Month: February 2020

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

A plan by the Greek government to build new migrant camps on five Aegean islands has sparked violent opposition from local residents, who fear that the facilities will encourage yet more mass migration from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The government says that the new camps, expected to be operational by July 2020, are needed to alleviate overcrowding at other locations that have been the focus of international criticism. Local residents counter that the migrants should be transferred to mainland Greece.

On February 25, more than 500 locals prevented construction workers from accessing the site of a proposed new migrant camp at Karava Mantamadou on Lesbos. Riot police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the crowds.

Similar clashes occurred on Chios, a large Greek island located less than 20 kilometers from Turkey, from where tens of thousands of migrants depart each year in hopes of eventually reaching mainland Europe.

The new site on Lesbos will be a so-called closed camp that tightly controls access and will replace the current open-access camp at Moria. The closed camps will allow migrants to go out during the day but will require them to be locked in at night. The objective is to control their movements and prevent them from escaping to the mainland.

In addition to Lesbos, Greek authorities plan to build closed facilities on the islands of Chios, Kos, Leros and Samos. The islands are all close to Turkey.

The camp at Moria — a sprawling facility built for no more than 3,000 migrants but which is now accommodating at least 20,000, approximately one-third of whom are under the age of 18 — has attracted widespread international criticism for its squalid living conditions.

A spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF), Sophie McCann, explained:

“They are living in squalid, medieval-like conditions… with barely any access to basic services, including clean and hot water, electricity, sanitation and healthcare. On a daily basis our medical teams are treating the consequential deterioration of health and wellbeing.”

In 2016, Greek authorities, with backing from the EU, introduced a so-called containment policy aimed at deterring migrants from crossing to Greece from Turkey. The policy requires migrants to remain on the islands — with no hope of reaching the Greek mainland — until their asylum requests are processed. With a backlog of tens of thousands of applicants, the asylum system has come to a standstill. Approximately 40,000 migrants are effectively trapped on the islands.

The containment policy has angered local residents, who complain that migrants are responsible for a spike in crime.

“People have seen their properties destroyed, their sheep and goats have been slaughtered, their homes broken into,” said Nikos Trakellis, a community leader in Moria.

“A few years back, when there were 5,000 migrants on the island, things seemed bad enough. Now there’s a sense that the situation has really got out of hand.”

In October 2019, the Greek government announced a plan to transfer 20,000 migrants from the islands to the mainland. A subsequent surge in new migrant arrivals from Turkey, however, has left the migrant camps on the islands as overcrowded as ever.

Greek authorities say that they are doing their best to satisfy locals, migrants and human rights groups. “The government is making an effort to change something, to implement a plan,” a government official told the Reuters news agency. “If we don’t construct new facilities, living conditions won’t improve.”

North Aegean Regional Governor Kostas Moutzouris, who opposes the government’s plan to build permanent migrant camps on the islands, described the situation on Lesbos as a “powder keg ready to explode.” He added: “It’s crucial that a state of emergency is called.” He also warned:

“I fear for the safety of our people, the residents of Lesbos. For the situation to change, many refugees have to be transferred to the mainland and new arrivals from Turkey must be stopped. If not, we are doomed.”

Government spokesperson Stelios Petsas, who described the existing facilities as “public health bombs,” said:

“We are asking the local communities to understand that these closed facilities will benefit the country and their communities. There’s a trust deficit right now that has been cultivated over previous years, and this needs to be restored. We will build these closed centers but also close the existing open ones. That is the government’s promise.

“The new camps will make it much easier to speed up the asylum process so that those who are entitled to asylum can be transferred west and those who are not can be returned to Turkey.”

Greece’s center-right government, led by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who took office after parliamentary elections in July 2019, has taken a more hardline approach toward migration than did the previous left-wing government led by Alexis Tsipras:

• July 2019. The new government revoked access to public health care for asylum seekers and undocumented migrants arriving in Greece.

• September 2019. The government raised the criteria for both the application and approval of asylum status applications. It also vowed to strengthen border security and return 10,000 illegal migrants back to Turkey by the end of 2020.

• October 2019. The Greek parliament passed a new asylum law, which introduced sweeping changes to the national asylum system, including cutting options for appeal and facilitating the deportation of failed asylum seekers.

• November 2019. The government said that it would tighten controls at Greece’s borders and clear bottlenecks in asylum vetting procedures.

• January 2020. The government announced the construction of a floating fence to deter migrants arriving by sea. The 2.7-kilometer (1.7 mile) barrier will be set up off coast of Lesbos. It will rise 50 centimeters above sea level and have lights that will make it visible at night. If the barrier is effective at reducing migration, it could be extended to 15 kilometers or more.

