May 062021
 


Edgar Degas Two laundresses 1876

Senior NHS Board Member: Stop The Genocide Or Our Children Are Next (UKC)
Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin (AJT)
Did People Or Nature Open Pandora’s Box At Wuhan? (Wade)
mRNA Vaccines Induce Broad CD4+ T Cell Responses
What A Convenient LIE (Denninger)
Crimes of Covid Vaccine Maker Pfizer Documented (M&A)
Stay-at-Home Lockdowns Made No Difference to Covid Deaths in US States (LDS)
US Backs Waiving Patent Protections For Covid Vaccines (CNBC)
Public Officials Turned Covid Celebrities Don’t Want Restrictions To End (RT)
This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship” (Whitney Webb)
CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos (CP)
US, NATO Launch Massive Military Exercise Amid Complaints From Russia (JTN)

 

 

 

 

“If you refuse to co-operate in rolling this out, then we’ll remove you.”

Senior NHS Board Member: Stop The Genocide Or Our Children Are Next (UKC)

The transcript below is of a call made to Brian Gerrish on 18 April 2021. The voice of the caller has been changed to protect her identity. The senior NHS Board member warns that the government is now controlling the NHS, and it is the government that is actually dictating what the NHS should do during Covid emergency measures. She states that the result of the government’s enforced Covid and vaccination policies can be described as genocide. [..] Brian Gerrish: I’ve been contacted by an NHS professional who would like to speak to me about things happening in the NHS. So, without any ado, let’s go over to our caller today. Thank you very much for calling me. It’s really been wonderful that you’ve had the confidence to give us a call at the UK Column. I’m going to ask the key question: why have you called me today?

Whistleblower: [..] You know, I just really wanted to share my personal story on what’s happened since last March. [..] I guess when all the Coronavirus started, and when it came into the UK — mainframing kind of March last year — obviously the conversations really were predominantly about measures to stop infection, forecasting, you know, “this is what we’re anticipating will happen”, you know, “how do we manage the services”. Kind of all that was going on, and then as we went through the summer, there started to be a little bit of talk about the vaccine development and potential treatments and things like that. And then the treatments completely went, and the vaccine discussions ramped up, and in November it really started to be predominantly what we talked about.

And, I mean, you can’t call it a vaccine, because it doesn’t meet the definition, so I’m going to refer to it as an injection, but I’m just making sure that everyone’s on the same page with me. So, it became kind of clear to myself, and a few other colleagues that I know on other NHS Boards, in November that we were going to be asked to completely roll this out — and also that there really were some long-term safety issues, and stuff that we just didn’t know. And so it really took us by surprise, the scope and speed at which they were moving. And at the time, we had a lot of discussions, as a Board, as to our concerns around this — and remember that when the NHS is in emergency measures, which it is and has been, then the Government is able to tightly control what the NHS does, and is able to dictate a lot more what the NHS does than it would be able to if it wasn’t in emergency measures.

So, our Chief Executive had discussions about our concerns, and I can say other Boards had the same discussions, and in a nutshell, what we were told in December was, “If you refuse to co-operate in rolling this out, then we’ll remove you.” And it wasn’t said explicitly, and it wasn’t put in e-mails, but it was certainly very indicated that that was the case.

Read more …

American Journal of Therapeutics

Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin (AJT)

Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has antiviral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2.9–17 Insights into the mechanisms of action by which ivermectin both interferes with the entrance and replication of SARS-CoV-2 within human cells are mounting. Caly et al18 first reported that ivermectin significantly inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in a cell culture model, observing the near absence of all viral material 48 hours after exposure to ivermectin. However, some questioned whether this observation is generalizable clinically given the inability to achieve similar tissue concentrations used in their experimental model using standard or even massive doses of ivermectin.19,20

It should be noted that the concentrations required for an effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent, such as ivermectin. Furthermore, prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short-term cell model exposure. Furthermore, multiple coexisting or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies.21–26 In 4 of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in 4 of these studies.27

This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either the ACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively, either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing hemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19.21,22,26–28 Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and nonstructural proteins required by the virus to replicate.26,29 Finally, ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication.30

Read more …

Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists

“The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months..”

