Coronavirus: Germany, France accuse Americans of mask ‘piracy’, dirty tricks
France's Macron administration is now openly accusing the Americans of foul practices in a time of acute distress, and Germany is joining in. Covid-19 may end up shredding the Atlantic alliance.
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A fundamental lack of trust between the US and Europe risks hampering efforts to collectively tackle the damage unleashed by the pandemic
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With hundreds of their citizens dying each day, the degree of suspicion also feeds into a narrative that it’s every nation out for itself
The US embassy in Paris said any suggestion that the federal government was involved in such practices was “completely false.” There was no immediate response the allegations from the White House or the State Department.
“We view this as an act of modern piracy,” Berlin Interior Minister Andreas Geisel said. “You cannot act in such a way among transatlantic partners. Such wild west methods can’t dominate, even in a time of global crisis.”
With hundreds of their citizens dying each day, the incidents highlight the fundamental distrust between the US and Europe. It risks hampering efforts to collectively tackle the damage unleashed by a virus that has brought the world’s economy to a standstill.
The degree of suspicion also feeds into a narrative that it’s every nation out for itself as Europeans are also viewing with greater scepticism offers of help from Russia and China, wondering if there are strings attached.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Thursday that his administration has seen orders cancelled as a result of the global shortage of protective gear. Some French officials are blaming unidentified Americans for swooping in to outbid them as they try to secure supplies.
“A load was taken from us by Americans who overbid on a batch that we had identified,” Valerie Pecresse, regional president of Paris, told broadcaster LCI on Thursday. “We pay on delivery because we want to see the masks, while Americans pay cash and without looking. Of course this is more attractive for those who just seek to turn a profit on the back of the world’s distress.” She didn’t say whether the people involved were federal officials, company representatives or private individuals.
The pandemic has left governments, companies, charities and individuals around the world competing for scarce supplies of protective kit and medical equipment as health care systems face an unprecedented surge of highly infectious patients with acute, sometimes deadly respiratory problems.
3M on Friday defended its decision to export respirators from its US facilities to Canada and Latin America, saying there would be “significant humanitarian implications” from halting supplies. Trump earlier threatened retribution against the company for sending masks and ventilators outside the US
The head of the Grand Est region in France, Jean Rottner, told RTL radio that his representatives had been outbid by rivals from the US when they were trying to source masks.
“On the tarmac, Americans take out cash and pay three or four times the price for our orders, so we really have to fight,” he said. A spokesman for Rottner declined to comment.
With the whole world trying to buy masks from China, it’s possible that there may have been some “incidents” involving the delivery of orders, an official in the President Emmanuel Macron’s office said.
“The United States government has not purchased any masks intended for delivery from China to France,” the US embassy said in an emailed statement. “Reports to the contrary are completely false.”
France has taken delivery of 1.7 billion euros (US$1.8 billion) worth of masks already and the volume is set to increase after this week’s air shipments arrived as planned, Macron’s aide said. The president has promised that France will be able to produce all the masks it needs domestically by the end of the year as the administration works to ramp up production.
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THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN
Weinstein with his then trophy wife, fashion designer Georgina Chapman. [dropcap]T[/dropcap]he sentence of 23 years in prison imposed on film producer Harvey Weinstein by Justice James A. Burke of the New York State Supreme Court is a savage conclusion to a travesty of a legal process. In a case in which a “mountain of doubt,” in the words of one journalist, was raised by Weinstein’s defense team, Burke handed out nearly the maximum possible sentence. Weinstein was found guilty February 24 of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. After experiencing chest pains Wednesday, Weinstein was taken from Rikers Island prison to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Weinstein’s sentence is longer than that given to numerous former Nazi officials convicted of horrifying war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. US government leaders, responsible for illegal, aggressive wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, resulting in more than 1 million deaths and tens of millions of refugees, have never been charged with any crime. Executives of corporations that murder workers or civilians, out of profit concerns, such as Boeing and General Motors, likewise escape without punishment. Burke’s brutal action was an obviously and overtly political one. The judge had no intention of coming under fire like Judge Aaron Persky, who sat on the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. Persky handed down a relatively humane decision in the Brock Turner sexual assault case in 2016 and was turned out of office in a recall vote. At an impromptu press conference following the sentencing hearing, defense attorney Donna Rotunno correctly pointed to the “obscene” character of the sentence, to the “total unfairness” of the trial and noted that many convicted murderers would leave prison sooner than her client. A partial guilty verdict was achieved through subjecting the jury