In latest Embarrassment For Macron, Former Advisor Ends Mayoral Bid After Explicit Texts, Video Emerge
French President Emmanuel Macron’s approval ratings already appeared to be at rock-bottom levels as yellow-vest wearing rioters sacked his country’s capital city and an 800-year-old monument to Roman Catholicism suffered a devastating fire on his watch.
But it appears he has started to dig.
Members of Macron’s “Le Republique En Marche” movement have fled the party ahead of local elections next month where the president’s centrist movement is expected to do poorly as opinion polls show Macron is giving his predecessor, socialist Francois Hollande, some stiff competition for least popular president of modern France, according to the FT.
In the latest embarrassment for Macron, Benjamin Griveaux, the “En Marche!” candidate for mayor of Paris, has withdrawn his candidacy after an explicit video and some private messages leaked online, the FT reports. Griveaux apparently sent the sexually-charged messages to a woman who wasn’t his wife.
Though readers outside of France might not recognize it at first, this is a major blow for Macron ahead of the regional elections next month.
Benjamin Griveaux
Before announcing his candidacy, Griveaux was one of Macron’s spokespeople, as well as one of the president’s closest lieutenants, according to Reuters.
The 42-year-old is one of the “Macron boys”, a clique of political advisors that helped propel the former investment banker to the Elysee Palace.
He got his start in politics as an adviser to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF head who achieved international notoriety after allegedly assaulting a maid in an NYC hotel.
For Griveaux and his family, the leaks followed months of anonymous threats and defamatory statements, along with threats to expose the private data that appears to have been stolen from Griveaux.
Now, it seems, his antagonists have made good on their threats.
According to Reuters, a Russian dissident artist named Pyotr Pavlensky published screenshots of an online chat between Griveaux and a woman who was not his wife, exposing his alleged “hypocrisy.”
The chat included a video of a man’s genitals – allegedly belonging to Griveaux.
Griveaux’s candidacy was central to Macron’s political strategy moving forward, which relied on building a base of local support in the French capital in the mayoral elections. However, opinion polls showed that Griveaux’ mayoral bid was already in trouble before the scandal.
The final ironiy is that Macron’s party chose Griveaux over Cedric Villani, whom Reuters described as “an eccentric mathematician.” It’s unclear whether the party will now rally around Villani, a rebel lawmaker who was kicked out of the party last month after referring to political rivals as “arseholes” in a leaked conversation.
French politicians from all camps denounced the leaks, saying it was a flagrant violation of Griveaux’s privacy.
Griveaux announced his decision to withdraw in a video statement where he lashed out at the mysterious people who have been hounding him and his family, saying he simply can’t take it anymore.
“I have decided to withdraw my candidacy from the municipal election,” Griveaux said in a video statement.
“I do not want myself or my family exposed any longer when all the low blows are permitted. Parisians deserve a dignified campaign,” he said.
“For more than a year, my family and I have suffered defamatory statements, lies, rumours, anonymous attacks, the revelation of stolen private conversations as well as death threats,” he said. “This torrent of mud has affected me and above all harmed those I love.”
As Macron’s technocratic, centrist dream crumbles, the French right have gained some newfound momentum. We may be heading for a rematch between Macron and Le Pen in 2022. Though the next French national vote is still a long way off…
Yanis Varoufakis once described negotiating with the European Union like you’re singing the Swedish National Anthem. No matter what proposal you put in front of them, they acted like they didn’t understand and simply reiterated terms.
But, at least then they heard something. It may have been gibberish to them, but at least sound waves made it to their ears.
Today, these people are like overwhelmed autistic kids needing noise canceling headphones to blot out the unwanted stimuli. It may be therapeutic but it doesn’t solve the situation.
Now that Brexit is complete the EU has gone one step further, blocking out the very real strategic and tactical disadvantage they are in dealing with the United Kingdom in trade deal talks.
The arrogance and intractability of the EU when it comes to negotiations is supposed to be their biggest weapon. They project a strange combination of strength and indifference that can only come from people thoroughly insulated from personal accountability for their mistakes.
Lead negotiator, the revealed to be inept, Michel Barnier has laid out his negotiating stance using the same language that was thoroughly rejected by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in October, the so-called “level playing field” of “regulatory alignment” as the basis for any kind of trade deal.
Has Barnier learned nothing from his last failure? Does he really think he can cover his ears, curl up in the corner and hope this all goes away?
Because if he does then he’s catastrophically misread the state of the game board.
Moreover, he’s convinced the European Council and Parliament that the way to ultimately win is to keep doing the same things that just failed.
Since they just overwhelmingly approved Barnier’s strict negotiating demands to the U.K. further signaling that they have no idea of the hornet’s nest they’ve just whacked with a baseball bat, oblivious to the buzzing and warnings coming from the U.K.
Mr Barnier said: “Any future agreement will need approval from MEPs. The deadline for the transitional period can be extended but the UK is still insisting on a deal being done by December 31st.”
{Tom’s response: because it’s now U.K. Law Mike, or did you miss that too?}
He again warned that if there’s no agreement by then, the UK will leave the customs union and single market and go back to WTO terms, meaning quotas and tariffs on British products.
