BMW Employee In Munich Tests Positive For Covid-19, 150 Others Sent Home For Self-Quarantine
On Monday morning, a Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) AG spokesman confirmed that one employee has tested positive for Covid-19, and over 100 others are in self-quarantine, reported Reuters.
The disturbing report of a potential breakout of the deadly virus at a BMW research facility in Munich, Germany, comes as the country has already confirmed 150 cases on Monday, up from 129 on Sunday.
Many of the confirmed cases are located in the western region of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populated state.
BMW said at least 150 employees at its Group Research and Innovation Center FIZ were in contact with the infected employee and have been sent home for two weeks of self-quarantine.
News of virus spread in the country on Monday sent safe-haven German bond yields to a six-month low as increased bets the European Central Bank (ECB) would cut rates as soon as its March meeting.
It remains to be seen if BMW will close its research and innovation center or production facilities in the country as the virus outbreak becomes widespread.
Moralising the way diseases and viruses are transferred is a very human, and particularly nasty trait.
“We don’t need this kind of riff-raff on our shores,” screamed The New York Times in 1892 in response to Russian Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island by boat. (The occupants hosted lice which, in turn, led to typhus.)
Italian immigrants in the United States would be also accused as being the bearers and spreaders of polio in 1916. Given that many, as a study by Alan Kraut from 2010 documents, lived in “tightly concentrated neighbourhoods, and because immigrants were viewed by many as a marginal and potentially subversive influence upon society, the incidence of Italian polio made a dramatic impact upon the imagination of a public already shaken by the virulence of the epidemic and the youth of its victims.”
In more recent times, the jaundiced eye nervously looked to the origin of AIDs, seeing dark Africa, exotic primates, bestiality. Ebola, as sociologist Kevin J.A. Thomas notes, received much the same press. When it infected some 28,000 across 10 countries some five years ago, “many people were surprised to learn that four of these cases were diagnosed on US soil.”
Follow the virus, find the maligned scapegoat. For COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus), a not negligible spray of suggestions claim that China, from eating habits, to politburo to laboratory, is responsible for cultivation and transmission. One purportedly scientific paper authored by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao claimed that the supposed origin of the virus – bats carrying CoV ZC45 –
“were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometres from the seafood market [in Wuhan].”
As the authors observed drily, “The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market.”
That paper has since been withdrawn, but the Wuhan Institute of Virology looms large in the conspiratorial consciousness. Why, for instance, did it have the highest security level – biosafety level 4? What were its researchers doing studying coronaviruses from bats?
“Speculations,” claims Jon Cohen in Science, “have included the possibility that the virus was bioengineered in the lab or that a lab worker was infected while handling a bat and then transmitted the disease to others outside the lab.”
Such accounts of attribution have paved the way of fanciful presumptions. As a group of 27 public health scientists wrote in rebuke in The Lancet,
“The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation about its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The point to keep reiterating, urged the authors, is that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife as have so many other emerging pathogens.”
In the case of coronavirus, the xenophobes have come out barracking, and bigotry has taken root. At the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, staff have faced irate patients beside themselves at being treated by those of a certain race. (While not always reported, the imputation about Chinese appearance is never far away.) The Australasian College of Emergency Medicine has also issued warnings of a spike in racist abuse in emergency departments across the country.
“One of our staff let us know that she had a family refuse to let her provide care for their child on the basis of her race, and what they declared was their concern that she was a risk of spreading coronavirus to them and their child.”
To date, the state of Victoria has seen seven of Australia’s 23 confirmed cases of COVID-19. None of these have been transmitted locally within Australia.
Such instances have not been confined to hospital wards or those in need of treatment. Earlier this month, a woman wearing a face mask was allegedly assaulted in the New York City subway at the Grand Street station in Chinatown. An eyewitness reportedly claimed to hear the words “diseased b—-” uttered.
In the detritus of the social media sphere, campaigns combating “coronaracism” have also found legs.
#JuNeSuisPasUnVirus made its debut on French twitter feeds in January 2020, and was duly replicated on other platforms such as Instagram. Australia’s own modest contribution to this came from Avani Dias, a journalist pushing the hashtag #DontDumpTheDumplings on February 13. This was, at least in part, intended as a remedy for dramatic declines in the patronage of Chinese restaurants in Sydney’s Chinatown. As Victor Tan, manager of the New Chilli House, told the radio program Hack, “We may not be killed by the virus but instead killed by the business environment.”
