Tag: news

One of the best things about San Diego is its legendary burrito scene. Known for being inexpensive and filling, meats such as carne asada (sliced skirt steak) and carnitas (pork) are marinated for days before being grilled to perfection for a California burrito or similar.

Now, thanks to soaring prices for meat and beef shortages which made headlines earlier this month, some San Diego taco shops are adding a COVID-19 surcharge due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to NBC 7 San Diego.

Today, more than two months after the coronavirus pandemic reached San Diego County, locals have reported finding signs at their local taco shops that alert customers of a rise in the price of California Burritos, as well as Carne Asada Burritos, due to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

For instance, last week a sign spotted at a Los Panchos Taco Shop on Waring Road near Zion Avenue in Allied Gardens read, in part: “The COVID-19 situation continues to bring unexpected beef and pork plant closures. This is creating a shortage of product into commerce and therefore protein prices are skyrocketing.”

As a result, that taco shop – on that same sign – had to let customers know that a surcharge of $1.25 is now being charged to all carne asada items, including the California Burrito. –NBC 7

According to the San Diego City Attorney’s Office, restaurants are allowed to increase prices during a State of Emergency as long as the surcharge is clearly disclosed prior to purchase, and it’s directly linked to an increase in prices incurred by the establishment.

“We understand the catastrophic impact that the pandemic has had on our local restaurants and that they are likely taking on new costs in order safely serve customers,” said the City Attorney’s office. “We’re hopeful that restaurants will continue to clearly disclose any necessary price increases to customers before they place their orders.”

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

So you are curious whether you have coronavirus? You could take a coronavirus test to find out. Well, not really find out, since the test results are not reliable. Nonetheless, you can take a test to obtain at least a Magic 8 Ball level answer of if you are or are not infected with coronavirus.

Here is some information likely unknown to many people when they are tested: The names and addresses of people who test positive are often handed over to police departments that can input or tag those names and addresses in police databases.

Kimberlee Kruesi provides the details in a Tuesday Associated Press article. She starts off her article with the following revelation:

More than 11 million people have been tested in the U.S. for COVID-19, all with the assurance that their private medical information would remain protected and undisclosed.

Yet, public officials in at least two-thirds of states are sharing the addresses of people who tested positive with first responders — from police officers to firefighters to EMTs. An Associated Press review found that at least 10 of those states also share the patients’ names.

Kinda makes those coronavirus tests that many government officials and people in the media have been promoting seem less warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it?

Continue reading Kruesi’s article here…

Mike Schultz is a healthy 43-year-old nurse from San Francisco. He’s gay, and a bodybuilder with no underlying health conditions, weighing in at a sprite-like 190 lbs despite his ripped physique. 

Men like Schultz typically aren’t considered “high risk” coronavirus patients. But that didn’t stop him from contracting a particularly virulent infection, leading him to be hospitalized in mid-March, then moved to another hospital, where he was intubated for nearly five weeks.

Remember, only roughly 1/5 patients who are intubated due to coronavirus die. Schultz shared his story on his instagram, long with some shocking before-and-after shots.

Schultz shared his story with Buzzfeed News.

“I wanted to show it can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, have pre-existing conditions or not. It can affect you,” Schultz told BuzzFeed.

“I knew what I thought going in [about the coronavirus]. I didn’t think it was as serious as it was until after things started happening,” he said. “I thought I was young enough for it not to affect me, and I know a lot of people think that.”

Schultz flew to Boston to visit his boyfriend Josh Hebblethwaite on March 14, just one week after the two had traveled to Miami for a music festival where dozens of others were diagnosed with the virus.

“We knew it was out there,” Schultz said. “There were no real restrictions in place, though. No lockdowns. We just thought, ‘Well, we gotta wash our hands more and be wary of touching our face.”

Shortly after arriving, Schultz began feeling very ill. When he arrived at a hospital, he had a temperature of 103 degrees and his lungs had filled with fluid.

“They took him right in and didn’t let me stay to say goodbye,” Hebblethwaite said.

Schultz was intubated, and four-and-a-half weeks later, was taken off the ventilator and came too, thinking only a week or so had passed. He was extremely disoriented at first, but after eating his first real meal in weeks – two McDonald’s burgers – he told Buzzfeed he was feeling much better.

