How Donald Trump Violated the U.S. Embargo Against Cuba

Donald Trump likes to talk about "crooked Hillary," but given the Trump University scam, Trump's use of his foundation as a personal piggy bank, and Trump's six bankruptcies and screwing over of contractors, Trump is the one who looks crooked.  Now, on top of all of this, Newsweek is reporting that Trump violated the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.  Admittedly, the dollar amounts are not huger - at least for someone like Trump.  But what I find so disturbing is Trump's attitude.  Like his Christofascist supporters, Trump obviously thinks that he is above the laws that apply to the rest of America.  Here are excerpts from the Newsweek piece:

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami, where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.

 Without obtaining a license from the federal Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) before the consultants went to Cuba, the undertaking by Trump Hotels would have been in violation of federal law, trade experts say.

Officials with the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to emails seeking comment on the Cuba trip, further documentation about the endeavor or an interview with Trump. Richard Fields, who was then the principal in charge of Seven Arrows, did not return calls seeking comment.

In that statement, Conway has acknowledged that Trump broke the law. Paying the money for the business trip and meetings in Cuba – regardless of whether it resulted in an additional investment or casino deal – would directly violate the law. 

[O]ne OFAC official, who agreed to discuss approval procedures if granted anonymity, says the probability that the office would grant a license for work on behalf of an American casino is “essentially zero.”

The goal of the Cuba trip, the former Trump executive says, was to give Trump’s company a foothold should Washington loosen or lift the trade restrictions. While in Cuba, the Trump representatives met with government officials, bankers and other business leaders to explore possible opportunities for the casino company. The former executive says Trump had participated in discussions about the Cuba trip and knew it had taken place. 

The fact that Seven Arrows spent the money and then received reimbursement from Trump Hotels does not mitigate any potential corporate liability for violating the Cuban embargo. . . . If OFAC discovered this and found there was evidence of willful misconduct, they could have made a referral to the Department of Justice.” 

Like the Communist regime, the company was struggling, having piled up losses for years. In 1998 alone, Trump Hotels lost $39.7 million, according to the company’s financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its stock price had collapsed, falling almost 80 percent from a high that year of $12 a share to a low of just $2.75.

Though it has long been illegal for corporations to spend money in Cuba without proper authorization, there is no chance that Trump, the company or any of its executives will be prosecuted for wrongdoing. The statute of limitations ran out long ago, and legal analysts say OFAC’s enforcement division is understaffed, so the chances for an investigation were slim even at the time.

And perhaps that was the calculation behind the company’s decision to flout the law: the low risk of getting caught versus the high reward of lining up Cuban allies if the U.S. loosened or dropped the embargo. The only catch: What would happen if Trump’s Cuban-American supporters ever found out?

The Bible: Myth or Revisionist Propaganda?

I'm a frequent critic of Christofascists, biblical literalists and the politicians who prostitute themselves to them.  Some readers - and some friends - say I am too harsh, especially when I comment on articles that question, gasp, the horror, whether or not Christ even existed.  A piece in Newsweek has prompted outraged among the "godly folk" by taking a good look at the truth about the Bible and its sketchy origins.  While they mutter about sacrilege, attacks on Christians, the real unspoken issue may be that these folks have possible lived their lives based on myth and/or revisionist lies.  The take away, for me, is that no serious minded person should take the supposed claims of the Bible very seriously and that those who do deserve little of no deference. Here are some highlights from the piece which deserves a full read:

They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.

They are God’s frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers—fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible’s words.

This is no longer a matter of personal or private faith. With politicians, social leaders and even some clergy invoking a book they seem to have never read and whose phrases they don’t understand, America is being besieged by Biblical illiteracy. 

The Bible is not the book many American fundamentalists and political opportunists think it is, or more precisely, what they want it to be. Their lack of knowledge about the Bible is well established.  

The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found in 2012 that evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees—religious leaders depicted throughout the New Testament as opposing Christ and his message—more than they accepted the teachings of Jesus.

Newsweek’s exploration here of the Bible’s history and meaning is not intended to advance a particular theology or debate the existence of God. Rather, it is designed to shine a light on a book that has been abused by people who claim to revere it but don’t read it, in the process creating misery for others.   When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.

This examination—based in large part on the works of scores of theologians and scholars, some of which dates back centuries—is a review of the Bible’s history and a recounting of its words.

At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times. About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament.  . . . . The first books of the Old Testament were written 1,000 years before that. In other words, some 1,500 years passed between the day the first biblical author put stick to clay and when the books that would become the New Testament were chosen.

[I]n the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries. And what biblical scholars now know is that later versions of the books differ significantly from earlier ones—in fact, even copies from the same time periods differ from each other.

