• Trump Owes $Millions To The Chinese Communist Party - He's A Traitor Ju

    From Yak@21:1/5 to All on Tue Oct 5 22:06:17 2021
    XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism

    Donald Trump’s Debt to China

    By John Cassidy
    April 24, 2020
    Image may contain Plant Human Person Flower Blossom Flower Bouquet Flower Arrangement Xi Jinping Coat and Suit
    The President’s reëlection campaign has released an ad attacking Hunter
    Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, but Trump has benefitted from
    Chinese investment, too.Photograph by Thomas Peter / Getty

    Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead
    published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s
    best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With
    the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to
    extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This
    strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of
    China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

    The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s
    campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection
    to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was
    elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for
    the global COVID-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean
    Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life,
    and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy,
    as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator
    Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called
    for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will
    try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

    With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new
    opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground
    states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump,
    beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t
    the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state,
    provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York
    office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans
    will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second
    term,” the timely article noted.

    The building in question is 1290 Avenue of the Americas, which is located between West Fifty-first and West Fifty-second Streets. The majority owner
    of the building is Vornado Realty Trust, a big real-estate company that is
    run by the veteran developer Steven Roth. In 2007, the Trump Organization acquired a thirty-per-cent stake in the Sixth Avenue building and also in separate Vornado development, in San Francisco. By all appearances, the
    Vornado stake has been one of Trump’s most successful investments, and the
    Bank of China played a significant role in its success. “The debt stems
    from a $950 million refinancing deal in 2012, to which the Bank of China chipped in $211 million,” the Politico article said. “Vornado’s federal financial disclosures show it and the other owner of 1290 Avenue of the Americas—Trump—are still indebted from the 2012 deal.”

    To be sure, there is no suggestion in the Politico story that the Chinese
    bank supplied this large sum of money specifically to curry favor with
    Trump. He hadn’t officially entered politics in 2012, and the Chinese institution also participated in other American real-estate deals around
    the same time. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from 2013,
    the Bank of China was “already one of the largest foreign lenders to
    commercial real estate in the U.S., helping finance prestige properties.”
    The Journal story said that the Chinese bank extended the 2012 loan to
    Vornado intending to package it into mortgage bonds, which it could then
    sell to other investors at a profit. In an update to its story, Politico
    wrote that on Friday evening the Bank of China issued a statement saying
    it did do a securitization and “has not had any ownership interest in that
    loan since late November 2012.”

    Video From The New Yorker

    Bringing Midwifery Back to Black Mothers

    But the fact remains that Trump, through his thirty-per-cent stake in the building on Sixth Avenue, has benefitted personally from a big loan from
    China, whoever owns it now. The Politico article linked to a filing from Vornado to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which shows that the nine-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan carries an annual yield of 3.34
    per cent and is due in November, 2022. “There are definitely legitimate questions that are raised by Hunter Biden’s actions,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
    Washington, told Politico. “They are not even in the same ballpark as the conflict of interest questions raised by President Trump’s continued relationship with his own company.”

    Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks—or other investors with ties to foreign governments—is unknown
    because Trump refuses to release his complete tax returns and other
    financial records. The “financial disclosure law did not require him to disclose any business loans he had not personally guaranteed,” Walter
    Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics, which establishes standards for the executive branch, wrote on Twitter on Friday. “So, who
    knows who else he owes money? I’ll tell you who: The lenders who have him
    in their grip.”

    We do know that Trump-family companies have done business with Chinese
    entities on other occasions, too. In 2017, a Trump-branded golf resort in
    Dubai hired two Chinese firms to do construction, McClatchy reported. And, since Trump has been in the White House, the Chinese government has issued numerous trademarks to Ivanka Trump’s businesses.

    Relative to the size of the two-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar loan in
    2012, these dealings were minor, but they confirm the essential truth that Trump, despite his rhetoric, is a participant and a beneficiary of the
    global economic system that he blames for the gutting of the American
    middle class. The Chinese financial investments that end up funding
    Trump’s office buildings and similar high-end developments are the mirror
    image of the trade deficit that has cost the United States, and Trump- supporting regions in particular, millions of jobs. The United States
    sends money across the Pacific to pay for goods manufactured in China,
    then China uses a lot of that money to make dollar-denominated investments
    in real estate and other sectors, and purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