• February 2020. The Greek parliament approved a law to regulate all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dealing with migration issues. The objective is to ensure that NGOs are not profiting from mass migration “in a faulty and parasitic manner.”

Mitsotakis recently said that, unlike under the previous government, Greece is no longer open to anyone who wants to come:

“Welcome in Greece are only those we choose. Those who are not welcome will be returned. We will permanently shut the door to illegal human traffickers, to those who want to enter even though they are not entitled to asylum.”

Since 2015, more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have entered the European Union through Greece.

A March 2016 agreement between the EU and Turkey reduced the flow, but the number of arrivals resurged in 2019, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and other members of his government threatened to flood Europe with Muslim migrants.

Greek officials have said that Erdoğan personally controls the migration flows to Greece and turns them on and off to extract more money and other political concessions from the European Union.

Greek Immigration Minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos noted that when Turkey “keeps repeating that we’re going to open the floodgates, what migrants do is they move closer to the floodgates waiting for them to open.” He added:

“Europe cannot act under threats or blackmail. As Europeans should understand the situation that the Turks are faced with, Ankara should on its part realize that this is not the way to deal with Europe.”

In 2019, approximately 60,000 migrants — an average of 164 per day — reached Greece, according to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. Nearly 80% arrived on Chios, Lesbos and Samos.

The trend continues: More than 6,000 migrants — an average of 133 per day — reached Greece during the first six weeks of 2020, according to the UNHCR. The top countries of origin: Afghanistan (50%); Syria (21%); Congo (6%) and Iraq (3.5%).

Recent fighting in Idlib, a war-torn province in northwestern Syria, has uprooted nearly one million people — most of them women and children — who have sought sanctuary near the Turkish border.

Turkey, which currently hosts nearly four million Syrian refugees, has said it cannot handle a new influx. It has repeatedly threatened to re-open the floodgates of mass migration to Europe.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Nearly two decades after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan post-9/11, and after an interminable war costing over $ 2 trillion, there’s hardly anything “historic” about a possible peace deal that may be signed in Doha this coming Saturday between Washington and the Taliban.

We should start by stressing three points.

1- The Taliban wanted all US troops out. Washington refused.

2- The possible deal only reduces US troops from 13,000 to 8,600. That’s the same number already deployed before the Trump administration.

3- The reduction will only happen a year and a half from now – assuming what’s being described as a truce holds.

So there would be no misunderstanding, Taliban Deputy Leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, in an op-ed certainly read by everyone inside the Beltway, detailed their straightforward red line: total US withdrawal.

And Haqqani is adamant: there’s no peace deal if US troops stay.

Still, a deal looms. How come? Simple: enter a series of secret “annexes.”

The top US negotiator, the seemingly eternal Zalmay Khalilzad, a remnant of the Clinton and Bush eras, has spent months codifying these annexes – as confirmed by a source in Kabul currently not in government but familiar with the negotiations.

Let’s break them down to four points.

1- US counter-terror forces would be allowed to stay. Even if approved by the Taliban leadership, this would be anathema to the masses of Taliban fighters.

2- The Taliban would have to denounce terrorism and violent extremism. That’s rhetorical, not a problem.

3- There will be a scheme to monitor the so-called truce while different warring Afghan factions discuss the future, what the US State Dept. describes as “intra-Afghan negotiations.” Culturally, as we’ll see later, Afghans of different ethnic backgrounds will have a tremendously hard time monitoring their own warring.

4- The CIA would be allowed to do business in Taliban-controlled areas. That’s an even more hardcore anathema. Everyone familiar with post-9/11 Afghanistan knows that the prime reason for CIA business is the heroin rat line that finances Langley’s black ops, as I exposed in 2017.

Otherwise, everything about this “historic” deal remains quite vague.

Even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was forced to admit the war in Afghanistan is “still” in “a state of strategic stalemate.”

As for the far from strategic financial disaster, one just needs to peruse the latest SIGAR report. SIGAR stands for Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In fact virtually nothing in Afghanistan has been “reconstructed.”

No real deal without Iran

The “intra-Afghan” mess starts with the fact that Ashraf Ghani eventually was declared the winner of the presidential elections held in September last year. But virtually no one recognizes him.

The Taliban don’t talk to Ghani. Only to some people that are part of the government in Kabul. And they describe these talks at best as between “ordinary Afghans.”

Everyone familiar with Taliban strategy knows US/NATO troops will never be allowed to stay. What could happen is the Taliban allowing some sort of face-saving contingent to remain for a few months, and then a very small contingent stays to protect the US embassy in Kabul.

Washington will obviously reject this possibility. The alleged “truce” will be broken. Trump, pressured by the Pentagon, will send more troops. And the infernal spiral will be back on track.

Another major hole in the possible deal is that the Americans completely ignored Iran in their negotiations in Doha.

