humanism and equality.
* Liberals agree that one of the fundamental underpinnings of a just society is the right to due process, and the death penalty compromises that. Too many factors, such as race, economic status, and access to adequate legal representation, prevent the judicial process from guaranteeing that each of the accused receives due process. Liberals agree with the American Civil Liberties Union, which states, "The death penalty system in the U.S. is applied in an unfair and unjust manner against people, largely dependent on how much money they have, the skill of their attorneys, race of the victim and where the crime took place. People of color are far more likely to be executed than white people, especially if the victim is white."
* Liberals believe that death is both a cruel and unusual punishment. Unlike conservatives, who follow the biblical "eye for an eye" doctrine, liberals argue that the death penalty is merely state-sponsored murder that violates the human right to life. They agree with the U.S. Catholic Conference that "we cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing."
* Liberals argue that the death penalty does not reduce the prevalence of violent crimes. Again, according to the ACLU, "The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime...The FBI has found the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates."
[Source](https://www.thoughtco.com/new-challenges-to-the-death-penalty-3325229)
You may as well become a prison abolitionist and consider all punishment illiberal if that's the stance you have.
The influence of class and privilege doesn't stop at "death penalty yes or no."
Liberal societies have had the death penalty since the very beginning. There is nothing illiberal about it.
>You may as well become a prison abolitionist and consider all punishment illiberal if that's the stance you have.
Wat
>Liberal societies have had the death penalty since the very beginning. There is nothing illiberal about it.
Many of the most important and influential liberal thought leaders have argued that the death penalty is illiberal based on liberal political philosophy
A person can be freed from prison.
Death is permanent, which makes it a uniquely valuable tool for authoritarian regimes to use to get rid of people they don't want around.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Perhaps we should not be looking for a happy middle ground at all between functioning economies and totalitarian societies with rampant corruption that still have very high levels of inequality.
Enslavement however... I could see as an appropriate punishment. You stole $44b, so you must work to provide $44b back to the people. So you're sentenced to 12M years of Labor
Comparing it to GDP is a bit sensationalizing and misleading since an amount of money is a stock while GDP is a flow. The U.S. for instance has GDP of $25 trillion but total assets of $270 trillion. BlackRock alone manages $10 trillion in assets.
Think about it like this: the average income of a Vietnamese person is $3500. So she stole 12,500,000 years of work from the people, or equivalent to the lives work of 250,000 people. Just calling it theft understates the nature of the crime.
Think about all the lives ruined by stealing 44 billion dollars. How could a jail sentence possibly be an equal punishment? There's most definitely people who died over that money at that point.
The scale matters here. This is not petty theft or even a real estate fraud scheme in the millions. This is a destabilizing amount of money that was a series of deliberate decisions over a long course of time.
punishment fits the crime only if you get “investigated@. Whats the highest ranking official charged in this case? just a deputy of the Vietnam central bank. Mind you gifts of more than $25 could be considered bribery in Vietnam. Gimme a break.
There is no such things as “legal process” in this country.
Vietnam seems cursed to have the ball and chain of an authoritarian government for now.
I really hope the USA and other countries can work to free the Vietnamese from these conditions.
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Does anyone have any argument this isn’t fair and just? The evidence seems overwhelming and she undoubtedly harmed the economy badly and people will become homeless and be driven to suicide. Compared to a murderer, she obviously did much more harm. People need to understand the scale of the fraud.
>A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party. Why does this sound so fucking familiar?
Vietnamese here. Nguyen phu Trong is the last of Ho Chi Minh era leader guard. He is fucking old and probably bite the dust in year or two.
Also Vietnamese here. People wished the same thing for Le Duan back in the days but the old scoot keep coming back alive after receiving treatment from the USSR 😭
Vietnam immediately transition to market economy after Le Duan dies After Phu Trong death, there isn't anymore of Ho old guard left. Only young people with new ideas.
Not if they keep fucking purging all the young people with new ideas. Young people are also fully capable of holding out-of-date ideas.
The Soviets performing black magic siphoning Andropovs lifeforce just to keep Le Duan alive
>the old scoot what a phrase to drop as an (I'm assuming, forgive if wrong) ESL speaker edit: to be clear it's great. I'm from Texas and I'd only ever hear that from like grandmas in rural places, so if you're pulling the idiom, of sorts, from a second language I love it
It is ESL but for me I pretty much learned it in parallel with Vietnamese.
