Raymond Richman - Jesse Richman - Howard Richman
Richmans' Trade and Taxes Blog
Dr. Fauci and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Victims - I'm published in American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 5/18/2020
I begin:
Although Dr. Anthony Fauci has lost his power to slow-walk a vaccine solution to COVID-19, he still retains his power to disparage HCQ (hydroxychloroquine), the most effective treatment against Covid-19. During the last few weeks, he has publicized two studies in which HCQ without zinc hasn’t worked with hospitalized patients. He has been so successful at disparaging HCQ that hospital use of HCQ has been declining.
[Click here to read it on the American Thinker website]
Operation Warp Speed eliminates Fauci’s power to delay vaccines - I'm published in American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 5/17/2020
On Friday, President Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year if possible. He put two “can-do” people in charge of the process – Glaxo Smith Kline’s vaccine expert Mancef Slaoui to oversee vaccine development and Army General Gus Perna to oversee logistics.
Not only will they facilitate testing of the available vaccines, but they will also arrange production of promising vaccines even before they have been approved. In contrast, during President Obama’s Swine Flu (H1N1) epidemic, the CDC got vaccines approved quickly (just 7 weeks after Phase 1 clinical trials began), but then a shortage ensued while the vaccines were being produced.
Taking Vaccines out of Fauci’s Hands
President Trump just took the power to slow-walk vaccines out of the hands of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID (one of the institutes of the NIH). When the first COVID-19 vaccine, the Inovio vaccine, was ready for clinical testing, Fauci buried it in a year-long Phase 1 clinical trial which began in April 2020 and is not scheduled to end until April 2021. (Fortunately, Fauci never got control over Bill Gates’ Moderna vaccine, which is making rapid progress, having already completed its Phase 1 clinical trial.)
President Trump officially announced Operation Warp Speed in the White House Rose Garden. Fauci stood behind him with hands folded in front of him (at the 24:00 mark) while Trump was saying, “And we hope to be able to do something by the end of the year, or shortly thereafter.”
Just three days earlier at a Senate hearing, Fauci had reiterated his claim that no vaccine could possibly be completed in less than a year to 18 months, even though in an earlier interview with Samantha Guthrie on the Today show Fauci had admitted that the coming Operation Warp Speed could get a vaccine out sooner.
Operation Warp Speed is a totally brilliant political move by Trump. He put a “can-do” leader in charge of vaccines, and “can’t-do” Fauci can’t object. Trump’s primary goal is to open up the economy ASAP. Firing Fauci would have hurt that effort. Trump has figured out how to neutralize Fauci’s obstructions without firing him....
[Click here to read it on the American Thinker website]
Four questions that senators should ask Redfield and Fauci on Tuesday - I'm published in the American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 5/10/2020
I begin:
On Tuesday, health bureaucrats Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, will testify at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Republican Senators should ask them four questions about their failures to expedite deployment of vaccines and test the successful HCQ-zinc treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I conclude:
Instead, of taking the time to keep up with the research regarding zinc and HCQ, Fauci talks daily on the telephone with Andrew Cuomo of anti-Trump CNN, supposedly to ask him about his health. Meanwhile, at the CDC, instead of expediting vaccines and testing treatments, Redfield calls for mail-in voting in the next election, a measure that would benefit Democrats.
Fauci and Redfield are playing political games while Americans die. Republican Senators need to ask them why they are failing to invoke the Accelerated Approval Process to get out a vaccine right away and why they are failing to test the HCQ-zinc treatment.
To read it on the American Thinker website, go to:
The last time they politicized the treatment for an epidemic - I'm published in the American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 5/3/2020
I’ve got a piece in American Thinker this morning about the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in our nation’s capitol, which at that time was Philadelphia. The parallels with COVID-19 today are amazing,
Just as Democratic-Republicans disparaged the only successful treatment – quinine – in 1793 just because Alexander Hamilton endorsed it, Democrats disparage the successful treatment by quinine’s successor, hydroxychloroquine, today just because President Trump partially endorsed it. See:
Zinc: The Missing Element in the HCQ/COVID-19 Debate - I'm published in the American Thinker blog this morning
Howard Richman, 4/26/2020
Here's a selection:
On April 21, Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) recommended against using the combination of HCQ and azithromycin for treating COVID-19 due to irregular heartbeats that can result. It based its recommendation upon a VA hospital retrospective study conducted without using zinc upon patients who were probably zinc-deficient, being elderly and about 2/3 Black.