That’s patently absurd. Teheran is a key strategic partner to its neighbor Kabul. Apart from the millenary historical/cultural/social connections, there are at least 3.5 million Afghan refugees in Iran.

Post 9-11, Tehran slowly but surely started cultivating relations with the Taliban – but not at a military/weaponizing level, according to Iranian diplomats. In Beirut last September, and then in Nur-Sultan in November, I was provided a clear picture of where discussions about Afghanistan stand.

The Russian connection to the Taliban goes through Tehran. Taliban leaders have frequent contacts with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Only last year, Russia held two conferences in Moscow between Taliban political leaders and mujahideen. The Russians were engaged into bringing Uzbeks into the negotiations. At the same time, some Taliban leaders met with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives four times in Tehran, in secret.

The gist of all these discussions was “to find a conflict resolution outside of Western patterns”, according to an Iranian diplomat. They were aiming at some sort of federalism: the Taliban plus the mujahideen in charge of the administration of some vilayets.

The bottom line is that Iran has better connections in Afghanistan than Russia and China. And this all plays within the much larger scope of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The Russia-China strategic partnership wants an Afghan solution coming from inside the SCO, of which both Iran and Afghanistan are observers. Iran may become a full SCO member if it holds on to the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, until October – thus still not subjected to UN sanctions.

All these actors want US troops out – for good. So the solution always points towards a decentralized federation. According to an Afghan diplomat, the Taliban seem ready to share power with the Northern Alliance. The spanner in the works is the Hezb-e-Islami, with one Jome Khan Hamdard, a commander allied with notorious mujahid Gulbudiin Hekmatyar, based in Mazar-i-Sharif and supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, more interested in restarting a civil war.

Understanding Pashtunistan

Here’s a blast from the past, reliving the context of the Taliban visit to Houston, and showing how things have not changed much since the first Clinton administration. It’s always a matter of the Taliban getting their cut – at the time related to Pipelineistan business, now to their reaffirmation of what can be described as Pashtunistan.

Not every Pashtun is a Taliban, but the overwhelming majority of Taliban are Pashtuns.

The Washington establishment never did their “know your enemy” homework, trying to understand how Pashtuns from extremely diverse groups are linked by a common system of values establishing their ethnic foundation and necessary social rules. That’s the essence of their code of conduct – the fascinating, complex Pashtunwali. Although it incorporates numerous Islamic elements, Pashtunwali is in total contradiction with Islamic law on many points.

Islam did introduce key moral elements to Pashtun society. But there are also juridical norms, imposed by a hereditary nobility, that support the whole edifice and that came from the Turko-Mongols.

Pashtuns – a tribal society – have a deep aversion to the Western concept of the state. Central power can only expect to neutralize them with – to put it bluntly – bribes. That’s what passes as a sort of system of government in Afghanistan. Which brings the question of how much – and with what – the US is now bribing the Taliban.

Afghan political life, in practice, works out from actors that are factions, sub-tribes, “Islamic coalitions” or regional groups.

Since 1996, and up to 9/11, the Taliban incarnated the legitimate return of Pashtuns as the dominant element in Afghanistan. That’s why they instituted an emirate and not a republic, more appropriate for a Muslim community ruled only by religious legislation. The diffidence towards cities, particularly Kabul, also expresses the sentiment of Pashtun superiority over other Afghan ethnic groups.

The Taliban do represent a process of overcoming tribal identity and the affirmation of Pashtunistan. The Beltway never understood this powerful dynamic – and that’s one of the key reasons for the American debacle.

Lapis Lazuli corridor

Afghanistan is at the center of the new American strategy for Central Asia, as in “expand and maintain support for stability in Afghanistan” coupled with an emphasis to “encourage connectivity between Central Asia and Afghanistan.”

In practice, the Trump administration wants the five Central Asian “stans” to bet on integration projects such as the CASA-1000 electricity project and the Lapis Lazuli trade corridor, which is in fact a reboot of the Ancient Silk Road, connecting Afghanistan to Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia before crossing the Black Sea to Turkey and then all the way to the EU.

But the thing is Lapis Lazuli is already bound to integrate with Turkey’s Middle Corrido r, which is part of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, as well as with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Plus, also part of Belt and Road. Beijing planned this integration way before Washington.

The Trump administration is just stressing the obvious: a peaceful Afghanistan is essential for the integration process.

Andrew Korybko correctly argues that “Russia and China could make more progress on building the Golden Ring between themselves, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey by that time, thus ‘embracing’ Central Asia with potentially limitless opportunities that far surpass those that the US is offering or ‘encircling’ the region from a zero-sum American strategic perspective and ‘forcing’ it out.”

The late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s wishful thinking “Eurasian Balkans” scenario may be dead, but the myriad US divide-and-rule gambits imposed on the heartland have now mutated into hybrid war explicitly directed against China, Russia and Iran – the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.

