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THE MARCH TO $2500

The flood gates have opened, liquidity has been poured into economies the world over; this is the result of the Wuhan Coronavirus which has paralyzed the economic output of states and countries. The United States is rolling out $2.2 trillion on top of the primary liquidity shoveled into the banking system by the FED. Effectively we will see the race to the bottom. How so?

Remember Weimar, where money was everything but real. By the time the man in the street realized what happened, his fortune went up in flames, or shall we say, went down in flames. Without a gold standard, States are given Carte Blanche of printing fiat paper to their heart desires.

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But before they know it, hyperinflation will roar its ugly head. And that is what happened in the Weimar Republic, to pay for war debt, the market was flooded with marks. This was subsequent of the releasing the mark’s ties to gold. Sounds familiar doesn’t it.

A loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 Marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks by late 1923. By November 1923, the US dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. You say it can’t happen here, but wait, they said a pandemic can’t happen here, but it did. Only the shadow knows what will happen next.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 120px-50_Billionen_Mark_Stolberg_Eschweiler_001.jpg

The 50 Trillion German Mark seen above.

GOLD, the store of value when the value of currencies is fungible. Will $100 become $1,000 or will $100 become $1. When the music stops there will be only one survivor. No need to tell you who, but we will anyway; those who hold the Gold will rule the roost. So in the finale we shall see the battle of currencies, which one will come out on top is the question. Let the games begin.

CHINA’S REVERSE YELLOW JOURNALISM – WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

China stifles coronavirus research in apparent bid to control narrative, analysts say.

Two websites for leading universities in China seem to have published and then deleted academic research about the origins of the coronavirus, according to a report.

The posts on the websites of Fudan University and the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) were erased from online caches — in a possible bid to control the narrative surrounding the pandemicThe Guardian reported.

The Wuhan university appeared to have published and then deleted posts about academic research that China’s ministry of science and technology needed to approve before publication.

Similar apparent censorship turned up in the form of deleted posts originally published on April 9 by the school of information science and technology at Fudan University in Shanghai.

“They are seeking to transform it from a massive disaster to one where the government did everything right and gave the rest of the world time to prepare,” Kevin Carrico, a senior research fellow of Chinese studies at Monash University, told The Guardian.

“There is a desire to a degree to deny realities that are staring at us in the face … that this is a massive pandemic that originated in a place that the Chinese government really should have cleaned up after SARS,” he added.

China’s science and technology ministry had announced on April 3 that academic researchers needed to report their coronavirus findings to officials within three days or be terminated.

The news outlet noted that China’s President Xi Jinping published an essay in March that included “tracing the origin of the virus” a national priority; the science and technology ministry referenced the essay shortly before the universities changed tunes.

On New Year’s Eve, China informed the World Health Organization of a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” spreading through Wuhan, an industrial city of 11 million.Video

The government closed a seafood market at the center of the outbreak, moved all patients with the virus to a specially designated hospital and collected test samples to send to government laboratories. Doctors were told to stay quiet; one who issued a warning online was punished. He later died of the virus.

The Pentagon was said to have first learned about the new coronavirus in December from open-source reports emanating from China. By early January, warnings about the virus had made their way into intelligence reports circulating around the government. On Jan. 3, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], Robert Redfield, received a call from his Chinese counterpart with an official warning.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said he was alerted to the virus around the same time — and within two weeks was fearful it could bring about a global catastrophe.Video

Quickly, U.S. intelligence and public health officials started doubting China’s reported rates of infection and death toll. They pressed China to allow in U.S. epidemiologists — both to assist the country in confronting the spread and to gain valuable insights that could help buy time for the U.S. response. U.S. officials also pressed China to send samples of the virus to U.S. labs for study and for vaccine and test development.

On Jan. 11, China shared the virus’ genetic sequence. That same day, the National Institutes of Health started working on a vaccine.

CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Ultimately, the U.S. was able to get China’s consent to send two people on the WHO team that traveled to China later in the month. But by then precious weeks had been lost and the virus had raced across Asia and had started to escape the continent.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

GOVERNOR CUOMO GIVES TRUMP A THUMBS UP

Contrary to the common diatribe that all Democrats and their alter-ego media consistently tow the progressive line, Governor Cuomo’s recent kudos for President Trump dispels that paradigm.

