US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8101

On July 16 2017 20:08 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Not that I want to justify myself, I am abrasive at time and not always the most open to different realities, but the situation of Trump's conflicts of interest is quite sweeping itself. I'm all for general critics of american politics, but this shit is unprecedented. The guy makes his first phone calls to foreign leaders as POTUS to talk about his buildings. It should be absolutely unthinkable.

On July 16 2017 20:12 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

I'm sure if Barry played his cards right he could be earning big bucks on the speaking circuit like the Clintons did.Just focus on legalising gay marriage, being the first black president and other feels.Avoid talking about his war record, the auto/bank bailouts or fracking increasing exponentially under his watch while the EPA ignored the dire environmental issues arising from that.

While Obama liked to hide behind environmental reasons for not allowing the Keystone pipeline the real reason was that major democrat donor and left wing billionaire Warren Buffet bought a train line that ran oil from North Dakota.Read for yourself but all this is pretty well known.To suggest that Obama was clean of cronyism is pretty laughable and i hope no-one is suggesting that seriously around here.



http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/warren_buffett_and_the_keystone_decision.html

On July 16 2017 20:14 Nebuchad wrote:


So would you say it is more flagrant and poorly executed?

On July 16 2017 19:32 Biff The Understudy wrote:

I love the cynicism, but I don't think you can compare an administration ran by a billionaire who clearly is there to promote his business interest and takes a foreign policy approach directly related to where his buildings and golf course are located and the Obama administration, which was certainly "corrupt" to a certain level as this is structural to american politics but was not ran by people who had direct private financial interest in what they were doing. Obama is no billionaire, and was certainly not there primarily to make money. Or if so, he was really shit at it.

It's good not to be naive and to be critical, but that's not a reason to become blind. This shit, at that level, is unprecedented.

On July 16 2017 20:34 FuzzyJAM wrote:

Trump is awful and by far worse than Obama. Of course. If you see what I was replying to, you'd see I wasn't contradicting that, only the idea that Obama (or indeed any major politician, at least in the US) wasn't ever corrupt.

But Trump will eventually be gone. The massive structural issues which make corruption and buying votes an inherent and entirely pervasive part of American politics likely won't because the only people who could change it are those who benefit from that corruption.

On July 16 2017 20:48 FuzzyJAM wrote:
I still don't get why you think we're in disagreement. I've explicitly stated that Trump is "by far worse".

On July 16 2017 20:23 Biff The Understudy wrote:

I don't know what you guys are struggling with. I'm sincerely puzzled. Conflict of interests always happen, and they are bad. But when it becomes systemic and start to happen everywhere all the time, something is going very wrong.

So what I'm saying is that it's worse by several orders of magnitudes of what we have ever seen, that he doesn't even try to hide it while nobody holds him accountable, and that in six months there has been several times more reported conflicts of interest of an extreme gravity that anyone can remember.

Now your line of reasoning is that Al Capone was not so bad because someone else shoplifted. That makes 0 sense. I'm not for shoplifting. I'm saying this shit, here, is batshit crazy, and what is crazier is that Republicans in their fact free bubble and their amazing partisanship don't seem to give a fuck.

A president of the US making his first official call to Argentina's president to talk about his own interest in Buenos Aires should be a historical scandal. It's absolutely unthinkable. Instead everybody shrugs their shoulders, because we knew all along it was gonna be like that, because the right has apparently no ability whatsoever to keep any value or any moral from the moment it's about them, and the left has GHfied into a dumb cynical attitude consisting in saying that we live in House of Cards and you are naive and it's always been like that anyway so better not care and keep talking about the fucking DNC while the country burns.


Do you guys realize that your à-la-GH cynical attitude actually prevents you from holding anyone accountable of anything at all?

On July 16 2017 20:34 FuzzyJAM wrote:

Trump is awful and by far worse than Obama. Of course. If you see what I was replying to, you'd see I wasn't contradicting that, only the idea that Obama (or indeed any major politician, at least in the US) wasn't ever corrupt.

