But first, a post.
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Trump still was the favorite to coast above an impeachment without conviction. But if there were a script in which he hangs himself by lack of impulse and anger control, he's trying hard to write it. It's one thing to engage in passive-aggressive obstruction against an investigation into a crime that never actually happened, which was #Russiagate in a nutshell. Here the crime, in the sense of a legal violation, definitely appears to have happened. Ironically, he had ways to do the exact same thing legally, if only he'd been patient and informed himself a bit in the ways of legal skulduggery and used the veiled language and protocols of the diplomats. But he was always about going it alone with a small crew, like he always has, confusing Trump Org with the U.S. government. Now the crime is something that one should be punished for, except that no one ever IS, as they do it a bit more skillfully than personally trying to shake down the Ukrainian president for favors on the phone. And yes, it's a minor crime on the grand scale, of course: the same call involved clearing weapons sales to Ukraine, which of course is a far more serious and bloody business, though fully legal within the system.
Jeffrey St. Clair in the weekend Counterpunch column 'Roaming Charges' wrote: I think we can all agree that refusing to send military aid to Ukraine would have been a wise decision by Trump. But trading the slaughter of civilians in eastern Ukraine for political dirt on HRC and the Bidens pretty much exposes his America First foreign policy as little more than diplomatic narcissism, which, of course, we’ve known all along but it’s useful to have it confirmed in his own “Rough Trade Transcript“….
All this and nevertheless, it will soon pale in comparison to what the fool is doing to himself (and the worse thing he is doing to the country) right now, the last couple of days, if no one in his circle can make him shut the fuck up. Accusations of treason (it wouldn't be: even if he were right, it would be a conspiracy against the head of state, who is not the country in wartime). Threats to have to "the spy" executed. Sorry, that's what it is when the president mouths off about it, it's a lot more than a drunk at a party saying someone should be shot. Threats to order the arrest of a congressman, which of course are close to threats to suspend Congress. Never mind what you think of Adam Schiff, I'm telling you how this will go down. If he pulls the trigger on that, he faces a high probability of non-compliance from the enforcing agency. And now he's talking about how this will lead to civil war -- some bloody version of which he may well be able to inspire among his personally invested followers, whom he is at the same time telling to watch out for the Democrats coming for their guns.
All in all, these may not even be top 10 in the list of barbaric and evil things this character has spoken, but they are escalations in terms of the legal actionability and legitimacy that he is granting to his would-be impeachers and others who want him out pronto. You'll tell me there is no scenario in which Trump pushes 20 Republican senators to vote to convict? I'd think so, I'd think there wouldn't be even one Republican senator. But he seems to be testing that certainty.
JackRiddler » Mon Sep 30, 2019 8:16 am wrote:.
Theory: Biden and Trump are both elements of the same wealthy classes that rule and are sustained by a political-economic system designed in every way to concentrate wealth and power in these classes. The system is complicated and dynamic, features a multitude of actors including varieties of apparatchiks and self-service actors, and evolves through crisis. It's almost perpetually in crisis, and lives from them, but also loses operational coherence over time because the responses to many of the crises are works in progress and at least initially sloppy and provisional, until they are patched into something workable. Other factors that fray its coherence include legacy procedures that clash with current needs. Also, it's a system that enshrines petty competitions and thus constant conflicts among the players. Some of the conflicts are based in actual differences of sub-class or factional interests. Some of them happen just because there is a clash over which player gets a goodie.
Set-up, the Bidens: Biden and Trump functionally occupy different roles. Biden's is within the management of the political apparatus, Trump's is as a self-service entrepreneur (management, entrepreneur, most of these terms should be in quotes!) engaged in the capture of rent and plunder and generally in autonomous side-grift. Biden's son straddles the two roles. He has made a career of shadowing his father's activities so as to extract payments through their shared name and presumed connection. He shows up on the sidelines wherever his father is an obvious actor within the policy being pursued and receives contracts from actors who wish to influence that policy or acquire the appearance of being close to the action. It's probably done professionally (again, the poverty of the words) in the sense that they don't need to coordinate or communicate directly about this, and are well-advised to avoid that. It suffices that Hunter can offer himself to an outfit like Burisma, or be called in by it, as the lawyer and consultant Hunter Biden, who only happens to be (ha ha, wink and nod) the son of the vice-president who is charged with conducting policy in a given sphere, in this case Ukraine. Hunter doesn't have to do much more than that to receive a form of tribute on the assumption that it will benefit the tribute-givers just on the strength of the appearance of the influence that being connected to him confers. What he provides otherwise as a consultant may or may not be useful. Biden and Hunter may genuinely be operating separately on a question such as whether pressure should be applied to fire the prosecutor, which is being decided in what passes for the councils of state within the administration and its environment of policy lobbyists and international bodies.