{Tom’s response: and so what? Y’all run a trade surplus with the U.K. Or are you economically ignorant as well as stupid?}
Michel Barnier said: “I would like to take this opportunity to make it clear to certain people in the United Kingdom bearing authority that they should not kid themselves about this – there will not be general, open-ended, ongoing equivalence in financial services.”
The EU would “retain a free hand to take our own decisions”.
{Tom’s response: Free to ignore reality at your own peril}
Barnier threatening the financial sector is an empty threat to get City of London bankers and traders to pressure Johnson into standing down. They were the loudest complainers during the fight over Brexit.
But Johnson understands something Barnier refuses to admit, because, as always, he doesn’t listen he just demands. Brexit was won in spite of London. Its political power is waning.
Without the support of the Midlands and the hollowed-out industrial north, Johnson isn’t Prime Minister. Barnier tried for three years to leverage City of London and failed.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you Mike Barnier, walking Einstein quote machine.
This is an empty technocratic threat issued by a career bureaucrat with an over-inflated sense of his own relevance.
The U.K. holds all the negotiating levers here and they’ve accelerated the time table while Barnier is oblivious.
Barnier has until the end of June to take off his headphones and let information into his brain that comports with reality. The collapse of the Remain coup in October was a strong message to the EU that they are vulnerable and that Barnier’s schtick is tired.
And because of this Boris Johnson has not only hardened his tone but also gone further than he did on the campaign trail, saying that even a Canada-style free trade deal may not be enough.
Now he’s invoking Australia as a proxy for a WTO-style ‘hard Brexit.’ And all Barnier can do is threaten tariffs and trade war. This is exactly the kind of idiocy that the British just fought three and a half years to divorce themselves from.
And this is coming from a political body with no hope of passing a budget this fall when a politically paralyzed Germany takes over the Presidency of the European Commission. A budget, I might add, that is staring at a €10+ billion hole thanks to the loss of the U.K.
The possibility of German political upheaval is causing the euro to crash uncontrollably. After a massive move up on the final day of January to avoid a technical breakdown the euro is not flirting with a crash to the 2017 low of $1.034
The fear here is a quick steepening of the German yield curve which is now flat to inverted out to 7 years. No wonder Mario Draghi restarted QE before he blew town to leave this mess to Christine Lagarde, without that in place there would be real trouble in European sovereign debt markets.
But a political disunion that is deaf not only to what its external critics are telling it but its internal ones as well has a limited self-life of invest-ability. Once momentum traders stop front-running the ECB and the euro’s weakness forces the unwinding of carry trades at that point someone will have to tap Barnier on the shoulder and tell him to listen to something approximating reason.
By this point, to be honest, it will likely be too late.
The Irish elections were a huge rebuke of the EU and how it handled Brexit negotiations. It was an outright embarrassment to have Sinn Fein coalesce the Irish Euroskeptic vote. And yet, the EU hasn’t learned a thing because they refuse to listen.
So what happens when we wake up one morning and Angela Merkel is no longer Chancellor of Germany, the Yellow Vests overthrow Emmanuel Macron in France or Matteo Salvini wins an Italian snap election from a jail cell in Rome?
Will they hear the populist barbarians at the gates then or will they continue to console themselves with dreams of Sweden?
Fiat Chrysler To Shut Serbia Plant As Covid-19-Shock Paralyzes Global Supply Chains
It’s certainly plausible that the global economy is in the early stages of grinding to a halt. Already, we’ve noted that two-thirds of China’s economy is offline, with major industrial hubs idle and 400 million people quarantined.
The next phase of the supply chain chaos is to spread to regions that are overly reliant on Chinese parts for assembly, such as a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV plant in Serbia.
Bloomberg reports Friday morning that the plant is expected to halt operations of its assembly line because of the lack of parts from China as the Covid-19 outbreak worsens.
Turin, Italy-based automaker’s Kragujevac factory in Serbia, which assembles the Fiat 500L, has to bring its production line to a halt due to lack of audio-system and other electric parts sourced from China.
We reported on Feb 6 that Fiat Chrysler was expected to close the plant if the virus continued to spread.
Four of the automaker’s suppliers have been impacted by China’s decision to shut down much of its industrial sector as part of a quarantine that’s expected to take a massive chunk out of GDP growth in the first half.
Fiat Chrysler CEO Mike Manley said four of the company’s suppliers in China had already been affected by the outbreak, including one “critical” maker of parts putting European production at risk.
The evolution of the supply chain disruption emanating from China is spreading outwards and to the West.
Wall Street is blind as a bat, or maybe their hope the Federal Reserve will keep pumping liquidity into the market will numb the pain of one of the most significant shocks expected to hit the global economy in the near term. This is mostly due to the world’s most complex supply chains, which as of late January, have been severed and will start affecting assembly plants in Europe.
The disruption could spread to the US, where many assembly plants source parts from China.
What’s about to hit the global economy was beautifully outlined by former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman Stephen Roach warned several weeks ago that the global economy could already be in a period of vulnerability, where an exogenous shock, such as the Covid-19, could be the trigger for the next worldwide recession.
Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser to the insurance company Allianz, recently said the economic damage caused by virus outbreak would play out this year.
