The pandemic’s beneficiaries

At a time when the world continues to hold its breath as the Coronavirus pandemic further spreads across borders and countries, leaving the horrific figure (as at time of writing) of 711,876 victims and over 19 million infected persons, and as governments

With millions of jobs lost and millions of others at stake during this annus horribilis, today’s super capitalists – the tech moguls – have seen their fortunes skyrocket as they get even richer thanks to hypedup activity online. According to Bloomberg’s index, a ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, the collective wealth of these major tech capitalists has nearly doubled since 2016, from $751bn to today’s $1.4trn. Suffice to say Elon Musk has more than doubled his net worth to $69.7bn, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has got richer by $63.6bn and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO has enjoyed a networth surge of $9.1bn.

What is fascinating about this increased rate in fortunes is not that it has taken place, but that it has been happening in a matter of weeks rather than years. As Prof. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told Bloomberg, “we have dramatically moved the brick-and-mortar economy to an online economy”.

The latest statistics show Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft, five of the largest American companies, have market valuations equivalent to about 30% of the US gross domestic product – almost double what they were at the end of 2018. While they gobble up all that crosses their paths – the latest and most likely victim is China’s TikTok, following The Donald’s highly disturbing interference in the world’s free trade. These same tech giants come out horrified and screaming in protest when governments in Europe, abetted by a rightly concerned EU, seek to have them pay a more than just amount of taxes.

That’s when American-style capitalism really stinks.

Old scores, healed wounds

You get people who stupidly seek to deny or at least downplay what the Jews had to undergo during the Second World War at the hands of a supposedly educated, innovative and European Christian German nation. To have had your heart ripped out in the form of no less than six million Jews killed and humiliated is not one you can easily forget and I do not find the annual commemorations the least excessive despite the passage of time. I do, however, detest the issue being exploited to ram home an ideological rather than a human message.

History is such a fascinating yet revealing domain. You learn stories you would otherwise have overlooked or ignored, but the ugly episodes tend to

Why all these blasts from the past of history? It all started the other day with an amusing piece of news about the American Ambassador in the South Korean capital of Seoul, Harry Harris, who has had to shave off his mustache because, according to the local media, people resented its Japanese-era look!

continue to fester among some people when the ideal way ahead is and should always be to forgive and to strengthen the process of peace. Old scores turned into healed wounds. Many have been able to. German heads of state, for example, have visited Israel and Israeli counterparts have visited Germany. The memory still hurts, but nations grow and mature.

The 700+-year wars between England and France are also happily an ancient memory and apart from the usual Franglais banter one still gets in the media, thousands of Brits live in France in search of a better climate and despite Brexit. You can go on like this back to the beginning of civilisation. Another example are the Ottoman wars in Europe during which Malta played her significant little part. Some oldtimers among us still remarkably blurt out “ħaqq it-Torok” (curse the Turks) when something goes wrong, but Malta and Turkey today exchange tourists and businesses, not slaves.

I always recall when, way back in the early 80s, I took a TVM crew with me to civil-war-torn Lebanon (still, as we have seen this very week, the horror goes on) for a documentary, certainly a first in Maltese television. I was told they still used the phrase “it’s like building a mosque in Malta” when something is deemed impossible to achieve. The Islamic complex at Corradino is, today, a testimony to history’s typical twists and turns.

Why all these blasts from the past of history? It all started the other day with an amusing piece of news about the American Ambassador in the South Korean capital of Seoul, Harry Harris, who has had to shave off his mustache because, according to the local media, people resented its Japanese-era look!

That facial hair can be a factor of irritation after more than a century since Japan’s brutal occupation of Korea (19101945) is truly incredible. How much hurt and how much time does it take, I wonder? Of course the fact that the Ambassador was born in Japan and is of partJapanese origin did not help. His explanation: “I tried to get younger but I couldn’t get younger. But I could grow a moustache, so I did that” did not convince the Koreans and he has actually had to post a threeminute-long video online showing him bidding farewell to his beloved moustache.

Like the Jews, the Koreans suffered murder, rape and infanticide at the hands of the invading Japanese army, but can’t all that now be forgiven if not forgotten? Japan’s Prime Minister has made a formal apology. Life goes on. Both countries are today among the top-performing economies of the world and centuries-old wounds need not undermine all that.

This very week, the Japanese themselves were commemorating the 75th anniversary of the destruction of the city of Hiroshima by an American atom bomb. Like the Jews, they can never forget it, but its commemoration serves as a living testament to the abiding dangers of a nuclear arsenal.

Oh, no...

Oh, no. I see the Lithuanians have asked us Maltese not to travel there while the recent spike in Coronavirus cases goes on. One might be tempted to ask who the hell wants to go to Lithuania in the best of a Mediterranean summer? But then, the issue of course has its mutual facet. There may be some people here who will badly miss the flow of Lithuanian poledancers...