An even more concrete suggestion is to circulate material – visual and textual – that focuses on efforts at combating COVID-19. Leave aside the ghoulish images of alien bats and desperate masked Asian faces; focus, instead, on what Amanda Darrach of the Columbia Journalism Reviewcalls“the logistics of providing care – an aspect of the story that involves Chinese people as medical professionals and activists”.
The great COVID-19 legacy will leave far fewer deaths than common influenza when the panic has dissipated. But fingers of stern accusation will continue being pointed, perceptions muddled by race and behaviour will continue to thrive, and losses, be it in terms of personal liberty or finance, will be tremendous.
Back in October 2018, Rep. Kevin McCarthy tweeted the following:
I think accusations of “buying” elections tend to range from silly to demagogic, but it seems fairly obvious why McCarthy picked these three guys: They were 3 of the top 5 Democratic donors that cycle, and the most well-known (or notorious in Republican circles). Various critics, however, accused McCarthy of antisemitism for picking on three Jews. Steyer himself called the tweet a “straight up antisemitic move.” Two problems: (1) Steyer, though he has a Jewish father, identifies as a Christian, and I doubt 1 in 100 people seeing that tweet knew he was of partial Jewish descent; and (2) Almost all of the Democrats’ top donors are Jews, so if you say that criticizing donors who are Jewish is antisemitic, than you can’t criticize the top Democratic donors. Nevertheless, even now, over two years later, I see this tweet cited as “obviously” antisemitic.
Meanwhile, consider this flyer I spotted on Twitter:
Near as I can tell, none of the critics of McCarthy’s tweet have expressed the slightest outrage at the Warren flyer. In fact, I challenged a couple of longstanding McCarthy critics on Twitter to explain why the McCarthy tweet was antisemitic, but the Warren flyer is not. I was met with silence, including from a couple of folks I interact with frequently. (By the way, my Twitter handle is @ProfDBernstein.)
This strikes me as an obvious double-standard, so I started thinking about the source of it. My tentative conclusion is that people, especially liberals in the media and in Jewish organizational circles, believe there is a large reservoir of antisemitism among conservatives that doesn’t exist on the left. So if a Republican, for example, seems to associate Jews with money and buying elections, that’s likely an appeal to latent or blatant antisemitism. But if someone like Warren seems to do something similar, that’s not antisemitic because, after all, who would she be appealing to?
The problem is that this is based on a false premise. Antisemitism certainly exists within Republican and conservative circles (especially on the far right) but it also exists in Democratic and liberal circles. Indeed, the most antisemitic demographic groups in the U.S.–Latinos (especially the foreign-born), African Americans, and Muslims, all vote strongly Democrat. So there is no a priori reason to interpret a Democrat’s ads or slogans charitably, but not a Republican’s.
Please note: I don’t believe that either McCarthy’s tweet nor Warren’s flyer had antisemitic intent, and indeed I doubt that in either case the Jewishness of the subjects entered into the relevant actors’ minds at all.
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Just as we saw happen with auto sales in China, Macau’s gaming revenue collapsed in February as a result of China grinding to a halt while the entire country remains mostly in lockdown as a result of the coronavirus spread.
Macau businesses closed for 15 days to help control the spread of the virus, but it cost them. Gross gaming revenue for February was just 3.1 billion patacas ($386.5 million), a 87.8% fall from 2019. Analysts were predicting the pain ahead of time, estimating for a median of a 90% drop, according to Bloomberg.
Macau, the world’s largest gambling hub, had its government suspend casino operations from February 5th to about February 19th. The epicenter was already dealing with falling revenue numbers from 2019 – and this closure just adds insult to injury. It was the longest closure on record, second only to a 33 hour shutdown that occurred as a result of a typhoon in 2018.
When business resumed around February 20th, foot traffic at casinos was still weak. China continued to halt visas to Macau and transportation remained restricted.
Analysts continue to see the near-term outlook as “murky”. JP Morgan estimates a 24% decrease in gross gaming revenue for the year, based on a 70% drop in March and a 35% decline in the second quarter.
The same analysts said in a March 1 note: “We do not think COVID-19 will curb gamblers’ enthusiasm in a sustainable way, so its impact on the industry’s sustainable earnings power should be limited.”
It continued: “Looking at the glass half-full, we feel it could have been worse given the extensive level of disruption suffered.”
Yeah, good thinking. After all, revenues could have been down 100%.
