Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.9.2020

Testimony of a surgeon working in Bergamo, in the heart of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak

Scientists may have found a way to prevent coronavirus spread

Coronavirus Update: Cases Skyrocket In Germany, Prompting Economic Concerns

Gates-funded program will soon offer home-testing kits for new coronavirus

Discovery of anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents from commercially available flavor via docking screening

Inhibitors for Novel Coronavirus Protease Identified by Virtual Screening of 687 Million Compounds

Coronavirus: Ten Dead in China Quarantine Hotel Collapse

Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus

Iran Reports Its Largest Coronavirus Death Toll Within 24-Hour Period

Netherlands: Big Jump in Breda Coronavirus Cases; 34% of Country’s Patients in Noord-Brabant

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Helmut Kohl’s Death Reminds us of NATO’s Uselessness

A while back around September, I started to write about why I agreed with those individuals that considered, or expressed the view that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete.  However, I refrained after reading other people expressing a historical viewpoint that was similar to mine and I did not want to just throw up more words on the same topic just in a different sequence and syntax of word usage.  But I have decided to revisit this topic upon the passing of former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl.

If we walk back in time to 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin wall, we would be able to see that the issues that concerned the western political establishment regarding German re-unification are similar in structure and content to those made in contradiction of the utility of NATO some 30 years later. What is going to happen to the stability of Europe that has been maintained ever since the end of the cold-war? Could and will Gorbachev (easily synonymous with Putin) accept the end of East Germany (soviet tanks were there at the time)?  What will happen to the Eastern borders of Europe (especially Poland in 1989 ironically where NATO is conducting war games currently)?

As then, these issues and questions persist and frequently brought up by pro-Hillary Clinton progressive Neoliberal NATO-crats and folks like Sen. John McCain who recurrently speaks out openly to convict any effort to normalization US and EU relations with Russia (Putin). This is done any time they get, like a talentless rapper who hypes the real star on stage, they hype-up the fake news that presents Russia being a military threat in Eastern Europe (and anywhere else if the can - see Syria). Seems some NATO or Brussel’s big wheel (Secretary-General Jens Stoltenber & German DM Ursulla von der Leyen) comes out of the back room every day to try and show how much they hate Russia over the next man or woman also.

Once upon a time NATO was simply a treaty designed to keep an occupying US army on European soil. Now it is just an outdated means of increasing US influence more so than being able to provide any real security anywhere. Basically, it is just a cash cow that seeks ways to justify immense military spending over the delusion America and European hallucination that we are perpetually on the brink of war with Russia, as well as a repurposed weapon of global neocolonialism and the tool of choice for regime change and national building. Thus, it’s clear that many have a serious interest in seeing the status quo (NATO) continue.

Dr. Kohl’s death is a reminder of this and that diplomacy is a skill set that is mandatory if peace and not war is truly the desired outcome for all conflicts. We must recall that the French said Kohl’s plan for German reunification was out of the question and there was a lot of resistance to the idea of a united Germany in general. Most (France and the UK) felt it would change the balance of the EU forever and it did. Not to mention there was the old axiom - NATO was designed to keep the Russians out, the US military machine in Europe and the Germans down. Making one Germany destroyed all three of these prospects. Moreover, Kohl’s success destroyed the justification for the incessant funding of the NATO war machine.

Probably the best detailed account of what Dr. Kohl had to deal with is described in Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification by Frédéric Bozo. Bozo describes how it only took Kohl less than a month to pre-empt all concerns from France, the U.K. and the United States when he came up with a 10-point plan to fast-track German unification. Of all his actions, his pledge to recognize the post-war German-Polish border (Oder-Neisse line) and his promise to pay for the cost of the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany were both shrewd and savvy and led to the end of the cold war. One could also posit that the post-Cold War reconfiguration of NATO that occurred after Kohl’s unification of Germany was the start of the post WWII uselessness of NATO.
The fall of the Berlin wall was then followed by Gorbachev dissolving the Warsaw Pact and relinquishing control over all the Soviet-occupied Eastern European countries. This should have been the end of NATO since it was FORMED and ESTABLISHED to serve as a  cooperative security peacetime military alliance against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact Nations. Kohl’s efforts also included getting the U.S. to promise that we would never expand NATO further eastward if he didn’t object to East Germany’s becoming a member of NATO.

