Economics

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Black Lives Matter Don’t Care About Black People | SOTS

12302430_16x9_xlargeBy Amir Pars

I will lose many friends over what I’m about to say.

I will possibly be called a racist or even a white supremacist (even though I’m a brown man, who’s been beaten to a pulp by neo-Nazis wearing steel toed boots).

But maybe, just maybe, the fact that I am getting 100% of my information from the black scholars in the picture – The Great Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, John McWorther, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster and Thomas Chatterton Williams, allows me some room for thought?

I’ve been watching the narrative play universally over the heinous killing of George Floyd, and the complete and utter lack of facts about African Americans in The US has been infuriating.

Unfortunately, anyone who doesn’t submit to the dominant narrative will be called a heretic, a racist, a whites supremacist etc. Still, I can’t stop myself.

Black Lives Matter don’t care about black people

Want evidence? Name me a single time – just once – when they’ve protested against black people being killed by other black people? Whether in America or elsewhere?

Why is this relevant? Because the biggest cause of death for black men aged 15-45 in USA is… other black men. Compare to white people, where it’s traffic accidents for the younger portion and heart attacks for those over 35.

Or how about the black lives in Sudan, East Timor, Libya? Why do we only ever hear from BLM when it’s a white person killing a black person?

Speaking of which – imagine if white people started doing the reverse. Imagine every time a white person was killed by a black person, there’d be protests, riots, looting and social media campaigns. First thing to notice is that it would be more frequent, because African Americans kill more white people in the US than white people kill African Americans. Now what? Should we really start applying the race card every time there’s a murder involving more than one pigmentation? Where will it end?

Police killings

The video of the murder of George Floyd is so visceral, by showing the casual evil with which officer Derek Chauvin kills George Floyd. People are rightly outraged, and no one can honestly defend the officer, who rightly has been arrested and hopefully will spend his remaining years behind bars (although the prosecutor has been idiotic in moving the case from 2nd degree to first degree murder – a burden of proof they will most likely fail to provide).

But… The only reason people are up in arms about these is that the social media and MSM attention focuses disproportionately on these incidents when the victim is black and the officer isn’t. Don’t believe me? Let me prove it:

You’ve all heard of Tamir Rice – a 12 year old black boy who was murdered when brandishing a toy gun. It was all over the news, there were riots and marches, hashtags and universal condemnation all over the media.

But how many of you have heard of Daniel Shaver? A white man who was showing his friends a scoped air rife used to exterminate birds who entered his store, and was killed for this?

You may remember the case of Sam DuBose, a black man who was shot dead for driving his car away from from the police. The exact same thing happened to before that to Andrew Thomas, a white man driving away from the police. None of you have heard of him.

Alton Sterling was a black man shot dead by the police when reaching into his pocket for his wallet – a travesty. The same thing happened to a white guy named Dylan Noble. Sterling made national headlines, none of us heard a word about Noble. Loren Simpson was a white teenager who was shot dead by the police in eerily similar circumstances as George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. You’ve not heard of the former, but demanded justice for the latter. You’ve not heard of James Boyd, Alfred Redwine, Brandon Stanley or Mary Hawkes.

But you’ve heard of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Because the only times police killings make the news is when the victim is black and the officer isn’t.

Here are the FBI, NCJRS and BJS statistics:

For every 10, 000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed by the police. For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed by the police.

In 2019, 49 unarmed people were killed by the police. 9 were black. 19 were white.

The likelihood for a black person being shot by the police is as high as being struck by lightning. Yet, we are seeing riots, every single post on Instagram and Twitter is in support of Black Lives Matter and denunciation of police in America…

“Systemic Racism” / “Institutionalised racism”

Sound good, don’t they? Such powerful words… and completely inaccurate. First, let’s see what the claims being made are:

Both insinuate built-in racism within various official institutions (police, law, governments etc). Yet, when they are challenged, by asking the proponents to provide *evidence* for these, nothing is provided. Name one single law that is targeting exclusively black people. Just one. There isn’t one. If the police is “systematically” anti-black, explain how it is possible that 20% of the Police Force in America is black (African Americans in America constitute roughly 14% of the population, meaning that blacks are *overrepresented* within the police force!)? Now, imagine how incredibly racist it is to say that the 100, 000 plus black police officers are too stupid to know that they are working inside and within a racist institution? That really is racism. And none of them have come out and said anything??? None of them have gone on 60 Minutes and said “We are being trained to be racists”? Seriously?

How about governments? Well, let’s leave aside the fact that America just had a two-term black president (whose second name was Hussein, by the way). Some of America’s worst run cities have black mayors, black governors and majority black councils. Look at two of the worst cities in America to be black in:

Baltimore and Chicago. Why is it that a place where the people in power are black can be *worse* for the African American Community, than cities that aren’t run by black politicians? This is a knock-down argument.

Disparity

People often look at the economic disparities between blacks and whites, and claim it to be evidence for institutionalised racism. It says something about the power of a narrative, when it has been debunked decades ago – by BLACK ECONOMISTS (like The Great Thomas Sowell) – yet the myth persists.

First of all, at no point in human history has any two groups of people had the same level of wealth or income as each other. It would be an absolute miracle to expect that people with different backgrounds, cultures, histories, values and ethics to have the same level of wealth.

This is even true within so called races – compare for example Black Americans (generational) vs Black Immigrants… particularly the ones from West Indies (Jamaica, Barbados etc.).

You couldn’t tell these people apart, just by looking at them, and whatever racism is in place for one group must by definition be applied for the second group. But what they have is completely different values and work ethics (the Jamaicans arriving in the US does so commonly to achieve greater heights than what he or she can in their home country). Whatever level of systemic racism exists, they are subjected to it as much as the African American.

Yet, already in the 1970’s (!!!), when racism was far more prevalent than it is today, Black Americans from the West Indies were earning 58% more than the Black American whose generations go back centuries in the United States. How could that be, if there’s supposed to be such a thing as “systemic racism”?

Disparities are only proof of disparities. Just because Group X doesn’t have the same as Group Y, doesn’t mean that it’s explained by racism. And why does this so called “White Supremacy” only run against one group of Black Americans? Why doesn’t it run against Asian Americans, who out earn White Americans by over 60%? Why doesn’t it apply to Jewish Americans? Or Indian Americans, all of whom earn more than… White Americans??

