HistoryBuff

Of course it was. They lost 5 million barrels of oil. The spent over $3 billion on the cleanup. they created a $20 billion fund to pay for damages. They had headlines around the world as a colossal screw up of a company. 

That wasn't dumping, or at least not intentionally. They lost huge amounts of money on that. 

You are talking about a disaster on a massive, insane scale that was highly visible. The vast majority of dumping is done on a smaller scale. In which case they can get away with it without attracting national attention. You need strong regulations to prevent that kind of dumping because it won't attract headlines and get a community response.    

I never said it would. Impeachment proceedings were ongoing for a year against nixon before he resigned and avoided being impeached. Depending on how hard the trump government fights the subpoenas and how long the courts take to rule that congress has the right to information it might be a year before the house votes to impeach trump. 

Unless he resigns 1st, but that seems unlikely. 

Agreed, Pelosi is terrible and should be removed. But now that the impeachment investigation is official, she can't prevent it any more. The investigation will show trump's crimes, which at this point are numerous. Pelosi won't be able to take that investigation which found trump guilty and refuse to let people vote on it. It would destroy her and the democrats credibility. 

Once the investigation is finished detailing trump's crimes, there will be a vote. I don't see any way that vote could be anything but to impeach. Without the investigation proceedings she could keep delaying, but now that the official proceedings have begun, the Rubicon has been crossed. There is no going back now. 

Trump is almost certainly to be the 3rd president in history to be impeached. 

If there were no regulations against it? nothing. You would get away with it and the world would be a worse place for it.

If the video happened to to go viral and caught alot of public attention there might be some blow back on your business. If it were a very small business you might go under. If it were a medium sized business you would suffer for a little bit, then people would move on and you could go back to dumping. Probably without the camera crews watching. 

But since dumping of waste is a regular occurrence and it rarely gets much coverage unless it is on a massive scale, you would almost certainly get off scott free. 

I don't think that makes any sense. I agree that Pelosi was doing her best to prevent this for the last few years. She thought initiating impeachment proceedings would energize Trumps base. But she no longer really had a choice. That ship has sailed. Even the moderates, who she thought she was protecting, started pushing her to impeach. At this point I don't think she has any chance of going back. 

The Mueller report showed at least 8 times trump committed a crime. Trump has now publicly said he asked the leader of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden. That is also a crime. 

Now that the investigation phase of the impeachment has begun, it will certainly find that he has committed crimes. Since his guilt has been established there is no chance they could find otherwise. I don't see how Pelosi could possibly prevent a vote at that point. And then Trump will be impeached by the house. 

Whether or not the senate convicts and removes him from office is uncertain. It will depend on the details about Trump's interactions with Ukraine. If there is a smoking gun to be found that makes his criminality undeniable, then it is possible. However, they are such sniveling sycophants that even a smoking gun might not be enough. 

I disagree with pretty much all of that. If capitalism is a game, then regulations are the rules of the game. Revoking all the rules will certainly make some players happy, but it doesn't improve the game. For example if soccer players were allowed beat each other up, really big players would probably like that. But most people would not. 

Removing regulations can, sometimes, be a good thing. But the vast majority of the regulations being removed are critically important environmental, economic or worker protections. Revoking these regulations is a very, very bad thing. It might help the market in the short term, but the long term damage these companies are now getting away with will only make it worse. For example, you remove the rules saying you can't dump industrial waste in the ocean. Big companies will save a fortune not having to actually safely dispose of their waste. But now everyone that uses the ocean is going to suffer. You save some money for a big corporation in one place, but you hurt everyone else and cost the economy a fortune somewhere else. 

I think you are incorrect. The investigation is the 1st step of the impeachment proceedings. Impeachment proceedings don't go directly to a vote. 

No, bailing them out was to prevent the recession from becoming a full blown depression. I don't necessarily agree they should have been bailed out. 

By guard rails I mean things like the Dodd-Frank act that helped to improve financial stability and consumer protection. These sorts of laws and regulations are now under attack by trump. It's barely been 10 years since the banks crashed the market and he wants to roll back the laws that were put in place to prevent them doing it again. 

Have you not glanced at the news today? The formal impeachment inquiry was announced yesterday. 

What exactly is a war on success? I am not aware of such a thing ever existing. Every politician who has held office for the last few decades has been selling out to companies and giving them virtually everything they could want. 