But after 15 months, we still have no idea about the origin of Sars 2.

Did People Or Nature Open Pandora’s Box At Wuhan? (Wade)

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory. This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment.

The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab. Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

Read more …

Question is: what else do they do?

mRNA Vaccines Induce Broad CD4+ T Cell Responses (JCI)

Recent studies have shown T cell cross-recognition of SARS-CoV-2 and common cold coronavirus spike proteins. However, the effect of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines on T cell responses to common cold coronaviruses remain unknown. In this study, we analyzed CD4+ T cell responses to spike peptides from SARS-CoV-2 and 3 common cold coronaviruses (HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63, and HCoV-OC43) before and after study participants received Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) or Moderna (mRNA-1273) mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine recipients made broad T cell responses to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and we identified 23 distinct targeted peptides in 9 participants including one peptide that was targeted by 6 individuals.


Only 4 out of these 23 targeted peptides would potentially be affected by mutations in the UK (B.1.1.7) and South African (B.1.351) variants and CD4+ T cells from vaccine recipients recognized the 2 variant spike proteins as effectively as the spike protein from the ancestral virus. Interestingly, we saw a 3-fold increase in the CD4+ T cell responses to HCoV-NL63 spike peptides post-vaccination. Our results suggest that T cell responses elicited or enhanced by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines may be able to control SARS-CoV-2 variants and lead to cross-protection from some endemic coronaviruses.

Read more …

“Let me give you a piece of advice: Shoving a gun in anyone’s face, which is what a mandate is, generates no confidence at all. It does, however, generate a whole bunch of other things, including revulsion, hatred or even justified retribution.”

What A Convenient LIE (Denninger)

Oh, look at this: Beyond safety, requiring mandatory vaccinations also allows us to set an example for those who are hesitant to get vaccinated. Leaders at all levels have championed the vaccine and are taking action to educate people who are reluctant to get vaccinated. By mandating vaccines, healthcare institutions will show the world that we trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, and inspire others to follow. Riiiight. You inspire women to consent to sex by putting a gun in their face and demanding they take off their clothes? Let me give you a piece of advice: Shoving a gun in anyone’s face, which is what a mandate is, generates no confidence at all. It does, however, generate a whole bunch of other things, including revulsion, hatred or even justified retribution.

In addition you’re not immune from lawsuit, nor is your institution. Pfizer is, but you are not. Sucks to be you if and when one of your staff members is badly hurt or killed by taking the shots. Maybe it hasn’t and won’t happen but that liability is open-ended and permanent for both you personally and your institution. Further that liability is civil so no, it doesn’t have to be proved the shot was the cause — just more-likely than not in the opinion of the jury. It’s not like you don’t have a very nice building and institution there that looks like some awfully-deep pockets to go raid if someone dies or perhaps worse, is permanently disabled from taking said shot, right? And it’s not like social media isn’t awash in people who have had that happen already and are all over GoFundMe and elsewhere begging for money as they’ve been hit with half-million dollar medical bills and aren’t done — right?

If that’s a result of an entirely voluntary decision then it’s of course on them no matter how foolish but if it’s a result of a mandate well, who gets to pay for that Marc and how do you think that will end for you and your hospital when, not if, it winds up in court? Because it will end up in court and you will be named as Defendant, both personally and corporately. Perhaps your threat to fire anyone who won’t submit is an empty one. We’ll see. Maybe your legal department has explained all of this to you and you’re waving your arms around making noise, publishing OpEds because you know damn well that you’re so far out on the legal ledge 300′ up that your greatest fear is that someone is going to come along with a chainsaw.

Perhaps the gun you claim to be shoving in people’s faces, in other words, isn’t actually loaded and you know damn well it’s empty. Perhaps the real reason you published the OpEd is that the other medical center across town is not mandating anything, you asked and were told to go to Hell and you’re scared that the best talent will quit and go work there, eviscerating the quality of your services. Is that really what this is about; another illegal, 15 USC Chapter 1 monopolist trick to go along with all the other ones damn near every medical center in the US have gotten away with for the last 30 years?