Maybe there’s something else going on…?

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”, where he saw that African American households were 25% single mothers – a frightening statistic that would have devastating consequences. Since then, Jim Crow laws and Red Lining have all been removed from the books, Martin Luther King Jr. and The Civil Rights Movement made tremendous strides and we’ve now even had a black two-term president.

But, today, black households with no paternal figure, and only a single mother constitute SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT of all black households in America!!! SEVENTY FIVE!!!!

Now you tell me, which is the better explanation for young black children ending up in a life of crime – the lack of a father figure, or the mythical, non-explainable entity known only as “institutional racism”, which for some reasons doesn’t apply to Nigerian immigrants, to black immigrants from West Indies, to Indian people, to Jewish people, to Asian Americans…?

Criminality

“Why are blacks being disproportionately imprisoned? There’s a racist Prison Industry Complex!”

The key word here is “disproportionately”. Because it most certainly is true that African Americans make out the majority of prisoners in America, but what is the evidence that this is disproportionate? It’s non-existent.

Let’s look at the stats:

Black Americans constitute roughly 14% of the population in America, yet they commit 50% of all the murders. But, this is misleading – because it’s not the elderly, nor the children nor the women who commit the murders. It’s almost exclusively the young men (15-40). That constitutes about a fourth of the black population, which means that about 3.5% of the American population are responsible for 50% of all the murders!

Read this again: 3.5% of Americans are responsible for 50% of all murders.

You will find similar astonishing figures for drug related crimes, armed robberies, breaking and entering and gang violence.

So, even though it is true that black people make up the majority of the prison population, the incarceration rates are only proportionate against the crime rate, not the population.

History of slavery, Jim Crow and Red Lining

“Well, that maybe so, but it’s because of the history of slavery and Jim Crow!”

I don’t doubt the good intentions of those making these arguments, but they don’t actually see how it is a classic case of Racism of Lower Expectations.

No one has been able to provide a logical link between historical racism and the plight of people today.

First of all, what’s unique about racism in America (and Britain, for that matter) is that these countries abolished slavery when they did! They were among the first countries in the world to do so, and America even fought a bloody civil war to implement the 13th Amendment. Almost every country in the world practiced slavery, and there are many – particularly in Subsaharan Africa – who still do to this day.

And it most certainly is true that racism didn’t end with slavery, and evil practices such as Jim Crow, segregation and Red Lining were practiced until the 70’s. But – and here is the most astonishing fact of all – African American’s had *more* wealth and less unemployment during those times than today, when such practices have been abolished and are rightly considered moral evils.

Now, before anyone makes the nonsensical claim that “You’re saying we should oppress them then, because they had it better!?”, let me explain that correlation does not mean causation. But just as facts don’t care about feelings, reality won’t comply with narrative.

“America is a White Supremacist society!”

This is one of the most egregious claims out there. First of all, compared to what? Show me a country where blacks are a minority, but still get to be elected presidents, have more than 50 Mayors, congressmen and women, run city councils and have had multiple presidential candidates. Show me one.

America (and Britain) are two of the least racist societies on earth and in history. For god’s sake, look at the response from the murder of George Floyd! Just look at the outpouring of support for black people, the universal condemnation of racism from exactly all corners of the political spectrum, the complete solidarity from every white person with a social media account.

“Black Lives Matter”

This is a big one. Because I don’t know of many organisations who care less about black lives than Black Lives Matter. 93% of all killings of black people are done by other blacks – BLM are completely silent on this. BLM has never – not a single time – had a march or campaign black people being killed en massé in places like Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia or Libya.

Instead, what they have done is to have chants like “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” (about the police), which inspired a lunatic in Dallas to murder 3 police officers.

During the current riots, a 77 year old, black former Police Captain – David Dorn – was murdered by rioters. BLM has not said a word.

BLM reject Martin Luther King Jr.’s sentiment that people should “…be judged based on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”. If you’ve actually listened to the “I have a dream” speech, that line is the one which got the loudest cheers and applauses. BLM believe people who aspire to apply this principle of colour blindness are racists.

Conclusion

I can go on and on. I’ve provided my sources below, and I can point to the works of economists and criminologists and historians for further data. But I don’t [think] it will matter – the narrative is too strong, and people are too emotionally invested. Facts don’t stand a chance.

People are so keen to use the tragic murder of George Floyd to wave their anti-racism badges and flags. It makes them feel good. Black friends of mine, who are incredibly successful in their fields, are talking about how they’ve been victims all their lives, even though they are some of the luckiest people who have ever lived, regardless of race.

All I ask of you, if you’re reading this (and I doubt many will, certainly not to the end) is to ask yourself “What if what Amir is saying is true?”

That’s all I can hope for.

References:

Source: SOTS

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The Moral Authority of the Lockdown Fetishists Is Gone. Thank the Protestors and Rioters | Ron Paul Institute & MISES

nyc-riotBy Ryan McMaken

Six weeks ago, when thousands around the nation took to state capitols to protest the human rights abuses inflicted by coerced “stay-at-home orders,” lockdown supporters reacted with sanctimonious outrage.

Declaring the protestors to be “covidiots” who failed to appreciate the virtue and necessity of police-enforced lockdowns, news outlets and lockdown advocates on social media declared the protests would cause outbreaks of disease, and nurses declared the protests were “a slap in the face” to those trying to treat the disease. One political cartoon featured an image of an emergency room nurse saying “see you soon” to anti-lockdown protestors.

Now, with far larger numbers of protestors amassing in larger groups, we hear none of the lofty moralism coming from the media or lockdown enthusiasts in social media. Yes, there are still some token attempts to express worry over how the riots and protests of recent days might spread the disease. But the tone is quite different. Concerned over COVID-19 are now phrased in the formula of ” if you protest, take these measures to minimize risk. ” It’s all very polite and deferential to the protestors.

Politicians like Kamala Harris have even joined the protestors in the streets, thus doing what she demanded other avoid just a few weeks earlier. Where are the nurses denouncing these protests as a “slap in the face”? They’re nowhere to be seen.

Of course, those who support the current protests, but oppose last month’s protests, claim there is no equivalence. Many would likely say “we’re now protesting against people being killed in the streets!” followed by “those other protestors just wanted haircuts!”