Back in October 2018, Rep. Kevin McCarthy tweeted the following:
I think accusations of “buying” elections tend to range from silly to demagogic, but it seems fairly obvious why McCarthy picked these three guys: They were 3 of the top 5 Democratic donors that cycle, and the most well-known (or notorious in Republican circles). Various critics, however, accused McCarthy of antisemitism for picking on three Jews. Steyer himself called the tweet a “straight up antisemitic move.” Two problems: (1) Steyer, though he has a Jewish father, identifies as a Christian, and I doubt 1 in 100 people seeing that tweet knew he was of partial Jewish descent; and (2) Almost all of the Democrats’ top donors are Jews, so if you say that criticizing donors who are Jewish is antisemitic, than you can’t criticize the top Democratic donors. Nevertheless, even now, over two years later, I see this tweet cited as “obviously” antisemitic.
Meanwhile, consider this flyer I spotted on Twitter:
Near as I can tell, none of the critics of McCarthy’s tweet have expressed the slightest outrage at the Warren flyer. In fact, I challenged a couple of longstanding McCarthy critics on Twitter to explain why the McCarthy tweet was antisemitic, but the Warren flyer is not. I was met with silence, including from a couple of folks I interact with frequently. (By the way, my Twitter handle is @ProfDBernstein.)
This strikes me as an obvious double-standard, so I started thinking about the source of it. My tentative conclusion is that people, especially liberals in the media and in Jewish organizational circles, believe there is a large reservoir of antisemitism among conservatives that doesn’t exist on the left. So if a Republican, for example, seems to associate Jews with money and buying elections, that’s likely an appeal to latent or blatant antisemitism. But if someone like Warren seems to do something similar, that’s not antisemitic because, after all, who would she be appealing to?
The problem is that this is based on a false premise. Antisemitism certainly exists within Republican and conservative circles (especially on the far right) but it also exists in Democratic and liberal circles. Indeed, the most antisemitic demographic groups in the U.S.–Latinos (especially the foreign-born), African Americans, and Muslims, all vote strongly Democrat. So there is no a priori reason to interpret a Democrat’s ads or slogans charitably, but not a Republican’s.
Please note: I don’t believe that either McCarthy’s tweet nor Warren’s flyer had antisemitic intent, and indeed I doubt that in either case the Jewishness of the subjects entered into the relevant actors’ minds at all.
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With last week’s collapse in the stock market, the internet has been set ablaze with discussion of a new crash looming on the horizon (even with today’s record-breaking point-gain in the Dow). The fact that such a chain reaction collapse was only kept at bay due to massive liquidity injections by the Federal Reserve’s overnight repo loans should not be ignored.
These injections which began in September 2019, have grown to over $100 billion per night… all that to support the largest financial bubble in human history with global derivatives estimated at $1.2 quadrillion (20 times the global GDP!).
Sadly economic illiteracy is so pervasive among today’s modern economists that the real reasons for this crisis have been entirely misdiagnosed with financial experts from CNN, to Forbes blaming the volatility on the spread of the Corona virus!
NOT THE CORONA VIRUS: THE REAL CAUSE OF THE ONCOMING FINANCIAL COLLAPSE.
As refreshing as it is to hear candid criticisms of the system’s failure and even support for the restoration of Glass-Steagall bank separation from presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard or even the lame Elisabeth Warren… we find that in each case, those candidates are on record supporting policies cooked up by the very same oligarchs they appear to despise in the form of the Green New Deal.
In spite of what many of its progressive proponents would wish, such a global green reform would not only impose Malthusian depopulation upon nation states globally were it accepted, but would establish a the supranational authority of a technocratic managerial elite as enforcers of a “de-carbonization agenda”.
Due to the rampant lack of comprehension of how this crisis was created such that such idiotic proposals as “green new deals” are now seriously being suggested as remedies to our current ills, a bit of history is in order.
SOME NECESSARY BACKGROUND
“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first Inaugural Address 1933
Knowing that the “money changers” had only been able to create the great bubbles of the 1920s via their access to the deposits of the commercial banks, Franklin Roosevelt made the core of his battle against the abuses of Wall Street centre around a 1933 legislation entitled “Glass-Steagall”, named after the two federally elected officials who led the reform with FDR.
This was a bill which forced the absolute separation of productive from speculative banking, guaranteeing via the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) only those commercial banking assets associated with the productive economy, but forcing any speculative losses arising from investment banking to be suffered by the gambler. The striking success of this law inspired other countries around the world to establish similar bank separation.
Alongside principles of capital budgeting, public credit, parity pricing and a commitment to scientific and technological development, a dynamic had been created that would express the greatest hope for the world, and the greatest fear for the financial empire occupying the City of London and Wall Street.