Read more …

November 18, 2020, from law firm Matthews and Associates.

Crimes of Covid Vaccine Maker Pfizer Documented (M&A)

Here’s a brief glimpse of Pfizer’s track record for safety and ethics. This is a short list, by no means inclusive of the company’s entire rap sheet.

Pfizer received the biggest fine in U.S. history as part of a $2.3 Billion plea deal with federal prosecutors for mis-promoting medicines (Bextra, Celebrex) and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Pfizer pleaded guilty to mis-branding the painkiller Bextra by promoting the drug for uses for which it was not approved.

In the 1990s, Pfizer was involved in defective heart valves that lead to the deaths of more than 100 people. Pfizer had deliberately misled regulators about the hazards. The company agreed to pay $10.75 Million to settle justice department charges for misleading regulators.

Pfizer paid more than $60 Million to settle a lawsuit over Rezulin, a diabetes medication that caused patients to die from acute liver failure.

In the UK, Pfizer has been fined nearly €90 Million for overcharging the NHS, the National Health Service. Pfizxer charged the taxpayer an additional €48 Million per year for what should have cost €2 million per year.

Pfizer agreed to pay $430 Million in 2004 to settle criminal charges that it had bribed doctors to prescribe its epilepsy drug Neurontin for indications for which it was not approved.

In 2011, a jury found Pfizer committed racketeering fraud in its marketing of the drug Neurontin. Pfizer agreed to pay $142.1 Million to settle the charges.

Pfizer disclosed that it had paid nearly nearly 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals some $20 Million for speaking on Pfizer’s behalf.

In 2012, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had reached a $45 Million settlement with Pfizer to resolve charges that its subsidiaries had bribed overseas doctors and other healthcare professionals to increase foreign sales.

Pfizer was sued in a U.S. federal court for using Nigerian children as human guinea pigs, without the childrens’ parents’ consent. Pfizer paid $75 Million to settle in Nigerian court for using an experimental antibiotic, Trovan, on the children. The company paid an additional undisclosed amount in the U.S. to settle charges here. Pfizer had violated international law, including the Nuremberg Convention established after WWII, due to Nazi experiments on unwilling prisoners.

Amid widespread criticism of gouging poor countries for drugs, Pfizer pledged to give $50 million for an AIDS drug to South Africa. Later, however, Pfizer failed to honor that promise.

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine is being rolled out with nothing but positive press from every mainstream media outlet in the country. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans surveyed have said they will not take a Covid vaccine. The plain fact is that many questions remain unanswered regarding this, or any other, Covid vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

Read more …

“We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation..”

Stay-at-Home Lockdowns Made No Difference to Covid Deaths in US States (LDS)

A new study from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago has analysed the impact of stay-at-home orders on infections and deaths in U.S. states and found they made no difference. The peer-reviewed study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, found stay-at-home orders (also known as shelter-in-place orders or SIPs) were not associated with lower infections or deaths; furthermore, they were actually associated with a slight increase in infections and deaths, although this was not statistically significant.

[..] The authors observe that if stay-at-home orders aren’t affecting mobility, it’s difficult to see how they will affect anything else: “If SIP [shelter-in-place] orders did not have large effects on behaviour, it is hard to imagine how they could have had large effects on COVID-19 cases and deaths.” They add: “The health benefits of SIP orders were likely limited because many people were already social distancing before the introduction of SIP orders.” They suggest that voluntary mobility reduction and social distancing made a difference to outcomes, though do not commit to saying how much. Noting that nationwide there was around a 50% decrease in mobility between February and April 2020, they state: “The nationwide reaction to COVID-19 almost surely decreased the spread of the disease.”