The reality, of course, was far different. Most of those who oppose the COVID lockdowns are well aware that the lockdowns kill. They lead to severe child abuse, to more suicide, and to more drug overdoses. They lead to denial of medical care because lockdown edicts have ridiculously labeled many necessary medical procedures to be “elective.” Lockdowns have rendered tens of millions of Americans unemployed while robbing people of their social support from family and community groups. Lockdowns increased police abuse and harassment of innocent people who were guilty of no crime but leaving their homes or trying to earn a living.

Lockdown advocates, however, declared all of this to be “worth it” and demanded that their ideological opponents just shut up and “#stayhome.”

Lockdowns for Thee, But Not For Me

But now the current spate of protests and riots have made it clear that lockdowns and social distancing are all very optional so long as the protestors are favored by a leftwing narrative.

While the pro-lockdown/anti-lockdown conflict can’t be defined by any neat left-right divide, it is nonetheless largely true that the most enthusiastic advocates of COVID lockdowns are found on the left side of the spectrum.

And that’s why things have now gotten so interesting. It was easy for the pro-lockdown left to oppose protests when those protest were seen as a rightwing phenomenon. But now that the protests are favored by the left, then it’s all perfectly fine outside of a handful of politely expressed “concerns” that protests might spread disease.

The left’s about-face on the sacredness of social distancing will have significant effects on the future enforcement of stay-at-home orders and social distancing laws.

After all, on what grounds will governors, mayors, and law enforcement officers justify continued attacks on religious groups who seek to assemble in the usual fashion? If one group of people are allowed to gather by the hundreds to express one set of beliefs, why are other groups not allowed the same?

Politicians will no doubt soon invent new rationales for this inconsistency. Indeed, we already have one case. New York mayor Bill DeBlasio has come right out and said people who protest racism are allowed to assemble. DeBlasio likes them. But how about religious gatherings? DeBlasio doesn’t like those, so they’re still prohibited.

The Moral Authority of the Lockdown Advocates Is Gone

The current riots and protests have accelerated this sort of disregard for coerced social distancing, although things were already headed in this direction anyway.

The lockdowns initially were imposed with so little resistance because the legacy media and government bureaucrats managed to convince a sizable portion of the public that virtually everyone was in grave danger of death of serious disability from COVID-19. Many people believed these experts.

By May, however, it had become clear the doomsday scenarios predicted by the official technocrats greatly overstated the reality. Certainly, there were many vulnerable groups, and many died of complications from disease, just as many died during the pandemics of 1958 and 1969. But there’s a difference between a spike in total deaths, and a civilization-stopping plague. The experts promised the latter. We got the former. And we would have gotten the former even without lockdowns. Those jurisdictions that imposed no general lockdowns — such as Sweden — never experienced the sort of apocalyptic death predicted by lockdown advocates. Yes, they had excess deaths, but Sweden’s hospitals never even went into “emergency mode.” In the US, those states that imposed limited lockdowns for only a short period never experienced overloaded hospitals and overflowing morgues and was claimed would happen.

Could this yet happen in the future? It’s certainly possible, but how will we know? The lockdown advocates have already been so wrong about masks, about fatality rates, about the models, and about so much more, that we have no way of knowing if we should believe them the next time they show up and swear “this time, the situation is truly dire!”

But we’re not out of the lockdown woods yet. This fall, politicians and other lockdown advocates are likely to start up again with demands that new laws be passed requiring people to stay home, shut down their businesses, and otherwise put life on hold in the name of stopping COVID-19.

But it’s unlikely the public will fall for the same routine twice in a row. At least not to the same extent. The reaction of many will likely be “we’ve heard this song and dance before. Besides, social distancing didn’t matter to these experts very much back during the riots. Why should we believe them now?”

It’s a good question.

Source: Ron Paul Institute & MISES

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Three Ways Lockdowns Paved the Way for These Riots | MISES

160209115236-24-mong-kok-riot-0209-exlarge-169By Ryan McMaken

There were many reasons to oppose the COVID-19 lockdowns.

They cost human lives in terms of deferred medical treatment. They cost human lives in terms of greater suicide and drug overdoses. Domestic abuse and child abuse have increased. There is also good reason to believe that lockdowns don’t actually work. The lockdown activists capitalized on media-stoked fear to push their authoritarian agenda based not on science, but on the whims of a handful of experts who insisted that they need not present any actual evidence that their bizarre, draconian, and extreme scheme was worth the danger posed to human rights, health, and the economic well-being of billions of human beings.

Those who lacked the obsessive and irresponsible tunnel vision of the prolockdown people warned that there were other dangers as well, in terms of social and political conflict.

[RELATED: “COVID Panic: The New War on Human Rights” by Ryan McMaken.]

It didn’t require an especially clear crystal ball to see that destroying the livelihoods of countless millions while empowering a police state to harass and arrest law-abiding citizens would create a situation that maybe—just maybe—could lead to greater social and political conflict.

Specifically, there are three ways in which the lockdowns laid the groundwork for our current state of unrest.

The Lockdowns Created an Economic Disaster

The COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, business closures, and other forms of coerced social distancing have so far led to job losses for well over 30 million Americans. The unemployment rate has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Food banks are under strain as Americans line up for free food. Thanks to government moratoria on evictions in many areas, it is still unknown to what extent homeowners and renters are unable to pay mortgages and rents, but a wave of delinquencies is almost certainly coming.

To advocates of lockdowns, this is all “worth it” even though these sorts of economic stresses often lead to suicide, stress-induced disease, and death. But impoverishment, unemployment, and financial ruin are all merely “inconvenient,” as described by head lockdown advocate Anthony Fauci.

To someone who isn’t enamored of lockdowns, however, it is clear that millions of job losses are likely to worsen a variety of social ills, sometimes even resulting in violence. Moreover, the current job losses appear to be affecting the young and those who earn lower incomes most.

Lockdown advocates have attempted to avoid responsibility for all this by claiming that it is the pandemic itself that has caused the current economic disaster, and not the lockdowns. This is a baseless assertion. As has been shown, neither the pandemics of 1918 or 1958 led to the sorts of job losses and decline in economic growth that we’re now seeing.

The Lockdowns Destroyed Social Institutions

Another outcome of the lockdowns has been the destruction of American social institutions. These institutions include schools (both public and private), churches, coffee shops, bars, libraries, barbershops, and many others.