In that study, the patients in the HCQ groups died at a significantly higher rate than the patients who had not received HCQ. But the higher death rate in the HCQ groups may have been due to the fact that the VA put sicker patients into the two groups taking HCQ (one of which also took azithromycin), while putting healthier patients into the control group that didn’t take HCQ. The GoodRX blog noticed this flaw. They wrote:...
One thing to note is that people who had more severe symptoms, which might partially explain the higher death rates, were also more likely to get medications...."
Even worse, Fauci’s NIAID never even considered the fact that the VA was treating a group that is known to be zinc deficient without adding zinc supplements. Nor did they consider the interaction between HCQ and zinc, such that HCQ either works better if combined with zinc, or HCQ can deprive patients of needed zinc if not administered along with zinc supplements to zinc-deficient patients.
Click here to read it on the American Thinker website.
Fauci time and the Coronavirus Vaccine - I'm published in American Thinker
Howard Richman, 4/17/2020
The American vaccine’s Phase 1 clinical trials are bogged down. They began on March 3 and are not scheduled to end until June 1, 2021.
Why fifteen months for the first American vaccine’s clinical trials? The reason is simple. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), is conducting them in Fauci Time. (Fauci is also conducting the clinical trials to see if Remdesivir is effective against COVID-19 in Fauci Time – those trials are not scheduled to end until April 1, 2023.)
Normally, during a health emergency, the U.S. gets out a vaccine within months. Take the H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic of 2009. The CDC has published a timeline:
- April 15. First human infection.
- May 5. School closings affect 607,778 students.
- July 22. Clinical trials begin.
- September 15. Four vaccines approved.
So, in 2009, the FDA started its clinical trials of a vaccine on July 22 and approved four vaccines seven weeks later. Meanwhile, in 2019, Fauci’s NIAID started its clinical trials on March 3 and plans to take 15 months to complete them.
U.S. regulations allow for two rapid approval processes for vaccines during a health emergency. One of them, called Accelerated Approval, is the process used to approve the H1N1 vaccines after less than two months of clinical trials. The other, called Emergency Use Authorization, is the process used to approve the anthrax vaccine so that it could be administered to the soldiers invading Iraq.
In the Accelerated Approval process, a single clinical trial phase determines whether the vaccine is safe and whether it creates the required antibodies. In vaccine terminology, these pathogen-specific antibodies are considered to be a “surrogate endpoint,” permitting the vaccine to be approved for use without field studies. For such vaccines, there is a “Phase 4” process during which the success of the vaccine is continuously monitored while it is being used.
The following are among the successful vaccines approved through the Accelerated Approval process:...
Click here to read it on the American Thinker website
Testing Hydroxychloroquine as a Prophylactic -- I'm published in this morning's American Thinker
Howard Richman, 4/13/2020
There are three experiments getting started now that will determine whether hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) works as a prophylactic. A prophylactic functions almost like a vaccine, except that it has to be taken daily.
All three experiments are the type that researchers dream about. They are called double-blind studies because neither the subjects nor the people working with the subjects will know which subjects are taking an HCQ pill and which are taking a placebo pill. Both pills will look identical.
The subjects of all three experiments will be healthcare workers and/or first responders. The experimenters will follow the subjects closely to determine which ones catch COVID-19. All three experiments are being conducted by reputable top-notch institutions:...
To read it on the American Thinker website, go to:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/testing_hydroxychloroquine_as_a_prophylactic.html
State restrictions on the use of HCQ
Howard Richman, 4/12/2020
I've gone through two websites (one published by the National Academy for State Health Policy and the other published by the American Medical Association) and have classified state restrictions regarding use of HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) to treat COVID-19. I have classified those state policies into three groups:
- Legal Restrictions: IL, MI, MS, NY, OH, and OR.
- Pharmacy Discretion: KS , KY, LA, and SC.
- Not for Prophylaxis: IA, ID, MO, NJ, NV, NC, RI TX and WI.
