The Coronavirus Must Become China’s Chernobyl, Hastening The Collapse Of Its Evil Regime

16 04 2020

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

As I have written:

China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is the face of America’s enemy today, and the enemy of  free people around the world.  No mercy should be shown to him, or to his despotic thoroughly-evil regime.

Reparations must be paid by China to Americans; U.S. businesses and other organizations, both large and small; our federal, state and local governments; and to the world for the Coronavirus—which will likely run into many trillions of dollars. Nothing less will suffice.  Or a global boycott of China must be instituted and implemented.[2]

Just as the Kremlin’s lies over a nuclear accident at Chernobyl hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union[3], so too China’s authoritarian leader Xi and his regime must be destroyed.[4]

The UK’s Economist has noted in an article entitled “Is China winning?”:

This year started horribly for China. When a respiratory virus spread in Wuhan, Communist Party officials’ instinct was to hush it up. Some predicted that this might be China’s “Chernobyl”—a reference to how the Kremlin’s lies over a nuclear accident hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were wrong. After its initial bungling, China’s ruling party swiftly imposed a quarantine of breathtaking scope and severity. The lockdown seems to have worked. The number of newly reported cases of covid-19 has slowed to a trickle. Factories in China are reopening. Researchers there are rushing candidate vaccines into trials. Meanwhile, the official death toll has been far exceeded by Britain, France, Spain, Italy and America.

China hails this as a triumph. A vast propaganda campaign explains that China brought its epidemic under control thanks to strong one-party rule. The country is now showing its benevolence, it says, by supplying the world with medical kit, including nearly 4bn masks between March 1st and April 4th. Its sacrifices bought time for the rest of the world to prepare. If some Western democracies squandered it, that shows how their system of government is inferior to China’s own.

Some, including nervous foreign-policy watchers in the West, have concluded that China will be the winner from the covid catastrophe. They warn that the pandemic will be remembered not only as a human disaster, but also as a geopolitical turning-point away from America.

That view has taken root partly by default. President Donald Trump seems to have no interest in leading the global response to the virus. Previous American presidents led campaigns against hiv/aids and Ebola. Mr Trump has vowed to defund the World Health Organisation (who) for its alleged pro-China bias. With the man in the White House claiming “absolute power” but saying “I don’t take responsibility at all”, China has a chance to enhance its sway.

Even so, it may not succeed. For one thing, there is no way to know whether China’s record in dealing with covid-19 is as impressive as it claims—let alone as good as the records of competent democracies such as South Korea or Taiwan. Outsiders cannot check if China’s secretive officials have been candid about the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. An authoritarian regime can tell factories to start up, but it cannot force consumers to buy their products. For as long as the pandemic rages, it is too soon to know whether people will end up crediting China for suppressing the disease or blaming it for suppressing the doctors in Wuhan who first raised the alarm.

Another obstacle is that China’s propaganda is often crass and unpleasant. China’s mouthpieces do not merely praise their own leaders; some also gloat over America’s dysfunction or promote wild conspiracy theories about the virus being an American bioweapon. For some days Africans in Guangzhou were being evicted en masse from their homes, barred from hotels and then harassed for sleeping in the streets, apparently because local officials feared they might be infected. Their plight has generated angry headlines and diplomatic rebukes all over Africa.

And rich countries are suspicious of China’s motives. Margrethe Vestager, the eu’s competition chief, urges governments to buy stakes in strategic firms to stop China from taking advantage of market turmoil to snap them up cheaply. More broadly, the pandemic has fed arguments that countries should not rely on China for crucial goods and services, from ventilators to 5g networks. The World Trade Organisation expects global merchandise trade to shrink by 13-32% in the short run. If this turns into a long-term retreat from globalisation—which was already a worry before covid-19—it will harm China as much as anywhere.