But Trump will eventually be gone. The massive structural issues which make corruption and buying votes an inherent and entirely pervasive part of American politics likely won't because the only people who could change it are those who benefit from that corruption.

On July 16 2017 20:02 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Sure, I'd be very happy to oblige. In fact I tried to copy paste the article, but the list is so freaking long TL wouldn't let me do it. Apparently you can't have more than 100K character in a post. That's a pity.

So here you go, enjoy the reading. Make a coffee before, it will take a while.

Can I keep using "clearly" and "literally every single" or do you want more of those?


And for people who say that it's business as usual (GH, I'm talking to you), I challenge you to read the thing, and fond me anything comparable in terms of density and seriousness of those conflicts of interests in the 8 years of the Obama presidency.

If that is indeed the case, the State Department’s expenditures represent a conflict of interest for him. As I wrote in February, when the Secret Service spent more than $97,000 to accompany Eric Trump on a business trip to Uruguay, it’s first and foremost improper that the Trump Organization appears to be directly profiting from taxpayer money because of the increased security necessary when its leaders visit their holdings.

Even if the Trump Organization doesn’t profit directly from the hotel’s success—that is, if the company makes a flat annual fee instead of a percentage of the property’s revenue—the State Department’s expenditure demonstrates the problems Trump’s continued intermingling of business and government continues to create. As of now, because Trump has disclosed only the minimum financial details he is required to by law, it's impossible to determine how exactly he makes money from properties like the hotel in Vancouver. That in turn makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of his conflict of interest—an epistemological problem that has arisen with several other business endeavors of his.

Trump administration looks to cut State budget by 32%

At the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Carson over the fact that, as the head of the department, he would be in charge of numerous programs that the president could manipulate to profit his real estate empire, asking Carson, “Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar that you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Though Carson did not respond to the question with regard to Trump specifically, he responded that he “will absolutely not play favorites for anyone” or act with an “intention to do anything to benefit any American, particularly.” (Warren went on to expound on how Trump’s lack of financial transparency makes it borderline impossible to know if a policy will benefit him.)

Warrens’s line of questioning was not entirely hypothetical: Trump does, in fact, own properties the maintenance of which falls under HUD’s purview. Thanks to an inheritance from his father, the president holds an ownership stake in—and has made millions from—Starrett City, a 153-acre, 5,881-unit low-income housing development in Brooklyn. The development, according to ABC News, receives substantial federal funding via HUD’s many programs designed to support low-income renters and homeowners. Trump could easily press for policies that would increase his profits from Starrett, most notably allowing for the sale of the complex, an action HUD blocked in 2007—and, potentially, to other properties from which he may profit in ways that, without more complete financial information, the American public may not even know.

None of this rules out the possibility of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but in sum it suggests that there is more to the case than what Feinstein alleges.

Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.

China says 'China responsibility theory' on North Korea has to stop

BEIJING (Reuters) - China hit back on Tuesday in unusually strong terms at repeated calls from the United States to put more pressure on North Korea, urging a halt to what it called the "China responsibility theory", and saying all parties needed to pull their weight.

North Korea: US may impose sanctions on Chinese firms over ties to rogue state, officials say

Frustrated China has not done more to rein in North Korea, the Trump administration could impose new sanctions on small Chinese banks and other firms doing business with Pyongyang within weeks, two senior US officials say.

On July 16 2017 20:34 FuzzyJAM wrote:

Trump is awful and by far worse than Obama. Of course. If you see what I was replying to, you'd see I wasn't contradicting that, only the idea that Obama (or indeed any major politician, at least in the US) wasn't ever corrupt.

But Trump will eventually be gone. The massive structural issues which make corruption and buying votes an inherent and entirely pervasive part of American politics likely won't because the only people who could change it are those who benefit from that corruption.