pool to a torrent of media filth and creating an intensely hostile climate in the courtroom, aided and abetted by a trial judge who manipulated the proceedings in such a manner as to prejudice the jury and ensure Weinstein’s conviction. The testimony of the three principal witnesses, Annabella Sciorra, Mimi Haley and Jessica Mann, was full of inconsistencies, gaps and implausibilities. Each of these women maintained long-term and friendly relations with Weinstein for years following the alleged attacks, asking him for jobs and favors, not indicating in a single email or text they were his victims. At the sentencing hearing Wednesday, Weinstein’s accusers had the opportunity to denounce him and demand the harshest possible sentence. Mann first attacked the defense attorneys, claiming that she had been “grilled” on the stand by lawyers who “twist the truth.” In fact, Weinstein’s lawyers, as was their obligation, merely pointed to the fact that Mann had sworn her love and friendship for Weinstein in the years following his alleged attack on her. Bizarrely, Mann described Weinstein as “a senior citizen who is literally crumbling” before our eyes. “Behind bars, Harvey can have the chance to rehabilitate while being held accountable for his crimes,” Mann said, while asking for the judge to throw the book at her former lover. Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi delivered the prosecution’s sentencing statement. Illuzzi asserted that Weinstein “got drunk on the power. He saw no authority over him, no limit to what he could take. He could take what he wanted knowing that there was very little anybody could do about it. He held all the cards and played them well.” Arthur Aidala, a member of Weinstein’s defense team, indicated he did not intend to rush. “This is a man's life here,” he said. Aidala argued for the minimum sentence of five years, observing that eight and a half years is the average sentence in New York for these offenses. Aidala went on, “He has no criminal history, he’s almost 70, he’s a broken-down man.” He said a longer sentence would be “a death penalty.” Donna Rotunno asked that Weinstein’s career as a movie producer and creative person should be considered, along with the impact of a sentence on his family, including his grown and young children. “No matter what happens here today, judge, no one really wins,” Rotunno told the court. Even if the producer received the minimum sentence, considering his health issues, “there's a good chance that Mr. Weinstein won’t live to see the end of that sentence, which is very sad.” In his own speech to the court, Weinstein explained that he thought the relationships with the various women were consensual and suggested, in the words of the New York Times, that “he was the victim of a rush to judgment.” He argued, according to the Times, “that the #MeToo campaign was similar to the Red Scare of the 1950s and compared himself to the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was jailed and blacklisted after joining the Communist Party. ‘I think that is what is happening now all over this country,’ Mr. Weinstein said.” Addressing his accusers, Weinstein remarked that he had re-read his correspondence with them and still saw their relationships as “a serious friendship, and that’s what I thought I had with you.” He continued, “I’m not going to say these aren’t great people. I had a wonderful time with these people. I’m confused, and I think men are confused,” he continued, turning once again to the #MeToo campaign. “I think about the thousands of men and women who are losing due process, and I’m worried about this country.” Judge Burke ignored the appeals of the defense and Weinstein’s own comments. “Although this is a first conviction, it is not a first offense,” he said. “There is evidence before me of other incidents of sexual assault involving a number of women, all of which are legitimate considerations for sentence.” Weinstein, in fact, has never previously been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. By the “evidence before me,” the judge presumably is referring to the so-called Molineux witnesses, i.e., witnesses permitted to testify about prior uncharged crimes by the defendant, a legally and constitutionally dubious practice. Burke allowed the testimony of several women whose alleged attacks fell outside the statute of limitations. In essence, by this logic, Weinstein received the lengthy sentence because of testimony relating to crimes that could not be proven or disproven. Burke gave Weinstein 20 years for the alleged attack on Haley and an additional three years for the alleged rape of Mann. Outside the courtroom, an obvious irate Rotunno addressed the media. “That sentence that was just handed down by this court was obscene,” she said. “That number [of years in prison] was obnoxious, there are murderers who will get out of [prison] faster than Harvey Weinstein will. That number spoke to the pressure of movements and the public. … That number did not speak to evidence, nor did it speak to justice. I am overcome with anger at that number, I think that number is a cowardly number to give. I think the judge caved, just as I believe the jury caved.” The sentence, the lawyer continued, showed “total unfairness, and a complete lack of acknowledgement of what the facts and evidence of this case actually showed. I think the judge took things into consideration that never should have been taken into consideration, especially when we know in a prior case recently, the judge gave someone in a much worse circumstance, seven and a half years.” Turning to the journalists, Rotunno pointed out that “most of you that I’ve spoken to privately have been very candid with me about the fact that you were surprised by this verdict.” Referring to the “victims’ statements,” Weinstein’s lead attorney suggested it was “very easy to say all these horrible things about him, but I think if you look at the circumstances, in real time, you say, wait a minute, what was really going on? … We don’t know what happened in those rooms, but what we