More fundamental than whether other countries are willing to see China supplant America is whether it intends to. Certainly, China is not about to attempt to reproduce America’s strengths: a vast web of alliances and legions of private actors with global soft power, from Google and Netflix to Harvard and the Gates Foundation. It shows no sign of wanting to take on the sort of leadership that means it will be sucked into crises all across the planet, as America has been since the second world war.

A test of China’s ambitions will be how it acts in the race for a vaccine. Should it get there first, success could be used as a national triumph and a platform for global co-operation. Another test is debt relief for poor countries. On April 15th the g20, including China, agreed to let indebted nations suspend debt payments to its members for eight months. In the past China has haggled over debt behind closed doors and bilaterally, dragon to mouse, to extract political concessions. If the g20’s decision means the government in Beijing is now willing to co-ordinate with other creditors and be more generous, that would be a sign it is ready to spend money to acquire a new role.

Perhaps, though, China is less interested in running the world than in ensuring that other powers cannot or dare not attempt to thwart it. It aims to chip away at the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. And it is working hard to place its diplomats in influential jobs in multilateral bodies, so that they will be in a position to shape the global rules, over human rights, say, or internet governance. One reason Mr Trump’s broadside against the who is bad for America is that it makes China appear more worthy of such positions.

China’s rulers combine vast ambitions with a caution born from the huge task they have in governing a country of 1.4bn people. They do not need to create a new rules-based international order from scratch. They might prefer to keep pushing on the wobbly pillars of the order built by America after the second world war, so that a rising China is not constrained.

That is not a comforting prospect. The best way to deal with the pandemic and its economic consequences is globally. So, too, problems like organised crime and climate change. The 1920s showed what happens when great powers turn selfish and rush to take advantage of the troubles of others. The covid-19 outbreak has so far sparked as much jostling for advantage as far-sighted magnanimity. Mr Trump bears a lot of blame for that. For China to reinforce such bleak visions of superpower behaviour would be not a triumph but a tragedy.[5]

What this pro-China, anti-Trump article fails to point out, much less emphasize, is that China unleashed its  Coronavirus-infected travelers on the world; and its killing spree has not ended yet.  Far from it.  Also, China is moving militarily to exploit the virus that it launched.[6]  President Donald Trump is acting for and to protect the United States and all Americans, which presumably will be hailed with his reelection later this year.

And yes, the world is uniting against China, as more die from its deadly virus.  China must be brought to its knees, crushed economically, and punished for the next twenty years at least.  And China’s rulers must be destroyed, just as the evil regimes of China’s Mao Tse-tung, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler vanished from the Earth.[7] 

 

 

© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele


[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-20-3-10). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/what-price-victory-in-the-coronavirus-war/ (“What Price Victory In The Coronavirus War?”); see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/why-should-the-world-trust-china-ever-again/ (“Why Should The World Trust China Ever Again?”)

[3]  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster (“Chernobyl disaster”)

[4]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/what-price-victory-in-the-coronavirus-war/ (“What Price Victory In The Coronavirus War?”)

[5]  See https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/16/is-china-winning (“Is China winning?”) (article citations omitted)

[6]  See, e.g., https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8215511/China-takes-advantage-USS-Roosevelt-crippled-coronavirus-send-jets-close-Taiwan.html (“China takes advantage of USS Roosevelt being crippled by coronavirus to send jets close to Taiwan”)

[7]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/the-silent-voices-of-stalin%E2%80%99s-soviet-holocaust-and-mao%E2%80%99s-chinese-holocaust/ (“The Silent Voices Of Stalin’s Soviet Holocaust And Mao’s Chinese Holocaust”)





What Price Victory In The Coronavirus War?

14 04 2020

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is the face of America’s enemy today, and the enemy of  free people around the world.  No mercy should be shown to him, or to his despotic thoroughly-evil regime.

Reparations must be paid by China to Americans; U.S. businesses and other organizations, both large and small; our federal, state and local governments; and to the world for the Coronavirus—which will likely run into many trillions of dollars. Nothing less will suffice.  Or a global boycott of China must be instituted and implemented. 