If anything, removing the guard rails preventing companies from doing stupid, stupid things only increases the risk of a recession. It wasn't government regulation that caused the crash in 2008. It was the market doing stupid, stupid things in order to earn a quick buck. They ended up crashing the economy and needed the government to bail them out. 

Biden is a terrible candidate. He is more right wing that Hilary Clinton was. He doesn't seem to remember what state he is in or what he is supposed to be talking about half of the time.

If this takes him down, it wont be fair. But we will all be better off with him out of the race. 

But we will also all be better off after trump is impeached. 

Large chunks of the US are already in recession. Corporate insiders have started selling off their stocks at a considerable rate. 2 months ago we saw an inverted yield curve. I don't pretend to be an economist, but this has predicted virtually all recessions for decades. 

These are all bad signs. The only question is will the market hold on until the election, or is the recession going to be earlier than that. 

Agreed. But there is no reason to believe that this is what trump was doing. His actions had no effect on NATO members. I haven't seen any evidence he communicated with NATO members about this during that 2 months. He certainly didn't do so publicly as no one knew Trump was doing this at the time. Even the US congress didn't know trump was doing this. It's hard to put pressure on NATO when you haven't told NATO what you are doing. 

Not yet. Trump and his lackeys haven't had to answer any questions under oath yet. They have just been lying on cable news about it. Trump has had months now to try to frame joe biden and appears to have come up with little more than an insinuation of wrong doing. Dems have only known this happened for a matter of days and they haven't been given most of the information yet. 

Hunter is getting dragged for this a bit. But he isn't an elected official. I don't think it will have any long term affect on his life. Except maybe if Trump's attempt to frame him is the reason trump gets impeached. Then it could be a long term benefit to his life. 

The markets have started sending warning signals of a national recession. if you look at specific states that focus more on agriculture, they are already in a recession. The numbers from states less affected by the tariffs are balancing them out so nationally things are still looking ok if you don't look too closely.

There has also been increasing reports of corporate insiders selling off huge amounts of stocks. The market is going to go into recession. It could be next month, 6 months from now, or maybe next year. But given how many insiders are selling off, my guess would be sooner rather than later. 

Also, even if somehow a recession didn't hit the rest of the country, Trump desperately needs rural america to vote for him. if they are getting wiped out by his trade war, and they are, it doesn't matter if Wall Street is doing fine. If he loses rural voters, he is done. 

Ukraine isn't a member of NATO. I haven't seen any evidence that he was pressuring NATO members during the 2 months he held back the money.

Also, why would holding back money from Ukraine put any pressure on NATO members at all? They had nothing to do with the US decision to send aid. They are completely unrelated to this. The only people that would feel pressured are the Ukrainians. 

Trump admits that that he held back the money from Ukraine and then made repeated requests to the Ukrainians to try to dig up dirt on a political rival. Ukraine eventually agreed. Congress found out that trump was holding back the money. Then the money was released. 

There is no reason to think this was for any other reason than to extort Ukraine.

But that still doesn't give you any leverage. I agree that the trade war will hurt China. But the trade war is hurting the US as well. China knows they can weather the storm longer than the US can for the reasons i already said. 

So it doesn't matter what damage you do to them. You will still lose. You have gained no leverage and have only managed to hurt everyone. The tariffs were simply never going to work. 

Now that we have gotten the Biden portion out of the way. What is your opinion on Trump withholding 100's of millions of dollars that had already been approved by congress in order to extort a foreign government to smear his political rival?

Trump held back money, which he had no right to do (congress controls the power of the purse) to try to force Ukraine to dig up dirt to help him in an election. That is textbook abuse of power and an impeachable offense. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon was for abuse of power. 

Even if everything you said was true, which I dispute, you would still be wrong. China doesn't have elections. Even if you did massive, catastrophic damage to China, which you are not, they would still be able to hold out longer than the US can. 

Once the US enters a recession in the next year or so and farmers start going bankrupt, it will be politically untenable for the trade war to continue. Republicans will have to cave to prevent a catastrophic shift in their support. Whereas china doesn't need to worry about people going bankrupt. Because those people don't get a say in anything. 

The fact that the US government needs to fear the anger of it's people means that you can't win in a game of roshambo (look it up on urban dictionary if you are not familiar with the term). They will outlast you. Trump will fall and no matter who replaces him, republican or democrat, the trade war will end. 

To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Hunter in particular was ever under investigation. The company he sat on the board of was officially being investigated. 

I don't know what you consider to be an "non biased" source. I have a feeling we would disagree on who those are. 

