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You know all this crap about Trump starting WWIII over the Taiwan phone call, blah-blah-blah? The sort of bullshit you can read in the World Wide Socialist Website that has found new clickbait since the H-Bombs didn't fly over Ukraine? It is crap--total crap. Like a professional wrestler screaming that he is going to kill his opponent, Trump is only interested in making money. This amazing article shows how internecine the ties between Trump's son-in-law and the Chinese deep state are. A telling quote:
One of the newest Kushner projects — a Trump-branded luxury apartment tower that opened in November in Jersey City — got nearly a quarter of its financing, about $50 million, from Chinese investors who are not publicly identified.
The investors are beneficiaries of a federal program that grants two-year visas and a path to permanent residency in exchange for investments of $500,000. The program, known as EB-5, has become popular with real estate developers as a cheap form of financing; in fiscal year 2015, the State Department issued 9,764 of the visas — overwhelmingly to applicants from China.
But the program, which must be renewed periodically by Congress, has lately come under fire. The Government Accountability Office has issued several reports raising concerns about what it termed the program’s insufficient background checks and lax safeguards against illicit financing. One applicant, the agency found, failed to report potential financial ties to a string of Chinese brothels.
Then there are the Kushners’ continuing negotiations with Anbang’s Mr. Wu, one of the most politically connected men in China.
In 2015, Mr. Kushner began pursuing a grand vision for 666 Fifth Avenue. The renowned architect Zaha Hadid was asked to come up with a design to resculpt the 40-story, 1950s-era aluminum-clad office building, adding apartments, a hotel and a mall and nearly tripling its height to 1,400 feet.
But the plan needed money, and while Mr. Kushner had managed to hang on to his family’s flagship building, it still had a lot of debt, with a $1.1 billion loan coming due in 2019, and a good portion of the commercial office space vacant.
Anbang, which got its start as an auto insurance company in 2004, had become one of the most aggressive Chinese buyers of United States real estate, and had begun investing in hotels. But it had encountered problems of its own; its byzantine ownership structure had given rise to concern on Wall Street and in Washington.
The Times reported last year that Anbang is owned by a few dozen companies, which in turn are owned by a number of shell companies that are controlled by roughly 100 people, many of whom have ties to a county in China that is the home of Mr. Wu, whose own power stems in part from marriage. In his case he married Zhuo Ran, a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, the leader who brought China out of the chaos of the Mao era. Mr. Wu also counts as a central business partner the son of a People’s Liberation Army marshal, and he has recruited several former government insurance regulators to serve on his board.
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/us/politics/jared-kushner-trump-business.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