The death of John F. Kennedy ushered in a new age of pessimism and cultural irrationalism from which our society has never recovered. The destruction of a long term vision as exemplified by the space program, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the New Deal projects had resulted in a tendency within the population to increasingly look upon present pleasures as the only reality, and future goods as the mystical expression of the sum of present pleasures.
In this new philosophical setting, so alien in previous epochs, money was permitted to act as a power unto itself for short term gains instead of serving the investments into the real productive wealth of society. With this new paradigm shift into the “now”, a new economic model was adopted to replace the industrial economic model which had proven itself in the years preceding and following World War II.
The name for this system was “post-industrial monetarism”. This would be a system ushered in by Richard Nixon’s announcement of the destruction of the fixed-exchange rate Bretton Woods system and its replacement by the “floating rate” system of post 1971 fame.
During that same fateful year of 1971, another ominous event took place: the formation of the Rothschild Inter-Alpha Group of banks under the umbrella of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which today controls upwards of 70% of the global financial system.
The stated intention of this Group would be found in the 1983 speech by Lord Jacob Rothschild:
“two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate.”
This policy demanded the destruction of the sovereign nation-state system and the imposition of a new feudal structure of world governance through the age-old scheme of controlling the money system on the one side, and playing on the vices of credulous fools who, by allowing their nations to be ruled by the belief that hedonistic market forces govern the world, would seal their own children’s doom.
All the while, geopolitical structures foreign to the United States constitutional traditions were imposed by nests of Oxford-trained Rhodes Scholars and Fabians who converted America into a global “dumb giant” enforcing a neo colonial program under a “Anglo-US Special Relationship”. The Dulles brothers, McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger, and Bush all represent names that advanced this British directed plan throughout the 20th century.
LONDON’S ‘BIG BANG’
The great “liberalization” of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the “Savings and Loan” debacle and also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths.
Volcker himself described this process as the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.
In 1986, the City of London announced the beginning of a new era of economic irrationalism with Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” deregulation. This wave of liberalization took the world by storm as it swept aside the separation of commercial, deposit and investment banking which had been the post-world war cornerstone in ensuring that the will of private finance would never again hold more sway than the power of sovereign nation-states.
After decades of chipping away at the structure of regulation that FDR’s bold intervention into history had built, the “Big Bang” set a precedent for similar financial de-regulation into the “Universal Banking” model in other parts of the western world.
THE DERIVATIVE TIME BOMB IS SET
In September 1987, the 20-year foray into speculation resulted in a 23% collapse of the Dow Jones on October 19, 1987. Within hours of this crash, international emergency meetings had been convened with former JP Morgan tool Alan Greenspan introducing a “solution” which would have the future echoes of hyperinflation and fascism written all over it.
“Creative financial instruments” was the Orwellian name given to the new financial asset popularized by Greenspan, but otherwise known as “derivatives”.
New supercomputing technologies were increasingly used in this new venture, not as the support for higher nation building practices, and space exploration programs as their NASA origins intended, but would rather become perverted to accommodate the creation of new complex formulas which could associate values to price differentials on securities and insured debts that could then be “hedged” on those very spot and futures markets made possible via the destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
So while an exponentially self-generating monster was created that could end nowhere but in a meltdown, “market confidence” rallied back in force with the new flux of easy money. The physical potential to sustain human life continued to plummet.
NAFTA, THE EURO AND THE END OF HISTORY
It is no coincidence that within this period, another deadly treaty was passed called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With this Agreement made law, protective programs that had kept North American factories in the U.S and Canada were struck down, allowing for the export of the lifeblood of highly skilled industrial workforce to Mexico where skills were low, technologies lower, and salaries lower still.
With a stripping of its productive assets, North America became increasingly reliant on exporting cheap resources and services for its means of existence.
Again, the physically productive powers of society would collapse, yet monetary profits in the ephemeral “now” would skyrocket. This was replicated in Europe with the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 establishing the Euro by 1994 while the “liberalization” process of Perestroika replicated this agenda in the former Soviet Union. While some personalities gave this agenda the name “End of History” and others “the New World Order”, the effect was the same.
Universal Banking, NAFTA, Euro integration and the creation of the derivative economy in a space of just several years would induce a cartelization of finance through newly legalized mergers and acquisitions at a rate never before seen. The multitude of financial institutions that had existed in the early 1980s were absorbed into each other at great speed through the 1990s in true “survival of the fittest” fashion. No matter what level of regulation were attempted under this new structure, the degree of conflict of interest, and private political power was uncontrollable, as evidenced in the United States, by the shutdown of any attempt by Securities and Exchange Commission head Brooksley Born to fight the derivative cancer at its early stages.