Others may look at the same charts and classify the states differently. The rules regarding Pharmacy Discretion and Prophylaxis are largely to prevent shortages from occurring in the event that there is not enough to go around. The Legal Restrictions appear to be designed to prevent primary care physicians from prescribing HCQ based upon symptoms. In this posting, I will just discuss the states that have legal restrictions:
- IL. Only those with a positive test result for COVID-19 may get a prescription.
- MI. Those who prescribe HCQ or fill HCQ prescriptions without further proof of efficacy for treating COVID-19 may be investigated and lose their licence.
- MS. Prescriptions limited to those who have been admitted to hospitals.
- NY. Prescriptions are limited to those who have tested positive.
- OH. Prescriptions are limited to those who have tested positive.
- OR. Prescriptions are limited to those who have tested positive or have a clinical diagnosis.
And here's a table showing the deaths per case and deaths per million people in the states with legal restrictions, as compared to the national average of all 50 states:...
Lots of studies of HCQ - none of which use zinc
Howard Richman, 4/12/2020
We will soon know whether HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) works by itself (none include zinc with the HCQ). I just searched clinicaltrials.gov. Eight new studies are testing the effectiveness of HCQ against COVID-19:
- Henry Ford Health System. Healthcare workers and first responders will take either HCQ or a placebo as a prophylactic.
- Pastier Institute in France. Healthcare workers will take either HCQ or placebo as a phophylactic.
- Duke University. Healthcare workers will get HCQ or placebo as a prophylactic.
- Gangnam Severance Hospital, South Korea. Those who have been exposed to COVID-19 will get HCQ, others will get no intervention.
- Rambam Health Care in Israel. Those with mild to moderate COVID-19 will get HCQ.
- Azidus Brazil. Those who have moderate to severe pneumonia as an after effect of COVID-19 will get HCQ and an antibiotic.
- University of Calgary. HCQ or placebo will be given to patients within 96 hours of a positive COVID-19 result.
- Instituto de Investigacion Marques de Valdecilla Spain. Patients with COVID 19 will be compared to patients with Immuno-mediated Inflammatory Disease as far as their response to HCQ is concerned....
Deborah Birx: 1 million Abbott Lab tests not being used.
Howard Richman, 4/10/2020
See this video from Wednesday's Coronavirus task force briefing at the 1:38:35 mark:
Detroit hospital system starts test of HCQ as Prophylactic
Howard Richman, 4/9/2020
President Trump isn't the only one who is bypassing the Washington bureaucracy in an attempt to find a solution to COVID-19. The Henry Ford Health System in Detroit has announced the WHIP COVID-19 study to find out whether HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) works as a prophylactic. They are now asking for volunteers among healthcare workers and first responders, people who are likely to come into contact with those who are sick from the virus. It will be a randomized, double blinded study, and the first results will become available about 4 weeks after the experiment begins -- probably around June 1.
They started the study in response to a request from Detroit's mayor and local health care experts, according to their April 2 press release:...
Fauci now is part of the problem, not part of the solution - I'm published in April 8 American thinker blog
Howard Richman, 4/7/2020
The South Korean solution to the COVID-19 virus (widespread testing and the hydroychloroquine-zinc cure) is beginning to work in the United States. Americans, like South Koreans, will soon be back at work and school. But at Monday's Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci ignored the success. Instead, he pretended that the only way the U.S. could get back to normal was through vaccines and new therapies. He was responding to a question directed to him by reporter Jonathan Karl at the 37:37 mark of this video:
Karl: Will we truly get back to normal before there’s a vaccine available to everybody?...
Fauci: … I believe with the therapies that will be coming online, with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right now. So, if that means getting back to normal, then we’ll get back to normal.
Fauci was being disingenuous. His own organization NIAID (one of the institutes of NIH) is slow-walking both therapies and vaccines. For example, NIAID is currently conducting a study on the effectiveness of Remdesivir, a drug which, along with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, proved effective against COVID-19 in the Chinese test-tube studies. Here's NIAID's schedule for completing Phase 3 of its approval process:
- Actual Study Start Date: February 2, 2020
- Estimated Primary Completion Date: April 1, 2023
- Estimated Study Completion Date: April 1, 2023
Believe it or not, that is not a misprint! Fauci was touting new therapies even while his own organization was slow walking the most promising of them so that it would not be ready until 2023!
