#Mnuchin

[mercoglianotrueblog]

Who's buying TikTok

#TikTok- final frontier of free speech-ban: #China isn't the reason

Rep.#Gallagher put the bill,#Mnuchin'(past #GoldmanSachs)raises funds to buy

#Palantir #Google #META #AIPAC #Zionists(#Milken, #Mossad'#Cohen) #LibertyStrategicCapital

#Trump to #CNBC

https://salvatoremercogliano.blogspot.com/2024/03/whos-buying-tiktok.html?spref=tw

[macwantspeace]

Bond supervillains want to buy TikTok. https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/steven-mnuchin-buy-tik-tok-ban-rcna143440

"The sharks smell blood in the water, and they’re circling TikTok.

Wealthy right-wingers in the U.S. are looking to sink their teeth into the app after Wednesday’s House vote in favor of banning the social media platform unless it’s divested from its China-based parent company, ByteDance."

[ifreakingloveroyals]

3 June 2019 | Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and United States Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin arrive through the East Gallery for a State Banquet at Buckingham Palace in London, England. President Trump's three-day state visit will include lunch with the Queen, and a State Banquet at Buckingham Palace, as well as business meetings with the Prime Minister and the Duke of York, before travelling to Portsmouth to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings. (c) Victoria Jones- WPA Pool/Getty Images

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich at Substack:

Friends, Elon Musk and entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on his X platform. According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about President Biden at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden's age to his policies on heath and immigration, calling Biden "a tragic front for a far left political machine.” The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases Trump now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias. This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.

No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India's Narendra Modi, Argentina's Javier Milei, and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.  Some of this helps Musk’s business interests. In India, he has secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he has opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he has solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries. Musk has slammed Biden for his decisions on electric vehicle promotion and subsidies, most of which have favored unionized U.S. auto manufacturers. Musk and his Tesla are viciously anti-union. But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and their cronies are backing a movement against democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, has written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

@Robert Reich nails it with this piece: Oligarchs are joining up with the anti-democracy MAGA movement to look out for themselves and aid the collapse of freedom.

[refractorind]

Rabbi Sam wants TikTok

[crybabyzine-subtext]

Don't ban TikTok, do anything else

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Trump Organization charged the Secret Service up to $1,185 per night for hotel rooms used by agents protecting former President Donald J. Trump and his family, according to documents released on Monday by the House Oversight Committee, forcing a federal agency to pay well above government rates.

The Committee released Secret Service records showing more than $1.4 million in payments by the Department to Trump properties since Mr. Trump took office in 2017. The Committee said that the accounting was incomplete, however, because it did not include payments to Mr. Trump’s foreign properties — where agents accompanied his family repeatedly — and because the records stopped in September 2021.

The records the panel obtained provided new details about an arrangement in which Mr. Trump and his family effectively turned the Secret Service into a captive customer of their business — by visiting their properties hundreds of times, and then charging the government rates far above its usual spending limits.

The records also make clear that Mr. Trump’s son Eric — who ran the family business while his father was in office — provided a misleading account of what his company was charging.

In 2019, Eric Trump said the Trump Organization charged the government only “like $50” for hotel rooms during presidential visits.

Instead, records obtained by the Committee showed, the Trump International Hotel in Washington repeatedly charged the Secret Service rates more than $600 per night. In one case, the hotel charged the Secret Service $1,160 a night for a room used while protecting Eric Trump in 2017. That was more than four times higher than the government’s usual spending limit for Washington hotels — but Secret Service officials approved the expense, according to the records.

The same year, the documents showed, Mr. Trump’s hotel in Washington charged the service $1,185 for a room used while guarding Donald Trump Jr.

“Per diem rates could not be obtained,” a Secret Service record said, referring to the government’s official maximum rate. By law, the department is allowed to exceed those maximum payments when its protective mission requires the additional cost.

Previously, the highest rate that the Trump Organization was known to have charged the government for a hotel room was $650 per night, for rooms at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“What gets me is, over and over again, how they just lie about this stuff,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the Chairwoman of the Oversight Committee. “Documents don’t lie.”

On Monday, Eric Trump issued a statement saying that the Trump Organization “would have been substantially better off if hospitality services were sold to full-paying guests.” He did not address the discrepancy between the rates he claimed the company had charged and the rates shown in the record.

In an interview, Ms. Maloney said the documents made clear that Mr. Trump was taking advantage of taxpayers by effectively requiring Secret Service agents to stay at properties he owned, and then billing the government exorbitant charges.

“This raises concerns that the Trump Organization was profiting off the presidency,” Ms. Maloney said. “It’s excessive.”