NEWS

NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO PRAISES DONALD TRUMP FOR RESPONDING ‘VERY QUICKLY’ TO CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo thanked President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday for responding “very quickly” to the coronavirus outbreak in the state.

The governor praised them during a press conference on Monday morning in which he provided updates to the coronavirus situation in New York.

“The fairness dictates that kudos where kudos are due, and here the vice president and the president responded very quickly. So, I want to thank them for that,” Cuomo said.

LINDSEY GRAHAM SAYS WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP THINKS

Contrary to the conventional opinion, well at least for those on record, Lindsey Graham has hit the proverbial nail on the head. Senator Graham is recommending that the United States cancel some of the debt owed to China. Now that is a plan.

This article originally appeared on Raw Storyrawlogo

On Fox News Thursday in discussion with Sean Hannity, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made an extraordinary statement: That he wants the United States to “cancel” some of the national debt held by the Chinese government as punishment for allowing the coronavirus to spread beyond its borders.

“I want to get the medical supply chain back in the United States, and I want to start canceling some debt that we owe to China, because they should be paying us, not us paying China,” said Graham. “So I think you’re going to see a bipartisan pushback against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.

Putting aside the thorny legal question of whether a foreign country can be legally held at fault for the spread of a deadly disease, there is a big problem with what Graham is proposing: the 14th Amendment.

The amendment, one of the three “Reconstruction Amendments” passed in the wake of the Civil War, contained a clause at the end that was designed to prevent Southern politicians — who historically wielded outsized power in Congress — from canceling the U.S. war debt, which could have shielded the white landowners who led the war effort from having to pay taxes: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

At a bare minimum, this amendment would appear to make it unconstitutional to “cancel” Treasury bonds held by the Chinese government or businesses. But it might go even further than that — some have interpreted the phrase “shall not be questioned” more literally, to mean that public officials are bound not to say anything that would make creditors “question” the validity of the public debt. If that is the case, then Graham would have violated the Constitution simply by saying he wants debt held by China to be canceled.

THE STORY HAS NOT BEEN WRITTEN YET, but when this is all over we shall see what price China will pay. And we guaranteed that it will be in spades. China is currently on a political campaign by supplying respirators, masks and other various supplies to countries in need. This is pure and simple the Zeitgeist of the day. And as the sun comes up, the countries of the world are licking the ass of China. However, it won’t be long before most countries who China patronized with construction projects, loans and whatever realized that they were patsies.

Take Italy for example, does anyone think that the Italians are happy with their relationship with China today. After the virus became known in Wuhan, the Chinese fled to Lombardy causing multitude of deaths, hard aches and illnesses. Italy has been devastated in more ways than one. And we shall see what price they will pay. We can almost guarantee that the Ndrangheta of Calabria and La Costa Nostra will be involved. Our bet is they will make China a deal that they can’t refuse. Count on it! Italians, like Albanians don’t forget.

DI FI – JOINS OBAMA

Giving aid to and abetting the enemy (Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemiesgiving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.) Senator Diane Feinstein has recommended that the United States give Iran $5 large, that is FIVE BILLION to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. Now that is a great idea, however there are no strings attached. We have no problem with helping people, but there are documents to sign, but most of all a regimen to follow is a definite mandate. Our number one priority is to force Iran to dismantle all of their nuclear facilities under United States guidance from day one. Additionally, we the United States must demand full access to the entire country of Iran.

THE WORLD MUST FILE A CLASS ACTION SUIT AGAINST CHINA

The Commie Chinese Government is guilty of Mass Murder. In cahoots with the WHO they have literally murdered hundreds of thousands. Additionally, they have caused economic havoc the world over, costing countries trillions upon trillions of dollars. The cost and total damaged will not be known for several years, but our back of the envelope estimate is somewhere in the hundred trillion range.

A suit must be filed in the World Court. China must pay for their crimes.

