Same day service
Huh. What a coincidence.
Ivanka Trump’s company won approval for three Chinese trademarks on the same day her father agreed to lift sanctions on ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications company that even a key Trump security adviser admitted is a national security threat.
According to records reviewed by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Ivanka’s business “received registration approval for three additional Chinese trademarks on June 7, 2018.”
President Trump struck a deal with ZTE on June 7, 2018.
The very same day. They’re taunting us, aren’t they.
Last year, Ivanka won provisional approval for three Chinese trademarks on the same day she dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping at her father’s Mar-a-Lago estate, allowing Ivanka Trump Marks LLC to sell activewear, jewelry, bags, and spa services under the first daughter’s name. Days after the meeting, the president broke a major campaign promise to punish China for being a currency manipulator and denying that it was manipulating its currency at all.
Trump had called China “world champions” of currency manipulation a mere 10 days earlier.
…
The president’s daughter recently reported she earned $82 million last year, partially from her ownership of her businesses. She also reported debts and liabilities in the undefined range of millions of dollars. Before she started working at the White House, she gave up official positions in her business, handing it over to a trust managed by members of her family, but she still retains ownership and benefits from any profits.
Greedy, aren’t they.
They aren’t even taking the piss. They’ve already taken the piss. We have no piss left to take.
What’s truly corrosive, here, is the bulk of his followers, I expect, won’t even particularly deny these are linked. They’ll argue, rather, that everyone does it, why can’t he.
It isn’t really true. And if true, wouldn’t necessarily follow. This being an understatement._Everyone_, were they in their right mind, should be against this. This kind of rampant corruption essentially _is_ kleptocracy, and, yes, these are hell to live in, in case you haven’t noticed. It is necessary to sustain them that there be no independent judiciary, no real rule of law, just the rule of graft. All the justice you can afford, really, so, yes, they’re miserable places for just about 99.999% of their inhabitants. The US already has issues this way, sure, but this is how to turn that up to eleven, and beyond: put the mob in charge of government. As, essentially, you now have.
The corrosive part, though: that argument, that everyone does it, largely flows from a deliberate campaign of misinformation. Look at Trump’s rhetoric, and that of those promoting him: it’s all about imagined criminal malfeasance, rampaging gangs, the bizarre and frequently absurdly exaggerated corruption of his political enemies, how they’re all on the take, running sex rings on Mars, and what have you.
That, and his own brazen steal everything that isn’t nailed down (and pull up with crowbar in broad daylight what is) behaviour is setting expectations steadily lower. Until people really believe this, that this is how the world has to be, anyway, no laws for anyone, loot and pillage, that’s how you get ahead, anyone who doesn’t is just a sucker, and deserves what they get. Putin’s Russia, tellingly, runs like this, and that’s what he and Trump both want: laws, if they exist, are political instruments the powerful order their courts to use against their enemies. Any semblance of one law for all–already a _badly_ damaged thing in the US–to go out the window entirely. And, frighteningly, their followers accept it, even _celebrate_ it. Let the powerful loot; they will anyway. Functionally, you wind up with an authoritarianism in which the powerless are expected to bow not to the divine right of kings, but to the iron fist of the most shamelessly rapacious.
Ways around? The usual, the same as always. Demand the fuckers go to jail, demand the fucking laws be sensible, and universally applied. No immunity for the blonde and surgically slim and born to wealth, or anyone else. Public office to remain a trust, with expectations of service. Society of _laws_, not men (or their daughters). As. Always. He can lie and deflect and distract and point to anyone else; he has to be brought to justice, or your future really is Orwell’s boot stamping on a face, forever (and the boot, oddly enough, an over the top tacky Gucci or knockoff thereof).
Which Chinese telecom isn’t a security risk? They’re probably more of a threat to national security than the Russians because of their huge size and advanced technology and skill at corrupting local politicians. If Trump, or any of his family, or his courtiers develop a business relationship with Huawei it’s time to turn the lights out.
But Canada charges 270% tariffs on dairy. And something about emails
(Really: isn’t it remarkable that everything Hillary Clinton is accused of doing has actually been done—and worse— by the Trumps?)
It adds a whole new dimension to the concept of trickle-down economics .It’s trickle sideways. Wealth trickles sideways to Trump from whoever is sitting next to him at dinner, breakfast, lunch; whatever. Or from whoever’s on the bar chair beside Trump at the bar. Or from their cabin cruiser or yacht that’s moored next to Trump’s in the marina at Murrya Largo or whatever they call it. (Sorry, I need another Margarita. Or better still, some more Bolly.)
That’s the way the world works these days.
Maybe one day there will be a meteorite land in Washington. Except it won’t have come from outer space. It will be Trump’s undeclared tax returns accidentally fallen out of the back door of Air Force One.
Could easily happen.
Well, there’s a hope of a chance of a possibility that perhaps one day they might. So fall. Might so fall. Surely. Surely we can all agree on that…!
Wonder if Trump would. Agree.
Especially Hillary.
This was essentially Nixon’s defense, along with it’s not illegal if he’s the president. Trump drank deep of the Nixonian spring, and has taken it to a level Nixon could only imagine. Of course, Nixon was more interested in power than in money, so he utilized it differently.
I’m now sure that they accused Mrs. Clinton of all the various crimes etc. which they were committing in order that when they were caught they could claim “She did it first, and you let her off!”