Still, despite his miraculous story, Schultz said he and his boyfriend have received a torrent of online harassment from ‘stay at home, save lives’ diehards who have mocked him and claimed he “deserved” to get sick for attending the music festival in Fla.

Still, “progressive” media org like Buzzfeed have become obsessed with the stories of seemingly healthy young people who struggled with life-threatening bouts of the virus. We suspect this is part of a campaign to scare young, healthy people into staying indoors for fear of the virus.

All the ‘financially privileged’ hipsters who write for Buzzfeed probably wouldn’t understand, but many of the people venting their frustrations with the lockdown on social media are doing so because they’re afraid of losing their livelihood, not because the think the virus is some kind of hoax or “a little flu”, as Bolsonaro would call it.

Then again, what else would you expect from a bunch of freelance writers who depend on their parents to help with the rent on their Brooklyn apartments? The pressure faced by people with real responsibilities, who will suffer very real and terrifying consequences if they can’t cover their nut – they can’t simply move back in with mom and dad if you get sick, or things go south financially – are entirely foreign to them.

Submitted by Kalev Leetaru of RealClearPolitics

Almost three months ago, COVID-19 became an inextricable part of American life. As the economy ground to a halt and unemployment soared, television news channels have focused the majority of their attention on the health impacts of the disease, while paying far less attention to the devastating economic harms, including historic job losses. A closer look at how channels are presenting the coronavirus crisis reveals stark differences, from CNN’s ever-present infections dashboard to Fox News’ periodic scrolling updates, offering clues to the increasingly partisan reaction to the pandemic.

The timeline below shows the percentage of daily airtime on BBC News, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News mentioning “COVID-19” or “coronavirus” or “virus” since the start of this year, using data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project. (Click to enlarge, or view the live data here.)

All four channels started covering the pandemic on Jan. 18, but BBC has consistently devoted a greater portion of its airtime to it. CNN’s coverage volume has remained largely unchanged since early March, while BBC and MSNBC have both slightly decreased their mentions over the course of this month. Fox News is a notable outlier, steadily decreasing its coverage since April 26.

In contrast, since March “unemployment” or “unemployed” or “jobless” or “job losses” have received just 10%-20% of the attention paid to “death” or “deaths” or “died” or “infection” or “infections.”

Yet the visual nature of television news means that the channels aren’t limited to just periodic verbal mentions of these term and related statistics. In CNN’s case, every day since March 20, the channel has displayed an on-screen infographic with live COVID-19 infection and death counts for a total of eight hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly two months now.

A typical version of CNN’s dashboard can be seen in the clip below.

Since April 3, GDELT has also analyzed the on-screen text of MSNBC, Fox News and BBC, allowing for a similar search of their on-screen health counts. However, as the graph below shows, other than CNN, only MSNBC displays the text “Johns Hopkins” (the source of the data) daily on-screen for any length of time and it is shown only a fraction of the time CNN does.

MSNBC has used several iterations of its COVID-19 dashboard, from this early version that looks very similar to CNN’s tracker.

To this later more streamlined version.

Fox News has occasionally run the CNN tracker by virtue of playing clips from CNN.

And it has also displayed the native Johns Hopkins dashboard.

However, Fox  has also developed its own dashboard, at least one version of which can be seen in the clip below, sourced to “WHO, CDC, ECDC, NHC, DXY,” relying on official government figures directly rather than Johns Hopkins’ compilation.

So how are the other stations reporting COVID-19 infection and death counts if they aren’t relying on the eight-hours-a-day dashboard model adopted by CNN? The timeline below shows mentions of “death” or “deaths” in the on-screen text of the four channels over the same time period. While CNN has the most mentions, BBC News comes in second, with Fox News and MSNBC nearly equal in third/fourth place.

Rather than a dedicated dashboard, BBC appears to communicate death counts primarily through brief unsourced updates in its chyron text at the bottom of the screen, such as “The death toll in the UK is now at 34,636” or “Number of confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the UK rises by 494 to 33,186,” as seen below.

Similarly, Fox News appears to primarily mention death counts in the scrolling text at the very bottom of the screen, as seen at the start of this clip.

