Im-Politic: Another Possible Biden-China Connection

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Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, Bill Clinton, China, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, Department of Education, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, National Legal and Policy Center, NLPC, Obama administration, University of Pennsylvania

Remember the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative? Because these ostensibly charitable endeavors set up by the former President and the former First Lady, Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate turned out to be such blatantly income-padding and pay-to-play schemes, contributions have dried up dramatically under the glare of public scrutiny and since Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, and her White House run was clearly undermined by the evidence of access selling.  (Here’s a good account of its offenses and its demise. And according to this report, the latest figures show that the Foundation has negative cash flow.)

Although practically unreported by the Mainstream Media, apparent President-elect Joe Biden has his own group of foundations, and the refusal of one in particular to disclose information about its budget and donors raises major questions about Biden’s own possible grifting – especially with regard to China. It’s the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

The Center describes its mission as engaging University of Pennsylvania “students and partners with its faculty and global centers to convene world leaders, develop and advance smart policy, and strengthen the national debate for continued American global leadership in the 21st century.” Although affiliated with the University, the Center is run out of a Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Given its lofty goals, you’d think that the Center would be eager to showcase the funders helping to achieve them – and that the funders would be just as eager for the good publicity. But not only is no information publicly available either about the Center’s budget or its donors. The Center has stonewalled requests for the names and numbers. And so has the University, to which it’s referred reporters.

What is publicly known, though, is a big problem, because a private watchdog organization called the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has discovered, by combing through U.S. Department of Education Records, that the University as a whole began receiving many more donations from Chinese sources once the Biden Center’s establishment was announced in 2017.  Indeed, these contributions increased greatly once the Center opened its doors in Washington in February, 2018 and continued after Biden announced his presidential bid on April 25, 2019. Moreover, in clear violation of federal law, more than 40 percent of the $54.05 million in 2018 and 2019 Chinese contributions came from anonymous sources.

Now as surely known by many RealityChek regulars who follow U.S. politics closely, the NLPC is a decidedly conservative group that’s no friend of Biden or any Democrats or liberals. At the same time, if you doubt these numbers, you can verify them for yourself (as I did) by examining the data base on Foreign Gifts and Contracts to U.S. higher education institutions maintained by the Education Department. (The link to database can be found at this Department website.)

Throughout the presidential campaign, Biden and his aides brushed off questions about his son Hunter’s business dealings with Chinese individuals and entities (all of which are controlled in various ways by the Chinese government) clearly based on his strategy of cashing in on the Biden name. Moreover, many of these relationships date from Biden senior’s years as Vice President, when he helped formulate an Obama administration China policy rightly described as squishy. And the Trump era deals took place during a period when a Biden 2020 presidential run was always a distinct possibility. 

In addition, the entire Biden family’s finances are known to have been shaky until his Vice Presidency ended, and that Hunter has been identified as the main Biden family breadwinner during the lean years. 

It’s bad enough that so many gaps in this record remain. Even less excusable is the unexamined (except by the NLPC) evidence of large anonymous (as well as identified) Chinese contributions linked at least chronologically to a Biden organization.  Both the Biden Center and the University could answer the crucial question – how much of the Penn China money found its way to the Biden Center –  instantly by opening up their books. Why won’t they?

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Im-Politic: Bernie Sanders’ All-But Fatal Debate Mistake

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2016 elections, Bernie Sanders, chattering class, Clinton Foundation, Democratic debate, emails, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic. Democrats, Joe Biden, Kevin McCarthy

Though much more low-key than its Republican counterparts, last night’s Democratic presidential debate wasn’t simply the earnest, policy-focused wonk-fest being portrayed by so much of the chattering class – and the party’s own spinners. (Click on this link for a transcript.) Especially interesting were the clashing views of achieving political change that were voiced by front-runner Hillary Clinton and her leading challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Clinton made the case for working conventionally through the political system, gridlocked though it seems to be, and securing whatever victories, even if modest, this state of affairs permits. Sanders served up the prospect of “a political revolution when millions of people begin to come together and stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.”

