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

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]

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.

What does Trump get out of it?

[satsuke]

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

Also, who will appoint the compliance team proposed? If it's Trump controlled cronies instead of competent engineering talent, what will that mean for national security going forward?