And that means that as far as realpolitik Afghanistan is concerned, with or without a deal, the US military have no intention to go anywhere. They want to stay – whatever it takes. Afghanistan is a priceless Greater Middle East base to deploy hybrid war techniques.

Pashtuns are certainly getting the message from key Shanghai Cooperation Organization players. The question is how they plan to run rings around Team Trump.

As the coronavirus becomes the all-consuming news story of the moment, the Financial Times decided to invite an extremely apropos guest for this weekend’s “Lunch with the FT”. That guest is: Belgian scientist Peter Piot, the “Mick Jagger of Microbes”, best known for discovering the Ebola virus.

Obviously well-qualified, how does Piot feel about COVID-19? He didn’t mince words: “This is serious.”

“I’m not the scaremongering type,” he says. “But I think this is serious in the sense that we can’t afford not to consider it as a serious threat.”

“It could be that, indeed, it’s going to be over in a few months,” he continues, crunching into a tempura-covered sage leaf. “But just take the counterfactual. We say, ‘OK, it’s fine and we don’t do anything.’ I bet that we would already have had far more cases in Singapore, the UK, Germany. Let’s not forget, we are already well over 1,000 deaths. That’s not a detail.”

The interview took place on Feb. 13, which means that since Piot made these comments, 1,500 more people have died, and serious outbreaks have emerged in Iran, South Korea and Italy. Saudi Arabia has halted pilgrimages to Mecca, and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has asked all schools in the country to close.

As the discussion delved deeper into the subject of the outbreak, Piot pointed out that although this “certainly isn’t SARS” it spreads much more easily because it resides in the tissues of the throat, allowing it to be spread through the air more easily.

With all this in mind, the “big question”, as Piot sees it, is how many will ultimately be infected.

“Now, let’s say, the mortality rate is 1 per cent. So, the big question is, how many people will get infected? Are we talking about hundreds of thousands or millions? Now 1 per cent of one million is 10,000; that’s 10,000 people who will die,” he says.

“It’s clearly not Sars,” he continues, referring to severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed nearly one in 10 who contracted it 17 years ago. “That’s the good news. But the bad news is, it spreads much faster. The Sars virus sits deep in your lungs. With this virus, it seems that it’s in your throat and that’s why it’s far more contagious.”

But since there is no vaccine, Piot pointed out that if it things do get bad, we’re screwed, since we only have “medieval” methods of containment at our disposal.

“Secondly, we have no vaccine. All we have is medieval ways of containment: isolation, quarantine, contact tracing.”

Piot then offered an interesting comparison to the AIDS outbreak. He recalls that, back in 1981, when the first AIDS cases were discovered among six or seven gay men in California, nobody expected it to go on to infect 75 million people.

In situations like this, he adds, it’s always better to overreact than to dismiss the threat.

Piot remembers hearing about the first cases of a mysterious virus in Los Angeles in 1981. “The first report of HIV was six or seven gay men in California. Cumulatively, now we have, like, 75m people who have been infected. Who would have thought that then? Nobody. I’d rather be accused of overreacting than of not doing my job.”

After exchanging some comments about the food, the epidemiologist explained to his FT interlocutor why he doesn’t begrudge the WHO for ‘going easy’ on China.

He praises the role of the World Health Organization, which he says is nimbler under Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian and its first African director. Dr Tedros has been criticised for going easy on China, which suppressed information in the early stages of the outbreak. “The dilemma is he could have his five minutes of fame by bashing China. But what happens afterwards? You need to work with them,” he says, scooping up some juicy borlotti beans.

As for what will happen with the outbreak in China? Piot suspects the situation will get “much worse” before it gets better.

What’s the worst-case scenario with coronavirus, I ask. “That we’ll have a pandemic,” he replies. “I think it will get much worse in China. And here we will see more and more transmission. That’s my gut feeling. But how big it’s going to be, I honestly don’t know.”

He actually has some experience in this department: When he was battling the spread of AIDS in 2002 as the head of UNAids, the United Nations-backed NGO dedicated to fighting the global outbreak, he made the mistake of publicly criticizing China about the number of AIDS cases going unreported.

“It’s a fine line. I learnt this the hard way,” he says, referring to 2002 when UNAids, the organisation he ran from 1995 to 2008, issued the so-called “Titanic Peril” report, which argued that China had many more cases of HIV than it was admitting. “It’s the only time that my then boss, Kofi Annan, called me on a Sunday afternoon. He said, ‘Peter, you’re a brave man, but nobody has ever won against the People’s Republic of China.'”

Though he also eventually convinced the CCP to make some progressive policy changes to contain an AIDS outbreak.