However, their results, they say, “have nothing to say about the health and societal benefits of staying at home and reducing physical contact with others. The model-based studies which claim stay-at-home lockdown orders saved thousands of lives are therefore in error, they argue. “The previously presented evidence on the effectiveness of SIP orders appears to be misleading, and there is currently no compelling evidence to suggest that SIP policies saved a large number of lives or significantly mitigated the spread of COVID-19. However, this does not mean that voluntary social distancing – SIP practice as distinct from policy – was ineffective.”

The study was written and submitted prior to the appearance in Nature this March of the study by R.F. Savaris and colleagues which in effect looked at “SIP practice as distinct from policy”. It found that actually staying at home made little to no difference either: “We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.”

Read more …

Long overdue. But far from done.

US Backs Waiving Patent Protections For Covid Vaccines (CNBC)

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines, as countries struggle to manufacture the life-saving doses. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai wrote in a statement. “As our vaccine supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to ramp up its efforts — working with the private sector and all possible partners — to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution. It will also work to increase the raw materials needed to produce those vaccines,” the statement added.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised the U.S. decision as a “monumental moment in the fight against Covid-19” that reflects the “moral leadership” of the White House in the fight to end the pandemic. Stocks of major pharmaceutical companies that have produced vaccines, including Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, dropped sharply after news of the potential waivers first broke. Pfizer ended its trading day flat, while Moderna lost 6.1%; Johnson & Johnson shed a modest 0.4%. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America expressed pointed opposition to the Biden administration’s support for waiving IP protections. The trade group’s members include vaccine makers such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

“In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety,” said Stephen J. Ubi, the group’s president and CEO. “This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. ”

Read more …

“..the Faucis and Ferrers of the world feasted well on buckets of media love for some 13+ months, and they’re not ready to go back to a diet of irrelevance.”

Public Officials Turned Covid Celebrities Don’t Want Restrictions To End (RT)

Narcissistic civil servants have turned into pseudo-celebrities thanks to the pandemic and they don’t want to go back to the shadows. Now the only way to stop their endless restrictions is by threatening their public standing. On April 21, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director, settled in before fawning SoCal reporters for the latest in her mind-numbing Möbius strip of press conferences. This grownup with a job she considers essential to her city’s survival proceeded to tell millions of restrictions-weary Angelenos about hungry bunny rabbits. In a failed effort to explain why fully vaccinated men and women who can no longer spread or suffer infection by the coronavirus should go on wearing masks for months to come, Ferrer wove a fable of a garden trying to fend off rabbits that want to eat carrots.

You can hear how proud Ferrer is of this few minutes of “Watership Downer.” She no doubt labored over her infectious fairy tale – this off-off Broadway brand of virus Vaudeville – for hours, confident she’d sway that handful of suckers still bothering to pay any attention. While news reports conveniently glossed over Ferrer’s furry voyage into drivel, I managed to find a recording of her hopping down the bunny trail. As she drones along, it’s clear she’s not educating the public. She’s performing. It’s juvenile, patronizing and ineffective. Still, you must wonder if Ferrer found it to be her finest hour. Ferrer feels comfortable enough to present a bad children’s book as public health data because she has soaked in the spa waters of media adoration and public attention for more than a year. All the while, panic over a serious, but manageable pandemic surged through the easily led, slow-to-question LA populous.

That same panic allowed this woman of some educational achievement to rise to fame from the dark and dusty halls of the public sector. In any normal era, she’s the kind of appointed official who would otherwise toil in anonymity. Fortunately for her, the “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV- 2)” made her a star, albeit a dim one. The slog that was 2020 became a time to glow for the likes of infectious disease personality Dr. Anthony Fauci and for Ferrer, too. And now it’s now well past the hour to turn out the lights on her and her kindred. But sadly, the Faucis and Ferrers of the world feasted well on buckets of media love for some 13+ months, and they’re not ready to go back to a diet of irrelevance.

Read more …

For the longest time, Moderna could not get mRNA approved for anything. Still not for its Covid vaccine either. But they have big plans.

This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship” (Whitney Webb)

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.” Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur.

Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.” The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants. ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID.

BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV. Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

Read more …

“..left the door open to future manipulation of humans.”

CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos (CP)

The Nobel prize in chemistry awarded last year to the biochemists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for the genetic modification technique called CRISPR cemented the popular idea that a new era of precision manipulation of hereditary material had arrived. The award came on the heels of the unauthorized use of the technique by the scientist He Jiankui in 2018 in China in an effort to produce individuals (twin girls in this case) resistant to HIV, and a flurry of studies in early 2020 showing that accuracy in altering DNA in a test tube or bacteria in a culture dish, did not hold up when applied to animal embryos. Attempts to modify single genes in human embryos (not intended to be brought to full-term) in fact led to “large-scale, unintended DNA deletions and rearrangements in the areas surrounding the targeted sequence,” aka “genetic chaos.”


Dr. He was imprisoned, fined, and fired from his academic position in China for his actions, although it is still not clear to what extent the higher-ups at his institute were aware of them. At a small meeting that I attended in Berkeley in early 2017 where He spoke, he unambiguously stated that “these things are thought of differently in China than in the U.S.” The U.S. scientific establishment uniformly condemned He’s experiments, but when questioned, most scientists, including Doudna herself, and bioethicists (a profession dedicated, with a few exceptions, to getting the public used to what the scientists and bioentrepreneurs have in store for it), left the door open to future manipulation of humans.

Read more …

The Pantagon touting its transparency. Onion material.

US, NATO Launch Massive Military Exercise Amid Complaints From Russia (JTN)

Following complaints from Russia that it was being cast as a mock NATO enemy, the United States and allies on Tuesday launched a long-planned military exercise in Europe involving more than 28,000 troops from 26 nations training across the continent. The exercise, Defender-Europe 21, commenced following opening ceremonies in Albania, and comes in the wake of Russian troop movements along the border with Ukraine. Amid speculation last month that Russia aimed to invade or intimidate Ukraine, Moscow charged that the current NATO exercise was designed with a Russian enemy in mind. The U.S. and its allies routinely conduct exercises “with a clear anti-Russian orientation,” Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said in an April videoconference with other military leaders.

Noting that Defender Europe 21 is is the largest NATO exercise in 30 years, Shoygo couched the training as a threat to Russia. According to the Pentagon, Defender Europe is meant to build readiness within the NATO alliance. “It’s defensive in nature, focused on deterring aggression, while preparing our forces to respond to crisis and conduct large-scale combat operations if necessary,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said this week. In a remark aimed at Moscow’s long silence on why 100,000 Russian troops had been sent to the Ukraine border, Kirby highlighted the openness surrounding Defender Europe.

“We actually come to the podium and tell you about it,” Kirby told reporters on Monday. “I told you how many troops. I told you how many nations. I talked about specifics in terms of what they’re going to be exercising … and we’re not getting that out of Moscow, and we haven’t. So that’s a big difference right there.” The Pentagon began moving troops and equipment to Europe for the exercise in March, and in April moved prepositioned military stocks from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The training will focus on defending the western Balkans and Black Sea regions, and also will rehearse defense operations elsewhere in Europe and Ukraine, according to the Pentagon. Events will include live fire training, medical exercises, and mock evacuations.

Read more …

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

 

 

Armenia Assange

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Apr 042018
 


Mayfair Building, Times Square NYC 1951

 

 

Dr. D is on a roll.

 

 

Dr. D: Since tariffs are in the news again, let’s run down the topic , first in micro, then in macro.

 

“Trump said this week he’ll slap 25% tariffs on $50 billion to $60 billion in Chinese exports to the U.S., including aerospace, information and communication technology, and machinery. The move is aimed at countering Chinese cyber and intellectual property theft of U.S. technology . It also tries to push back against China’s demands for technology transfers from U.S. companies in return for access to China’s market.

The Chinese government, in turn, said it would hit U.S. shipments to China with $3 billion in tariffs, affecting goods such as pork, aluminum pipes, steel and wine.

