CORONA VIRUS EXCLUSIVE: WHY ITALY? Corrupt use of Illegal Chinese Workers a Likely Cause.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 14 March 2020 05:00.
First of all, the virus hit Italy first among European nations, and for that reason they were uniquely unprepared for the novel Covid-19 virus. Furthermore, Italy has business ties and migration - both above ground and illegal - from China. The economy of Lombary is largely dependent upon said ties - markedly, contributing to reluctance to shut down the garment industry, which has many Chinese workers working in close quarters. Finally, Italy has the second oldest population in the world, thus having a particularly susceptible demographic.
As the impact of the Corona Virus (Covid-19) continues to grow, nowhere in Europe has been more affected than Italy, and in particular northern Italy.
With a complete lockdown announced by the Italian Government, everyday life for Italians has ground to a halt as the rise in cases of Wuhan-Flu continues.
This has raised the question of why Italy has suffered more than other countries to date?
CORONA VIRUS EXCLUSIVE: WHY ITALY?
AltNewsMedia has a theory as to what may lie behind this.
Many Italians in Northern Italy have sold their leather goods and textiles companies to China. Italy then allowed 100,000 Chinese workers from Wuhan and Wenzhou to move to Italy to work in these factories, with direct flights between Wuhan and Northern Italy. This continued post outbreak, so is it mere coincidence that Northern Italy is now Europe’s hotspot for Corona Virus?
The murky reality is that the EU turned a blind eye to vast numbers of illegal Chinese immigrants working in Italian factories.
The ‘Open Borders’ EU will of course try to keep this under wraps, but reality is, the Chinese Mafia operate Italian textile factories with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants shipping ‘made in Italy’ goods into China and elsewhere.
Why didn’t the EU act to stop corrupt Italians taking backhanders from the Chinese mafia?
Why is Boris and our Scientific community still happy to allow Italian flights into the UK?
This is an area that logically should be front and centre of investigations into how the virus spread into Europe, but we suspect it will overlooked.
The whole scenario is a disaster for the EU and their open borders narrative, but as the 4th biggest economy in the EU this whole situation with Italy could accelerate the collapse of the whole EU project.
Listen here as we discuss this further in our weekly podcast.
Related:
While Prato, a city near Florence, is not a Coronavirus hot-spot, the corrupt practice of using illegal migrant Chinese workers gained precedence there.
Prato, the historical capital of Italy’s textile business, has attracted the largest concentration of Chinese-run industry in Europe within less than 20 years.
As many as 50,000 Chinese live and work in the area, making clothes bearing the prized “Made in Italy” label which sets them apart from garments produced in China itself, even at the lower end of the fashion business.
In some ways, the Chinese community of Prato has succeeded where Italian companies have failed. Italy’s economy has barely grown over the past decade and is only just emerging from recession, partly due to the inability of many small manufacturers to keep up with global competition.
Yet Prato, which lies 25 km (16 miles) from the Renaissance jewel of Florence, is also a thriving hub of illegality committed by both Italians and Chinese, a byproduct of globalization gone wrong, many people in the city say.
Up to two thirds of the Chinese in Prato are illegal immigrants, according to local authorities. About 90 percent of the Chinese factories - virtually all of which are rented out to Chinese entrepreneurs by Italians who own the buildings -break the law in various ways, says Aldo Milone, the city councilor in charge of security.
This includes using fabric smuggled from China, evading taxes and grossly violating health and labor regulations. This month a fire, which prosecutors suspect was set off by an electric stove, killed seven workers as they slept in cardboard cubicles at a workshop.
Italian officials acknowledge they haven’t cracked down effectively on the mushrooming illicit behavior.
Prato mayor Roberto Cenni, himself a textiles entrepreneur, arrived in 2009 promising to clean up the area. Cenni says he has trebled inspections since then, but still only a small fraction of the factories are monitored regularly.
“We don’t have the ability to fight this system of illegality,” he said, noting that Prato has only two labor inspectors.