El-Erian said the economic shock to China and surrounding manufacturing hubs is happening at a time when the global economy is slowing, and interest rates among central banks are near zero, indicating their ammo to fight the downturn is limited.
Freeport-McMoRan CEO Richard Adkerson said in an interview last month that the virus outbreak in China is a “real black swan event” for the global economy.
Alibaba Group’s CEO Daniel Zhang said this week that the virus outbreak in China is developing into a “black swan event” that could have severe consequences for China and the global economy.
When the world’s most complex supply chains break, so does the global economy. It’s only a matter of time before disruption is seen in the US.
NATO is marketed as providing each member nation with the benefit that the other member nations are committed to coming to its aid militarily in the event of an attack by another nation, especially Russia.
However, Pew Research Center poll results released Sunday indicate that the majority or plurality of people in 11 of 16 NATO countries where individuals were questioned oppose their respective governments meeting this commitment, at least if the military adversary were Russia.
These poll results indicate that serious thought should be given to disbanding NATO, an organization with a primary objective that appears to be at odds with public opinion in many NATO countries.
When asked if their respective countries’ governments should use military force to defend a NATO ally country neighboring Russia with which “Russia got into a serious military conflict,” people living in the 16 NATO countries tended to answer in the negative.
“No” was the answer for the majority of polled individuals in eight countries — France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Turkey.
In three more NATO countries — the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland — a plurality rejected military intervention.
Only in five countries — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Lithuania — did more people (a majority in each case) support such military intervention than reject it.
The US government and its many agencies and educational and health institutions, have for many decades conducted intensive research into biological warfare, in many cases strongly focused on race-specific pathogens.
In a report to the US Congress, the Department of Defense revealed that its program of creating artificial biological agents included modifying non-fatal viruses to make them lethal, and genetic engineering to alter the immunology of biological agents to make treatment and vaccinations impossible. The military report admitted that at the time it operated about 130 bio-weapons research facilities, dozens at US universities and others at many international sites outside the purview of the US Congress and the jurisdiction of the courts.
This knowledge hasn’t been a secret for a long time. In a classified 1948 report by the Pentagon’s Committee on Biological Warfare, the main selling point was that:
“A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if … an epidemic slashes across a crowded city, there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who”, adding hopefully that “A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated” with only very small amounts of a pathogen.
A US Army operating manual from 1956 stated explicitly that biological and chemical warfare were an integral operating portion of US military strategy, were not restricted in any way, and that Congress had given the military “First Strike” authority on their use. In 1959, an attempt by Congress to remove this first-strike authority was defeated by the White House and bio-chemical weapons expenditures increased from $75 million to almost $350 million. That was an enormous amount of money in the early 1960s.
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (image on the right) executed 150 top-secret bio-weapons programs in the 1960s, performing bio-weapons experiments and field tests on an unwitting public, sometimes in foreign countries but most often against American citizens. McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to consider all possible applications” of these agents against enemy nations in a coherent plan for a total “biological and chemical deterrent capability”, the plan to include cost estimates and an “appraisal of international political consequences”.
In the year 2000, The Project for the New American Century produced a report titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, which contained a radical and belligerent Right-Wing policy ambition for America. Their report called itself a “blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence … and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” The authors, their genocidal mentality obvious, stated:
“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare … to a politically useful tool.”
Bio-Weapons Research Institutions
The US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland is the military’s main facility for research on biological warfare. It comprises 80,000 m². By the mid-1980s, this bio-weapons section of Fort Detrick was receiving nearly $100 million per year, and this was only one of many sections.
When Japan invaded China, one of Dr. Ishii’s (unit 731) grand successes was to develop methods of mass-producing fleas and ticks infected with the plague and other lethal pathogens for distribution among civilian populations – which is how the Americans learned to weaponise insects – to breed and disseminate ticks infested with Lyme Disease from their secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State. This was also the source of the US programs of breeding and disseminating mosquitoes and fleas infected with cholera and Yellow Fever in China and North Korea, to say nothing of the domestic mosquito programs the US inflicted on its own people.
Founded on Ishii’s human research, the US military developed an entomological (insect) warfare facility, and initially prepared plans to attack Russia and the Soviet States with entomological bio-weapons. The facility was designed to produce 100 million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes per month, its output tested on unwitting American civilians by dropping infected mosquitoes and other insects over large portions of the US. As is so typical for the US military, these projects beginning in the 1950s and 1960s were given juvenile appellations like “Project Big Buzz” and “Project Big Itch” and “Operation Mayday”, but were tests of the feasibility of producing billions of insects, infecting them with lethal pathogens, then loading them into munitions and dispersing them over Russia from aircraft or even missiles.
From a US Army report from March of 1981, one writer noted that “you can marvel at how much (or how little) it would have cost to launch a yellow fever-infected mosquito attack on a city – with a handy “Cost per Death” chart included!.” The Dugway Sheep incident is worth attention as well.
Then we had “Operation Drop Kick”, designed to test various ways of dispersing infected insects over large geographical areas, the tests carried out over various parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. We had “Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). Then, as late as 2000, we had “Project Bacchus” designed to determine the feasibility of constructing an anthrax production facility in a foreign country while remaining undetected. There were other of these programs of course, all with foolish names and all designed to assess the dissemination of infected insects and other lethal pathogens into civilian populations. They were kept very secret since they were illegal in domestic law and contravened international law and many weapons treaties that other nations signed with the US in good faith.
