Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.
Trump’s Binance buddy gets a pardon: Changpeng Zhao began this year the disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, having done prison time for, as the Biden DOJ put it, “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,” violating the Bank Security Act, and allowing money to flow freely to a host of bad actors, including “terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.” But Zhao, having forfeited the right to run Binance, wanted back in. So he used his connections to Trump’s family and inner circle to secure a pardon that would let him run the show again. In return, Zhao showered his attention on World Liberty Financial—using Binance’s leverage to enrich Trump’s private crypto fund. TNR’s Tim Noah was positively apoplectic about the shady arrangement.
Chips to China: Speaking of Tim Noah and apoplexy: It’s probably not great that one firm, Nvidia, has come to possess such godlike, market-moving power. Its outsize importance to the global economy had Noah fingering it as one of the major pillars to crumble, when he gamed out a potential Trump stock market crash back in October. Trump’s been doing what he can to boost Nvidia’s fortunes, however: This year, the president broke with long-standing national security tradition and announced that he was permitting the firm to sell its H200 chips to China. As The New York Times’ David Sanger noted, the deal—the fruits of “intense lobbying” from Nvidia CEO and White House gadfly Jensen Huang—raised a basic question: “If the chips that power the most advanced technology can be sold to the United States’ chief technological, military and financial competitor, where is the new line drawn?” That’s probably the least of Trump’s concerns, however: The deal also guaranteed that “25 percent of all the revenues from the sales would go to the United States,” in yet another case of this administration’s affection for fascist corporatism.
Great Job Jason Linkins & the Team @ The New Republic Source link for sharing this story.