By 1999 a politically castrated Bill Clinton found himself signing into law a treaty authored by then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which would be the final nail in the coffin for the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking in the United States.
The new age of unregulated trading and creation of over-the-counter derivatives caused these strange financial instruments to grow from $60 trillion in 2000 to $600 trillion by 2008.
THE 2000-2008 FRENZY
With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges. Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs obscene.
The obscenity swelled as the values of the houses skyrocketed far beyond the real values to the tune of one hundred thousand dollar homes selling for 5-6 times that price within the span of several years.
As long as no one assumed this growth was ab-normal, and the unpayable nature of the capital underlying the leveraged assets locked up in the now infamous “sub-primes” and other illegitimate debt obligations was ignored, then profits were supposed to just continue infinitely. Anyone who questioned this logic was considered a heretic by the latter-day priesthood.
The stunning “success” of securitizing housing debts immediately induced a wave of sovereign wealth funds to come into prominence applying the same model that had been used in the case of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to the debts of entire nations.
The securitizing of bundled packages of sovereign debts that could then be infinitely leveraged on the de-regulated world markets would no longer be considered an act of national treason, but the key to easy money.
CONCLUSION
This is the system which died in 2008. Contrary to popular belief, nothing was actually resolved. For all the talk of an “FDR revival” under Obama, speculation wasn’t actually regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act or the Volker Rule of 2010. No productive credit was created to grow the real economy under a national mission as was the case in 1933-1938.
Banks were not broken up while derivatives GREW by 40% with the new bubble concentrated in the corporate/household debt sector now collapsing. During this time, nation states continued to be stripped, as austerity was rammed down the throats of nations.
It should be no surprise that in the midst of this despair, a creative alliance was consolidated in defense of the interests of sovereign nation states and humanity at large led by the leadership of Russia and China.
This leadership took the form of the China-led Belt and Road Initiative which has grown to embrace over 130 countries today and looking more and more like an Asian-led version of the New Deal of the 1930s.
Indeed, China’s capacity to unleash long term credit for thousands of international long term infrastructure projects was made possible by the fact that it was the only country on the globe which had not given up the principles of bank separation which were destroyed in every other nation.
Very few western figures stood up to this self-induced destruction over the decades, but one notable exception here worth mentioning is the figure of the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019) who not only resisted this process for over four decades, but fought alongside the Schiller Institute to promote New Silk Road as early as 1996.
With the 2016 Brexit and election of President Trump, a new wave of nationalist spirit has become a fire which the technocrats have lost their capacity to snuff out.
Increasingly, the idea that nation-states have a power over the private banking system has become revived and discussion for reforming the now dead Trans-Atlantic system is increasingly shaped not by the calls for a “New World Order” as Sir Kissinger would have liked, but rather for a New Silk Road and a true New Deal.
The Eurasian nations are already firmly committed to this new system, and if the west is to qualify morally to take part in this new epoch, then the first step will be a return to a Glass-Steagall.
“It’s Sad” – First Chinatowns, Now LA’s Koreatown, ‘Asianphobia’ Crashes Food Sales Amid Coronavirus Fears
Pandemic fears grip the world as cases and deaths surge ex-China. Last month, we reported that Chinatowns around the globe were struck with a demand shock as consumers ditched Chinese restaurants for fear they could catch Covid-19. Eater LA says Los Angeles’ Koreatown has also seen plunging food sales as ‘Asianphobia’ rises with increasing virus cases in the US.
General Tso’s chicken has left a sour taste among consumers’ mouths as eating habits rapidly shift because of virus fear. From Australia to New York City to Toronto to England to San Francisco, Chinatowns around the world have had their food sales halved in the last month. Some restaurants warned if low traffic continues into the next quarter, their operations would have to be shuttered.
It’s not just Sinophobia that has consumers absolutely terrified that they could contract the virus if they are near a Chinese person, it’s now anyone who looks Asian, otherwise known as ‘Asianphobia.’
Eater LA notes that on Friday a KBS America’s news story on Tuesday detailed how a Korean Airlines flight attendant with symptoms of the virus recently visited LA’s Koreatown turned out to be entirely false. Though, in the wake of the story, food sales of restaurants in the Central LA neighborhood centered near Eighth Street and Irolo Street, west of MacArthur Park, plunged.
