Patrick's Notebook

by Kenny Stancil

To improve outcomes for people in the United States, the lawmakers wrote, the next administration must “stop special interests from profiting off of the public service of government officials.”In an effort to seal off the revolving door between special interests and government, senators recommended that President-elect Biden enact “a total ban on lobbyists employed by corporations from serving in the administration, especially at executive agencies they lobbied.”

In the wake of the Trump administration’s pervasive corruption and flagrant law-breaking, a trio of Democratic lawmakers is urging President-elect Joe Biden to establish new, high standards for federal ethics and transparency by adopting key reforms that would prevent corporate lobbyists from serving in the White House, require the disclosure of lobbying materials privately shared with administration officials, and crack down on financial conflicts of interest.

“The American public has a right to know when lobbyists meet with executive branch officials and what they share in the course of those meetings.”
—Sens. Merkley, Warren, and Markey

Encouraged by what they characterized as Biden’s “commitment to restore executive branch ethics through executive action,” Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on Monday sent a letter (pdf) to the president-elect with specific recommendations for how to “end special interest corruption of our politics and make government work for the people.”

Americans, the lawmakers wrote, “have endured four years of the most corrupt president and administration in modern memory.”

Despite pledging to “drain the swamp,” the Trump administration “has allowed lobbyists and special interest to run federal agencies, even when they have been openly hostile to the agencies’ missions,” the senators continued. “It has allowed senior officials to maintain unacceptable personal and financial conflicts of interest, and allowed foreign governments to try to curry favor, as President Trump and senior White House staff abused the presidency to enrich themselves.” » Read the rest of this entry «

By Brandon Weichert

The United States is mired in a succession crisis. There is much loose talk about another civil war erupting between supporters of President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. As this occurs, America’s enemies act boldly against U.S. interests. Each precious moment wasted on deciding which septuagenarian won the White House in November is another moment that the Chinese Communist Party continues its long march to global dominance.

China’s dominance will not come at first in the form of military conquest. Beijing is very much a 21st century power, and its program for displacing the United States will look far different from what the Soviet Union tried during the Cold War. Chinese dominance will be brought on by superior trade, industrial, and technological development practices.

Beijing recently signed a revolutionary free trade alliance with several Asian powers—including Australia—meant to increase China’s influence over the Indo-Pacific and diminish Washington’s hard-won influence there. China announced it had achieved quantum supremacy—a lodestar for whichever country or company seeks to pioneer quantum computing. Many technologists, like Scott Amyx, have previously argued that quantum computing could be as disruptive to the world economy as the cotton gin or automobile were. Whoever dominates this new industry will write humanity’s future. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Jake Johnson

“Small donors who give to Trump thinking they are financing an ‘official election defense fund’ are in fact helping pay down the Trump campaign’s debt or funding his post-presidential political operation.”

After bombarding supporters daily with emails blaring lies about the election and soliciting donations to overcome virtually non-existent voter fraud, President Donald Trump’s political operation has reportedly raised more than $150 million since November 3, a staggering windfall that is being funneled into a Republican joint fundraising committee and a Trump PAC established to fuel his post-White House activities.

While the Trump team’s aggressive emails—sometimes as many as 15 per day—purport to be raising money for an “Official Election Defense Fund” set up to finance the president’s flailing legal effort to overturn the election, the fund does not exist.

“The average donor who gives in response to Trump’s appeal for funds to ‘stop the fraud’ likely doesn’t realize that their money is actually retiring Trump’s debt or funding his leadership PAC.”
—Brendan Fischer, Campaign Legal Center

“There is no such account,” the Washington Post reported late Monday. “The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of November 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and which he can use to fund his post-presidency activities.” » Read the rest of this entry «

By Deng Xiaoci and Fan Anqi

A panorama of the moon’s surface by the lander-ascender combination of China’s Chang’e-5 probe after its smooth moon landing on Tue Photo: CNSA

China’s Chang’e-5 probe executed a successful landing on planned location on the moon 11:11 pm Tuesday Beijing time, sending images of operation. Photo: CNSA

Following a perfect landing on the designated area on the near side of the moon late Tuesday evening, the landing vehicle of Chinese robotic lunar probe Chang’e-5 officially began sample collecting work on the surface of Earth’s celestial neighbor, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Wednesday.

