Trump Strikes Deal With China's ZTE on Sanctions (usatoday.com)

The Trump administration struck a deal Thursday with a Chinese telecom that will allow it to do business with U.S. companies even though it violated sanctions. From a report: China's ZTE will pay a $1 billion penalty and will embed a U.S. appointed compliance team, terms that are similar to those President Trump discussed last month when he revealed that Chinese leaders had asked him to look into the matter. "At about 6 a.m. this morning, we executed a definitive agreement with ZTE," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC in an interview Thursday. "And that brings to a conclusion this phase of the development with them." Trump asked the Commerce Department to investigate the restrictions on ZTE in April following a request from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Commerce imposed a seven-year ban after the company sold American-made products to Iran, a violation of U.S. sanctions.

Comments

So now we know how much it costs!

[OzPeter]

[Pinky finger to corner of mouth] Only $1 Beeelllyon to sell out national security and do away with trade sanctions.

Not really that much in today's markets.

Re:So now we know how much it costs!

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way the examples I brought up you didn't give a shit about when they happened.

They never happened. Stop watching fake news that has been proved to be false and have defended themselves in court as "just entertainment". You get some seriously messed up ideas of reality that way.

ZTE got away with it, and others will too

[It's the tripnaut!]

It certainly pays to have friends in high places.

ZTE will easily recoup the $1B just by the fact that its share price will certainly jump up with this news alone. Essentially, ZTE will have suffered very little penalties after all the transgressions it has done against the US. This sets a precedent that many other foreign companies with good ties to their government will surely follow.

Open for business

[Sarten-X]

The message seems pretty clear: laws don't matter if you pay enough money.

This is essentially an open invitation for other businesses to bribe the Trump administration. Just pay the right "fine" to the right department, and any violation of those pesky rules will just be forgiven. Either Trump will start negotiating on your behalf, or he'll just pardon the liable people. Either way, "consequences" will be left for those poor people who lack the business skill to blatantly ignore morality.

...Where's Martin Luther gone off to now?

Re:Open for business

[Sarten-X]

In case you missed the news, Hillary isn't our president, and neither is Obama any more. I complained plenty when the Democrats were in charge, but now it's the Republicans who are undermining the Constitution, so they get the complaints.

I know it's shocking, but it is actually possible to criticize an authority without caring what party they represent. It's called "having strong principles", and it appears to be an utterly foreign concept to this administration. I don't necessarily agree with the Democrats' principles, but at least they have them.

Re:Open for business

[Sarten-X]

They already had admitted the wrongdoing, and said they'd make amends... then they didn't follow through. That's what triggered the last round of sanctions, adding a US business ban on top of their existing billion-dollar fine.

In a functional administration, this wouldn't be something the White House would interfere with at all. The DOJ would make their recommendations, following any directional guidance the White House would establish in policy. That's a nice and predictable process, where one can review the law and policy before committing crimes, and know with a good degree of certainty how things will turn out.

Now we've defenestrated the rule of law. The policy doesn't actually matter. If you think you have enough money, you can go ahead and break the laws, and just buy an ad on Fox or host a party for Kanye, and you won't need to worry about anything the DOJ says.

Re:Open for business

[Sarten-X]

Oh, goody! It's time for a history lesson!

When slavery was a major issue in the United States, the parties looked very different from what we have now. The Democrats and Republicans had a lot of dissent within the parties, on pretty much every issue except one: slavery.

It seems weird to say it, but prior to the founding of the Republican party, political movements were more like sports teams than they are today. There was heavy anti-federalist sentiment, so people would usually support their state's party at a national level, mostly just to promote their own state's interests. Handling important issues federally was a rarity.

Then the civil war broke out.

The newly-formed Republican party was literally started as a one-issue party. They wanted to end slavery. They also absorbed a lot of the old Whig supporters (mostly from northern states), who wanted strong business support and social reform. When the southern Congressmen left their offices to join the Confederacy, the Republicans took over, by wide margins.

Obviously, slavery didn't last very long. The Union won the war, leaving Republicans in charge as the heroes of social equality, which worked until the Democrats came back a decade later. That's when segregation and Jim Crow laws came in from the Democrat side, and the Republicans pushed the Whig legacy of strong business.

The next big shift came with the Great Depression. All of that business-central policy collapsed on the Republicans, and people started leaving the party. Notably, the folks mainly concerned with social reform ended up in the Democrat camp, slowly reversing the Democrats' position on social equality. By the 1960s, with still no major opposition on that front by the Republicans, the Democrats actually ended up pushing to reverse their own segregation policies.

That support for the civil rights movement was very unpopular among the traditional southern Democrats, so they left the Democrat party, just like the Republicans had 30 years earlier. They ended up in the Republican camp.

In short, through the middle of the 20th century, the two major parties swapped their positions on social policy, while keeping their position on economic policy. That's pretty much the situation we have today, where the Democrats push for strong social equality and small-business economics, and the Republicans want big business and try to ignore racism entirely.

To wit, then: Democrats have principles today, but the Democrats we have today aren't the Democrats we had when the Democrats supported slavery.

(For clarity, I mostly align with the Whig ideas, mixed with a bit of socialism and statism... I don't really care who you are or how you were born, but if you follow the law you should have an equal opportunity for success as anyone else)

Re:So Much Winning

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

And, of course, this has NOTHING to do with the new batch of Chinese trademarks that Ivanka got - on the same day he announced this.

Re:So Much Winning

[nitehawk214]

That isn't what whataboutism is, comrade. But nice try on trying to discount the entire concept by misusing it.

Re:So Much Winning

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

WOW. If that's your take-away from that, maybe we should just drop an anvil on you to get your attention.

Re:What does Trump get out of it?

[thegarbz]

Trump's administration is openly pay-to-play, which begs the question, what does Trump get out of this transaction?

$500million

May 8th: Trump announces sanctions on ZTE.
May 9th: ZTE announces it will shutdown phone business.
May 11th: $500m investment from China http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/...
May 13th: Trump tweets concern about Chinese jobs lost with ZTE, confirms he spoke to Xi, and tells the commerce department to "get it done".

War with Canada but Buddy with China

[LostInTaiwan]

WTF!!!!!

We are in multiple trade wars with multiple democratic allies of ours. Allies that share our democratic ideals, share our common defense, and are not actively trying to undermine our global economic and military leadership position. Yet, we are openly helping authoritarian countries that violated our sanctions, aim their missiles at us, rams our ship and planes. Let's not kid ourselves. In authoritarian states, all large companies are organs of the state, subject to the bidding of the government. Helping companies in China is no different than helping the Chinese government itself. ZTE is a prime example.

Do evangelicals know that China actively suppressed the Christian faith and all non state-organized religion in China? Doesn't Fox News cover this topic?