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To metaphorically do in America, what Mussolini had done in Agro Pontino, would be a big task. To do it in an unfair manner is trivial, and there exist sufficient precedent, but doing it justly requires institutions uncaptured by partisans.
Trump was indicted in what many considered, in the absense of prosecution of Bidens or Clintons, selective enforcement. That a thorough investigation of Donald would probably discover he violated some statue would be admitted by many of his supporters, but they would add that so did other polticians of his rank but who didn't
But now news has come in Biden's son has been indicted for a second time (first was for gun possesion) for evading 1.4M USD (14.6M SEK) of federal taxes. Despite being filed in today the stronghold of Democrats, the inditement pulls no punches in describing Hunter's lifestyle, claiming that he spent money on "drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes".
With this step family members of important politicians of both American political parties are facing justice. Perhaps Hunter knows more than he lets on and it will be both candidates for US president in 2020 who are suspects. In such a case the US could said to be a tragic country if criminality is so common in the ruling classes, a democratic one if no one is above the law, or an oligarchic one if there exist factions divorced from democratic oversight able and willing to besmirch beyond repair the reputation of any politician.
But if the middle option is true, and this the few unrighteous in high places made low due to their unrighteousness (and not for coming into conflict with the deep state), the metaphorical Wermacht is always a danger. A former ally of amelioration and reclamation now undoing the hard work for short-term gains. This role could be played by judges finding guilty politicians innocent due to having political opinions similar to those accused, temporarily strengthening their party but in the long term promote rot in the republic.
I don't see how it's really a stain on the nation that a relative of the President should be caught engaging in a life of sleaze and criminality. You can't pick your relations, after all. If Biden is personally implicated, that's a different story. But America can, and has, bounced back from worse. The question you always have to ask is - is it worse than Nixon?
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While the American regime has managed to convince people that rule of law and democracy go together, they don't. In fact rule of law and democracy are in constant conflict. Enforcing laws is an explicitly unpopular position in American politics. Allowing the mob to rule precludes allowing rules to rule.
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Excellent. Now let's see it pull no punches with the charges, and subsequently pull no punches with the sentencing.
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So basically Hunter did something that any normal American would’ve gone to prison for a long ass time, the DOJ tried its best to prevent charges from ever being filed, they even seemed to conspire with Hunter in Delaware to slap him on the wrist, but now because of public pressure they are forced to indict him in California.
But of course that now will prevent Hunter from testifying before Congress and will anyone be surprised if when no longer useful the DOJ enters a plea deal (more painful than Delaware but only marginally so)?
Trying to say “it works for both sides” ignores the massive purposeful missteps re Hunter Biden. His lawyers were willing to extend the SOL but DOJ let them expire!
I don't think most tax cheats who get caught "go to prison for a long ass time". The IRS only pursues criminal charges in a small number of high-profile cases (see Motte discussion and linked LessWrong post) and normally just drives you into bankruptcy with civil penalties. (There are about 1500 criminal tax prosecutions a year).
There are unfortunately no published statistics about how likely you are to be criminally prosecuted when there is $1.4m at stake (presumably more likely than for smaller amounts). It looks like the guideline sentence if you do evade this much tax and plead guilty is about 2 years.
You are citing to a laughable post encouraging straight up fraud. Often, the IRS doesn’t jail people. They do when the conduct is frequent and knowingly. The person in the post you cite will probably go to jail (if that person is even real). People like Hunter (whose CPA is basically saying “woah dude” go to jail for a long time.
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I really do feel bad for Joe regarding Hunter. He doesn’t appear to have been a particularly awful father. Reminds me of a conversation we were having with @raggedy_anthem last week, sometimes you just get an asshole failson, but then what do you do? You can’t not love them, not provide for them. Good parents hide bad children from the law, sacrifice their careers, even their lives, for them. I can’t be too mad at the participants in the college admissions scandal, who did after all only want the same advantage for their kids that the super rich get by being on the college’s board of trustees.
Regarding Trump, it’s both trivially true that the Democrats are out to get him and obvious that he doesn’t help himself and has engaged in shady conduct throughout his career without much care for the consequences. So what do you do? Moldbug suggests that rightists essentially ignore some corruption and venality in (reactionary) elites because, in the grand scheme of things, a king who skims off the top but who does what you want is always better than an incorruptible bureaucrat who doesn’t, let alone a corrupt one who doesn’t.
