Hasta La Gadget!

In an attempt to rebut reports that he is governing ineffectively and beholden to a small group of fringe right-wing aides, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering yet another White House staff shakeup just 11 weeks into his presidency.

Axios and The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump is thinking of dismissing or demoting his current chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and his key adviser, Steve Bannon. Both outlets reported that former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn ― who currently serves as Trump’s top economic adviser ― is a key contender to replace Priebus.

“Gary Cohn would be the top pick for chief of staff,” if Priebus is fired, a White House official told The Huffington Post.

In an internal struggle for Trump’s good graces, Cohn has a strong hand: He’s rich, close to the Trump family and has ex-employees who now work for the Trump family in the White House. Perhaps most importantly, his promotion could salve Trump’s ego, which has been bruised by his relatively small inauguration crowd and a series of political failures that began with his attempt to ban Muslims from traveling to the United States and continued through his catastrophic attempt to repeal Obamacare.

Cohn “speaks the language of ‘business,’ which is what Trump understands,” the White House official noted. The language of business is money: Cohn walked away with $285 million when he left Goldman Sachs for the Trump administration, and is in many ways a stand-in for the kind of New York businessmen who have shunned Trump for years. After years of being spurned by the American banking elite ― Trump famously had to turn to Deutsche Bank for cash after burning his creditors in bankruptcy ― he appears to enjoy being part of the club.

The White House denied the reports of a staff shakeup, writing in a statement that “the only thing we are shaking up is the way Washington operates as we push the President’s aggressive agenda forward.” 

Cohn is personally close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, and Trump’s daughter and aide Ivanka, the White House official notes. Cohn’s status in the White House is also bolstered by Goldman Sachs veteran Dina Powell, who was effectively hired as an aid to and proxy for Ivanka and now serves on the National Security Council.

“Dina Powell is going to be a big, big person in the White House” the official said. “She can boost Cohn, and Cohn can do the same for her.”

After spending a decade as the president and COO of Goldman Sachs, Cohn also has the boardroom skills to use those connections to his advantage. Bannon’s most recent managerial efforts focused on leading the relatively small newsroom at Breitbart, a website popular with white nationalists.

Everyone who works on Wall Street does it for the same reason: the money. But high finance attracts a host of different personality types (like Cohn, Bannon is a Goldman alum).

For the last half of the 20th century, big banks were a socially acceptable career choice for people with strong appetites for personal financial gain who were also interested in deploying their fortunes to support liberal causes. Banking summoned Democrats from the ether the way the oil and gas industry drew Republicans. There are still some Democrats on Wall Street today, but many of them changed teams after the financial crisis, including Cohn.

During the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Cohn was a heavyweight Democrat, offering up over $136,000 to official party organs while supporting individual candidates, including stalwart liberal Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.). His only donation to a Republican prior to the financial crisis, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, was a $2,000 check to Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) in 2004.

But in December of 2009, Cohn’s donations took a dramatic turn. He started giving to right-wing darlings like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), former Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), while pouring tens of thousands of dollars a cycle into the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Every Republican is Crucial PAC.

Though Cohn is often described as a political moderate, and his opponents in the Trump White House even deride him as a “Democrat,” his partisan transformation occurred as Republicans were making a dramatic shift to the right.  

Cohn’s pattern of contributions doesn’t fit that of an opportunist looking to buy access to winning candidates. Prior to December 2009, he gave to Democrats whether the party’s political fortunes appeared good or bad. But that month, the House of Representatives passed its version of what would become known as the Dodd-Frank Act, and did so without the support of a single House Republican.

Since then, Cohn has not flexed any particularly impressive liberal ideological muscles. During his tenure in the Trump administration, his work has included efforts on a health care bill that would have rescinded coverage from 24 million Americans ― not exactly the Wellstone-ian ideal.

Cohn didn’t suffer any meaningful personal financial consequences from Dodd-Frank ($285 million, the amount he left Goldman Sachs with, is more than 5,100 times the median household income). But many on Wall Street felt attacked by the regulatory restructuring, which shifted some political and economic power away from the private sector and into the hands of federal authorities.