As I have written:

China unleashed the deadly Coronavirus on the world—intentionally (as a bioweapon) or inadvertently—and it is responsible for so much suffering. It must be brought to its knees, crushed economically, and punished for the next twenty years at least. This is how long cars manufactured by the Japanese and Germans were effectively boycotted by Americans, after their savagery in World War II ended.[2]

Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has written: 

The same day the number of U.S. dead from the coronavirus disease hit the 15,000 mark, we also crossed the 15 million mark on the number of Americans we threw out of work to slow its spread and “bend the curve.”

For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because of conscious and deliberate decisions of the president and 50 governors.

Some 60,000 citizens, we are told, will likely be lost in this pandemic. Are we prepared to accept 60 million unemployed to “mitigate” those losses?

What price victory in this good and necessary war to kill the virus? Is it unseemly or coldhearted to ask?

At what point do we “declare victory and get out,” as one senator told us to do in Vietnam, rather than continue to sustain the U.S. war dead, even if that meant South Vietnam would fall to our common enemies?

Economists at J.P. Morgan are forecasting that the U.S. gross domestic product will fall by 40% this spring and unemployment will reach 20% of the labor force this month.

These are numbers not seen since the Great Depression.

What does this deliberate decision to shut down the country and carpet-bomb our own economy, upon which we all depend, tell us about what we Americans value?

Consider. In a nation one-tenth as populous as ours today, Abe Lincoln sent more than 600,000 men and boys, North and South, to their deaths rather than let seven Deep South states secede and depart in peace.
 
While the daily loss of Americans to the virus appears to be leveling off, one-third of the way to that 60,000 figure, the other losses from the social and economic devastation we have invited upon ourselves have just begun to mount and will continue far longer.

How many millions of sick and elderly have we sent into solitary confinement? How many families have we forced into a daily struggle for the means to put food on the table and get medicine from the pharmacy?

When the decisions come from President Donald Trump and the governors to open up the economy and encourage Americans to go back to work, will the nation respond?

Will movie theaters and malls all reopen? Will shuttered hotels and motels fill up again? Will professional teams — the NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL — play again to the crowds they knew?

Will public, private and parochial schools, charter and high schools, colleges and universities, all open again to the same-sized classes?

Will conventions, concerts, rallies and recitals begin anew?

To save Americans from contracting a virus that may kill 1-3% of those infected, we have put America on a ventilator.

By courting a depression — a certain consequence of having a nation of 328 million mandatorily sheltering in place and socially distancing — we are telling the world the price we will pay to help save the lives of the thousands who might otherwise contract the virus and die.

Yet this decision raises related questions of life and death.

Can a nation that will accept a depression that destroys the livelihoods of millions of its citizens be credible when it warns another great power that it is willing to fight a nuclear war — in which millions would die — over who rules the Baltic states or who controls the South China Sea?

Would a nation so unwilling to accept 60,000 dead in a pandemic it would induce a depression to cut the casualties, engage in a nuclear exchange with Russia over Estonia?

The longer the shutdown continues, the broader, deeper and more enduring the losses the country will sustain.

We Americans already live in a nation and world atop a mountain of debt.

Student loan debt. Mortgage debt. Consumer debt. Corporate debt. Municipal, county and state debt. A national debt of $22 trillion now soaring into the stratosphere.

Then there is the sovereign debt of the Third World and of nations like Argentina and Italy. If we bring the U.S. and world economy down, who pays that debt? Or is that a ridiculous question?

The decisions we are taking today, hurling scores of thousands of small businesses and millions of citizens toward bankruptcy, could start a rockslide of loan defaults that will start tumbling the banks as well.

The decisions we take in this coronavirus crisis are defining us as a nation and a people. They are telling the world what we Americans will sacrifice and what and whom we will seek to save at all costs. They will tell us who and what is expendable and who and what is not.

They will establish a hierarchy of values that may not correlate exactly with what we Americans publicly profess.