Others would say it matters. There are two main reasons why the Swiss have largely abandoned their vaunted neutrality over the last 25 years. The first is, of course, that the SEC, IRS and wider US government effectively threatened to destroy the Swiss banking sector if they didn’t kowtow to them. But the second, perhaps as significant, is that the Swiss started paying the price for their participation in various shadiness abroad. Huge corruption in politics (beyond what was previously considered standard), in public sector contracting, in banking, the growing influence of the Moroccan, Italian and Albanian mafias in Swiss politics and public life, things that ordinary Swiss had to pay for. The idea that one could deal with and bribe anyone abroad without concern for morality while maintaining a high-trust, low-corruption society at home was suddenly no longer as obvious as it had once been.
The money paid to Hunter by foreign oligarchs ended up in Joe's bank accounts. He used a psuedonym in emails to avoid subpoena requests. Joe is basically in on the whole thing, and he's the one who failed Hunter.
I sure hope we can get some forensic accountants on the case to track the money flows.
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How does any of that supposedly stem from the doctrine of neutrality in foreign policy?
It doesn’t stem from neutrality in foreign policy but from one of the consequences of neutrality, which was becoming a place for the world’s dirty money, whose owners had for many years (until recently) the (correct) belief that unlike Britain, Germany, the US etc it wouldn’t be confiscated by the Swiss. The problem is that this inevitably aligned Swiss executives and bankers with eg. corrupt Angolan officials, and once one sees how easy and efficient it is to do these things abroad, one eventually starts engaging in them at home.
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I think Joe was an awful father to his sons. He used them as props after their mother died. He pushed his known drug addled son into “the family business.” What kind of dad pushes his clearly incompetent son into business with Eastern European oligarchs to make dad a buck or two?
Maybe the kind of dad who correctly believes that his own political status as former VP of the world's most powerful country will shield his son from the nasty consequences that sometimes befall people who cross Eastern European oligarchs.
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The way that the political grift game works it was simply unnecessary to push Hunter onto the shady Eastern European oligarchs. As I say, Biden could make more in a single speech to an above-board ‘reputable’ US think tank, [major bank’s] annual ‘global leaders summit’ that they use to entice client CEOs into attending to pitch business at etc than Hunter would make in a year, and that’s likely even if he wasn’t a fuckup and followed the rules. Joe doesn’t want to be poor (and there are stories in Delaware of some small scale grift, I think someone here collated them), but he’s never expressed Clinton or Obama or Pelosi-tier financial ambitions.
If anything, it seems more likely looking at Hunter’s career that Joe consistently intervened to try to find employment for his son so he could try to make some of ‘his own’ money rather than doing nothing. Again, that’s hardly ‘not corrupt’, but I don’t think it suggests that Biden ordered him to do it.
I tend to agree with this take. I don't think Joe was pushing Hunter on anyone to make bucks for Joe, I think Hunter was not averse to using his perceived connections when shady oligarchs offered him plum jobs with big salaries to do nothing (but hook us up with your dad the Vice President of the USA, okay?).
I think Joe is guilty of protecting Hunter past the point where he should have been left to face the consequences of his fuck-up lifestyle, but every family will act according to their own notion of unconditional or tough love.
"10% for the Big Guy" isn't nothing. If I got 10% of my son's wages, I would rather he not work at a pizza place and might encourage him to aim higher.
Lots of parents would push their kids to aim higher than working at a pizza place, if they had an education and family network contacts. Look, the Bidens are their own family and unless there's evidence that Joe stole government money and gave it to Hunter, or vice versa, what goes on is none of our business.
Taking 10% of money that you know, I know, the dogs in the street know, Hunter is going to spend like a drunken sailor on leave is only prudent, so the guy won't be left absolutely penniless. There has to be sorted out is this a bribe or is it just Hunter being a little bitch about Dad taking his allowance away or what, but that's what all the court cases are about.
If Hunter is obtaining his money illegally, Joe knows this, and Joe is taking 10%, that's enough to materially implicate Joe right there. It doesn't matter that Joe is taking the money for Hunter's benefit.
Yes obviously, but it affects the morality of it substantially if (a) Joe isn’t doing it for his personal enrichment, which is obvious and (b) his involvement relates solely to his attempt at preventing Hunter from immediately wasting all his income. In the same way, the morality of Trump keeping those classified documents after he left office depends quite substantially on whether he forgot them or whether he took them with the intention of selling them to a foreign power, for example.
There isnt a logical basis to cast Hunter’s Eastern European dealings as an attempt by Joe to enrich himself because ex-VPs can make more money in a single speech to Blackstone’s annual blah blah summit than Hunter ever made ‘being corrupt’. The numbers don’t check out, Biden can easily make $20m+ in his first year out of office.
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Speculation: As a toddler, Hunter might have received lifelong mild brain damage from the accident that killed his mother and sister. Wikipedia notes that, “Beau suffered multiple broken bones while Hunter sustained a fractured skull and severe traumatic brain injuries.”