In contrast, the timeline below shows the total seconds of airtime each day on the four channels mentioning “unemployment” or “unemployed” or “job losses” over the same time period. In contrast to the three-to-10 hours a day each station spends displaying the latest health statistics, job losses are seen for just five-to-10 minutes on most days.

In the end, no matter what channel viewers tune into, they are confronted with many hours a day of live death counts compared to just minutes a day about lost livelihoods and ruined lives, perhaps explaining why many officials in Washington – and, to some extent, at the local level — seem in little rush to reverse the economic devastation that they and the white-collar class have largely been insulated from to date.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via The Daily Reckoning,

A popular claim is that the 1918–19 flu pandemic killed millions but no biggie, the Roaring ’20s started the following year. It’s onward and upward, baby, once we toss the masks.

Wrong. Completely, totally, dead wrong.

The drivers of the past 75 years of growth — globalization and financialization — are dead, and so is everything that depended on them for “growth.”

Here’s what’s poorly understood: Globalization and financialization die when they stop expanding.

Just as a shark dies if it stops swimming forward, globalization and financialization die once they stop expanding, because their viability depends on expansion.

Globalization and financialization have been losing momentum for years.

Globalization Has Strip-Mined Economies

Under the guise of “opening markets,” globalization has strip-mined every economy that can’t print a reserve currency and hollowed out economies globally as only globally competitive sectors survive globalization.

The net result is that once vibrant, diversified economies have been reduced to fragile monocultures completely dependent on global flows of capital and spending for their survival.

Tourism is a prime example: Every region that has seen its local economy crushed by global corporations, leaving global tourism as its sole surviving sector, has been devastated by the drop in tourism, which was always contingent on disposable income and credit expanding forever.

But credit can’t expand forever, as it eventually runs out of income to service additional debt.

Financialization is not just the expansion of credit and leverage to marginal borrowers; it’s also legalized looting, as the true risks of soaring debt and leverage are hidden in obscure financial instruments and bogus claims of “safety” and “hedging.”

Excesses of debt and leverage funneled into risky speculations inevitably end in default.

Asset and Consumption Bubbles

Financialization manifests as asset bubbles and hyperconsumption as people who never had credit spend up to the credit limits and beyond.

Both asset and consumption bubbles pop, pushing the financial sector that feasted off the unsustainable expansion of credit into insolvency.

In other words, neoliberal globalization and financialization — essentially one dynamic — are inherently destabilizing, as all the incentives are perverse.

Just as asset and consumption bubbles are inevitable, so too is the bursting of those bubbles and the devastation of everything that had become dependent on the expansion of those bubbles.

And that has real consequences.

Food security, to take a basic example, is impossible once globalization has destroyed local agricultural production, and financialization has rewarded factory-farming since Big Ag can borrow capital at scales that only make sense in a world of globalized monoculture agriculture.

1919 Is Not 2020

Everyone touting 1919 as the model for 2020 is deeply ignorant of history and the destructive ontologies of globalization and financialization. There is virtually no overlap between the world of 1919 and the world of 2020 in terms of financial structures and excesses.

That globalization and financialization are dead is revealed by what Federal Reserve bailouts and fiscal free-for-alls cannot do:

1. They cannot create creditworthy borrowers out of thin air like the Fed creates dollars out of thin air.

2. They cannot force lenders facing mass defaults to loan more money to uncreditworthy borrowers

3. They cannot force creditworthy borrowers to borrow money.

4. They cannot reflate asset and consumption bubbles that have popped.

5. They cannot restore confidence in long, fragile supply chains.

6. They cannot magically turn unprofitable enterprises into profitable enterprises.

7. They cannot create income streams — revenues, profits, wages, etc. — with bailouts that continue the perverse incentives of moral hazard or “free money” designed to give debt-serfs enough cash to continue making their loan payments.

8. They cannot forgive debt payments without destroying the wealth held as debt: Mortgages, student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, corporate junk bonds, etc., are assets that lose their value once borrowers default.

9. The Fed can buy impaired debt, but that doesn’t change their abject powerlessness (points 1–7 above).

Financialization was never sustainable, and neither was the destructive globalization it enabled.