In addition to Fort Detrick, the US military has a bio-weapons ordnance plant at Vigo, Indiana, which was a massive production facility that specialised in biological pathogens, and capable of producing 275,000 bombs containing Botulinum or one million anthrax bombs per month. The fermenter tanks at Vigo contained 250,000 gallons, or about one million liters, making it, according to reports, by far the largest bacterial mass-production facility in the world.
This was not a recent development; Vigo was fully operational during the Second World War, essentially a bio-anthrax factory, one of its first orders being from Winston Churchill in 1944 for 500,000 anthrax bombs, and which Churchill stated should be considered only the “first installment”. Vigo was eventually turned over to Pfizer for “antibiotics manufacture” and was replaced in the mid-1950s by a new state of the art facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal.
The Daily News published an article on 24 September 2005, in which it detailed US Army plans for bulk purchases of anthrax, relating a series of contracts that had been discovered by Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, which emanated from the military’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. These notices asked various companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of anthrax, as well as to produce “significant volumes” of other biological agents. One contract specified that the tendering company “must have the ability and be willing to grow (anthrax) in 1,500-litre quantities”, and “must also be able to produce 3,000-litre batches” of unspecified other biological agents.
When a nation’s military is producing lethal biological pathogens in quantities of millions of liters, it is time to stop pretending we are not engaged in biological warfare. It is of no comfort that the military might claim these to be “harmless” strains of pathogens, since (1) any facility capable of producing benign pathogens can easily produce lethal varieties and (2) there is no such thing as ‘harmless’ anthrax.
There is no material difference between a defensive and an offensive biowarfare program, and even fools cannot claim “self-defense” when producing millions of liters of anthrax. Even the US Government Accountability Office, in its 1994 report on these programs, stated that US military’s Biological Defense Program contained “scores of divisions, departments, research groups, bio-intelligence and more, by no means all related to “‘defense’ in any sense”, and were by nature belligerent and offensive military programs. We are nevertheless assured that the US “has never used biological weapons”, by the same people who were simultaneously tendering contracts for the production of anthrax and other “pathogens” in multiple batches of 3,000 liters. Dissembling propaganda is impossible to avoid in America, even in official military medical textbooks.
There were other sites and facilities besides Fort Detrick that were constructed by the US military solely for the development of bio-weapons, including the Horn Island Testing Station in Mississippi which was meant to be the primary bio-weapons testing site, and the Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State from which the military spread Lyme Disease among half the area population.
One portion of the Plum Island facility was designed exclusively to develop and test lethal animal pathogens that could destroy an enemy nation’s food supply – as the US attempted to do in North Korea. Deadly strains of foot-and-mouth disease were one result of this research, which the Americans later shared with their fellow psychopaths at Porton Down in the UK – who put it to good use. An additional portion was the development, testing and production of bombs containing what was called a “vegetable killer acid”, and which could destroy cereals, grains, and most cultivated vegetable crops. I have a strong suspicion that many of the recent bird flu and swine flu epidemics originated from pathogens created at Plum Island.
The textbook titled, Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare (2007), published by the US military’s Surgeon-General, admits to the establishment of “a large-scale production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas”, with the new plant featuring “advanced laboratory … measures enabling large-scale fermentation, concentration, storage, and weaponisation of microorganisms”.
And it does also admit that by 1951, the US had produced its first biological weapons, anti-crop bombs, and “antipersonnel” munitions, having “weaponised and stockpiled” all these. It adds that the CIA had independently “developed weapons using toxins including cobra venom and saxitoxin for covert operations”, but that unfortunately “all records regarding their development and deployment were destroyed in 1972” when the information became public.
And the US military has tried to weaponise venereal diseases, leading to travesties like the Guatemala Syphilis project, where they infected thousands then left them to die. The official narrative, while admitting the criminality, stubbornly adheres to the tale of a charitable purpose of testing medications – for thousands who were specifically denied the medicines that would have saved their lives.
The US military appears desperate not only to find biological ways to kill nations of people, but is equally interested in methods of destroying their food supply. Accordingly, it also confessed to another several dozen (at least) occasions where devastating crop and plant disease agents had been released, in experiments to test methods of destroying the entire food plant life of an enemy nation. In 2012, Japanese media revealed that the United States government had tested specific, DNA-engineered crop-killing bioweapons in Okinawa and Taiwan during the 1960s and early 1970s, and that the US military tested some of these within the continental US as well. They were also applied in Vietnam. The purpose of Agent Orange was never as a defoliant as claimed, but developed instead to destroy Vietnam’s entire rice crops and to sufficiently contaminate the soil to prevent re-growth.
Today’s daters are taking matters into their own hands. Seemingly no longer satisfied with the potential partners that life throws at them at work, in school and in their circle of friends, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that an increasingly large number of heterosexual daters is opting to meet their partner online.
