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US Reaches Deal To Keep Chinese Telecom ZTE in Business (reuters.com)
The Trump administration told lawmakers the U.S. government has reached a deal to put Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp back in business, a senior congressional aide said on Friday. From a report: The deal, communicated to officials on Capitol Hill by the Commerce Department, requires ZTE to pay a substantial fine, place U.S. compliance officers at the company and change its management team, the aide said. The Commerce Department would then lift an order preventing ZTE from buying U.S. products.
ZTE was banned in April from buying U.S. technology components for seven years for breaking an agreement reached after it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The Commerce Department decision would allow it to resume business with U.S. companies, including chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.
ZTE was banned in April from buying U.S. technology components for seven years for breaking an agreement reached after it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The Commerce Department decision would allow it to resume business with U.S. companies, including chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.
Make America Great Again. That President Trump sure goes out of his way for the forgotten people of America.
and Carrier Air conditioning would very much like a word with Mr President. Maybe if they could block him from building his next hotel...
Seriously, the amount of open corruption and violations of the emoluments clause on display here is insane. And at the rate this guy is going he's on track to get reelected when the Dems run Hilary Bot 2.0 in 2020...
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ZTE was getting a lot of its components from American suppliers and the ban could have hurt those suppliers financially. Some may even have reduced their work forces if demand dropped. This probably also plays into Trump's plans to get China to buy more American products to reduce the trade deficit.
There's also the remote chance that Trump has money invested in those American suppliers. We'll probably never know.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the $500,000,000.00 that a Chinese government bank just poured into a failing Trump property in Indonesia.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
No quid pro quo. You're the quid pro quo.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They did pay a fine as part of the original settlement, and a moderately severe one, too. The Commerce Department's decision to ban them from buying American hardware and software was levied only after they failed to adhere to the terms of settlement, specifically, that several executives would be punished, fired, and receive no bonuses. They didn't follow up on punishing the executives, hence the ban.
It's not like this was a draconian move out of the blue - they were told ahead of time what the consequences would be for not doing what they agreed to do, and they did it anyway. I presume the assumption was that the Commerce Department wouldn't actually follow through with it, which turned out to be wrong.
'course, Trump's probably the most corrupt president we've ever had, so it turns out to have been a fine move by ZTE.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
Spy Handler stated, in part:
China has been the #2 source of illegal immigrants to the US for a long long time, at least two decades. .... but it used to be very common to see headlines like,
"Cargo container seized at port of Long Beach found with fifty Chinese migrants living inside while being unloaded from cargo ship."
(Quote above edited to remove gratuitous xenophobia.)
The "#2" claim is bullshit - but the People's Republic is, in fact, a non-trivial source of unauthorized immigrants to the USA. According to the New York Times, there are currently 268,000 of them here.
That number is dwarfed by the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, but it's still more than the population of Newark, NJ (at least, as of the 2010 census). And China refuses to accept deportees, so we're basically stuck with them, even if the current administration manages to locate them all - which it won't, because it's focused exclusively on Hispanics.
It's also worth noting that Chinese immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, tend to be younger, and have skills that are better-suited to the American job market, than the average Hispanic immigrant. They also tend not to arrive in shipping containers. Most of them arrive legally, on tourist visas - which they blithely overstay, because there's nowhere near the level of effort expended on tracking them down as there is on tracking down Hispanics.
In my experience (and I know several such Chinese), they tend to be highly entrepreneurial. The ones I know are engaged in smuggling consumer goods - not from China to the USA, but from the USA to China. (Levis 501's are hugely popular - and extremely costly - in China, for instance.) In a twisted way, you could say they're actually contributing to this country's economy, and doing a tiny bit to redress our trade imbalance with China.
In another way, you could say they're probably laundering money for the Chinese mob - and I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you'd be right ...
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