Given the history, hard not to disagree but Donald Trump or anyone else as it regards NATO usefulness. Fact is that when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, the reason for the formation and maintenance of NATO ended too. If you want to keep it real, NATO was never capable of defending Europe without the US and its mission still hasn’t evolved to keep up with threat of international terrorism and combatting the Islamic State. Problem is when you openly say such, you end up hurting the feelings of the D.C. neoliberal establishment war machine profiteer cartel. Cats the likes of Will Marshall, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, and Stephen Hadley who see NATO to extend their crony capitalistic ways. These are the folk who are the maddest when Trump and others point out that NATO freeloader nations need to “pay up or get out.”
Yes, Kohl reminds me of how archaic and old-fashined and unserviceable NATO is. Nations like Albania, Croatia Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia  are all member states now (although the U.S. promised Gorbachev that NATO would not encroach upon Russia’s borders). It is easy to see that in 2017 it has a single purpose: to serve as bait to start a world war with Russia.

Instead of heeding the wisdom of former statesmen before Kohl like Sen. Robert A. Taft in 1949 or President Eisenhower’s via his prophetic cautioning in 1961 that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," the west has yet to objectively examine the utility of NATO – especially if the desire is peaceful co-existence globally. Taft understood all of this and saw the formation of NATO, regardless of what was said, as “an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia,” saying that he believed “such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace. A third world war would be the greatest tragedy the world has ever suffered.” True, the UN Charter supposedly only allows nations to use force only in self-defense when under threat of imminent attack, but it seems that NATO knowing it is no longer valid, is just itching to provoke a fight with Putin, against reason and even to the detriment of humanity.

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War of Taxes

Around 600 years ago in England there was a war.  It was between the House of Lancaster and the House of York and was called ex post facto the Wars of the Roses. It was a petty and bloody war and ended when Richard III, the last Yorkist king, was defeated by Henry Tudor founder of the house of Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. We may be in for a similar metaphorical history making period of time if the tea leaves read from Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and with Italian voters rejecting Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s referendum on constitutional reforms and the established world order with a “no” vote this past Sunday. If so, an ample title for this allegory could be the “War of Taxes.”

Here in America, liberals have been so caught up on raising taxes on the wealthy that they missed the picture worldwide in terms on how these policies impact not only the world transnational economics but also the common citizen. This means that tax policy has to consider global and national economic interest equally.

As it stands, Ireland with a 12.5% corporate tax rate, has one of the lowest in the world. The federal corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent. Thus using basic math, if a company constructs a factory in Ireland that produces $1 million in profit, it will pay $125,000 in Irish tax compared to $350,000 that it would pay if it built the same factory in the U.S. This is a large difference seeing that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) notes that the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate among its 35 industrialized member nations.  What does this mean? Well knowing that Ireland is in the midst of a deep recession, the last thing there economic policy needs is to run-off foreign investment.

The U.K. has a similar economic problem. But after their June 23 Brexit vote to leave the European Union, under the leadership of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May,they are going out of their way to comfort international companies to show that the U.K. will become an even better place to do business. Although what the U.K. corporate tax policy will be (whether she would be willing to embrace a suggested cut to 15% or to cut the rate by 2020 to 17%), the British government commitment to lower corporation tax is being well received and it is certain that in the future, it will be significantly lower than current levels and would give the nation the lowest corporate-tax rate among G20 nations. Presently the U.K. corporate tax rate is 20%, which is one of the lowest in the G-20 and the same as Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

President elect Donald Trump has also expressed the importance of addressing the U.S.corporate tax rate. If we look beyond the G20 to the top 188 economic nations, the U.S.’s corporate tax rate is the third highest in the world, lower only than the United Arab Emirates’ rate of 55 percent and Puerto Rico’s rate of 39 percent, with the worldwide average corporate tax rate being 22.5 percent. Trump has proposed reducing the US federal tax from 35% to 15%. If this happens, in particular with a GOP dominated House and Senate, we may see the possibility of additional cuts in other nations. Steven Mnuchin, Trumps U.S.Treasury Secretary-nominee is already on record saying he wants to make tax reforms to increase job growth his main priority.