Surveys carried out and analyzed by Stanford University show that between 1995 and 2017 the number of heterosexuals who met their partner on the internet rose sharply from 2 percent to 39 percent. With the help of dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony, but also through social networking sites like Facebook, daters reconnected with old friends and acquaintances (8 percent of couples who met online), were introduced to someone (11 percent) or – in the majority of cases – met someone completely new on their own (81 percent).
The authors of the survey concluded that the main draw of looking for a stranger online was a larger set of choices than when leveraging friends and family, which was especially useful when “searching for something unusual or hard‐to‐find.“ In a similar vein, meeting your partner in a bar or restaurant was also on the rise between 1995 and 2017.
Stanford researchers excluded homosexuals from their analysis because they constitute a minority sexual orientation, making meeting someone online a more obvious choice for them than for heterosexuals. These were usually in a “thick dating market” (quote from Stanford) and therefore normally also able to identify several potential mates in their offline lives, according to the research.
A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?
Michael Vlahos has argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but a “system leader” – “a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.” And, we should add, China – which he did not mention. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.”
Intel stalwart Alastair Crooke, in a searing essay, digs deeper into how this “civilizational vision” was “forcefully unfurled across the globe” as the inevitable, American manifest destiny: not only politically – including all the accouterments of Western individualism and neo-liberalism, but coupled with “the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too”.
Crooke also notes how deeply ingrained the notion that victory in the Cold War “spectacularly affirmed” the superiority of the US civilizational vision among the US elite.
Well, the post-modern tragedy – from the point of view of US elites – is that soon this may not be the case anymore. The vicious civil war engulfing Washington for the past three years – with the whole world as stunned spectators – has just accelerated the malaise.
Remember Pax Mongolica
It’s sobering to consider that Pax Americana may be destined to a shorter historical existence than Pax Mongolica – established after Genghis Khan, the head of a nomad nation, went about conquering the world.
Genghis first invested in a trade offensive to take over the Silk Roads, crushing the Kara-Kitais in Eastern Turkestan, conquering Islamic Khorezm, and annexing Bukhara, Samarkand, Bactria, Khorasan and Afghanistan. The Mongols reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1241 and the Adriatic Sea one year after.
The superpower of the time extended from the Pacific to the Adriatic. We can barely imagine the shock for Western Christendom. Pope Gregory X was itching to know who these conquerors of the world were, and could be Christianized?
In parallel, only a victory by the Egyptian Mamluks in Galilee in 1260 saved Islam from being annexed to Pax Mongolica.
Pax Mongolica – a single, organized, efficient, tolerant power – coincided historically with the Golden Age of the Silk Roads. Kublai Khan – who lorded over Marco Polo – wanted to be more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. He wanted to prove that nomad conquerors turned sedentary could learn the rules of administration, commerce, literature and even navigation.
Yet when Kublai Khan died, the empire fragmented into rival khanates. Islam profited. Everything changed. A century later, the Mongols from China, Persia, Russia and Central Asia had nothing to do with their ancestors on horseback.
A jump cut to the young 21st century shows that the initiative, historically, is once again on the side of China, across the Heartland and lining up the Rimland. World-changing, game-changing enterprises don’t originate in the West anymore – as has been the case from the 16th century up to the late 20th century.
For all the vicious wishful thinking that coronavirus will derail the “Chinese century”, which will actually be the Eurasian Century, and amid the myopic tsunami of New Silk Roads demonization, it’s always easy to forget that implementation of myriad projects has not even started.
It should be in 2021 that all those corridors and axes of continental development pick up speed across Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, Russia and Europe, in parallel with the Maritime Silk Road configuring a true Eurasian string of pearls from Dalian to Piraeus, Trieste, Venice, Genoa, Hamburg and Rotterdam.
For the first time in two millennia, China is able to combine the dynamism of political and economic expansion both on the continental and maritime realms, something that the state did not experience since the short expeditionary stretch led by Admiral Zheng He in the Indian Ocean in the early 15th century. Eurasia, in the recent past, was under Western and Soviet colonization. Now it’s going all-out multipolar – a series of complex, evolving permutations led by Russia-China-Iran-Turkey-India-Pakistan-Kazakhstan.
Every player has no illusions about the “system leader” obsessions: to prevent Eurasia from uniting under one power – or coalition such as the Russia-China strategic partnership; ensure that Europe remains under US hegemony; prevent Southwest Asia – or the “Greater Middle East” – from being linked to Eurasian powers; and prevent by all means that Russia-China have unimpeded access to maritime lanes and trade corridors.
The message from Iran
In the meantime, a sneaking suspicion creeps in – that Iran’s game plan, in an echo of Donbass in 2014, may be about sucking US neocons into a trademark Russian cauldron in case the regime-change obsession is turbocharged.
There is a serious possibility that under maximum pressure Tehran might eventually abandon the JCPOA for good, as well as the NPT, thus openly inviting a US attack.
As it stands, Tehran has sent two very clear messages. The accuracy of the missile attack on the US Ayn Al-Asad base in Iraq, replying to the targeted assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, means that any branch of the vast US network of bases is now vulnerable.
And the fog of non-denial denials surrounding the downing of the CIA Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) – essentially an aerial spook shop – in Ghazni, Afghanistan also carries a message.