Set-up, the Trump: Coming from a different sector with other functions and rules, Trump has learned to operate in a more directly transactional, less regulated capacity when seizing what he wants or demanding that something be done his way. This is largely a matter of Trump not even knowing how to do this a different way, not maintaining the apparent formal separation between his decisions and the channels through which they are carried out, since this was how it worked in the world that he operated within in the past, which is several levels lower than Biden's organizationally even if Trump is presumably much richer. You make a call and get your men in to do the thing that you want. If you get it, they are rewarded, if you don't, they are fired. Things do not just happen as in Biden's world, as a matter of the whole world having been rendered routine to the opportunism of the son. Now president, Trump also doesn't know how to do it like Biden, and absolutely doesn't want to learn how to do it that way. It doesn't satisfy his need for immediate gratification and personal dominance expressions. He does it like he's still operating on the level he rose up in, the one just above the Tony Soprano equivalents but below the banks within the NY-NJ development gangster milieu. It's a cultural difference. This is not how you steal things at Biden's level. You don't want your hand in there, grasping and potentially visible. You just let the money flow toward you.
Psychology: Of course, as men of a certain culture, they are not very different: Both especially enjoy the opportunities for macho dominance expressions, and make these into spectacles, enjoying the applause. These moments are where they each can produce their own downfall, where they feel like demigods and masters with their worshippers arrayed before them, and are thus at their blindest. I'm not going to argue Biden has more self-control than Trump. They have both been able to express this side of themselves constantly within contexts that allowed and seemed to celebrate it. But now they are both in different worlds: Trump as the big tribal chief in the White House, Biden as the presumed presidential front-runner. (He's been running for a long time, but was never this far on top in the league tables).
Story: From all appearances, as a matter of consensus among the policy makers charged with managing the Ukraine transition, Biden was supposed to do the job of pressuring for the firing of the prosecutor, and the prosecutor was actually corrupt and, contrary to what we seem to believe, avoiding a Burisma investigation. In this the prosecutor would be like his predecessors and presumably all of his potential replacements and successors. But the crunch had come: Burisma had been caught out laundering in Britain, and the UK complaint was not being pursued in Kiev. More fundamentally, appearances of US power had to be maintained at that moment. Ukraine was in the process of being regime-changed and so a determination was made (in places you will never know exactly) that the old prosecutor had to go, just as the finance minister was replaced directly by the former State Department official in charge of handling financial relations with Ukraine.
Detour: Yes. Look it up. I'll post more later. Or wait, I did in the Kiev Discredited thread, see this post. "An American citizen born in the U.S. [to Ukrainian immigrant parents], a State Department official formerly charged with managing financial relations with Kiev, was offered the finance minister job in the Maidan government - and took it. She was given Ukrainian citizenship on the day of her appointment. She promptly made the agreements that ran their foreign debt to IMF-EU up by another 40 billion dollars. Who owns your country, baby? And here's the kicker: After two years she got to call mission accomplished on that mess, and took the job as the chief of PROMESA, the Puerto Rico debt junta! They really don't bother to disguise anything and they don't have to, never had, and never will, because the miseducation system, the culture of political apathy, and the corporate media make sure almost no one hears these stories or learns the contexts and histories and reasons why they matter.")
The Drama: Is the prosecutor's removal good for Hunter, is it bad for Hunter? Who knows? It's almost certainly totally indifferent. Hunter's playing his own grift, and it's legalized. (Trump's grifts were also mostly legalized, de facto if not de jure, back when he was playing at his accustomed level.) Off in other cities, other board rooms, Hunter's just watching the contract money roll in, and it's as green as it should be. That is all that matters to him presumably. Joe may not even know about it. It's better for them if he doesn't. Poor Trump has the disadvantage of having to do his own dirty work, and the flaw that he really likes it that way and doesn't want to adapt to the way things are done in a White House as opposed to a Trump Tower.
What's next? In any case, now that this has developed to this point, it likely will be Biden who will be ruined as a candidate, while Trump after impeachment will not be convicted in the Senate and remain as beastly as ever going into the 2020 campaign. This is the fundamental strategic idiocy of the Democrats on the electoral level at work. It's an intentional, planned idiocy, since they're not allowed to gain popularity by advocating the popular policies, since these are contrary to the political-economic system designed in every way to concentrate wealth and power in the classes that rule. That's the Democrats' conundrum. They can't just win by speaking truth and doing the things that the majority wants, since that would be too much system change.