Any system that depended on the ever-expanding exploitation of new resources, debtors and markets could never be anything but fragile. The ferociousness of its rapacity masked its inherent weakness, a weakness that is now exposed as fatal.

But let’s stick to the U.S. alone for now. The pandemic is having a dramatic long-term effect on Main Street local tax revenues.

First- and Second-Order Effects

To understand how, we need to consider first- and second-order effects.

The immediate consequences of lockdowns and changes in consumer behavior are first-order effects: closures of Main Street, job losses, massive Federal Reserve bailouts of the top 0.1%, loan programs for small businesses, stimulus checks to households that earned less than $200,000 last year and so on.

The second-order effects cannot be bailed out or controlled by central authorities. Second-order effects are the result of consequences having their own consequences.

The first-order effects of the pandemic on Main Street are painfully obvious: Small businesses that have barely kept their heads above water as costs have soared have laid off employees as they’ve closed their doors.

The second-order effects are still spooling out: How many businesses will close for good because the owners don’t want to risk losing everything by chancing reopening?

How many will give it the old college try and close a few weeks later as they conclude they can’t survive on 60% of their previous revenues?

How many enjoy a brief spurt of business as everyone rushes back, but then reality kicks in and business starts sliding after the initial burst wears off?

How many will be unable to hire back everyone who was laid off?

Falling off a Cliff

As for local tax revenues based on local sales taxes, income taxes, business license fees and property taxes: The first three will fall off a cliff, and if cities and counties respond to the drop in tax revenues by jacking up property taxes, this will only hasten the collapse of businesses that were already hanging on by a thread before the pandemic.

The federal government can bail out local governments this year, but what about next year, and every year after that?

The hit to local tax revenues is permanent, as the economy became dependent on debt and financialization pushed costs up.

Amazon and online sellers don’t pay local taxes except in the locales where their fulfillment centers are located.

Yes, online sellers pay state and local sales taxes, but these sales are for goods; most of the small businesses that have supported local tax revenues are services: bars, cafes, restaurants, etc.

As these close for good, the likelihood of new businesses taking on the same high costs (rent, fees, labor, overhead, etc.) is near zero, and anyone foolish enough to try will be bankrupted in short order.

Now that working at home has been institutionalized, the private sector no longer needs millions of square feet of office space. As revenues drop and profits vanish, businesses will be seeking to cut costs, and vacating unused office space is the obvious first step.

What’s the value of empty commercial space?

Trying to Get Blood From a Stone

If demand is near zero, the value is also near zero. Local governments will be desperate to raise tax revenues, and they will naturally look at bubble-era valuations on all real estate as a cash cow. But they will find that raising property taxes on money-losing properties will only accelerate the rate of property-owner insolvencies.

At some point valuations will adjust down to reality and property taxes collected will adjust down accordingly. If municipalities think they can make up the losses by jacking up the taxes paid by the survivors, they will quickly find the ranks of the survivors thinned.

This doesn’t exhaust the second-order effects: Once Main Street is half-empty, the attraction of the remaining businesses declines; there’s not enough to attract customers, and the virtuous circle of sales rising for everyone because the district is lively and attractive reverses: The survivors struggle and give up, further hollowing out the district.

The core problem is the U.S. economy has been fully financialized, so costs are unaffordable.

The commercial property owner overpaid for the buildings with cheap borrowed money, and now the owner must collect nosebleed-high rents or he can’t make the mortgage and property tax payments.

Local governments spend every dime of tax revenues, as their costs are insanely high as well. They cannot survive a 10% decline in tax revenues, much less a 40% drop.

The Lesson of Yellowstone

The metaphor I’ve used to explain this in the past is the Yellowstone forest fire. The deadwood of bad debt, extreme leverage, zombie companies and all the other fallen branches of financialization pile up.

But the central banks no longer allow any creative destruction of unpayable debt and misallocated capital; every brush fire is instantly suppressed with more stimulus, more liquidity and lower interest rates.

As a result, the deadwood sapping the real economy of productivity and innovation is allowed to pile higher.

The only possible output of this suppression is an economy piled high with explosive risk.

Eventually nature supplies a lightning strike, and the resulting conflagration consumes the entire economy.