do know is all of the circumstances that surrounded it, and I will never be able to reconcile that all of those circumstances are what normal, regular rape victims do.” Fellow Damon Cheronis spoke bluntly, insisting that Weinstein “wasn’t treated fairly at all, let’s just call it what it is, not by the court, not by the jury, not by a lot of you, that’s what happened. The evidence in this case, we firmly believe, did not establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about anything else [other] than whether there was reasonable doubt in this case. And to say that there wasn’t, based on the defense we put forward, is outrageous. The pressure came from everywhere, from you, from the public … Every single step of this case was engineered for this moment right here. And for people not to accept that, I find pretty disingenuous.” Weinstein faces extradition to California to face four charges there. Rotunno indicated that the defense would file its appeal in July. [premium_newsticker id=”211406″] THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN Aftermath of coup attempt in Turkey. Getty What anchors hold Turkey together if not the threat of death. A criminal holding together a nation of eighty million people and no one understands why or how it came about that the putsch that failed ended so many untold lives and empowered its mad leader to up the ante and lift the anchor and set sail on the transitory, in which direction no one knows. Six Italians whose stories will never be told died on the seashore of Nice, France together with seventy-eight other lives adrift. While the mass proletarianization of the Islamic world, accompanied by Western-made globalization continues unabated, so also the intensification of the reality of exclusion and growing inequalities in that “other” world of over one billion Muslims. And thus grows the numbers of Muslims intent on killing indiscriminately the peoples and destroying the symbols of their tormentors too busy with getting elected to consider putting a halt to murderous globalization. And thus the “assymetrical” war of kamikaze bombs and bullets mowing down now also Europeans, a war which can hardly be won or even controlled without the contribution of the people of partly European Islamic Turkey, today radicalizing at home instead of pacifying across its borders. A situation which began in the 1970s following the onset of mass unemployment in the Islamic world of workingmen, transforming them into defeatists and creating their thirst for revenge for the losses they have suffered. After decades of this catastrophe, unstoppable, apparently inevitable in a world where only power counts, an unstoppable attack on the Islamic way of life, what is the response of the West today to death? The response is weeping and mourning the dead, the granting of ever greater powers to western governments and their institutions and leaders. And in the Occident’s most powerful and power mad country, a madman contestant for leadership believes his electoral opponent should be executed. Meanwhile wave after wave of refugees, young men, women and many children trying to escape the mayhem created by the West in their lands, continue to set out for Europe from Africa and the Middle East across the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean Sea, many of whom end up in the graveyard at the bottom of that ancient sea. The chaos in Turkey, the terror spread by the Islamic State (IS-ISIL-ISIS), the ascendancy of populists like Donald Trump, and the exit of Great Britain from the European Union (Brexit) are all expressions of the lifting of familiar anchors of security worldwide, which should be sufficient to convince sane human beings to re-think their behavior. The Italian philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, notes that “the essential aspect of ancient tragedy consisted of the catharsis that caused it in the first place. But modern man has been struck blind and consequently insane. The world has apparently been struck blind and rendered mad by a chain of events only apparently disconnected one from the other and which contribute to the Great Global Disorder: the Turkish chaos, the ascendency of Donald Trump and Brexit, while the West holds fast to its conviction that its culture is still an unbreakable network covering the entire planet. Never have mere words been more significant than the expression made popular in German: Wen die Götter verderben wollen, den schlagen sie mit Blindheit. (Whom the gods want to ruin they strike with blindness.) =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= Max Keiser and Henry A. Giroux Donald Trump plays right into this zombie politics in a number of ways. As Giroux says, “Trump is among the walking dead” he seems to be out of touch with any notion of political, economic, and social justice, and will do everything he can to undermine democracy. At the same time he represents the interests of the 1%. According to Giroux, Trump is the product of what the Republican Party has been promoting for years with its flaunting of bigotry and hatred. The Democratic party has participated in this to some extent as well. Since 2001, there has been a constant play to the culture of fear. Trump also plays on celebretiy culture and he knows how to drive the media. He also pushes the anti-intellectualism that has become a source of pride in the party and in much of US culture. Trump is the epitome of civic illiteracy. He is the end point of zombie politics – a politician who basically wants to commit war crimes (torture, carpet bombing populations). His popularity is an outcome of a two party system in the US that has become so unresponsive to the needs of the people that there is tremendous anger – which he plays on to the hilt. Meanwhile the media, which should be a strong component of a democratic society is lost. The “lust for the spectacular combined with lust for profit has created an institution void of “any kind of amoral, political, social, and ethical accountability.” =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= // =By= Michael