Whether it’s Hunter Biden or Ivanka Trump
Sarah Chayes in the Atlantic on Hunter Biden’s legal and socially acceptable corruption:
The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?
How indeed? I didn’t know any of this. Chayes is a former foreign correspondent for NPR, so that’s useful.
She dispenses quickly with the “Trump is worse” objection – of course he is, but that doesn’t make this shit ok.
All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted.
Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed amid a popular revolution, giving its gas a newly strategic importance as an alternative to Russia’s, housed in a potentially democratic country. Hunter’s father was comfortably into his second term as vice president—and was a prospective future president himself.
There was already a template, in those days, for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit such a crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
I did not know that either. How revolting.
Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.
Some of these gigs require more ethical compromises than others. When allegations of ethical lapses or wrongdoing surface against people on one side of the aisle, they can always claim that someone on the other side has done far worse. But taken together, all of these examples have contributed to a toxic norm. Joe Biden is the man who, as a senator, walked out of a dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.
It’s not a million miles from Ivanka’s profiteering. It would be nice if it were but it’s not.
To me the clear pattern in the polls is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders share a lot of the same base, and Warren is establishing a clear lead over Sanders and is closing the gap with Biden, even beating him in some recent national polls (and in many early-primary-state polls). I’m hoping Bernie drops out and Warren consolidates their supporters and surges way past Biden. Even if Bernies doesn’t drop out, if he continues to weaken the voters may drop him on their own, to the same effect.
All of that to say here’s hoping we won’t have to worry about Biden and his baggage much longer.
Off-topic, but in reply to the above… My suspicion (and hope) is that the reverse will happen – Warren will fade, Bernie will regroup and win the nomination.
Skeletor@1:
But… that’s not the point. Biden isn’t the point. It doesn’t matter if he loses the primary, we’re still stuck with a culture of powerful people cashing in on their influence in a way that has become normalized, and some of those people are going to be “ours”, no matter what tribe you call your own. Everyone who is nominally Left(ish) is brushing that aside with a string of Whataboutisms and pretending like it’s of no importance, for one reason or another, and you’ve just done it again.
Here’s a good article from 1998 about the Harvard/Russia Oligarch connection. What a disastrous missed opportunity that all was. “Fre market” fundamentalism paving the way to fascism.
https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/
Thank you LD.
Concluding paragraph of that article:
I was in Russia in 2016 on a trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow and while our time in Moscow one of our tour guides told us that there were more billionaires per capita in Moscow than in any other major city in the world.
This guide was a Russian and I had no reason to doubt his assertion. And then I remembered: in 1994 we took a trip to the Canary Islands and stayed in a Time Share with another couple. It was owned by a gentleman who also owned an airline in Scandinavia. While there, we attended one of those “sales” pitches and noted that there were a large number of Russians there at the same time. The salesperson told us that the owner’s airline flew to Moscow and brought out a full plane load to this resort for free! I queried by asking “wasn’t he taking a chance?”
She advised that ‘oh no, if they were getting on the plane, they were coming to purchase a time share’. In fact, they had had their best week in sales EVER. Prices at that time were 6,000 British Pounds and the pound was still doing very well in financial markets. In fact, these folks were bringing out tons of money that had been ‘loaned’ from countries such as yours and mine. After all, there was not much of value to invest money in Russia! As well, it has come to my attention that the most expensive/exclusive properties in the city of London have been purchased by these same oligarchs. I imagine that London has just as many voracious politicians as Washington does.