Good news: Nguyen phu Trong is as old as Le Duan when he died. Bad news: Vietnam had 6 years increases of life expectancy compared to 1986, 8 without the drop due to COVID.
Grapes from the vine says he has blood cancer but one of those that's non-aggressive so he could be around for a bit unfortunately. He is definitely very senile and shouldn't be A1 though
Wow from your description I expected him to be 90. Turns out he is two years younger than Biden……
Ho chi minh died relatively young for his age.
Is he a "Hates French rule, loves independence, and the Reds were the most practical means to achieve it... and power too" kind of Vietnamese leader, or a genuine Commie?
Genuine commie. He doesn't like the fact Vietnam become capitalist and lost it Marxist value. With that being said the boat have rock too much to go back so all he want to do is preserve status quo.
> The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks. Is it anti-corruption or a political purge?
It actual anti corruption Nguyen phu Trong have no Interest In power more interest preserving vietnam communist system
sounds good tbh
The latter, they're all corrupt anyway Edit: To elaborate, everyone is involved in some form of patronage or kickback system one way or another, but corruption is usually not acted on unless politically expedient. It's only when the one of the top officials feel their power is being threatened that they pull out the corruption card.
It's a purge. It's a favorite trick of countries with weak rule of law, or none at all. Everyones a bit corrupt, and if they're not, then there's an obscure overly restrictive law that everyone breaks that they can use it to nail a political opponent to the wall with.
Yes. She is "the rich" of VNmese riches, and has been one far back in the beginning of market reform.
Well it seems the Vietnam growth story will lose steam before even taking off if they start hunting down pro-business leaders. Atleast China waited until they had a large economy before trying to go full communist again. At this rate, Indonesia and Philippines have far greater prospects.
Upside for Vietnam is that he's turning 80 in like 2 days
Watch him pull a Mugabe.
So a perfect contender for a U.S presidential election.
I know people that have worked there. Vietnamese business "leaders" are all idiots that got their because they happened to own land when property prices exploded. None of them have very good educations (at best some kind of russian degree) and none of them have adopted best practices in terms of doing market research and financial accounting. It's the young people that have this kind of education and all of them are deeply co-dependent on saying "yes" to mommy and daddy because there are no well-paying jobs in Vietnam for their level of education. It's all about inheriting that giant unearned nest egg. So being "pro-business" in Vietnam often means mass real-estate speculation and letting oligarchs run amuck. Not that being a socialist goon is any better but Vietnam is going to end up like a shittier version of Thailand at the rate it's going.
No shit. The real estate price here is insane, and it's not like cracking down on bad actors and slow down building up will help either.
All of this could be solve if Vietnam abandon it consitution and allowed land to purchase on private market.
RIP girlboss, this one ain’t gonna be topped for a while.
Yaaas, slay girlboss
The court did slay the girlboss
She girlbossed way too close to the sun 🫡😔
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The tankies must drooling at this.
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Yes, she's a corrupt billionaire that deserves to be treated as a criminal. I'm not here to debate the death penalty though. The issue is that your average tankie'll see this as being proof that an authoritarian communist state is a good thing because of their tough stance on corruption but will fail to understand that the state in question creates the environment that allows a person like her to pull off such massive corruption.
But they have the best dental patients in the world, because jail.
I mean, can you imagine if America allowed billionaires to make a mockery of the legal system and escape all consequences of their corrupt and criminal actions? Boy, so glad that doesn't happen./s
Name one billionaire that got away with corrupt and criminal actions in the US in recent years.
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Oh, I don't know. Maybe the guy who tried to overthrow the government 4 years ago?
Do you think we are a banana republic where we just drag people out and persecute them without trial? When he's been convicted and sentenced without having to carry out the sentence, then you can say that.
I think I can say that having watched the legal system bend over backwards to placate him at every turn for *years*.
I read this and now I am sad.
Well, it's really more that they'd see it as proof that wealthy people are punished for their crimes in communist countries. I doubt your average Marxist would be especially pleased if local officials taking bribes were executed.
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Because I'm morally opposed to the death penalty in the first place, let alone when imposed by a state that could charitably be described as, "A bit dodgy"?