Lockdown advocates continue to claim that this is no big deal and insist that people just sit at home and “binge watch” television shows. But researchers have long pointed to the importance of these institutions in preserving peace and as a means of defusing social tensions and problems.

As much as lockdown advocates may wish that human beings could be reduced to creatures that do nothing more than work all day and watch television all night, the fact is that no society can long endure such conditions.

Human beings need what are known as “third places.” In a 2016 report, the Brookings Institution described what these places are:

the most effective ones for building real community seem to be physical places where people can easily and routinely connect with each other: churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers, gyms and even fast-food restaurants. A recent newspaper article on McDonald’s found that for lower-income Americans, the twin arches are becoming almost the equivalent of the English “pub,” which after all is short for “public house”: groups of retirees meeting for coffee and talk, they might hold regular Bible study meetings there, and people treat the restaurant as an inexpensive hangout.

Third places have a number of important community-building attributes. Depending on their location, social classes and backgrounds can be “leveled-out” in ways that are unfortunately rare these days, with people feeling they are treated as social equals. Informal conversation is the main activity and most important linking function. One commentator refers to third places as the “living room” of society.

The lockdown advocates, in a matter of a few days, cut people off from their third places and insisted, in many cases, that this would be the “new normal” for a year or more.

Yet, these third places cannot simply be shut down—and the public told to just forget about them indefinitely—without creating the potential for violence and other antisocial behavior.

Indeed, third places act as institutions that provide a type of social control that is key to a well-functioning society. In his trenchant book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, historian and social critic Christopher Lasch described the importance of third places in communicating political and social values and conventions to young people, and in setting the bounds of acceptable behavior within the community. Lasch notes that these institutions are also important in defusing violent impulses among the young. Also of great importance is the fact that third places provide a means of social control that is voluntary and not a form of state coercion.

Writing in the 1990s, Lasch was lamenting the decline of third places, although he emphasized their importance even in their modern reduced form. Thanks to the lockdowns, however, these places have been crippled far beyond what Lasch might ever have imagined.

The Lockdowns Empowered the Police State

The lockdowns have created a situation in which millions of law-abiding citizens have been deemed criminals merely for seeking to make a living, leave their homes, or engage in peaceful trade.

In many areas, violations of the lockdown orders have been—or even still are, in many places—treated as criminal acts by police. This has greatly increased negative interactions between police and citizens who by no moral definition are criminals of any sort.

Many have already seen the stories: police arresting mothers for using playground equipment, police arresting business owners for using their own property, police beating people for the “crime” of standing on a sidewalk.

Complicating the issue is the apparent fact that police have not enforced social distancing edicts “uniformly.” Some have alleged, for example, that the NYPD has lopsidedly targeted nonwhites in enforcement:

Of the 40 people arrested [for social distancing violations in Brooklyn between March 17 and May 4, 35 were African American, 4 were Hispanic and 1 was white. The arrests were made in neighborhoods—Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Cypress Hills and East New York—which have large concentrations of blacks and Latinos.

This may or may not reflect the reality of the general situation, but the fact is that the lockdowns created theperception among many that this is just yet another case of law enforcement targeting certain populations over small-time violations.

Moreover, it is quite plausible that lower-income populations have more often been on the receiving end of state harassment in the name of social distancing. After all, compliance with lockdowns is something of a luxury reserved for higher-income, white-collar residents who can work from home and remain comfortable for long periods in their roomy houses. Working-class people and those with fewer resources are far more likely to need to find income and venture outside during lockdowns. This attracts the attention of police.

Lockdown advocates, apparently in their usual state of extreme naïvete, perhaps believed that further empowering police to violently enforce government decrees against petty infractions would not lead to any unfortunate side effects down the road. Yet criminalizing millions of Americans and subjecting them to heightened police harassment is not a recipe for social tranquility.

Worsening a Volatile Situation

Of course, my comments here should not be interpreted as making excuses for rioters. Smashing up the property of innocent small business owners—or worse, physically harming innocent people—is reprehensible in all circumstances. But this isn’t about making excuses. We’re talking about avoiding extreme and immoral government policies (i.e., police-enforced lockdowns) that remove those institutions and conditions which are important in helping minimize conflict.

Some may insist that the riots would have occurred no matter what, but it’s easy to see how the lockdowns made a bad situation worse. Yes, some of the rioters are lifelong thugs who are always on the lookout for new opportunities to steal and maim. But experience suggests that the pool of people willing to engage in riots is often larger during periods of mass unemployment than during other periods. In addition, those people who exist on the margins of criminality—the sorts of people for whom third places serve an important role in moderating their more antisocial tendencies—are more likely to be swept up in these events when third places are abolished. And, as we have seen, lockdowns also create more opportunities for police abuse that ignite riots of the sort we’ve seen in recent days.

It’s true the responsibility for the riots lies primarily with the rioters. But we cannot deny that policymakers fuel the flames of conflict when they outlaw jobs and destroy people’s social support systems by cutting them off from their communities. It’s also wise to not provoke people by pushing for widespread human rights violations and additional police harassment. But this is what lockdown advocates have done, and their imprudence should not be forgotten.

Source: MISES

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Trump says U.S. will withdraw from WHO: President also declares Hong Kong is no longer separate from China | Washington Post

PNG imageBy David J. Lynch & Emily Rauhala

President Trump on Friday leveled an extraordinary broadside at the Chinese government, accusing it of a comprehensive “pattern of misconduct” and ordering U.S. officials to begin the process of revoking Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law.

The president did not outline a deadline for the historic action. But if carried out, it would mean that the United States would no longer treat Hong Kong and China as separate entities for the purposes of extradition, customs, trade and visa issues, he said. And the announcement could include sanctions on Hong Kong or Chinese officials.

In Rose Garden remarks, Trump alleged that the Chinese government covered up the coronavirus outbreak and instigated “a global pandemic that has cost more than 100,000 American lives and over 1 million lives worldwide.” The president also attacked the World Health Organization as effectively controlled by Beijing.

“We will today be terminating our relationship” with the WHO, the president said, adding that the organization’s more than $400 million annual U.S. contribution will be diverted to other health groups.