Our decisions may tell us who we truly are.[3]

This is a false “Hobson’s Choice” that has been foisted on the world by Xi Jinping and his regime, which are the 21st Century equivalents of China’s Mao Tse-tung, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and their brutal regimes.[4]  Indeed, there are reasons to believe that China is moving militarily to exploit the virus that it launched.[5] 

Mao Tse-tung and Stalin were the most ruthless killers of their own people in the 20th Century, and perhaps in the entire history of mankind.  They were responsible for the world’s deadliest holocausts—or the mass destruction of human beings.  While history has focused on Hitler’s rise to power, and his atrocities in the Nazi death camps and on the battlefields of World War II—and his cherished dream of a “Thousand Year Reich,” and the Jews who were persecuted and systematically killed by the Nazis—Mao Tse-tung and Stalin were responsible for more deaths.

Indeed, Mao was directly responsible for an estimated 30-40 million deaths between 1958 and 1960, as a result of what his regime hailed as the “Great Leap Forward.”  Like Stalin, Mao’s crimes involved Chinese peasants, many of whom died of hunger from man-made famines under collectivist orders that stripped them of all private possessions. The Communist Party forbade them even to cook food at home; private fires were outlawed; and their harvests were taken by the state. Those who dared to question Mao’s agricultural policies—which sought to maximize food output by dispossessing the nation’s most productive farmers—were tortured, sent to labor camps, or executed.

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of more than 30 million men, women and children—his own countrymen—including millions during the collectivization of the Soviet farms in the 1930s.  Also, as the Soviets moved through Germany at the end of World War II, they raped at least two million German women in what is now acknowledged as the largest case of mass rape in history.[6]

Yet, when the deadly Coronavirus has run its course, Xi Jinping and his despotic regime may have been responsible for many more deaths than Mao Tse-tung, Stalin or Hitler.  The victims will have died directly from the virus, or from the economic ruin globally, which have been aptly likened to a catastrophic weather event:

[I]f the COVID-19 health crisis is an earthquake, then the economic crisis is the tsunami that follows the earthquake. The tsunami rolls in after it and covers everything.[6]   

Again, China must be brought to its knees, crushed economically, and punished for the next twenty years at least.  Nothing less will suffice—just as the evil regimes of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin and Hitler vanished from the Earth.

 

 

© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele


[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-20-3-10). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/why-should-the-world-trust-china-ever-again/ (“Why Should The World Trust China Ever Again?”)

[3]  See https://buchanan.org/blog/what-price-victory-in-the-coronavirus-war-138432 (“What Price Victory — in the Coronavirus War?”)

[4]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/the-silent-voices-of-stalin%E2%80%99s-soviet-holocaust-and-mao%E2%80%99s-chinese-holocaust/ (“The Silent Voices Of Stalin’s Soviet Holocaust And Mao’s Chinese Holocaust”); see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson’s_choice (“Hobson’s choice”) 

[5]  See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8215511/China-takes-advantage-USS-Roosevelt-crippled-coronavirus-send-jets-close-Taiwan.html (“China takes advantage of USS Roosevelt being crippled by coronavirus to send jets close to Taiwan”)

[6]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/the-silent-voices-of-stalin%E2%80%99s-soviet-holocaust-and-mao%E2%80%99s-chinese-holocaust/ (“The Silent Voices Of Stalin’s Soviet Holocaust And Mao’s Chinese Holocaust”)

[7]  See https://jewishinsider.com/2020/04/the-jewish-non-profit-future-uncertainty-anxiety-furloughs-and-slashed-budgets/ (“The Jewish non-profit future: uncertainty, anxiety, furloughs and slashed budgets”)





What The FBI Did To President Trump Was One Of The Greatest Travesties In American History

10 04 2020

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

Rowan Scarborough has reported in the Washington Times:

Attorney General William Barr says that what the FBI did to President Trump in the Russia probe was one of the “greatest travesties in American history.”

He said investigator misdeeds went beyond “mistakes or sloppiness” to “sabotaging the presidency.”