In some cases, local officials share the blame. Prato chief prosecutor Piero Tony ordered the arrest of 11 people this month, including a city council employee who is suspected of issuing false residency permits - for between 600 and 1,500 ($820-$2,100) euros a piece - to more than 300 Chinese immigrants since May (2014)
The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany
Many companies are using inexpensive immigrant labor to manufacture handbags that bear the coveted “Made in Italy” label.
The Chinese residents of Prato have arguably revived the fading manufacturing city, which has the highest proportion of immigrants in Italy.
Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.
The first significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the industrial zone around Prato, a city fifteen miles northwest of Florence, in the nineteen-nineties. Nearly all of them came from Wenzhou, a port city south of Shanghai. For the Chinese, the culture shock was more modest than one might have expected. “The Italians were friendly,” one early arrival remembered. “
[...]
By the mid-nineties, Wenzhouans were setting up textile businesses in small garages, where they often also lived. Soon, they began renting empty workshops, paying with cash. The authorities didn’t ask too many questions. Prato’s business model was falling apart under the pressures of globalization. As it became harder for Italians to make a living in manufacturing, some of them welcomed the money that the Chinese workers brought into the local economy. If you could no longer be an artisan, you could still be a landlord.
Throughout the aughts, Chinese continued to show up in Tuscany. A non-stop flight was established between Wenzhou and Rome. Some migrants came with tourist visas and stayed on. Others paid smugglers huge fees, which they then had to work off, a form of indentured servitude that was enforced by the threat of violence.
[...]
While Florence was celebrated for its premium leatherwork, Prato was best known for the production of textiles. The Wenzhou workers tacked in a third direction. They imported cheap cloth from China and turned it into what is now called pronto moda, or “fast fashion”: polyester shirts, plasticky pants, insignia jackets. These items sold briskly to low-end retailers and in open-air markets throughout the world.
The Chinese firms gradually expanded their niche, making clothes for middle-tier brands, like Guess and American Eagle Outfitters. And in the past decade they have become manufacturers for Gucci, Prada, and other luxury-fashion houses, which use often inexpensive Chinese-immigrant labor to create accessories and expensive handbags that bear the coveted “Made in Italy” label.
[...]
More than ten per cent of Prato’s two hundred thousand legal residents are Chinese. According to Francesco Nannucci, the head of the police’s investigative unit in Prato, the city is also home to some ten thousand Chinese people who are there illegally. Prato is believed to have the second-largest Chinese population of any European city, after Paris, and it has the highest proportion of immigrants in Italy, including a large North African population.
A fugitive boss of the calabrese Mafia was arrested, on Friday, thanks to the lockdown imposed by the Italian government to contain the coronavirus.
Cesare Antonio Cordì, 42, emerging boss of the Locri clan, in Calabria, has been wanted since last July and accused of fraudulent money transfer. The man was hiding in a villa in the countryside of Locri. The police have been busy, for days, on the checks to enforce the lockdown and the ban on going out, except in cases of extreme necessity. The day before, they stopped a man with shopping bags who justified himself saying he was only bringing the groceries to a friend who could not go out.
The police were suspicious of the fact that, in that area, almost all the villas were uninhabited. In the following hours, they followed him and found the shopping was destined for the boss Cordì.
To arrest him, the intervention of a special military unit was necessary. It consists of elite and highly trained soldiers, known as the Carabinieri Heliborne Squadron, or the Cacciatori, literally: the hunters.
According to investigators, Cordì is a mobster on the rise in the fierce Locri clan and the subject of a recent investigation by the Calabrian prosecutors.
Thousands of citizens have been reported for violating the ban on staying at home, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior.
In Sciacca, Sicily, a Covid-19 positive man who was forbidden from going out, was discovered by the police, while shopping. The Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation and accused the man of “aiding the epidemic”. If convicted, he faces 12 years in prison.
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Posted by 368 died Sunday, Italy's death toll at 1,809 on Mon, 16 Mar 2020 03:34 | #
Italy reports 368 coronavirus deaths in 24 hours: Latest updates
Over 1,800 killed so far in Italy, the worst-hit country after China, with total number of cases hitting nearly 25,000.