Before you say that Trump economic policy is impractical, be reminded that the U.S. is not the only country pushing for lower corporate tax rates. In 2015 Italy moved to lower its national corporate tax rate 24% starting in 2017 and Canada and Japan are just two of other countries currently in the process of lowering their corporate tax rates to attract new transnational businesses. Canada currently has a corporate income tax rate of 26.7 per cent. Even Japan, in an effort to promote growth just reduced its corporate tax rate to 30%. Germany along with Ireland made big cuts in an effort to attract corporate investment more than a decade ago and it has proffered effective. 

All of the above may be a forewarning of what may be on the horizon – a war of corporate tax rates around the globe.  This should only be expected since after losing regulatory requirements and closing tax loopholes, the only thing left to promote domestic economic growth in pragmatic terms is to reduce ones national corporate tax rate. Moreover, given that the U.S. doesn’t have a value-added tax (VAT or federal sales tax), having higher corporate tax rates will continue to serve as an impediment to economic growth domestically in terms of increased wages and jobs.  It is not a requirement that we turn into a Greece before we learn the lessons of Greece. So although the War of the Roses is history, maybe 600 years from now, history books will be talking about the war of taxes.

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Assad, Trump, Putin and Rethinking Syria

With sixty-five days remaining before President Elect Donald Trump takes office, one of the more pressing foreign policy concerns, even from his mouth involves ISIS and Syria.  In particular given the international disquiet and precarious uncertainty member states of the European Union have displayed before and after his election.

Prior to the U.S. completion of the primary election, the EU and Obama administration were not completely inagreement on how to address Syria or ISIS.  On the one hand the Obama Administration only claim of success was the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons capability, which was achieved mainly because of the influence of Russia.  However, outside of this, the Obama administration has been unable to contain the Syrian crisis and has resulted in a mass exodus of refugees into surrounding nation and Europe.

Consequently the EU is just as confused as the present administration and is all over the place with respect to any consistent policy options pertaining to Syria as one would expect with 28 different member states. Instead of embracing Putin, the EU adopted the position of President Obama from 2011 and the leaders of some of the nations, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany repeated verbatim that Assad must go.

Instead of working with Putin to attempt to destroy a common foe, the Obama administration has resulted to the childish action of name calling as opposed to formulating a geopolitical policy to address ISIS.  In one such instance, Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN accused Russia of supporting “barbarism” upon which she and representatives to the UN from the UK and France walked out right when the Syrian representative was to address the council. Even when Obama decided to work with Putin concerning a ceasefire in Aleppo, he was unable to bring fellow NATO member Turkey along, who believes that such would end in a redrawing of the battlefield of Syria in favor of Bashar Assad’s regime and the Kurd’s.

Beyond the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, the citizens of the EU are more concerned with the massive influx of immigrants and a succession of terror attacks in France, Belgium and Germany more than Assad. Trump’s approach is more in line with the citizens of the EU and US than the leadership of the US and EU independent nations.

Trump’s election will obviously take U.S. Syrian foreign policy in a direction in contrast to the EU and President Obama. His approach seems to be more political and diplomatic including working with Putin and Assad if his views on regime change are sincere. Trump has said the U.S. will close its borders to refugees from the Syrian civil war which is in diametric opposition to the stance taken by Merkel.  It is also understood from his statements made during the second presidential debate that his focus would be on defeating the Islamic State (IS) as opposed to going against Russia or Assad, or seeking regime change in Syria.

He has also openly stated he viewed Putin as a good leader and a person he could work with looking for peace and cooperation as opposed to war and animosity.  Similarly, he has offered a not too positive picture of the Saudi’s and NATO. One reason for this is that during the republican primary and general election Trump placed domestic policy as his most unyielding concern. 

Just this past week Trump indicated that he would stop supplying weapons to anti-Assad forces on the ground. This is consistent with some of his past statements in which he has been quoted as saying “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned withSyria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, isaligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have noidea who these people are.” He has even warned that if the US attacks Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

All of this is speculation with the exception of the President Elect’s words and his media described “isolationism.”  We still have to wait for him to put together his administration and name a secretary of state. What is certain is that the back and forth that pigeon-holed the Obama Administration, his Department of State, the Pentagon and CIA on ISIS and regime change in Syria are over.

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