[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The whole issue and capacity of closing down borders, monitoring exit and entry is intriguing in demonstrating that human ecology management - border control - is possible.
Furthermore, the issue of viral contagion being immediately destructive, brings into awareness and discussion the hazard and potential long term destruction of introducing different species of people into a human ecology. It assists in cultivating benign rhetoric.
We might refer back to the issue of Typhoid Mary accusing the health department of NYC of discriminating against her because she was Irish.
No, dear, it’s not arbitrary discrimination and blind prejudice. It’s not because you are Irish. On the contrary, our human ecology and the nuances of its management cannot accommodate this introduction.
Amren’s Jared Taylor comes to a similar conclusion which he relates in this communique:
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.
Poland reports first death from COVID-19, to raise epidemic alert level
Poland reported its first death from coronavirus, local authorities in the city of Poznan said on Thursday (Mar 12), as reported by private broadcaster TVN24.
The 57-year-old female teacher, who had recently been hospitalised in critical condition with pneumonia, was put into an artificial coma and on a ventilator but “unfortunately she died not long ago,” Poznan deputy mayor Jedrzej Solarski told reporters.
Poland currently has 46 other confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the health ministry.
The woman’s husband and daughter are among those hospitalised with coronavirus but their conditions are not critical. Other family members, including the woman’s two sons, have not been infected.
“What we feared over the last few days has come about. We have our first death from the coronavirus,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters.
“I offer my condolences to her close ones.”
STATE OF EPIDEMIC THREAT
Poland plans to announce a state of epidemic threat, health minister Lukasz Szumowski said on Thursday.
“Yesterday, the WHO announced a pandemic. Today we will release a decision by the Health Minister regarding the introduction of a state of epidemic threat,” Szumowski told a press conference.
This will allow the government to close chosen places of work or institutions and direct medical workers to places of need, he added.
It is known that the woman has not recently been abroad and had no contact with a person who would have been suspected to have or having been diagnosed with COVID-19 disease. According to preliminary findings, several days ago she had contact with a person who returned from Italy.
For the first time, the World Health Organization called the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, a pandemic. Meanwhile, the United States now has more than 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus — but testing in the country is still ramping up, meaning that number could continue to climb.
WHO defines a pandemic as the worldwide spread of a new disease for which most people do not have immunity.
On Wednesday, the governor of New York questioned the number of people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S.
“When they do the retrospective on this one, they are going to say, ‘Why did it take the Unites States so long to bring up the testing capacity?’” Gov. Cuomo said on “TODAY.” On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that he was implementing a “containment area” around a one-mile radius in the city of New Rochelle, home to one of the largest clusters of coronavirus cases in the country.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 March 2020 07:45.
The Fed’s Baffling Response to the Coronavirus Explained
Man wearing mask in front of New York Stock Exchange buildingA man taking precautions amid the coronavirus outbreak walks past the New York Stock Exchange. (Mark Lennihan / AP)
When the World Health Organization announced on Feb. 24 that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic, the stock market plummeted. Over the following week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 3,500 points, or 10%. In an attempt to contain the damage, the Federal Reserve on March 3 slashed the fed funds rate from 1.5% to 1.0%, in its first emergency rate move and biggest one-time cut since the 2008 financial crisis. But rather than reassuring investors, the move fueled another panic sell-off.
Exasperated commentators on CNBC wondered what the Fed was thinking. They said a half-point rate cut would not stop the spread of the coronavirus or fix the broken Chinese supply chains that are driving U.S. companies to the brink. A new report by corporate data analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet calculates that some 51,000 companies around the world have one or more direct suppliers in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus. At least 5 million companies globally have one or more tier-two suppliers in the region, meaning that their suppliers get their supplies there; and 938 of the Fortune 1,000 companies have tier-one or tier-two suppliers there. Moreover, fully 80% of U.S. pharmaceuticals are made in China. A break in the supply chain can grind businesses to a halt.
