Forget About Saving Trees. Let's Kill all the MBAs -- September 20, 2020

 

Forget About Saving Trees. Let's Kill all the MBAs

 

By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 20, 2020

 

 

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

(William Shakespeare, Henry VI).

 

 

Confucius taught that wisdom must come before knowledge, the reason for which is not difficult to fathom. When we impart knowledge, we give people tools - and the power to use them, and we all know that many tools, improperly used, can cause harm. The tools of knowledge imparted in most of the prominent MBA programs have a surprising capacity for malevolence and which, in the hands and minds of immature recruits lacking the basic wisdom of tool safety, i.e., morality, have altered our corporate ethical landscape beyond hope of repair.

 

 

The world's large corporations have always contained a shrouded element of malevolence inherited from the characters of their owners, but there was a discernible point in time when this element became wholeheartedly embraced as part of the politically correct mainstream of corporate thought, a true watershed in the history of unbridled capitalism. As you no doubt already know, the US financial system, fueled by credit and cheap money alternating with deliberate monetary contractions, all controlled by the FED, has been responsible for most of the world's recession. It was thus in 1971 when the US was deeply immersed in its war in Vietnam, and it was this that would set the stage for the management changes that were to follow. When in 1971 the US government reneged on the Bretton Woods Agreement, it set in motion a worldwide inflationary spiral that ended with the savage FED-induced economic contraction in the early 1980s, initiating an abrupt and brutal recession. If we have to choose a time when everything changed, this was the time.

 

Killing Chinese Brands -- September 19, 2020

 

 

Killing Chinese Brands

 

By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 19, 2020

 

 

It is a matter of urban legend in the West that China has no international brands. With brand warfare being the current rage, so many articles in so many Western media take apparent pleasure in mocking and denigrating China for the apparent inability of Chinese companies to either produce a brand attractive to Westerners or to effectively market it in the West. One article in the Wall Street Journal claimed China could build ipads and high-speed trains, but can't even make its own fancy handbag. There is much truth in the claim that few Chinese brands have escaped their domestic environment to find comfortable residence in Western countries, though the insinuation that this has been due to Chinese shortcomings is not justified. The reasons lie elsewhere, as we will see.

 

 

One seldom-mentioned reason for the absence of Chinese brands on foreign shelves is that American, and especially Jewish-owned, multinational firms have made a science of pre-emptive registrations of brands and trademarks. As one Chinese media source reported,

 

 

"There are so many painful cases of time-honored [Chinese] brands being pre-emptively registered by foreign companies overseas and some enterprises have been unable to get their brand names back."

 

 

Sometimes these registrations are made by individuals hoping to profit by extorting large cash payments later but, far more often, are done by US multinationals to prevent the Chinese brands from ever becoming international competitors. In most cases, the Chinese firms have no idea their brand names and trademarks have been stolen and registered in all Western countries, and learn of the fact only when they begin to expand internationally. When they do learn of it, most are unfamiliar with the procedures of taking legal action against an American company, and most Chinese don't trust American courts to render fair judgment to a Chinese firm against an American company or citizen. Think of Nike and Onitsuka, or of Citibank and the Chinese citizens still trying to recover their gold. A few Japanese firms have done this as well, but the practice appears to be almost entirely American.

 

 

Changing Cultural Values -- September 19, 2020

 

Changing Cultural Values

 By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 19, 2020

 

ENGLISH    PORTUGUÊS

 

Most domestic goods are a product of, and contain much of, a nation's cultural and value-based heritage. It may be difficult to find much culture in a ballpoint pen, but Chinese Moon Cakes are all culture. Brands and products that become famous, popular, and even beloved, in a nation earn that position because of the intrinsic cultural heritage embedded within them. They resonate with the culture, the traditions and values of the people. And in the buy and sell of international commerce, these myriad products cross the oceans and travel the world's continents carrying their cultural baggage with them, with that baggage unloaded in each other nation and assimilated in part or in whole by those societies from a conscious or unconscious adoption of their inherent cultural values.