“A family of four will end up paying about $500 more to buy (clothing, shoes, fashion accessories and travel goods) every year” if those products are subject to 25% tariffs, the American Apparel and Footwear Association says…

Retaliatory tariffs from China, meanwhile, could especially hurt American farmers.  China is the world’s top soybean importer, with the U.S. providing close to 60% of the commodity. And the country is the second-largest purchaser of U.S. pork. Growing talk about a trade war has worried Iowa farmers. The state is the nation’s largest corn and pork producer and second-largest soybean grower.”

Historical background, when Clinton added China to the WTO, it opened the borders and U.S. markets to Chinese goods, but likewise, China promised to treat the exports of the U.S. fairly, which are driven by movies, patents, and intellectual property rights. In theory, that’s how the deal would be equitable. However for 20 years they have not been paying billions in patents or media royalties back to the U.S.. Stealing everything, patents, intellectual rights, ignoring international law, building a mile high tariff wall, and polluting their whole nation to boot, just like we did back in the 19th century when we were a wee country.

Guess what that shows? Tariffs work. It worked for us then and it works for China now. Go to a store and look for any item that isn’t made in China. That has devastated industry, and is arguably dumping, i.e. selling at a loss to ruin your competition. How? China isn’t a “capitalist” country, really. It’s an amalgam of communism and protectionism meant to rapidly modernize China in the footsteps of Stalin or Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and it works. As such, factories are built of debt money printed by the Central State then protected from bankruptcy with more printing and bailing out hand-picked winners by the state — just like we do.

Just like Abe buying up the entire Nikkei or the Swiss Bank buying a trillion in foreign stocks. So in a roundabout way, China is creating all these products at a loss, but doesn’t care about profit because people are employed and their industry rockets into the 21st century. Since profit is not a motive and bankruptcy is not a possibility, the strategy to modernize and compete with the U.S. is enhanced not only by moving China forward, but also by moving the U.S. backward into the last century. So the very concept of WTO, “Free Trade”, “Fair Trade” does not and cannot exist with a centrally-planned, centrally-protected, non-free market economy – theirs and ours. Only national strategy remains.

When that’s the case, you see Trump merely advocating for consequences to China breaking the original treaty, the original parity of hard goods for intellectual property. And why shouldn’t breaking a treaty have consequences? The problem of course is what those consequences mean.

Since from the Chinese perspective, they have reduced U.S. wealth, production, capacity for production, and even the U.S. military to 3rd world levels, and the U.S. no longer has the bargaining power to reverse what was supposed to be a free-market trade, but was executed by China as a mercantile/protectionist trade. And good on them, well played!

Here in the States, we hear people say –still!—“well if they give us cheap goods at a loss, who are we not to take them?” Regardless of the jobs lost since that giant sucking sound started. Or worse, “Since rebuilding industry will cost money, any move to help ourselves should be avoided because it will raise prices.” Yes people, we already missed the 21st century, let’s move back from the 20th century into an 19th century African colony because fighting it would cost something and be inconvenient. Worked for Argentina, right?

 

Trump said in his Asian tour:

“I don’t blame China – after all, who can blame a country for taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens… I give China great credit,” said Mr. Trump while addressing a room of business leaders. Instead, the US leader said previous US administrations were responsible for what he called “a very unfair and one-sided” trade relationship with China.”

China seemed to understand this and take it pretty well: in the last 30 years 500 million were lifted out of poverty, they got everything they wanted, and are arguably already the largest, most modern economy, but the ride is over. Asia loves gold-plated show-boaters like Trump and their equanimity was unreported by the press.

It’s no surprise; I’m sure they knew it would end someday. Probably never dreamed it would go on this long. However, the way the game is played, China will still negotiate all they can as the inevitable ends. And with retaliatory tariffs, they negotiate their best deal, and as quoted, Trump understands that too. Nothing personal.

 

Daily news covered, let’s go Macro.

In the bigger sense, a lot of this is window dressing. We hear a lot about how “the world can’t feed itself if such and such,” but it’s feeding itself now: clearly it’s perfectly possible: if anything we may have too much! Same with trade and tariffs. So China refuses to buy American soybeans, but buys Brazilian, great: stick it to those farmers (mega corps actually) in the voting states! Show ‘em!