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WANTED FOR MASS MURDER
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus - 2017 (36433272494) (cropped).jpg
WANTED FOR MASS MURDER

THE WORLD IS CALLING FOR HIS HEAD

Embattled global health boss faces calls for resignation over handling of coronavirus, China ties

Embattled global health boss faces calls for resignation over handling of coronavirus, China ties
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE FOR MASS MURDER

PELOSI DIAGNOSED WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER

An obsessive woman denied is an obsessive woman full of rage. Nancy Pelosi fits the bill. From Day 1 she has gone on with uncontrollable anger against President Donald J. Trump. She will not let up, her. Trump has gotten under her skin. She is distraught, she has been battered; she is on a rampage with no end in sight. If she was a private citizen, a restraining order would have been issued by the police for harassment. Her rage is fueled by an underlying disease called HATE. Yes HATE. She is a hater. PELOSI IS A STALKER.

THE LADY HAS LOST HER MARBLES

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/coronavirus-pelosi-partisan-investigation-voters-liz-peek

It is almost inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is launching yet another investigation aimed at undermining President Trump. How does the woman sleep at night?

Here we are, in the midst of a horrific health and economic crisis, and House Speaker Pelosi wants, once again, to squander our nation’s resources by playing politics. She is setting up a select House committee to “assure that the taxpayer dollars are being wisely and efficiently spent”; but also, she said, to “examine all aspects of the federal response to the coronavirus.” In effect, an unlimited investigation, with subpoena powers to boot.

Should you wonder about her ambitions, consider that she put Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., who called the emergency coronavirus bill a “tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” in charge of the inquiry.

ANDY PUZDER: IN CORONAVIRUS CRISIS, TRUMP DISPLAYS LEADERSHIP AMERICANS EXPECT AND WANT

Maybe that was a reward for Clyburn providing the pivotal endorsement for Joe Biden, on the cusp of the South Carolina primary, helping the former vice president leap ahead in the race for the Democratic nomination. That pleased Establishment Democrats like Pelosi; Clyburn deserves a reward.

Never mind that the House already has an Oversight Committee; never mind that, as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., pointed out, “Congress already wrote oversight provisions into the latest funding package.”

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No, Queen Nancy wants her new investigation, no matter how it damages and divides the country. Imagine pulling our health officials off the front lines even for a minute to testify before legislators more interested in scoring soundbites than solving the nation’s problems.

In case you haven’t noticed, the coronavirus task force looks exhausted; they have been working, we hear, 20 hour days trying to cope with this monster disease. The last thing they need is a lot of nit-picking Democrats trying to trip them up.

We get it. Congress is on the sidelines and President Trump is getting way too much press to make his opponents happy. And, his approval ratings are heading higher even as Democrats criticize his every move. But for heaven’s sake: this is a national emergency – not the time for political showboating.

Sure, Congress should oversee the hundreds of billions of dollars heading to struggling Americans courtesy of the CARES Act. Heaven knows someone should be supervising the enormous release of taxpayer money. For instance, it would be fascinating to know why $25 million was funneled by Pelosi to the Kennedy Center, even as that organization had already decided to lay off its employees.

But judicious oversight, we know, will not be the focus of the committee she has formed. 

Just as her impeachment effort yielded nothing good for her party, so will this new investigation please only determined Democrats and further alienate all-important independent voters. 

Instead, Democrats will ferret out instances in which President Trump underplayed the urgency of the coronavirus threat, or cases where different federal agencies tripped over each other, causing overlapping orders and waste, or other problems that arose while mobilizing the vast federal government against the deadly virus.

There will be plenty of those, of course. That’s called the fog of war and when the war is waged suddenly and hugely against a new and invisible threat, the fog is dense.

But for fair-minded Americans sick of partisan politics and who see a national crisis as a good time to holster the pistols, Pelosi’s newest assault on the president will be yet another dud. Just as her impeachment effort yielded nothing good for her party, so will this new investigation please only determined Democrats and further alienate all-important independent voters.

Those Independents generally decide elections; it is they who have been boosting the president’s approval ratings of late. The New York Times reports that many who did not previously vote for Trump have been impressed by the vigor and determination with which he has commanded the public and private sectors to attack this deadly disease. They appreciate that mistakes will be made, but that the president is doing “the best with the information he had.”