Mr. Barr told Laura Ingraham on Fox News Thursday night that the FBI lacked sufficient evidence to open an investigation into the Trump campaign.

John Durham, a U.S. attorney and the attorney general’s special investigator since March on origins of the Trump-Russia election investigation, will file a report at some point.

But, Mr. Barr said, “his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report. He’s looking to bring to justice people who are engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations and that is what the focus is on, building these cases, especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here.

“It takes some time to build a case. So he’s diligently pursuing it. My own view is that the evidence shows we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There’s something far more troubling here and we’re going to get to the bottom of it . . . and if people broke the law and we can establish that with the evidence they will be prosecuted.”

The FBI opened the Trump probe on July 31, 2016, singling out four Trump associates suspected of having contacts with Russians. There was no evidence at the time that they were involved in a conspiracy with the Kremlin to interfere in the election.

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey announced at a House hearing that the entire campaign was under investigation for any links to Russian government officials.

In the end, special counsel Robert Mueller concluded in March, after a 22-month probe, that he did not establish a conspiracy and no Trump ally was charged in election interference.

Along the way, the FBI relied greatly on the Christopher Steele dossier. Financed by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaign, Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence officer, leveled more than a dozen conspiracy allegations against Mr. Trump and associates. All were disproven by subsequent government reports.

The FBI used the dossier to convince judges to let agents spy on Trump volunteer Carter Page. The Justice Department inspector general said the warrant applications were riddled with errors and omissions of exonerating evidence.

The IG, however, did say the probe was justified because there is a low bar for starting a counter-intelligence inquiry.

With this FBI conduct as a backdrop, Mr. Barr told Ms. Ingraham: “I think the president has every right to be frustrated because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis, they [FBI] started this investigation of his campaign and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign. A whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage the presidency, or at least having the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

As for the warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Mr. Barr said, “The people who abused FISA have a lot to answer.”

FBI agents didn’t seek Justice Department approval to start the Trump probe. Mr. Barr has since changed the rules to require any investigation into a presidential campaign to require the attorney general’s OK.[2]

Beginning with the un-American racist and anti-Semite Barack Obama, each and every one of the co-conspirators should be prosecuted and imprisoned; and in the case of the “mastermind” himself, Obama, executed for treason.  Nothing less will suffice.[3]

Since its founding, and under the “leadership” of its first Director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been a rogue American agency, and the moral equivalent of the former Soviet Union’s dreaded KGB, where Russia’s killer—and totally evil and sinister—Vladimir Putin learned his trade and perfected the art of killing.[4]

No American should trust the FBI now or in the future.  It is the very essence of the “Deep State,” and corrupt at its very core.  Yes, Americans are suffering greatly because of China’s Coronavirus[5], but we need to clean up the Deep State too, beginning with the FBI.

Are there decent and honorable agency employees?  Perhaps so, but they have to be as appalled as the rest of us concerning what the agency has done, and continues to do in the process of shielding and protecting its own.

 

 

© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele


[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-20-3-10). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/10/fbi-sabotaged-trumps-presidency-barr/ (“FBI sabotaged Trump’s presidency: Barr”); see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/the-department-of-injustices-inspector-general-is-complicit-in-the-deep-state-cover-up/#comment-22794 (“The Department Of Injustice’s Inspector General Is Where The Truth Goes To Die”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/the-department-of-injustices-inspector-general-is-complicit-in-the-deep-state-cover-up/#comment-21790 (“More Evidence That The Department Of Injustice’s Inspector General Is Knee-Deep In The Deep-State Cover-Up!”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/u-s-attorney-general-barr-is-appalled-give-americans-a-break/#comment-19204 (“NO JUSTICE AT THE DOJ!”)