Scribes added whole sections of the New Testament, and removed words and sentences that contradicted emerging orthodox beliefs.  Take one of the most famous tales from the New Testament, which starts in John 7:53. A group of Pharisees and others bring a woman caught committing adultery to Jesus. Under Mosaic Law—the laws of Moses handed down in the Old Testament—she must be stoned to death. The Pharisees ask Jesus whether the woman should be released or killed . . . . .

Unfortunately, John didn’t write it. Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages. It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John. Even if the Gospel of John is an infallible telling of the history of Jesus’s ministry, the event simply never happened.

[T]he earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8.  . . . . .  The 12 verses that follow in modern Bibles—Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the Disciples and then ascending to Heaven—are not there. A significant moment that would be hard to forget, one would think.

The same is true for other critical portions of the Bible, such as 1 John 5:7 (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”); Luke 22:20 (“Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you”); and Luke 24:51 (“And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”).  

Then comes the problem of accurate translation. Many words in New Testament Greek don’t have clear English equivalents. Sentence structure, idioms, stylistic differences—all of these are challenges when converting versions of the New Testament books into English. And this can’t be solved with a Berlitz course: Koiné is ancient Greek and not spoken anymore. This is why English translations differ, with many having been revised to reflect the views and guesses of the modern translators. . . . . In other words, religious convictions determined translation choices.

In other words, with a little translational trickery, a fundamental tenet of Christianity—that Jesus is God—was reinforced in the Bible, even in places where it directly contradicts the rest of the verse.

[W]here does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts?  Nowhere. And in that deception lies a story of mass killings.

Christians are believed to have massacred more followers of Jesus than any other group or nation.  Those who believed in the Trinity butchered Christians who didn’t. Groups who believed Jesus was two entities—God and man—killed those who thought Jesus was merely flesh and blood.  . . . .  Indeed, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed.

At Nicaea, rules were adopted regarding the proper positions for prayer on Sundays—standing, not kneeling; nothing was said of the Jewish Sabbath or Saturday. Many theologians and Christian historians believe that it was at this moment, to satisfy Constantine and his commitment to his empire’s many sun worshippers, that the Holy Sabbath was moved by one day, contradicting the clear words of what ultimately became the Bible.  . . . . .  Constantine sided with those who believed Jesus was both God and man, so a statement of belief, called the Nicene Creed, was composed to proclaim that. Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were slaughtered. After they had returned home and were far from Rome, some who signed the document later sent letters to Constantine saying they had only done so out of fear for their lives. 

About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed was rewritten, and those who refused to sign the statement were banished, and another wholesale slaughter began, this time of those who rejected the Trinity, a concept that is nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts and is often contradicted by it.

None of this is meant to demean the Bible, but all of it is fact. Christians angered by these facts should be angry with the Bible, not the messenger.

The declaration in 1 Timothy—as recounted in the Living Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New International Version Bible and others—could not be more clear: Those who “practice homosexuality” will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the translation there is odd, in part because the word homosexual didn’t even exist until more than 1,800 years after when 1 Timothy was supposed to have been written. So how did it get into the New Testament? Simple: The editors of these modern Bibles just made it up. Like so many translators and scribes before them, they had a religious conviction, something they wanted to say that wasn’t stated clearly enough in the original for their tastes. And so they manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions.

The original Bible verse in Koiné used ἀρσενοκοῖται for what has been translated as “homosexual.” For the Latin Bible, it was as masculorum concubitores. The King James Version translated that as “them that defile themselves with mankind.” Perhaps that means men who engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.  The next thing to check here is whether 1 Timothy was based on a forgery. And the answer to that is a resounding yes. 

There is more which deserves a full read.  Again, the take away?   Those who believe in the Bible as inerrant or that it is the "word of God" are engaged in either deliberate self-delusion, suffer from shocking ignorance, or merely want to believe in fairy tales and myths.  What's even more sad is that so many lives have been damaged or lost based on supposed belief in a book that isn't much more that frequently manipulated fiction.  Belief in the Bible and its supposed strictures have no place in public policy or the civil laws.

New Owner of Newsweek Thinks Gays Can Be "Cured"

There are plenty of reasons to not read Newsweek, not the least of which has been the decline in quality of the magazine to which I once was a subscriber.  Now, with the spinoff of the magazine by The Daily Beast, there is another one: one of the new owners is an evangelical Christian who believes in "ex-gay" cures for gays.  Obviously, if he believes this kind of batshitery, one has to wonder what other aspects of the magazine's reporting will be distorted by religious based lunacy.  Will Newsweek become akin to other reality untethered "Christian" publication?  A piece in The Guardian looks at this disturbing development.  Here are highlights:

It was meant to herald the triumphant return to newsstands of a venerable 80-year-old American media institution with a proud journalistic record.

Newsweek’s 4,500-word relaunch cover story on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a California engineer who, it claimed, was the creator of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, gripped readers from Silicon Valley to Manhattan and delivered a frenzy of follow-up coverage to rival some of the biggest scoops of the magazine’s heyday.