CIA icon Mike d’Andrea, known as ‘Ayatollah Mike’, The Undertaker, the Dark Prince, or all of the above, may or may not have been on board. Irrespective of the fact that no US government source will ever confirm or deny that Ayatollah Mike is dead or alive, or even that he exists at all, the message remains the same: your soldiers and spooks are also vulnerable.
Since Pearl Harbor, no nation has dared to stare down the system leader so blatantly, as Iran did in Iraq. Vlahos mentioned something I saw for myself in 2003, how “young American soldiers referred to Iraqis as ‘Indians’, as though Mesopotamia were the Wild West”. Mesopotamia was one the crucial cradles of civilization as we know it. Well, in the end, that $2 trillion spent to bomb Iraq into democracy did no favors to the civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’.
The Sirens and La Dolce Vita
Now let’s add aesthetics to our “civilizational” politics. Every time I visit Venice – which in itself is a living metaphor for both the flimsiness of empires and the Decline of the West – I retrace selected steps in The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s epic masterpiece.
Last December, after many years, I went back to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, also known as “The jewel box”, which plays a starring role in The Cantos. As I arrived I told the custodian signora that I had come for “The Sirens”. With a knowing smirk, she lighted my way along the nave to the central staircase. And there they were, sculpted on pillars on both sides of a balcony: “Crystal columns, acanthus, sirens in the pillar head”, as we read in Canto 20.
These sirens were sculpted by Tullio and Antonio Lombardo, sons of Pietro Lombardo, Venetian masters of the late 15th and early 16th century – “and Tullio Romano carved the sirens, as the old custode says: so that since then no one has been able to carve them for the jewel box, Santa Maria dei Miracoli”, as we read in Canto 76.
Well, Pound misnamed the creator of the sirens, but, that’s not the point. The point is how Pound saw the sirens as the epitome of a strong culture – “the perception of a whole age, of whole congeries and sequence of causes, went into an assemblage of detail, whereof it would be impossible to speak in terms of magnitude”, as Pound wrote in Guide to Kulchur.
As much as his beloved masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini and Piero della Francesca, Pound fully grasped how these sirens were the antithesis of usura – or the “art” of lending money at exorbitant interest rates, which not only deprives a culture of the best of art, as Pound describes it, but is also one of the pillars for the total financialization and marketization of life itself, a process that Pound brilliantly foresaw, when he wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that, “all things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness, shall reign throughout our days.”
La Dolce Vita will turn 60 in 2020. Much as Pound’s sirens, Fellini’s now mythological tour de force in Rome is like a black and white celluloid palimpsest of a bygone era, the birth of the Swingin’ Sixties. Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) and Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), impossibly cool and chic, are like the Last Woman and the Last Man before the deluge of “tawdry cheapness”. In the end, Fellini shows us Marcello despairing at the ugliness and, yes, cheapness intruding in his beautiful mini-universe – the lineaments of the trash culture fabricated and sold by the ‘system leader’ about to engulf us all.
Pound was a human, all too human American maverick of unbridled classical genius. The ‘system leader’ misinterpreted him; treated him as a traitor; caged him in Pisa; and dispatched him to a mental hospital in the US. I still wonder whether he may have seen and appreciated La Dolce Vita during the 1960s, before he died in Venice in 1972. After all, there was a little cinema within walking distance of the house in Calle Querini where he lived with Olga Rudge.
“Marcello!” We’re still haunted by Anita Ekberg’s iconic siren call, half-immersed in the Fontana di Trevi. Today, still hostages of the crumbling civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’, at best we barely muster, as TS Eliot memorably wrote, a “backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.”
“I Have No Idea What To Do Now”: South Korean & Japanese Firms Screwed By Shortage Of Chinese Migrant Workers
Since COVID-19 went global just over two weeks ago, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing how China’s economic shutdown is going to impact the global economy. But by focusing on giant companies like GM and Foxconn, we’ve maybe overlooked some of the little people.
People like the millions of Chinese migrant workers who occupy unskilled and skilled jobs in South Korea and Japan. Many companies in agriculture and construction employ young Chinese ‘technical interns’ to compensate for serious labor shortages. These workers effectively form the base of a transnational supply chain. And without workers, the agricultural sector could be in a serious bind as the spring and summer approach.
In a story published Friday, the Nikkei Asian Review offers a glimpse into the world of migrant workers in Japan and South Korea (the paper essentially caters to English speakers in East Asia outside mainland China).
As Nikkei reminds us, South Korea’s economy has experienced a serious backlash from the global resurgence of protectionism and mercantilist trade policies. These changes have disrupted trade and global supply chains across Asia, creating winners and losers (Vietnam has often been cited as a beneficiary of President Trump’s antagonism of Beijing), and South Korea is an example of a fast-growing economy that has been upended. Some economists have gone so far as to argue that it could be the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the global economy if trade continues to decline.
That being said, the situation is often overshadowed by South Korea’s accomplishments in culture and arts. A foreign film directed by a South Korean and produced in South Korea won best picture at the 2019 Academy Awards, becoming the first foreign film to ever win the honor. Young Americans are increasingly listening to Korean “K-Pop” artists directed at the teenage demographic in South Korea.