 

Much of this cultural baggage is neutral in that it doesn't detract from indigenous cultural elements but may add to them, perhaps even in a positive sense. Westerners have embraced chopsticks, dim sum, and Dragon Boat races while the Chinese embraced Valentine's Day and the trappings of Christmas decorations, but these are superficial adaptations of charming and attractive foreign customs that do not replace local culture, and indeed the underlying cultural traditions are not even understood, much less adopted. Americans may enjoy watching Chinese lion dances and firecrackers during a Chinese New Year festival but these are appreciated only for their colorful visual appeal, the embedded values having been stripped out, with the underlying culture and philosophy holding no meaning. It is similar with Christmas in China, appreciated only for its colorful visual appeal and gift-giving to friends, the vast underlying cultural and religious traditions stripped out and irrelevant. The insertion of these items into a local culture is only superficial, and has been instinctively accomplished by local society in a non-intrusive way that does no harm and is not meant to replace local culture.

 

An Epidemic of Foreign Fraud in China -- September 19, 2020

           

             An Epidemic of Foreign Fraud in China

 

 By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 19, 2020

 

 

Commercial consumer fraud by foreign multinationals in China has become so widespread that normal trust factors like famous branding, high standards, or a successful reputation are no longer reliable indicators for Chinese consumers. The many hundreds of foreign consumer-goods companies in China have so consistently and repeatedly violated not only a myriad of China's laws, but all norms and standards of morality and ethics, of pride in product, and even of simple common decency, that a healthy functioning of markets could soon become impossible. Most of these violations are not minor; almost all are criminal and most would qualify as felonies in the West. They include fraudulent advertising and consumer price frauds of every nature, constant price-fixing and retail price manipulation, violations of contract law, fraudulent JV conduct, tax evasion, consumer fraud, bribery, espionage, visa violations, illegal transfer pricing, refusals of warranty service, selling used or reconditioned products as new, serious environmental pollution, physical abuse of staff, wages below legal levels, unpaid overtime, knowingly selling diseased meat and contaminated food products, knowingly shipping substandard foods and consumer goods to China, flagrant violations of health regulations. The list is almost endless.

 

 

American multi-nationals like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, Apple, P&G exhibit not only an appalling lack of social responsibility, but demonstrate a mocking open contempt for both the consumers they defraud, and for the governments. They specialise in exploiting cheap labor in developing countries, combined with a wide range of illegal and criminal business strategies, then employ powerful PR tactics, lobbying and bribery, to avoid accountability for their products or actions. And in each instance, when another fraud is exposed or another violation discovered, these firms respond with an arrogance that appears almost surreal, a kind of crazy-making consisting of lies and denials, claims about 'core values' and 'high standards', inevitably followed by the standard Saatchi Brothers PR tactic of a list of charitable donations. When Coca-Cola was discovered selling products containing dangerous levels of pesticides and free chlorine, the company simply denied the irrefutable evidence, airily claiming its products were safe to consume, and refused a recall. When finally forced to destroy all the contaminated product, the company issued an infuriatingly arrogant babble of nonsense about high standards and core values, reminding the Chinese that Coke had made contributions to local charities. I believe most Chinese would happily forego Coca-Cola's charity, preferring that the company instead remove the pesticides from its drinks and its dealers refrain from beating employees unconscious when they ask to be paid.

 

EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- Harvard University's Fraudulent Chinese DNA Exploitation -- September 17, 2020

 

Harvard University's Fraudulent Chinese DNA Exploitation

 

 

By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 17, 2020

CHINESE   ENGLISH   NEDERLANDS   PORTUGUESE   SPANISH

 

In April of 2005, Margaret Sleeboom from the University of Amsterdam published a paper on PubMed.gov concerning a Chinese research project by Harvard University which drew international condemnation for Harvard's appalling lack of ethics in the theft of Chinese DNA. (1) (2)

 

 

Years after completion of this research, when the details were leaked to the media, Chinese authorities were furious to learn that Americans had engaged in an underhanded and secret project to collect Chinese DNA. Even though the Chinese government had previously prohibited the collection or export of any such data, Harvard eluded the prohibitions and slipped the DNA out of China.

 

 

One of the leaders of this project was a Chinese Harvard researcher Xu Xiping who, with financing from the US government (most likely the military's DNA database project) and Millennium Pharmaceuticals (3) (4) of the US, conducted this study in Anhui with Frank Speizer and Scott Weis, the latter a Harvard epidemiologist who apparently had access from an unknown source to information on about 60 million people in Anhui. Xu, who came from Anhui and still maintained contacts there, conspired with Weis and the financiers to recruit thousands of volunteers to collect the DNA and blood samples, all unknown to China's central government. Millennium was closely related to the US Defense Department and was paying millions of dollars for the study and its data.