Here is a link to a bloomberg article about it. I found several others that also discuss this if Bloomberg is "biased" in your opinion. 

Burisma Holdings was founded in 2002 by a corrupt oligarch with ties to the corrupt government of Ukraine. Hunter Biden was named a paid board member of Burisma Holdings in April 2014, 2 months after the UK had starting investigating Zlochevsky (the founder). 

Ukraine didn't really do anything to assist the British in their investigation of Zlochevsky. 

Shokin became prosecutor general in February 2015. Shokin took no action to pursue cases against Zlochevsky throughout 2015 according to his deputy at the time, Kasko. 

The U.S. stepped up its criticism in September 2015, when its ambassador to Ukraine, during a speech, accused officials working under Shokin of “subverting” the U.K. investigation.

Kasko resigned in February 2016, citing corruption and lawlessness in the prosecutor general’s office.

Officials in the US embassy in Kiev began pushing for Shokin to be removed and eventually Biden went to force the Ukrainian government to take more action and get rid of Shokin. 

I have yet to see any evidence that Hunter was actually closely involved in the actions of Burisma Holdings. He was put on the pay roll around the same time as several other high profile or connected people, likely in an attempt to curry some favor. Some others were a former president of Poland and the Director of the American CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in the George W. Bush administration.

It doesn't look to me like Hunter ever actually did much for the company and therefore would have risk of being caught up in a corruption investigation. Therefore Biden would have no motivation to go after a prosecutor to protect his son. 

This whole "scandal" is just an attempt to smear Biden. That being said, I still consider Hunter profiting off of his father being VP to be scummy. Although less so than Trump's directly profiting off of being president. 

I don't understand your point. Hunter certainly benefited from his father being in an important position. i don't disagree with that. I don't disagree that this is a shitty practice. But pretending that this is a scandal is weak. Virtually every politician and family member of politicians try to do this. I am not defending them. They all suck. 

But there is absolutely no evidence that Biden pushed for that prosecutor to be removed to help his son. In fact, since the prosecutor was corrupt and not investigating, pushing him out actually increased the odds of Hunter being investigated. 

I would be fully in favor of stronger laws being put in place to restrict politicians and their families from profiting from public service. But Donald trump, a man who diverted military aircraft to stay at his resorts, a man who put his son in law and daughter into important positions despite them having no experience, to criticize others for trying to profit from their office is the absolute worst sort of hypocrisy. 

If the US had come together with their allies and had a unified front towards China, then tariffs might have worked. But Trump decided to start trade wars with everyone. For god's sake he said Canada's steel industry was a national security threat. He burned any good will and co-operation he might have had. 

As a result China is just getting their raw materials elsewhere. The US has the biggest economy of any country. But the rest of the world is a lot bigger than they are. The US has caused a bit of a slowdown in China's growth, but the chinese don't have to worry about elections. They can ride out any difficulties the trade war causes for the next 10 years with no problem at all. The US is already having to spend huge amounts of money to keep farmers afloat as the trade war destroys the US markets. 

The bottom line is that the trade war will hurt both sides. But China can keep this up a lot longer than the US can. A few years of rural america being in full recession will shift the electoral map away from the republicans and then the trade war will end having accomplished very little. 

It wasn't Biden, or even the US that began to push for the removal of Shokin. The UK and pretty much all of the G7 wanted him gone because he was incredibly corrupt. Shokin's 2nd in command quit because Shokin kept promising to clean up corruption and then would do nothing. 

Biden was the one that was finally able to push the government to get rid of Shokin, but pretending like he was somehow alone in wanting him gone is incredibly disingenuous. 

Additionally, Hunter joined the board of that company well into it's legal troubles and was likely never closely involved in it's affairs. The odds that Hunter would have been caught in any corruption investigation is extremely low. Therefore, Biden had no personal reason to want Shokin gone. 

Hunter getting a seat on that board was an attempt by that company to get some influence in america. Is that a bit shady, absolutely. Is it illegal, no. Did Biden pushing out his Shokin protect hunter? probably not as the reason he was being pushed out was because he wouldn't investigate corruption. 

The bottom line is that Hunter's part in this was the normal attempt of a company to buy influence in america (which i think should be illegal, but at the moment is incredibly common). Biden's part in this was to make the final push to get rid of a corrupt government official who most of the G7 wanted gone. 

The crap Trump is trying to sell is a conspiracy theory.