On July 16 2017 22:12 Nevuk wrote:

I actually question whether or not he will eventually be gone. So far he's been able to flagrantly ignore the rule of law, I see nothing preventing him from declaring himself winner of the next election before the votes are counted and refusing to leave the white house after his second term.

On July 17 2017 02:01 mozoku wrote:

Can you give any examples of Trump "flagrantly ignoring the rule of law?" He hasn't passed any legislation and his travel bans have had legal issues since their rollout. His use of executive order has been no more expansive than Obama's was (and Obama actually did expand EO usage relative to his predecessors). In addition, he's being investigated for criminal wrongdoing related to his presidency. If anything, the rule of law is slaughtering Trump

I think Trump is incompetent and a pretty terrible president so far imo, but you sound like you're getting your lines from some liberal equivalent of Fox News.

In general, the amount of hyperbole about Trump as a president in this thread (and the left in general) isn't that different from Fox News during the Obama era.

On July 17 2017 02:01 mozoku wrote:

Can you give any examples of Trump "flagrantly ignoring the rule of law?" He hasn't passed any legislation and his travel bans have had legal issues since their rollout. His use of executive order has been no more expansive than Obama's was (and Obama actually did expand EO usage relative to his predecessors). In addition, he's being investigated for criminal wrongdoing related to his presidency. If anything, the rule of law is slaughtering Trump

I think Trump is incompetent and a pretty terrible president so far imo, but you sound like you're getting your lines from some liberal equivalent of Fox News.

In general, the amount of hyperbole about Trump as a president in this thread (and the left in general) isn't that different from Fox News during the Obama era.

On July 17 2017 02:44 Leporello wrote:


Even attempting comparisons to other Presidents is an exercise in failure. We don't know how Fox News would've reacted if Obama fired the FBI Director, then joked about it in a private Oval Office meeting with the very people the FBI Director was investigating, while claiming, "This will help".


You know, we (the media, the public, the government) are looking into the legality of various actions. But this investigation should be happening under a different President. To make a different comparison: You have a soldier. Let's put him in the ww2 era, for simplicity.

That soldier is constantly talking about how good and misunderstood the German and Japanese are. He even says they're better than some of these American soldiers who've served in the past. You even catch him laughing with some Germans while they make fun of some American soldiers. He even argues that Germany didn't really invade Poland. It's fake news. "Maybe Russia is in Ukraine, I don't know. Maybe Russia hacked us, I don't know".

You can argue about legality, but the bottom-line is, if I were that soldier's superior, I would not order him into battle with other soldiers. I would do everything I can to keep him out of fighting with other men. He should not be there. And Donald Trump should not be Commander-in-Chief.

In any other day, he'd be gone. Go back some generations, a man who has behaved similarly would not just be impeached, he'd be in much worse problems. Don't compare this to Obama -- literally none of it fits. There is no basis. Obama didn't have personal lawyers speaking for him on Sunday morning talk shows, about why we should just ignore our President's disgusting lack of loyalty, and other inappropriate behaviors.

I don't recall much hyperbole about Obama that even smells like many of the genuine claims that can be leveraged against Trump. Also remind me who started the birther nonsense?

On July 17 2017 03:41 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Obama was hated because he was black. There was so much good that he did that overshadows anything negative that might have happened. Sure, he dropped a ton of drone strikes, but he didn't have military men dying left and right (some died for sure, not saying there were no casualites).

US-World relations were probably never higher than when he was in office. We went from "Yes We Can" to "Lock Her Up" and "Build that Wall". For every step forward we took during Obama's presidency, we've taken 5 back under Trump. And it's only 6 months in.

The hyperbole surrounding trump is warranted because there has never been this much corruption and lack of respect for the office of the president before. This administration is trying to undo everything we've accomplished simply out of spite. DeVos is trying to take education back to segregation times, EPA is trying to outdo China in pollution, DoJ is trying to lock up more people and criminalize anything they can to deepen the PIC (prison industrial complex), and trump is just a moron trying to hand the country over to the highest bidder. If China or NK offered him anything, he'd jump on the opportunity.