“One of the major things people want from politicians is psychic income,” former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told HuffPost in 2014. “They want to be told that they are wonderful people, that their jobs are important for the human race, that they contribute greatly. Lloyd Blankfein was not really kidding when he said that, ‘We are doing God’s work.’ That’s his inner feeling. I don’t think that the [Dodd-Frank] legislation really hurt them much …. But we really hurt their feelings mightily.”

Wall Street had, of course, caused millions of foreclosures and created vast human suffering by throwing the global economy into the most severe economic calamity since the Great Depression. Many families have yet to recover, but Cohn and other top bankers survived with padded pockets thanks to federal support.

Cohn’s appointment as White House Chief of staff wouldn’t just be a boon for bank lobbyists seeking lucrative new loopholes. It would be a restoration of finance to the center of American politics.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Harvard’s Graham Allison worries that China and the U.S. risk falling into the “Thucydides Trap” ― named after the historian who chronicled the conflict between ancient Athens and Sparta ― in which rivalry between rising and established powers inevitably leads to war. More often than not, Allison’s research shows, similar rivalries throughout history have held to that pattern. The great question in this era is whether the world’s two largest economies can embark on a new departure, or if they are fated to replay an all too familiar past. 

The first face-to-face meeting this week of Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump is an opening indicator of which path will be taken. One summit does not make a relationship. But it does set a tone. That Donald Trump has changed his tune from charging “rape” by China on the campaign trail to inviting President Xi for a lavish repast at Mar-a-Lago is a sign that convergent interests may out of necessity forge a different future than history would suggest. 

The interwoven relationship that has tightly tethered the U.S. and Chinese economies over the past three decades is the basis both of the present conflict and for resolving it. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have escaped poverty and climbed the income ladder by supplying cheap goods and produce to the likes of Walmart, Costco and Home Depot or assembling Apple iPhones and other electronics that are ubiquitous in the daily lives of Americans. This accounts for the huge trade deficit with China ― though the main reason for U.S. trade imbalances globally is simply that, since the 1970s, Americans consume more as a nation than they save and invest.

As the made-for-export low-wage factory of the world, China has surely taken up jobs that might have been created in the U.S. Yet China, too, is a major importer of components for what it produces, reportedly spending more on importing microchips than oil, to take but one example. Increasingly, the fortunes of leading U.S. industries like Hollywood and Boeing depend on Chinese markets.

If “the globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia,” as White House adviser Steve Bannon has declared, then therein lies the solution. Having achieved relative prosperity built upon the American-led open trading order that President Trump says he is seeking to dismantle, China now has the income and the intent to shift to a domestic consumption-driven economy less reliant on exports to the U.S. As Shen Dingli writes from Shanghai, that means the present trade imbalance can best be addressed by China through increasing imports from the U.S. rather than cutting exports. The enormous financial resources China has accumulated from its trade surplus with the U.S., David Shambaugh suggests from Singapore, could be plowed back into the U.S. to finance the very kind of infrastructure projects Trump has promoted. If Trump can manage to restore a manufacturing base in the U.S. that is not mostly automated, it will reinforce the trajectory toward a more stable balance between the American and Chinese economies.

Further, China is plotting an economic future that largely looks away from the U.S. ― through regional free trade agreements in East Asia, building out a revived Silk Road trading route that stretches across Eurasia from Beijing to Istanbul and deepening commercial ties with Africa. In short, if the U.S. and China can manage the bumps over the next few years, the root of economic conflict will resolve itself over time.

But there’s a big hurdle they’ll have to get over first. For the two leaders, dealing with North Korea’s nuclear and missile program is a continuing conundrum. The likely course ahead appears to be a hybrid of harsher sanctions ― which the U.S in pushing ― followed in time by direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which China is pressing for, according to top Chinese diplomat Fu Ying. 

As Xi sat down with Trump in Florida, the American president launched his first direct military strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s airfield, where the planes which allegedly delivered this week’s deadly Syrian gas attack were based. Former NATO commander James Stavridis calls the move “proportional, tactically sound, professionally executed” and says it “sends a reasonable coherent strategic signal.” That signal, he suggests, was not only to Russia and Syria, but also to China and North Korea. The follow-up message Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should carry on his visit to Moscow next week, the former admiral adds, is that it must “restrain” its Syrian ally.