Since then, however, the article has come under an onslaught of criticism, as Nakamoto “unconditionally” denied that he was "the face behind bitcoin", as Newsweek’s cover had proclaimed, and said that he had not even heard of the currency until he was contacted by a reporter.

The relaunch has, however, focused new attention on the young and relatively inexperienced men now at the helm of the newsweekly: [Jonathan] Davis, 31, and Etienne Uzac, his 30-year-old business partner, whose company IBT Media bought the magazine last August and detached it from the Daily Beast, with which it had merged three years earlier.

But they come with a backstory that is unusual for the mainstream media. The pair started their company in 2006 reportedly after meeting via Christian fellowships, and have frequently been the subject of reports linking them to David Jang, a controversial Korean pastor who is also the founder of Olivet University, an evangelical school based in San Francisco, California.

Davis once taught journalism at Olivet, and his wife, Tracy, is the university’s president. Uzac sat on Olivet’s board of trustees until last year, and his wife, Marion, who has also worked at IBT Media, was previously the press secretary for the World Evangelical Alliance.

Davis said in an interview that their work and faith were separate, and that he wanted “the journalism to speak for itself” both at their new magazine and at the International Business Times, a news website that was IBT Media’s flagship title until it bought Newsweek.

Similarly, he dismissed the notion that readers should be troubled by the little-known fact that he has personally endorsed the view, espoused by the so-called “ex-gay” movement, that gay people may have developed their sexuality as a result of being sexually abused as children, and can be cured by therapy to make them heterosexual.

In a Facebook post in February 2013, Davis described as "shockingly accurate" an op-ed article written by Christopher Doyle, the director of the International Healing Foundation (IHF), which works to convert gay people. Davis said it “cuts like a hot knife through a buttery block of lies”.

The American Psychological Association states that “ex-gay” therapies are “based on a view of homosexuality that has been rejected by all the major mental health professions”. A spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign said: “We would condemn any support for such activity.”

Corporation records in New York and California suggest that a web of media organisations connected to Davis have even more links to Olivet than previously thought.

Journalists who worked at both the International Business Times and 33 Universal told the Guardian that at times they seemed to operate more as “content farms” – referring to the high volume of their output – than as outlets for the sort of quality journalism associated with a major title such as Newsweek.

There's much more in the article.  Suffice it to say, if one is looking for serious journalism, Newsweek is not likely to fit the bill.

Newsweek Draws Fire on Gay Marriage; Bush: Bible Not Literal

As predicted, the regular Christianist loud mouths are in a frenzy hyperventilating over the Newsweek story on the Biblical basis for gay marriage that I talked about just yesterday. The always homophobic blowhards Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Tony Perkins of Family Research Council make the same old disingenuous anti-gay arguments and Ralph Reed - who I met in person at a political meeting some years back where he sent my gaydar into overdrive - chimes in too, apparently seeking attention after his ill-fated political run in Georgia. What strikes me most is that without the pretext of always working to "protect marriage," these guys would all be basically out of jobs In other news, the Chimperator made comments that will likely cause James Dobson wet himself. First, here are highlights from Politico concerning the shrieking against Newsweek (btw, remember that Perkins has NO theological credentials of his own):

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Leading social conservatives blasted Newsweek for its current cover story, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage," which they said misinterprets both biblical scripture and their own political movement. “It doesn’t surprise me. Newsweek has been so far in the tank on the homosexual issue, for so long, they need scuba gear and breathing apparatus,” said Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of anyone who takes biblical teachings seriously.”

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Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council, agreed, calling Newsweek’s cover story “yet another attack on orthodox Christianity.” “I hardly think that Newsweek is a credible venue for theological discussion,” said Perkins. “I mean, I thought it was just full of holes.”

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In addition to contesting Newsweek’s specific scriptural arguments, some social conservatives took issue with the basic premise of the magazine’s story: that conservative opposition to same-sex marriage is based on specific biblical instructions. “I see it as an attempt to caricature and reduce to a cartoon the social conservative belief in the efficacy of traditional marriage, and try to reduce it to some formulaic, scriptural literalism,” said Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition.

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In an e-mail to Politico, Maggie Gallagher, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, took a similar line, calling marriage “the one necessary adult relation in society – the way we bring together male and female to bring the next generation to life in a way that connects those children in love to their own mother and father.”

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On a somewhat related note, during an interview, the Chimperator said what can only be considered as heresy by the most unhinged Christianists. Namely, that the Bible is not to be construed literally and that the theory of evolution is not incompatible with the Bible. Here are some highlights from Raw Story:

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US President George W. Bush said in an interview Monday that the Bible is "probably not" literally true and that a belief that God created the world is compatible with the theory of evolution. "I think you can have both," Bush, who leaves office January 20, told ABC television, adding "You're getting me way out of my lane here.

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"I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution," he told ABC television. Asked whether the Bible was literally true, Bush replied: "Probably not. No, I'm not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it."