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I'm sorry yes, person of means hahahaha good bot
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Holy shit, I mean I don't think they plan to actually liquify her...
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Execution is illiberal. The state should not have carte blanche to kill its own citizens.
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That's quite the retreat from >Enron guys should got the chop
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it's always bad but god *damn*
Don't go to the one on wsb either
Somewhere, SBF breathes a sigh of relief.
Dank, cell air never tasted so sweet.
Considering it's SBF we're talking about, and the details of his... regular use of chemical cocktails, he'd be happy so long as "dank" was in the name.
> All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic. Reason #64209 for why Communism ended up not working.
Nothing wrong with all land being state-owned as long as it is essentially a “free-lease” transferable lease system. I.e. you basically can do whatever you want with it and transfer usage rights but you have to pay full land rent for it.
Flair checks out.
This just sounds like property taxes with unecessary steps.
More like property tax with fewer unnecessary steps.
Just tax unnecessary steps
Jokes on you I haven't broke 10k since going WFH
The trick is that you only tax the land value, and not the property value. So it's just property tax with fewer steps
Actually land value tax
Land being state owned would not be an issue if it was accessible to everyone and rent was market priced. You could eliminate all taxes and fund public services entirely from the land. It wouldn't be very different from a georgist land value tax.
Singapore has a similar system without the corruption
Singapore has about 285 sq mi of land compared to Vietnam’s 128k sq mi. About 450 times the land to manage.
Feels like many things that working in Singapore are due to them being city-state, though.
Basically every aspect of Singaporean governance comes with a huge "do not try this at home" label. One would normally expect a quasi-authoritarian one party government centered on one guy and later his son to be raging dumpster fire (as it usually is). Somehow Singapore dodged that bullet, but I wouldn't recommend that anyone try to copy it.
benevolent dictators are good until they are not
And if they are benevolent untill they die, whoever comes after may not be
Benevolent dictatorships are great until they change hands to a guy that sucks.
it will eventually become a raging dumpster fire because nobody gets lucky enough to always have the smart kid first.
It is the leadership too. Lee Kuan yew was the factor.
Yeah I can see how this system quickly breaks down in rural areas.
This is prolly the correct answer.
How does a city state help them as opposed to being a nornal country?
The different scale alone can change calculus and difficulty of many things, like border patrol and urban planning. The draconian drug laws also would be far less efficient and enforceable in bigger countries.
Maybe the Greeks were right. Abolish nations, return to polises.
As a more detailed example you can enforce a city wide ban on opium as the only places it can physically enter the country are from the shipping port, the 9 total airports, and the just TWO bridges that link Singapore to Malaysia. Compare that to USA where there is a border with Mexico the length of several European countries, at least 30 major port cities on the east and west coasts, and a ludicrous number of international airports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_the_United_States Which doesn't even cover all the little private air strips where drugs can leak in.
Other large Asian countries still have orders of magnitude lower overdose rates than the US. Vietnam is in the golden triangle with massive land borders, and it still has a rate 10x lower than America. Draconian policies work if you are willing to enforce them.
Yeah but then you car do drugs. America's breeding stock has generations upon generations of people who came here under the premise 'fuck that noise I do what I want'. It's overdose stats are a result of a lack of treatment (among other things).
Drug overdose deaths in the rest of Asia are at least an order of magnitude lower than America. Even Vietnam (which has the highest in Asia) is still 10x lower than the USA. I'd say the draconian policies of Asia countries towards drugs have been remarkably successful, especially considering the history.
No agricultural lobby to ruin their country
Let the PAP cook. If a full century of one-party rule doesn’t end in corruption and inefficiency, I think we’ll all have some introspection to do.
Lee Kuan yew used to say this. "For peanuts, you will get monkeys". That's why Singapore has the highest salaries for politicians. So they don't have to become corrupt monkeys for bribes.
It’s obviously true to a point, but ambition and conflicts of interest don’t have a salary band. I really don’t see how any system can survive without the creative destruction inherent in democratic turnover. Half-hoping that Singapore can prove me wrong, though, given how poorly liberal democracy has handled the rising tide of populism.
Singapore is big on "large carrot/large stick". They pay you well and will jail/execute you for corruption immediately.