The same is true of vaccines....
[Click here to read it on the American Thinker website.]
The solution to COVID-19 is in Sight! - we're published in today's American Thinker
Howard Richman, 4/6/2020
The solution to COVID-19 is in Sight! It is the South Korean solution: (1) widespread testing, and (2) treatment at home using a hydroxychloroquine-zinc cocktail.
The South Korea solution works! People there are back at work. The death ratios (deaths/recoveries; deaths/cases) are low. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats in the U.S. health bureaucracy are trying to stop it from happening in the United States. See the commentary that my son and I wrote in today’s American Thinker:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/a_solution_to_covid19_is_in_sight.html
COVID-19 shows that imbalanced trade is killing US - we're published in today's American Thinker
Jesse Richman, 3/29/2020
by Jesse Richman and Howard Richman
We have been warning of the costs and dangers of imbalanced trade for decades. With the election of Donald Trump, U.S. voters showed they got it. But our country's elites in Congress and the bureaucracy have dragged their feet. Perhaps with COVID-19, U.S. elites will recognize that imbalanced trade is killing the U.S. and finally get behind President Trump to fix it.
When a country configures its policies so that it consistently buys almost a trillion dollars more in goods from abroad than it sells, several things happen. First, it stops making stuff. Second, it goes deep in debt to foreigners. Third, it becomes less resilient in the face of disasters and threats.
The consequences of imbalanced trade are dramatically apparent in the manifold weaknesses revealed by the current pandemic. When China fought the virus, its medical workers had available top-quality respirators and full-body protective suits. Millions of face masks were sent to the people of Wuhan, allowing each person to play a role in reducing transmission of the virus.
When American companies produce abroad, their factories may be taken over by the countries where the factories reside. In fact, that is exactly what happened in China during the COVID-19 epidemic, as President Trump's economic adviser Peter Navarro pointed out in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on February 23 (see the 2:15 mark):
In terms of the immediate issue, face masks — the N-95 face masks, China put export restrictions on those masks and then nationalized an American factory that produces them there.
As the U.S. attempts to fight the pandemic that spread from China, our hospitals have dwindling supplies of the most basic protective gear and no possibility of providing our medical workers with the kind of protection China's doctors and nurses had available.
[Click here to read the rest on the American Thinker website.]
Deborah Brix announces breakthrough -- FDA has agreed to let at-home testing resume later this week
Howard Richman, 3/24/2020
Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force said the following at the press conference yesterday:
There has been a breakthrough today, and I think you will see this from the FDA. For all of you who are waiting for self-swabbing options, those are going to be available sometime this week, to enable individuals to do their own tests.
FDA shuts down at-home tests for COVID-19
Howard Richman, 3/23/2020
Proving again that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution, the FDA on March 21 shut down the at-home tests for COVID-19 that had been developed by several companies according to techcrunch.com:
While a number of companies who currently offer at-home medical and health diagnostics had rushed to produce kits that would allow for self sample collection by people who passed a screening and believed they might have contracted the new coronavirus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated its Emergency Use Authorization guidelines to private labs that specifically bar the use of at-home sample collection. This means startups including Everlywell, Carbon Health and Nurx will have to immediately discontinue their testing programs in light of the clarified rules.
The FDA issued the updated guidance on March 21, and though some of the companies had already begun to ship their sample collection kits to people, and even begun to receive samples back to their diagnostic laboratory partners, even any samples in-hand will not be tested, and will instead be destroyed in order to comply with the FDA’s request....
All three of the companies we spoke to that were working to distribute these tests had partnered with labs that were approved under the FDA emergency guidelines to perform COVID-19 diagnostics, and it was the understanding of all parties that at-home self collection via swab kits was included in the authorization. All three also said they were offering their tests at-cost, and seeking ways to defray even that cost to consumers through potential healthcare agency partnerships. Each also offered telehealth consultations for both the sample-gathering process, as well as for delivery of the results....
Stop slow-walking synthetic vaccines! Our bureaucracy is killing us! - we're published in American Thinker this morning.