“Wen asked me, ‘What’s the situation, what should we do?’ And I thought, you have 10 seconds to think. Am I going to be diplomatic or am I going to say the truth? He must have seen it. He said, ‘Forget who I am. Forget that we’re the Communist party. Tell me what you think and I’ll see what I can do.’ Piot advised Beijing to be more open about the problem and to work with people who were vulnerable, including drug addicts and sex workers, rather than jailing them. China’s policy changed decisively after that encounter.

Overall, in Piot’s estimation, the world has done a decent job of recognizing the threat posed by pandemics. Still, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, as the epidemic is showing the world, particularly now that the issue of mask shortages is becoming a problem in the US after playing a major role in exacerbating the outbreak in China.

Piot thinks differently. “If we do nothing, then that’s the case,” he says, particularly since new viruses – as coronavirus appears to have done – can always jump from animal to human. But these days far more people die of non-communicable diseases than of infectious ones, he says.

“Collectively, we’ve done quite a good job. That’s why we need, how to say it, a fire brigade,” he says, of a stronger and better-prepared global health system. “You don’t set up a fire brigade when your house is already on fire.”

That’s a catchy line. Hopefully, once the dust settles, the global community will remember that this wasn’t the first global pandemic, and it likely won’t be the last.

Authored by Whitney Webb via MintPressNews.com,

A little known specialized bond created in 2017 by the World Bank may hold the answer as to why U.S. and global health authorities have declined to label the global spread of the novel coronavirus a “pandemic.”

Those bonds, now often referred to as “pandemic bonds,” were ostensibly intended to transfer the risk of potential pandemics in low-income nations to financial markets.

Yet, in light of the growing coronavirus outbreak, the investors who purchased those products could lose millions if global health authorities were to use that label in relation to the surge in global coronavirus cases.

On Tuesday, federal health officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they are preparing for a “potential pandemic” of the novel coronavirus that first appeared in China late last year. The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that an estimated 80,000 worldwide have contracted the disease, most of them in China, while more than 2,700 have died.

However, some have argued that the CDC’s concerns about a likely pandemic have come too late and that action should have been taken much earlier. For instance, in early February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had told the New York Times that the novel coronavirus is “very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” while former CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden had echoed those concerns at the time, stating that it is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained.”

Despite those warnings, among many others, the CDC waited to announce its concerns that the virus could spread throughout the United States. Their Tuesday announcement riled markets, wiping out $1.7 trillion in stock market value in just two days. The CDC’s warning has reportedly angered President Trump, who accused the agency of needlessly spooking financial markets.

Notably, WHO officials have taken an even more cautious approach than the CDC in their recent comments, stating that it is still “too early” to declare the coronavirus outbreak a “pandemic” while also asserting that “it is time to do everything you would do in preparing for a pandemic.”

The refusal to label the outbreak a pandemic is odd, since it refers to an epidemic or actively spreading disease that affects two or more regions worldwide. This currently describes the geographical spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus, which has now resulted in significant clusters of cases far from China, namely in Italy and Iran. Countries closer to China, like South Korea, have also recently experienced an explosion in novel coronavirus infections.

It is possible that concerns over using the word “pandemic” could upset global markets and lead to economic turmoil, similar to what happened to the U.S. stock market following the CDC announcement on Tuesday. Though such concerns are valid, there is also evidence that a particular class of bonds issued by the World Bank that are closely related to official declarations of pandemics may also be responsible for having steered WHO and CDC officials away from using this term, even though the consequences of doing so could negatively impact global public health.

Pandemic Bonds: a “scheme like no other”

In June 2017, the World Bank announced the creation of “specialized bonds” that would be used to fund the previously created Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) in the event of an officially-recognized (i.e. WHO-recognized) pandemic.

They were essentially sold under the premise that those who invested in the bonds would lose their money if any of six deadly pandemics hit, including coronavirus. Yet, if a pandemic did not occur before the bonds mature on July 15, 2020, investors would receive what they had originally paid for the bonds back in addition to interest and premium payments on those bonds that they recieve between the date of purchase and the bond’s maturation date.

The PEF, which these pandemic bonds fund, was created by the World Bank “to channel surge funding to developing countries facing the risk of a pandemic” and the creation of these so-called “pandemic bonds” was intended to transfer pandemic risk in low-income countries to global financial markets. According to a World Bank press release on the launch of the bonds, WHO backed the World Bank’s initiative.

However, there is much more to these “pandemic bonds” than meets the eye. For example, PEF has a “unique financing structure [that] combines funding from the bonds issued today with over-the-counter derivatives that transfer pandemic outbreak risk to derivative counterparties.” The World Bank asserted that this structure was used in order “to attract a wider, more diverse set of investors.”