A South Korean soccer club has been fined for posing sex dolls in the stands during a recent game, Yonhap reports.

South Korean football club FC Seoul was slapped with a 100 million won (US$81,410) fine on Wednesday for posing the sex dolls in the stands with signs, creating an uncanny tableau that apparently offended some of the more priggish officials running South Korea’s premier soccer league.

The use of more than a dozen life-size dolls in place of spectators (since fans weren’t allowed at the match) took place during the club’s Sunday match against Gwangju FC at Seoul World Cup Stadium.

In a statement, the league accused FC Seoul of “causing great damage to the image and the integrity of the K-League” and offending female fans.

The fine is the largest the league has ever levied against a club, according to Yonhap.

The team has said it will “humbly accept” the fine.

If any traders, or frankly anyone out there, still cares about fundamental economic data, there was little to celebrate this evening, when Japan reported another round of dismal trade numbers, with Imports plunging 7.2% in April, worse than the -5.0% drop in March but slightly better than expected. However, it was Japan’s exports – that key benchmark for the BOJ whose goal of keep the yen weaker is not only to support stocks but also to facilitate exports – that was the highlight, with the April number plunged by 21.9%, double the previous month’s -11.7% drop and the biggest plunge since the financial crisis.

But if Japan’s number was dismal, at least it was expected. What was more concerning was the latest Korean export number for the first 20 days of May, which some had expected to see a solid rebound in light of the so-called reopening observed this month. Well, it did not happen, and while the May number wasn’t quite as bad as the near-record plunge in April when exports plunged by 26.9% in the first 20 days, the -20.3% Y/Y drop in May – off an already depressed 2019 number – showed that any hopes for a solid global recovery taking hold have been painfully premature.

To be sure, there was a tiny silver lining, as semiconductor exports rose 13.4% in contrast to a 15% decline in the same period of April. According to Bloomberg “this supports optimism for an economic turnaround and equities’ rally” and is “likely to give investors fresh reasons to look at the tech sector in Korea and abroad” although we disagree.

As noted in recent weeks, just like during the trade war in much of 2019, the reason for a sharp pick up in semiconductor trade has been fear that China’s tech sector will soon be locked out of US supply chains – as the recent Huawei news confirmed – and as such any jump in S.Korean semi exports is simply frontloading of demand now ahead of more crackdowns on the Chinese tech space in the future, when Huawei et al may find themselves completely locked out from US suppliers, which in turn explains why as Bloomberg reported earlier, China is planning to invest $1 trillion in its semiconductor industry to if not overtake the US in technology, at least become self-sufficient and not rely on US semi production.

Authored by Kyle Bass, op-ed via NewsWeek.com,

In international politics, few things are certain during these uncertain times. But I can predict one: the relationship between America and Hong Kong is in the throes of major change.

On May 22, China’s leaders will convene for their annual People’s Congress, during which they will discuss the status of Hong Kong and whether to push forward with their rebuffed attempts to impose upon that special jurisdiction the laws and circumscribed rights of mainland China. If they do so, America and Britain will push back—with lasting consequence.

Hong Kong has become ground zero for the ideological clash between democracy and heavy-handed Chinese communism. This tug-of-war was on global display last summer, when over two million Hong Kongers—26 percent of the entire population—peacefully took to the streets of Hong Kong, in sweltering 100-degree heat, to protest Beijing’s overreach with a proposed extradition bill that would impose China’s laws on Hong Kong. The people of Hong Kong have completely lost faith in their embattled leader, Carrie Lam, and their police force. Peaceful protestors have been brutalized, pro-democracy figures have been illegally arrested and the Hong Kong Legislative Council’s day-to-day operations have been tampered with by the Chinese government. During the most recent attempt to conduct a Legislative Council meeting in Hong Kong, in a scene that is reminiscent of an event that might take place in a failed state, fist fights broke out between the pro-China members and the pro-democracy members.

Unfortunately, the rapt global attention and support that greeted Hong Kongers last year at the start of their protests has been sidetracked by other news. But this week, the world should again pay attention to Hong Kong.