LA County Public Health Department stated in a presser on Thursday that no information suggests the flight attendant visited Koreatown.
Food sales at Han Bat Shul Lung Tang were halved last week because of the rumor. Hangari Kalguksu, a popular restaurant offering various noddle dishes, made a statement on Instagram that they hired a professional cleaning company to sanitize the restaurant, dismissing the virus rumor.
A trade group representing LA’s Koreatown restaurants said business conditions deteriorated last week on the rumor, contributed to a 50% decline in food sales.
“In the Korean American community here, it [the rumor] went like wildfire,” Alex Won told AP News on Friday as he chowed down on a bowl of beef brisket soup at Han Bat Shul Lung Tang. “It’s sad.”
Restaurants in LA’s Koreatown Reel Amid Coronavirus Rumor In a Koreatown restaurant known for its beef bone broth soup, the lunchtime crowd Friday was half its normal size. The reason was a virulent rumor about a customer with coronavirus. Han Bat Shul Lung Tang was one of fi… pic.twitter.com/yampUBGFb0
Won said he’s never seen Han Bat Shul Lung Tang “this empty, “adding that “there are always people here.”
AP News notes that their interactions with various shop owners in Koreatown said business died overnight because of the rumor.
“It’s a bad rumor, but people like bad rumors,” said Jay Choi, manager of Hanshin Pocha.
The streets of Koreatown last week and this weekend had people wearing masks, out of fear the virus is stealthily spreading on the West Coast.
State Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose, said Chinatowns had taken severe economic losses as a result of Sinophobia. Now it appears, Asianphobia has claimed its next victim: LA’s Koreatown.
If community spreading across the US erupts, could the virus lead a bust of Asian eateries?
When the Commander of NATO says he is a fan of flexible first strike at the same time that NATO is flexing its military muscle on Russia’s border, the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is real.
US Air Force Gen. Tod D Wolters told the Senate this week he “is a fan of flexible first strike” regarding NATO’s nuclear weapons, thereby exposing the fatal fallacy of the alliance’s embrace of American nuclear deterrence policy.
It was one of the most remarkable yet underreported exchanges in recent Senate history. Earlier this week, during the testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee of General Tod Wolters, the commander of US European Command and, concurrently, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) also the military head of all NATO armed forces, General Wolters engaged in a short yet informative exchange with Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican from the state of Nebraska.
Following some initial questions and answers focused on the alignment of NATO’s military strategy with the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the US, which codified what Wolters called “the malign influence on behalf of Russia” toward European security, Senator Fischer asked about the growing recognition on the part of NATO of the important role of US nuclear deterrence in keeping the peace.
“We all understand that our deterrent, the TRIAD, is the bedrock of the security of this country,” Fischer noted.
“Can you tell us about what you are hearing…from our NATO partners about this deterrent?”
Wolters responded by linking the deterrence provided to Europe by the US nuclear TRIAD with the peace enjoyed on the European continent over the past seven decades. Fischer asked if the US nuclear umbrella was “vital in the freedom of NATO members”; Wolters agreed.
Remarkably, Wolters linked the role of nuclear deterrence with the NATO missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere outside the European continent. NATO’s mission, he said, was to “proliferate deterrence to the max extent practical to achieve greater peace.”
Then came the piece de resistance of the hearing.
“What are your views, Sir,” Senator Fischer asked, “of adopting a so-called no-first-use policy. Do you believe that that would strengthen deterrence?”
General Wolters’ response was straight to the point.
“Senator, I’m a fan of flexible first use policy.”
Under any circumstance, the public embrace of a “flexible first strike” policy regarding nuclear weapons employment by the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe should generate widespread attention. When seen in the context of the recent deployment by the US of a low-yield nuclear warhead on submarine-launched ballistic missiles carried onboard a Trident submarine, however, Wolters’ statement is downright explosive. Add to the mix the fact the US recently carried out a wargame where the US Secretary of Defense practiced the procedures for launching this very same “low yield” weapon against a Russian target during simulated combat between Russia and NATO in Europe, and the reaction should be off the charts. And yet there has been deafening silence from both the European and US press on this topic.
There is, however, one party that paid attention to what General Wolters had to say–Russia. In a statement to the press on February 25–the same date as General Wolters’ testimony, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister stated that “We note with concern that Washington’s new doctrinal guidelines considerably lower the threshold of nuclear weapons use.” Lavrov added that this doctrine had to be viewed in the light “of the persistent deployment of US nuclear weapons on the territory of some NATO allies and the continued practice of the so-called joint nuclear missions.”