The Fed slashes rates to zero to combat coronavirus
today
Italy on Sunday reported 368 new deaths from the coronavirus outbreak as the country’s death toll hit 1,809 while the number of positive cases rose to 24,747 from 21,157 on Saturday, the country’s civil protection authority said.
Governments around the world have stepped up restrictions on the movement of their citizens to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 5,800 people with over 153,000 infected globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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Posted by Austria imposes curfew (1000 infected) on Mon, 16 Mar 2020 15:27 | #
Italy on Monday reported 349 new deaths from coronavirus, raising the total number of victims in the country to 2,158.
The latest figures provided by the Italian Civil Protection Department show that the total number of confirmed cases in the country also continues to rise, climbing 12% from Sunday to reach 23,073.
The Italian government is still hoping that stringent containment measures – including a near-total lockdown of the country – will at some point stop the lethal spiral sparked by the virus, which now has its epicenter in Europe and its highest number of deaths in Italy.
To help Italian businesses and families face the prolonged lockdown imposed by the epidemic, the Italian government on Monday approved a much-awaited package of economic measures for up to €25 billion, including incentives for workers who risk losing their jobs and baby-sitting vouchers for parents.
COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China last December, and has so far spread to some 150 countries and territories, and the World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a pandemic.
According to the WHO, out of roughly 165,000 confirmed cases, the death toll is nearly 6,500.
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Posted by Camorra virus and its Nigerian vector on Tue, 17 Mar 2020 18:02 | #
An Italian virologist says that the country’s attempt not to appear “racist” in the early says of the coronavirus outbreak crippled the ability to properly respond to the pandemic.
Professor of Virology and Microbiology at the University of Padova Dr. Giorgio Pal told CNN that measures imposing travel restrictions and border controls were taken too late due to fears over political correctness.
“There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China,” Pal told CNN. “Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak.”
Italy is now the hardest hit country in the world in terms of coronavirus deaths, with 3,405 people losing their lives.
The need to minimize potential “racism” and “stigmatization” in response to the coronavirus was a policy endorsed by the World Health Organization itself on numerous occasions and adopted by the left-wing Italian government.
As we previously highlighted, the Mayor of Florence launched a nationwide campaign at the start of February encouraging Italians to hug Chinese people on the street to “stem the hatred.”
Footage of the stunt even shows Italians physically removing a Chinese man’s face mask while closely embracing him.
The Mayor even released a Twitter video of himself hugging an awkward-looking Chinese person to promote the campaign, which was launched to “express solidarity with the Chinese community.”
Mayor of Florence Dario Nardella has suggested residents hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, a member of Associazione Unione Giovani Italo Cinesi, a Chinese society in Italy aimed at promoting friendship between people in the two countries, called for respect for novel coronavirus patients during a street demonstration. “I’m not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”
The video was uploaded February 4th
It’s sad to me, really, because in concrete terms, I’d like for there to be good relations between Europeans and Orientals. It is the abstract concept of anti-racism and anti prejudice and its consequences that is the problem.
That video was uploaded February 4th. Three weeks later, Italy had recorded its third death. On March 20th alone, 627 deaths were recorded, bringing the total to over 4,000, with a frightening new trend introducing critical patients in their 40s and 30s.
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Posted by See Naples, then don't die. on Tue, 31 Mar 2020 21:43 | #
Italy: Inside the hospital where no medics have been infected
Sky’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay is given exclusive access inside the Cotugno Hospital in Naples, where medics are taking serious measures to avoid coronavirus infection.
It comes as the number of deaths from COVID-19 continues to climb across Europe, with the hardest-hit nation Italy, reaching 100,000 cases and recording more deaths than any other country.
Posted by Italy and the Corona road initiative on Sat, 14 Mar 2020 11:56 | #
However, it hasn’t only been below ground dealings with Chinese that has brought them and the Coronavirus to Italy.