Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Appearance counts.

This whole sorry saga reminds me heavily of Nhlanhla Nene.

Siyabonga Nene, Nhlanhla’s son, and his business partner Muhammad Amir Mirza had approached the Public Investment Corporation for a business loan when Nhlanhla was in charge there.

The plan was that their company, Indiafrec Trade and Invest would use the money to buy a 50% stake in S&S Refinery LDA in Mozambique.

The thing is – Nhlanhla was in fact furious with his son for the attempted use of him as a connection, and it was only after Siyabonga resigned from Indiafrec Trade and Invest that eventually the loan went through.

Siyabonga so far as anyone is aware, never saw a cent of that money – but this was enough to sink Nhlanhla’s political career, just as Nhlanhla was being praised all over the place for his role in resisting state capture when this story came out.

Nene resigned over this.

So I look at Joe Biden – and what Hunter did was so much worse. The Ukraine basically had a gun to its head in the form of Russia, keeping in good with America is an existential necessity for them, this is a big chunk of what makes Trump’s corruption where Ukraine is involved so bad. It is essentially threatening a nation with its own obliteration if it doesn’t play ball.

You’ve got a ruling class that sees nothing wrong with saying “You’ve got a nice country there Ukraine, it would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

It throws the entire basis of US foreign policy into doubt. Is it there to protect the interests of the US on the world stage, or is there so that the president or vice president’s kid can get rich? Or so that the president can gather blackmail material against his political rivals?

And recognise Ukraine is where they got caught, we can’t know how many cases like this there are across the world. I mean I think we can be pretty clear that Trump was willing to allow genocide against the Kurds – for the sake of his business in Turkey. I don’t think the Ukraine situation is all that isolated.

This should disqualify Biden and Trump, and raise serious questions about how deep this rot goes – with it appearing at the very top of both parties. It staggers me that Americans aren’t more angry about this.