Saturday, May 26, 2018

On Beyond Belief

Remember Republicans having fit after free-market fit when that Obama guy bailed out the Chrysler Corporation? An American corporation that hadn't violated sanctions, lied to Federal investigators, yada yada? Now where's the outrage?
President Trump said late Friday he had allowed embattled Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp. to remain open despite fierce bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill, defying lawmakers who have warned that the huge technology company should be severely punished for breaking U.S. law.

Trump said on Twitter he was allowing it to “reopen with high-level security guarantees, change of management and board,” a requirement that it must purchase U.S. parts, and a $1.3 billion fine.

Sensing such a move, top Democrats and at least one Republican on Friday said the White House's decision was tantamount to a bailout of a large Chinese company with little benefit for the United States.

The requirement that ZTE purchase U.S. parts could draw criticism on Capitol Hill, as the company relies on U.S. parts to make its products. In fact, it was the Commerce Department’s April penalty that banned ZTE from buying U.S. parts that effectively put it on the brink of closure.

The Obama administration and Trump administration have repeatedly punished ZTE for violating sanctions laws by selling products to Iran and North Korea and then lying to federal investigators.

After Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross imposed the April penalty, Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally appealed to Trump to intervene and allow the company to continue operating, something Trump said he would do as a personal favor.
America first, as promised!!

Added 'bout 0300, from David Atkins at WashMo:
In any previous administration, just one of these dozens of scandals would have been enough to grab endless headlines and lead to impeachment proceedings. The press has been struggling to keep up with the monumental self-dealing involved, but it’s difficult for the public to comprehend the sheer scope of the criminality involved because it seems too coldly nefarious to be believed. People assume that politics is dirty to a certain extent and tolerate it as such, but in this country we’re not used to a single family leveraging the entire apparatus of the state for pure self-enrichment, and openly colluding with multiple hostile powers to do so. So the press reports on all of this as if it was an abnormally dirty but fundamentally legitimate government, and the public is numbed by barrage of stories into a state of collective shock.

But it’s not so much the fault of the public or the press as it is of Trump’s Republican allies. At least until a new Congress is seated in January 2019, there is nothing Democrats can do to hold the Trump family accountable outside of make considerable noise. The levers of accountability are all in Republican hands, and Republican legislators are either afraid of Trump’s base, or actively working with him to strip mine the country.

So the looting continues unabated in the open light of day, there is no depth to which the Trump family will no sink in their amoral greed, and to our collective horror there is no one of moral character with the will or power to stop it.
Woe is us.

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