Roberts Image from Twitter via Calle Johansson [dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat the mainstream media helped to create the political monster (and disaster) that today is Donald J. Trump is not in dispute. And, aided and abetted by its willing lackeys in the neo-conservative television and radio movements, they helped to over-inflate his insatiable mega-sized ego that told him he could win the ultimate prize — the presidency of the United States. Indeed, Republican hatred of President Barack Obama and his policies, and their spineless prevaricating cowardice to privately embrace what Trump is saying and vocalizing in public, allowed a loud mouth and blowhard mediocre businessman to hijack the Republican Party from its conservative moorings. Obama by Latuff They both conspired and fornicated with each other to produce this bastard political horn-child now genuflecting to his every whim and outrageous pouting all in the interest of the continued cancerous metastasizing hating Barack Obama. Embraced by the most rabid sections of the Republican Party, the Tea Party zealots, traditional GOP establishment leaders were powerless to stop the rise of this ultra-Right Wing faction within the party that see Trump as “speaking their language” and identified with his particular odious brand of extremism and xenophobia. They are ALL complicit in the rise of the GOP’s Political Pretender. Establishment Republicans should have seen the writing on the wall when Eric Cantor, then the party’s majority leader in the House, was defeated in his bid for re-election in June 2014 by Dave Brat, an unknown Tea Party member. They should have known that the extreme wing of the party was now calling the shots when a freshman senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, one year before Cantor’s defeat, was able to orchestrate a temporary shut down of the Federal Government in October 2013. And they should have been put on the alert when the 40 or so Tea Party members in the House successfully hounded Speaker John Boehner out of office on October 31, 2015. Trump Everywhere by Rowan Wolf But even with all that these signs and developments Republican leaders still so hung up on hatred from Barack Obama did absolutely nothing. They continued to be an obstructionist force and rejected any and all compromise. Talk about unintended consequences! Now they have laughingly launched a “Stop Trump” movement to deny the party’s present front runner the presidential nomination. The party’s conservative wing, joined by a whorish mainstream media, and sundry political pundits and talk show hosts, are desperately seeking ways and means to stop Trump up to and including a controversial “brokered convention” — not that they are calling it that. If no GOP candidate — Trump, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich — reaches the magical number of 1,237 delegates the party’s national convention in July would be the last place where Trump can be stopped. But it will be very, very messy and unpopular with the Republican Party’s base, especially its Tea Party section. It that happens, the political civil war will be waged between the white collar sections of the party and its ruling class elements pushing proxy candidates like Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush, and, perhaps Senator Marco Rubio. What this will boil down to is a party willing to deny and reject the will of the vast majority of Republican voters, no matter how misplaced, in favor of a hand-picked, anointed, party establishment candidate. The split, already evident, will be between white collar Republicans and their angry blue-collar brethren from where the Trump and the Tea Party draw its members and support. The ultra-Right Ted Cruz is now attempting to position himself as the Trump alternative and the “stop Trump” candidate. However, it appears increasingly that the GOP leadership and its establishment wing is in favor of a so-called “contested convention.” Well, for starters, during the early days of American politics there was no need for the present system of primaries across the states. There was no 24-hour news cycle that hung on the every word of posturing, bombastic candidates and their surrogates. So for decades both parties — the Democratic and Republican Parties — chose candidates in large convention halls and negotiated, horse-traded, in smoke-filled hotel rooms near and around the main convention center. Ultimately, these systems became corrupt and were simply mechanisms for protecting party favorites. They were ultimately replaced by primaries where delegates were selected and apportioned based on who won (or lost). This process was accelerated in the 1970s that literally did away with brokered party conventions. The last Democratic political convention to go more than one ballot round was in 1952. On the Republican side their last brokered convention was in 1976 when Ronald Reagan forced Gerald Ford into a primary contest. Reagan was unsuccessful and had to wait until 1980 before becoming the GOP’s candidate and win the presidency for two terms. Contested or brokered conventions are very messy things. There are still many arcane and obscure rules and procedures that govern delegate behavior depending on the state they come from. For example, there are rules instituted by party organizations in, say, Ohio, that may compel its delegates to behave in a particular way in the first round of balloting in a contested convention and if there are no clear results may or may not apply to them in future rounds. Delegates may be “bound” to a frontrunner candidate in the first round of balloting and “freed” in the second round if no winner emerges. If they are “freed or unencumbered” then they can pretty much vote for who they choose. Here is where “politricks” and corruption sets in: candidates can woo delegates with promises that will materialize after they win the nomination. That’s called bribery but its quite legal in BOTH parties since its called “negotiating and advocacy.” It’s “horse-trading” at