Howard Richman, 3/22/2020
by Howard Richman and Jesse Richman
The world is entering an economic recession and health crisis partly due to the continuing lack of imagination and capability among experts in the bureaucracy. Perhaps these supposed experts are suffering from a disease first named by C. Northcote Parkinson several decades ago: injelitance or the rise to power of incompetents who are skilled only in the arts of preventing problems from being solved by the capable.
The now legendary failure of the CDC to manage the task of developing an effective test for the virus is being compounded by the efforts of state and federal government bureaucrats to block Americans who developed their own tests, including the heroes at the Seattle Flu Study. U.S. public health officials have advised Americans not to wear face masks that work and can be made at home, and even though some countries are requiring masks to slow virus transmission.
Many millions of Americans now on lock down are paying with their liberty for the freedom accorded to a few hundred thousand travelers from China and Europe over the last two months by incompetent government agencies like Homeland Security, despite President Trump’s clear intention to close the border to the disease.
And now health bureaucrats are slow-walking their testing of possible vaccines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lethargic actions of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics completed the world’s first candidate COVID-19 vaccine in just 42 days and rushed the first vials to NIAID on February 24. But then NIAID bureaucrats started slow-walking it. They told TIME that they and the rest of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) couldn’t possibly prepare the vaccine for human testing before April, at the very earliest. Finally, perhaps due to intervention by the Trump administration, they discovered that they could, after all, begin human testing on March 16.
Meanwhile, NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci has repeatedly told reporters that no vaccine could possibly be approved in less than a year to a year and a half. In fact, one of the first times he said this, he was directly contradicting President Trump who had just said that he expected a vaccine in months, or a year at the most. The question becomes: Is Fauci’s bureaucracy intentionally slow-walking the approval process?
But the problem is not just bureaucratic lethargy, it is also a regulatory system which was designed to protect the public from vaccines made from attenuated pathogens, not vaccines that are synthesized in the lab. Attenuated viruses are dangerous. Sometimes they mutate within the body so that they can reproduce themselves and produce a disease. The following appears in a 2019 medical journal article, available on the NIH website:..
[Click here to read it on the American Thinker website]
Our Pharmaceutical Industry needs Surgical Mask Protection -- we're published in American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 3/19/2020
by Jesse Richman and Howard Richman
Search Amazon today for face masks and the product will be unavailable, dramatically marked up, and/or shipping from China. In the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, masks are an essential component of the equipment medical professionals need but one that some hospital systems are also struggling to procure. And if they were widely available, face masks could potentially help Americans reduce the risk of infection as well, since one of the main infection pathways is through breathing the virus in, and masks substantially reduce exposure.
One of the reasons why masks have been in short supply in the U.S. is inevitable – any time there is a major pandemic involving a respiratory infection, there will be mask shortages. Part of it also involves decisions about trade policy that have systematically made the U.S. more vulnerable to political, economic, and health shocks....
To read the rest on the American Thinker website, go to:
Human trials for US Vaccine moved up from April to today!
Howard Richman, 3/16/2020
The human trials for the U.S. vaccine, Moderna's mRNA vaccine, will start today. According to The Online Citizen:
The first participant in a clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday (16 March), a United States (US) government official said.
The official also spoke on the condition of anonymity as the trial has not been publicly announced yet, according to an AP report earlier today. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the trial which will take place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.
The trial is aimed to test whether the vaccine will show any potential side effects and to set the stage for a larger test. It will start with 45 young and healthy volunteers, in which they will be given different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc.
Originally, according to TIME magazine on February 25, the first human trials were not going to start until April:
Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech company based in Cambridge, Mass., has shipped the first batches of its COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine was created just 42 days after the genetic sequence of the COVID_19 virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was released by Chinese researchers in mid-January. The first vials were sent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, which will ready the vaccine for human testing as early as April.
My guess is that somebody in the Trump administration intervened to get NIAID and NIH moving.
Israelis moving quickly to get out a COVID-19 vaccine - I'm published in American Thinker this morning.
