BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

Dilbert_X wrote:

Trump has defunded the WHO, amazing.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Trump has defunded the WHO, amazing.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

The USPS is secretly in league with Jeff Bezos who is the architect of the Prime Rebellion, along with his renegade newspaper, 'The Washington Post.'

As a side, I guess Amazon owns Goodreads. Huh.

When McConnell presided over Trump’s impeachment trial, in which the President was accused of trying to extort Ukrainian officials into helping him smear his political rival Joe Biden, he allowed Republican senators to keep insisting that the “real” Ukraine scandal was the Biden family’s enrichment from their connections with the country’s rulers. Yet McConnell must have known that virtually any criticism one could make about the Biden family could be made as well about the Chao family. In fact, such criticisms had been made in the book “Secret Empires,” by the conservative writer Peter Schweizer. Republicans who promoted the book’s accusations against the Biden family evidently skipped the adjoining chapter on McConnell and the Chao family.

As the Times has documented, McConnell and his in-laws have benefitted from unusual connections in Beijing. One of James Chao’s schoolmates was Jiang Zemin, who later became China’s President. According to the paper, James took a stake in a state-run company closely associated with Jiang. James and his daughter Angela, the chairman and C.E.O. of the family business, have also been on the boards of directors of some of China’s most powerful state-run businesses, including the Bank of China. Moreover, both Angela and her father have been on the board of a holding company that oversees China State Shipbuilding, which builds warships for the Chinese military. Angela Chao told the Times, “I’m an American,” and suggested that nobody would question the business “if I didn’t have a Chinese face.”

McConnell’s marriage also made him kin to some of the most influential businessmen in America. Angela Chao was married to the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, who died in 2009, and she’s now married to Jim Breyer, a billionaire venture capitalist with huge financial interests in China. In 2016, Breyer joined the board of directors of Blackstone, giving McConnell a brother-in-law at a company that financially supports his campaigns, and that manages more than half a trillion dollars.

Chao family members were campaign donors of McConnell’s even before his marriage to Elaine. According to the Times, over the years the family has given more than a million dollars to McConnell’s campaigns or pacs tied to him. Furthermore, disclosure forms show that, after Elaine Chao’s mother died, in 2007, the family gave her and McConnell as much as twenty-five million dollars, making McConnell one of the Senate’s wealthiest members.

According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, in 2002, Bob Murray, the C.E.O. of another coal company, Murray Energy, shouted down a Mine Safety and Health Administration inspector in a meeting by observing, “Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked he was sleeping with your boss.” Both Murray and McConnell disputed the report, which was based on interviews and notes from the meeting. Records showed that Murray and his company’s pac had donated repeatedly to McConnell’s campaigns.

Two decades since the Massey slurry-pond disaster, the coal industry has collapsed, barely employing five thousand people statewide, but the region’s water remains tainted. McConnell takes credit for recently delivering several million dollars in federal funds to the area for water-infrastructure improvements, but William Brandon Halcomb, a property manager who lives there, told me that the situation is still “horrible.” Shortly before we spoke, there had been no water for three weeks. He keeps a bucket tied to a bridge, which he lowers into the creek below when he needs water to flush a toilet. He must drive to another county to buy clean water. “You get a gallon, heat it on the stove, and take a trucker’s bath,” he said. “A wash-off is all you can do.” As covid-19 spreads, the health hazards posed to Americans who can’t reliably wash their hands are obvious.

Martin County is overwhelmingly Republican and pro-Trump, and many residents see no connection between their problems and Washington. Gary Ball, the editor of the Mountain Citizen, a local newspaper, told me, “It’s not McConnell’s fault that our water is in bad shape.” Ball, a former coal miner who strongly backs Trump, blames local Democratic officials for “years of mismanagement.” Cara Stewart, the chief of staff for the Kentucky House Democrats, unsurprisingly sees it differently. “Why does Kentucky not have clean, reliable water?” she said. “McConnell could help, but he’s in bed with the companies that are causing the problems.”

Last edited by uziq (2020-04-24 06:23:23)