its best. When you add the anger that now permeates BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and the growing distrust of the American electorate then the recipe for political chaos looms very large are is a very real possibility. For the Republican Party this convention is about the battle for the heart and soul of the par On the Democratic side of things are different, but there is an important fight. The party is fighting to redefine its very identity having been caught in a socio-political crisis for more than a decade. In 2016 the party that once identified with poor and working class Americans is no more. That is why Democratic party establishment figures and leaders cannot understand or come to grips with the anger and dissatisfaction that has been the meteoric rise of Senator Bernie Sanders on the Left pitted against the establishment candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Right. Today, the Democratic Party is the party of the hyper-educated elite and the so-called “professional class,” a veritable meritocracy that is status driven and not welcoming of dissenting voices, especially from its blue-collar wing. It is a party that has and is now identified more with Wall Street than with Main Street. In many ways the political dialectics that drove the rise of Donald Trump are partly due to the unbelievable shortsightedness of policy decisions made by Democrats in government and on Wall Street. For example, many Southern conservative Democrats in Congress did nothing when their Republican colleagues were excoriating and attacking President Barack Obama left, right and center. They stood by and twiddled their thumbs or abandoned the party’s position and sided with Republicans. Their dislike of their own president (I’m loath to use the word “hatred”) helped to legitimize people like Trump. They never condemned a member of Congress, Joe Wilson for South Carolina, who called the president a liar during a September 2009 speech. And they have done very little to help push the president’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. Such party abandonment has drawn the ire of blue collar Democrats and young voters who saw this as a betrayal of their contract with President Obama starting in 2008. This anger and disenchantment would morph into the “Occupy and Black Lives Matter Movements” that Hillary Clinton cannot impress or attract to her campaign. In fact, were it not for the African American community and voters in the Democratic Party Ms. Clinton could not win the party’s nomination or the presidency. Here I have a word of caution for her: Just because young Democrats and white blue collar workers are flocking to Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign does not translate to her winning these voters over if he loses the nomination as expected. She’ll have to do a hell of a lot more to win over these angry and frustrated voters then she’s presently doing. Her political dilemma is that she has to be the standard bearer of a new Democratic Party — a class party. And it’s not a blue-collar working class party or even a middle class party but a party of the professional elite classes. So what’s the difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the context of this new socio-economic and political dispensation? Well, there are now just only two hierarchal structures in the United States t that at the core definition and character of bot the Republican and Democratic parties. The first is that of the dominance of corporate big business interests and the obscene amounts of money of the one percent as evidenced by the concentration of wealth in the hands of 540 American billionaires with a combined net worth f $2.4 trillion. The second is the rise and now control of the professional class that are also at the very zenith of this moneyed and wealth hierarchy. They are in a now symbiotic relationship and share the same assumptions and attitudes to the world. However, they differ in significant ways even as they share some similarities. On the Republican side these professionals are ultra and neo-conservative when it comes to finance, business policies, cultural issues, and class challenges. By contrast, professionals on the Democratic side tend to be very liberal on most issues except the economy where they are just as conservative as their Republican counterparts. They also share on essential and fundamental similarity: both are hostile to labor and contemptuous of the American working class. Certainly not. But I do have a problem with a kind of arrogant orthodoxy that comes with that class. When meritocracy becomes the dominant ideology of the professional class it creates a certain world outlook that says that you’re at the top of your profession because you deserve to be there and you’re the smartest and the best in whatever you do. You see this in the Democratic Party when Hillary Clinton seeks to dismiss income inequality as a “one issue” and universal healthcare as impractical and unattainable. You see this in the orthodoxy of President Barack Obama whose cabinet picks all come from Harvard. What happens here is that you get a group of people who do not listen to other voices and ideas from those outside of their narrow social groupings and treats those differences with total contempt. MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and Business, Management and Communications Specialist in New York City’s Black community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is socio-political and economic analysis and local community relations. He has covered the United Nations, the Caribbean and Africa in a career that spans over 32 years in journalism. As Editor of New York CARIB NEWS, a position that he’s held since 1990, he is in a unique position to have his hands on the pulse of the over 800,000 Caribbean-American community in Brooklyn, and the over 2.5 million members resident in the wider New York State community. Note to Commenters We apologize for this inconvenience. |
Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: 