At the People’s Congress, the Chinese Communist Party is likely to push forward with having Hong Kong implement a full set of laws with “Chinese characteristics” that give Beijing the right to essentially do whatever it pleases. This will shatter the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, in which China agreed to allow Hong Kong to continue to operate “autonomously” until 2047. After 156 years of Hong Kongers experiencing British rule and all the freedoms and rights that accompanied it, expect larger and more dynamic protests and (hopefully) more global action from politicians. Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that he would not renew Hong Kong’s special trade status until he had seen the outcome of the People’s Congress.

But absent a complete about-face on that, it is unclear how Pompeo could possibly validate Hong Kong’s continued “autonomy” after the blood-letting the world has witnessed firsthand. In late 2019, Amnesty International titled a piece, “Hong Kong: Arbitrary arrests, brutal beatings and torture in police detention revealed.” Suffice it to say this is not something any responsible autonomous nation would do to peaceful protestors.

Unfortunately for citizens, at the same time that Hong Kong is experiencing the worst political destabilization since the Opium Wars, the special jurisdiction is already in the throes of the worst economic depression it has ever faced: GDP is down 24 percent quarter-over-quarter annualized. I have been studying the Chinese banking system and Hong Kong closely for the last decade, and I think that Hong Kong is living on borrowed time. (In full disclosure, I run global investment funds investing in this macroeconomic outcome.)

What happens in Hong Kong will not stay in Hong Kong. The battle between an expansionist, increasingly repressive Chinese communist government, on the one hand, and a Western rule of law-based democracy, on the other, will spill over into Taiwan. Already, the battle in Hong Kong has affected Taiwanese politics: watching China’s Communist Party try to assert control in Hong Kong is the primary reason that a historic number of Taiwanese voters took to the polls to rebuke the pro-Beijing candidate and elect a president, Tsai Ing-wen, who campaigned with the promise of protecting Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty. Taiwanese voters will continue to be enthralled by every development in Hong Kong, because they know that an aggressive and emboldened Chinese Communist Party is bad news for them, too.

The world should focus on Hong Kong. This is not just about the fate of millions of peaceful protesters, but about democracy, reneged promises and a global order that is shifting as the Chinese Communist Party continues to change its terms of engagement.

As we have been writing since late 2018, when it comes to the technological arms race between the US and China, one place where China has been badly lagging the US, is in the production of semiconductors, which is also China’s biggest weakness in its ongoing scramble to catch up with the US technologically.

China’s media agrees: over the weekend, we quoted from a Global Times op-ed according to which “although the US had experienced a large-scale deindustrialization in the second half of the 20th century, it still maintains advantages in the semiconductor sector with companies such as Intel, which could complete the whole process of the chip design to producing. The country has held on to cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing techniques over the past decade.”

And now that the cold war between the US and China is about as formal as it can get, China has decided it can no longer rely on the US for being its primary source of high-end technology, and according to Bloomberg, Beijing is accelerating its bid for global leadership in key technologies, and will pump more than a trillion dollars into the economy “through the rollout of everything from wireless networks to artificial intelligence.”

Purposefully invoking the spirit of “Made in China 2025”, a plan that has in the past infuriated the White House, China’s strategic “masterplan” is backed by President Xi Jinping himself, and will see China invest an estimated $1.4 trillion over six years to 2025, “calling on urban governments and private tech giants like Huawei Technologies to lay fifth generation wireless networks, install cameras and sensors, and develop AI software that will underpin autonomous driving to automated factories and mass surveillance.”

This also means that while pursuing China’s plans to reinvent its technological base and to restructure its entire semiconductor supply chain, Beijing will also create the supreme police state dystopia, one which is even more powerful than the current iteration.

Predictably, the new infrastructure initiative is expected to rely on local giants from Alibaba and Huawei to SenseTime Group while shunning U.S. companies. And as Bloomberg adds, “as tech nationalism mounts, the investment drive will reduce China’s dependence on foreign technology, echoing objectives set forth previously in the Made in China 2025 program. Such initiatives have already drawn fierce criticism from the Trump administration, resulting in moves to block the rise of Chinese tech companies such as Huawei.”

“Nothing like this has happened before, this is China’s gambit to win the global tech race,” said Digital China Holdings Chief Operating Officer Maria Kwok, as she sat in a Hong Kong office surrounded by facial recognition cameras and sensors.