[3]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/should-barack-obama-be-executed-for-treason/ (“Should Barack Obama Be Executed For Treason?”); see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/should-barack-obama-be-executed-for-treason/#comment-21003 (“Barack Obama, The Clintons And The Bidens”) 

[4]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/the-death-of-putin-and-russia-the-final-chapter-of-the-cold-war/ (“The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of The Cold War”); see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/the-real-russian-conspiracy-barack-obama-the-clintons-and-the-sale-of-americas-uranium-to-russias-killer-putin/ (“The Real Russian Conspiracy: Barack Obama, The Clintons, And The Sale Of America’s Uranium To Russia’s Killer Putin”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/russias-putin-is-a-killer/ (“Russia’s Putin Is A Killer”)

[5]  See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/why-should-the-world-trust-china-ever-again/ (“Why Should The World Trust China Ever Again?”)





So You Want To Sue A Bank, Or Defend One?

7 04 2020

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

This is the title of my newest law review article that discusses financial institution litigation, which is a lucrative field for lawyers.[2]

Banks and their financial institution brethren present wonderful targets for American and foreign lawyers, because they have “deep pockets” from which to recover.  After all, Wells Fargo Bank alone has incurred losses of more than $12 billion, inter alia, to compensate aggrieved parties and their lawyers for the misconduct and alleged criminality of its management and employees—even though no one has gone to prison yet.[3]

Can there be big “paydays”?  Of course.  The class settlement in one recent lawsuit resulted in the payment of $432.4 million to the class members, $36 million in attorneys’ fees to class counsel, and another $483,489.04 to class counsel in litigation costs.  This is not a pittance—nor were the substantial revenues generated on the other side of the ledger, for the bank’s counsel.

To succeed, great skill and determination—coupled with tenacity and luck—are necessary.  Such litigation is not for the faint-hearted or for amateurs. 

 

 

 

© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele


[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-20-3-10). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See Timothy D. Naegele, So You Want To Sue A Bank, Or Defend One? 137 BANKING L. J. 164 (April 2020) (Naegele April 2020) (Banking L J April 2020 Naegele) [NOTE: To download The Banking Law Journal article, please click on the link to the left of this note]

[3]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/wells-fargo-an-american-banking-nightmare/ (“Wells Fargo: An American Banking Nightmare”) (see also the comments beneath the article)





Why Should The World Trust China Ever Again?

7 04 2020

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is the face of our enemy.[2]

In an article entitled, “Kissinger’s Call for a New World Order,” Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has written:

Among the works that first brought Henry Kissinger to academic acclaim was “A World Restored,” his 1950s book about how the greatest diplomats of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to restore order to a continent shattered by the Napoleonic Wars.

The balance-of-power peace these men achieved lasted — with the significant exception of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 — for the full century, from 1815 to 1914.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal Friday, Kissinger declared that it is now an imperative that the world’s leaders, even as they deal with the raging pandemic, begin to make the “transition to the post-coronavirus order.”

“Failure to do so could set the world on fire.”

Yet, the ingredients Kissinger considers essential for establishing that new world order appear, like ventilators, to be in short supply.

“Sustaining public trust,” asserts Kissinger, “is crucial … to international peace and stability.”

But how do we trust again our adversary China, after its criminal cover-up of the menace and magnitude of the virus unleashed in Wuhan?

How do we trust again this regime that was, until recently, blaming the coronavirus on U.S. Army troops visiting Wuhan?

Observing governments thrashing about in the crisis, the phrase that comes to mind is not “public trust” as much as “every nation for itself.”

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal described Europe’s recent behavior thus:

“EU countries unilaterally shut borders and hoarded vital medical gear, leaving people stranded far from home, grocery stores struggling to stock shelves and hospitals desperate to save critically ill patients.

“When Italy and Spain, reeling from some of the world’s most deadly outbreaks, urged their richer and healthier Northern neighbors to help, Dutch politicians brushed off the appeals as new signs of southerners’ mismanagement.”

Last week, the EU’s Court of Justice ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke EU law by refusing to relocate refugees during the migrant crisis in 2015. The three nations offered no apologies.

