Greasing the wheels
Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:
Maybe I’m expecting too much from Biden, but a small incident recently reported by Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal troubled me. Toward the end of a nuanced article about the president’s many, many ties to the University of Pennsylvania, Linskey revealed that one of Hunter Biden’s daughters was rejected for early admission to Penn in 2019. That setback prompted Biden—then a private citizen about to declare for the presidency—to speak to the dean of admissions at Penn. Probably not coincidentally, Biden’s granddaughter ended up among the 7 percent of applicants eventually admitted to Penn in 2019.
Of course it did, and of course she did, because this is the guy who let his son leverage Dad’s status into a lavishly paid job that he had no qualifications for. It’s the same old crap. Biden is Mister Important and he uses it. It’s smug and sleazy and not as different from the trumpy network as it should be.
In a world of overhyped fake scandals—where everything is the greatest outrage since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton—this is a nothing-burger.
I don’t care. I don’t care how it ranks. It’s using privilege in backstage ways to advance oneself and one’s friends and family at the expense of people who don’t have that privilege. It’s corrupt. Yes there are much worse forms of corruption, but that doesn’t make Biden’s okay.
Perhaps Hunter Biden’s daughter would have gotten into Penn on her merits during the regular admission period, but thanks to Grandpa Joe’s intervention, we will never know. In all likelihood, someone else was denied admission to Penn so there would be a slot for Biden’s granddaughter.
And why? Because she’s Biden’s granddaughter. That’s not a good enough reason.
I agree with you both that it’s blatant corruption and that it shouldn’t be shrugged aside as unimportant and also agree that it isn’t a big deal. My Trump supporting relatives point to Hunter Biden regarding his well-paid Ukrainian corporation position. I can’t say that doesn’t look like corruption. It does. Turning a blind eye to this sort of thing is why so many working-class Americans are MAGA people. I just point out that the Trump children were even more blatant about cashing in on their fathers position, both foreign and domestically. Doesn’t matter of course. They love Trump. He hasn’t done anything wrong in their opinion. Then we talk about other things.
IMO, the most serious corruption affecting us is the issues of industry capture of regulatory agencies. It is pernicious throughout the federal U.S. regulatory system. I don’t have any solid feeling about what it would take to turn those agencies back into defenders of citizens rather than corporations. Terrible tragedy maybe? That seems inevitable if we don’t figure out a better solution to improving that situation. Sadly, this one doesn’t even make anybody’s radar as a thing to focus on.
Actually, on second thought, the solution isn’t that hard. We have a lot of research about what we need to do regarding this problem. But it’s devilishly hard to implement because it would require a power shift within each of the agencies.
As the old saying has it, ‘it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.’ Donald Trump, a world-famous ignoramus, showed how far that could take one. Ignoramus, I mean.
Such a starter could finish up as chief of NASA, or become an astronaut. Maybe get stranded on the Moon; unintentionally or otherwise.
I’m not a big fan of Biden, but the alternative was so much worse. I am quite certain that he will seek the nomination for a second term, and lock it up early. What bothers me is that a second Biden term will probably make it easier for a Republican to win in 2028.
This kind of thing is endemic to American politics, and probably almost everywhere. I hate to sound defeatist, but I think it’s impossible to root out. I do think that such favors need to be known, and acknowledged, but I don’t know what the penalty should be. Right now all we can do with it is accept “what abouts” when we talk about, for example, Republican Corruption.
What is frustrating in the way that we communicate and talk about politics in our social circle is to apply the halo effect to those whose policies reflect our own, and the horn effect to those whose policies are opposite. It’s reinforced by social media, too. I have been trying to keep my Instagram feed politics free, but somehow it has started loading liberal content and I would rather keep politics separate, because I don’t want to get sucked into the same sort of things that caused me to deactivate my Facebook account. Social media encourages sound-bite thinking, thinking of political issues as team-based rather than the way in which we solve problems of society. No new understandings come out of it, or if they do, they take a long time to get through.
@beth – I am kind of curious about what some of the solutions are. Part of the reason that whenever a revolution happens “the new boss, same as the old boss” governance persists is that bureaucracies are necessary for a government to function. While the new boss may replace top-level administrators to departments, the middle and lower-level bureacrats keep their jobs unless they were too political under the prior regime. And expertise in making and enforcing regulations for the mundane and every functions often requires input from the regulated industries. There’s a whole momentum in play here.
When I volunteered in the Sanders campaign in Phoenix, most of the people that I worked with had this idea that if Bernie got in he would rip apart the neo-con foundation of government, and the Clintons and Bushes would be cast aside on the ash heap of history. It didn’t take long to lose interest in the Campaign and start donating to Clinton’s campaign. I didn’t even feel like to Traitor to the Revolution. (I also couldn’t stomach the bile that many had for Clinton. It was frightening.)