“Starting this year, we are really beginning to see the money flow through.”

Maria Kwok’s company is a government-backed systems integration provider, among many that are jumping at the chance. In the southern city of Guangzhou, Digital China is bringing half a million units of project housing online, including a complex three quarters the size of Central Park. To find a home, a user just has to log on to an app, scan their face and verify their identity. Leases can be signed digitally via smartphone and the renting authority is automatically flagged if a tenant’s payment is late.

The tech investment push is part of a broader fiscal package waiting to be signed off by China’s legislature, which convenes this week. The government is expected to announce infrastructure funding of as much as $563 billion this year, against the backdrop of the country’s worst economic performance since the Mao era. It will also include an expansion in the PLA’s budget to contain the “growing threat of US conflict“, as we discussed last night.

As Vital Knowledge points out in a note on Wednesday afternoon, “depending on how Beijing frames its tech ambitions around the NPC, this $1T+ blueprint could draw the ire of the White House and spur further measures aimed at inhibiting Chinese IT firms (recall the White House pushed hard for China to drop its prior “Made in China 2025” tech plan).”

The GOP-controlled Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday voted to issue a subpoena to a Democratic consulting firm, Blue Star Strategies, which Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings paid $60,000 in November 2015 in connection with efforts to help end a long-running investigation in Ukraine. Burisma notoriously employed Hunter Biden to sit on its board – paying him upwards of $50,000 per month.

The vote to subpoena Blue Star was passed 8-6 along party lines.

Blue Star responded to the subpoena Wednesday in a letter to Johnson, writing that they don’t understand the need for a subpoena, as they have cooperated – or intend to cooperate – with the committee “at every opportunity” in what Democrats are calling a politically motivated probe.

Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Committee, said the committee should be focusing on the pandemic instead of Hunter Biden.

“We’re in the midst of a pandemic with over 90,000 people who have lost their lives, we’ve got an unprecedented amount of unemployment that’s sweeping across the country,” Peter told reporters. “We need to be focused on the crisis.“

But Johnson says that he’s moving forward with the investigation because people “need to know the truth.” –NBC News

In March, Johnson said he wanted to specifically address matters involving Andrii Telizhenko – a former Blue Star consultant who hid behind a nondisclosure agreement.

“Because Mr. Telizhenko’s records and information would be responsive to the committee’s requests, and Blue Star has refused to provide them, a subpoena to Mr. Telizhenko for these records is appropriate at this time,” read a March letter Johnson sent to members of his committee. “Accordingly, I will be scheduling a vote in the near future to approve issuing the enclosed subpoena.”

“Blocking the receipt of relevant records, as any committee member voting against this subpoena would be doing, only heightens the risk of ‘disinformation’ because Congress would not have access to all pertinent information,” he added.

Hunter Biden was paid upwards of $50,000 per month to sit on Burisma’s board while his father was Vice President, and Obama’s point-man on Ukraine policy – where he notoriously forced the country’s prior administration to fire a prosecutor investigating the energy giant.

Meanwhile, Hunter and his colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle – just one month before Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma for corruption, according to investigative journalist John Solomon.

Via John Solomon Reports:

During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)

Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.

Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting. The subject line for the email exchanges read simply “Burisma.”

“Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption,” a Feb. 24, 2016, email between State officials read. “She noted that two high profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company (including Hunter Biden as a board member).

“Tramontano would like to talk with U/S Novelli about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt,” the email added. “According to Tramontano there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing or process, and evidence to the contrary has not been considered.”

At the time, Novelli was the most senior official overseeing international energy issues for State. The undersecretary position, of which there are several, is the third-highest-ranking job at State, behind the secretary and deputy secretary. And Tramontano was a lawyer working for Blue Star Strategies, a Washington firm that was hired by Burisma to help end a long-running corruption investigation against the gas firm in Ukraine.

Tramontano and another Blue Star official, Sally Painter, both alumni of Bill Clinton’s administration, worked with New York-based criminal defense attorney John Buretta to settle the Ukraine cases in late 2016 and 2017. I wrote about their efforts previously here. 

Burisma Holdings records obtained by Ukrainian prosecutors state the gas firm made a $60,000 payment to Blue Star in November 2015.