The president later issued a proclamation to protect sensitive American university research from Chinese spying and to bar an unspecified number of Chinese nationals from entering the United States for graduate study. He also directed an administration working group headed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to evaluate Chinese corporations listed on U.S. financial markets as potential targets of future restrictions.

The moves seemed certain to intensify growing U.S.-China tensions , though investors on Friday took them in stride.

The president’s comments were as notable for what he did not say. There was no mention of his irritation with China’s failure to quickly increase purchases of American goods as required by the trade deal he signed in January. He also made no direct reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as he said “the world is now suffering as a result of the malfeasance of the Chinese government.”

In one sign of Trump’s increased fury with the world’s second-largest economy, on Friday morning he tweeted simply: “CHINA!”

His formal Friday announcement — while long on harsh rhetoric — was short on details. The president reiterated some familiar grievances, blaming the Chinese for stealing American trade secrets and jobs and assailing his predecessors for allegedly letting them get away with it.

He expanded his indictment of the Chinese government to include its program of island construction in the South China Sea, a national security concern he rarely addresses.

“The Chinese government has continually violated its promises to us and so many nations,” he said.

Trump also stopped short of taking concrete action against the U.S.-listed Chinese companies he said posed “hidden and undue risks” for American investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators have complained for years about China’s refusal to grant access to their companies’ audit records.

As of last year, 156 Chinese companies — including 11 with significant government ownership — traded on U.S. markets, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a nonpartisan congressional body.

After Trump’s remarks, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested the president was trying to use China to distract from the pandemic and battered economy.

“President Trump’s Rose Garden event just now was pathetic,” he said. “It perfectly encapsulates his inability to lead when our nation needs it most. The only question is whether President Trump is afraid to lead or just doesn’t know how.”

Trump’s announcement followed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement earlier this week that Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous from mainland China to deserve separate treatment. Under the 1997 handover agreement with the United Kingdom, China agreed to preserve the former British colony’s democratic system for 50 years. Xi’s decision to impose security legislation on Hong Kong directly rather than by working through the territory’s local legislature may mark the collapse of that “one country, two systems” approach.

Some advocates of a tougher U.S. approach to China were disappointed by the president’s 10-minute statement.

“They didn’t do anything with regard to Hong Kong. His Hong Kong comments could have been issued as a statement a week ago,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the American Enterprise Institute. “The administration has absolutely considered specific actions since the NPC proposal was made public but decided not to announce a single one.”

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Caught in the middle of the deepening U.S.-China dispute are more than 1,350 U.S. corporations with offices in Hong Kong. The erosion of the city’s freedoms, including an independent judiciary, threatens to turn one of the global economy’s financial centers into just another Chinese city and calls into question the rationale for such a sizable commercial presence there.

The Chinese National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, on Thursday approved a plan to impose national security legislation in Hong Kong. The move was denounced in a joint statement by the United States, Canada, Australia and United Kingdom as in “direct conflict” with China’s promises in 1997 when it regained sovereignty over the former British colony.

“The United States may well have to do something the market doesn’t like in light of its longer-term interests,” said Patrick Chovanec, economic adviser for Silvercrest Asset Management in New York. “But there is concern about whether the U.S. is in a spiral of escalation with China on several fronts.”

The president’s visa move targets Chinese graduate students in the United States who have worked, studied, or been employed by entities linked to China’s efforts to “acquire or divert” technology for the People’s Liberation Army.

It is not immediately clear how many of the 350,000 Chinese students in the United States will be affected. And the announcement is expected to draw strong pushback from U.S. universities; some are heavily reliant on the full-fee tuition payments from Chinese students.

Over a 10-year period, the People’s Liberation Army dispatched 2,500 scientists and engineers to study overseas, focusing on democracies like the United States, according to a 2018 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

In January, the FBI arrested a 29-year-old Boston University student, accusing her of failing to disclose on her visa application that she was a lieutenant in the PLA.

Friday’s action represents only the administration’s latest slap at Beijing. The president earlier this month pushed a federal retirement pension board to abandon plans to invest in Chinese securities. And the Commerce Department tightened limits on Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s ability to purchase American computer chips.

Just four months after Trump celebrated a partial trade deal with China, marking an apparent truce in a two-year diplomatic conflict, relations between the two countries have plummeted. The president has been openly displeased with China’s failure to quickly fulfill the trade deal’s terms, including massive additional purchases of American crops, energy products and manufactured goods.

“Frankly the U.S. government is — I’ll use the word furious with what China has done in recent days, weeks and months. They have not behaved well and they have lost the trust I think of the whole Western world,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said Friday on Fox News.

Lawmakers in both parties also are increasingly impatient with Beijing, and the president failed to address some issues of concern on Capitol Hill. He made no reference, for example, to new legislation that requires him to impose sanctions on Chinese officials implicated in human rights violations in the Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang.

Trump’s decision to “terminate” the United States’ relationship with the World Health Organization comes after repeated threats to act.

Of the $893 million the United States sent in the 2018 and 2019 funding period, $237 million was an “assessed contribution” — a type of membership fee that may prove hard to cut without congressional approval.

At greater risk is what’s known as the “voluntary contribution,” that is money provided to U.S. agencies for health efforts and then given to WHO programs. The largest share of this money goes to polio eradication, with large chunks to fight vaccine preventable disease, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and the provision of basic health care.

The prospect of cutting U.S. funding for public health issues like polio in the middle of the pandemic drew immediate fire. Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association, said the action “serves no logical purpose and makes finding a way out of this public health crisis dramatically more challenging.”

Source: Washington Post

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600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ | Forbes

960x0Editor’s Note: An Associated Press article by Michael Biesecker and Jason Dearen that includes a description of the 600-physician letter is headlined “GOP fronts ‘pro-Trump’ doctors to prescribe rapid reopening,” which has led to criticism of Gold and her colleagues on social media. However, as the article acknowledges in the text, “Gold denied she was coordinating her efforts with Trump’s reelection campaign.” Gold echoed those comments to us, saying, “This was 100% physician grassroots. There was 0% GOP.”

More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.

“The downstream health effects…are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.

“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties:  “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”

From missed cancer diagnoses to untreated heart attacks and strokes to increased risks of suicides, “We are alarmed at what appears to be a lack of consideration for the future health of our patients.”