But here’s the thing: there are X hectares of soybeans grown on planet earth, and Y people who eat them. If China buys “The Beans of Brazil”™, then whoever bought Brazil last year won’t get theirs and will buy American. Same with steel, same with oil. If China now buys Saudi oil or Russian oil, then that oil is simply removed from Europe, and Europe must buy Norwegian or Venezuelan oil. But it’s the same oil, from the same wells, going to the same people: that is, FROM planet earth, TO planet earth, BY the people of planet earth.

There are strategies and prices, advantages and minutia down there, but in the big picture, the effect becomes more subdued than may appear. So China places tariffs, even boycotts Iowa corn, then that corn is sold to Europe instead. What kind of political pressure are they really bringing, aside from making headlines?

The same is with Trump attempting to change the composition of U.S. industry. It’s a lot harder and takes a lot longer to rotate out of services and back into hard goods than it seems. What’s more, to start making your own chips or medical equipment requires a constellation of support industries: power lines, rails, screw machines, sheet metal stamping, servo motors, and behind them the dirty, heavy industries we erased: mining, steel and aluminum smelting, and so on. Yet this has to be done. We can’t run a country by asking China, “pretty please sell us some steel so we can make battleships to bomb you with.”

But like the soybeans, this shift of capacity doesn’t work in the macro view: if we’re not buying Chinese goods because we’re making our own, what is China going to do with all their factories? That capacity exists. It’s going somewhere or it will collapse, we BOTH have a lot to lose. A cutoff of most retail goods, their factories idled and people in the streets, Mutual Assured Destruction.

This goes back to 2005 and something Ben Bernanke said about the “Global Savings Glut.” That is, the problem wasn’t that the U.S. spent too much, but the real problem was the darn Chinese were too productive, too responsible, and spent too little. You might recognize this same argument from Germany and Greece. As much as this deserves raucous laughter, the larger macroeconomic imbalance is only this: the U.S. imports instead of producing, and China exports instead of consuming.

That’s how we come to a $700B yearly trade deficit, a deficit that is not ours alone, but China’s too. This goes back to righting the trade imbalance, the tariffs, in fact the overall inequality of the present (former) globalism: the U.S. prints fake digits and the Chinese send us real goods. If the imbalances are righted, there is only one path: China must spend more and the U.S. must spend less.

 

What will China do with their own factories if the U.S. reindustrializes and makes their own goods? They’ll buy those Chinese products themselves.

 

This is a long time coming, too. For decades, China has worked hard and developed their country, so why should they make cheap products and get nothing for their work? They deserve the products of their labor — arguably more than the Americans do. They need to spend more, and as we see with input costs rising back home, we need to spend less. So let them buy their “Make-happy ginsu mango-mango slicer.” No one deserves it more.

What do you think Chairman-for-life Xi thinks of this? Trump is going to make China stop saving and force their middle class to start spending, to start behaving like the modern nation they are. Xi and his predecessors have been unable to convince China to spend. But now Trump can blame his problems on China and Xi can blame his problems on Trump. So do you think Xi is angry? Or happy?

This had to happen. A nation cannot live at the expense of everyone else forever, amen. The only question is when and how it ends. So if China makes and buys Chinese products, and the U.S. makes and buys U.S. products, and we trade equally, where’s the harm?

It’s no fun to re-industrialize, to fall back to the level of real production your country is capable of minus extractive, extortive credit, but there are only two choices: the Neocon’s one world unipolar empire of murder and force, or nation states with borders and the independence and the internal capacity to produce for and defend themselves on all fronts, agricultural, manufacturing, intellectual, and military.

That’s what the “America First” plan was and in the Asian tour, China showed they understand this. So since nation states are going to persist for now, the best we can do is rebuild, re-normalize, and re-localize independently as best we can.

As the imbalances are reversed, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, but if we can do it, it will be worthwhile. At the very least, better than the alternative (They tried). We can – it is possible – recover our nation again, and with it, what it means to be “America”, and that may be worth the work.