She said the Committee would continue to investigate how Mr. Trump’s businesses leveraged the presidency to his financial advantage, particularly regarding connections to foreign governments.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ms. Maloney said.

While Mr. Trump was in office, his hotels were visited repeatedly by people seeking to influence his administration, including foreign leaders, embassies and telecom executives who needed the Justice Department’s approval for a pending merger. Since Mr. Trump still owned his businesses, he could benefit directly from their patronage.

In the past, Trump Organization representatives have said that the company billed the government “at cost” and could have made more money renting rooms to other guests. The company continued to charge the Secret Service since Mr. Trump left office and began living at his properties full-time.

In 2020, The Washington Post reported that the government had spent more than $2.5 million at Trump properties during his presidency. The payments came from multiple agencies and were largely prompted by Mr. Trump’s travel.

The State Department, for instance, paid the Mar-a-Lago club thousands of dollars for expenses related to Mr. Trump’s summits with foreign leaders there — including charges for flowers, food and even glasses of water.

The White House paid Mar-a-Lago more than $1,000 to cover 54 alcoholic drinks consumed by Trump aides in a private bar, as first reported by ProPublica.

And the Secret Service paid Mr. Trump’s company to follow his family to properties around the country and the world. Many of those charges were related to the former president’s visits to Mar-a-Lago and Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. — where the Secret Service paid the Trump Organization $17,000 per month, an unusually high rent for that area, to use a “cottage” on the grounds of the golf club.

The Secret Service also paid the Trump Organization for rooms it used while protecting top administration officials — including Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin — during their stays at Trump properties.

The records obtained by the Oversight Committee show that the Secret Service has made at least 669 payments to Mr. Trump’s company, Ms. Maloney said on Monday in a public letter to Kimberly A. Cheatle, the agency’s director.

The Secret Service issued a written statement saying only that it would respond to the Committee’s requests for more information but did not provide any additional details.

Mr. Trump continued to own his businesses throughout his presidency, though he said he had given day-to-day management to his adult sons. The Trump Organization’s charges did not violate the law, ethics experts said, since presidents are largely exempt from conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other federal officials.

[miss-floral-thief]

Hm I randomly smell coffee around my here

[msclaritea]

[barbaragenova]

This got me on Last Estate, it's about that thing when super famous accomplished married women decide they want to write and direct IMPORTANT movies, and then, the movies either *disappear* or get blown up as global objects of scorn. 

[mercoglianotrueblog]

Who's buying TikTok

#TikTok- final frontier of free speech-ban: #China isn't the reason

Rep.#Gallagher put the bill,#Mnuchin'(past #GoldmanSachs)raises funds to buy

#Palantir #Google #META #AIPAC #Zionists(#Milken, #Mossad'#Cohen) #LibertyStrategicCapital

#Trump to #CNBC

https://salvatoremercogliano.blogspot.com/2024/03/whos-buying-tiktok.html?spref=tw

[kp777]

Oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t just hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself

Excerpt:

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.

Read more.

[avelera]

I've been talking with a few people irl about the TikTok ban and I was wondering if I could get your take on it? (iirc you work in election security). Mainly I'd like to know why TikTok/China is *uniquely* bad wrt dating mining/potential election interference when we've seen other companies/governments do the same thing (thinking of the Russian psyops here on Tumblr in 2016). It feels like the scope is so narrow that it doesn't come close to targeting the root problem (user privacy and data mining as a whole), leading me to think it's only point is "ooh China Scary". Thoughts? (No worries if you'd rather not get into it, I just thought of you as someone who might have more insight/informed opinions on the matter).

So I'm not really familiar with all the details of the case and certainly not all the details of the bill. But I will give my perspective:

TikTok as a particular threat to users' data and privacy has been known for some time in the cybersecurity world. US government employees and contractors have been straight-up forbidden to have it on their phones for some time now. I, for example, have never had it on my phone because of these security concerns. (Worth noting, I'm not a government employee or contractor, it was just a known-to-be dangerous app in the cybersecurity world so I avoided it.)

This is because the parent company, as I understand, has known connections to the Chinese government that have been exploited in the past. For example, to target journalists.

Worth noting, another app that would potentially be on the chopping block is WeChat, which also has close ties to (or is outright owned by?) the Chinese government. This is just speculation on my part but it's based on the fact that all the concerns around TikTok are there for WeChat too and it has also been banned on government devices in some states, so I imagine it would be next if the bill passes.

I think this is important to note because I've seen some hot takes here on Tumblr have said that the entire case against TikTok is made up and there is no security threat. That is simply not true. The concerns have been there for a while.

However, the question of what to do about it is a thorny one.