China’s intertwined relationship with the U.S. is also getting entangled in the immigration debate. While most of that debate has focused on Mexicans and Muslims, a new schism has broken out between second and third generation Asian Americans and immigrants who have arrived in recent years from a bolder and more prosperous Middle Kingdom. Frank Wu, who chairs the prestigious Committee of 100 top Chinese-American entrepreneurs, scorns the new immigrants “from an ascendant Asia.”: “Some of our cousins, distant kin who have shown up here, are alarming. They are bigots who do not care about democracy. They believe themselves to be better than other people of color ― it hardly is worth pointing out since it is so obvious. They even suppose, not all that secretly, that they will surpass whites.” Responding furiously to this characterization from Shanghai, Rupert Li fires back that, “The Chinese-American elite were appalled by the watershed of support for Donald Trump among new Chinese arrivals.” If “they do not feel solidarity with disadvantaged groups,” he goes on to say, it is “not because they are bigoted, but because they do not consider themselves disadvantaged.” 

Reflecting on events elsewhere in the world, Scott Malcomson reports on the latest turmoil in Hungary around the government’s effort to impose crippling restrictions on the Central European University, founded with the help of the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, and other institutions that receive foreign funding. As Malcomson sees it, the anti-foreigner animus of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is “self-destructive” because it isolates the country and will undermine what it needs to progress. Muhammad Sahimi worries that the tough stance of the Trump administration on Iran only boosts the chances of the hard-liners ousting reformist President Hassan Rouhani from power in upcoming elections and putting a conservative, Assad-supporting cleric in his place. Erin Fracolli and Elisa Epstein contend that what they call Trump’s “Muslim ban” harms women by identifying “honor killings” as an Islam problem in the same way he conflates the Muslim religion with terrorism in his rhetoric about “radical Islamic terrorism.” 

Pax Technica author Phil Howard reports on his new research that shows “more than half the political news and information being shared by social media users in Michigan [a pivotal state that helped Trump triumph in the recent U.S. president election] was not from trusted sources.” He contrasts that experience with an election in Germany where, “for every four stories sourced to a professional news organization, there was one piece of junk.” He concludes: “Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t generate junk news, but they do serve it up to us. They are the mandatory point of passage for this junk, which means they could also be the choke point for it.”

Finally, our Singularity series this week looks at how CRISPR gene editing for crops can feed the 9.7 billion people our planet is expecting to host by 2050.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Squeeze, measure, pour, ???, profit.

Read more…

ADATA has taken the wraps off a new sleek metal USB flash drive, one featuring a shiny and durable metal design with a large open loop on the end and dark, stamped branding on the top. The drive is long and looks well when paired with any device, including high-end and aluminum laptops. The style isn’t unlike what we’ve seen … Continue reading

Jesus was born in a stable and likely spent many a night sleeping beneath the stars. But if he were to return to Earth, as Christian scripture predicts, and make his way to New York City, he’d be sure to find fancier accommodations awaiting him, thanks to an early 20th century religious group.

In 1928, members of the Outer Court of the Order of the Living Christ religious community initiated construction on an impressive, 14,000-square-foot home designed for none other than Jesus Christ. The mansion remains standing, and, after it changed hands several times over the years, it was sold to new owners this year for $6.25 million.

The house, referred to as Chapel Farm in a 1936 court document, was listed at $11 million in 2013 ― the most expensive home in the borough at the time, according to Halstead real estate. The mansion has seven bedrooms, a gym, hot tub, six fireplaces and 2 acres of sprawling gardens. Sandra Galuten, who had owned the home for about 30 years, told local news she even had hallway tiles brought in from the Vatican.

“The house has such a history to it,” Galuten told the New York Post in 2015. “It is really interesting.”

Scroll down to see photos of the mansion built for a heavenly king:

Gabriela Landazuri Saltos contributed to this article.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.