Patients fearful of visiting hospitals and doctors’ offices are dying because COVID-phobia is keeping them from seeking care. One patient died at home of a heart attack rather than go to an emergency room. The number of severe heart attacks being treated in nine U.S hospitals surveyed dropped by nearly 40% since March. Cardiologists are worried “a second wave of deaths” indirectly caused by the virus is likely.

The physicians’ letter focuses on the impact on Americans’ physical and mental health.  “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.

“It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown,” the letter says. “Losing a job is one of life’s most stressful events, and the effect on a person’s health is not lessened because it also has happened to 30 million [now 38 million] other people.  Keeping schools and universities closed is incalculably detrimental for children, teenagers, and young adults for decades to come.”

While all 50 states are relaxing lockdowns to some extent, some local officials are threatening to keep stay-at-home orders in place until August.  Many schools and universities say they may remain closed for the remainder of 2020.

“Ending the lockdowns are not about Wall Street or disregard for people’s lives; it about saving lives,” said Dr. Marilyn Singleton, a California anesthesiologist and one of the signers of the letter. “We cannot let this disease change the U.S. from a free, energetic society to a society of broken souls dependent on government handouts.” She blogs about the huge damage the virus reaction is doing to the fabric of society.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, also warns that restrictions are having a huge negative impact on non-COVID patients.

“Even patients who do get admitted to hospital, say for a heart problem, are prisoners. No one can be with them. Visitation at a rare single-story hospital was through closed outside window, talking via telephone,” she wrote us.  “To get permission to go to the window you have to make an appointment (only one group of two per day!), put on a mask, get your temperature taken, and get a visitor’s badge of the proper color of the day.”

How many cases of COVID-19 are prevented by these practices? “Zero,” Dr. Orient says.  But the “ loss of patient morale, loss of oversight of care, especially at night are incalculable.”

Virtually all hospitals halted “elective” procedures to make beds available for what was expected to be a flood of COVID-19 patients.  Beds stayed empty, causing harm to patients and resulting in enormous financial distress to hospitals, especially those with limited reserves.

Even states like New York that have had tough lockdowns are starting to allow elective hospital procedures in some regions.  But it’s more like turning up a dimmer switch. In Pennsylvania, the chair of the Geisinger Heart Institute, Dr. Alfred Casale, said the opening will be slow while the facility is reconfigured for COVID-19 social distancing and enhanced hygiene.

Will patients come back?  COVID-phobia is deathly real.

Patients still are fearful about going to hospitals for heart attacks and even for broken bones and deep lacerations. Despite heroic efforts by physicians to deeply sanitize their offices, millions have cancelled appointments and are missing infusion therapies and even chemotherapy treatments. This deferred care is expected to lead to patients who are sicker when they do come in for care and more deaths from patients not receiving care for stroke, heart attacks, etc.

She waited almost a week before going to the hospital where doctors discovered she had a brain bleed that had gone untreated.  She had multiple strokes and died. “This is something that most of the time we’re able to prevent,” said her neurosurgeon, Dr. Abhineet Chowdhary, director of the Overlake Neuroscience Institute in Bellevue, Wash.

As the number of deaths from the virus begin to decline, we are likely to awaken to this new wave of casualties the 600 physicians are warning about. We should be listening to the doctors, and heed their advice immediately.

Source: Forbes & Associated Press

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Pandemic Profiteering | Inequality

The number of U.S. citizens filing for unemployment increased to 38.6 million since March 18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Over the same two months, the wealth of U.S. billionaires has surged $434 billion – an increase of 15 percent.

The combined fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg alone grew by nearly $60 billion during these two months, according to a new analysis, jointly released by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, which released Billionaire Bonanza 2020 in April to examine billionaire wealth during the first month of the pandemic.

Between March 18 and May 19, the total net worth of the 600-plus U.S. billionaires rose from $2.948 trillion to $3.382 trillion.  In March, there were 614 billionaires on the Forbes list. There are 630 two months later, including newcomer Kanye West at $1.3 billion.

Among other COVID-19 victims are the more than 16 million Americans who have likely lost employer-provided healthcare coverage. Low-wage workers, people of color and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises. Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.

Wealth growth of other select billionaires in the top 30 on the Forbes May 19 list are below.

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Sources: All data analyzed by ATF and IPS is from Forbes and available here.
March 18, 2020, data is from the Forbes World’s Billionaires List: The Richest in 2020.
May 19, 2020 data was taken from Forbes real-time estimates of worth that day.

May 14, 2020 Update

 

Between March 18 and May 14, 2020, over 36 million U.S. workers lost their jobs, with 2.98 million claims in today’s announcement. Over these same eight weeks, U.S. billionaires saw their wealth increase by $368.8 billion, a 12.51 percent increase.

On March 18th, U.S. billionaires had a combined $2.947 trillion, down from $3.111 trillion a year earlier, according to Forbes annual global billionaire survey. As of May 14, total U.S. billionaire wealth has increased to $3.316 trillion.  In the last eight weeks, 14 new billionaires joined the U.S. billionaire list, which increased from 614 to 628.

Even with a decline in markets, Elon Musk’s wealth increased $3.5 billion in the last week, since May 6. Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased by $900 million and Eric Yuan saw his wealth increase by $800 million.  Mike Bloomberg saw his wealth increase by $400 million.

Between March 18, when Forbes published their 2020 annual Global Billionaire Survey, and the morning of Thursday, May 14, these billionaires have seen their wealth surge:

  • Jeff Bezos – up $30 billion
  • Mark Zuckerberg – up $21 billion
  • Steve Ballmer – up $11.6 billion
  • Elon Musk – up $11.3 billion
  • Michael Bloomberg – up $10 billion

Read more about IPS’s methodology in our report and in this fact check by USA Today.

April 30, 2020 Update

Between March 18 and April 30, 2020, over 30 million U.S. workers lost their jobs. Over these same weeks, U.S. billionaires saw their wealth increase $406 billion, an increase in 13.8 percent increase.

On March 18th, U.S. billionaires had a combined $2.947 trillion, down from $3.111 trillion a year earlier, according to Forbes annual global billionaire issue.

As of April 29, total U.S. billionaire wealth had increased to $3.353 trillion.  This is a boost of $406.2 billion, a 13.78 percent increase in six weeks.

