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.
Correct. They did not need to discuss anything and they presumably are
just smart enough to discuss nothing. It suffices that Hunter steps off the plane with his father, the Vice-President of the United States. Hunter no doubt has his appointments in China scheduled already. But, for the sake of argument, even if he didn't, he'd be approached soon enough!
Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy.
Seriously exaggerated. He's a fish swimming in a pool that goes back 80 years, and that is similar to the pools that preceded it over prior centuries.
And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.
Here's the key. It is not only what federal law allows, but how it was written and rewritten to legalize yesterday's corruption. In this, Biden would have played a role in the rewriting process.
Who among us has not admired or supported people who have engaged in or provided cover for this kind of corruption? How did we convince ourselves it was not corruption?
This example illustrates why corruption is not a very useful category for understanding and rolling back the doings of the ruling class and the power elite. Corruption (like conspiracy) implies crime under an applicable law, an indictable crime. But that's rarely the case, and thus a distraction.
The valid categories are class and system. There is a two-tiered legal system, by design. There is a system of political economy and ownership designed to benefit and protect and grant legal impunity and privilege to the ruling class and its managers (in a sufficiently complex system the latter effectively become ruling class, or can be more important as members in the system, regardless of how big a chunk of property they own themselves).
It goes back to conceptions and legal structures of property rights hundreds of years old, preceding the founding of the United States (the Constitution of which was practically a utopian project of this mode of thinking). A hundred turns later, and especially after the big neoliberal turn of which he was a small part, Biden's doings are the routine practice of a whole management class and a ruling class that celebrates nothing more than making money by whatever means are available, and that has begun to take on the qualities of a feudal caste.
Framing this as corruption is, first, overwhelmingly likely to fail in court, as if it would ever get that far. (Maybe in Ukraine, in abstentia!) And it is prone to bad apple or exemplary punishment theory, as if bringing down this one case would cleanse the system of the "corrupt," or, in the terms of the Creature from the NYNJ Development Mobster Swamp himself, "drain the swamp."
They will be found innocent of the supposed legal violations, as their actions will turn out to be legal. We all know it's happened that corporate-state lawyers have lobbied to legalize previously criminal behaviors that they then immediately engage in.
Second, it veils the systemic and routine nature of the actions, which are conducted as everyday business by tens of thousands within the upper class, and even perceived as necessary conduct in maintaining the system.
This can only be addressed through revolution, by whatever means. Other than full fascism, which would represent the worst and most catastrophic outcome, the likeliest revolution (and I'm not calling it likely) would involve a complete rewriting of the underlying legal code, which in many ways preceded the "market" system and the ideologies through which it is naturalized. Short of Bernie Sanders winning in an 82% landslide, and then improving on that in the midterms and reelection, it's hard to imagine. In other words, also impossible.
The difference between Biden and Trump, to repeat myself, is that although the latter began as ruling class and establishment by definition, as a big property owner and money launderer in NYNJ with excellent local political connections ("corruption") and total media cover for his "organization" (in fact, celebration as a success story), he is used to doing business on a more personal, bone-breaking level, through his personal diktats as owner of "property." He is unable or just doesn't want to adapt to the White House context. So he actually manages to find the loopholes by which his behavior can be framed by his opponents as genuinely in violation even of the "laws" reserved for the top tier.
However, this also fits his fascistic understanding of how things
should work. He is the boss, his dictate should suffice. He doesn't do nuance, as Bush said of himself. He doesn't do winks and nods. His religious faith is in the vitalism of the lone entrepreneurial individual who creates all "wealth" through his will and creative power, even though he's pretty much the most sorry possible avatar of this fabled creature.
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