Good point, yeah it’s easily possible that this is the cause of the impulsiveness and low inhibition.
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I've long believed that if Hunter had any decency at all, he would go to his dad and demand to go to prison. Even if, by some absurdity, he was factually innocent. The best thing he can do for his father, his family, his country, is to go to prison. Take the rap on tax stuff, get two years, read the Bible cover to cover and lift weights. Most Americans don't actually find tax fraud morally disqualifying anyway.
Then Joe can get up and give a speech about how in America no one is above the law, his son made mistakes and he's going to pay for them.
Americans, just like all other nations, love to glorify the idea of criminality and mob bosses and so on as long as they themselves are not affected by it. That's why stuff like The Godfather is so popular. Hunter going to prison would satisfy some people, but it would also make Joe look like weak patriarch, which could affect people's monkey-level views of him, their basic assessment of how tough he is as an alpha male. And the monkey-level views are very important, for example they're a big part of why Trump is popular.
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No real need to do that at this point. Charges filed now? Easy peasy to push the timeline for the trial (or at the very least, sentencing) until after the next election. It's always hard to make an argument that they're being unfair by just taking too long (people do try, but it never really works). This will certainly be Joe's last election of his life, so as long as they can get themselves to November 6, 2024, he never has to see the inside of a jail cell, and the topic will completely disappear from any discussions in future elections. This is the correct game theoretic play, regardless of what any omniscient planner might think is otherwise good/bad for the country.
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Assuming the Bidens would live it down, how do you do this without providing subpoena power to people who would discover links between Hunter's fraud and the Big Guy
(for you)?I'm not sure I'm seeing where anyone would gain additional subpoena power as a result of a guilty plea which closes all active cases and sends Hunter to club fed for a two year stretch? If anything significant discovery powers would be headed off, both legally and politically.
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The link appears to be that Joe pressured Hunter into giving him some of his earnings, likely to prevent Hunter from immediately spending it all on hookers and blow. I realize that might seem overly sympathetic; Joe has likely been about as corrupt as the average long-standing machine Democrat, but he hasn’t displayed a particular desire to get rich outside of office relative to more ambitious politicians, and Hunter’s income is nothing compared to what Joe could have made after he left office in 2016 if he really wanted to pursue significant wealth.
It doesn’t make sense for Joe to delegate his corruption to Hunter; even as ex-VP he could make more in a single speech than Hunter was making in a year.
Will it come out that 10% of Hunter's earnings were going into a nice managed fund that paid out $X/mo to Hunter?
Well, it certainly seems more likely than Joe using the single most incompetent person in his life to profit from his position in an unbelievably inefficient manner.
Sorry, I realized as I was framing that last post it has an annoying tone-of-voice, especially since I licked an argument with you in a different thread, so I ended up fixing the end but not the beginning.
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This is the same Joe Biden who washed out in the 1988 Democratic presidential primary because he plagiarized his campaign speeches. I suppose there are lots of possible interpretations of what the Bidens have been up to, some worse than others, but I think it's pretty plausible that Joe did not behave all that smartly. Especially when you consider that, throughout his Vice-Presidency, it was assumed that Hillary would be the next president, and nothing Biden could reasonably get up to wiuld possibly matter.
I suspect ‘grabbing as much of his money as he’ll let you get away with and sticking it in an account you control access to’ is a standard play for upper class families dealing with a failson, and as noted elsewhere Joe hasn’t displayed Clinton or even Obama level grifting to get rich; in general he seems to be basically content once he’s ensured he has a nice lifestyle and the same for his immediate family. It just seems a lot more plausible that this was a roundabout way to set up a custodial account than that it was legit collecting otkat.
He set up Hunter to collect the otkat, then he took some of the resulting money. That's "legit collecting otkat", even if he was doing it for Hunter's benefit.
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Yeah, I think that too. No matter how indulgent Joe was, even he can't ignore that if Hunter gets money, he's going to blow through it all and be left penniless and going round with the begging bowl once more. So taking a chunk of his earnings where he can't get his hands on it for (quite literally) hookers and blow is responsible.
And yeah, Joe is nowhere near as rich as the Clintons, who (yes, even Hillary the Competent) were absolutely damn shameless about shilling for their 'foundation' and raising money off political connections and graft.
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A less generous read is that the charges were brought so that he could take the fifth in his upcoming congressional appearance.
His lawyers have a fairly compelling case that he was given legal immunity to these tax charges with his diversion agreement signed relating to the gun charge. However that immunity would prevent him from taking the fifth in front of congress.
These charges in a separate district create a legal justification for taking the fifth, then later his lawyers can have the case dismissed.
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