Donald Trump, China, Wall Street and the environment

This video from the USA says about itself:

RNC Holiday Party Held At Trump Hotel, What Conflict Of Interest?

11 December 2016

The RNC is having a Holiday Party, wait until you hear where they’re having it. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

“President-elect Donald Trump is doing exactly what he always said he was going to do with his company, the Trump Organization. But he’s spinning it as a new decision — and the press is buying it.

The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reported Wednesday evening that Trump won’t sell his stake in his company. His adult sons will run the business, but he won’t transfer ownership to them. And he certainly won’t be doing anything remotely resembling divesting or installing an independent administrator to run the Trump Organization.

It’s a plan that does almost nothing to address the massive conflicts of interest inherent in owning a real estate and branding business while serving as president of the United States.

It’s also the same thing he’s been promising to do for months.

You don’t need to rely on unnamed sources to know that Trump plans to have his adult children run his business while he’s in the Oval Office. He said so on live TV during a Republican primary debate in January. He said so in September. His son Donald Jr. has said the same thing. On Nov. 10, two days after Trump won the election, his attorney said the president-elect’s children were already running the business with, he claimed, no involvement from their father. (Heightening the conflicts of interest is the fact that his three oldest children are also on his transition team’s executive committee.)

The only notable difference reported in the New York Times story is that Trump’s daughter Ivanka will also step aside from the business. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are reportedly moving to Washington, D.C., to work in some as-yet-to-be-determined roles in her father’s administration. (Kushner’s potential position brings its own multibillion-dollar conflicts and, given his marriage to Ivanka, may also violate anti-nepotism laws.)

And the president-elect’s team is making sure reporters know he may still change his mind. “No final decisions have been made,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told HuffPost. Hicks added that, as previously announced, Trump will publicly announce his plan on Dec. 15.

“This leaves us exactly where we thought we would be,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It is, assuming this is what he announces next week, an entirely inadequate approach to avoiding conflicts.””

Read more here.

By placing a question mark over US-China relations, Trump is recklessly compounding rising uncertainty in Asia and around the world, as well as the threat of war: here.

In his book on the 1930s Depression, The Great Crash, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith included a chapter titled “In Goldman, Sachs We Trust.” The title could well be reprised in an analysis of the stock market surge that has followed the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency: here.

President-elect Donald Trump last Thursday nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a fervent advocate of deregulation and a tool of the oil and gas industry, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The selection of Pruitt underscores the incoming administration’s far-right agenda and determination to eviscerate any remaining regulatory obstacles to corporate profit: here.