Critics, however, have called the unnecessarily convoluted system “World-Bank-enabled looting” that enriches intermediaries and investors instead of the funds intended targets, in this case low-income countries struggling to fight a pandemic. These critics have asked why not merely give these funds to a body like the Contingency Fund for Emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO), where the funds could go directly to affected countries in need.

Notably, WHO determines if a pandemic meets the criteria that would see investors’ money be funneled into PEF as opposed to their own pockets, which would take place if no pandemic is declared between now and when the bonds are set to mature this upcoming July.

In 2017, the news site Quartz described the mechanism of “pandemic bonds” as follows:

Investors buy the bonds and receive regular coupons payments in return. If there is an outbreak of disease, the investors don’t get their initial money back. There are two varieties of debt, both scheduled to mature in July 2020.

The first bond raised $225 million and features an interest rate of around 7%. Payout on the bond is suspended if there is an outbreak of new influenza viruses or coronaviridae (SARS, MERS). The second, riskier bond raised $95 million at an interest rate of more than 11%. This bond keeps investors’ money if there is an outbreak of Filovirus, Coronavirus, Lassa Fever, Rift Valley Fever, and/or Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. The World Bank also issued $105 million in swap derivatives that work in a similar way. (emphasis added)”

In 2017, the World Bank issued $425 million in these “pandemic bonds” and the bond sale was reported to have been 200 percent oversubscribed, “with investors eager to get their hands on the high-yield returns on offer,” according to reports. The premiums bondholders have received thus far were largely funded by the governments of Japan and Germany, who are also the top nation-state funders of WHO behind the United States and United Kingdom. Reports have claimed that most of the bondholders are firms and individuals based in Europe.

Some analysts have argued that these pandemic bonds were never intended to aid low-income pandemic-stricken countries, but instead to enrich Wall Street investors. For instance, American economic forecaster Martin Armstrong has called the World Bank’s pandemic bonds “a giant gamble in the global financial casino” and a “scheme like no other,” recently arguing that these bonds could present a “a structured derivative time bomb” that could upend financial markets if a pandemic is declared by WHO. Armstrong went on to say that it is in WHO’s interest to declare the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, but noted that, in doing so, they would cause bondholders to take significant losses.

Even establishment economists like former World Bank chief economist and Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers have criticized the World Bank’s program, dismissing the PEF as “financial goofiness.” Bodo Ellmers, the director of the Global Policy Forum’s sustainable development finance program, has similarly called pandemic bonds “useless,” while Olga Jonas, who worked at the World Bank as an economist for over 30 years, said the program was “designed to fail” because the bonds were crafted in order “to reduce the probability of payout.”

Economic and business analyst and host of the podcast “Quoth the Raven” Chris Irons told MintPress News that, with respect to the pandemic bonds, “What’s important is to focus on who stands to benefit from this not being declared a pandemic,” a difficult task given that the identity of most bondholders are not currently publicly available.

Irons also noted that, in his opinion, “WHO and the CDC have been caught a little flat-footed here” and that some governments that fund WHO, particularly the Trump administration, appear “more concerned with the stock market than giving people information that may be necessary and vital.” He added that behind-closed-doors pressure on WHO by those who stand to lose financially from an official declaration of a pandemic would be “unsurprising.”

How to trigger a payout

As the coronavirus outbreak grows, concern has grown among those invested in pandemic bonds that payout to countries affected by coronavirus will be triggered, despite the clear delay by WHO in declaring the outbreak as a pandemic. While WHO could theoretically alter the criteria that would trigger payout and cause bondholders to lose big, some recent reports have claimed that bondholders are seeking to rid themselves of the bonds prior to their July maturation date.

German media outlet Deutsche-Welle noted that the trigger for the first class of pandemic bonds, valued at $225 million, would normally have already been met due to the criterion of more than 2,500 deaths in a “developing country.” However, WHO has said this does not meet said criterion because it does not consider China to be a developing country, even though the World Bank’s own criteria do consider China to be a developing country.

For the second and riskier category of pandemic bonds, those bonds are triggered when the disease in question crosses an international border and causes more than 20 deaths in the second country. At the time of publication of this article, Iran has recorded at least 50 deaths, which should have triggered this second category of pandemic bonds, valued at $95 million. Yet, WHO yet to comment on how this criterion for the second category bonds has been met.

The WHO’s decision to refuse to use the “p-word” may be the result of several factors, though the pandemic bonds loom large as a $425 million incentive for not doing so. While avoiding the use of the term may please pandemic bondholders, it is set to have major negative consequences for global public health, particularly given the fact that early action against epidemic and pandemic outbreaks is widely considered to be an imperative.

As the coronavirus disrupts supply chains from automotive to tech to retail, thousands of American brides might be left without ‘the dress’ of their dreams when the big day arrives.