Last month, Greece used force to stop Syrian refugees from entering its territory. According to Human Rights Watch, Greek troops and armed men at the Greece-Turkey land border sexually assaulted, robbed and stripped asylum seekers and migrants, driving them back into Turkey. The EU has stayed largely silent.

When Donald Trump’s issued his Jan. 31 travel ban on those who had recently been in China, candidate Joe Biden denounced Trump for “hysterical xenophobia and fearmongering.”

Biden now thinks Trump did the right thing.

Even lifetime liberals can put ideology on the shelf when the voice of the people is loud and clear enough.

We must “struggle to heal the wounds to the world economy,” said Kissinger.

Yet, the crisis has revealed that a prominent feature of this global economy is that China controls the production of medicines essential to keeping Americans alive. Do we want to continue that dependency?

Says Kissinger: “The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values… (and) safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.”

But did not March 2020 prove the superior wisdom of Alexander Hamilton: “Every nation ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.”

Today, borders are everywhere being strengthened as nations compete ferociously for N95 masks and ventilators. Authoritarian rulers are seizing broader powers. The claims of family, faith, tribe, nation and country seem ascendant over all.

“The founding legend of modern government,” writes Kissinger, “is a walled city … strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. … This pandemic has produced … a revival of the walled city in an age where prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.”

Kissinger calls the concept of the walled city an “anachronism,” a “legend.”

But is the idea of the nation-state, whose principal duty is the defense of the health, safety and security of the unique people who created it, the “legend”?

Or is the real legend, the myth, the idea of some New World Order of countries traveling and trading happily with one another in a federation of the world?

In this coronavirus crisis, we can see clearly now, no longer as through a glass darkly.

As in most wars, it is to the men of action not the men of words to whom the people turn — to governors, not legislators or members of Congress, who are taking action, as states outbid one another for critical medical equipment.

As for Donald Trump, suddenly, the elites are berating him for being insufficiently dictatorial.

Trump, they rail, did not move swiftly enough to invoke the Defense Production Act. He failed to use its authority to dictate to U.S. companies what they must produce. He did not shut down the country quickly enough. He failed to issue orders soon enough to governors who delayed shutting down their states.

People are dying, it is now said, because Trump did not immediately become the autocrat that progressives were denouncing him for being during the impeachment hearings two months ago.[3]

First, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is an un-American fraud and fool.  He told Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.—then America’s Chief of Naval Operation—that the United States was on the decline and the Soviet Union was the wave of the future.  And Kissinger added that his job was to soften America’s decline.[4]

The fact is that the Soviet Union collapsed, and it is no more.  Kissinger has essentially zero credibility., and is a discredited traitorous relic of the past.  

Second, China unleashed the deadly Coronavirus on the world—intentionally (as a bioweapon) or inadvertently—and it is responsible for so much suffering.  It must be brought to its knees, crushed economically, and punished for the next twenty years at least.[5]  This is how long cars manufactured by the Japanese and Germans were effectively boycotted by Americans, after their savagery in World War II ended.  

Nothing less will suffice. 

 

 

© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele


[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-20-1-1.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/expert-warns-quarantine-process-failed-as-china-stands-ready-to-crash-world-economy/#comment-23571 (“We Are At War”); see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/china-infects-the-world-then-lies-and-blames-america/ (“China Infects The World, Then Lies And Blames America”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/expert-warns-quarantine-process-failed-as-china-stands-ready-to-crash-world-economy/#comment-23560 (“China’s Hitler, And Beyond The Coronavirus Crisis”)

[3]  See https://buchanan.org/blog/kissingers-call-for-a-new-world-order-138395 (“Kissinger’s Call for a New World Order”)

[4]  See, e.g.https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/05/archives/the-gloomy-side-of-the-historian-henry-a-kissinger.html (“The Gloomy Side of the Historian Henry A. Kissinger”—”Dr. Kissinger is quoted as saying that he thinks of the United States as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta.  ‘The day of the United States is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union.’  And he added, ‘My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most, acceptable second‐best position available'”)

[5]  See supra n.2.