So what was the Fed’s reasoning for lowering the fed funds rate? According to some financial analysts, the fire it was trying to put out was actually in the repo market, where the Fed has lost control despite its emergency measures of the last six months. Repo market transactions come to $1 trillion to $2.2 trillion per day and keep our modern-day financial system afloat. But to follow the developments there, we first need a recap of the repo action since 2008.
Repos and the Fed
Before the 2008 banking crisis, banks in need of liquidity borrowed excess reserves from each other in the fed funds market. But after 2008, banks were reluctant to lend in that unsecured market, because they did not trust their counterparts to have the money to pay up. Banks desperate for funds could borrow at the Fed’s discount window, but it carried a stigma. It signaled that the bank must be in distress, since other banks were not willing to lend to it at a reasonable rate. So banks turned instead to the private repo market, which is anonymous and is secured with collateral (Treasuries and other acceptable securities). Repo trades, although technically “sales and repurchases” of collateral, are in effect secured short-term loans, usually repayable the next day or in two weeks.
The risky element of these apparently secure trades is that the collateral itself may not be reliable, because it may be subject to more than one claim. For example, it may have been acquired in a swap with another party for securitized auto loans or other shaky assets — a swap that will have to be reversed at maturity. As I explained in an earlier article, the private repo market has been invaded by hedge funds, which are highly leveraged and risky; so risk-averse money market funds and other institutional lenders have been withdrawing from that market. When the normally low repo interest rate shot up to 10% in September, the Fed felt compelled to step in. The action it took was to restart its former practice of injecting money short-term through its own repo agreements with its primary dealers, which then lent to banks and other players. On March 3, however, even that central bank facility was oversubscribed, with far more demand for loans than the subscription limit.
The Fed’s emergency rate cut was in response to that crisis. Lowering the fed funds rate by half a percentage point was supposed to relieve the pressure on the central bank’s repo facility by encouraging banks to lend to each other. But the rate cut had virtually no effect, and the central bank’s repo facility continued to be oversubscribed the next day and the following. As observed by Zero Hedge:
This continuing liquidity crunch is bizarre, as it means that not only did the rate cut not unlock additional funding, it actually made the problem worse, and now banks and dealers are telegraphing that they need not only more repo buffer but likely an expansion of QE [quantitative easing].
The Collateral Problem
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of thirteen books including “Web of Debt”, “The Public Bank Solution” and her latest, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.”
As financial analyst George Gammon explains, however, the crunch in the private repo market is not actually due to a shortage of liquidity. Banks still have $1.5 trillion in excess reserves in their accounts with the Fed, stockpiled after multiple rounds of quantitative easing. The problem is in the collateral, which lenders no longer trust. Lowering the fed funds rate did not relieve the pressure on the Fed’s repo facility for obvious reasons: Banks that are not willing to take the risk of lending to each other unsecured at 1.5% in the fed funds market are going to be even less willing to lend at 1%. They can earn that much just by leaving their excess reserves at the safe, secure Fed, drawing on the Interest on Excess Reserves it has been doling out ever since the 2008 crisis.
But surely the Fed knew that. So why lower the fed funds rate? Perhaps because it had to do something to maintain the façade of being in control, and lowering the interest rate was the most acceptable tool it had. The alternative would be another round of quantitative easing, but the Fed has so far denied entertaining that controversial alternative. Those protests aside, QE is probably next after the Fed’s orthodox tools fail, as the Zero Hedge author notes.
The central bank has become the only game in town, and its hammer keeps missing the nail. A recession caused by a massive disruption in supply chains cannot be fixed through central-bank monetary easing alone. Monetary policy is a tool designed to deal with demand — the amount of money competing for goods and services, driving prices up. To fix a supply-side problem, monetary policy needs to be combined with fiscal policy, which means Congress and the Fed need to work together. There are successful contemporary models for this, and the best are in China and Japan.