 

 

•The Harvard University Experiment

 

 

Tufts University’s Fraudulent China Golden Rice “Experiment” -- September 17, 2020

 

Tufts University’s Fraudulent China Golden Rice “Experiment”

 

By LARRY ROMANOFF – September 17, 2020

 

 

 

The US Department of Agriculture and the US military used Tufts University as a tool under the guise of conducting innocent food health research, to carry out an illegal, deplorable and fraudulent biological weapons experiment on unwitting Chinese children. This is part of that story.

 

Many groups have experimented with gene-splicing technology, inserting unrelated DNA into various seeds. In one case in Canada, a government department discovered an "anti-freeze" gene contained in the blood of fish living in Arctic waters, permitting them to survive in waters of sub-zero temperature. The scientists spliced this gene into Canadian wheat crops, permitting the wheat to withstand freezing temperatures without damage. An American research lab spliced the genes from fireflies into tobacco plants, producing a tobacco field that glowed in the dark. These examples may be harmless, but others are much less so.

 

 

The US Defense Department has invested huge sums in research directed to splicing lethal genes into these GM crop seeds, including smallpox, bird and swine flu viruses, the plague, AIDS, and more. As a military weapon, such science is priceless. Why bother with a shooting war when Monsanto can sell them rice, corn and soybeans that contain smallpox and the H5N1 virus? When the seed is harvested and passes into the nation's food supply it could, within weeks, exterminate 50% or more of the population without firing a single shot and with no risk to the aggressor. I have seen US military documents that even included a handy "cost per death" chart, demonstrating that seeds are far cheaper and more effective than bombs in the search for military domination. The report also noted that

 

"As well, genetic weapons can be dispersed in a multitude of ways, using virus-infected insects or bacteria, or spliced into GM seeds. These weapons are difficult to detect and identify, and often a treatment or vaccine could be years in the making." (1)

 

 

拉里·罗曼诺夫 -- 1934年美国白银购买法案 -- 2020年9月14日

 

1934年美国白银购买法案

作者：拉里·罗曼诺夫–2020年9月14日

 

中文   ENGLISH  ESPAÑOL  

 

巴尔的摩约翰霍普金斯大学经济学教授史蒂夫•汉克在2010年11月的《环球亚洲》上就这个话题写了一篇很好的文章，题为“美国破坏中国稳定的计划——货币：秘密武器”。它可以在网上找到，值得一读。[1]

 

1934年8月9日，罗斯福总统执行了另一项行政命令，这次是6814号总统令，叫做《白银购买法》，主要规定了两件事 [2]。一是没收美国所有的白银，二是在公开市场上以几乎三倍于当时市场价格购买白银的庞大计划。从任何理性的角度来看，这种行为都是奇怪的。

 

罗斯福假装受到国内白银生产商的压力（他们一点也不受苦），不顾来自各方的压倒性批评，实施了这项法案（由美联储发起），该法案指示财政部（或美联储）以每盎司至少1.29美元的价格购买白银，这几乎是当时市价45美分的三倍。美国政府确实将美国的白银库存国有化，但以0.45美元的旧价格从美国人手中购买白银。直到那之后，财政部才提出以更高的价格购买白银。在大萧条最严重的时候，这一行动耗尽了数十亿稀缺的政府资金，当时大多数美国人都在努力生存，避免饥饿和破产。人民为一项对任何人都没有明显好处的政策付出了巨大的代价。白银生产商从中获得了短暂的收益，但整个行业只雇佣了几千人，所以不管宣传的内容如何，这个庞大的项目绝对不是为人民准备的。

 

但这项购银政策的诡异之处还不止于此。这项法案主要授权美国财政部和美国联邦储备委员会在纽约期货交易所公开市场“从外国”购买白银。但在“公开市场”上的购买从未发生过，也不会发生。我们要做的就是思考。即使是一个疯狂的人也不会花1.29美元去买一件0.45美元的东西。那么，到底是什么推动了这项新政策？

 

好吧，除了帮助没有挣扎的国内白银生产商的荒谬和明显捏造的故事外，还有另一个慈善目的——“帮助”中国，这个计划已经酝酿了好几年。正如史蒂夫·汉克所说：