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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.
Britain is now facing a ‘recession’ as first coronavirus death on UK soil sends markets in panic with FTSE 100 opening 1.85% down at 6,581 - wiping off gains made during the week
London FTSE100 index major companies loses 124 points, 1.85% to 6,581
Frankfurt DAX30 sheds 1.8% to 11,735, Paris CAC40 drops 1.8% to 5,264
Milan’s major stock index FTSE-Mib also goes down 3.1% to 20,890 points
Hong Kong & Shanghai stocks also tanked overnight amid economic fears.
European stock markets including the FTSE 100 sank further this morning as traders feared that the coronavirus crisis could plunge Britain into recession.
London‘s benchmark index of major companies lost 124 points or 1.85 per cent to 6,581 today after Britain recorded its first death from the infection.
It also comes as a top investment bank warned coronavirus could push the UK to the brink of recession in the coming months.
In eurozone, Frankfurt DAX30 shed 1.8% to 11,735 points and ParisCAC 40 dropped 1.8% to 5,264, compared with yesterday’s closing levels.
TODAY: London’s FTSE 100 of major companies lost 124 points or 1.85 per cent to 6,581 today
THIS WEEK: The FTSE fell this morning, wiping out the gains it had seen so far this week
PAST FORTNIGHT: The FTSE has plunged since the virus sparked a worldwide rout last week
Meanwhile Milan’s major stock index the FTSE-Mib went down 3.1 per cent to 20,890 points as Italy continues to face the biggest outbreak in Europe so far.
In Asia, Hong Kong and Shanghai stocks also tanked as the coronavirus crisis overshadows government and central bank moves to limit economic impact.
Global markets hit by another wave of panic selling as fears…
for the FTSE 100 erased the index’s gains from earlier this week, with export-heavy companies now having lost more than £175million in value since the epidemic sparked a worldwide rout last week.
Cruise operator Carnival dropped 4.2 per cent to its lowest level since 2012, a day after its Grand Princess ocean liner was barred from returning to its home port of San Francisco on virus fears.
Britain said an older person with underlying health problems had succumbed to the flu-like virus yesterday, while the number of infections jumped to 115.
In company news, drug maker AstraZeneca fell 1 per cent after it said its treatment for a form of bladder cancer failed to meet the main goal of improving overall survival in patients in a late-stage study.
Top investment bank Goldman Sachs analysts has warned coronavirus could push the UK to the brink of recession in the coming months.
They say the outbreak will cause a ‘substantial’ near-term hit to economic growth, decimating the tourism industry and slashing leisure spending as Britons stay indoors.
It will cause a headache for new Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who is due to present his first Budget next week.
But analyst Sven Jari Stehn said: ‘The Budget may now focus on measures to safeguard public health than a broad-based expansion of spending.’
Goldman Sachs expects the economy to be flat in the first three months of 2020 and to contract by 0.2 per cent between April and June.
While US advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico’s new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks weren’t serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom’s left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico’s 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico’s “first full-fledged left-wing experiment,” AMLO’s election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book “A New Hope for Mexico,” “In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers…. Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites.”
The new president has held to his campaign promises. In 2019, his first year in office, he did what Donald Trump pledged to do — “drain the swamp” — purging the government of technocrats and institutions he considered corrupt, profligate or impeding the transformation of Mexico after 36 years of failed market-focused neoliberal policies. Other accomplishments have included substantially increasing the minimum wage while cutting top government salaries and oversize pensions; making small loans and grants directly to farmers; guaranteeing crop prices for key agricultural crops; launching programs to benefit youth, the disabled and the elderly; and initiating a $44 billion infrastructure plan. López Obrador’s goal, he says, is to construct a “new paradigm” in economic policy that improves human welfare, not just increases gross domestic product.
The End of the Neoliberal Era
To deliver on that promise, in July 2019 AMLO converted the publicly owned federal savings bank Bansefi into a “Bank of the Poor” (Banco del Bienestar or “Welfare Bank”). He said on Jan. 6 that the neoliberal era had eliminated all the state-owned banks but one, which he had gotten approval to expand with 2,700 new branches. Added to the existing 538 branches of the former Bansefi, that will bring the total in two years to 3,238 branches, far outstripping any other bank in the country. (Banco Azteca, currently the largest by number of branches, has 1,860.)
Digital banking will also be developed. Speaking to a local group in December, AMLO said his goal was for the Bank of the Poor to reach 13,000 branches, more than all the private banks in the country combined.
At a news conference on Jan. 8, he explained why this new bank was needed:
There are more than 1,000 municipalities that don’t have a bank branch. We’re dispersing [welfare] resources but we don’t have a way to do it. ...People have to go to branches that are two, three hours away. If we don’t bring these services close to the people, we’re not going to bring development to them…
They’re already building. I’ll invite you within two months, three at the most, to the inauguration of the first branches because they’re already working, they’re getting the land … because we have to do it quickly.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”