The CNSA said in a statement sent to the Global Times that as of 4:53 am Wednesday, the lander-ascender combination of the Chang’e-5 probe had completed drilling the moon’s surface and sealed the samples it had collected. The CNSA did not reveal the weight of the sample collected as of press time.

The lander-ascender combination of the spacecraft is currently working on collecting samples from the lunar surface, the Chinese space agency said.

The Chang’e-5 uses a combination of a robotic arm and drilling equipment for its automatic and robotic sample collection from multiple points on the moon’s surface and deeper ground, the CNSA said.

The surface sample collecting stage will take about two days, after which the ascender segment of the probe, carrying the sealed lunar samples, will take off from the moon to rendezvous and dock with the orbital module. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Celine Castronuovo

Businesses at properties owned by the Trump Organization and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family reportedly received more than two dozen Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans worth more than $3.65 million.

An analysis by NBC News of Small Business Administration (SBA) data released Tuesday night found that millions of dollars were given to businesses located at Trump Organization and Kushner Companies properties that pay rent to the two companies.

NBC reported that 15 of those properties self-reported that after receiving the PPP loans, they kept only one employee, did not keep any employees or did not report how many workers they retained.

Among the loans was one for $2,164,543 to the Triomphe Restaurant Corp., located at Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York City. The company reported the money was not used to keep any jobs. The restaurant later closed.

Additionally, NBC reported that two tenants at Trump Tower in New York received more than $100,000 and only kept three jobs, while four tenants at the Kushner Companies-owned 666 5th Avenue received a total of more than $204,000 and held just six jobs. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Scott Galloway

People often ask me what stocks I own. My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent. Big tech is the twenty-first century version of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and there is no trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon to rein them in.

How have they done it? The algorithm is this: innovate, obfuscate, and exploit. Especially in a pandemic.

Put simply, COVID-19 has been an effective weapon of mass distraction from big tech’s bad behavior. No news story survives 12 hours while a pandemic coupled with a national display of incompetence renders everything else what it is, less important. But whether we are paying attention or not, unchecked growth and market dominance lead to a slew of problems. Inevitably, companies without serious competition become less innovative and capture more profits and share from exploiting their position, and less from creating real value. And to protect that position, they perform infanticide on other innovators.

No wonder that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have added hundreds of billions in market value since March. By virtue of being the biggest elephants in the herd, the Four are well positioned to survive any crisis, and to thrive when the rains return. And a pandemic that keeps us home in front of our screens and leaves the professional class with plenty of unspent income is hardly a crisis at all for the companies that sell us those screens and dominate what we do on them. The Four were already ascending to dominance, and the pandemic has accelerated that trend, just as it has so many others. » Read the rest of this entry «

by William Pesek

All Asia can do is buckle its seat belts and hunker down for the messiest political exit in modern historyStage set for the messiest political exit in modern history

Wow, who knew Donald Trump had a Securities and Exchange Commission? After four years of making inside deals and corporate malfeasance great again, the U.S. president is turning on the lights at the SEC to hit China on his way out the door.

Trump’s crack team of China trolls is rushing to kick companies off U.S. stock exchanges before Jan. 20, when he leaves office. Could Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding be among them? Stay tuned for coming episodes of the Trump v. China reality show. This is but a preview of the next two months of Trumpian chaos sure to shake Asian markets early and often.

As Trump casts blame for his blistering Nov. 3 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, China’s Xi Jinping can expect to sustain most of the blows. Trump was already miffed that President Xi ran circles around him in trade talks before COVID-19 arrived. In pre-pandemic times, Trump saw a buoyant economy as his ticket to reelection. Now that he lost, Xi’s economy — and Asia’s more broadly — is in harm’s way for 62 more days of Trumpian score-settling.

The good news: Biden will be in the White House soon enough to de-Trumpify this region. A lifelong centrist and multilateralist, the former senator and vice president will lower the geopolitical temperature from the go. Count the ways, though, Trump could ruin the coming holidays for Asian leaders, corporate chieftains and investors alike. And in ways that might be difficult for Biden to unravel in short order. » Read the rest of this entry «