Between April 22 and April 29, billionaire wealth increased $98.1 billion, a 3 percent increase.

The Reach of Billionaire Bonanza 2020

Our Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report has struck a nerve around the world with over 200 media stories in U.S. and global press. See the full report, Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers

Highlights of coverage include: Reuters, Newsweek, New York Post, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Investing.com, Nasdaq, GQ,  US News & World Report,  Fortune,  The Week, Business Insider , Futurism, Bill Moyers.com, LA Progressive. In These Times, Yahoo Finance, Gizmondo, and GQ Magazine, and Jacobin.

Several feature pieces include:

Fast Company, “American Billionaires Have Gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic,”

Capital & Main: “Tale of Two Pandemics: The Rich Are Getting Richer”

Sunday Guardian (UK): “Heads we win, tails you lose; America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit.”

Business Insider did four different stories, including: “9 mind-blowing facts about America’s richest people”.

New Republic, “Billionaires Are Eating the Economy,” May 7, 2020

We were fact-checked as true by USA Today, which resulted in one of the best stories about our methodology. See: USA Today:  Molly Stellino, “Fact Check: The super rich did indeed get richer in early weeks of coronavirus pandemic,” May 7, 2020.

Billionaire Bonanza made a splash in the sports reporting world, including this story in Football Times, “Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke’s wealth increases by £323m as players take wage cut”, May 6, 2020.  James Benge wrote, “ The wealth of Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke has increased by over £300million since the start of 2020, a study by a leading American think tank has revealed.”

Sample of international coverage: Straits Times (Singapore) Observador (Portugal), Daily Mail (Australia), Regina Leader Post (Saskatchewa, Canada), Sunday Times(South Africa) “Corona boost for richest in the U.S.”  International Business Times. La Jornada (Mexico), Publico (Spain),

Our own commentaries appeared in CNN and The Guardian.  An op-ed by report co-authors, Omar Ocampo and Chuck Collins, “Rich Getting Richer Despite Pandemic,” has been syndicated in over 60 U.S. newspapers by the Tribune News Service/ Progressive Media Project, including in Houma Today (LA), Daily Comet (Lafayette, LA), Tyler Paper (TX) The Derrick (Oil City, PA), Bozeman Daily Chronicle (MT).

Source: Inequality

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Trump takes control of the Federal Reserve Bank under the U.S. Treasury with Michael Telling | YouTube

By Michael Tellinger

U.S. President Donald Trump breaks a 250-year long stranglehold of the Royal Political Elite and their central banks. Since the 1760s and the rise of the Rothschild banking empire, the world has been held hostage by the global banking elite families, led by the Rothschilds – creating the largest organised crime syndicate on Earth – larger than all other crime syndicates combined – more brutal, more bloodthirsty and yet completely visible to all. They have abducted, tortured, bribed, extorted and murdered all their opponents to stay in control. They launched most of the wars in history, invaded countries and removed any threat with brutal force over and over again.

They have more blood on their hands than all other crime syndicates combined. Many honest leaders, presidents and prime ministers have tried to free their countries from the banksters’ stranglehold over this period, but so far, in over 250 years, no one has succeeded. Until NOW President Donald J Trump has quietly taken over the Federal Reserve Bank of the USA, in the last 2 weeks of March 2020 – without any fanfare or massive media exposure.

In a cunning move, Trump is now in complete control of the largest Reserve Bank on Earth – without any violence or bloodshed – by simply absorbing the FED into the Treasury Department. It may take some time for this to sink in – But this is a pivotal moment in more that 250 years – will other leaders follow the USA president, or are they too fearful? At least the USA will not invade your country, as they have done before – to topple the “rogue” leadership in order to retain control of the central bank – because the USA is now leading this historic break-away moment.

If only 10 countries of the world do this – take control of their central banks – and in essence rename them the “Peoples Banks” – we will rapidly break the Rothschild stranglehold over humanity and usher in a new era of freedom from economic slavery – prosperity and abundance for all.

Source: YouTube & Michael Tellinger’s Ubuntu Planet

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Rose/Icke III: The Livestream | London Real

Screen Shot 2020-05-04 at 6.27.40 AMJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is the third and final interview between Brian Rose and David Icke. After the first and second interviews which he exposed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for the Global Power Structure, or cult as he calls it, to impose their decades long New World Order (NWO) agenda to destroy the sovereignty of nations. 

Their ultimate goal is to undermine freedom, destroy independent small businesses, reduce the human race to a starving population fighting each other for survival and impose a an absolute totalitarian control system which includes mandatory vaccines laced with microchips/nanobots. All this is run robotically with the rollout of 5G networks.

Immediately after the second interview, David Icke was banned from Facebook and YouTube for violating “community” standards (and daring to air a controversial perspective the Global Power Structure doesn’t want you to hear about).

You can believe Icke’s perspective or not, but it’s your sovereign right (i.e., human right) to be able to hear his perspective and decide for yourself.  For anyone knowledgable in his field of research, you would know Icke is speaking truth if the technocrats have to go to the extreme measures of squashing/censoring the message to stop his message from getting out to the uninformed.  Friends of Liberty, do listen and decide for yourself, but under no circumstances bury your head in the sand. This is the turning point of human civilization and our individual awareness and collective decisions will determine the fate of all humanity.

By David Rose & David Icke

The Broadcast They Don’t Want You To See… The Ideas They Don’t Want You To Hear…

On May 3, 2020 at 5pm UK time, David Icke is LIVE on the DIGITAL FREEDOM PLATFORM for the largest LIVESTREAM of a conversation in human history. This single broadcast could change the course of humanity.

If we get the information now, we can act on it, we can change course.

If We Are Silenced, It Could Be The End of Humanity As We Know It.

WE NEED YOU!

Based on the popularity of our previous Icke I and II interviews, we expect to have a MILLION PEOPLE ACCESSING THIS LIVE.

As a member of the London Real Army you can make a difference by sharing this link and sharing this video.

Be Brave. Stand Up. Fight For Your Freedom.

What Will You Tell Your Grandchildren You Did During The Removal Of Civil Rights During The Great Pandemic?

Did You Stay At Home And Did What You Were Told? Or Did You Fight For Your Freedom Of Speech?

Join Us And Let’s Change The World.

WE WILL NOT BE CENSORED.
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.