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Those same independents were repulsed by Pelosi’s impeachment effort. As the pointless political maneuver finished up in February, Trump scored record-high ratings from that group. They saw the Democrat-led investigations as partisan game-playing, and they were right.

The newest round of House “gotcha” will play out in the same way. Democrats will call health officials from President Obama’s team to testify that Trump should have ordered ventilators earlier or imposed a federal lockdown sooner. Republicans will counter with reports detailing Obama’s failure to rebuild spent federal stocks of critical supplies like ventilators. The GOP will show clips of Pelosi encouraging people on Feb. 24 to visit San Francisco’s Chinatown for the Lunar New Year celebration, claiming it was “perfectly safe” to be there.

AN EDITORIAL FROM The Atlantic

DEAS

Consider the Possibility That Trump Is Right About China

Critics are letting their disdain for the president blind them to geopolitical realities.APRIL 5, 2020Nadia SchadlowFormer deputy national-security adviser for strategyEnjoy unlimited access to The Atlantic for less than $1 per week.Sign inSubscribe Now

A masked man on a scooter in front of a portrait of Xi Jinping
ALY SONG / REUTERS

When a new coronavirus emerged in China and began spreading around the world, including in the United States, President Donald Trump’s many critics in the American foreign-policy establishment were quick to identify him as part of the problem. Trump had campaigned on an “America first” foreign policy, which after his victory was enshrined in the official National Security Strategy that his administration published in 2017. At the time, I served in the administration and orchestrated the writing of that document. In the years since, Trump has been criticized for supposedly overturning the post–World War II order and rejecting the role the United States has long played in the world. Amid a global pandemic, he’s being accused—on this site and elsewhere—of alienating allies, undercutting multinational cooperation, and causing America to fight the coronavirus alone.

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And yet even as the current emergency has proved him right in fundamental ways—about China specifically and foreign policy more generally—many respectable people in the United States are letting their disdain for the president blind them to what is really going on in the world. Far from discrediting Trump’s point of view, the COVID-19 crisis reveals what his strategy asserted: that the world is a competitive arena in which great power rivals like China seek advantage, that the state remains the irreplaceable agent of international power and effective action, that international institutions have limited capacity to transform the behavior and preferences of states.

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Kori Schake: The damage that ‘America first’ has done

China, America’s most powerful rival, has played a particularly harmful role in the current crisis, which began on its soil. Initially, that country’s lack of transparency prevented prompt action that might have contained the virus. In Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Chinese officials initially punished citizens for “spreading rumors” about the disease. The lab in Shanghai that first published the genome of the virus on open platforms was shut down the next day for “rectification,” as the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported in February. Apparently at the behest of officials at the Wuhan health commission, news reports indicate, visiting teams of experts from elsewhere in China were prevented from speaking freely to doctors in the infectious-disease wards. Some experts had suspected human-to-human transmission, but their inquiries were rebuffed. “They didn’t tell us the truth,” one team member said of the local authorities, “and from what we now know of the real situation then, they were lying” to us.   

Now China’s propagandists are competing to create a narrative that obscures the origins of the crisis and that blames the United States for the virus. This irresponsible behavior and lack of transparency revealed what Trump’s National Security Strategy had identified early on: that “contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of others.” Instead of becoming a “responsible stakeholder”—a term George W. Bush’s administration used to describe the role it hoped Beijing would play following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001—the Chinese Communist Party used the advantages of WTO membership to advance a political and economic system at odds with America’s free and open society. Previous National Security Strategy documents had tiptoed around China’s adversarial conduct, as if calling out that country as a competitor—as the 2017 document unequivocally did—was somehow impolite.

Lindsay Gorman: 5G is where China and the West finally diverge

But at some point, an American administration needed to shift the conversation away from hopes for an imagined future China to the realities of the Communist Party’s conduct—which is hardly a secret. For the decade and a half prior to 2017, Republican and Democratic leaders publicly worried about China’s unwillingness to play by the rules, but were reluctant to deal head on with China’s authoritarian government and statist economy. The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic Security Commission has consistently called out China’s unfair practices. In 2010, President Barack Obama lambasted China before the G-20 for its currency manipulation. The need to compete effectively with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party is one of the few points of agreement between Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even as he seeks to find ways to conclude reciprocal trade agreements, his administration has not lost sight of China’s aggressive rise.