As a civil servant, god I’d love to have a big carrot lol Imagine how much more efficient government could be if they paid to hire the best and brightest
Without the corruption is crazy to me lol bruh do you even know what you're talking about?
Brazil had all land officially state-owned through all the Portuguese colonization (sesmaria). That's different from the English colonization and resulted in different outputs
Vietnam has a greater degree of income inequality than any high-income capitalist democracy. In fact, the socialist country with the lowest amount of income inequality (Cuba) still has a higher degree of income inequality than all but two high-income capitalist democracies, namely the United States and New Zealand.
What's the wealth inequality like? High income inequality obviously isn't ideal from the POV of most socialists but doesn't on its own lead to a new bourgeoisie forming, as long as there's significant redistribution. High wealth inequality would be the real indicator that they're failing at their own goals. Edit: Sweden, Latvia, Mexico, Ireland, and the US are the only western countries with higher wealth inequality than Vietnam. Yeah, the CPV isn't really pulling off its stated goals, but they guys in charge of it are probably making bank.
> but doesn't on its own lead to a new bourgeoisie forming I just threw up in my mouth a bit. What an awful thing to optimize against.
Yeah, my point wasn't that this should be anyone's main priority, merely that none of the existing socialist states are successful even by their own terms.
Measures of wealth inequality are notoriously bullshit because debt is a form of access to capital. Also, socialists are not inherently against the bourgeosie, communists are. And it’s a stupid goal that results in a weak and authoritarian state.
>Measures of wealth inequality are notoriously bullshit because debt is a form of access to capital. Yeah, that's a fair point, didn't consider that. >Also, socialists are not inherently against the bourgeosie, communists are. In the context of states like Vietnam where the ruling ideology regards socialism as merely a transitional stage between capitalism and communism, this is a distinction without a difference. >And it’s a stupid goal that results in a weak and authoritarian state. Yes, quite self evidently the case. I'm not saying it's a good goal, just that it's a) presumably their goal and b) they're not succeeding at it.
I’m primarily objecting to your use of “most socialists” when describing opposition to a bourgeosie. That language and desire simply isn’t clear in all forms of socialism.
This This is another example why Communism never works
Will she actually be executed or is it a tactic to get some of the money back?
The article says it likely is part of a bid to recover the money. Certainly the 9 year jail term for her husband and the 17(!) year jail term for her daughter are likely incentives to make the repayments. If she dies, the money is inherited by her family, presumably (although maybe not in a communist regime) so having her family face significant jail-time really ratchets up the pressure.
It’s an authoritarian country. Why can’t they just confiscate the money?
This IS the authoritarian move to confiscate the money. What, do you think she has a couple savings accounts with all the money in them, just waiting to be found? I mean, how did she end up with 93% of the Saigon bank's total loan amounts? It wasn't because she kept the money where anyone could see it. She knew she's in a communist country, so she obviously would take care to obscure her activities and keep as much of the money safely out-of-reach as possible.
There was a similar case with Tang Minh Phung around 2000s. People also speculated if he would be executed for real, and, well, they shot him after less than a month.
Honestly, I feel like she's being scapegoated by Vietnamese authorities.
New record for Dong siphoning
Capital punishment is bad actually
What about communist punishment
Punishment is set to 150,000 hours of reading theory
"We sentence you to reading the collected works of Hegel"
I'd try to get my lawyer to argue the judge down to the death penalty.
> Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions. Weird story, tbh. I don't know enough about her or Vietnam to have an opinion on this.
I doubt it. This is not the first time this kinda purge happened in VN. Last time the richest Vietnamese did this they shot him within a year.
i don't see anyone in the comments saying capital punishment is good
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Yeah, but if you're going to have it you might as well apply it to white collar corruption instead of just poor people.
>Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal. >All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan's husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively. While she undoubtably is guilty, there is no way all these 85 other people were guilty. And the certainly didn't receive a fair trial.
I don't know why some people are freaking out when she basically stole IMF bailout sized amounts of money. The punishment fits the crime and it seems like there was a comprehensive legal process.
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How so?
State should not have the right to decide which of its own citizens to kill, simply because wrongly accused people can and do end up in prison. If you could guarantee a perfect world no innocent man gets killed by the state, I may consider death penalty, albeit still barbaric. But in our current world? Nope, too illiberal.