Sometimes, I just remember the closing line in Chinatown and realize that the US is always going to be as it is; a huge government run by different shades of neocons, and the best we can do is protect the good programs in place now. That doesn’t mean I think that we should accept corruption when it’s found, but we can’t expect to ever root it out even when the “good guys” are in power.
No doubt the University of Pennsylvania may expect a generous endowment or some other favour at a suitable time.
Though even if this had occurred after he became president, it would still be a form of corruption.
@ Mike – The solution is to remove corporate funding from the agencies. The practice of corporations providing the funding for the agencies that regulate them through various fees has been building since Pres. Reagan. That solution is simple but expensive and means a very different power structure and cultural orientation throughout the agency.
In addition, there is the revolving door issue of agency regulators being hired by industry after they leave their government jobs. This problem is a bit harder. A time limit on how soon a person is allowed to go to work for a company regulated by their former agency can help, but has its own issues and doesn’t really solve the problem.
What is your basis for saying Hunter Biden wasn’t qualified for the job, I assume you mean as a Board Member of Burisma?
I hear that a lot, but Hunter Biden was as qualified for that position as the vast majority of corporate board members are. He has degrees from Georgetown and Yale, worked for the Department of Commerece under Clinton, and was appointed to the Board of Amtrak by President Bush, serving as Vice Chair of the Board. He ran multiple international investment funds and consultancies. Biden was on the board of directors of World Food Program USA, from 2011 to 2017; he was board chairman from 2011 to 2015. Biden was more than qualified to be a board member of any corporation. Board members don’t need to be industry experts, they often are not.
Whether Biden got the job because of his name is a different issue than whether he was qualified for the position. Both can be true.
That’s a fair point. What do corporate boards even do? What are they for? I don’t know. I looked at Hunter Biden’s work history via Wikipedia and it looks as if it could easily all be a matter of connections rather than qualifications.
You can say the same thing about Chelsea Clinton, and soon Malia and Sasha Obama. Every child of a famous or wealthy person gets where they are because of connections. We just had the whole “nepo baby” discussion about Hollywood. Talented people often have talented children.
You assume Biden wasn’t qualified for a position when you don’t understand what the position entails. You’re just repeating right wing talking points.
The Board of Directors hires the corporate officers, who are in charge of managing the day to day operations of the company. The Directors are in charge of setting long term strategy, overseeing management, and making major decisions for the corporation. It is possible to be an excellent director without direct experience with a corporation’s specific industry because much of the director’s role is oversight, hiring, and planning.
I probably have said the same thing about Chelsea Clinton. I’m sure I’ve said it about a number of Kennedys. Not every child of a famous or wealthy person does get where she or he is because of connections; some of them are determined not to. Anyway even if it were true that they all do it, that’s not a reason to shut up about it. I object to a lot of things that They All Do. Don’t you?
I didn’t assume Biden wasn’t qualified in my reply to you, I said you had a good point. As for repeating right wing talking points, so what??? If they’re genuine points we should be repeating them, and trying to do something about them. I’ve said all along the right wing was right about the Burisma thing, because that’s what I think.
IANAL, but one explanation I once heard that made a lot of sense to me was that in questions like “Do I have a conflict of interest?”, “Is this inappropriate use of my position?”, “Should I recuse myself?” etc., the general rule of thumb is “If that is even a relevant question to ask, it probably means the answer is yes”, or as we used to say in my skydiving days (on the question of whether or not to employ the reserve parachute), “If you’re in doubt, you’re not in doubt”.
Even if something is technically “legal”, and perhaps not even particularly problematic in itself, there’s still the issue of issue of undermining public trust in the integrity of the system. It still contributes to the (not entirely unjustified!) impression that the people in charge are constantly operating in an ethical gray zone, engaging in questionable activities, and making shady deals, thus enabling people like Trump to argue that everyone’s a crook anyway, so Right-wingers might as well prefer their own crook over the other team’s crook.
I’m in no position to make any sweeping statements about Hunter Biden’s qualifications or lack thereof, and anyway there is probably only so much the current president could do to prevent his son from accepting whatever positions were offered to him (although there’s almost certainly a case to be made that Hunter himself should have held himself to a higher standard of integrity and principles). However, if it is true that Joe Biden exerted any influence on the admission process of a University to get his own granddaughter in, that seems to me about as blatant as it gets, and I can see no redeeming or mitigating factors what so ever.
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@Ophelia “As for repeating right wing talking points, so what??? If they’re genuine points we should be repeating them, and trying to do something about them. I’ve said all along the right wing was right about the Burisma thing, because that’s what I think.”
I wish more people would take this attitude rather than simply repeating or dismissing points based on which ‘side’ they support.