Howard Richman, 3/15/2020
Israeli scientists at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute had worked for four years and had successfully developed a coronavirus vaccine for chickens which passed clinical trials. When they saw the genetic sequencing of the COVID-19 virus, they realized that they could quickly adapt their chicken vaccine to the human virus. Ella Dagan, a spokesman for MIGAL told europorter:
When the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus COVID-19 was published, the researchers realized that the two viruses have the same infection mechanism similarities so they can use it, with small amount of adaptation, to achieve an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time.
Dr. Shahar, one of the scientists at MIGAL, saw God’s hand in this. He told nocamels.com:
It’s a little bit like fate that we were working on this coronavirus vaccine at the same time that the world was suddenly hit by this epidemic of coronavirus for humans.
MIGAL created its vaccine by synthesizing two proteins. Unlike vaccines that are created by injecting a dead or weakened disease-causing virus, there is little danger that a synthetic virus will give patients a disease.
Its vaccine creates antibodies in the mucosal immune system of the body which consists of thin permeable barriers to infection in the lungs, gut, eyes, nose, throat, uterus and vagina. Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader, gave europorter a detailed cellular-level description of how MIGAL’s vaccine works:...
To read the rest at the American Thinker, go to:
God's Providence at work: The Israeli COVID-19 vaccine
Howard Richman, 3/11/2020
Israeli scientists have developed an oral COVID-19 vaccine. The latest report is from nocamels.com, a website that reports Israeli innovation news:
While working on the avian [coronavirus] vaccine, the scientists [at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute] said they identified a possible COVID-19 vaccine candidate as a by-product of the [avian] vaccine and have made the “required genetic adjustments to adapt the vaccine to COVID-19, the human strain of coronavirus.”...
“It’s a little bit like fate that we were working on this coronavirus vaccine at the same time that the world was suddenly hit by this epidemic of coronavirus for humans,” [Dr. Shahar of MIGAL] says.
The MIGAL vaccine was created by synthesizing two proteins. Unlike vaccines that are created by injecting a dead or weakened disease-causing viruses, there is very little danger of the MIGAL vaccine giving patients a disease.
The main danger with synthetic vaccines is that they will only work in the test tube, not in-vivo. But the researchers at MIGAL have already proven in clinical trials that the avian version of their vaccine works in live chickens.
Most vaccines create antibodies in the bloodstream – not this one! This one creates antibodies in the mucosal immune system which consists of thin permeable barriers to infection in the lungs, gut, eyes, nose, throat, uterus and vagina. The nocamels.com website quotes Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader saying:...
Is Manufacuring in Recession? No.
Jesse Richman, 12/23/2019
In the last several days I have read several opinion pieces which stated as a fact that manufacturing was in "recession." But as is all too often the case even in a world where hyperlinking is easy and simple, they linked to no evidence. So I went looking. It seems that they were likely mislead by a one month blip driven by the autoworker's strike into thinking manufacturing was is recession. Hardly. Take a look at the graph of manufacturing employment by the St. Louis Fed. Whilst there is that sharp one-month drop, it is followed by a sharp rebound to a level higher than has been seen since before the Great Recession. Some recession.
China's Genocide and Efforts to Export the Destruction of Human Freedoms
Jesse Richman, 12/6/2019
Helen Raleigh has an important piece in the Federalist today on recent leaks from China and the revelations made by a former Chinese spy in Australia who is seeking ausylum. It's an important counterpoint to those who seek to diminish the threat posed by China.
Raleigh discusses the recent document leaks which reveal in further detail the thoroughgoing Chinese plans to brutaly suppress the culture of 13 million citizens because of their culture and religion. The manuals for deception. The Orwellian survielance state.
If the world would protect human rights, then it must not treat China as a normal state in these circumstances. States engaged in genocide are not normal states. A good place to start would be suspension and then expulsion from the World Trade Organization, followed by revocation of most favored nation status, a status China richly deserved to lose 30 years ago when it slaughtered pro-democracy protestors, and should never have been given back.
1989 democracy protests in China were brutally repressed with about 10,000 killed. But after brief interregnum US continued open economic policies with regime responsible for that violence despite the continued political dominance of the Chinese Communist party.
“Students understood they were given one hour to leave square but after five minutes APCs attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make 'pie' and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains. Four wounded girl students begged for their lives but were bayoneted." -From recently declassified British diplomatic cable. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516
The second set of revelations concerns Chinese influence and subversion campaigns...