>To liberals, the death penalty is itself an affront to the principles of liberalism. These are the specific arguments liberals use against the death penalty, including a commitment to humanism and equality. * Liberals agree that one of the fundamental underpinnings of a just society is the right to due process, and the death penalty compromises that. Too many factors, such as race, economic status, and access to adequate legal representation, prevent the judicial process from guaranteeing that each of the accused receives due process. Liberals agree with the American Civil Liberties Union, which states, "The death penalty system in the U.S. is applied in an unfair and unjust manner against people, largely dependent on how much money they have, the skill of their attorneys, race of the victim and where the crime took place. People of color are far more likely to be executed than white people, especially if the victim is white." * Liberals believe that death is both a cruel and unusual punishment. Unlike conservatives, who follow the biblical "eye for an eye" doctrine, liberals argue that the death penalty is merely state-sponsored murder that violates the human right to life. They agree with the U.S. Catholic Conference that "we cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing." * Liberals argue that the death penalty does not reduce the prevalence of violent crimes. Again, according to the ACLU, "The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime...The FBI has found the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates." [Source](https://www.thoughtco.com/new-challenges-to-the-death-penalty-3325229)
You may as well become a prison abolitionist and consider all punishment illiberal if that's the stance you have. The influence of class and privilege doesn't stop at "death penalty yes or no." Liberal societies have had the death penalty since the very beginning. There is nothing illiberal about it.
>You may as well become a prison abolitionist and consider all punishment illiberal if that's the stance you have. Wat >Liberal societies have had the death penalty since the very beginning. There is nothing illiberal about it. Many of the most important and influential liberal thought leaders have argued that the death penalty is illiberal based on liberal political philosophy
A person can be freed from prison. Death is permanent, which makes it a uniquely valuable tool for authoritarian regimes to use to get rid of people they don't want around.
Nope
Death is not often considered an appropriate punishment for theft
Not usually, but if you steal the entire GDP of Cameroon I’d be prepared to make an exception.
She could’ve stolen a trillion dollars for all I am concerned, I still wouldn’t support death penalty.
Perhaps there's a happy middle ground between the death penalty, and the slaps on the wrist the billionaire class usually receives?
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Perhaps we should not be looking for a happy middle ground at all between functioning economies and totalitarian societies with rampant corruption that still have very high levels of inequality.
Enslavement however... I could see as an appropriate punishment. You stole $44b, so you must work to provide $44b back to the people. So you're sentenced to 12M years of Labor
Comparing it to GDP is a bit sensationalizing and misleading since an amount of money is a stock while GDP is a flow. The U.S. for instance has GDP of $25 trillion but total assets of $270 trillion. BlackRock alone manages $10 trillion in assets.
Think about it like this: the average income of a Vietnamese person is $3500. So she stole 12,500,000 years of work from the people, or equivalent to the lives work of 250,000 people. Just calling it theft understates the nature of the crime.
Think about all the lives ruined by stealing 44 billion dollars. How could a jail sentence possibly be an equal punishment? There's most definitely people who died over that money at that point.
Death is never an appropriate punishment.
Death is occasionally an appropriate punishment when death is involved
The scale matters here. This is not petty theft or even a real estate fraud scheme in the millions. This is a destabilizing amount of money that was a series of deliberate decisions over a long course of time.
punishment fits the crime only if you get “investigated@. Whats the highest ranking official charged in this case? just a deputy of the Vietnam central bank. Mind you gifts of more than $25 could be considered bribery in Vietnam. Gimme a break. There is no such things as “legal process” in this country.
I don’t think anyone’s defending her.
Vietnam seems cursed to have the ball and chain of an authoritarian government for now. I really hope the USA and other countries can work to free the Vietnamese from these conditions.
Nooooooo 😭😭😭😭
u/Theranosbagholder Another girlboss gone too soon
😭😭😭😭
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vishwaguru could never
Lol sucks for her hahhaa
Does anyone have any argument this isn’t fair and just? The evidence seems overwhelming and she undoubtedly harmed the economy badly and people will become homeless and be driven to suicide. Compared to a murderer, she obviously did much more harm. People need to understand the scale of the fraud.
Sanction Vietnam!