But don’t be fooled. None of the policy proposals introduced and debated in Las Vegas last night had anything to do with the only moment of real significance in the debate – and it was not only a game-changer, it looks like a campaign-changer. I’m talking about Sanders’ undoubtedly well-intentioned but bone-headed demand, “Enough of the e-mails. Let’s talk about the real issues facing America.” For Sanders’ belittling of the latest cloud of scandal surrounding the former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State may well have handed her the nomination on a silver platter.

Sanders allowed that his ostensible pitch for substance “may not be great politics.” That will soon rank as one of the biggest understatement in the last few decades of campaign history. You don’t have to love political mudslinging to recognize that much more often than not, winning political candidates draw sharp distinctions between themselves and their rivals that portray the latter in unflattering lights. And you don’t have to be a shallow, image-obsessed Beltway politico to recognize that voters vote not only on “the issues,” but on character.

So challengers (even with powerful momentum) facing front-runners (even struggling) simply can’t afford to pass up debate-level high profile opportunities to tout their own ethical record and attack their opponents’ – the more so when the policy gap is less than yawning, and when character is the main rival’s greatest weakness by far.

The loud applause Sanders won from the (understandably) partisan crowd strongly suggests that Democrats view the controversies surrounding Clinton as simply the latest smear attempts from the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that they believe has long targeted both Clinton and her husband. (And yes, this narrative has been decisively strengthened by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s breathtakingly stupid apparent confirmation of these suspicions.)

Yet it’s likelier that the doubts inevitably raised are in fact eating at party loyalists. Maybe they have simply undermined confidence about Clinton’s electability next fall. Maybe Democratic voters are more privately troubled than they let on in public by the questions raised by Clinton’s handling of national security-sensitive material, by conflict-of-interest charges stemming from the activities of the Clinton Foundation,  and by the multiple government and private sector jobs held by some of her senior State Department aides. Whatever the reason, or combinations, these Clinton missteps surely help explain her plummeting poll numbers among Democratic loyalists since they started making news.

As a result, Sanders’ priority during his first face-to-face meeting with his chief rival was to feed the party’s doubts about Clinton’s character. And if he was worried about lowering himself to the level of tawdry political hit men (and women!), Sanders could have told himself that the “Email-gate” monicker shamefully trivializes the central charges against Clinton. After all, her use of an unsecured private server for official State Department business practically invited disclosures of communications that could endanger national security. In addition, once Clinton was appointed to President Obama’s cabinet, the Foundation run by her and by Bill Clinton started looking like nothing so much as a machine for soliciting bribes from foreign governments.

It’s true that none of these allegations has been proven – plainly in part because so many thousand of the emails on Clinton’s private system have been destroyed and not yet recovered. But even if her conduct on both fronts stayed within the bounds of the law, the judgment it reflects is so shockingly poor that it does call her presidential qualifications into question. Consequently, Clinton’s troubles were, and remain, fair-game even for the most high-minded politician.

Sanders, however, not only dropped this ball. He all but pinned a seal of character approval on his rival, and in effect denied himself the option of bringing these matters up for the rest of primary season. And if Sanders can no longer even mention these possible Clinton transgressions and mistakes, the heat is now off her in terms of ethics and judgment – unless of course major new revelations emerge, or unless you think any of the three second-tier contenders will attack this dimension of the Clinton record.

In fact, although predictions are always hazardous, especially with the primaries still months off, barring the possibility of Clinton facing legal charges and consequences, the only major question surrounding the Democratic primaries now is whether Vice President Joe Biden joins the race. He’s much closer to Clinton ideologically than Sanders; therefore, he was well-positioned to present himself as “Hillary without the headaches” – of course without even having to voice this slogan. But when Bernie Sanders declared these headaches out of bounds for Democrats, to the full-throated cheers of the Las Vegas audience, chances are he finally sidelined the already ambivalent Biden as well.