In some cases, Chinese workers who have lived in South Korea for years are being fired in what some might describe as a xenophobic panic.
Ahn and Choi are among those impacted by the outbreak. On Wednesday, the two men were sharing a drink of Korean rice wine at a convenience store in Daelim-dong, the largest residential and commercial area for Korean-Chinese workers in Seoul, and commiserating over their plight.
Choi, 62, said he was fired a week ago from a hospital in Pyeongtaek, 65 km south of Seoul, where he had worked as a caregiver for a year. Choi is from Jilin Province in northeastern China, where many people of Korean descent live.
“I was forced to leave my job just because I am Chinese,” said Choi, adding that he has been in South Korea for more than a decade.
“I have no idea what to do now.”
Ahn, meanwhile, said he has no hope of getting a cleaning job at a sauna or a golf course because people are avoiding such activities due to fear of the coronavirus, which had infected 28 people in the country as of Wednesday.
“Many stores and companies are closed due to the virus. I hope it goes away as soon as possible.”
Chinese who speak Korean (there are ethnic Korean communities in mainland China) are often sought after in South Korea for jobs, some of which can still pay a decent wage, even if the primary appeal of the workers is that they’re generally cheaper to hire than locals (veteran Silicon Valley coders should recognize this dynamic).
But some of the labor shortages are the result of genuine problems with getting workers from one place to the next when countries around the world are tightening their borders. As NAR explains, in Japan, the problem is that prospective and current employees can’t get back to Japan after going home to visit family for the LNY holidays.
Agriculture, construction and other industries are really feeling the squeeze.
The problem is particularly acute for sectors such as agriculture and construction, which rely on Chinese “technical interns” to fill serious labor shortages.
The government-backed technical trainee program is often seen as a back door for foreign unskilled workers to work in manual labor in Japan. The interns typically stay in the country for three years, and are crucial for rural areas, whose own young populations are increasingly moving to big cities.
According to the Organization for Technical Intern Training, there were about 90,000 Chinese approved interns in 2018, accounting to 23% of the total.
Representatives from Japan’s big ag cooperatives spoke to the NAR about the problems, possibly in an effort to influence popular opinion and/or government policy.
They cited specific examples in the industry where companies depending on the Chinese “interns” are being left high and dry.
Several regional representatives for the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives expressed their concerns to the Nikkei Asian Review.
“Honestly, it will be a difficult situation if the trainees miss their schedule,” said Takayuki Fukuda, manager at JA Churui in Hokkaido.
Churui was expecting three interns from China’s Hubei Province, where the virus broke out, to arrive in March. Even if Japan allows entries from the province by then, the prospective interns are not able to take the necessary training in China. That means their arrival is likely to be delayed or cancelled, Fukuda said.
At Iwai in Ibaraki Prefecture, which produces green onions and lettuce, three technical interns from Hubei and Sichuan provinces who went home for the Lunar New Year are unable to come back to Japan. JA Iwai is also expecting four new Chinese trainees in June, but “we are considering delaying their participation,” a representative said.
In Tokyo, Takashi Maruyama at Shutoken Shouko Kensetsu Cooperative for the construction sector also said some Chinese interns cannot return for work from their holidays. He added that he is concerned about the new interns who were scheduled to arrive in the next months.
The cooperative sends about five to 10 Chinese interns to its member companies every month. “There has been labor shortage in the last few years,” Maruyama said. “If the virus situation do not calm down, companies will be affected.”
The virus may also hit factories. Some Chinese interns for Aichi Machine Industry Cooperative, which is located in the hometown of Toyota and its suppliers, are also expected to delay their arrival.
The cooperative’s representative said it will consider taking more interns from other countries instead “depending on the situation.” It currently accepts about 440 interns from China, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Globalization has created an international tapestry of goods, services and labor that’s almost inscrutably complex. But examples like these are a reminder: the economic ramifications of the outbreak will be felt outside the PRC.
Then again, we can’t help but wonder: Where could these countries turn for reliable migrant labor?
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Listen: we don’t have to agree about everything.
We don’t even have to agree about most things.
We don’t have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other. And we certainly don’t need to think alike or dress alike or worship alike or vote alike or love alike.
But if this experiment in freedom is to succeed—and there are some days the outlook is decidedly grim—then we’ve got to find some way of relating to one another that is not toxic or partisan or hateful or so self-righteous that we’re doomed to failure before we even start.
America has been a warring nation—a military empire intent on occupation and conquest—for so long that perhaps we, the citizens of this warring nation, have forgotten what it means to live in peace, with the world and one another.
We’d better get back to the fundamentals of what it means to be human beings who can get along if we want to have any hope of restoring some semblance of sanity, civility and decency to what is progressively being turned into a foul-mouthed, hot-headed free-for-all bar fight by politicians for whom this is all one big, elaborate game designed to increase their powers and fatten their bank accounts.
Maybe Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was right: maybe all we really need to know about “how to live and what to do and how to be” is as simple as remembering the basic life lessons we were taught as children.
What were those lessons? Fulghum reminds us:
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody…. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together…. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup—they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned—the biggest word of all—LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living. Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
The powers-that-be want us to forget these basic lessons in how to get along. They want us to fume and rage and be so consumed with fighting the so-called enemies in our midst that we never notice the prison walls closing in around us.