Rather than embracing a policy of “flexible first strike”, Lavrov suggested that the US work with Russia to re-confirm “the Gorbachev-Reagan formula, which says that there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed.” This proposal was made 18 months ago, Lavrov noted, and yet the US has failed to respond.
Complicating matters further are the ‘Defender 2020’ NATO military exercises underway in Europe, involving tens of thousands of US troops in one of the largest training operations since the end of the Cold War. The fact that these exercises are taking place at a time when the issue of US nuclear weapons and NATO’s doctrine regarding their employment against Russia is being actively tracked by senior Russian authorities only highlights the danger posed.
On February 6, General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian Chief of Staff, met with General Wolters to discuss ‘Defender 2020’ and concurrent Russian military exercises to be held nearby to deconflict their respective operations and avoid any unforeseen incidents. This meeting, however, was held prior to the reports about a US/NATO nuclear wargame targeting Russian forces going public, and prior to General Wolters’ statement about “flexible first use” of NATO nuclear weapons.
In light of these events, General Gerasimov met with French General Fançois Lecointre, the Chief of the Defense Staff, to express Russia’s concerns over NATO’s military moves near the Russian border, especially the Defender 2020 exercise which was, General Gerasimov noted, “held on the basis of anti-Russian scenarios and envisage training for offensive operations.”
General Gerasimov’s concerns cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather must be considered in the overall historical context of NATO-Russian relations. Back in 1983, the then-Soviet Union was extremely concerned about a series of realistic NATO exercises, known as ‘Able Archer ‘83,’ which in many ways mimicked the modern-day Defender 2020 in both scope and scale. Like Defender 2020, Able Archer ‘83 saw the deployment of tens of thousands of US forces into Europe, where they assumed an offensive posture, before transitioning into a command post exercise involving the employment of NATO nuclear weapons against a Soviet target.
So concerned was Moscow about these exercises, and the possibility that NATO might use them as a cover for an attack against Soviet forces in East Germany, that the Soviet nuclear forces were placed on high alert. Historians have since observed that the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR was at that time the highest it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
US and NATO officials would do well to recall the danger to European and world security posed by the “Able Archer ‘83” exercise and the potential for Soviet miscalculations when assessing the concerns expressed by General Gerasimov today. The unprecedented concentration of offensive NATO military power on Russia’s border, coupled with the cavalier public embrace by General Wolters of a “flexible first strike” nuclear posture by NATO, has more than replicated the threat model presented by Able Archer ’83. In this context, it would not be a stretch to conclude that the threat of nuclear war between the US and Russia is the highest it has been since Able Archer ’83.
Nikolai Romanov. Muammar Ghaddafi. John Rockefeller…
What do these three men have in common? As it turns out, they were all three recently included in a list of “Five Richest Men of the 20th Century” following a quick study by LearnBonds.com.
The total list is as follows: 5) Ghaddafi, 4) Mir Osman Ali Khan, 3) Romanov, 2) John D Rockefeller, 1) Andrew Carnegie.
Their aggregate net worth, adjusted for inflation, would amount to $1.62 trillion in 2019 dollars. In 1913, that would have worked out to a fortune of $63 billion – an unimaginable sum at the time. To arrive at these numbers, LearnBonds used the CPI index.
The valuation was arrived at by incorporating the consumer price index change over the years as provided by the Usinflationcalculator.com. To calculate 1913 wealth in US dollars the formula 2020 Price x (1913 CPI / 2020 CPI) was used.
Historical records show that Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-American industrialist, was the richest man in the world back in 1913. But if his wealth were adjusted into today’s dollars, he would still occupy the top spot with a net worth of $419.8 billion. His vast fortune was credited to his legendary decision to sell Carnegie Steel Company to JP Morgan for $480 million in 1901. From the sale, Carnegie also received $230 million in gold bonds. Carnegie left most of his estate to charity after his death in 1919.
Since wealth inequality is such a big theme in this year’s presidential election (everybody who watched Wednesday’s debate probably remembers the drubbing Bloomberg took just for being a humble self-made billionaire), LearnBonds also thought it would be informative to compare the wealth of America’s ‘Robber Barons’ to their contemporary counterparts – the tech barons who dominate Silicon Valley and the American economy.
Though there’s little doubt that the wealth gap has grown since the financial crisis thanks, in large part, to the Fed’s monetary stimulus which heavily inflated asset prices from their post-crisis lows.
But for everybody who complains about Jeff Bezos, just remember: wealth concentration still hasn’t reached ‘Gilded Age’ levels.