The Chinese Stock Market Has Held Its Ground
While U.S. markets were crashing, the Chinese stock market actually went up by 10% in February. How could that be? China is the country hardest hit by the disruptive COVID-19 virus, yet investors are evidently confident that it will prevail against the virus and market threats.
KASTANIES, Greece (AP) — Greek authorities fired tear gas and stun grenades Wednesday morning to repulse a push by migrants to cross its land border from Turkey, as pressure continued along its frontier after Turkey said its own border with Europe was open to whoever wanted to cross.
Meanwhile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia pledged to help Greece to deal with pressure along its border.
Speaking after meeting his counterparts from the other three countries, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the situation was serious and the EU must protect its borders.
“We’re ready to help,” Babis said.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said his country was ready to deploy guards at the Greek-Turkish border, while his Slovak counterpart Peter Pellegrini said the growing number of migrants “poses a security threat not just for Greece.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that there are some 130,000 migrants on the move that the EU has to stop on its borders, and that “Hungary will take an active role in doing so.”
The four countries have been known for their tough stance against migrants and rejected an EU plan to redistribute refugees in member states.
Meanwhile, European Council head Charles Michel was meeting with Erdogan in Ankara Wednesday, while EU Vice President Josep Borrell and Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic were holding talks with Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Erdogan, Borell said that the EU delegation asked Turkey “not to encourage the further movement of refugees and migrants toward the EU borders.”
“We had the opportunity to express our understanding of the difficult situation Turkey is currently facing but also stressed that the current developments at the European borders is not leading to any solution,” he said.
Borell also told reporters that Turkish officials’ response was that Turkey was not encouraging people to move but that “they cannot prevent people from doing so.”
Greek authorities said there were about 15,000 people along the Greek-Turkish land border on Wednesday. They said that between Saturday morning and Wednesday morning, they had blocked 27,832 attempts to cross the border, and had arrested a total of 220 people who managed to cross.
Ankara has come under harsh criticism from some European countries.
“The people are being used by President Erdogan as a political football, as weapons and as instruments of pressure on the European Union,” Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Tuesday.
Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Elena Becatoros in Athens and Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this report.
On behalf of the Polish authorities, the Interior Affairs Minister Mariusz Kamiński has declared readiness to send 100 border guard soldiers and 100 police officers to support Greece in dealing with the migration crisis that has recently emerged at the country’s frontier with Turkey.
On Wednesday, EU member states’ interior affairs ministers met in Brussels at an extraordinary assembly in the wake of thousands of migrants and refugees from the Middle East gathering at the gate to Europe.
“We hope that the situation will settle down, but we have to take into account all the scenarios, which is why we are able to lend the Greeks a hand very quickly,” Minister Kamiński said.
The Commander of the Polish Border Guard, in consultation with the Minister of the Interior has already forwarded information on this matter to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). Greek authorities had previously requested the institution launch a rapid intervention as regards the migrants issue. Such interventions are intended to provide immediate assistance to an EU country whose border is under extreme pressure due to a large number of developing countries’ nationals attempting to enter its territory illegally.
As it stands, Frontex does not have its own regular corps, hence it must be based on border guards from EU states. After agreeing on a rapid intervention operational plan with Greece, Frontex will ask other EU and Schengen-associated countries to provide border guards and other personnel from the rapid response reserves immediately.
Mr Kamiński stated that Poland’s participation in any plan to relocate refugees would be out of the question if such a proposal were put forward.
“Refugee relocation is not an option, I stressed it clearly. What matters first and foremost is the real protection of the Greek-Turkish border, which we treat as the external EU border. On that matter, Poland presents concrete, real proposals that can mitigate the situation on the EU border,” the minister said.
On Wednesday morning, Greek services reported that from Saturday to Wednesday, they had stopped nearly 28,000 people attempting to cross the border illegally from Turkey and arrested 220 who had succeeded.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of thirteen books including “Web of Debt”, “The Public Bank Solution” and her latest, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.”