At least as controversial as Trump’s critique of China is his emphasis on the importance of sovereignty and his insistence that strong sovereign states are the main agents of change. But states are the foundation of democratic governance and, fundamentally, of security. It is the citizens of states who vote and hold leaders accountable. And it is states that are the foundation of military, political, and economic power in alliances such as NATO, or organizations like the United Nations.

Trump’s emphasis on protecting U.S. sovereignty brought to a boil a simmering national debate about the overlooked costs of globalization. A blind adherence to what the economist Dani Rodrik has called “hyper-globalization”the idea that the interests of big corporations and the principle of market integration took precedence over widely shared prosperity and economic security—had come at the expense of domestic industries. For years, people who complained about these consequences were dismissed as isolationists or as being on “the wrong side of history.”

Peter Beinart: Trump’s break with China has deadly consequences

The coronavirus experience demonstrates that economic interaction does not occur in a vacuum of geopolitical competition. Dependence on China for crucial medical equipment throughout the pandemic has illuminated the dangers of a hyper-globalized economy. Experts had warned of American dependence on key drug ingredients from China. The Wall Street Journal has reported that China is the only maker of key ingredients for certain classes of drugs, including established antibiotics that treat a range of bacterial infections such as pneumonia. American reliance on Chinese suppliers for other pharmaceuticals and medical supplies is also worrisome. Americans should not depend on an authoritarian rival state for its citizens’ health—any more than the United States and other free and open societies should give Chinese companies, and by extension the Chinese Communist Party, control over communications infrastructure and sensitive personal data.

Many of President Trump’s critics in the foreign-policy community put great stock in the ability of multilateral and international organizations to constrain the misbehavior of China and other states. These organizations, at their best, promote concerted action against commonly recognized problems. But Trump’s critics tend to view them mainly in their idealized form and as the central instruments to solve global problems and advance values shared by all. In practice, though, how international organizations perform is profoundly influenced by power relationships among member states.

China’s leaders have become quite skillful at using these bodies to pursue their own interests. President Xi Jinping has made it a priority—as he put it in a 2018 speech—to “reform” and lead in the “global governance system,” viewing such efforts as integral to “building a modern, strong socialist country.” Despite its record of stealing patented technologies, China tried to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization, an effort thwarted by Washington. Chinese tech companies have also sought to induce the United Nations to adopt their facial-recognition and surveillance standards, to clear the way for the deployment of their technologies around the world.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy challenged the assumption that international organizations are always driven by a common global good. China’s undue influence in key international organizations was evident most recently, when the World Health Organization hesitated to declare COVID-19 a public-health emergency of international concern. WHO officials amplified Chinese officials’ early claims that the virus posed no danger of human-to-human transmission. The head of the organization even congratulated China’s top leadership for its “openness to sharing information.” Apparently seeking to avoid Beijing’s wrath, the WHO refused to respond to Taiwan’s early concerns about human-to-human transmission of the virus outbreak in Wuhan.

The COVID-19 experience, although far from over, has generated strong evidence that, while the WHO and other international organizations are of course important for information sharing and coordination, nations continue to do the heavy lifting. The United States remains the largest contributor to the WHO, paying about 15 percent of the organization’s budget—compared with China’s 0.21 percent. In early March, Trump signed a supplemental appropriations act that included $1.3 billion in additional U.S. foreign assistance for pandemic response. Most recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an additional $274 million in emergency funding for at-risk countries. This aid does not come with the strings that China attaches to its aid.

Contrary to what critics argue, “America first” does not mean “America alone.” That Trump might be introducing needed correctives to the hyper-globalization pursued by earlier administrations is generating serious cognitive dissonance in some quarters. And the reality is that only one organization in the entire world has as its sole responsibility the American people’s safety. That institution is the U.S. government. Whether led by Republicans or Democrats—or by Donald Trump or anyone else—it should always put the American people first.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.NADIA SCHADLOW, a former deputy national security adviser for strategy, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.