Politics Plus

Yesterday, President Biden designated Camp Hale as a National Monument. It’s the site, high in the Rockies, where the Army’s 10th Mountain Division trained during World War II. “It was the first and only division of the U.S. military trained to fight in mountain terrain, and many of the soldiers came back to the area to help build the local ski industry.” Of course, Colorado Republican heads exploded. They are painting it as a “land grab,” but the entire area is already protected anyway. This is just a designation of a piece of Federal land as a Monument. It may possibly increase funding (which is needed.) I thought a little good news would be helpful today. I’m breaking my own (unwritten) rule today to use two short takes from the same source. That’s because, though each highlights a different person, both center on a crook from China, and the facts in both articles are from the same investigation. We certainly have some egregious crooks in the US – but we have no monopoly on them. Also, I’ll be watching the hearing today, so I won’t be saying anything about it till tomorrow.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

ProPublica – How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels
Quote – As they investigated [Xizhi] Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $3.8 trillion of capital has left China since 2006, making the country the world’s top “exporter of hot money,”
Click through for the beginning of the onvestigation (and probably ore than you ever wanted to know about money laundering.)

ProPublica – The Globetrotting Con Man and Suspected Spy Who Met With President Trump
Quote – In July 2018, President Donald Trump met at his New Jersey golf club with a Chinese businessman who should have never gotten anywhere near the most powerful man in the world. Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. But Liu was also a fugitive from Chinese justice. Media reports published overseas three years before the meeting had described him as the mastermind of a conspiracy that defrauded thousands of investors.
Click through for Part Two of the investigation. This is more information which doesn’t exactly make the Secret Service look good.

Food For Thought