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Further reading. Risen is suspect, especially the last couple of years after his own travails and possible disciplining by the security state and discovery of #Russiagate as if it was real. But this report, unfavorable to Biden, was written in 2015. It shows how grift at this level works, unconscionably, but it also makes clear why the Hunter Biden grift was legalized business as usual. The article has been spun now to falsely imply the prosecutor was the good guy whom Biden forced out so as to save Burisma for his son. That's not how it worked, and I say that with some confidence because that is not how it needed to work. After the February 2014 coup, Joe's playing the guy charged by US-international policy consensus to force Ukraine to "crack down on corruption," including Burisma, which of course isn't going to happen even after the prosecutor is replaced. The son is the guy who stepped up to Burisma and said, I can help advise you in this difficult time. The two functions do not need to be coordinated. The son is well-advised to just take the money, play lawyer, and avoid exposing his father to any quid pro quos. They're both doing what they do and being rewarded for it, just at that time. The son's action is predicated entirely on the fact that he has this father, so it's a grift, but it's not illegal, and presumably the father's proud that his son is off the coke and so good on the make. Only later does this turn into a problem for the elder Biden (aaaaaaawwww) and a club for Trump to grab and start smashing furniture, including his own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/worl ... -ties.html
http://www.nytimes.com
Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch
By James Risen
[Image] Hunter Biden at a campaign event in 2008. He sits on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies. CreditCreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.
But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.
Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.
But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.
“In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Pyatt said. Officials at the prosecutor general’s office, he added, were asked by the United Kingdom “to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.”
Mr. Pyatt went on to call for an investigation into “the misconduct” of the prosecutors who wrote the letters. In his speech, the ambassador did not mention Hunter Biden’s connection to Burisma.
But Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the involvement of the vice president’s son with Mr. Zlochevsky’s firm undermined the Obama administration’s anticorruption message in Ukraine.
“Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message,” Mr. Chow said. “But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues.”
Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Hunter Biden’s business dealings had no impact on his father’s policy positions in connection with Ukraine.
“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer,” she said. “The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company. The vice president has pushed aggressively for years, both publicly with groups like the U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum and privately in meetings with Ukrainian leaders, for Ukraine to make every effort to investigate and prosecute corruption in accordance with the rule of law. It will once again be a key focus during his trip this week.”
Ryan F. Toohey, a Burisma spokesman, said that Hunter Biden would not comment for this article.
It is not known how Mr. Biden came to the attention of the company. Announcing his appointment to the board, Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who is chairman of Burisma, said, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”
Joining the board at the same time was one of Mr. Biden’s American business partners, Devon Archer. Both are involved with Rosemont Seneca Partners, an American investment firm with offices in Washington.
Mr. Biden is the younger of the vice president’s two sons. His brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in May. In the past, Hunter Biden attracted an unusual level of scrutiny and even controversy. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. He received a commission as an ensign in 2013, and he served as a public affairs officer.
Before his father was vice president, Mr. Biden also briefly served as president of a hedge fund group, Paradigm Companies, in which he was involved with one of his uncles, James Biden, the vice president’s brother. That deal went sour amid lawsuits in 2007 and 2008 involving the Bidens and an erstwhile business partner. Mr. Biden, a graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, also worked as a lobbyist before his father became vice president.
Burisma does not disclose the compensation of its board members because it is a privately held company, Mr. Toohey said Monday, but he added that the amount was “not out of the ordinary” for similar corporate board positions.
Asked about the British investigation, which is continuing, Mr. Toohey said, “Not only was the case dismissed and the company vindicated by the outcome, but it speaks volumes that all his legal costs were recouped.”
In response to Mr. Pyatt’s criticism of the Ukrainian handling of Mr. Zlochevsky’s case, Mr. Toohey said that “strong corporate governance and transparency are priorities shared both by the United States and the leadership of Burisma. Burisma is working to bring the energy sector into the modern era, which is critical for a free and strong Ukraine.”
Vice President Biden has played a leading role in American policy toward Ukraine as Washington seeks to counter Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine. This week’s visit was his fifth trip to Ukraine as vice president.
Ms. Bedingfield said Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine with his father. She also said that Ukrainian officials had never mentioned Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma to the vice president during any of his visits.
“I’ve got to believe that somebody in the vice president’s office has done some due diligence on this,” said Steven Pifer, who was the American ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. “I should say that I hope that has happened. I would hope that they have done some kind of check, because I think the vice president has done a very good job of sending the anticorruption message in Ukraine, and you would hate to see something like this undercut that message.”
A version of this article appears in print on
Dec. 9, 2015, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Vice President, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch.