Capitalism is coming to an end in China
Howard Richman, 11/17/2019
Capitalism is coming to an end in China. On the China Law Blog, Dan Harris writes that Chinese businesses are trying to get short-term profits now because they don’t believe in the long run. Harris also writes that Chinese partners in joint manufacturing ventures with American companies are starting to ignore their American partners:
[O]ur China lawyers are dealing with an increasing number of situations where the Chinese side of a China joint venture has essentially taken over the joint venture and stops communicating with its foreign joint venture partner. Maybe these joint ventures are no longer even profitable, but our clients are entitled to determine this and if the joint venture should be shut down, our clients are also entitled to a share of the joint venture company’s existing assets. For how to prevent/mitigate such problems, check out this article on China joint ventures. It’s as though the Chinese side in these joint venture partnerships views it as their patriotic duty to kick their foreign partner to the curb....
How Urkaine oligarchs stole $1.8 billion of IMF (i.e., U.S.) loans, while Biden was watching.
Howard Richman, 11/15/2019
The U.S. gives loans to prop up foreign banks through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 2009 and 2015, President Obama increased the U.S. contribution to the IMF, so that our contribution went up by a total of $9.2 billion. In 2014, the IMF gave the central bank of the Ukraine a massive $4.51 billion loan. However, $1.8 billion of that loan disappeared, despite the fact that Vice President Biden had been delegated by President Obama as the U.S. point man (start watching at 51:37) to prevent such corruption. In an article that was published in 2015, Harper's Magazine traced how that $1.8 billion disappeared:
The scheme, as revealed in a series of court judgments of the Economic Court of the Dnipropetrovsk region monitored and reported by Nashi Groshi, worked like this: Forty-two Ukrainian firms owned by fifty-four offshore entities registered in Caribbean, American, and Cypriot jurisdictions and linked to or affiliated with the Privat group of companies, took out loans from PrivatBank in Ukraine to the value of $1.8 billion. The firms then ordered goods from six foreign “supplier” companies, three of which were incorporated in the United Kingdom, two in the British Virgin Islands, one in the Caribbean statelet of St. Kitts & Nevis. Payment for the orders—$1.8 billion—was shortly afterwards prepaid into the vendors’ accounts, which were, coincidentally, in the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank. Once the money was sent, the Ukrainian importing companies arranged with PrivatBank Ukraine that their loans be guaranteed by the goods on order....
Review of: The Unifinished Peace: The Council of Foreign Ministers and the Hungarian Peace Treaty of 1947 by Mihály Fülöp
Jesse Richman, 11/11/2019
Published by Social Science Monographs, Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications.
2019 marks the 30th anniversary of what in Hungary is sometimes referred to as the "annus mirabilis" or year of miracles -- the fall of the iron curtain which was rapidly succeeded by the end of the cold war. In that year a series of events, some planned from above and others organized from below, brought about the dissolution of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the freeing of nations which had been held in bondage and coercion in the Soviet orbit for more than four decades. One of the joys of my Fulbright in Budapest this year has been the opportunity to take part in many commemorations of the events that unfolded 30 years ago.
But the world is now 30 years beyond that era. And as tensions rachet, institutions are tested, and power balances shift in the current moment, it is worthwhile to reflect upon another set of lessons: lessons from the tumultious years that marked the transition point from World War II to the Cold War. And to understand those events, there are perhaps few more intriguing vantage points than the Hungarian experience. During WW II Hungary had fought the Soviets, attempted shifting sides, been occupied by the Germans, and been liberated by the Red Army. In the aftermath of the war, it was the only country in what would become the Soviet block to hold nearly free elections, a late 1945 ballot in which communists won less than 20 percent, even under Red Army occupation.
Fülöp's book introduces the reader to the complicated interplay of understandings and and actions that shaped the policies...
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May 2020
- Dr. Fauci and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Victims - I'm published in American Thinker this morning
- Operation Warp Speed eliminates Fauci’s power to delay vaccines - I'm published in American Thinker this morning
- Four questions that senators should ask Redfield and Fauci on Tuesday - I'm published in the American Thinker this morning
- The last time they politicized the treatment for an epidemic - I'm published in the American Thinker this morning
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