As KMBC, a local TV station in Kansas City, reports, even without any confirmed cases of the virus in the Kansas City area, the outbreak in China is going to have an impact on local brides – as well as brides across the country.

Brides might be facing a shortage of dresses as the summer wedding season approaches, they said.

With so many factories still shut down across China, and only 30% of small businesses back on line, the television station warns that if your dress isn’t already in the country, you might want to start thinking about a ‘Plan B’.

Salespeople at a local bridal shop told the station that the coronavirus is impacting which dresses they show and sell.

“In the past, we’d say go ahead and order it, they’ll manufacture it. It’ll be here in time. I can’t do that today. Today I have to say, ‘You know what sweetheart? We need to find you a different dress,” said Lisa Carson, a stylist at Natalie M. bridal shop in Overland Park.

As of Tuesday, some shipments have been delayed indefinitely, and the shop will no longer order dresses with any exposure to China anywhere along the supply chain.

It is not just the dresses; it’s everything that it takes to make the dress that is now on hold.

“It could be the stones. It could be the thread that’s utilized,” Carson said.

Sometimes, these factors aren’t explicitly known, so the bridal shops are scrambling to trace the provenance of their merchandise and attain a level of familiarity with their products that they have never before needed.

“What people need to understand is even if the factory where the goods are manufactured is up and running, maybe it’s the factory where the fabric is made or the notions are made, so there’s all those different pieces of the supply chain and they need to all be back on line,” Carson said.

The issue isn’t limited to bridal dresses: Prom dresses, bridesmaids gowns – anything, really. If you’re planning to order formal wear, and you don’t have a tracking number showing it’s already in the country, you might be screwed.

Some shops managed to beef up inventory before the shutdown. But only a handful of retailers had the foresight and financing to pull this off.

For every thousand women who can’t get ‘the dress’, some will inevitably cancel or postpone their weddings, assuming that the supply-chain problem might be a recurring annoyance.

That would have knock-on effects for venues, country clubs, so much of the service and hospitality industry which is already being hammered by a drop in tourism could see the other shoe – domestic demand – drop.

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is well known for its desire to spy on, track, and contact mass surveillance in order to store information on every single human being possible. And now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, it’s known that they created a robot dragonfly to spy on us.

Newly-released CIA documents show how the espionage agency developed a robot dragonfly spy. The tiny aerial surveillance device – known as the “insectothopter” – was built in the 1970s according to the CIA Museum, where it has been displayed for 16 years.

But blueprints for the robotic insect were released this week by the U.S. spy agency to the website The Black Vault. Those blueprints reveal the finely honed microengineering behind the little spy machine.

They show how CIA engineers had built miniature listening devices by 1970, but getting them over obstacles such as an embassy wall remained a major obstacle. Many know that the U.S. government, under the Patriot Act, began to spy relentlessly on our every move and store all of the information that they could on us.

When it was first revealed that the Bush Administration had implemented a secret program of warrantless wiretaps and domestic spying on US citizens, few Americans knew that all of this had happened before. In the early 1970s, it was revealed that US government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and IRS, were being used as part of a deliberate plan to infiltrate and disrupt political opponents, and this plan had continued for 20 years under four different Presidents, both Democratic and Republican. This report by the Senate Select Committee (the Church Committee) details the elaborate efforts by the FBI, CIA, and NSA to spy on Americans by tapping their telephones, by intercepting and copying their mail, and even by burglarizing their homes (known as “black bag jobs”). In response to this report, Congress established the FISA courts that Bush bypassed when he directed the NSA to once again spy on Americans without court approval or oversight.

“The ultimate demonstration of controlled powered flight has not yet been achieved,” the CIA chief scientist, who helped develop the robotic dragonfly wrote.

In the end, the robot dragonfly – developed 40 years before unmanned drones – never flew and the spy agency closed the project, but they didn’t stop their quest to find new ways to conduct mass surveillance.

Amazon is dominating the retail space, putting massive pressure on brick and mortar retail outlets. Now it appears Walmart is going to flank Amazon with a taste of its own medicine by launching a new paid membership program to take on Prime. 

For the last 18 months, Walmart has been secretly working on a paid membership program called Walmart+, reported Vox. 

For just $98 per year, subscribers will get the benefits of unlimited delivery for groceries and all other store items. Walmart had previously rolled out a program called ShippingPass, which shut down three years ago. 

Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside is overseeing the development and rollout of Walmart+. Additional perks of the service could include discounted drugs and fuel, as well as a new service called Scan & Go that allows subscribers to dodge long cashier lines. 

Walmart+ is expected to launch a pilot program next month, Vox said. Walmart executives are hoping that future subscribers would lead to more consumption of products and services under the Walmart roof, which would boost profit margins and help stabilize its losing e-commerce business.  