JOIN THE RESISTANCE.
JOIN LONDON REAL.

Source: London Real

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Opposition to Decoupling From China Misses the Problem of 5G | The Epoch Times

FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed Huawei logo is placed on glass above displayed US flag in this illustrationJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: After reading this expose’ I realized why the race for 5G dominance is also a race for which political system will prevail – capitalism or communism. China has taken the lead in 5G and already dominates the marketplace. Unless the USA steps up along with its telecommunications partners and has the ability to compete in a free market with China, it will lose the battle for freedom as well. This does not imply that I wholeheartedly support 5G especially with regards to the untested health and safety issues. Already we know that millimeter radiation damages human health, but the industry refuses to study or mitigate these. It’s a grand experiment which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths which were falsely attributed to COVID-19.

By Bonnie Evans

As calls to decouple U.S. industries from dependency on manufacturing in China are growing, President Donald Trump has helped prepare the ground for a shift from China by taking a more skeptical approach to relations with the regime in Beijing than his predecessors.

While globalists are pushing back against the efforts to decouple, the key telecommunications technology of 5G shows the limitations of their approach, according to one expert.

Opposing Views

The argument for protecting the deeply intertwined U.S.–China economic relationship is widely supported in some circles.

Last December, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who served the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, asked a gathering of the U.S.–China Business Council, “Are you ready for this?”

“The 20th century painted a shocking picture of industrial age destruction; do not assume that the cyber era of the 21st century is immune to crack-ups or catastrophes of equal or even greater scale,” Zoellick said.

“You need to decide whether you think the United States can still cooperate with China to mutual benefit while managing differences, and if so, how.”

The Financial Times said that Zoellick’s words “captured the fears—particularly within parts of Washington’s economic and foreign policy establishment—that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Beijing has paved the way for an irreversible ‘decoupling’ of the world’s two largest economies.”

Zoellick was responsible for completing the negotiations that brought China into the World Trade Organization.

Zoellick’s views are echoed by other trade and China specialists.

Harry G. Broadman, an economist who has worked in key U.S. government, international organization, private sector, and academic roles during his 30-plus-year career, wrote in Forbes in September 2019 that decoupling from China potentially presents “worldwide negative spillover impacts.”

Of those consequences, Broadman suggests, “technological bifurcation, which could fundamentally jeopardize harnessing global benefits from advances in science and technology,” is one of the riskiest aspects of taking the United States out of China.

In plain English, Broadman’s argument is that without globalization, which is largely underpinned by the U.S.–China relationship, technologies go their own way, developing standards and specifications for the regions in which they emerge, rather than under a globalized standard common throughout the world.

5G Domination the Danger

“He’s mistaken,” Robert Spalding said, referring to Broadman’s views on technological bifurcation. Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and architect of the U.S. National Security Strategy, which named China as an adversary. He is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, and author of the recent book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.”

The real danger, Spalding told The Epoch Times in an extensive interview, is in the ongoing struggle for dominance in fifth-generation—5G—mobile technology and standards that are already beginning to change how data is collected and used around the world.

“The U.S. was the first to develop the smartphone in 4G,” Spalding said. As a result, “we dominate the information market.”

But as the world moves into 5G, the risks are greater if the “concept of open data” and “open data markets” of those 4G networks are maintained. In Europe, the open data concept has already “created concern for privacy protection.”

In China, however, open data markets create a global opportunity.

“In the hands of China,” Spalding said, open data “lets the state take hold of power that Google and Amazon have.”

The “state” in China is led and run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“The ability of these companies to pinpoint your location and the things you’re doing and buying is incredibly powerful and counter to privacy concerns and counter to the principles of our liberal democracies,” Spalding said.

Spalding pointed out that “as Android and Apple become less of dominant players in 5G, now Tencent and Alibaba and DJI and Hikvision can begin to dominate that data space. So we move from a world centered on the U.S. to one centralized on Baidu and Tencent.”

All five companies are Chinese technology companies with ties to the CCP. Alibaba and Tencent generally rank in the top 10 internet companies in the world by market capitalization.

“That’s why he’s mistaken [about the problem of technological bifurcation]. It’s positive if we move to a data system that is focused on privacy and security and sovereignty and deploying secure 5G,” Spalding said.

Referring to Broadman, Spalding said that “what he’s advocating is that China dominate the technological space.”

China Sets Standards

Already, Spalding said, 3GPP, the umbrella body under which the key telecommunications standards organizations in the world operate and coordinate, is heavily dominated by China.

Since American network equipment manufacturers “are not expected to survive,” that leaves only four companies in the world that will make the networking equipment for the 5G future.

Those companies are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and China’s Huawei—all subject to the standards that are being so heavily influenced by Chinese technical specifications.

Functionally, therefore, Spalding points out that even though Ericsson and Nokia are Swedish and Finnish respectively, and Samsung is South Korean, they end up building the same system as Huawei.

“Essentially,” Spalding said, “everybody is building a Chinese network based on open data, not on a secure network. That’s why he’s incorrect. His theory promotes China,” Spalding said.

This means, Spalding said, that China’s “acquisition of intelligence” and “ability to influence societies” is greatly enhanced both in China and abroad, including in the United States.

Statistics from the Institute of Electronics and Electronic Engineers support Spalding’s claim.

In a March 17 post titled “Strategy Analytics: Huawei 1st among top 5 contributors to 3GPP 5G specs,” Alan Weissberger reports that “even though there are more than 600 member companies participating in 3GPP, their 5G specification process is actually led by only a few leading telecom companies. … New research from Strategy Analytics … finds that 13 companies contributed more than 78% 5G related papers and led 77% of the 5G related Work Items and Study Items.”

Of those 13, the top five are, in order, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and China Mobile.

Free Versus Centrally Resourced Trade

“By allowing China to be in the global trading system, you’re actually undermining the foundational premises” of that system, Spalding said. That global trading system has “a market-based approach to both capital allocation and trade.”

“China is not a market-based economy,” Spalding said. China, Spalding has said earlier, is not “a centrally planned economy, but it is centrally resourced.”

“When the state is providing resources and capital to a company, that’s not a market-based solution,” he said.

“Prices are set by China, not by the market.

“If you really want to have a free trading system … then China can’t be a part of it because they don’t believe in it.”

Source: The Epoch Times