The determination seems to be that so long as TikTok is still owned by its parent company with its direct ties to the Chinese government, there really is no way to guarantee that it's safe to use. From that angle, demanding that the company sever ties and set up some form of local ownership makes sense.

I am not a lawyer, but, that being said, forcing them to sell their local operations to a locally-based buyer is a pretty invasive and unusual step for legislators to take against a private company, even in a clear case of spying. I'm sure TikTok's widespread popularity is a big part of the threat it poses, which lends to the argument used to justify such an extreme step. (Because it is on so many phones, it really could be a danger to national security.)

That said, at one point young activists on TikTok embarrassed Trump (lots of good context in this article) while he was campaigning in 2020, and there was some talk then about shutting it down which seemed pretty clearly linked to how it was used as a platform to organize against him. I'm sure there's at least some right wing antipathy towards the app that has a political basis going back to this event. Trump signed an executive order banning it, the ban going into effect got bogged down in the courts, and then Biden rescinded that executive order when he got into office, pending an investigation into the threat it posed.

Those investigations seem to have further confirmed that the Chinese government is getting access to US user data through the app, and further confirmed it as a security threat.

Now, to muddy the waters further, there's several dodgy investment funds including one owned by former Secretary of the Treasury to Trump Steven Mnuchin that are circling with an interest to buy TikTok if it does sell. That's very concerning.

Funds like Mnuchin's interest in purchasing TikTok (even though they do invest in other technologies too, so it is in their portfolio) definitely makes the motivations behind the sale look pretty damning as momentum builds, that it could be some sort of money grab here in the US.

China has also pointed out that forcing the sale of a company because of spying concerns like this opens a whole can of worms. If China thinks that, say, Microsoft is spying on their citizens, could they force the US company to sell its operations in China to a Chinese investor? Could they force Google? Could they even further polarize the internet in general between "free" and "not free" (as in, behind the great Chinese or Russian firewall, as examples) if this precedent is set, so that no Western companies can operate in authoritarian states without selling their local operations there to a government-controlled organization, and thus be unable protect their users there? Or, if you don't have so rosy a view of Western companies, could it effectively deal a blow to international trade in general by saying you have to have to sell any overseas arms of a company to someone who is from there? Again, I'm not a lawyer, but this is a hell of a can of worms to open.

But again, this is muddy because China absolutely is spying on TikTok users. The security reason for all of this is real. What to do about it is the really muddled part that has a ton of consequences, and from that angle I agree with people who are against this bill. Tons of bad faith consequences could come out of it. But the concerns kicking off the bill are real.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

"Harry did do a hospital visit and I got a little bit of Diana vibes from the few photos I saw (I think they were on Cat’s blog?)."

When i saw the photos from the hospital, i felt something was off on top of the obvious Diana cosplay.

Then i had a eureka moment. The beds were too neat and tidy, all the 'patients' looked healthy and posed plus they were all in scrubs. One of them didn't bother taking off his shades. No medical paraphenalia eg medical id bracelets, insect nets, IVs, blankets, charts, medical personnel to usher him around and or introduce the patients, no patients' personal effects on the drawers or elsewhere, medical supplies on the drawers, not even a glass of water. 

One of the patients said on camera, but audio cut from video posted to sussex.com that he'd received his prosthetic leg a year ago and it was working fine without any issues. 

I might be too deep in conspiracy territory when it comes to the Sussexes, but when it was announced that they were to visit a military hospital to see some military patients, i assumed they'd meet them in common room as they do UK patients.

I didn't think they'd stage them to cosplay Diana and also invoke *saviour barbie imagery and badly in a way that shows a complete lack of attention to detail. 

*saviour barbie = an instagram account inspired by Steve Mnuchin's book about her visit to Africa which was published at a moment in time where too many celebs were heading to Africa to ge photographed with poor black children in rural areas. It's pretty funny because it's all about the photos and not at all about the mission. Markle in Rwanda is the perfect example of saviour barbie trope.

[kaelio]

the incredibly fucked up thing im about to tell you is steve mnuchin was actually by far the best member of trump's cabinet. i think trump hired him because he looked like an evil monopoly man and his wife looked like a bondage-themed villainess from a Spy Kids movie , but steve. was actually ok. like not great but he was ok. at his job as secretary of the treasury. like he was a piece of garbage but he generally wanted america's economy to work so that he could continue to make money and not scrounge for beans in a nuclear apocalypse. its insane that this was the "good one". look at that guy. also he managed to stay the entire time. genuinely incredible.

[crybabyzine-subtext]

Ohhhhhhhhhhh i get it now

We're not trying to BAN Tiktok

We're trying to BUY Tiktok

Fxck these guys