I can’t remember a time when we have seen such widespread “panic buying” all over the nation. Today I spoke with someone that just visited the closest Wal-Mart in this area, and I was told that there are empty shelves all over the store. There are very few canned goods left, some of the most essential medications have been cleaned out, and there was nothing left in the long-term storable food section at all.
Of course similar things are being reported at major retail stores all across the United States. All of a sudden, fear of COVID-19 has motivated thousands upon thousands of Americans to start prepping like crazy. But most of the population is still not taking this crisis seriously enough.
As the number of confirmed cases all over the world continues to rise at an exponential rate, what are the stores going to look like when most of the country finally realizes that they should be prepping for an extended pandemic?
Over the past several days, this coronavirus outbreak has escalated significantly.
From Saturday to Sunday, the number of confirmed cases in Italy jumped by 50 percent…
Italy reported a 50% increase in coronavirus cases Sunday, as the US further restricted travel and the famed La Scala opera house closed.
Italy’s Civil Protection Authority reported the country now has 1,694 confirmed coronavirus cases, up from 1,128 confirmed cases on Saturday. Thirty-four people have died.
And in Germany, the number of confirmed cases actually doubled in just 24 hours.
A “boom” of confirmed cases of the coronavirus that has now killed more than 3,000 people around the world — including two in the U.S. — could already be racing across America despite ramped-up efforts to contain the outbreak, experts say.
The spread of the virus by “community transmissions” is an indication that we could indeed be looking at the tip of the iceberg,” Ogbonnaya Omenka, an assistant professor and public health specialist at Butler University’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, told USA TODAY on Sunday.
Overall, the number of confirmed cases outside of China has more than tripled over the past week. If we continue to see that sort of a growth rate, there will be more than a million confirmed cases outside of China just five weeks from now.
I don’t think that it will happen that quickly, and let us pray that we don’t hit that number at all, but right now this outbreak is starting to spiral out of control.
As fear of this virus rises, grocery stores from coast to coast are stocking up on essential supplies in an effort “to prevent shortages”…
Now grocers are working to prevent shortages and preparing for a spike in demand for disinfectants and long-lasting items such as pasta and canned food. Some are ramping up orders from suppliers.
“This is like a natural disaster, but it’s an illness,” said Doug Baker, vice president of industry relations at FMI, a trade group for food retailers.
In the short-term, hopefully things won’t be too bad.
“Literally, empty shelves in Target and Walmart as early as April,” predicts David Iwinski, a local China business consultant who once ran a factory in China.
Most retail stores are likely to have shortages because the coronavirus in China is hampering the manufacture of products shipped to America.
If there are things that you need to go buy, you need to do it now, because thousands upon thousands of Americans are already storming the stores.
At a Costco Wholesale market in Los Angeles Saturday morning, a swarm of shoppers loaded up carts with essential items to prepare for a possible period of quarantine.
According to the chain, water, paper towels and Clorox disinfecting wipes were the most in-demand products.
On social media, residents further north shared shocking photos and videos from Costco centers in San Francisco.
Shelves were depleted of tinned food, while some shoppers climbed up onto shelving in order to reach remaining supplies of rice.
Of course the exact same thing is happening in other states as well.
In Washington, one local resident claimed that “thousands of people” have been descending on the local Costco centers…
I live in the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Washington State. My advice for those elsewhere – go to Costco now. Thousands of people at local stores yesterday – not where you want to be if there is a virus spreading. Glad I went a week ago.
And one video that has been very widely shared shows hundreds of people lined up at a Costco in Brooklyn before it even opened in the morning.
The surgeon general has a message for people who want to run out and stockpile masks to combat the coronavirus – don’t.
“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Personally, I don’t understand his logic. If the masks are not effective, then why do healthcare providers need them?
Yes, the masks have limited effectiveness against a virus that is so easy to catch. But at least they are better than nothing.
The time of “the perfect storm” is here, and this virus has the potential to greatly accelerate our problems.
Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the coronavirus that has killed at least 2,859 people and infected more than 83,700 globally may be the “once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”
“I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume it will be until we know otherwise,” Gates wrote in an article published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Personally, I am still hoping that this outbreak will start to subside once warmer weather arrives.
But so far nothing is slowing this virus down. As I mentioned above, the total number of cases outside of China has more than tripled over the last seven days, and that is a huge red flag.
If you need to get to the store, do it now. Because at the rate that people are raiding the stores, there could soon be shortages of some of the most important supplies.