Don’t be distracted.
No matter what happens in the next presidential election, no matter how many ways the powers-that-be attempt to sow division and distrust among the populace, no matter how many shouting commentators perpetuate the belief that there is only one “right” view and one “wrong” view in politics, the only “us vs. them” that will matter is whether “we the people” care enough to stand united in our commitment to the principles on which this nation was founded: freedom, justice, and equality for all.
The rest is just noise intended to distract us from the fact that life in America has become a gut-wrenching, soul-sucking, misery-drenched, demoralizing existence, and it’s the government that is responsible.
Even so, here’s why I’m not giving up on the American dream of freedom, and—despite all the reasons to the contrary—why you shouldn’t either: because this is still our country.
I’m outraged at what has been done to our freedoms and our country. You should be, too.
We have been subjected to crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.
We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.
We’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.
We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. The police continue to push, prod, poke, probe, scan, shoot and intimidate the very individuals—we the taxpayers—whose rights they were hired to safeguard. Networked together through fusion centers, police have surreptitiously spied on our activities and snooped on our communications, using hi-tech devices provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
We’ve been railroaded into believing that our votes count, that we live in a republic or a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy, politicians represent only the profit motives of the corporate state, whose leaders know all too well that there is no discernible difference between red and blue politics, because there is only one color that matters in politics: green.
We’ve had our schools locked down and turned into prisons, our students handcuffed, shackled and arrested for engaging in childish behavior such as food fights, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors, all the while they are treated like criminals and taught to march in lockstep with the police state.
We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country, denied basic due process rights, held against our will without access to an attorney or being charged with a crime, and left to waste away in jail until such a time as the government is willing to let us go or allow us to defend ourselves.
We’ve had our cities used for military training drills, with Black Hawk helicopters buzzing the skies, Urban Shield exercises overtaking our streets, and active shooter drills wreaking havoc on unsuspecting bystanders in our schools, shopping malls and other “soft target” locations.
You should be. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and right these wrongs.
Stop waiting patiently for change to happen, stop waiting for some politician to rescue you, and take responsibility for your freedoms: start by fixing what’s broken in your lives, in your communities, and in this country.
Get mad, get outraged, get off your duff and get out of your house, get in the streets, get in people’s faces, get down to your local city council, get over to your local school board, get your thoughts down on paper, get your objections plastered on protest signs, get your neighbors, friends and family to join their voices to yours, get your representatives to pay attention to your grievances, get your kids to know their rights, get your local police to march in lockstep with the Constitution, get your media to act as watchdogs for the people and not lapdogs for the corporate state, get your act together, and get your house in order.
Appearances to the contrary, this country does not belong exclusively to the corporations or the special interest groups or the oligarchs or the war profiteers or any particular religious, racial or economic demographic.
This country belongs to all of us: each and every one of us—“we the people”—but most especially, this country belongs to those of us who love freedom enough to stand and fight for it.
Don’t wait for things to get that bad before you find your voice and your conscience. By then, it will be too late.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s character reflects in The Gulag Archipelago:
How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if … during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Take your stand now—using every nonviolent means at your disposal—while you still can.
Don’t wait to reflect back on missed opportunities to push back against tyranny.
Coal Shipping In US Industrial Heartland Collapses To 35-Year Low
President Trump vowed to make “Coal Great Again” and restore the industrial heartland. But it seems as Trump’s many campaign promises to coal miners have been broken, as there’s hardly a peep from the administration about the imploding industry.
Take, for instance, a new report from A.P. News, that details how Twin Ports of Duluth-Superior, recorded its lowest coal cargo volumes in three decades during the 2019 shipping season.
Greg Nemet, a public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said coal shipments in the port have plunged as the demand for renewable energy has soared in recent years.
“It’s really a competition between coal, natural gas, and renewables. It’s cheaper to make electricity with natural gas and with solar,” Nemet said. “Coal really can’t compete with either of those.”
A.P. said 8 million tons of coal moved through the Twin Ports, the lowest volume since 1985.
U.S. coal production has plunged from 1.2 billion tons in 2008 to 597 million last year. Despite Trump’s promises to revive the industry, production continues to decline.
Trump was silent last year after a significant bankruptcy wave devastated the industry.
Deteriorating coal industry fundamentals and escalating environmental, social and governance concerns, led to the recent bankruptcy of Peabody, the world’s largest coal producer.
Trump routinely pumped the coal industry, calling it “indestructible” and telling everyone on social media that “coal is back.” Here he is in 2017 famously telling people that “We are going to put our coal miners back to work.”
And to make matters worse for miners, the Trump administration isn’t about saving the industry:
“Coal as a percentage of U.S. electricity generation is declining and will probably continue to decline for some time,” Sec. Dan Brouillette told the Atlantic Council. “The effort that we’re undertaking is not to subsidize the industry and preserve their status, if you will, as a large electricity generator. It is simply to make the product cleaner and to look for alternative uses for this product.”
The hopes of a coal rebound were all for election purposes. The industry is imploding, as it’s clear that, according to Trump, the stock market is more important than the real economy.