NEW from me:

Walmart is working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+ that could launch next month

Grocery delivery is at core, but plan is to add more perks that Amazon can’t easily match. Fuel and prescription drug discounts being consideredhttps://t.co/X29TdzSB5s

— Jason Del Rey (@DelRey) February 27, 2020

The online retail war between Walmart and Amazon is about to heat up. As we’ve previously noted, Walmart has offered free two-day shipping on orders of $35 or more since early 2017, which helped it keep up with Amazon. Amazon still accounts for about half of all e-commerce spending in the US. 

Walmart teased Amazon last April when it tweeted, “One-day free shipping…without a membership fee. Now THAT would be groundbreaking. Stay tuned.” 

One-day free shipping…without a membership fee. Now THAT would be groundbreaking. Stay tuned.

— Walmart (@Walmart) April 26, 2019

In preparation to take on Amazon, Walmart acquired Jet.com in 2016 to expand its e-commerce reach. Now the retail giant believes it has what it takes to challenge Amazon and keep subscribers in a perpetual loop of consumption, enticed by perks and credit cards to overindulge in products.

Consumption and capitalism, hand in hand: it’s the American way. 

Authored by Lydia Saad via Gallup

Story Highlights

• Nearly four in five Americans now see trade as mainly an opportunity

• Fewer than one in five consider trade an economic threat, an all-time low

• New U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade is favored by both parties

More Americans than Gallup has seen in a quarter century view foreign trade positively, with 79% calling it “an opportunity for economic growth through increased U.S. exports.”

Fewer than one in five (18%) — down by about half from 34% in 2016, and the lowest Gallup has recorded — now perceive trade as mainly a “threat to the economy from foreign imports.” A high of 52% of Americans held this skeptical view of trade during the last recession.

While the percentage of Americans viewing trade as a threat has slipped three percentage points in the past year, the share viewing it positively has risen five points to 79%.

The latest results are from Gallup’s 2020 World Affairs survey, conducted Feb. 3-16. Gallup has asked this question periodically since 1992, including annually since 2011.

Americans’ perceptions of whether trade is more of a benefit or a hindrance have closely tracked the U.S. economy, particularly since the 2007-2009 recession. As that recession got underway, Americans were highly likely to view trade as a threat because of imports. But as the economy improved and unemployment declined to historical lows, so too have perceptions of trade as an economic threat.

Party Groups Largely Agree on Trade

Trade enjoys strong bipartisan support in the U.S. today, with roughly eight in 10 Democrats (82%) and Republicans (78%), in addition to 76% of independents, seeing it as more of an opportunity for growth than a threat from imports.

Today’s views by party reflect marked increases in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ positive outlook on trade since their low points in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

NAFTA’s Replacement Enjoys Broad Support

The new poll was conducted shortly after President Donald Trump signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) — his long-promised replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — after bipartisan approval of the bill in both houses of Congress over the prior month. Trump and his North American counterparts signed the initial agreement over a year ago, but its implementation has been held up as congressional Democrats negotiated with the Trump administration over environmental and labor provisions.

Americans’ views of the USMCA closely mirror their opinions of trade overall. Eight in 10 say the agreement will be good for the U.S., while 13% predict it will be bad.

Reflective of the bipartisan nature of the USMCA’s passage, the newly minted trade agreement receives high support from all party groups, including 88% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 73% of Democrats.

This reaction is similar to Americans’ initial response to NAFTA after that agreement was proposed during Republican George Bush’s presidency in 1991. At that time, 72% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for the U.S., including 71% of both Republicans and independents, and 73% of Democrats. It was only in later years that NAFTA became more controversial, as well as more closely associated with the Democrats, possibly in part due to Trump’s declaring the agreement a “disaster” during his 2016 campaign.

Public Not Following USMCA News Story Closely

Americans’ attention to news about the USMCA has been on the low side for news stories Gallup has measured since 1991. Twelve percent say they have followed it very closely and another 34% somewhat closely, while 28% say not too closely and 26% have not followed it at all. Republicans (56%) are more likely than Democrats (45%) and independents (39%) to have followed it at least somewhat closely.

The 46% of all Americans following news about the USMCA very or somewhat closely falls short of the 60% average attention score for nearly 230 news items in Gallup’s trend. Support for the agreement is a bit higher among those following it closely (88%) than among those following it not too closely (79%) or not at all (67%).

Bottom Line

The large majority of Americans now see trade as mainly an opportunity for economic growth through increased exports rather than a threat from imports. Apart from continued low U.S. unemployment, which raises everyone’s comfort level with trade, Republicans and Democrats likely have differing reasons to feel positively about what trade means for the country. Republicans may feel confident that trade is in better hands under Trump, while Democrats may feel that supporting trade is supporting the effectiveness of the trade deals put in place or championed by Trump’s Democratic predecessors.

View complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.