    Trump won’t dwell on any of this during the campaign, of course. But, the
    next time he brings up Hunter Biden or starts railing against the Chinese government, somebody should ask him about the 2012 loan from the Bank of
    China.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Yak@21:1/5 to All on Fri Oct 8 15:11:41 2021
    XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism

    Donald Trump’s Debt to China

    By John Cassidy
    April 24, 2020
    Image may contain Plant Human Person Flower Blossom Flower Bouquet Flower Arrangement Xi Jinping Coat and Suit
    The President’s reëlection campaign has released an ad attacking Hunter
    Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, but Trump has benefitted from
    Chinese investment, too.Photograph by Thomas Peter / Getty

    Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead
    published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s
    best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With
    the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to
    extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This
    strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of
    China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

    The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s
    campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection
    to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was
    elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for
    the global COVID-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean
    Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life,
    and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy,
    as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator
    Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called
    for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will
    try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

    With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new
    opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground
    states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump,
    beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t
    the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state,
    provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York
    office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans
    will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second
    term,” the timely article noted.

    The building in question is 1290 Avenue of the Americas, which is located between West Fifty-first and West Fifty-second Streets. The majority owner
    of the building is Vornado Realty Trust, a big real-estate company that is
    run by the veteran developer Steven Roth. In 2007, the Trump Organization acquired a thirty-per-cent stake in the Sixth Avenue building and also in separate Vornado development, in San Francisco. By all appearances, the
    Vornado stake has been one of Trump’s most successful investments, and the
    Bank of China played a significant role in its success. “The debt stems
    from a $950 million refinancing deal in 2012, to which the Bank of China chipped in $211 million,” the Politico article said. “Vornado’s federal financial disclosures show it and the other owner of 1290 Avenue of the Americas—Trump—are still indebted from the 2012 deal.”

    To be sure, there is no suggestion in the Politico story that the Chinese
    bank supplied this large sum of money specifically to curry favor with
    Trump. He hadn’t officially entered politics in 2012, and the Chinese institution also participated in other American real-estate deals around
    the same time. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from 2013,
    the Bank of China was “already one of the largest foreign lenders to
    commercial real estate in the U.S., helping finance prestige properties.”
    The Journal story said that the Chinese bank extended the 2012 loan to
    Vornado intending to package it into mortgage bonds, which it could then
    sell to other investors at a profit. In an update to its story, Politico
    wrote that on Friday evening the Bank of China issued a statement saying
    it did do a securitization and “has not had any ownership interest in that
    loan since late November 2012.”

    Video From The New Yorker

    Bringing Midwifery Back to Black Mothers

    But the fact remains that Trump, through his thirty-per-cent stake in the building on Sixth Avenue, has benefitted personally from a big loan from
    China, whoever owns it now. The Politico article linked to a filing from Vornado to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which shows that the nine-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan carries an annual yield of 3.34
    per cent and is due in November, 2022. “There are definitely legitimate questions that are raised by Hunter Biden’s actions,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
    Washington, told Politico. “They are not even in the same ballpark as the conflict of interest questions raised by President Trump’s continued relationship with his own company.”

    Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks—or other investors with ties to foreign governments—is unknown
    because Trump refuses to release his complete tax returns and other
    financial records. The “financial disclosure law did not require him to disclose any business loans he had not personally guaranteed,” Walter
    Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics, which establishes standards for the executive branch, wrote on Twitter on Friday. “So, who
    knows who else he owes money? I’ll tell you who: The lenders who have him
    in their grip.”

    We do know that Trump-family companies have done business with Chinese
    entities on other occasions, too. In 2017, a Trump-branded golf resort in
    Dubai hired two Chinese firms to do construction, McClatchy reported. And, since Trump has been in the White House, the Chinese government has issued numerous trademarks to Ivanka Trump’s businesses.

    Relative to the size of the two-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar loan in
    2012, these dealings were minor, but they confirm the essential truth that Trump, despite his rhetoric, is a participant and a beneficiary of the
    global economic system that he blames for the gutting of the American
    middle class. The Chinese financial investments that end up funding
    Trump’s office buildings and similar high-end developments are the mirror
    image of the trade deficit that has cost the United States, and Trump- supporting regions in particular, millions of jobs. The United States
    sends money across the Pacific to pay for goods manufactured in China,
    then China uses a lot of that money to make dollar-denominated investments
    in real estate and other sectors, and purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

    Trump won’t dwell on any of this during the campaign, of course. But, the
    next time he brings up Hunter Biden or starts railing against the Chinese government, somebody should ask him about the 2012 loan from the Bank of
    China.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Yak@21:1/5 to All on Sat Oct 30 13:56:29 2021
    XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism

    Donald Trump’s Debt to China

    By John Cassidy
    April 24, 2020
    Image may contain Plant Human Person Flower Blossom Flower Bouquet Flower Arrangement Xi Jinping Coat and Suit
    The President’s reëlection campaign has released an ad attacking Hunter
    Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, but Trump has benefitted from
    Chinese investment, too.Photograph by Thomas Peter / Getty

    Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead
    published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s
    best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With
    the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to
    extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This
    strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of
    China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

    The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s
    campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection
    to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was
    elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for
    the global COVID-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean
    Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life,
    and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy,
    as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator
    Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called
    for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will
    try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

    With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new
    opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground
    states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump,
    beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t
    the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state,
    provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York
    office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans
    will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second
    term,” the timely article noted.

    The building in question is 1290 Avenue of the Americas, which is located between West Fifty-first and West Fifty-second Streets. The majority owner
    of the building is Vornado Realty Trust, a big real-estate company that is
    run by the veteran developer Steven Roth. In 2007, the Trump Organization acquired a thirty-per-cent stake in the Sixth Avenue building and also in separate Vornado development, in San Francisco. By all appearances, the
    Vornado stake has been one of Trump’s most successful investments, and the
    Bank of China played a significant role in its success. “The debt stems
    from a $950 million refinancing deal in 2012, to which the Bank of China chipped in $211 million,” the Politico article said. “Vornado’s federal financial disclosures show it and the other owner of 1290 Avenue of the Americas—Trump—are still indebted from the 2012 deal.”

    To be sure, there is no suggestion in the Politico story that the Chinese
    bank supplied this large sum of money specifically to curry favor with
    Trump. He hadn’t officially entered politics in 2012, and the Chinese institution also participated in other American real-estate deals around
    the same time. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from 2013,
    the Bank of China was “already one of the largest foreign lenders to
    commercial real estate in the U.S., helping finance prestige properties.”
    The Journal story said that the Chinese bank extended the 2012 loan to
    Vornado intending to package it into mortgage bonds, which it could then
    sell to other investors at a profit. In an update to its story, Politico
    wrote that on Friday evening the Bank of China issued a statement saying
    it did do a securitization and “has not had any ownership interest in that
    loan since late November 2012.”

    Video From The New Yorker

    Bringing Midwifery Back to Black Mothers

    But the fact remains that Trump, through his thirty-per-cent stake in the building on Sixth Avenue, has benefitted personally from a big loan from
    China, whoever owns it now. The Politico article linked to a filing from Vornado to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which shows that the nine-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan carries an annual yield of 3.34
    per cent and is due in November, 2022. “There are definitely legitimate questions that are raised by Hunter Biden’s actions,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
    Washington, told Politico. “They are not even in the same ballpark as the conflict of interest questions raised by President Trump’s continued relationship with his own company.”

    Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks—or other investors with ties to foreign governments—is unknown
    because Trump refuses to release his complete tax returns and other
    financial records. The “financial disclosure law did not require him to disclose any business loans he had not personally guaranteed,” Walter
    Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics, which establishes standards for the executive branch, wrote on Twitter on Friday. “So, who
    knows who else he owes money? I’ll tell you who: The lenders who have him
    in their grip.”

    We do know that Trump-family companies have done business with Chinese
    entities on other occasions, too. In 2017, a Trump-branded golf resort in
    Dubai hired two Chinese firms to do construction, McClatchy reported. And, since Trump has been in the White House, the Chinese government has issued numerous trademarks to Ivanka Trump’s businesses.

    Relative to the size of the two-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar loan in
    2012, these dealings were minor, but they confirm the essential truth that Trump, despite his rhetoric, is a participant and a beneficiary of the
    global economic system that he blames for the gutting of the American
    middle class. The Chinese financial investments that end up funding
    Trump’s office buildings and similar high-end developments are the mirror
    image of the trade deficit that has cost the United States, and Trump- supporting regions in particular, millions of jobs. The United States
    sends money across the Pacific to pay for goods manufactured in China,
    then China uses a lot of that money to make dollar-denominated investments
    in real estate and other sectors, and purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

    Trump won’t dwell on any of this during the campaign, of course. But, the
    next time he brings up Hunter Biden or starts railing against the Chinese government, somebody should ask him about the 2012 loan from the Bank of
    China.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Yak@21:1/5 to All on Wed Nov 3 22:35:51 2021
    XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism

    Donald Trump’s Debt to China

    By John Cassidy
    April 24, 2020
    Image may contain Plant Human Person Flower Blossom Flower Bouquet Flower Arrangement Xi Jinping Coat and Suit
    The President’s reëlection campaign has released an ad attacking Hunter
    Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, but Trump has benefitted from
    Chinese investment, too.Photograph by Thomas Peter / Getty

    Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead
    published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s
    best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With
    the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to
    extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This
    strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of
    China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

    The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s
    campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection
    to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was
    elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for
    the global COVID-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean
    Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life,
    and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy,
    as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator
    Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called
    for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will
    try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

    With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new
    opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground
    states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump,
    beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t
    the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state,
    provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York
    office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans
    will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second
    term,” the timely article noted.

    The building in question is 1290 Avenue of the Americas, which is located between West Fifty-first and West Fifty-second Streets. The majority owner
    of the building is Vornado Realty Trust, a big real-estate company that is
    run by the veteran developer Steven Roth. In 2007, the Trump Organization acquired a thirty-per-cent stake in the Sixth Avenue building and also in separate Vornado development, in San Francisco. By all appearances, the
    Vornado stake has been one of Trump’s most successful investments, and the
    Bank of China played a significant role in its success. “The debt stems
    from a $950 million refinancing deal in 2012, to which the Bank of China chipped in $211 million,” the Politico article said. “Vornado’s federal financial disclosures show it and the other owner of 1290 Avenue of the Americas—Trump—are still indebted from the 2012 deal.”

    To be sure, there is no suggestion in the Politico story that the Chinese
    bank supplied this large sum of money specifically to curry favor with
    Trump. He hadn’t officially entered politics in 2012, and the Chinese institution also participated in other American real-estate deals around
    the same time. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from 2013,
    the Bank of China was “already one of the largest foreign lenders to
    commercial real estate in the U.S., helping finance prestige properties.”
    The Journal story said that the Chinese bank extended the 2012 loan to
    Vornado intending to package it into mortgage bonds, which it could then
    sell to other investors at a profit. In an update to its story, Politico
    wrote that on Friday evening the Bank of China issued a statement saying
    it did do a securitization and “has not had any ownership interest in that
    loan since late November 2012.”

    Video From The New Yorker

    Bringing Midwifery Back to Black Mothers

    But the fact remains that Trump, through his thirty-per-cent stake in the building on Sixth Avenue, has benefitted personally from a big loan from
    China, whoever owns it now. The Politico article linked to a filing from Vornado to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which shows that the nine-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan carries an annual yield of 3.34
    per cent and is due in November, 2022. “There are definitely legitimate questions that are raised by Hunter Biden’s actions,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
    Washington, told Politico. “They are not even in the same ballpark as the conflict of interest questions raised by President Trump’s continued relationship with his own company.”

    Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks—or other investors with ties to foreign governments—is unknown
    because Trump refuses to release his complete tax returns and other
    financial records. The “financial disclosure law did not require him to disclose any business loans he had not personally guaranteed,” Walter
    Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics, which establishes standards for the executive branch, wrote on Twitter on Friday. “So, who
    knows who else he owes money? I’ll tell you who: The lenders who have him
    in their grip.”

    We do know that Trump-family companies have done business with Chinese
    entities on other occasions, too. In 2017, a Trump-branded golf resort in
    Dubai hired two Chinese firms to do construction, McClatchy reported. And, since Trump has been in the White House, the Chinese government has issued numerous trademarks to Ivanka Trump’s businesses.

    Relative to the size of the two-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar loan in
    2012, these dealings were minor, but they confirm the essential truth that Trump, despite his rhetoric, is a participant and a beneficiary of the
    global economic system that he blames for the gutting of the American
    middle class. The Chinese financial investments that end up funding
    Trump’s office buildings and similar high-end developments are the mirror
    image of the trade deficit that has cost the United States, and Trump- supporting regions in particular, millions of jobs. The United States
    sends money across the Pacific to pay for goods manufactured in China,
    then China uses a lot of that money to make dollar-denominated investments
    in real estate and other sectors, and purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

    Trump won’t dwell on any of this during the campaign, of course. But, the
    next time he brings up Hunter Biden or starts railing against the Chinese government, somebody should ask him about the 2012 loan from the Bank of
    China.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)