Im-Politic: A Masterful Takedown of Ruling Class Economic Hypocrisies

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2016 elections, Afghanistan-ism, Bernie Sanders, boardroom liberalism, Clinton Foundation, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, free trade agreements, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Noam Scheiber, Obama, offshoring, Paul Theroux, poverty, reform, The New York Times, Trade

Here’s a must-read for you: Paul Theroux’ op-ed in The New York Times today on the hypocrisy of members of the American corporate class who have made towering fortunes by offshoring U.S. jobs to developing countries, and then have contributed to and even fostered charitable efforts that seek to alleviate the poverty their business models have produced.

The highlights (lowlights?) are too numerous to list. And besides, the entire article really does deserve your attention. But given the burst of interest in recent years occasioned by all the fiftieth anniversaries of milestones of the civil rights movement, this paragraph on the impact of offshoring on some of that period’s most revered stretches of hallowed ground in Alabama is just jaw-dropping:

“Selma may have been a political success and a great symbol, but it is an economic failure; Greensboro has some effective well-wishers, but it does not look very different from the town that James Agee wrote about and Walker Evans photographed in ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ which was published in 1941; Monroeville earns some revenue from the ‘Mockingbird’ literary pilgrims, but it lost more than 2,000 jobs when Vanity Fair Brands downsized its operations there. The catfish industry is faltering all over the state, thanks in part to fish imported from special-relationship Asia.”

In all, Theroux’ article is so devastatingly on target that I can only offer one observation to help round out, and one to help sharpen the author’s long overdue attack on the “strategy of getting rich on cheap labor in foreign countries while offering a sop to America’s poor ” through ostensibly good works – and implicitly on the pass this gimmick gets from our social, cultural, and political tastemakers. (That is, when they’re not explicitly praising and endorsing these crocodile tears displays).

First, Theroux’ inclusion of the role played in this snow job by the Clinton Foundation and its galaxy of one percenter business and entertainment industry supporters deserves much more attention, for two reasons. After all, the Clintons epitomize the politicians that the offshoring interests needed to buy with campaign contributions in order to push their agenda through Congress in the form of the string of job- and wage-killing trade deals that began with the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Just as important – along with President Obama – they epitomize the Democrats and liberals who became champions of offshoring-friendly trade strategies even though they clashed violently with their avowed determination to fight poverty and expand opportunity and create more “inclusive growth.”

In this vein, their efforts to square this circle wound up fueling a broader approach to politics that New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber has insightfully called “boardroom liberalism.” Click here for a post where I discuss this phenomenon and describe it as “an especially insipid version of the ‘trickle down’ theories championed by most of [these liberals’] conservative rivals.”

Moreover, much of the fight for control of the Democratic party playing out in this year’s presidential campaign entails a fight between the boardroom liberals – represented not only by Hillary Clinton, but potentially by Vice President Joe Biden – and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. His supporters, of course, and those of fellow Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, favor reform programs that, if not more realistic substantively than those supported by the boardroom liberals, flow from views of economic power and human psychology that seem far more accurate.

I also hope that Theroux recognizes that to some extent his piece conflates two related but distinct problems: the boardroom liberals’ offshoring hypocrisy on the one hand, and what has been called their “Afghanistan-ism” on the other. What I mean by that latter term is the tendency of many of society’s avowed do-gooders (and I’m not using that term as such as a pejorative) to focus on dramatic, high-profile, exotic, and geographically distant problems and injustices that (perhaps not so coincidentally) they can’t do much about rather than on equally serious but more mundane woes right under their noses that they can plausibly hope to address meaningfully.

The author does a terrific job of upbraiding the boardroom liberals not only for their responsibility for domestic poverty but for their neglect of this situation in favor of funding all manner of charitable endeavors focused overseas. My reference above to the chances of solving or at least significantly easing domestic versus foreign problems indicates that boardroom liberalism and Afghanistan-ism are certainly closely related – by suggesting that major reform at home is the last outcome boardroom liberals want. But they’re not identical.

In any event, please read Theroux article. It speaks volumes about why the current two-party system today represents an obstacle to the kinds of change America so urgently needs, rather than a potential change agent.