Saturday, June 17, 2017

Trump wants Cuba's Hotel and Entertainment market, uses U.S. policy to get it?

Trump is now eyeing up the Cuban hotel and entertainment markets under the guise of "human rights and democracy." See if this isn't blatantly transparent to you:
Trump is on the cusp of reversing President Barack Obama’s limited opening to Cuba, moving back toward Cold War-era policies designed as part of a catastrophically failed half-century attempt to foster regime change. Carried out under the unlikely banner, for Trump, of human rights and democracy, the shift is instead more likely to re-impose hardships on ordinary Cubans — the very same people Trump, Rubio, and Diaz-Balart claim to champion. 
"Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration's completely one-sided deal with Cuba. Easing of restrictions on travel and trade does not help the Cuban people. They only enrich the Cuban regime."
Here’s the con, because Trump’s policy would…:
…impose new limits on commercial transactions that involve the Cuban military. That could have far-reaching effects since the military touches almost every corner of the Cuban economy. Many of the big hotels in Havana, for example, would be off-limits to American visitors.
"We will very strongly restrict American dollars flowing to the military, security, and intelligence services that are the core of the Castro regime," Trump said.
I wasn't the only one who saw the obvious, despite the media blind spot on this new Cuban policy. A frequent guest on MSNBC, Richard Painter tweeted:

Richard W. Painter is an American lawyer and the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration from 2005–2007.

All of this is coming out at the same time of this recent story:
All Things Considered: Anonymous Buyers Account For Majority Of Trump Property Sales: NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with USA Today reporter Nick Penzenstadler about how the number of anonymous buyers of Trump real estate has jumped to a dramatic 70 percent since the president's nomination. Before Trump was nominated to be president, 4 percent of Trump Organization property sales went to secretive shell companies called LLCs.
PENZENSTADLER: "When you add into that that we don't know who's buying the property, ethics people we spoke to said it's definitely cause for concern. So when someone buys a property or purchases anything in the business it goes into the Trump Organization, which is held by a trust. And Trump is the sole beneficiary of that trust. So the money goes into a pool of money, and the president can draw from that whenever he'd like.

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